In a conversation with John Anderson (April 2, 2020), Douglas Murray asks: “Where does the natural feeling of unity lie?” and suggests that it inheres with a return to the Nation State. History shows very clearly what has for thousands of years brought nations together: anti-semitism, hatred of jews. Perhaps we have something to learn in this respect from the experience of Nazism? Was the latter what the EU was meant to be an antidote for? Nazism was the ultimate affirmation of closed borders. That experience is the gold-standard. Anything less will be the frivolity and petit-bourgoeis indulgence of intellectuals who become misty-eyed at the mention of the Nation State, along with those authoritarian strong-arm leaders like Orban, who are already capitalizing on European disunity to create illiberal political regimes that run rough-shod over the rule of law. In an effort to find an alternative to Globalization, the false promises which people have been offered through the idea of a return to a nation state lead us back, as the Nazi example makes clear, to the mythological attachment to a place. The ideal of a homeland, real or imagined, is the very splitting of humanity into natives and strangers. And in this light, technology is far less dangerous than the spirits of a sacral Earth. “It is therefore”, as Maurice Blanchot explains, “the poverty of the world of technology that is its truth, and its great intellectual virtue is not to enrich us but to denude us”. In dis-enchanting humanity, technology “empties us horribly of everything we love and love to be, draws us from the happiness of our hideouts, from the semblances of our truth, destroys that to which we belong and sometimes even destroys itself. A fearsome test. But this contestation, precisely because it leaves us destitute of everything . . . perhaps also gives us the chance that accompanies rupture: when one is forced to give up oneself, one must either perish or begin again”. Technology does away with the privileges of enrootedness, but also its related sense of exile. In other words, it isn’t a matter of returning to the nomadism that is as incapable as sedentary existence of leaving behind a landscape and a climate. Technology goes beyond such an ‘alternative’. “To be or not to be?”. But is Identity the First Question? No. The First Question is not what I am but what I must do. In short, belonging to humanity means belonging to a supreme order of obligation. This is where technology can be of assistance. It wrenches us out of the superstitions surrounding enrootedness or the desire to belong, through which individuals defer to some collective ‘instinct’ or ‘ethos’, call it family, tribe, nation or trans-individual grouping. It also allows the attenuation of that ineluctable sense of personal, non-transferrable responsibility to the stranger, the foreigner, about whose fate I can never simply say, ‘it is of no concern to me, since they are not one of us’.  Only when one gives up all these attachments does an opportunity appear (which is a messianic opportunity): to perceive the human outside the situation in which they are placed, be it geographical, ethnological, societal, historical, political or metaphysical, so that the face of the stranger may shine in all its nudity. Only then can there arise the possibility of absolute justice. Of course, there is the fear that this deracination will deprive the person of a certain instinctual orientation – the organic nourishment provided by filial solidarities, innumerable secret well-springs, that promise of untold spiritual riches. The organic solidarity of the nest or the village has two sides; it both provides protection and facilitates exploitation. No doubt, in a global society individuals are prone to becoming alienated, exposed, friendless; but they also have the liberty to choose their associations without the coercion of custom, without bondage to a feudal law of favours. Still, the contemporary world seems to present impossible alternatives: on the one hand, a rapacious capitalism which exploits developing cultures, on the other, those who advocate a new Feudalism, which sabotages civil society and turns a blind eye to the filial slaves of theocratic societies. But are these really alternatives? In reality, postmodern serfdom allows the law of competition to continue, only that, concealed behind the mask of ideological pronouncements such as ‘ethic fraternity’ and ‘higher moral truths’, it will not be restricted by anything like a rule of law.  Then again, what of those who endure the terror of statelessness? In the condition of the refugee, humanity cannot but be confronted by the afflictions of the stranger, the wanderer, the neighbour who comes knocking on one’s door, or flooding across one’s sacred borders, threatening those who are self-satisfied, barricaded in limitless concern for their own well-being. But is this not also an auspicious moment? An unparalleled opportunity to become acquainted, yet again, with that primordial interdict to extend care and support for “the widow, the orphan and the stranger”: on opportunity, in short, for humanity to become human again. And what about economics? The phenomenon of a globalized world-economy would be the situation par-excellence of human desecration. In commerce, the individual is apparently reduced to a number, to something quantifiable, an object bought and sold. And yet, for there to be such a transaction at all, there must first be a law, which not only protects and safeguards contractual obligations in all their transience, but also maintains, behind the facades of the marketplace, the unity of a juridical subject, and thus the very humanness of the human. It’s not by accident that in the first of the precepts given to Noachide humanity is the command to establish (secular) courts of law. The juridical process is the archetype of all free rational communication, of a person-to-person relation whose universality resides in recognizing the stranger as an equal insofar we both fall under the law.  But one might say the same for a world opened up by trade, facilitating contact between cultures and across borders, bridging the apparently insuperable barriers of chauvinism and self-preoccupation. Is not this free communication one of the preconditions of a humanity which, insofar as it finds a way to cooperate, rather than coming to blows, creates the very idea of a peaceful earth? In this dimension of exchange and mutual recognition is the source of all that is genuinely human in the world, against the particularism of tribalism that, by institutionalizing a divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’, sees human nature as bound to some order of necessity, be it ontological, sociological, perhaps even neurological.  Finally, the detachment from roots liberates intelligence, making both philosophy and the progress of knowledge possible. Thus Socrates preferred the town, in which one meets people, to the countryside and trees. Judaism is the brother of the Socratic message. It has always been free with regard to place. It remained faithful in this way to the absolute value of the human over and above any kind of chiming with the cosmos. The Bible knows only a Holy Land, a fabulous land that spews forth the unjust, a land in which one does not put down roots without certain conditions.  The human is their own master, a mastery that allows us to serve others. Let us remain masters of the mystery that the earth breathes. It is perhaps on this point that Judaism is most distant from Christianity. The catholicity of Christianity integrates the small and touching household gods of the pagans into the worship of saints, and local cults. Through sublimation, Christianity continues to give piety roots, nurturing itself on landscapes and memories culled from family, tribe and nation. This is why it conquered humanity. Judaism has not sublimated idols; on the contrary, it has demanded that they be destroyed. Like technology, it has demystified the universe. It has freed the human from the intoxication of myths and tribalisms. Because of its abstract universalism, it runs up against imaginations and passions. But it has discovered the human in the nudity of their face.