Chantal Delsol, a French philosopher, writes with clarity and frankness when she takes the pulse of the vicissitudes of our time. In * The Hatred of the World: Totalitarianism and Postmodernity* (IES, Santiago, Chile, 2026), she points out that the emancipatory drive is one of the keys—with its lights and shadows—to modernity and to our current postmodernity. It is a torrential drive aimed at building a new humanity, undermining the roots of the inherited cultural trunk. It is an impatient search for the future that, with the motto “anything is possible,” sweeps away everything in its path in the name of the “absolute good” to which it aspires.

The emancipatory agent assumes the role of demiurge, creating reality to his liking. This demiurge seeks to create the new man, for which purpose he proposes to free man from all ties, that is, to strip him of his social condition, his belonging to small societies (family, community), his affections. For this maker of the new humanity, there is nothing given or received that must be respected. Human will becomes law unto itself and makes the laws that shape the new society. What remains of the ordinary person, the common man in Chestertonian terms? What remains is the mere individual without original attachments, without bonds. An individual reduced to pure becoming, without any familial or communal roots, and even without a natural grammar that must be respected.

Marx—echoing modernity—wrote in his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it .” Goodbye to the initial attitude of respect for the given (admiration, wonder). From then on, the focus shifted to a revolutionary transformation, the driving force behind the Nazi and communist totalitarianisms of the 20th century. This transformative zeal still persists in postmodernity, subverting the human condition and its inherent desires.

This totalitarian mentality still largely prevails in our time; its emancipatory, overwhelming zeal places itself—in many cases—”beyond good and evil.” Its new demiurges consider themselves the representatives of a vast majority, of which they proclaim themselves the vanguard. They think for the people, because they believe they know their own good better than the people do (cf. p. 213). There were enlightened ones before, and there are now, too.

What does Delsol propose? To re-examine all of reality in its most intimate and constitutive essence. It is about distinguishing without separating, because human beings need both rootedness and emancipation, roots and freedom. “It is not Modernity,” the author states, “that is in question, but its excesses. Nor is it emancipation itself, but the persistent, wicked, and ultimately futile desire—for the undertaking is impossible—to eliminate all rootedness in order to achieve an absolute, triumphant, and barrier-free emancipation” (p. 68). It is the excesses, the hubris of modernity, that must be properly contained.

Chantal Delsol’s proposal adopts a compassionate view of reality. We are not in the best of all possible worlds, certainly, but our world is capable of improvement. Time will tell, without undue impatience, because “the moral message is a promise that is translated day by day into unglorious gestures, that begins anew in each generation, but cannot aspire to its definitive fulfillment by order of an official circular (p. 56).” To reconcile ourselves with reality, we must begin by loving the world, not by rejecting or demolishing it. We must heal, repair, and add to it with the attitude of a gardener, who cleans, fertilizes, sows, and cares for the world he found upon arriving (cf. p. 276).

We also need the attitude of Nehemiah, whose “account shows how the city [Jerusalem] is reborn not through the initiative of a single person, but through the shared responsibility of the entire people: priests, artisans, heads of families, women, and young people. It is a work that has God at its center and rebuilds relationships even before the stones (Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, n. 8).” First things first, and the beginning lies in the centrality of the human person and their relationships; then come the stones. Affirming roots, improving the environment, elevating the individual, and fostering social relationships are attitudes that manifest love for the world: the work of gardeners, not demiurges.