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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Our culture has no concept of stopping. We continue to build motorways and airports for a future in which cars and planes may no longer exist. We're converting our planet from a natural one to an artificial one in which the quantity of man-made objects - houses, asphalt, cars, plastic, computers and so on - now exceeds the totality of living matter. And while biomass continues to decline due to deforestation and species extinction, the mass of man-made objects is growing faster than ever. We're on a treadmill to disaster. To get off this treadmill, argues Harald Welzer, we need to learn how to stop: as individuals and as societies, we need to stop doing what we're doing and say 'enough'. We find it hard to do this because our culture has trained us to regard endless escalation as desirable, and we're reluctant to surrender the material benefits of growth. But as long as the expansive cultural model continues to prevail, there will be no change of course in favour of sustainable and climate-friendly practices and lifestyles. We need a cultural model in which the beauty of stopping is given the recognition needed for the project of civilization to continue. Optimizing processes that are heading in the wrong direction only makes matters worse. Stopping is imperative: it is a human cultural technique that we must re-learn. Only then can we achieve a new beginning.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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CONTENTS
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
I Away from Here
Dead mass and life
The time before
The Great Refractor
Media in vita
Dead people have no problems
Tamed death
The yawning gulf
Philosophy has no answers either
Heart attack
Residues of the past
Stories of conspicuous consumption
Scaring Mr Ochs
Sympathy for the Devil
Humanity unbound
Unlimited enlightenment
You can’t bargain with nature
The heart
The best strophes are catastrophes
The twenty-first century is already old, yet we still think of it is as young
What does it mean to be born human?
Natural culture
In with the new
Question
Notes
II Narratives of Stopping ‒ and of Life
Reinhold Messner
Jan Vermeer van Delft
Tino Sehgal’s
Realities:united
Jan and Tim Edler
Johannes Heimrath
Katja Baumgarten
Thomas Kessler
Christiane zu Salm
Hans-Dietrich Reckhaus
Peter Sillem
Klaus Wiegandt
Slicky Baby
Notes
III An Obituary to the Rest of My Life
I want my obituary to say: He was a good time waster
I want my obituary to say: He learnt to resist optimization
I want my obituary to say: He always tried to make useful mistakes
I want my obituary to say: He was nutty, frivolous, interesting, stimulating, arrogant, annoying, illuminating, unjust – but never banal
I want my obituary to say: He was always radical, yet always willing to be inconsistent
I want my obituary to say: He made a difference
I want my obituary to say: He created space for people to act
I want my obituary to say: He was willing to take things seriously ‒ but not too seriously
I want my obituary to say: He was never quite as brilliant at skat as he thought he was, but by God did he play a good game
I want my obituary to say: He never took or supported decisions detrimental to the development of future generations
I want my obituary to say: He always tried to fight stupidity
I want my obituary to say: He saw nothing wrong in saying what he thought
I want my obituary to say: He was always susceptible to beauty
I want my obituary to say: He considered the right questions more important than the wrong answers
I want my obituary to say: He learnt not to be afraid of death
Notes
IV An Immense Journey
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1
The Ever Given in Suez, Egypt, 28 March 2021.
Figure 1.2
The Great Refractor. Wikicommons
Figure 1.3
Neanderthal reconstruction in Halle, Germany.
Figure 1.4
New York City’s Hart Island (Bronx), temporary mass grave of unclaimed victims, …
Figure 1.5
ECG.
Figure 1.6
Aeromodeller by Belgian artist Panamarenko, displayed in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts …
Figure 1.7
Bild report: 25,000 air miles in five days.
Figure 1.8
SUV and Fiat 500 in London, United Kingdom, 2018.
Figure 1.9
German Chancellor Angela Merkel looks down onto the flooded areas from a helicopter …
Figure 1.10
Grave of Herbert Marcuse.
Figure 1.11
Tesla Gigafactory.
Figure 1.12
Heart.
Figure 1.13
Menschen bei Maischberger talk show.
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1
Johannes Vermeer, The Art of Painting. Wikicommons
Figure 2.2
BIG Vortex.
