No More Learning

Such countries inevitably create their corresponding dream factories. The Arabs have also reached their own stage of myth creation and are beginning to give themselves a poetic image. They are inventing themselves as agents of a great history. The air is full of fairy tales and imperial epics – including the epic hostilities essential for any great story. The young men become soaked in a heroic fairy-tale paranoia that requires them to fight the nearby enemy at home and the faraway enemy across the Atlantic.
What makes Bin Laden so interesting is that he torpedoes the magical sense of fellowship between the two escapist powers. He has understood that dream factories can only be fought with the aid of alternative dream factories. Citizens of a genuine escapist power are no longer interested in resistances of yesterday. Escapism is the model for movement by which people can live away from resistance. If there are still obstacles left to face, it is only because the old evil followed you to your new home. You fled from the Old World and left all your old troubles behind and now what you left has caught up with you. The best thing would be to eliminate the evil at its own source.
POSCHARDT: Then the story of America’s creation is based first of all on the flight of Europeans to a desired place that turns out successfully. It starts on the East Coast and flees further westwards until it reaches the Pacific coast. That is where Hollywood arose, where the escape was dematerialized and continued in imagination.
SLOTERDIJK: In fact, going West is fundamental for the entire modern age: from Europe across the Atlantic and further from the East Coast to the West Coast. But that was not the end of the great escapist drift by a long way. The escape energies accumulated at the Pacific wall and rose upwards. California emerged as the first land of ‘get high, go easy, get rich, get famous’. Everything has the same dynamic, the same flight into the easy, magnificent, glorified life. People always want to get away from the old powers of depression. Still, the Americans sense that something is creeping up behind us that we can’t get rid of completely. Persecutory forces are at work, pursuing us into the heartland of evasion. Many of those who are fleeing are tired and at risk of giving up the race. Is it coincidence that the USA is the paradise of psychotropic drugs – and the hell of overweight people? The scales tell them they don’t look fit for escape.
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POSCHARDT: From that perspective, would nation-building, the idea of exporting democracy – by armed force, if necessary – also be a consequence of that escapism?
SLOTERDIJK: Nation-building is the attempt to sedate possible pursuers on the spot.
POSCHARDT: Do you believe that?
SLOTERDIJK: Of course not. Not because I don’t trust the Americans and don’t wish them success in what they do. On the contrary, one wishes the agenda as such the best of luck. But, as Europeans, we know a few things that dampen our confidence in political engineering. Nation-building isn’t a stupid concept in itself. We could use it to sum up a good part of what has happened in Europe since Napoleon. Above all, he characterized French world politics in the offensive phase after the revolution of 1789. The French democratic messianic ideology that Napoleon embodied is absolutely comparable to the America of today, and its conse- quences make us think. It took 150 years after Napoleon’s death to get rid of the last detritus of his politics.
POSCHARDT: Can you give an example?
SLOTERDIJK: Let’s consider Spain and Germany, both objects of Napoleonic nation-building. In Spain the effects lasted until the death of Franco in 1975. In 1808, Napoleon stood outside Madrid with an army of three hundred thousand men, as a liberator and herald of human rights, of course. All at once the miserable Spanish could participate in the achievements of the French Revolution, the abolition of aristocratic privileges, the end of exploitation of the people by a parasitical clergy. The conquerors didn’t utter a single wrong word. What happened then? The downtrodden Spanish peasants, the poorest of the poor, ganged up together and picked out young men from the liberators’ army and, full of hate, massa- cred them. We are reminded of this story today every time we say the word ‘guerrilla’. After that, Spain needed nearly 170 years to find its own path to democracy. In Germany things weren’t much better, because anti-French emotions led to the ideas of the German national movement splitting off from the ideas of the Enlightenment – with consequences that could be observed in 1945. Briefly, the Europeans know, or should know, what to think about import exemptions and import democracies. At best we get dictatorships in democratic clothing with a substructure of a market economy.
POSCHARDT: That sounds as if it would apply to us Germans as well.
SLOTERDIJK: At a distance, the Wilhelmine Empire prob- ably seemed to be a construct like that. The Federal Republic of Germany, however, was fortunate and bypassed the usual
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emotional backlash against the liberator. But this is a historical peculiarity that the present propaganda mongers of nation-building mistakenly hold up as a model. We can’t derive anything at all from the German case. The world in the twenty-first century will most probably become a form of global authoritarian capitalism. With the war on terror and the Islamists’ jihad romanticism, war capital- ism is already palpably close. The circumstances are such that there will soon be attempts to increase non-democracy.
POSCHARDT: Is it the task of intellectuals to remind democracy of its own roots?
