Today, moments of pleasure are rare, with the media owned by those who are hostile to democracies and forget the consequences we experienced 80 years ago… Human memory seems to work in such a way that, within two or three generations, forgetfulness prevails and we repeat the same dreams of letting a powerful figure or strongman make decisions for us. As Gramsci wrote from prison in the 1930s, political domination is always preceded by the domination of minds. Today more than ever, this is achieved through the media, which can shape minds. For those who doubt this, look at how wars and massacres have been triggered everywhere from my Bosnia to Palestine and Ukraine, with the Russians’ fascination with their dictator and, in parallel, the Americans’ fascination with the buffoonish occupant of the White House.
It is therefore all the more pleasant and refreshing to hear and read the lecture at the Collège de France by Léa Ypi, of Albanian origin, professor at the London School of Economics, who explains with elegance and wit the importance of the “Enlightenment” and of returning to the Age of Enlightenment by putting aside the “unreason” that dominates. Rethinking socialism as an “aspiration to the fullest realization of freedom,” a key concept of the Enlightenment.
Excerpts “We are living in troubling times. The president of the world’s greatest military power writes to the prime minister of an allied country that, since his country “has decided not to award him the Nobel Peace Prize,” he no longer feels “obliged to think only of peace.” A technology magnate uses his platform to support far-right parties that encourage racism and violence against immigrants. The publicized emails of a wealthy financier accused of sex trafficking reveal a global network of corruption, abuse of power, and manipulation of vulnerable people.
Is there a word that sums up the troubling times we live in? I would call it the Age of Unreason. The Age of Unreason is the opposite of the Age of Reason: the collapse of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, according to its most famous definition, consists of human beings emerging from the state of guardianship for which they themselves are responsible. Today, this dependence on authority takes new forms: political conformism, the influence of influencers, the delegation of decisions to algorithms.
Why does unreason persist? How can we regain the courage to think for ourselves? That will be my main question (…). I will call the alternative I propose, for lack of a better term, “moral socialism.” Those who are uncomfortable with the word “socialism” may prefer “liberal egalitarianism,” “radical democracy,” or some other similar concept. The term matters less than the substance: what matters is that we diagnose the same phenomena and look in the same direction for change.
The root of the word “capitalism” is “capital”—a thing. The root of the word ‘socialism’ is “social,” from the Latin socius: “companion,” “friend.” Morality is primarily concerned with relationships between people. There is therefore something problematic in a society that makes people’s relationships dependent on their relationship to things. (…) Capitalism undermines the concept of freedom that is at the heart of the Enlightenment tradition that I am trying to revive. (…) I call “socialism” the philosophical and political vision that, in the circumstances of today’s globalized capitalism, aspires to the fullest realization of freedom.
This critical method is not limited to describing the world; it questions the limits of knowledge and the possibility of social transformation, thus opening up avenues for rethinking capitalism. The Enlightenment project, of which we can be proud, is rejected by the right, which constantly seeks to destroy it because the courage to think for oneself—the heart of the Enlightenment—is a threat to authority and its normative methods, which are enforced through the media and the domination of our daily lives by AI. Invisible algorithms replace freedom of thought with thinking like others who are subject to the same techniques. Léa Ype revisits this reduction of global conflicts to local cultural “particularisms” (Serbs and Bosnians have always fought each other, etc.). Yet this is a product of capitalist expansion.
We must return to the Enlightenment and to a “moral socialism” based on key points. First, a universalist vision: retreating into a nation-state project or socialism in a single country is illusory because capitalism is a global system. “Relations of exploitation transcend borders and in fact depend on the segmentation of the world into competing political units. A moral socialism worthy of the name must therefore have a cosmopolitan scope, concerned not only with guarantees of just freedom within existing states, but also with the transformation of the global structures that determine who has access to resources, who bears the costs of production, and whose freedom counts.” Morality is not a taboo concept, as the right and part of the left believe; it is central to creating a world in which freedoms are real, with social institutions organized in such a way as to make it impossible to treat others as mere means to an end. Ultimately, it is a question of turning the Enlightenment project into a political project. This is a warning to politicians who forget or ignore the dangers that lie ahead.