Figure 2.3
Fazit (Frimmersdorf).
Figure 2.4
Erika.
Figure 2.5
Slicky Baby’s funeral.
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1
The Walking Ears.
Figure 3.2
Photo by David Clay. Wikicommons
Figure 3.3
Raoul Hilberg.
Figure 3.4
Moscow subway.
Figure 3.5
Warning sign.
Figure 3.6
Tanzlinde and Peesten Church, Bavaria, Germany.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Begin Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
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Dedication
For Nicholas Czichi-Welzer
The Culture of Stopping
Obituary to Myself
HARALD WELZER
Translated by Sharon Howe
polity
Originally published in German as Nachruf auf mich selbst. Die Kultur des Aufhörens Copyright © 2021 S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main.
This English edition © Polity Press, 2023
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5588-8
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022948602
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
I learnt a great deal from a number of people while working on this book: from Reinhold Messner, Johannes Heimrath, Katja Baumgarten, Christiane zu Salm, Thomas Kessler, Hans-Dietrich Reckhaus, Peter Sillem, Klaus Wiegandt – for that, and for your time and input, I am truly grateful to you all. Jochen Hein and Hans Ulrich Gruber were extremely helpful and contributed photos and information – my thanks to you both and I hope to see you again soon! The writing of this book coincided with various lockdowns, resulting in long evenings on Zoom which were partly spent tossing around ideas for this book – my heartfelt thanks to Siegrun Appelt, Heidi Borhau and Alexander Roesler for listening and contributing your thoughts and inspiration.
Finally, a very special thank you to Sonja Diekmann for making this book possible in the first place by ensuring that the author is still alive and kicking today.
Berlin, July 2021
IAway from Here
I gave orders for my horse to be brought from the stables. The servant did not understand my orders. So I went to the stable myself, saddled my horse and mounted. In the distance I heard the sound of a trumpet, and I asked the servant what this meant. He knew nothing and had heard nothing. At the gate he stopped me, asking: ‘Where are you riding to, master?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘just away from here, just away from here. Further and further away from here, only then can I reach my destination.’ ‘And so you know your destination?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘I’ve just told you. Away-from-here, that is my destination.’
Franz Kafka, ‘The Departure’
Dead mass and life
The mass of man-made objects has doubled approximately every 20 years since 1900. At that time, it was equivalent to around 3 per cent of biomass: that is, 3 per cent of all living matter. In 2020, dead mass – houses, asphalt, machinery, cars, plastic, computers and the like – exceeded biomass for the first time. By contrast, the biomass of all wildlife has shrunk by more than four-fifths over the past 50 years. This is a staggering development. According to scientists at the Israeli Weizmann Institute,1 while biomass continues to diminish due to deforestation, soil and ocean degradation and species extinction, the mass of man-made objects is growing faster than ever.
To help visualize this process, it has been calculated that the amount of stuff produced each week is equivalent to the body weight of every person on earth. That’s fifty-two times a year that your own weight in dead mass is added to the total. It all sounds a bit creepy to me, although I should stress that this fifty-two-times-me figure consists of substances taken from the living soils, forests, oceans and rivers – indeed, where else would they come from? In other words, the world is being converted at an ever-faster rate from a natural one to an artificial one or, rather, from a living one to a dead one. A victory of man-made products over biomass. Of dead stuff over living stuff.
On 23 March 2021, something happened that brought this fact directly to our television screens: the 400-metre-long and almost 60-metre-wide container ship Ever Given became stuck – quite literally – in the Suez Canal. Opened in 1869, this waterway was never designed for a vessel of such monumental proportions, and the incident brought a large part of the world’s freight traffic to a standstill. In no time, another 150 cargo ships were queuing up on either side of the canal, in the Mediterranean and Red Sea. The costs incurred by such a snarl-up are enormous, as the punctual delivery of the cargoes can no longer be guaranteed by a global supply chain based on just-in-time logistics. In this case, chemical, automotive and electronics manufacturers waited in desperation for the monster ship to free itself. But all to no avail. Because in addition to its dead weight of 220,000 tons, it was also carrying over 20,000 containers, and once something of that size has run aground, it’s no easy feat to dislodge it.
