No More Learning

SLOTERDIJK: Maybe we should realize that for nearly twenty- five years the German party system has been offering voters the choice between four varieties of social democracy: the unity party of prosperity spreads across the whole so-called political spectrum.
MATUSSEK: The former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was the first to understand that, by turning his politics towards social democracy. His era was marked by the lucky accident of German unification – and everything that wasn’t dealt with.
SLOTERDIJK: Kohl remains the undisputed lord of German lethargy. He led the Germans to the end of history. He turned the promise of post-history, general lethargy with a high level of afflu- ence, into reality, with visible success. Things have become decidedly more uncomfortable since slimmer men have been in government. We are even being threatened with history starting all over again.
MATUSSEK: The new men are getting fatter again as well.
SLOTERDIJK: Nobody can beat Kohl on the scales. But now the new uncomfortable types have arrived and want to put the German lethargocracy back into competition with the best in the world. No wonder the great majority says, predictably: ‘Wait, that’s not what we signed up for! We haven’t trained for the top! ’ That’s why so many journalists and sociologists seriously consider German football as the oracle of the nation. On the football pitch we can see that simply praising ourselves isn’t always enough to get by.
MATUSSEK: It seems poverty is being officially tolerated for the first time in Germany – this was previously unheard-of in Germany’s centrist society of consensus.
SLOTERDIJK: Agenda 20103 contains nothing that Kohl shouldn’t have already introduced twenty years ago. Now his suc- cessor has to take over the other side’s operations. That is the usual SPD [Social Democratic Party] tragedy, by the way. As for the new
3 Agenda 2010 was a reform programme for the German welfare system and labour relations. It was launched in 2003 by the Social Democrat/ Green Party coalition led by the German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.
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visibility of poverty, it is related to the disappearance of the special German climate after 1945. Back then, when the whole country con- sisted of losers, the socio-psychological grip on the whole thing was much tighter than it is today. The post-war reconstruction was a collective effort. By now, being a loser is seen more as an individual issue again.
MATUSSEK: Is the thesis of the completed reconstruction actu- ally right? Berlin, for example, has not been recreated at all, and is a city of construction sites, strips overgrown with weeds, and wasteland, which local politicians are actually selling as a prime opportunity.
SLOTERDIJK: It’s always devastating when politicians talk like gallery owners. People in the special Berlin biotope have had half a century’s practice at being kettled as an attraction. After the border opened, along with all the impressive new buildings there was con- stant competition over the memorials that were supposed to make historical remembrance impressive as well.
MATUSSEK: Remorse, made in Germany.
SLOTERDIJK: German remorse used to be a brand-name article in the moral markets of the world. Meanwhile it is only rarely in demand.
MATUSSEK: What is much more visible is German self- confidence, at least in foreign policy, which has even taken the liberty of resisting American messianic ideology.
SLOTERDIJK: I made a lot of enemies before the Iraq War started by saying that Schröder’s vote against the US-British policy represented the voice of free and reasonable Europe – against the opportunists in the South, in the East, and in the German Parliament.
MATUSSEK: Is that the new German role, perhaps even a German identity: to push on with Europe as a kind of self- dissolution in the European project?
SLOTERDIJK: Europe’s nation-states, including Germany, do not have to liquidate themselves. But they should remember their great common script: this is the home of the anti-miserabilism project, which should bring humankind as a whole, or a large part of it, into a worldwide community of comfort. Let’s note that behind human rights are always rights to comfort that are wrongly described merely as ‘material interests’.
MATUSSEK: Isn’t that a rather harsh de-mystification of noble human rights?
SLOTERDIJK: Not at all. Human rights begin with the right to a lawyer; in the first place, they protect those who aren’t able to speak for themselves yet. Once people can speak for themselves, they
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immediately start making material demands. This is an unavoidable sequence. It’s impossible to imagine a majority that is full of human rights down to the tips of their toes but remains as poor as beggars. People who say and mean human rights are also affirming the trend towards opening up access to the affluence zone.
MATUSSEK: Is the new Federal German President on the right track in announcing that ‘The nation needs the courage to change’? SLOTERDIJK: He’s humming the right theme tune. However, even the best speeches about courage and rolling up our sleeves are fundamentally flawed. If our new president has a good relationship to courage then he has to do something courageous, maybe pardon somebody unexpectedly or visit a proscribed country. Just urging
courage on its own would be too German.
