The world is a European invention, and Europe's task in the twenty-first century is to take responsibility for it. It is true that every large cultural unit, now or in the historical past, can be said to have a “world” of its own. It is perhaps even true that every human individual has his or her own “world”, in the sense of a particular way of organizing the data of experience. But the world, the familiar globular entity, both physical and intellectual, which ever-increasing numbers of people, over the past six or seven centuries, have been persuaded to accept as a universal human environment, was invented (although we still say “discovered”) by European explorers, experimenters, and thinkers.

A principal characteristic of this world is that it is not organized, that it always turns out to be more than we thought it was, more than we can fit under the dominion of God or Fate in any form, that it always turns out, paradoxically, to be different from itself. Indeed, the inventors of this world, and we in their wake, set a positive value on its infinite elusiveness. We insist on respecting hard facts, which always means new facts, since old facts by definition are soft, corrupted by the devices we have applied in understanding them. We insist on the uncharted, the unknown, even the unimaginable, as a field for our activity. In other words, this new world – which we thus follow those European pioneers in recreating – is designed to be out of control. Its whole character – as world, as “reality”, as fact, as a field for activity – is always to be at least one step beyond all our abilities to control it.

Out of control

If you want a world of infinite possibility, therefore presumably of infinite promise, you have to accept a world out of control. It took until the twentieth century for the second half of this bargain to become fully clear to us. The world has been out of control ever since its invention; but only recently have the most disastrous consequences of this condition forced themselves on our awareness.