By Silvia Zimmermann del Castillo, Co-President of the Club of Rome
Faced with a crisis of meaning, it is necessary to integrate science, art, ethics, philosophy and spirituality into a new civilisational synthesis.
The history of humanity does not always advance in a linear fashion, and even less often, peacefully. Instead, it unfolds through tension, rupture and profound crises that signal the exhaustion of one order and the beginning of another. Today we are witnessing one of those liminal moments. The world order that emerged after industrial modernity and consolidated in the 20th century seems to have reached its peak of entropy: a phase of growing disorganisation in which political, economic, social and symbolic structures no longer manage to maintain coherence or meaning.
The term 鈥渆ntropy鈥�, taken from physics, refers not only to chaos, but also to the internal wear and tear of closed systems. A system that does not exchange energy, information or meaning with its environment is exposed to decay. The current global order, arrogantly based on unlimited accumulation, the fragmentation of knowledge, the supremacy of technical and financial power, and the disconnection between humanity and nature, has operated for decades as a closed system. Today, its contradictions are obvious: recurring wars, ecological crisis, the collapse of shared narratives and a profound loss of ethical orientation. Existential chaos.
However, entropy is not the end. It was Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigogine, father of Chaos Theory, who told me: 鈥淓ntropy is the opportunity for freedom and improvement.鈥� Of course, it depends on us.
In times of maximum instability, what scientific thought calls 鈥榙issipative structures鈥� emerge: new forms of organisation that arise precisely from chaos, capable of transforming crisis into creativity. These structures do not deny disorder, but rather traverse and transmute it. Applied to civilisation, this implies recognising that the new order cannot be built with the prevailing conceptual tools that generated the crisis. But it also implies understanding that the future cannot be built without the accumulated wisdom of the past.
It is these structures that we must preserve from the order that is perishing. Great civilisations understood something that dizzying modernity has forgotten: that knowledge is not only technical, but also ethical, spiritual and relational. Confucius expressed it clearly more than 2,000 years ago: 鈥淗armony is the supreme value.鈥� For the Chinese sage, a just society is not sustained by the imposition of law, but by the virtue, balance and moral responsibility of each individual within the social fabric. This relational vision is surprisingly contemporary today in the face of the fragmentation of the globalised world.
Marie Curie, the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize and the only person to receive it twice, expressed a similar sentiment. Her studies discovered radioactivity and led to the understanding that the atomic structure was more complex than previously believed. Marie Curie said, 鈥淵ou cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals.鈥� She added, 鈥淧ersonal effort is not enough if it is not accompanied by collective responsibility.鈥� Each individual shares a responsibility towards humanity as a whole. And we cannot expect deplorable individuals to build a better world.
In this year in which we commemorate the 40th anniversary of his passing, we cannot ignore the thinking of Jorge Luis Borges. Borges abhorred the idea of linking evil with intelligence. Instead, he connected it with stupidity, and goodness with intelligence. For Borges, culture is inseparable from this ethical stance. Perhaps his conviction was strengthened by rereading one of his favourite philosophers: Schopenhauer, for whom goodness is the most admirable of all virtues, and easily recognisable in the capacity for empathy and compassion.
Aristotle, for his part, understood that the ultimate goal of human life is not the accumulation of goods, but 鈥渆udaimonia鈥�: a full and flourishing life in harmony with reason and virtue.
鈥淭he whole is greater than the sum of its parts,鈥� he said, thus anticipating a systemic understanding of reality that reappears today in the sciences of complexity and quantum physics.
This intuition of wholeness is strongly manifested in the thinking of David Bohm, an American physicist and philosopher who challenged the mechanistic view of the universe. Bohm proposed the idea of explicit order and implicate order. The former is the reality that emerges on the surface, the visible reality that we believe to be unique and definitive. The second is a deep, underlying reality in which everything is internally related, beyond the apparent fragmentation of the visible world. For Bohm, the crisis of humanity was not only political or economic, but essentially a crisis of thought: a fragmented way of perceiving reality that generates equally fragmented systems. A crisis of meaning.
In line with this critique of fragmentation, Spanish philosopher Mar铆a Zambrano had already pointed out that the crisis in the West is not only structural, but also spiritual. According to her, modern reason became insufficient when it separated itself from inner life. In response to this, she proposed poetic reason: a form of knowledge that does not dominate reality, but rather listens to it, contemplates it and reveals it. Like Prigogine, Zambrano was able to see the positive side of chaos: 鈥淓very crisis is an awakening.鈥�
From this broader perspective鈥攕cientific, philosophical and spiritual鈥攖he current order is not collapsing by chance, but because it no longer responds to the profound coherence of the universe鈥攖o the implied order. The radical separation between subject and object, between humanity and nature, between individual and community, has led the global system to a state of extreme entropy.
In the 1970s, the founder of the Club of Rome, Aurelio Peccei, in conversation with Japanese philosopher Daisaku Ikeda, predicted that in the not-too-distant future, humanity would need to reflect on what it means to be human. Technological advances and scientific knowledge alone will not suffice to answer that question. The day will come when humanity will have to delve into a new humanism: into the relationship between human beings and nature, with each other, with life. Today, the Club of Rome promotes this reflection, which requires the courage to recognise mistakes and to rescue long-sacrificed values.
The task of the new humanism, then, is to act as a conscious dissipative structure integrating science, art, ethics, philosophy, and spirituality into a new civilisational synthesis.
The dissipative structures that will build the new order will not be imposed from above, but will emerge from culture, deep thought, art, ethics, and education. Where the old logic persists in chaos, the new humanism must learn to see the possibility of transformation.
The change of era we are going through is not simply technological, although artificial intelligence and digitalisation are accelerating it. It is essentially a change of consciousness. Either we persist in exhausted structures, increasing entropy until final collapse, or we assume the existential responsibility of creating new forms of organisation based on interdependence, wisdom and human dignity.
Lao Tzu said, 鈥淲hen the world is in confusion, the wise man acts with simplicity.鈥�
It is in that profound simplicity that integrates the old and the new, the scientific and the spiritual, the human and the planetary, that the seed of the new order resides, one that we do not yet know but that we can germinate in a redemptive future. We can. And we must.
