Our liberal democratic modern Western civilization does not seem very healthy at the moment. Who knows, of course, this is just a brief moment of history, anything could happen after all. But at the same time our responsibility surely is for the moment, our moment. Even that is a lot to ask, from a culture maybe not able to be serious, to be intense. Like the Greeks were, like Athens - like Jerusalem was, each incomplete without the other.
So what we have is immense opulence, irresponsible global capitalism (increasingly unconstrained by social democracy), confronting rather imminently huge, monstrous global challenges. Not being ready at all. We are not holding to liberty and reason like the Greeks would have, as flawed as they were, as flawed as their conception of virtue and duty were. But we don't seem to have anything any longer to hold on to, except the shopping mall and the online shop, the entertainment industry, the debased religion, the debased liberty. This will not be enough, not nearly enough to contain the coming floods.
