An Essay on Self-Aggrandizement
Ladies and gentlemen, this lecture, like everything else concerning the ecological fate of our planet, comes half a century, or perhaps a whole century, too early. Anybody who wanted to talk briefly about how a civilization with an incomparably high level of luxury consumption achieves ecological balance would have to look at accomplished, or at least solid, facts. Such facts can only be discovered by long-term observations of the sole case that will provide information about our interests – our own case, actually. Conclusions from the past are no longer valid because relations in the modern age are not comparable to each other. History is no longer the teacher of life. If you want to know the truth about our crisis, you will have to wait. Only a historian three or four generations from today who looks at the ecodramas of the late twentieth and the twenty-first centuries would be able to see the material that would qualify him or her to make valid judgements; he or she could look back on the turbulence that the future represents to us like a mass of problems that had been dealt with. He or she could benefit from the methodical advantage that our riddles will have become their system of rules, and our expectations will have become their established facts. By the way, in using the male and female pronouns in this rather odd parallel fashion, I am referring to the inexorable sexual dualism of the future sciences of history and social studies. One of the side-effects of emancipatory progress, however delayed it may be, is that it also puts women in a dubious ecological situation. Tomorrow’s research into the past will illuminate everything we were able to produce today by means of the environment and cosmetics and expose it merely as a demonstration of our incorrigibly brilliant recklessness. In the face of the truth to come in a hundred years, anybody who behaves as if he or she could already speak the truth would undoubtedly be – well, what? A charlatan? An illusionist? A confidence trickster? A rainmaker? A Pied Piper? A card sharp? At this point we could list all the many words for trickery and cheating but would still not exhaust what there is to say about how our claims for the future lack real seriousness.
But perhaps premature concern about future truths has a different meaning. There are strong indications that the meaning of ‘truth’ is undergoing a major change in the logical budget of our civilization, a change that requires us to take increasing responsibility for the facts that have not yet been established. If we are concerned a hundred years too early with things for which we have no proof, this may be an indication that yesterday’s charlatanry is about to become tomorrow’s seriousness. People today will increasingly be drawn into a type of futurized practice that forces them to worry about the facts before they appear. To the extent this is true, we have reason to pay attention to a transformation in traditional mental attitudes. To be brief, I will summarize this transformation in three sweeping statements that are part of a diagnosis of our times. First, insofar as we are sufficiently involved in contemporary life, we are living at the peak of a reorganization of our logical budget from the primacy of the past to the primacy of the future. Second, in future the interest in truth will not be able to be expressed mainly as history, in the sense that history asks how it really was, nor as philosophy, in the sense that philosophy asks which origins and principles actually give rise to that which exists; instead, it will take the form of prognosis and prophecy, to the extent that this sees things coming that must come and invokes what should come if things are done correctly. Third, we are participating in a broad horizontal transformation from passive to active promotion of prophecies. In some situations we stop reacting to warnings and predictions with suffering and instead we start creating our own facts to fit the fictions and projects we prefer. If this theory could be firmed up, however, it would not imply that we were unconcerned about the perspective of the historian a hundred years from now. On the contrary, the historian of the future will sit in judgement on the prophetic activities of the present, and the truth that intelligence will find when it looks back in a hundred years’ time will also pass judgement on our predictive activities. The proposition we advanced at the beginning still holds: if it were a matter of providing cogent truths in the sense of retrospective assessments, we would, indeed, be arriving too early. We are coming in time to realize what doing history means for the future. It means using active prophecy to gather the material that will be available to future historians. Nonetheless, we have been warned that anything we do and say from now on can be used against us before the court of the future.
In the dark decade after the end of the Second World War a dictum circulated in the Western hemisphere that human beings were condemned to freedom. It was one of the theses that would become both classic and inapt in the course of a few decades. The author of this theorem, Jean-Paul Sartre, succeeded in making it the hallmark of existentialism; the phrase may not have epitomized his times, but it certainly captured their mood. The basic tone of the decade was a sense of bottomlessness that people at that time called the absurd. Existence was pervaded by a kind of cheap tragedy. Those who were alive had experienced fragmentation; those who had escaped felt the chance nature of their survival in every gesture; what still existed stood around like remains, surrounded by annihilations and empty spaces. Those who had survived felt their existence outlined more sharply, as if an invisible hand had drawn a black line around their own life.