SLOTERDIJK: In principle, yes, but the intellectuals themselves don’t really know any longer where the roots lie.
POSCHARDT: That leads to the question: who are we Germans? Cosiness is more important to us than freedom. We would rather live nice and warm in a little shack than freezing in huge rooms. We are like Oblomov, the nineteenth-century Russian hero who spends his life on the sofa.
SLOTERDIJK: I think the Russian association leads to the issue itself, for modern Germans are actually much more Russian than they imagine. We resemble the romantic cliché of Russians from nineteenth-century literature. They probably slipped into us by a kind of soul migration during the Cold War. However, the Germans are cosy in a completely different way than their Eastern cousins. They stay away from the precipice; their cosiness remains compat- ible with work. German motivation is a reliable constant as long as it goes along with a strong imperative, because Germans don’t want to get involved voluntarily. They want to be compelled.
POSCHARDT: They first have to hit the rock bottom of necessity.
SLOTERDIJK: If the rock bottom has spoken to them, they’re capable of anything.
POSCHARDT: Where are we now? Have we hit rock bottom or are we still going down further?
SLOTERDIJK: I think the country’s own success mechanisms are in such good shape that we can’t fall much further. The German export economy, German science, the German legal system, the German social system, all of that is firmly established in positive routines that keep going even when a few individuals dig their heels in.
POSCHARDT: And what about freedom?
SLOTERDIJK: By now, most goals for freedom are defined apo- litically or post-politically.
POSCHARDT: Strange things happen in Germany: People work illegally and complain there are no jobs. They moan about the col- lapse of the inner cities and go shopping in malls outside the city.
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They complain about jobs migrating away and save money by going shopping in Poland. Are many Germans incapable of understand- ing their own actions and the consequences?
SLOTERDIJK: Most people are not particularly good at grasp- ing if-then relationships – I wouldn’t restrict that to Germans. In our case we have the added factor of the general infantilizing ten- dency of the social climate. The drug subculture offers the paradigm for the radical separation of one’s own behaviour and awareness of consequences, and the open consumer society has more in common with this subculture than it realizes. Drug consumers have learned to ignore the consequences of their addiction, whether physical or moral. Their own ruin doesn’t bother them: just watch how you cope with my self-destruction! ‘You’ means the legendary unreal collective of the Others that is to blame for everything and respon- sible for everything. This collective contains the so-called ‘society’, the biggest of all vague addresses. It is the perfect imaginary recipi- ent for passing on blame that can’t be addressed. I actually think our beloved homeland consists to a large extent of people who practise the art of passing things on. We blame our bad mood on the conjuncture; we pass on our own consumer behaviour to the desola- tion of the inner cities.
POSCHARDT: What can politics do in that case? Isn’t it, in fact, the motive force of this infantilization?
SLOTERDIJK: Social policy is an enterprise for eliminating the serious case. It should and must promise that nobody will go under, and that is how it manages to prevent the experience of total scarcity. That is very right and human, but it has the unintended effect of making things progressively unreal. In the unreal climate, antecedent clauses no longer reach their consecutive clauses, and logical and practical connections become random: 2 x 2 only equals 4 in poor countries.
POSCHARDT: Can politics organize mathematics lessons again?
SLOTERDIJK: No, it can’t. That would mean putting math- ematics above the human right to cosiness. Politics can’t dictate the logic of hardship. The state can’t even balance its budget because the unreal imperative is stronger than financial reasoning. It was easier for the German state after 1945 when it had a poor population that didn’t have to be taught the basic concepts of hardship. The state found it easy to deal with the population and to key into its basic resilience to pursue its projects. That is unimaginable today after a fifty-year-long intensive course in consumerism. Today’s state could certainly do with its citizens having a tougher mentality for coping with economy measures or building successful new enterprises. It can’t achieve either of these things under its own steam as long as its
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clientele is operating on a completely different dynamic. As a result, it is condemned to maintaining a climate of well-tempered unreal- ity. The mood resembles people in a moderately affluent family who give their children the assurance that however they behave they won’t fall out of the family nest. Middle-class children today are so well cushioned that they can do what they want without having serious worries about being downgraded. We won’t even mention the offspring of the new upper class, who have far less stress. This puts today’s state in a very difficult situation because it simply can’t do what it was able to do previously with its members. Above all, it can’t give any orders – and it isn’t allowed to act as a fitness coach. Usually the state has the characteristics of a coach in the sense that it determines for which kind of contests and for which kind of stress the different population groups have to be trained, and at which arenas they should appear. Today the state, with the President as its mouthpiece, can only advise citizens to do more themselves on their own initiative. This is dreadfully similar to the famous double-bind command: ‘Damn it all, be spontaneous at long last! ’ Present-day politics reminds me of the strategy of health insurance companies in the 1970s, when jogging paths were constructed in the woods on the city outskirts to allow the few people who wanted to do some- thing healthy to let the general community off the hook by keeping themselves fit.
