REGIONS OF THE WORLD AND THEIR CULTURAL DIVERSITY IN THE FACE OF THE “LABYRINTH OF LONELINESS” (ON THE EXAMPLE OF LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL EXPERIENCE)

The regions of the world, with their cultures and traditions, are destinations, that is, places where people settle down, finding their place of residence and their home. Thus, people have their ‘home’ in many places, and so it can be inhabited and populated as a ‘common home,’ as Pope Francis suggests in his encyclical Laudato Si'. But it so happens that today the ‘common house’, which in its truth is peace, is caged because the networks, structures and mechanical devices of the ‘civilisation of wealth and capital’ have been thrown over it, depriving it of the breadth and freedom of deployment that its regions give it, together with its diversity, and narrowing its horizon to the line of the idolised civilisational progress of the hegemonic civilisation. Faced with this situation, which I believe exacerbates a long-standing problem in the cultural history of Latin America, and it is this history that I will use as the background for my presen-tation today, I think that Domingo Faustino Sarmiento was wrong when he said for his time and the future that the struggle is between ‘civilisation and barbarism’, and that José Martí was right when he said: ‘There is no struggle between civilisation and barbarism as there is between false erudition and nature.’ Therefore, which I will outline in the next section, following José Martí, I will try to argue in it for the idea that it is not ‘nature’, which I translate here as the regions of the world and their ‘special elements’, but ‘false erudi-tion’, which is currently condensed in the aforementioned ‘civilisation of capital’, which is now generating cultural loneliness and thus confronting the regions of the world with the challenge of the ‘labyrinth of loneliness’, which, as Octavio Paz has masterfully shown in his essay of the same name, poses to the ‘regional’ peoples and their cultures, both Latin American and many other peoples of the world, the dra-matic question of how to emerge from their loneliness and participate in the universal communion of hu-manity without losing themselves, denying themselves or disappearing as such. I will try to explain and clarify the stated connection between civilisation and loneliness, focusing on the consequences of civilisa-tional loneliness for life and life-area formation in regions of the world. This will be followed by the sec-ond paragraph with some reflections on what to do in the face of the ‘labyrinth of loneliness’.