Fig. 1.1: The Ever Given, stuck fast
As if to highlight the absurdity of our way of life and economic system, the ship in question gloried in the name Ever Given. And just as that huge vessel found itself stuck helplessly in limbo, so our cultural model seems helplessly stuck between past and future.
The radically accelerated conversion of matter is fast consuming the very resources it depends on: at some point, this ‘ever given’ too will run aground. I have just read a piece by the anthropologist Michael Tomasello in which he argues that human culture has led to the fascinating co-evolutionary principle of cultural inheritance. Every new human child is born into a world where it can build on the achievements of its predecessors’ cultural evolution. Tomasello calls this the ‘ratchet effect’ of the human condition: a new generation never starts from scratch but always from the point where the previous one left off. This is what distinguishes human life from that of all other living creatures. It is co-evolutionary: humans don’t only exist in a natural environment but also in one of their own making. This is what we call culture.
The question Tomasello fails to ask himself is this: what if our cultural development has taken a wrong turn – one that is detrimental to our survival? That process then continues for a few more generations and, since the world each of those generations is born into is the only one they know, it inevitably takes time for anyone to notice that the direction of travel is unsustainable. For the culture we grow into is not something external – it is not only embedded in our infrastructures and institutions, our legal constitution, our school curricula and our traffic regulations, but in our habits, our perceptions and interpretations, our psyche, our selves. Just as we shape our way of life, so we are shaped by it, and that shaping is not conscious and intentional but a product of our everyday practices.
Practices like the expectation in modern hyper-consumerist societies that we can have anything we want, whenever we want it. This is something we take completely for granted, and it’s only when ‘shortages’ occur due to disasters like the Suez Canal incident that we realize that all the stuff in our shopping precincts doesn’t appear by magic but actually comes from somewhere. How it got there is a question our cultural model systematically ignores. This is the ‘cultural unconscious’, and, as members of this culture, we are all practised in the art of forgetting. When we get our hands on a nice new iPhone, we’re not the least bit interested in its manifold and complex origins. So accustomed are we to constant availability, it doesn’t even occur to us to ask ourselves this question.
To take another example: just as economic performance is measured in quantitative terms and expressed in exchange rates and GDP, so the need to measure things has permeated almost every aspect of our lives – from school grades and credit points to the number of dates we’ve been on, or our daily step count. The iPhone, Apple Watch and Peloton body-control apps are a prime illustration of how numbers have become an everyday part not just of the way we present but also the way we perceive ourselves. This migration of the quantitative into our inner selves and our mental landscape clearly shows that culture is never something external, surrounding human beings like environmental furniture, but always translates itself into the inner worlds of our psyche and sense of self-worth. And because culture changes, we will always be different from our predecessors, right down to our sensory perceptions, emotions and self-image.
This is what makes it so difficult to imagine that the culture one belongs to could be heading in the ‘wrong’ direction. After all, that culture has always been ‘there’ for all of us, like water around a fish. But it is perhaps fair to say that a culture that consumes the very basis of its existence is, at the very least, misguided. Nor would this be anything new in the context of human history. We have seen cultures of mass murder, delusional cultures, and cultures that have dumped their baggage on places where it didn’t belong. And we have seen cultures that have pursued a path leading to disaster and self-destruction.
In his important book on failed cultures, Collapse, Jared Diamond has argued that what appears as a mistake when reconstructed historically is not perceived as such by people at the time but simply as the way things have always been done. After all, deforestation, soil erosion, salinization, overhunting and overfishing, population growth and rising wealth2 have no time index from an individual perspective. Our perception changes with our changing environment, and the alarming realization that we are on the wrong track only comes in retrospect, if at all. Normally, we are swept along on the tide of change, by which time we no longer have any fixed reference points from which to judge what has changed and when things started going awry. Such ‘shifting baselines’3 consistently prevent us from recognizing an ongoing decline or actual failure, which is why such an epochal event as the collapse of the entire Eastern bloc, including the GDR, in 1989 was not predicted even by any of the relevant disciplines – history, political science, sociology or economics – but appeared to happen just like that, out of the blue. Oops.
