We live in a time of pressing questions and frail responses. The pressing questions are those that address not only our individual and collective life-style options, but above all those which address the roots, the foundations which brought into being the horizon of possibilities for which we are able to opt. They are, therefore, questions which give rise to a peculiar perplexity . The frail responses are those that are unable to ease this perplexity and which, on the contrary, may aggravate it. The questions and the responses differ from culture to culture, from region to region in the world. But the discrepancy between the pressing nature of the questions and the frailty of the responses seems common to all. It derives from the multiplying, in recent times, of areas of contact between cultures, religions, economies, social and political systems and different ways of life, resulting from what is commonly known as globalization. Power assymetries in these areas of contact have now become as great as, if not greater than, they were during the colonial period. But they are now far more vast and numerous. The experience of contact is always an experience of limits and boundaries. Under today’s conditions, it is this experience which gives rise to the discrepancy between the pressing questions and the frail responses. From among many others, I will pick three pressing questions. The first can be formulated thus: if humanity is one, why are there so many different principles governing human dignity, all purporting to be unique, and at times contradicting themselves? At the root of this question is the discovery, emerging as increasingly unequivocal, that the understanding of the world by far exceeds the Western understanding of the world. The return, in the past three decades, of political theology (political Islam, Hinduism and Christianity) has imprinted a special urgency on this question, given that religious monopolies tend to nurture extremisms both within the ranks of the different religions, as among those who fight them. The dominant response to this question is human rights. It is a frail response because it takes refuge in abstract universality (a Western particularism) and does not explain why so many social movements against injustice and oppression do not formulate their struggles in terms of human rights and sometimes, incidentally, formulate them according to principles which contradict those of human rights. This question gives way to another. What degree of consistency can be demanded between principles, of whatever nature, and the practices which are carried out in their name? This question takes on a special urgency in the areas of contact, for it is there that principles try hardest to conceal their discrepancies as regards their practices and that the latter become visible in a more brutal light whenever concealment is unsuccessful. Here, too, the response based on human rights is frail. It is content to accept as natural or inevitable that the reiterated statement of principles should not lose credibility when faced with the increasingly more systematic and glaring violations of human rights by State and non-State players. We go on visiting the market-places of innovation in the human rights industry (global compact, anti-poverty programmes, millenium objectives, etc.) but on our way there, we have to travel past an ever-growing cemitery of broken promises. The second question is this: if the legitimacy of political power is grounded on citizen consensus, how can we guarantee the latter when social inequalities grow wider, and sexual, ethnic-racial and cultural discrimination become more visible? The dominant responses are twofold and equally frail: representative democracy and multi-culturalism. Representative democracy is a frail response because citizens feel less and less represented by their representatives; because, once in power, the parties are, as never before, disregarding their promises; because mechanisms for accountability have become ever more irrelevant; because the political market (the competition between ideologies or commodities to which a price cannot be attached) is being absorbed by the economic market (the competition between commodities which do have a price), with corruption thus becoming systemic. For these reasons, political power tends to ground itself more on resignation on the part of the citizens than on their consensus. In turn, hegemonic multi-culturalism is a frail response because it is exclusive in its pretensions to inclusiveness: it tolerates the Other, within certain limits, but it in no way conceives of being enriched and changed by the Other. It is thus a statement of cultural arrogance. The third question is as follows. How does one change a world in which the five hundred richest individuals have an income equalling that of the 40 poorest countries or that of 416 million people, and where ecological collapse is an ever less remote possibility? The dominant responses are development, development aid, and sustainable development. These are variations on the same frail response, that which posits that the ills of capitalism shall be cured by more capitalism. It assumes that the economy of altruism is not a credible alternative to the economy of selfishness and that the natural world does not deserve any other rationality than the irrationality which we mete out to it and with which we are destroying it.