POSCHARDT: The way society is separating into different layers is having dire consequences. The performance elite has to work more and more, and is ridiculed for doing so. The gap between rich and poor is widening – and is supposed to be closed by redistribu- tion. People evidently think any kind of differentiation is always a result of injustice.
SLOTERDIJK: Perhaps we should take a look at Niklas Luhmann’s writings, for example, the important essay ‘Am Anfang war kein Unrecht’ [‘In the Beginning there was No Injustice’]2. But what happens today goes beyond questions of the sense of justice. People think they are feeling a psychological disintegration that goes deeper than a normal class divide. It is connected to the fact that key personnel with a sixty- to eighty-hour week are barely able to understand how those less heavily occupied experience reality.
POSCHARDT: Where does the hatred against the elites stem from?
2 Niklas Luhmann, ‘Am Anfang war kein Unrecht’, Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik: Studien zur Wissenssoziologie, vol. 3. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag), 1989, pp. 11–65.
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SLOTERDIJK: To understand that, aside from the timeless psychology of resentment, it is useful to look back at the histori- cal semantics. Sometimes the history of words is great politics in itself. At the beginning of the modern hatred of elites we find the anti-aristocratic sentiments among the plebeian layer in the French Revolution. At that time, citizens and plebs began with a common understanding that the conventional treatment of the people by a parasitic aristocracy and a clergy in the same mould couldn’t go on. This verdict was put into practice in 1789. From then on, people in Europe used the word ‘exploitation’ until 1917, and in some regions until 1968, whenever they wanted to interpret widely disparate income relations. The term was unambiguous for the period before 1789: the aristocracy and its clerical counterpart really existed and appropriated the French nation’s surplus product to lead their lordly life without doing anything themselves – and, moreover, there was a hyper-parasitic royal court that made the stupid mistake of showing off its extravagance to the nation. A situation like that creates – to put it mildly – various kinds of intolerance, and those fitted the description of bourgeois morality. In that regime, proletarians and citizens defined themselves quite logically as the exploited and the old ruling class as exploiters. When the citizens and proletariat mutually disentangled themselves after the revolution the exploiter title was passed on to entrepreneurs, and along with a grain of truth this involved a misnomer with serious and widespread effects. Now 200 years have passed and we still haven’t really understood that a completely new figure has appeared on the stage of world history, that of the rich person who works, often more than anybody else. This type has still not found its rightful place in the collective wisdom and linguistic vocabulary of contemporary culture. The reason, perhaps, is that it was God’s last thought. It is so improb- able that even with the best will we only understand it reluctantly. To be rich, but to do more than anybody else: for many people, if not the majority, this still seems totally absurd. Nonetheless, quan- titively and qualitatively, it is an impressive phenomenon. Without the working rich there would be no modern welfare state. The ominous high earners who constitute barely 10 per cent of the popu- lation generate more than 50 per cent of the national tax revenue.
POSCHARDT: The personal responsibility of the socially weak is still a taboo subject for discussion.
SLOTERDIJK: I don’t believe in taboos, only in difficult topics. The most difficult topic is that a large number of poorer people are absolutely not exploited; they are people who nobody has deprived of anything, but who have consciously not used their opportunities, mainly because they probably found no incentives to rise above
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their situation. Of course, many people are in need through no fault of their own, and we help them, as we obviously must. But given the present facts, we can talk about a changed perspective even on the left wing. It is no longer a question of starting from accusations of exploitation and corresponding class solidarity, but of going back to seemingly old-fashioned concepts like empathy and shared respon- sibility for the weaker members of society.
POSCHARDT: Compassionate conservatives – a success model of the Republicans in the USA.
SLOTERDIJK: The European way will be different because we don’t appreciate the political exploitation of religious feeling. But let me say a word about the situation of exploitation: the ‘exploitation of man by man’, to recall the Count of Saint-Simon’s phrase, has largely been shifted to the exploitation of nature by human beings. We live in a situation where even the poorest believe they have the right to a share in this new exploitation of nature. Your earlier mention of the cosy, warm cabin fits this trend perfectly. High room temperatures today are almost always a theft from nature or, more precisely, from the history of the earth. We forget too easily that fossil energy carriers, the real benign geniuses of our time, have done more for the transformation of human living conditions in the past 200 years than all the cultural factors together. We have to think about this provocative statement to understand the extent to which most people today live from unfinanced ideas. We say ‘culture’, and have no idea where it comes from.
