(by Paolo Petroni)
All wars are ultimately civil wars, with human beings against human beings, concludes David Armitage, professor at Harvard where he teaches the history of political ideas and global power structures, speaking about war in every sense, starting from classical history, moving on to African civil wars that the EU and USA avoid discussing, and dwelling also on the civil war of men against their own environment, through which they put primary resources at risk, from food to water. War, moreover, in these times, is one of the central topics of this edition of the Philosophy Festival, whose theme is Chaos.
The concept of war ecology is thus elaborated by Pierre Charbonnier, of the Centre for European Studies in Comparative Politics in Paris, who, after many studies on the ecological consequences of wars, has dedicated himself to those of peace—that is, to the ecological sustainability of the world order from the end of the Second World War onwards, where the habitability of the planet, meaning the climate crisis, and geopolitics become intertwined. The scholar begins from the political thought that since the eighteenth century has seen in progress, in the exploitation of the land, in commerce and industry a path toward peace, arriving today at the need to ask whether we will be able to build peace without destroying the planet. There are then the universalist ideals that envision peace in the process of globalization that would unite peoples as inhabitants of the common space of earth, threatened however by the race for nuclear and space capabilities that renders the planet vulnerable. Finally, there is the historical commitment of the ecological movement that challenges the world order and the power of technology, and believes that the future common good can prevail over the particular interests of individual countries—a movement that now faces the crisis created by wars, with the consequent severe economic crises, especially in energy, which, Charbonnier concludes, seem to be pushing, particularly Asia, to exit as rapidly as possible from dependence on fossil fuels.
All these discourses are obviously connected today to the forms of power, and Nadia Fusini, a great scholar of literature and of Shakespeare, begins, in order to address this, with the war and violence through which Richard III seizes power and how his arrogance constitutes its abuse, gradually drawing a comparison with Trump's management of power, for whom "Yes I can" becomes I can, meaning I can do whatever I please. Instead, the scholar explains, the original meaning of the English expression is I can in the sense that I know how to do it, and this knowing implies an awareness of limits and should lead to power as an idea of service.
In this vein, the idea of democracy is also examined, which, as Simona Forti, professor of Political Philosophy at the Scuola Normale, recalls, citing Claude Lefort, "is an empty place" (which is also what is said of Chaos), so that no one can say "power is me" just as no one can say "I am the truth," because it is a matter of exercise and not of possession: "a laborious exercise, which requires commitment, time, responsibility, so much so that the criticisms of democracy are those of inefficiency, waste of time, of opportunity and money." It is on this, and on the conflict between the need for security and at the same time the desire for freedom, that an equilibrium must be built—one that tilts toward the former in moments of crisis such as our own, and on which populism plays, whose
propaganda, according to Armitage, "creates internal divisions, strong contrasts, while also presenting as natural assumptions ideas and constructions that are clearly artificial, starting with that of the nation-state".
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