https://jacobin.com/2025/04/melenchon-virtue-universalism-humanity-creolization

This article from Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France gives much food for thought. It seems our comrades on the other side of the pond have had similar observations and notions bouncing around in their heads as those we have had in recent years. If you consider yourself politically active at all, if you have any intention to organize, or are already organizing, I really think you should read this.

tl;dr: comrade Mélenchon is spitting fire and worth considering at least

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>Even when we do not want them for ourselves, we are now more accepting of the freedom of each individual to make use of them. Indicative in this regard are three fundamental rights of self-determination that are increasingly gaining recognition, at least in some societies. These are the right to voluntary termination of pregnancy, the freedom to identify as the gender of your own choosing, and the right to die when you wish.
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>Even insofar as these issues produce bitter debates, these shifts are testament to movements in the history of ideas and behavior. What is good for each person endowed with equal rights is good for everyone — even if you do not use that right yourself. No one is forced to have an abortion, or commit suicide, or choose a different gender, just because the law allows for it.
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>Other moral or religious norms that someone has taken up may dissuade them from exercising some freedom that they have gained. **But in each case, an equality of rights is the basis of the desirable order of things. Here freedom of choice turns out to be the surest path toward equality**. This connection between freedom and equality gives moral and ethical force to our political efforts.

(emphasis added)

The way I've formulated this basis, at least in my material conditions of Tarrant County, Texas, is on a shared rejection of supremacy. Better? Worse? Maybe. But supreme? The Best *and Only*? That there is a dangerous notion. You think cars suck and trains are better? Maybe. You prefer your diesel truck and think trains are for losers? Maybe. Ultimately, a healthy dose of *uncertainty* --- and a willingness to fully and honestly inherit the *costs* of each, as well as the *benefits* --- are more likely to produce a Tarrant County that meets some semblance of harmony.

>If virtue is the basis of a civic morality, then we must not shy away from the questions posed by its material practice. Virtue is not a state of being that we could hope to reach, as if it were like climbing a mountain and then staying up there like hermits. Rather virtue is a path that must continually be built anew.
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>It is the path that we take when we question the consequences of our actions: Are they really good for everyone? Virtue cannot stop at the level of good intentions. If it did, it would turn into something of a totally different nature. It would become hypocrisy, something in which we wrap our mere inability to act. To be something real, it must necessarily be an action, in the here and now.
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>There can be no virtue without the virtuous. Virtue cannot be merely decreed but must be observed in reality. Virtue finds its concrete application in the way in which we live together with others.
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>Virtue is its own reward and is itself fulfilling. To expect something else in return would hardly be virtuous. It would turn the focus of our actions away from doing what is good and just for everyone. But virtue is not self-denial or a negation of the self. In its most fundamental principle, it is a quest for reciprocity.

Not gonna lie, I think this line of approach would work *really*, **really** well in a religious, even evangelical, context; it walks along the same path Jesus laid, offering a manner for a traditionally secular left to bring in notions of morality that could be shared between the secular and religious alike.

>For this reason, it has to be based on equality. Virtue is impossible wherever one person dominates another. It does not matter whether that domination is based on prejudice or on custom and practice, as patriarchy does through the creed of social one-upmanship — or worse still, by making people act out of fear of punishment. Equality is the very oxygen of solidarity.
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>Reciprocity means recognizing that we each have similar needs to be met. Virtue is the ability to reconcile the principles that we apply in our own lives with the ones that we would like to see applied to other people, for our common benefit. At a time when our societies are brimming with hatred, virtue is the glue that sticks us together.

Hard agree.

>One development stands out as the most crucial advance of our era: the rise of a single human people, united by its shared fate and its common dependence on the ecosystem. This itself provides the starting point for writing a new narrative about human history.
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>We need to make this the oxygen of our aspiration for a different world order. Humanity is indeed bound together, at the very least by its equal dependence on its ecosystem. This provides the objective basis for the universality of rights: we all have the same inescapable needs and must have the same right to satisfy them.

The basis for a 21st century internationalism, I suppose. A manner of countering the inevitable desire to turn inward, to close the gate, to say "what's mine is mine and not yours."

>We see this in the human tendency to create a common culture out of distinct elements; that is, to practice cultural mixing. This process has been called “creolization.” The word stems from the creation of a new language in the West Indies and South America: Creole.
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>There the slaves who had been kidnapped from all over Africa did not speak the same language, either among themselves or with the slaveowners. But communication is fundamental for all social animals. It is a means, but also an end: to produce the social bond without which no human can survive.

I like the metaphor.

>We find it in all languages, which integrate loanwords from some other language, but we can likewise find it in music and rhythms. The same can be said of more private tastes. Whether it is cooking or clothing, creolization is proof of human universality, because it makes it a reality.
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>From a political point of view, it is the missing link between the desire for universalism and the assertion of the right to be different. It is not a half-and-half but the passage toward something new. Most creolization today takes place through music, television series, and our know-how in using various objects. These things all allow for a fusion of behaviors and norms.

Diversity and Unity form a dialectic. It is senseless to have one without the other. Norms and Deviations only exist within each other. There is no place for Supremacy within such a framework. Only the Maybes of Better and Worse, informed by material conditions and the passage of time.

>This tendency is all the more powerful when the pressure of numbers multiplies connections and increases the interactions between people. In such a context, creolization can be seen as the preparation of a common matrix to build from, or as the foundation of a future cumulative culture.
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>Politically creolization offers a perspective for an era of mass population movements in the age of large numbers. Creolization does this at a time when climate change is massively increasing the number of human beings on the move. It does this at a time when the intensification of connections in the online noosphere has an unparalleled capacity to produce a common culture of reference.
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>It does this a time when an AI system like Bloom has proven its ability to “think” in forty-six different languages and come up with “intelligent” suggestions. And finally, it does this at a time when humanity’s expansion into outer space is underlining the existence of a single human community — and beginning to transport it into a boundless universe. Creolization is the future of a humanity that is soaring to new heights.

I'd caution against artificial "intelligence," and I'm a little confused by "space expansion" being the driver of a single human community, rather than the climate change that was harped on earlier, but yes: I do think that the creolization metaphor is a useful construct to work from.