24 February

Superb from Stan Grant today. These are the deep currents underneath our lives and our politics. All politics comes down to identity. In the West we fractured into a million competing individual identities. Russia and China maintain a collective identity, maintained by nation, race and geography. Geography to us in the West is just travel destinations. But we’re not going anywhere, to use Grant’s quote. ‘We appear ever rootless, not rooted’. Amen. As Michel Serres said 40 years ago, and which I repeat here a lot. Who is ‘we’? The question underneath it all. What does ‘we’ mean? It’s not just adding up all the individuals. But it’s not mobilising them all around old ideas of race or nationhood either, as the Russians are doing. This is why humans had gods for most of our history. They unified us. We can’t just reinvent them. But we can place something bigger than us at the centre of our lives and societies. That thing is the Earth. Climate change is it telling us this.