So if we ask ourselves questions like ‘What was the man who cut down the last palm tree on Easter Island thinking?’, ‘What were the Greenland Vikings thinking when they wasted their resources on trying to farm cattle in Arctic conditions?’, ‘What were engineers in the age of climate change thinking when they designed gas-guzzling 4 × 4s for city dwellers?’, then the answer in each case is nothing: they weren’t thinking at all. Because all these things are the product of long-term developments that become established cultural practice. And all new arrivals are simply absorbed into the flow – just as children today are born into a world of cars and computer screens. Tomasello’s ratchet effect operates regardless of whether or not the evolving culture is conducive to our long-term survival. Where trees have always been felled, they will go on being felled.
Cultural practice is lived practice, not a matter of discussion, reflection or thought, where you can simply say: hang on, something’s not right here! And that is why such practices persist, sometimes even at the risk of damaging personal interests. To apply this to today’s economic system: we keep on raising production because that’s what we have always done – a fall in GDP is considered a disaster to be avoided at all costs. When the COVID crisis hit, economists didn’t have a clue how to tackle it, yet they managed to calculate in a flash – and to the last decimal place – that the economy would grow by such-and-such a percentage in the fourth quarter of 2020. And by such-and-such a percentage in 2021. Their forecast was wrong – as usual – but the funny thing is, it doesn’t matter. Standard economics sees itself as a science and is regarded as such by society, yet it is, at bottom, a priesthood. It has its own ceremonial proclamations (of decisions reached by the economic sages), pilgrimages (to the World Economic Forum in Davos) and magical explanations for the world order (the market moves in mysterious ways), no different from the priests of Easter Island. And its god is called Growth.
It could be that this principle of growth-based capitalism belongs to the category of failed cultural models. And this is of course all the harder to grasp since capitalism has brought such concrete improvements in education, health, law and liberty – improvements that were previously unimaginable. All people in rich societies today enjoy a higher living standard than Louis XIV – not a bad record for capitalism. But its history – measured against the 200,000 years of Homo sapiens’ existence – is very short: a mere 200 years. And it is only in the last few decades that it has become a global phenomenon.
Most failed cultures have hung on for longer – eight hundred, nine hundred or a few thousand years – which further relativizes our sense of the sustainability of our own cultural model. Perhaps the fact that dead mass now exceeds living mass marks a tipping point – defined as the point beyond which something can no longer be corrected or restored to its previous state. Then again, perhaps there are no such points in human history given that our condition, as already mentioned, is already characterized by constant change and adaptation.
And by the ability to look ahead. What declining and defunct societies have lacked is the capacity to observe themselves from the outside, as in a thought experiment – just as I sometimes imagine historians 300 or 500 years hence might attempt to understand the at times curious world of the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Such an alienation effect would be illuminating, and useful when it comes to navigating our way out of blind alleys. In fact, modern societies ought to write their own obituaries setting out how, in retrospect, they would like to have seen themselves develop. Such an approach, from the standpoint of an imagined future, would free us from the tyranny of the present, in which too many decisions are taken based on our cultural subconscious. And it would free us from the boundless catastrophism in which we have become culturally entrenched owing to our fear that, whatever the future brings, it will inevitably be worse than the present. We must learn once again to see the future as a creative challenge, not as something we would rather avoid when so many things – global warming, biodiversity loss, the rise of dictators – loom darkly ahead.
But there is no end to history. History will only end when humankind has abolished itself. Or rather, after humankind has abolished itself. This is a meaningless sentence, for in that event, there will be no one around to register the fact. Any meaningful sentence presupposes the existence of a future world.4 As long as we are still talking to each other, history has not come to an end.
The time before
It would, therefore, make little sense to write a book for the time after. What we need are books for the time before. Not another one on the fate of the world, climate disaster, species extinction, plastic pollution and impending doom. After all, these are books for the time after, when there will be no one left to read them.
