La culture est la façon dont une grande partie de la société perçoit la vie (et ses diverses manifestations), le monde et l’univers (ce que l’on peut interpréter et ce que l’on ignore). Comme tout phénomène complexe, la culture a ses fonds (souvent difficilement approchés) et ses apparences, qui peuvent facilement nous désorienter et nous laisser prendre comme essentiel ce qui est vraiment superficiel et secondaire.

Culture is the way in which a large part of society perceives life (and its various manifestations), the world and the universe (what can be interpreted and what is ignored). Like all complex phenomena, culture has its (often difficult-to-approach) foundations and its appearances, which can easily disorientate us and leave us taking as essential what is superficial and secondary.

The background of European culture is largely determined by the nature, landscape, and external environment of the Mediterranean: bright sunshine, a mild climate, easily available food (fish, river water, arable land), fewer constraints on survival than elsewhere, easy and inexpensive access by sea facilitating human contact and the transfer of knowledge, a crossroads of trade both between Mediterranean sites and between the Mediterranean and the rest of the world. It is these characteristics of the Mediterranean that make Mediterranean culture human, sustainable, perpetually young and unsurpassable. And this, despite the rules that various authorities, political or religious, have always tried to impose on true Mediterranean culture. Indeed, all authority is based on the submission of the individual’s will to the wisdom (often madness) of a king, a God (and his prophets), an emperor, a religious leader and his followers, a head of state and his subordinates. This submission is always accompanied by rules, duties, prohibitions, sanctions, at least feelings of guilt and limitations of mental freedoms. Thus, freedoms are restricted (recently by what is euphemistically called digitalisation and automatic information), and true human understanding is replaced by obligations. The search for the true nature of culture leads us to consider all these political and religious rules as false appearances that camouflage the true Mediterranean culture (which is the same everywhere and homogeneous) and disorients our consciousness and our daily life towards the consideration that there are various Mediterranean cultures (or components).

Is it by chance that Abraham ¬ father of the three monotheistic religions (Jewish, Christian and Muslim), who lived in Uhr, in the desert south of the Euphrates, a few kilometres from Babylon and 1,700 kilometres from Phoenicia ¬ was called by his God (according to the Hebrew myths) and then brought to the promised land, which was the Mediterranean, not the fertile land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, where poor Adam was deceived by his wife Eve and from which they were driven out of the imaginary and grossly mythical paradise?

Successive invaders and the impressive continuity of the Mediterranean cultural heritage

Except for the Phoenicians and Egyptians, all the other peoples of the Mediterranean were invaders: Greeks (c. 2000-1000 BC), Hebrews (c. 1700 BC), Latins (c. 1000 BC), Celts (c. 1000 BC), Persians (550-330 BC), Germanics (300 AD), Slavs (500 AD), Arabs (after 630 AD), Turks (after 1100 AD).

Miraculously, each built its culture, which was always based on the achievements of its predecessors. The few exceptions of destruction were very localised and rather symbolic: Persepolis by Alexander the Great, Carthage by the Latins, Rome by the Germans, Jerusalem and the Hebrew temple by the Assyrians and Romans.

Each invader quickly became aware of the cultural richness of the peoples of the conquered lands. Gradually, he could either adopt the existing culture (the case of the Romans who converted to Greek culture), modify the existing culture (the case of the Germans) or borrow the essence of the existing cultures and integrate it into his own culture (the case of the Arabs, somewhat less so the Turks).

Could science, art, philosophy, and culture have been born elsewhere than in the Mediterranean?

Human beings have never given up on trying to understand the world, penetrating the mysteries of the natural phenomena and mechanisms that surround them, predicting their plausible evolution and thus improving their quality of life. However, this continuous search for understanding the world is hemmed in and trapped by various external constraints: religious (especially), political, social and even familial. The path to truth and freedom has never been simple or obvious.

