“It’s true that political salesmen can market a mythology and iconography that entice people into privileging a religion, ethnicity, or nation as their fundamental identity. With the right package of indoctrination and coercion, they can even turn them into cannon fodder. That does not mean that nationalism is a human drive. Nothing in human nature prevents a person from being a proud Frenchman, European, and citizen of the world, all at the same time.”[1]
That person is me.
Do today’s Europeans remember or know why some yesterday’s Europeans created the European Union? Simple. After two World Wars coming from Europe in about 35 years and 60 million Europeans killed, those European of the 1950s said: “This must never happen again”.
And guess what? It has worked! Almost 75 years with peace, without millions of Europeans getting killed. 75 years of peace, of growth and of progress as precisely evidenced and documented by Pinker, one who works with reason and science, not with emotions and ideology. This had never happened in European history before. And this is a creation of men. As such, it is fragile, it is not a given. It can disappear overnight. Europeans must defend and preserve this major achievement of mankind. This why the EU is a human project that the Dalai Lama admires - "I think this spirit of the European Union eventually should spread to Africa and further in the world"- and why he is sad about the impending exit of Britain.
Of course, the EU is far from being perfect, like any Human endeavour, and must be improved. But Pinker is right of course: History, Reason, Science and Humanism show that to unite proves to be always so much better than to divide… even if not as easy.
Next Sunday (27 May 2019) please vote, and vote to unite, not to divide humans.
Guillaume Prache, Proud Human, European and Frenchman
[1] Steven Pinker, Enlightenment now – The case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress, 2018