POSCHARDT: Let’s look at the problem of roots. Who is conservative today? Who is progressive? The trade unions or the middle-class parties? Or have these terms become obsolete?
SLOTERDIJK: The trade unions are doubtless the crux of today’s conservatism – compared to them, parties like the German Christian Social Union (CSU) are pure soviets. But there is no cul- tural success without conservatives.
POSCHARDT: And the Christian Democratic Party (CDU)?
SLOTERDIJK: Like every major party, it contains both elements, the preserving and the progressive. The old form of social democ- racy was another wonderfully conservative institute, populated by achievement conservatives. In contrast to that, the Schröder line of the new Social Democratic Party (SPD) expresses how the party’s present internal learning processes work. We can generally say that unrest always arises from learning, and people can and must learn only when they are in power. The SPD’s malaise comes from the fact that it contains a few people who really want to govern. If the party didn’t have such people it could declare itself satisfied with cosy illusionary opposition, and spare itself the trouble of learning
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for today’s world. As we have said, we only learn after leaving the safe reservation of irresponsibility.
POSCHARDT: The will to freedom is gaining a voice in the East of Europe and in the mosques of fundamentalism. Are we learning from the Ukrainians what we should be, and from the Islamists in Germany what we shouldn’t be?
SLOTERDIJK: Two frontiers are becoming discernible – not frontiers of geopolitics but of political mentalities. The one is defined by hate and resentment, both in vehement, almost incurable forms, and the other by idealization and anticipation of rescue. Two of the strongest affects that humans are capable of are working right now on the frontiers of Europe. The Europeans have every reason to see this as an incredible opportunity. These facts should make us realize the real situation of Europe. Without exception, Europe’s leading nations are the constructs that followed humbled empires. If we look at the history of mentalities in the past fifty years, we recognize the transitional pathologies of the vanished world powers. But those phenomena have had their day, and that is why a new European affirmation is emerging. In this situation we must narrate the European myth again, in such a way that the people listening to the story understand that it is about something magnificent, some- thing we are proud to be part of. This presupposes that we demand our most beautiful myth back from the Americans, who took it with them over the ocean.
POSCHARDT: Which myth?
SLOTERDIJK: The story of the refugee Aeneas as told by Virgil. Anyone who hears it immediately understands where Europe is located: Europe is a place on the map of hope where defeated people have a second chance. What used to characterize the verve of American escapism must now become the core of European con- sciousness. The story begins, inevitably, with the burning of Troy, from which Aeneas, the greatest loser of all, flees with his father on his back and the Penates in his bags, to embark on a second attempt at life in Italy – and you know how the story goes on.
I think we should make this initial, non-imperial opening section of the Aeneid the founding myth of present-day Europe, and finally stop repeating those meaningless, lascivious stories of the bull and the maiden. Our main narrative says very clearly that Europe is a country where vanquished people can find their feet again.
The Americans hijacked the story with their brilliant, unerring instinct, and the Europeans will have to get it back, whether they want to or not. Otherwise they will become boring collective nationalists and will be unable to solve the problem of the countless new citizens without whom they can’t survive. We are looking for a new formula
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for European hospitality and integration, and Virgil delivered it in advance.
POSCHARDT: What will happen to the Americans if we take away their myth?
SLOTERDIJK: The Americans are putting their own dream at risk without the Europeans having to take anything away from them. They give the impression of being psychologically and politi- cally blocked, and seem defenceless against the spirit of revenge that has gripped them. They can’t get over the fact that people don’t love them as they think they deserve. No good can come of this narcissistic touchiness. The Europeans may be lethargic but they have enormous potential, especially with the unique relationship between a culture of freedom and savoir-vivre. That is something that only exists in this particular way in the Old World. Europe is a big matrix of the art of living. I have just returned from Korea, very impressed by the country, which is experiencing something like the German economic miracle of the 1960s and 1970s on today’s technological level. It is a country intoxicated with performance. You notice there that a collective capitalism exists in East Asia that is hugely different from our very individualized lifestyle. This brings us back to our European culture. I told myself we should be grateful for every minute we are able to live in this part of the world – unless our modernizers destroy culture and education with their disastrous economism. The danger signals are clear to see.
POSCHARDT: Has gratitude got lost with freedom? Have we lost the feeling that we should count ourselves lucky?
