Civilizations are mortal. We know of entire worlds disappearing, of empires collapsing. It is happening again.
Imagine a ship. You start by changing the bow, then the rudder, the hull, the mast, the sail and finally all the constituent parts as they erode. At the end of this transformation, will it still be the same ship? Plutarch’s image in the “Life of Theseus” offers some help for a reflection on identity. Let’s imagine that the boat is our civilization. Would we still be faced with the same civilization?
With the wave of mass migration towards Europe we are faced with the greatest upheaval of European identity since the times of the Spanish Reconquista and the Ottoman wars. Italian PM Giorgia Meloni said that “millions” will come, after 10.000 migrants landed in the Italian island of Lampedusa.
