The notion of hybridity encourages us to investigate

International audienceWe have a new task before us. Our difficulties have become interesting instead of a cause for despair. Our ideologies have indeed become less convincing, just as it is true that our institutions are crumbling and we do not know how to repair them. It may be that most of our social problems, as we conceive them, are insoluble. We are besieged by uncertainty. This means we are lost, but also that we are free. We are no longer prisoners of our inherited assumptions. We need no longer worry that we are unable to establish a consensus. This is where the notion of hybridity is helpful. At the personal level, we can now see ourselves more clearly than ever before as hybrids, composed of a mixture of memories from different centuries, beliefs gathered from many sources, dependent on possessions manufactured by people we have never met. We once believed democracy would make us increasingly alike, but the opposite has happened. Eachidi one of us unique, we are hybrid imaginations, each viewing the world in a slightly different way, blind in some directions, obsessed by prejudices to which we give our own peculiar interpretation. The more information there is in the world, the more we can absorb only an ever smaller part of it. However, though in nature hybridity may be sterile, in humans it is on the contrary an opportunity for creating value from our disagreements and diversities