Friends: let us rather concentrate on the time before! No more swan songs for the future. They are merely ritual invocations of the idea that there can be no end to history because such a thing must never be allowed to happen. All these invocations – it’s not too late, there’s still time, it’s five minutes to midnight (how long have we been saying that?) – distract us perpetually from the simple fact that, before death, there is life. Therefore, we should – as individuals and as a society – organize our life in the meantime according to how we would one day like to be able to look back on it and ourselves.
I have seldom felt as melancholic as in the days following the death of Frank Schirrmacher, co-editor of the FrankfurterAllgemeine Zeitung and head of its arts section. Few have received as many obituaries: so impressive and influential was his work that commentators were falling over themselves after his ‘far too early’ demise to list all the important and significant things he had said and done, and to bemoan this great loss to society.
And so on and so forth. What made me so sad was the fact that there was only one person who would never be able to read and appreciate all these tributes. That person was Frank Schirrmacher himself. As noted, any meaningful sentence must presuppose the existence of a future world. On that basis, obituaries would only be meaningful if they were written for the life before, not the life after – which, of course, does not exist.
Therefore, I say, everyone should write an obituary to themselves – in the sense of an account of how they would hope to have lived – while they are still alive. After death, that task falls to other people, by which time the content (by definition) no longer matters to the deceased, nor do they have any influence over it. I suspect that the task of writing your own obituary would be very productive, as it would oblige you to a certain extent to act like the person you would hope to have been. That would be much more constructive than just living from day to day and receiving an obituary at the end of it. If you’re lucky, that is: after all, most people don’t get one at all. You can read my own obituary on pp. 165–211 – but before that, let me tell you a few more stories.
The Great Refractor
One of the countless conferences on climate change and the necessary policy response took place at the site of the Great Refractor on Potsdam’s Telegrafenberg. No idea exactly when: let’s say ten years ago – it doesn’t really matter. The Great Refractor is what you might call the ultimate telescope: inaugurated in 1899 by Kaiser Wilhelm, it is a monument to the age of science and technology, and remains the fourth largest in the world. All very impressive.
I remember that conference not just because of the truly aweinspiring venue, but also because it was an ‘open space’ event, meaning that there was – unusually – no fixed agenda, i.e., presentation, discussion, presentation, discussion and so on. Instead, the participants could propose their own topics for the sessions, whose results would then be presented and debated in turn. A host of topics – carbon pricing, better communication of climate issues, strategies for obtaining research funding – were all readily adopted and discussed. For my part, I had proposed the topic ‘What if we fail?’ It seemed logical to me to use this ‘open space’ forum to talk openly for once about the possibility that, as things stood, all efforts to reach the 2° target postulated at the time might fail and that, consequently, we would not be able to halt the progress of climate change. What then?
Even today, at least a decade later, I still believe that our ability to build a future for ourselves depends on being realistic about the conditions for doing so, rather than simply clinging to the hope that things will somehow turn out all right in defiance of all data to the contrary. And in order to think realistically, we have to factor in the possibility of failure, otherwise we won’t know what measures and regulations need to be devised in order to prevent failure or mitigate its consequences. Let’s face it, we are much more likely to fail to limit global warming to a 2° rise than we are to achieve it5 – and what then? Will that mean the end of the world? Or only the end of climate politics? Will there no longer be any point in modernizing human activity in such a way as to prevent, or at least curb, the massive destruction of our vital resources? Or in restoring ruined forests, waters, marshes and soils?
As such, the question ‘What if we fail?’ seemed to me a very obvious one for a conference on climate change, quite apart from my own burning interest in the answer. Given its relevance to our survival, it is, after all, anything but trivial, especially if it remains unanswered. But there was only one other delegate besides me who was interested in the subject, so we chatted for a bit, missed everything else and had nothing substantial to contribute to the final plenary. By voting with their feet, the delegates had already given a sufficient empirical demonstration of their unwillingness to accord any relevance to the question of failure. ‘What if we fail?’ had been dropped from the agenda.