SLOTERDIJK: ‘Sich glücklich schätzen’ [‘Count yourself lucky’] – isn’t that one of the most beautiful expressions in the German language? I suspect you may be the first person for years to use it in a meaningful context again. It is a fantastic, suggestive phrase, basically very un-German. The best German for identifying a very un-German feeling.
POSCHARDT: We say people ‘shrink away’ from happiness. That describes a very typically German type of movement, I think.
SLOTERDIJK: I wonder whether it isn’t actually part of the mood in Western culture as a whole. Coaching is on offer everywhere to teach us to present our own life in the light of discrimination we have suffered. People think they make more of an impression if they portray themselves as victims of an attack. We are constantly filling out invisible forms for compensation and submitting them to an obscure authority. I think this illustrates the Germans’ well-known tendency to complain. Although the feature pages in the German press have picked up the complaining habit, ‘complaining’ isn’t the right word because it actually belongs to a musical category or a
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biblical one, if we think of the threnodic prophet Jeremiah. What we are talking about has no relation to the musical mode of lamento. In fact, our complaining involves filling out misery forms. If we sign and stamp them, we can be sure we will get something for it from somewhere.
POSCHARDT: That sounds more like filling in an order form, whereas the de facto lament is enough in itself.
SLOTERDIJK: Shakespeare says somewhere: ‘I will not praise that purposes not to sell. ’3 In our case the analogy should be: ‘Who would complain if he couldn’t fill in a form? ’
2 Sloterdijk’s original German quote, ‘Wer würde preisen, wenn er nicht verkaufen wollte? ’, could be a paraphrased reference to William Shakespeare, Sonnet XXI. Or perhaps Sloterdijk is thinking of the proverb ‘He praises who wishes to sell. ’
17
COMPARATISTS OF HAPPINESS
Interview with Manfred Keuler and Paul Pantel*4
PANTEL: Mr Sloterdijk, we have done interviews on the topic of work and unemployment, and poverty and wealth, with economic and social experts and with futurists and literary figures. They include, for example, Peter Glotz, Alexander Kluge and Hans-Olaf Henkel – all rather independent people from a variety of disciplines. The interviewees do not meet in person, only through their state- ments in the minds of readers who will then, ideally, continue the conversation themselves. To round off the interview series we would like to have the topic reviewed from a philosophical standpoint. We thought of you because there are exciting connections with our kinds of questions in your new book, Sphären III. Schäume [Spheres III. Foam], notably in the chapter titled ‘Stimulus and Pampering. A Critique of Pure Mood’.
SLOTERDIJK: It sounds like a sort of ‘colloquium of the absent’. If you are naming names, Glotz has persistently asked the fundamental questions from the left-wing perspective about the production of social relations through work, and about the divi- sion and redistribution of the results. Kluge, too, has never tired of investigating the cunning of reason in its more or less microscopic form – not the very grand type of divine reason, but the cunning of
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk, Manfred Keuler and Paul Pantel appeared under the title ‘Komparatisten des Glücks. Über Mangelfunktionen, Reichtumsmärchen und die Politik der Großzügigkeit’, in Manfred Keuler and Paul Pantel (eds), Absturz oder Neubeginn. Arbeitswelt in der Globalisierung: Interviews mit Hans-Olaf Henkel, Peter Glotz, Oona Horx-Strathern, Frithjof Bergmann, Rolf Hochhuth, Alexander Kluge und Peter Sloterdijk (Munich: GIB Verlag), 2004, pp. 66–75.
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ordinary people and their life strategies. He augments the Marxist concept of the base in an extraordinary way, making the whole social underground swarm with cunning Odysseus figures.
The gender issue comes into play here as well, because the German word List [cunning] is not just grammatically feminine. As far as Henkel is concerned, I see him generally as an edgy figure whose position is influenced by a degree of anarchism, as he starts with the entrepreneur and not with the bourgeois. Incidentally, our problem in the Federal Republic is actually the return of the bour- geois, of the person of private means, of the unproductive glutton as a mass event, a phenomenon we are seeing everywhere, including in the form of small savers and people who play the stock exchange. We have to take this class of apolitical gold diggers seriously. They include all the people who worship the economic utopia of the modern age and accept being dominated by a dangerous and irre- sistible fairy-tale theme, the dream of income without performance. I would gladly discuss this topic in an interview with Alexander Kluge: to what extent so-called society represents a collective for telling fairy tales whose key economic fairy tale is Fortunatus’1 dream of a free income personally handed out to you by the goddess Fortuna or her modern successor, the lottery fairy. Lucky wins like these are supposed to be a shortcut by magical methods on the long road from wishing to success to great freedom: ‘I woke up this morning and discovered I was rich! ’
PANTEL: But that’s really a subject for the popular press – in fact, we’re miles away from that!