Man's great battle has always been against his prejudices. Liberation from this spiritual bondage began timidly in Babylon, on the Nile and in China. It suddenly exploded around 500 BC on the shores of the Mediterranean. Man then began to believe in the existence of universal laws outside the will of the gods (or God). He discovered that beauty and art are not indications of vanity, but almost essential components of our daily lives, which can always be improved. This sudden transition from obscurantism to light could only have taken place in the Mediterranean. The bright light, the natural beauty, the easy communication by sea and the transfer of knowledge are the real reasons for the birth of the so-called "European culture", which to a large extent is the Mediterranean culture. Only in the Mediterranean and nowhere else could man escape his destiny of liberation and leave behind mental obscurantism (based mainly on religion, but also on existing authority and social customs). This statement does not underestimate the qualities of other peoples and cultures in the world. But it is in the Mediterranean that the ideal conditions are met for the scientific, artistic and cultural egg to hatch, to emerge from isolation and to exploit more and more the qualities, admittedly natural, of the human spirit.

Let us recall spectacular feats of the human mind that have changed the course of history: the Phoenician alphabet (around 1000 BC, adopted by the Greeks around 800 BC and by the Latins around 400 BC) facilitated writing and made it widespread among the middle classes; the existence of universal scientific laws governing physical phenomena (Thales, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Euclid, etc.) led to the birth of science; the search for ultimate beauty created architecture, painting and sculpture (Phidias, etc.); the desire to educate people and to make them aware of the importance of the arts; and the need for a new way of thinking); the desire to educate society, to give it a moral and a goal above the everyday affairs led to the art of theatre (Sophocles, Euripides...); the desire to interpret the world and life globally led to philosophy (Plato, Aristotle); freedom and parity led to democracy (Pericles...); the need to give people a sense of identity led to the creation of a new society (the "new world"); the need to give people a sense of lasting and unequivocal justice led to Roman law; the discipline of the Germanic peoples led to the creation of rules applicable everywhere (today they are called European directives and regulations); the Arab conception of ten symbols (the ten digits) to express any sum further facilitated the development of mathematics and physics. Is it by chance that the great achievements of the human mind were born in the Mediterranean?

The gods and the God: the unfinished road to immortality and morality

The man of the Mediterranean world is at the origin of the creation of the gods or the God. Confronted with the double human incapacity, on the one hand, to justify a large part of natural phenomena (from storms to earthquakes), and on the other hand, to deal with human and social injustice and immorality, societies ended up considering forces outside of human existence, forces that they named "the gods" or "God". But whereas the Greek gods, and most of the gods of the East, had all the human faults (e.g. they cheated on their wives with almost no consequences), the Hebrew God was blameless. Man had to obey all of God's wills (which are now imposed as moral or legal codes) in order to one day approach divine perfection. This fundamental Hebrew consideration is taken up by Christianity, but in a softened and lightened way thanks to the mixing of Hebrew mythology (called Old Testament) with Greco-Latin philosophy. The same is true of Islam, which also adopted the fundamentals of the Hebrew view of the world, but in an austere, severe and much less flexible way.

Would the three monotheistic religions have swept away all other ideologies if they had not been adopted as state ideologies and rules? Christianity was chosen by the Roman emperor Constantine, who saw the need to give his empire a more effective tool than Roman law to forge a bond. Islam was preferred by the various princes of Arabia, who multiplied their territories under the flag of their new religion. In this respect, it is important to distinguish between what the state powers have added to the three monotheistic religions and their moral and cultural foundation. All three are based on goodness, solidarity, and humanism. Their apparent aggressiveness is only the result of their appropriation by ambitious and ruthless kings and princes, whether Christian or Muslim.

However, it remains for a balance to be found between human freedom (which is a prerequisite for the survival of all living beings) and the Hebrew conception (taken up by Christianity and Islam) of submission to an omnipresent God (as if he were a field, in the physical sense of the term, invisible but covering almost everything, like gravity, for example). A God who becomes the guarantor of morality, immortality, a continuous surveillance of every act and a permanent guilt linked to the original sin committed by Adam and Eve. The omnipresence of God is a tool for social peace, not a mechanism for restricting human freedom.

In other words, the three monotheistic religions, once the mythical aspects, state orientations and personal pretexts have been decoded, are essentially a factor of Mediterranean culture: freedom, goodness, equality of people and genders, solidarity, respect for the other are the true characteristics of our Mediterranean culture, derived from the achievements of the three monotheistic religions.

A short text can only schematise a subject as complex as European culture. I must admit that these lines are only adaptations of the works of great minds such as Aristotle, Plato, Dante, Victor Hugo, Goethe and many others, who all lived (at least part of their lives) in the Mediterranean. There is no doubt that European culture is one, continuous, formidable, and admirably young