Fig. 1.2: The Great Refractor: life is always better on the outside
In the meantime, of course, the 2° target has been revised to 1.5°, regardless of the fact that emissions have since increased to such a level that the original 2° figure has become even less realistic than it already was. But such social realities are not allowed to get in the way of a scientific rationale which, based on highly complex measurements and calculations, insists on the necessity of such a limit.6 If the science says 1.5°, then 1.5° it is. End of story. The trouble is, the climate pays no heed to such scientifically unassailable assertions but carries on warming away merrily as it deals with our ever-growing greenhouse gas output.
The fact that all this took place in a historic shrine to modern science struck me as highly symbolic. The vast room housing the Great Refractor was created exclusively for the purpose of looking out of it into the infinite expanse of the universe. Looking inwards, at ourselves and our own activity, was not part of the plan. Hence the name refractor, not reflector.
Ever since this episode, I have wondered why it is that scientific reason appears incapable of conceiving of the possibility that it could all go wrong. The simple truth is that that reason – a legacy of the Enlightenment – has no category of finitude and no strategy for stopping something it has once begun. Neither, as far as I can see, is there any scientific discipline focusing on the finite nature of human endeavours. While there are shelves upon shelves of apocalyptic writings – not just in the esoteric section but also under ecology and climatology – they all end not with the Lutheran sentiment ‘let goods and kindred go, This mortal life also’, but the predictable ‘It’s not too late.’ Followed, equally predictably, by ‘the comfortable small gestures of cycling, using energy-efficient bulbs, taking shorter showers and repairing electrical appliances’, as Eva Horn, author of The Future as Catastrophe, observes with rightful exasperation.7
The concept of ending and finitude only occurs in non-scientific contexts – in lived experience, literature or art. And, of course, in religion, in the context of the Apocalypse. There is no place for it in the technical and scientific world, which is unhelpful when it comes to dealing with it as an actual problem. And that brings us back to the refractor: from there, we look outwards in the hope of discovering what exists outside the world. Outside the world there is the lure of infinity, the universe – a place without limits. And it is this notion of unlimited progress, of rolling back the boundaries of the possible, that constitutes the mythical basis of modern science; no one has ever been given a Nobel Prize for proving that something can’t be done. Nobel Prizes are awarded to those who succeed in overcoming the limits of knowledge or perceived possibility. It is no coincidence that we date the beginning of modern science back to the decentring of our world view, when Copernicus displaced the Earth from the centre of the solar system and Galileo invented the telescope. Since we have ceased to be at the centre of things, we prefer to look outwards. And that’s what the Great Refractor stands for: the infinite gaze.
Were we instead to look inwards, at ourselves and our own activity, our hopes and aspirations, there is one limit at least that we would be forced to address: the simple fact that, if anything is finite, it is, alas, our own lives. We all know that we are mortal, and it is an extremely uncomfortable fact. Death is incompatible with life because it is the opposite of life – and I will go on later to discuss why it is particularly incompatible with life in the modern era, and why it is perceived more than ever nowadays as so utterly out of place, frightening and antithetical to all our endeavours. But there it is: life is finite, and the grotesque idea of prolonging it infinitely by uploading the mind – or what we think of as the mind – to a hard disk speaks volumes about the fear of death experienced by those individuals who hope to defeat it through technology, if necessary by having themselves cryogenically frozen during their lifetime, to be thawed again once science has moved on a little.
Even before the first signs of a crisis of finitude start to appear in our cultural model, technical fantasies are already being mobilized: digitalization will bring about miraculous energy savings, hydrogen will save the day, electric cars will avert climate change and, ditto, green aircraft fuel. Instead of entertaining the possibility that less energy will be generated and consumed in future – for instance, because there are no more cars or planes – we celebrate tech heroes such as Elon Musk who have arrived on the scene two generations too late, courting and showering them with money even though they have nothing to offer beyond the mobility utopias of the fifties: rockets, cars and hyperloops – all things designed to take us somewhere at high speed, without ever stopping to ask ourselves what we plan to do when we get there. This future is an extremely outdated one, and merely tells the story of the loss of social and moral intelligence in the twenty-first century.