SLOTERDIJK: Quite the opposite! At the level of dreams – and dreams are something very real – we have never been in the grip of these fairy-tale themes as much as we are now. Looking at the subject superficially, the collective as such (or whatever we want to call ‘society’) is suffering at present from all the experiences related to the production of the feeling of shortage. But we shouldn’t forget for a moment that shortage is an interpreted feeling. We shouldn’t forget that today we live in the richest society of all time, and are tyrannized by the feeling of shortages more than almost any other group ever before. This is investigated far too rarely. Today’s pervading feelings of shortage are generated, hallucinated and organized feelings of shortage, created in a kind of social
1 Fortunatus is a German folk tale that was popular in the sixteenth century, about a legendary hero who lived on money from the never-empty purse of the goddess Fortuna. The story first appeared in the Volksbuch, a book of folk tales from 1509.
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democratic-neoconservative dream factory of shortage. The main agents in this ‘Hollywood of poverty’ are the media, trade unions, employers’ associations, health insurance bureaucrats and creative artists – in other words, everybody involved in evoking and inter- preting collective feelings of wealth and poverty. They are busy all the time agitating us with a new genre of poverty films. Almost all our contemporaries, whether they publish or not, are riding on this roundabout of shortage theory while the real dropouts, the hard core of the Tuscany faction, so to speak, or the people who simply stayed on in Crete, or never came home from their holiday in Spain, take care not to intervene in such topics. Only a few well-known interventionists who commute between the dolce vita and the misery at home get flown in from Italy now and then to give finger-wagging lectures in Germany. Whereas people used to talk about a jeunesse dorée, today we could talk about a critique dorée, a type of golden criticism expressed by the spokespeople for federations for the wealthy.
PANTEL: If reality looks so different from the general assump- tion, that is, if there is much less scarcity than most people think – and, indeed, you have written that the ‘major event of the 20th century consisted in the affluent society breaking out of the reality definitions of the ontology of poverty’ – why does this major event get so little attention?
SLOTERDIJK: Because the standpoint from which we can see what really happened and will happen is not very easy to find. We can probably get to it only through psychological training that helps to remove us from the permanent agitation about shortage and its interpreters. In the past, people went to India for a year, perhaps, or to other parts of the world where they could observe authentic conditions of shortage. Incidentally, at the moment there are very active groups in Europe trying to articulate specifically European responsibility for Africa. I think that makes sense, partly because we can only re-establish criteria for ourselves by understanding the real contrast. The collective feeling of loss of criteria is especially typical for Germany. There is an all-pervasive climate in this country of false self-congratulation and false complaints, with the two systems meshing smoothly. People say, ‘Maybe things aren’t that bad here, but still, the conditions are incomparably awful. ’
PANTEL: Yet the German Institute for Economic Research has just published a ‘poverty report’. It says that one German person in eight lives below the poverty line, which is defined as ‘less than 60 per cent of the average income’. Compared with many people in India or Africa, they are doing well, of course. They don’t have to suffer hunger. But they are badly off in relation to the majority in
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Germany. In other words, poverty and shortage can be defined in very different ways.
SLOTERDIJK: Certainly; and the relativity of this definition is exactly what we systematically obscure in our styles of speech. As I have said, we are usually only reminded of our own affluence when we are faced directly with absolute poverty. But I think we have to try to find the criterion again inside our system and, in fact, in the place where we live. We can’t advise everybody to be dropouts just to get an outside view of their own world. We can’t expect everybody to see their living conditions as if they came from Mars. People are always embedded in their own habits and things they take for granted, and feel naturally entitled to be naïve. But we can find a starting point for becoming properly aware of the situation even under those conditions – for Dasein inevitably means self-comparison as well. Thanks to the modern media, we have all become comparatists of good and bad luck. The existential com- parative study has become completely natural to us. Human beings always tend to look on the brighter side and then on the darker side, and then try to capture the middle – unless they have a reason for seeing themselves as an exception and having the right to be happier than others, or they have a reason for being more closely tied to the darker side than usual, for example, if they belong to a religion of redemption which internalizes the figure of the Samaritan, or if they believe in a religion of socialist solidarity. We saw some- thing like that in the worker-priest movement in twentieth-century Catholicism: young men from prosperous families discarded their cassocks and moved into working-class districts to share the lives of the poorest and more oppressed. Except for such extremists, average people are comparatists who commute in the middle between mis- fortune and good fortune.
