On a flight I took recently from Paris to Osaka, the screen displaying our plane's route reflected the state of the world in 2024: the aircraft zigzagged from France to Austria, over Romania, Turkey, Georgia, and Turkmenistan, crossing China via the Gobi Desert, then rounding North Korea before making a 90° turn toward our destination. Our flight carefully avoided the hot war zones (Ukraine, the Middle East, Iran) and a heavily sanctioned Russia that is now thoroughly alienated from the West. We were flying over a world in shambles.

Day after day, with its images of shelled schools, wrecked hospitals, women screaming in despair, mass protests, and tent encampments at universities, 2024 was a year of super-charged gloom. Having spent much of the past decade researching my book Picasso the Foreigner, I was reminded by this turmoil and devastation of the artist's monumental masterpiece, Guernica.

In the spring of 1937, the first spring of the Spanish Civil War, Pablo Picasso found a universal language to denounce an extreme episode in modernity's escalation of horror: the destruction, in fewer than four hours, of a Basque country town enjoying a sunny market day. Solemnly calling on centuries' worth of sources, and summoning all the references his prodigious literary, pictorial, and religious erudition could muster, Picasso set to work creating a huge, tragic tableau. Even today, when refugees in transit camps are asked about a major work of art, Guernica springs to mind.

The late ethnographer Michel Leiris helps us understand the painting's power: "the Old World has committed suicide ... No words can describe this summary of our catastrophe ... In a black-and-white rectangle resonant of ancient tragedy, Picasso sends us our mourning letter: everything we love is going to die." The continuing relevance of this message speaks volumes about the state of the world. We are all aware that we could well be living in the final hours of The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig's memoir of Europe on the brink of catastrophe, which he began writing in 1934 and mailed to his publisher just before committing suicide in 1942.

How do we account for the past year, almost nine decades after Guernica, when all the boundaries of horror have been pulverized? For months, we Europeans awaited the verdict of the US presidential election, as if it were some barometer of our daily lives. Will Donald Trump's seemingly unthinkable victory now cast an even darker pall over this already gloomy picture? "Drill, baby, drill!" is his program for the planet - science, global warming, and the fate of our grandchildren be damned.

The Heroes Have All Gone

Here we are, buffeted by the political ill winds that drive people to withdraw, deafened by populist slogans proclaiming the greatness of America while disowning its deepest values, and surrounded by an ever-growing number of democracies turning to the right, rejecting newcomers, oblivious to the power they derived from the immigrants of earlier years. Have we forgotten that Picasso was considered a dangerous "foreigner" in France, an "enemy within" in Franco's Spain, and a "degenerate artist" in Hitler's Germany? "From Virgil to Augustine, from the Aeneid to the Confessions, the heroes of our great stories are men who flee," the historian Patrick Boucheron observes. "They are the fugitives and castaways who, like Aeneas escaping the night of Troy in flames and ruin, invented the world we live in today."

The global political trend, though, points toward a return to the law of the jungle: Is it not the end of international law and the delicate framework it established after 1945? As Europeans, we are all too aware that, barring an immediate collective leap of faith, our continent is likely to become the first victim of the new Trumpist order.

My assessment of the past year remains the darkest I can recall. As an Algerian Jew, my own cultural heritage - anchored in the medieval culture of Al-Andalus and slowly woven over many decades, in a conversation between sister languages, built on friendships with Lebanese, Palestinians, and Israelis - has been torn apart in the monstrous war in Gaza and Lebanon. The Arab and Jewish people are now pitted against each other in hatred and fanaticism, ignoring all attempts at international intervention.

In March 1987, during a visit to Gaza, I recorded: "Gaza City: one hundred and fifteen thousand inhabitants... Gaza Strip: six hundred and fifty thousand. Right now, fifty thousand people in jail ... three hundred square kilometers ... After Hong Kong, the most densely populated city in the world." Thirty-seven years ago, I felt that the Middle East was at a tipping point. There would soon be the Oslo Accords, which instilled hope by recognizing the necessity of a two-state solution. But on November 4, 1995, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish extremist shattered this fragile advance.

Since then, the ascendancy of right-wing forces and uncontrolled colonization have made the Middle East a fertile breeding ground for the kind of hatred that Hamas, with its terrible terrorist attack last year, has carefully nurtured. The world that I have known - the world that I have built for myself and called my own - is no more. Extremists on both sides have killed all dialogue.

When the Rains Come

Even the physical world has been ravaged. On my trip to Japan, we were confronted by Typhoon Kong-rey. In Kyoto, the imperial "city of a thousand temples," people awaited the storm with resigned wisdom.

For two days, we experienced a condensed version of the archipelago's climate patterns: the treacherous deluge, with its heavy, icy rain, was followed by the bluest of spring days - pure, glorious, dazzling. On that long November weekend, umbrellas gave way to elegant sunshades around temples and shrines. But all over Japan, the threat of extreme weather has grown as a result of global warming and remains a daily concern. "Many people visit this shrine for its divine protective power against fire and other calamities," reads the inscription at the threshold of the Misaki Shinto shrine at the bank of the Takase river.