After all, civilization’s greatest advances have been achieved through the improvement of inter-human relationships, and technology has only helped where people were able to use it to that end. The fact that there are far fewer victims of violence in modern societies than in medieval times is not due to better weapons technology or surveillance cameras but to the state monopoly on violence, and that is the result of social, not scientific, intelligence. Such intelligence must always be founded on a normative purpose, and what arises from it is not innovation but progress.
It is no accident that the concept of innovation seems to have replaced that of progress nowadays. Innovation needs no normative reference: to be innovative, a thing merely has to be newer than something else, regardless of whether that innovation was necessary. According to road safety statistics, more and more crashes are now caused by drivers being distracted from the road while scrolling through touchscreen sub-menus to adjust the windscreen wipers, for example. An old-fashioned lever on the steering wheel can be adjusted without looking: to transfer that function to an operating screen is innovative but idiotic. Progress, by contrast, is measured according to whether an innovation contributes something to a normatively justified end. If not, it can be dispensed with – just as developments that have become pointless or obsolete could be halted and dispensed with.
The trouble is we have no methodology for stopping because, in the magical thinking of our present symbolic universe, things go on for ever and problems of finitude are systemically non-existent. ‘Away-from-here’ is the only goal. Because we have no methodology for stopping, we never stop.
In the case of global warming, tackling this problem would mean stopping a lot of things, such as the mining of ever more raw materials in order to produce ever more products and services, for example. We would have to stop increasing the footprint of our economic metabolism and start reducing it. We would have to implement a methodology of finitude, and that means, quite simply, learning to stop. We would have to learn to recognize that life inevitably means death. As individuals, we cannot escape this lesson, however much we may resist it. As a society, we have a huge, highly developed and complex apparatus for avoiding it at all costs. In this respect, we are not a ‘knowledge society’ but a ‘knowledge avoidance society’. As a culture, we have no concept of our own finiteness. Death is not a cultural category: in social terms, it simply doesn’t exist.
Media in vita
By way of a brief interlude, here are two verses from the poem Media in vita (1931) by Theobald Tiger (a pseudonym of the German-Jewish satirist Kurt Tucholsky):
Every morning when I’m shaving in the lamplight’s glow, I soap my face and think: just x times minus one to go.
And there I stand in foamy piety
Brooding on my own mortality.
There where the parallels intersect, that’s where I too must fly,
Ah, how I will miss myself when in my grave I lie.
And others too ‒? If they have eyes to see they’ll take the view
That dying is like pulling out a spoon that’s stuck in glue.
Dead people have no problems
‘Death is a problem of the living. Dead people have no problems.’ With this laconic remark, the sociologist Norbert Elias shows himself to be very much part of an enlightened, post-metaphysical culture in which a dead person is regarded unequivocally as a lifeless body; as matter without consciousness, it can have no feelings and hence no problems. On a rational level – that is, within the context of our modern reason – we will concur with this view, but whether we do so on an emotional level is far less certain. Chances are we will still catch ourselves occasionally – at funerals or when passing through a cemetery – pondering the uncomfortable question of what it must be like to be dead. And that question is only uncomfortable because, when we try to imagine it, we still think of ourselves as having some kind of self-consciousness. Consequently, questions that seem on the face of it to be straightforward – such as organ donation, burial or cremation, wills, living wills and the like – turn out, when applied to ourselves, to be much less clear. After all, when we reflect on such things, we are picturing ourselves in a state that we cannot know while we are alive. Between you and me, whenever I’m in a cemetery, I can’t help thinking it must be unpleasant to be buried next to someone you can’t stand. Or too close to the road. It’s strange when you think about it: we all know for certain that we will die, but no one knows what it’s like to be dead.
It is precisely for this reason that scholars who have studied man’s relationship with death, whether from a philosophical, sociological or physiological perspective, have found it so fascinating. For humans are – or so we assume – the only animals that are aware of their mortality, yet they are no less helpless in the face of it than any other species. When we think about the end of life, we inevitably get into another philosophical category which, once again, is something that presumably only humans agonize over, namely the meaning of life. Even if you consider life and the universe to be essentially meaningless, and can think of no better answer to the ‘meaning of life, the universe and everything’ than Douglas Adams’s supercomputer which, after several million years, finally spits out the number 42, you would still find it unsatisfying to sum up your own precious life, its hopes, disappointments, successes and failures, triumphs and embarrassments in this way. Our own life is far from being a matter of indifference to us. At least, in most cases.
