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Two worlds are colliding, and the collision is raging through Ukraine. So serious is the collision, that even nuclear strikes are being hinted at.
World war is usually thought of as a war covering most of the world, or at least a substantial part of it. I would like to offer another definition: A world war is a war between two worlds; an old world and a new world. Right now, a fault line between an old world and a new one is running through the war in Ukraine.
The old world is the world of the modern, industrialized society. In its extreme form, modernity becomes a hypermodernity that has no love of life, no joy, only contempt and force. Putin’s attack on Ukraine is hypermodern. It is a relic of the Cold War, and the hot wars that went before it. It shows the dark side of modernity where technology at an industrial scale is used to kill freedom, beauty, and life itself.
The Ukrainian people, their freedom, their path to the future, their 21st century opportunities, and the immense beauty of their country are now being bombed to death. The shear ugliness—ugliness of power, ugliness of destruction, ugliness of military equipment and the rubble and dead bodies they leave behind—is crushing to the human soul. Meanwhile, it is inspiring and giving so much hope to see how the Ukrainian people are taking up the fight for their freedom.
And here is the fault line:
Putin’s military war represents the past. On several levels: ideologically, militarily, politically. It represents a hypermodernity where technology, brute force, anger, hate, and contempt offer only ugliness.
The Ukrainian response and the response of the EU, the US, and NATO are taking place in both the old world and the new world.
The old-world response is the scramble to supply Ukraine with weapons to fight the war of the old world: the hypermodern, material war. The EU, the US, and NATO are doing everything they can to stay out of this war, not out of cowardice, but out of refusal to escalate the old-world hypermodernity. Yet, we cannot do nothing.
The new-world response is an economic and cultural shutdown. It is a non-violent suffocation of the flow of symbols: money and culture. Of prosperity and beauty.
World War I led to the League of Nations, which eventually failed. World War II led to the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the EU and NATO, and a whole new world of institutions, collaboration, order, prosperity, freedom, beauty, and peace. Now is the moment to not let them fail.
Let us instead strengthen that which the new world ought to be and create new collaboration for it.
It has been noted that Russia has no allies. Russia, the state, has no friends: Belarus is a vassal, as are a few other states, and China is a polite acquaintance of convenience. There needs to be a path for Russia to connect with the friendly collaboration of the new world. For Russian beauty, freedom, and prosperity to flourish.
A fault line between the old world and a new one is running right through the war imposed on Ukraine.
We all have an obligation to choose on which side we stand. We live in such an inherently beautiful world, and this past week, Ukraine has stood up for it for all of us.