The typhoon in Asia was preceded a few days earlier by monumental flooding in Spain's Valencia region, with villages south of the Turia river wiped out and the number of victims still undetermined weeks later. The list grew by the day, and Spaniards expressed their anger at the Spanish king, the prime minister, and, most of all, Carlos Mazón, the climate-skeptic president of the regional government. Humanity faces a future of severe and unsustainable natural disasters, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts. Yet the bad news continues to fall, like a rain of cleavers.

How to live on a volcano? Inexorably, the Anthropocene - the epoch in which human activities have become a force capable of reshaping planetary conditions - has become the central, even obsessive, theme of many intellectuals. "We did ignore the planet, but it came back to us in the form of crises. And it took scientists to discover that everything was linked for us to understand it," warns the University of Chicago historian Dipesh Chakrabarty. "The age of the global has produced pride; conversely, the planet invites us to humility. It's only in this collapsed and increasingly planetary world that we can currently forge this call to humility: Even if currently utopian, it remains, to my mind, absolutely decisive."

The scientific evidence is unambiguous, yet Trump and many others deny it. With the US election result, "stabilizing warming below 1.5° Celsius probably becomes impossible," concludes Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania. It is "the final nail in the coffin," adds Rachel Cleetus of the Union of Concerned Scientists. As 2024 ends, where are the politicians prepared to limit global warming caused by humans? And where are the ones capable of imposing the drastic decisions that would protect us from an otherwise inevitable tragedy?

Rather than aligning with planetary "time," the world's political evolution has moved in the opposite direction, toward the struggle of empires. How can we fail to see what is staring us in the face? Under the influence of global warming, current and future mass migrations will become increasingly harsh, dangerous, and deadly.

Yet it is in the darkest moments that the most powerful ideas often are born. In my case, the trip to Kyoto allowed me to take a different look at the past year. Perhaps it is because the spiritual domain assumes calmer, more integrated forms there than in worlds governed by monolithic ideas. How can we not salute the peaceful syncretism of Japan's religious edifices, such as the Yoshiminedera Temple, which incorporates a beautifully preserved Shinto shrine with two statues of little foxes?

The long-term coexistence embodied in Kyoto has been built since the sixth century, when Indian philosophy arrived from China and Korea before merging with Shinto beliefs. Japan was, of course, once laced with violence - with temples burned down or vandalized, and Buddha statues thrown into rivers or used as firewood. Freedom of religious practice was established in Japan only gradually, and under international pressure, beginning with the Meiji Constitution in 1889, which led to a peaceful cohabitation of Buddhism and Shintoism in which elements of each integrated into the other's practices.

Bearing Witness

This year, I sent my friends a New Year's message with a photo of the staggering twelfth-century Otranto Cathedral mosaic, intending it to be both serious and cheerful: "It's a medieval mosaic discovered the day before yesterday in a territory at the end of the world that will carry our wishes in this period of extreme turbulence. It's breathtaking, labyrinthine, and mysterious, with its tree of life and animals killing each other. Happy 2024!" Now, a year later, there is no longer any doubt: 2024 did not bring us much happiness. When politicians go astray, when institutions fall silent, when populism runs riot, it is up to individuals to lead the way. Such was indeed the case in 1937 for Picasso's Guernica.

We need to recreate open dialogue. Writers and artists must mobilize. In his own time, Jean-Paul Sartre and others stood up and created the Russell Tribunal for war crimes. As he told an audience at Japan's Keio University in the autumn of 1966:

"The intellectual is indeed the man who becomes aware of the opposition, in himself and in society, between the search for practical truth and the dominant ideology ... A product of torn societies, the intellectual bears witness to them because he has internalized their tear ... In this sense, no society can complain about its intellectuals without accusing itself, for it has only those it makes."

Yet intellectuals' voices are all but inaudible today. Commitment, freedom of speech, autonomy - these are the pillars that guarantee the power of artists. Through their vision, artists alert us, anticipating the world's upheavals and then revealing, unmasking, and condemning ongoing tragedies. It is Guernica again and again.

Let us recall Mark Rothko and his 1971 Rothko Chapel, a visionary and ecumenical work of art in Houston, Texas, at the crossroads of aesthetics, ethics, and politics; or Empires, Huang Yong Ping's installation at the Grand Palais in Paris, which magnificently referred to the return of empires in struggle, while claiming a cosmopolitan singularity.

And who would have bet on The Floating Piers, the visionary installation on Lake Iseo unveiled in June 2016, in the wake of the previous year's migration crisis, by Christo, a Bulgarian who emigrated to France as a political refugee nearly 60 years earlier? By asserting his freedom, Christo proclaimed the omnipotence of art, offering over a million visitors an experience of empowerment, from which no one returned untouched. The crossing between two shores, the feelings of pitching and vulnerability, haunted the spectator long after the return to dry land.

Finally, let us not forget the devastating power of Naoya Hatakeyama's 2018 Untitled (tsunami tree). His photo of a silent, shredded, amputated, martyred tree - a witness to the Fukushima nuclear disaster in the now-reborn region of his birth - captures the essence of the year we have just endured. What artistic auguries await us in the year ahead?

From Project Syndicate