PANTEL: But we have 5 million unemployed in Germany. Surely you wouldn’t go to them and say, ‘You’re not that badly off com- pared to a carpet maker in Bangladesh, so be satisfied with your lot! ’ Isn’t it a matter of unemployed people changing their perspective on their own situation, and the new viewpoint giving them opportuni- ties for a different life?
SLOTERDIJK: That’s an old debate. Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker2 said more than a quarter of a century ago that the way we interpret unemployment is a result of our inability to see an achievement in a positive light. And we are really talking about an
2 Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (1912–2007) was a German physicist and philosopher.
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achievement if we manage to reduce work. The fairy-tale theme of abolition of work has existed as long as work itself. Note that I’m not talking about the abolition of the active life!
Hard work, in the sense of labor improbus, as the Romans called it, drudgery, slogging, the physical alienation caused by humans being used as machines alongside horses and oxen for ploughing: across the millennia, that has been the dark spot on the conditio humana. Modern civilization, with its machine culture and modern forms of division of labour, has almost wholly emancipated itself from that. The only people who flex their muscles nowadays are body artists, or sports people as they are called. If muscles are flexed at all, this is done under the banner of acrobatics or artistry, simply because sport, if practised at a specific level, is done for show, just like a work of art. Sports people are actors doing body performance.
PANTEL: Why haven’t we managed to interpret and use the free time gained through machine culture, that is, ‘unemployment in the positive sense’, in a different way, both in terms of society and the individual? On the contrary, as you say, there is the ‘terror of unemployment that is expressed as having-nothing-to-do’. Why isn’t there a more sensible solution?
SLOTERDIJK: There is no solution because the unemployed are seen as deficient entities. The jobless do not see themselves as liberated from work; their unemployment doesn’t make them lords, but slaves, recipients of alms, bereft, basically like sick patients, in fact. Unemployment, as we interpret it, is a sociopathic situation in which people are deprived of the most important aspect of their human dignity as seen in economic terms. They are deprived of the satisfaction of ensuring their survival themselves on the basis of their own work. The unemployed are really in an unenviable situation, surrounded by a culture that defines autonomous life as wage-dependent. If the job is lacking, everything seems to be lacking.
Incidentally, you can find the toughest statements on this topic very early on, from Hannah Arendt. In her book, The Human Condition, she propounded a radical and snobbish interpretation of unemployment. It is a very ambitious, very nostalgic and rather dif- ficult theory of humans as active living beings. What she describes as the vita activa is an attempt to say that humans know the world by three methods of casting off their shackles: action, work and labour. I can’t go into detail here, but the main point is easy to explain: if the modern age tends towards eliminating action, which means politics, and towards transferring work to machines, for the great majority of people that leaves only working as the main purpose of life. And if a working society, which is essentially a philistine society, runs
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out of work, a human remnant is created, a political cave dweller without art, without education and finally without a job. That is Hannah Arendt’s conclusion from the 1950s: modern ‘society’ as a conglomerate of tragic philistines. We have had half a century to watch this prophetic formula of the working society that runs out of work becoming concrete reality. But I believe we are at a turning point today. The difference between not having work and having work, between the unemployed and others, is becoming increas- ingly blurred, due to the phenomenon of the so-called leisure society in which people are increasingly working in part-time jobs or in a shorter working week, and large numbers of people are condemned to seeing leisure as an immense asset. (For the moment I’m ignoring the high-achievement class for whom a seventy- or eighty-hour week is typical. ) This raises the question of which means those people use to structure their luxuriant free time.
PANTEL: To repeat the basic question: what is responsible for the unemployed being seen as ‘deficient entities’? What is the mecha- nism, the principle, the force – what are the people, the interests behind this idea? Or is it simply lack of ideas?
SLOTERDIJK: I don’t really believe it is ideas that are lacking. There is a lack of attitudes. We have enough ideas, but the attitudes with which we could pursue those ideas resolutely are not available. We have a kind of Sunday socialism that can be trotted out for rhe- torical quotation now and again, but not an ideology of solidarity that functions on weekdays as well. We are familiar with a Sunday- type relationship to asceticism and a weekday consumerism. We are familiar with a sentimental state of emergency in which we show solidarity with people in acute distress (remember the events of the Elbe floods),3 but we don’t have a principled attitude to sharing or inclusion.
In addition, there is definitely the conviction inherited from Calvinism, a conviction more widespread in countries such as the United Kingdom and the USA than in Germany, that everybody gets the destiny he or she deserves. This implies that an active redis- tribution policy in the sense of eliminating severe poverty would be interfering with God’s work.