MATUSSEK: What can a German President do in this context? SLOTERDIJK: He has to stay on the beaten track. The fact is,
people in the affluence zone only accept changes that give them the security of knowing things will generally stay the same as they were. Comfort systems are controlled by tautologies. If, for example, Günter Netzer4 comments after a bad football match: ‘We have been watching a bad match’, a light goes on all over the country because we have all seen the same thing. He probably says ‘A seri- ously bad match’ to boost his intellectual status.
MATUSSEK: He says what everybody wants to hear.
SLOTERDIJK: He says what everybody has seen. Right now he holds the highest informal national office – that of chief tautologist. Only he can speak with authority and call a bad match a really bad match. Right now the country’s highest office is shared – Günter Netzer occupies one half and the German President the other. The latter holds the prerogative of saying that we can win anyway.
MATUSSEK: Mr Sloterdijk, thank you for this interview.
4 Günter Netzer is a famous ex-football player from the German national team who later became a TV football commentator.
16
GERMANS WANT TO BE COMPELLED
Theory for the Year’s End
Interview with Ulf Poschardt*1
POSCHARDT: The year 2004 is coming to an end. What did the philosopher see in it?
SLOTERDIJK: To start with, three deaths in the autumn that may form a constellation. First, the death of Jacques Derrida: the last of the greats of our discipline. A distant colleague, but still present like a friend or a conscience. When we heard the news of his death from Paris during the Frankfurt Book Fair there was a hushed silence at the Suhrkamp stand, as if time had stood still. A few weeks later, the macabre death agony of Yasser Arafat began. He lay brain dead in a French military hospital, a living corpse, but was not allowed to be officially dead. As a head of state he had to remain in office while the jockeying for positions and millions took place over his near-corpse. This recalls the medieval legend of El Cid, whose dead body was tied to a horse’s back to lead his troop into battle. The question is, on which horse’s back Arafat’s corpse sat during those days.
The third death happened several days earlier: the murder of a moderately talented but famous film director, slaughtered on the street in public view in a way that showed this was not just an execu- tion but an excommunication of a man consigned to the animals for slaughter. The letter claiming responsibility was less a sign of terror than of enraged violated faith.
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Ulf Poschardt appeared under the title ‘Deutsche wollen müssen’ [‘Germans want to be compelled’], in the Welt am Sonntag (12 December 2004).
Ulf Poschardt is a journalist and author.
126 Theory for the Year’s End
POSCHARDT: What do those three deaths have in common?
SLOTERDIJK: They form a kind of thanatological colloquium because they express something about exemplary deaths in our time. The philosopher Derrida died after a long, very consciously organ- ized farewell to the scourge of postmodern humankind, cancer – an evil that has not yielded to any enlightenment or deconstruction. Yasser Arafat died as an icon and zombie, and Theo van Gogh as a victim of fanaticism because he tried to apply Voltaire’s battle cry against the repressive Church – écrasez l’infame! – to Islam.
POSCHARDT: Which death did you think about most?
SLOTERDIJK: On the personal level, Derrida, of course, but nothing can compare to Arafat’s end as an emblem of the state of the world. He died as the enemy of countless people, as a repository for the curses of millions, however much he was a votive image, a repository of hope, for many others. In ethnological terms he was a Nail Man, like one of those Congolese fetishes in which curses are hammered with nails. He was the perfect Fetish Man of the last quarter-century.
POSCHARDT: In the end he was merely his wife’s puppet. Is that a neat punchline against the latent disrespect of women in Islam?
SLOTERDIJK: The woman’s revenge occurred when she married him. Nietzsche used to say, ‘A married philosopher belongs in a comedy. ’ Where does a married terrorist belong? Someone like that only fits into the chilling satire of the Middle East. Arafat was, incidentally, the only statesman of recent times who secretly bore the name ‘terrorist’ as an honorary title. Nobody else has done that since Churchill.
POSCHARDT: Churchill?
SLOTERDIJK: Of course. He described himself as a terrorist when he gave the order for the bomb warfare against Germany. In those days the history of the word ‘terrorism’ was more open than it is now, and since Churchill usually knew what he was doing he identified clearly with his methods.
POSCHARDT: Didn’t the word ‘terrorist’ exist earlier?
SLOTERDIJK: Indeed, modern terror has a long history dating back to the Jacobins’ use of the guillotine. In nineteenth-century Italy an anarchist who planted bombs was called a dinamitario – a beautiful job description, totally hardware oriented. Today’s concept of terror, however, is very zeitgeisty, that is, it focuses on software and is designed for aesthetic effect. Churchill’s admission shows that the word’s history had not yet been decided. If terror is the means of conquering Hitler, one should admit it and wear the title of terrorist like a medal. Churchill did that. Arafat had his own particular ideas about that.
