No one is in control. That is the major source of contemporary fear. The fears are scattered. The fears are diffused. We can’t pinpoint the sources wherefrom they are coming. They seem to be ubiquitous.
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When we think of citizenship nowadays, we mostly see it as a contested notion for it being reduced to an administrative criterion that is actually selectively differentiated: inclusion in, or exclusion from the nation-state membership, from privileged membership of Western nation-states.
Today, in America right now, we only can think of growth in quantitative terms. And in a resource-constrained environment, how frickin’ stupid is that? You’re actually imposing your own death sentence by not being able to get over the grip of this quantitative dynamic.
There are biologists who’ve spent their careers working on some species of beetle in the tropical rainforest, and they just love the rainforest in their bones And they feel that when they go testify in Congress to some committee, that they can’t just say, “I love it in my bones and you guys will love it too, if you share it with me.” They have to say, “Oh, we’ve done all this math and computed that there’s an ecosystem service here.” And I think that that has really impoverished our debate about environmental issues.
What has redeemed the faith community throughout the centuries of history has been that there has always been a sector of the faith that has not sold out, that has recalled the genuine moral and ethical values of that faith and its tradition, and has renewed that, and therefore moved the agenda into the future, that is moral and ethical and just.
You all have, undoubtedly, friends in New York and San Francisco and Berlin and Tokyo and Australia or whatever, all of whom you have much more in common with than you do with your neighbor. You’ve created diasporas of interest. The death of distance has created many different new forms of country. Countries which aren’t based on how far it is from us to those guys over there, but new countries based on what you’re interested in.