PANTEL: But don’t you think economic interests or forces exist that say that nothing should change, that the wage-labour principle
3 Sloterdijk is referring to the enormous nationwide support for the regions devastated by exceptional flooding of the River Elbe in central Germany in 2002.
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should be maintained, otherwise the system would fall apart com- pletely, and we don’t want that.
SLOTERDIJK: The argument has a grain of truth in it. We shouldn’t forget that modern society, the system as a whole, has gone through a change of emphasis from a paternalist state that was capable of being strict to a maternalist state doomed to pam- pering. This touches on the great socio-psychological adventure of the twentieth century: the maternalization of the state system. It is embodied in the system of solidarity funds that, as we know, can only run on the basis of wage labour plus compulsory levy. This reveals the postmodern social nexus: everybody is involved in pampering everybody. It will obviously lead to paradoxes in the second or third generation at the latest. This is why there is pres- ently a mood of public withdrawal of solidarity. We realize that the people now paying contributions can’t be supported any longer by those coming up behind. We are realizing that the social contract always had elements of a chain-letter problem – which is despised and prohibited in other areas of life, of course. This insurance chain letter runs through the generations; the later we take our place in the recipients’ line the more certain we are to be losers. That’s one reason why we won’t be able to abandon the principle of wage labour for a long time to come. The relationship between wage labour and social security contributions will remain the nerve of social linkage for the foreseeable future. This would apply even if we adopted the Swiss system of a total levy of social security contributions in which freelance professions, civil servants, employers and workers were all treated the same way and everybody paid for each other and for everything. All the same, it is an interesting alternative to the models so far. Firstly, it would lead to a strong reduction in contri- butions at the same time as an increase in insurance fund holdings. It’s an inspiring model, but I really don’t know if it is applicable to Germany and how it can be calculated in the long term.
PANTEL: What does pampering by the ‘nanny state’, the ‘other mother’ [Allomutter], as you call it, do to individuals? How does it change them? Does it raise them to be juvenile and to lack independence?
SLOTERDIJK: That description goes too far. Looking at today’s young people, we can see immediately that they are not really dependent; they are demanding. And they take offence exception- ally easily. They also give up very easily, with a sour attitude that there’s enough for all the other wretches, but they are the ones who get too little. This outlook produces the German weather, the coun- try’s regular grey. All the same, it’s possible to carry on dreaming the dream of the land flowing with milk and honey. I note that the
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fairy-tale motif of the modern age that we have already mentioned, the popular dream of income without performance, has reached the stock exchange now. The famous ‘securities’ express nothing but the idea that people can easily get an income with venture capital defined as a risk premium. It’s a field day for Fortunatus and idlers. However, this idea of risk is absent from the typical get-rich fairy tales of the modern age. The poor child in the ‘Star Money’ story by the Brothers Grimm is suddenly rewarded for being a good lad – all he has to do is to stand on the spot where gold rains down and lift up his shirt. Fortunatus, the honest German, is rewarded for getting lost in the right woods at the right moment to meet the virgin of luck, who tells him, ‘I offer you six choices and you are free to choose one. Do you want wisdom, strength, righteousness, moderation – the classical virtues – or would you prefer health or riches? ’ Fortunatus, whose story was first written down in the Volksbuch from 1509 and has since been retold countless times, is important for the history of ideas because he was the first, when offered these options, to declare: ‘Leave me in peace with your noble virtues, I want riches! ’ He was granted his wish in the form of a magic purse that, when he opened it, contained forty gold pieces in the currency of whichever country he was in. It was a perfect anticipation of the euro, in fact. It is worth noting that the owner of the purse didn’t have to ask how the money got there. Fortunatus, the economic good-for-nothing, enjoyed the privilege of not having to ask any questions. He didn’t have to be interested in the origin of wealth. He didn’t have to refer to produc- tion or the tax system. He opened the magic purse and found what he was looking for. The fantasy of lasting abundance is situated directly at the level of fairy-tale themes and the dynamics of wishes, and declared valid – and that’s it. In short, it economizes on think- ing about production. This savings programme for thinking creates a type of person that doesn’t have to deal with declining production any longer.
This is one reason, by the way, why the Marxist producer-person has a greater dimension of complexity than today’s consumer. Today’s affluent people tend to be located at the consumer end and don’t know the answer to the question of whether they earn what they earn. They don’t know how wealth is really created and they don’t want to know any more either, because, as the last humans, they are equally indifferent to production and reproduction. It is true that people today know more about products – Marx would probably collapse if he were given a menu in a hotel that required him to choose between the ten kinds of dressing that come with salad nowadays. But don’t worry; he would learn quickly, just as today’s consumers learn to cope with the abundant options.