No doubt about it: death – what Ernst Bloch calls ‘the great In-Vain’ – stands coolly and matter-of-factly in the way of all our desires for permanence, eternity and immortality, and that modern fantasy of uploading the contents of our minds to a hard disk in the hope of some kind of post-mortal mental life is no more realistic than the hope of being reborn as another being, transitioning to a new form of existence as a light, spirit or astral being, going to heaven or hell, or – if you died a good martyr – having sex with seventy-two virgins. Whatever the prospects, they are by no means assured, and even an Islamic State fighter is terrified of being killed by a Kurdish Peshmerga and losing his prime spot in macho martyrs’ heaven. The afterworld is an uncertain place.
That nagging uncertainty over death and the presumable eternity awaiting us beyond it is of course particularly prevalent in our secularized modern world, where the main reason that death has no proper place is that neither heaven nor hell, nor any kind of afterworld, can be located empirically; consequently, it has to be assigned to a compartment which lies outside our rational comfort zone, and into which we are loath to venture unless we have to. In other words, death is cognitively alien to the modern age, whose whole self-identity rests on the notion that all natural processes can be explained – if not immediately, then at least a step at a time – by an everevolving science. But even though we may be able to decode the genome, photograph black holes and visualize brain activity with imaging techniques, use artificial intelligence to help detect tumours and develop vaccines in hitherto unimaginable time frames, the fact remains that no one knows what death is. Let alone how to abolish it. On that front, all science is helpless. In other words, Death is the opposite of Enlightenment, the final mystery, an uncomfortable reminder that knowledge has its limits and, alas, that every life is finite.
I have just read a couple of works on ‘the history of death’ and ‘death, modernity and society’ because it troubles me that our modern society has no relationship with death and hence with finitude, and that this curious fact has a lot to do with the inability to stop which has increasingly shaped our cultural model since the rise of growth-based capitalism. And if we’re not able to stop, then we’ll never be able to deal with the problems of finitude, such as climate change or species extinction. It’s as simple as that.
By contrast, it is undoubtedly the case that premodern societies did have a connection with death – indeed, they had to, for many different reasons. In times when life expectancy was less than thirty years (as it was around 1700), or less than forty years (as was still the case in Germany until a mere 150 years ago), death was always close at hand, or at least closer than today, when we are statistically likely to live twice as long. Average life expectancy has grown in tandem with the rise of industrial capitalism and hence of modern western-style society; in the case of Germany, to quote the market research company Statista, ‘between 1871/1881 and 1949/1951 alone, average life expectancy at birth rose by 29 years for men and 30 years for women. In the second half of the twentieth and the early part of the twenty-first century, between 1949/1951 and 2016/18, average life expectancy at birth rose by 13.9 years for men and 14.8 years for women.’8
Such an extension of our lifespan would have been unthinkable at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and it is not the result of medical progress alone, though this is often claimed. True, we can now cure many diseases that people were still dying from only a few decades ago, but even the great victories in the fight against infectious diseases can be distorted by statistical effects. After all, some individuals have always managed to reach a ripe old age – but only a few. Most perished in younger years, from causes such as inflamed tooth roots, appendicitis or cholera, but also – and here’s the point – a general level of violence that made the chances of dying an ‘unnatural’ death much higher than in modern constitutional states.9
In short, it is not the march of science alone that has prolonged the life of large numbers of people: advances in the organization of human coexistence – what we call the civilizing process – are also responsible for increasing the interval between birth and death to such an extraordinary extent.
At a psychological level, however, this means that, since death no longer looms on the horizon from early adulthood but is normally associated with ‘old age’, we don’t need to give it any serious thought for five or six decades. For the greater part of our life, death isn’t that important.
Another statistical factor affecting average life expectancy is infant and child mortality. Around 1820, a fifth of all children died at birth, and a further third failed to reach adulthood. In such circumstances, the death of a child was a routine
