December 2012

The ancient cultures of the different peoples of Asia, Oceania, Africa, and Latin America challenge, in practice and in theory, the conceptions of the allegedly linear historical development of humankind that is characteristic of Western modernity.
Humankind is well aware, for example, of the crucial objective fact that what is left of the major reservoirs of biodiversity on the planet have been conserved by several of these peoples called “barbarians” and “uncivilized,” despite and against the “civilized” scientific progress of the modern West, which would most certainly have exterminated those reserves of life if it had been able to get hold of them.
Generating the conditions to retrieve in a useful way the cultural legacies of the peoples of the world is a theoretical task of prime significance, for we are aware that these new or renewed ethical approaches are to be necessarily incorporated into the transition process begun in the late twentieth century.