الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

Islam and the West… for a better world @

The Frenchman Jean Christophe Rufin, founder of the organisation ‘Médecins sans Frontières’, believes that the national, democratic culture has long been challenged by the global economic system:

The system, especially in its economic aspects, is becoming ever more inter-national and supra-national, and is thus increasingly difficult to monitor. People can only express their political choice at a national or local level, which means without reaching the real power sources of the system. This split between the national (which for better or worse remains the space in which democratic monitoring takes place) and the supra-national, in which the real decisions are made, is one of the reasons for the autonomy of the liberal culture. It has several benefits. For example, it allows the economic system to escape democratic control. It also enables political protest to be kept within limits by restricting it to a national context. (Rufin, La dictature libérale)

What does this mean? The political dilemma of Europe is that one does not in fact know how global capitalism can be politically restrained subdued or reformed. National democracies and Parties are “politically” too weak for this new titanic task. Is the vociferous battle against islamism diverting attention from these questions? What is the nature of civil rights, of freedom in the modern high-security state? Does the humanist project end up with total security in the modern states but is accompanied by dwindling freedom? We can only briefly hint at this here: philosophically speaking Europe today is faced by the fundamental question as to the nature of modern technology. “Technology” according to the famous philosopher Martin Heidegger ”is not in man’s hand, but rather technology holds men in its hand. The human being of the modern age is essentially not free.” The Slovenian Slavoj Zizek describes the modern relationship of the Europeans to politics in pessimistic words:

It is generally well known that the button for closing the doors in most lifts is a completely functionless placebo in order to give the person the impression that he has some influence over the rapidity of the functioning of the lift. This extreme case of faked participation is

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