Saving Integral Humanism

We keep talking about “globalization” as though the word still had a shared meaning. It no longer does. Or rather: all that remains of it is its economic shell—globalization as such: capital flows, supply chains, digital platforms—while its soul has vanished.

Globalization as openness, as the promise of a world made more habitable for all, as the search for a shared language among cultures, is in the process of dying. And yet that form of globalization was never merely a material reality; it was a moral horizon. It rested on a simple, almost naïve idea: that repeated contact among peoples, cultures, imaginaries would eventually disarm the temptation of war. Distances reduced by technology, by transportation, by the abolition of customs borders… People would meet at universities, festivals, NGOs, international institutions; they would build compromises, treaties, exchange programs. They would learn to live together, for lack of a better option.

That horizon was born with a specific generation: the baby boomers. A generation traumatized by the Second World War, by industrial extermination, Hiroshima, the discovery of the camps. A generation for whom the word “universal” was not a philosophical abstraction, but a response to the abyss—to Hitlerism, Mussolinism, Francoism, to the horror of Auschwitz. Openness against concentration camps. From this emerged the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations, the European Union, the major cultural and scientific institutions that tried—awkwardly, imperfectly—to construct a shared space.

This generation endowed itself with a language: that of integral humanism. A humanism that did not reduce human beings to their communal identity, that did not dissolve them into the market alone, that did not sacrifice them on the altar of a jealous transcendence either. A humanism that placed the dignity of each person at the center, against the fetishes of race, confession, clan, or nation. That generation is now disappearing. And with it, the symbolic architecture that made an open form of globalization possible.

We have indeed entered, for some time now, the famous Gramscian interregnum: “The old world is dying, the new one struggles to be born, and in this twilight, monsters appear.” The old world was one in which the universal still had a place, if only as official hypocrisy. The new one is taking shape before our eyes: a world of blocs, walls, proxy wars, digital platforms that fragment societies into hostile tribes. And now artificial intelligence, which sends everyone back to “their” truth, narcissism as intellectual comfort—yet another virtual addiction under the guise of progress. Between the two, monsters proliferate: authoritarian regimes that speak the language of democracy in order to hollow it out; populisms that turn social anger into hatred of the internal enemy; religious, ethnic, civilizational identitarianisms that turn otherness into an ontological threat.

Hatred has unfortunately become the structuring affect of politics, where the will to live together—even fragile, even wavering—once carried the hope of a better world. Probably up until the watershed disaster of September 11, 2001. Hatred and violence used to be the shadow cast by conflicts; today they are their openly embraced engine. The border is no longer an instrument of regulation but a fetish brandished as a totem. Walls are erected, customs barriers raised like weapons, fantasies of a return to closed sovereignties flourish—as though material interdependence could be repealed by decree. There is a cruel irony here: at the very moment when exchanges have never been so intense—data, images, capital, goods circulating at the speed of light—imaginaries are closing in. We no longer dream of a shared world; we settle for defending fortresses.

A shattered postulate

The cultural globalization of the baby boomers was certainly Western, sometimes arrogant, often asymmetrical. But it contained a measure of self-risk: one went toward others, confronted them, allowed oneself to be transformed. It assumed that the world could not be divided into culturally airtight blocs. That postulate is now shattered. The twenty-first century is being written in a closed plural: “Christian civilization” versus “Islamic civilization,” “the Russian world” versus the “decadent West,” the “true people” versus “cosmopolitan elites,” “us” versus “them,” everywhere, all the time. This is what Francis ceaselessly denounced until his death. The question is no longer: what do we share? but: what separates us, and how can it be exploited?

Integral humanism, for its part, is caught in a vise. On the side of markets, it is disqualified as naïveté: what matters is no longer the person but the profile, the data point, the consumer segment. The individual is thus pulverized into measurable, monetizable behaviors. On the side of identities, it is denounced as a Western ruse: the universal would be nothing but a mask of domination, a moral varnish laid over colonial power relations. The response: a return to “authentic” belongings, to supposedly preserved communities, to tribal passions.

Caught between the cynicism of global capital and the resentment of wounded identities, integral humanism no longer finds a political space. It survives in institutions on the verge of ossification, in diplomatic discourse, sometimes in a few individual consciences. But it no longer structures the social imaginary. Perhaps most worrying of all is the generational rupture. The baby boomers carried within them the direct or transmitted memory of the catastrophes of the twentieth century. They had seen where radical dehumanization leads, and it was this memory that made credible—despite everything—the promise of a fragile universal. Subsequent generations grew up in a world already globalized, already connected, but also already fractured. For them, the universal often appears as an exhausted discourse, an official narrative with no grip on reality. They live with economic precarity, the climate crisis, repeated wars, informational vertigo.

Survivals of a bygone world

The most natural reflex is no longer openness but defense: defending one’s job, one’s territory, one’s identity, one’s comfort, one’s narrative. In this context, figures of openness become inaudible. Whether they speak in the name of faith, reason, human rights, or literature, they seem to be speaking a foreign language. They appear as survivals of a bygone world—one in which it was still believed that dialogue could bend reality. “Strongmen,” by contrast, reassure. Whether they are called Putin, Trump, Erdoğan, MBS, Netanyahu, Orbán, or Le Pen, they all respond to an intrinsic fear of being swallowed, absorbed, erased of all difference in a world that, through technology, had reached a culminating point of mimetic proximity among peoples and their particularities.

Should we conclude that everything is lost? That would be too simple, and too comfortable. The death of open globalization does not mean the end of the universal as a demand. It means that the historical form this universal took—the one constructed by the baby boomers, with their institutions, treaties, and grand narratives—is running out of breath. What remains is the naked, brutal question: how can we still speak of human dignity, of rights, of the common, in a world that has ceased to believe in them? We will probably have to begin again from below, in cities, schools, associations, in those minuscule places where individuals stubbornly continue to believe that the other is not first and foremost an enemy.

Integral humanism will not be reborn from a diplomatic summit or a new treaty, but from a counterculture: a culture that refuses hatred as a mother tongue and withdrawal as a horizon; a culture that does not confuse the memory of wounds with the perpetuation of vengeance. Open globalization may be dead. But as long as there remain men and women capable of saying “we” beyond their tribes, and of rising beyond the “me” to celebrate and promote a culture of connection, the universal will not be entirely buried. It will move forward limping, against the current, without illusions, certainly. As it always has. But it will find its way. A phrase attributed to Burke held that “evil is the inaction of good people.” So we must unite—and act.