What, in truth, does it mean to love the world?

To urge the United States of America to “learn to love this world” – as the Daily Nation put it in a headline on Thursday – is to pose a fundamental question for humankind.

What, in truth, does it mean to love the world?

How does one make manifest one’s love of our planet?

What exactly do you love so much about this world in its perennial peregrination around the sun?

The answer that may begin to satisfy me should be completely objective.

For, to my mind, the concept of love is meaningless unless it is dual-traffic.

If you really love a woman and she really loves you, you will both strive to give each other as much as you expect from each other gratuitously so as to benefit the union equally and perennially.

Yet, though humanity is the only species in which individuals are capable of making such a conscious ethico-mental effort – ours remains such a world in which Western European, North American and Japanese individuals are always getting fatter and fatter at the expense of the rest of us.

The so-called developed world is developed completely at the expense of the so-called under-developed world – not only in terms of terribly underpaid labour but also in terms of the consequent alienation and under-development of the intellect and of skills throughout the world.

WRONG ACTIONS

The question is thus completely manifest: How can the planet’s self-declared most intelligent species behave so completely unintelligently not only against the planet but also against all the other con-specifics that make the planet tick?

How can Western Europe, North America and Japan, the most educated and most skilled sections of that species, behave so unintelligently against the rest of mankind’s world?

Nobody can objectively call you intelligent when, for centuries, you make the world’s resources to flow in such a way that, by starving the Third World, you condemn to slow death the very hand that feeds you.

In what exactly does your intelligence consist if – into the bargain – you arrange world trade and world knowledge in such a way that the producers of the raw materials get practically nothing by selling these to you at a pittance?

Every minute, you are so busy digging the grave even for all the other species that enrich our environments but also for your own con-specifics, namely, for all other human beings, including the ones whose practically unpaid labour makes your affluence and leisure possible?

CHERISH IT

Where is your intelligence when you allow flaming greed to drive you into making it impossible for the children of the world that labours for you to eat adequately, to clothe themselves properly and to educate themselves fully against the way the world is now structured culturally, intellectually and ethically?

If the species daily announces that it is the planet’s most intelligent and most compassionate, how can it daily condemn most members of that species to starvation and death and to intolerable suffering by means of an obviously hopelessly lopsided world system – a world defended by some of Euro-America’s “brainiest” intellectuals?

The North Atlantic’s corporate system is the most relevant recipient of my question because it is the human community which – as its own William Shakespeare already noticed many centuries ago – “… doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus …” to preach water but wallow in wine.

If the pale-skinned and starry-eyed priests who introduced the concept of heavenly love to us – but who, in contrast to us, went ahead to live like angels in poverty-stricken Africa – wish for my love, let them fling us a handful of stars.

Yes, we must learn to love the world because, as far as I am aware, the world is the only existential possibility we have.

But our love for the earth must be practical. We must tend it with the greatest care because, otherwise, we have no future.

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