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POSCHARDT: But in this sense terror would always be a means or an aspect of politics. In the sense of the defence capability of a constitutional state, it is part of its monopoly of power.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s quite right. Politics is always a mode in which the state organizes how it appears to the people. The lofty state has to administer the terror it evokes itself. It is responsible for the aura that surrounds it as the ‘coldest monster’, to quote Nietzsche again. That means it not only has to keep its symbols of sovereignty intact, but also to manage the epiphanies of its violent core – think of the military parades in France on 14 July. Carl Schmitt wrote that ‘The sovereign is the person who decides on the state of emergency. ’ Such a situation occurs when the latent means of terror are transformed into actually existing ones. In other words, the sovereign is the person who has the possibility of making con- vincing threats.
POSCHARDT: Would that make the democratic politician a kind of castrated terrorist?
SLOTERDIJK: Democracy means not having a need for terror any more. The careers of Castro and Arafat, but also of Menachim Begin, show the trajectory from terror to legality. The title of castrated terrorist suits figures like Castro and Arafat very well, although it is more about pacification than about castration.
POSCHARDT: Was Arafat a supremely skilful Machiavellian?
SLOTERDIJK: He was already head of the PLO in 1972, at the time of the attack on the Olympic village in Munich in which several Israeli athletes died. Back then he already showed his talent as a media politician, because anyone who successfully disrupts the Olympic Games becomes a global star. In November 1974, Arafat spoke to the UNO assembly in New York, scoring an enormous prestige victory for the PLO. The Munich drama was also the beginning of the hot phase of the alliance between terror and the media – that was the zero hour of terror as a media event. This has no connection any longer with the terror of the French Revolution that Hegel examined, and that was partly legitimated, or with the conservative nihilists who made regular attacks on the Czars. As we know, the author of The Phenomenology of Mind described the Jacobin murders as the frenzy of abstract subjectivity that wipes away everything obstructing freedom.
POSCHARDT: Did that shock Hegel the Swabian?
SLOTERDIJK: I don’t think so. Hegel was cold-blooded, or he understood everything, which is the same thing. He saw terror as the price for a learning process modern people had to go through before they could live as citizens in a constitutional state. The terror of pure conscience is a stage in the curriculum that leads to the modern
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state: terror is the way that the spirit of freedom, which is simply abstract, first learns about its own state and learns to appreciate the indispensability of the law. This stage is a necessary experience because bourgeois society and its state only become consolidated in the post-terrorist stage. Expressed in educational terms, we could say that terror is an episode in the preparatory period for human- kind’s high-school certificate.
POSCHARDT: Do constitutional states react so vigorously to terror because they recognize their own previous existence in it?
SLOTERDIJK: Perhaps. They recognize in terrorism what they have dispensed with. But the present terror is basically very roman- tic. It is conceived as a hero cult and its aim is to found a new community through inflammatory theatrical acts of violence.
POSCHARDT: What about Bin Laden? The al-Qaeda fighters of September 11 were mostly fellow Saudis.
SLOTERDIJK: Bin Laden is an activist of the third dream. He places an Islamist dream alongside the American dream and the Saudi dream.
POSCHARDT: What dreams do the Saudis have?
SLOTERDIJK: Next to the Americans with their religion of success, the ruling Saudi cliques are the greatest escapists of our time. Because their money never runs out, they can live in an absolute dream world in which they are free to move through the centuries like sleepwalkers. They escape from the present to the past and then return again. At one moment they are in the seventh century riding through the desert with Mohammed, their minds full of plans; then they are in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and flirt with Wahhabi asceticism; and then they plunge into the twenty-first century and get high on the goods of the liberal world. They can endlessly afford that Arabo-Disney lifestyle feeling and can arrange themselves in a total virtual reality.
POSCHARDT: Does Bin Laden have anything in common with those Disney Arabs?
SLOTERDIJK: He is a creation of Saudi escapism, but a ren- egade from it at the same time. His goal is to destroy the most bizarre alliance in world history, the entente cordiale between the USA and Saudi Arabia. This alliance binds the world’s two great escapist powers together in a kind of synchronized sleepwalking. We shouldn’t forget that in its own way the USA is also a purely escapist nation. From the perspective of the Old World, the reason is obvious. The majority of the country’s population consists of people who fled from miserable circumstances to make a new start elsewhere. The country itself is founded on the flight to happi- ness. Basically, the people are refugees from poverty in their home
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country, people who think they are escaping, whether from bad to better or from good to fantastic. But the dependence on oil means the American way of life is tied to the Gulf region, which forms an ironic bond between the earth’s two great escapist extremes. The Saudi and the American dream mutually support each other. 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?