The abrupt absence of forty million people who had died vibrated in the atmosphere like a mystical emission; some of the more sensitive survivors expressed the feeling that a lifetime was only a loan from those who had vanished. It took a long time for the cloud of absurdity to dissolve. By the late fifties, however, slogans of reconstruction were increasingly being taken up. A new kind of solidity developed, people talked of the New Realism, positivists of all nations united to come down to earth and face facts, and in the sixties we saw the banners waving for overconsumption. It created the backdrop for new risks and new forms of security related to democracy and unchecked industrial growth; both democracy and growth optimism encountered irritating opposition from neo-utopianism and the moral impatience of young Western academics.
Then an odd concept appeared on the horizon: ‘quality of life’. Anybody who remembers the time when this was a new expression will be unable to suppress a smile. The word floated above the capitalist political parties like a Zeppelin over a fairground; it was as if politicians had discovered how to put pie in the sky in their electorate’s letterboxes. This is all history now – it is lecturing, to paraphrase Thomas Mann, in the grammatical tense of the deepest past. What was completely broken back then? It seems to me as if Herbert Marcuse simultaneously became the contemporary of Plato, St Paul and Spartacus, Adorno was immersed in endless conversation with the prophet Jeremiah, Mao Zedong’s shadow joined the circle around Tamburlaine and Cortés, and Simone de Beauvoir and Galla Placidia discovered traces of mutual sympathy. Such dreamy conjectures may confirm the impression that the past has lost all its dimensions and collapsed into a single point, as it were.
Only a few people still alive now can remember the time when existence seemed to flow out from the depths of time like a wide, peaceful stream; nowadays the weeks behind us quickly turn into jet trails that dissolve into unreality in seconds. Years are like garbage bags collected on New Year’s Eve. How undignified elapsed time became, as if the concept of waste included the consumed present. A new zeitgeist took shape – a spirit of destruction that was presaged through signals from the 1970s on has been within our grasp since the 1980s and can be verified by huge numbers of personal statements. This spirit, too, is full of the sense of bottomlessness, but not the same as the one that produced the absurdity of the 1950s; today it has a different shade. In short, aestheticism has overwritten absurdity. Not decision, but experience is the key word of our times. People today do not dream of making their own choices without any reason, as people did in the general drabness of postwar life. Today’s great opportunity comes from consuming oneself without reason. We do not feel the empty space gaping around us and as if all institutions were built on sand because the dead appeared in the majority, as after the war – no, we have become unrestrained because the world as a list of options makes us feel dizzy. We are bottomless because we have to choose between fourteen different types of salad dressing. The world is a menu and we have to consume and not be doubtful. This is the basis of the postmodern ‘condition’. You only have one life, so fill your plate, eat yourself up, don’t leave anything of yourself; the leftovers will end up in a plastic sack anyway. We drift on the ocean of appetite. Our readiness for experience has removed the world’s borders. Although the last conservatives, both Stoics and Christians, have preserved the remnants of faith in the spirit of serious missions and objective tasks, the broad majorities have long since converted to the Consumerist Unbeliever International – to paraphrase a remark by the English cultural historian Ernest Gellner.1
In his capacity as a consumer, the human being of the new millennium perceives his position in bottomless existence. He is no longer condemned to freedom but to frivolity. The frivolous person is someone who must decide for one thing or another without a serious reason – it is the dove-green and not the crimson, the salmon teriyaki and not the lamb shanks, the Seychelles and not Acapulco; it is Naomi and not Vanessa, the Bad Boys not Depeche Mode, the biggies from Honda not BMW, Long Island not Bogenhausen. To know that one will die and to summon the energy to wear not silk but cool simple striped cotton – that demands greatness, and that is precisely what the members of our generation tacitly possess. In lucid moments we are shocked by our own capacity for decision-making. The roots of this recent decisiveness are actually not to be found in a high-energy will to power, as impassioned Nietzsche followers would have liked to believe. In fact, they come from small, unstable differences in tension. We could call their regulatory principle ‘the will to have fun’, if we understand fun as the principle of elimination of small and tiny quantities of tension. At the same time, what we call the ‘will to have fun’ is not an expression of will in the conventional sense because in the culture of fun the traditional image of human beings who are able to will something has become obsolete. Fun was not, and is not, a principle that takes itself seriously. There is nothing at its core that insists on basic principles. The ability to evacuate positions is the defining characteristic of people who want fun. Frivolity is the aura of a world situation in which the great mass of everyday ways of behaving is justified for one reason, for fun – a justification that is a weak difference, a small gap. We could add a sweeping, almost inappropriate generalization that the system of frivolity hovers over a principle whose basis is minimally sufficient. Options, moods and preferences must be sufficient to give the details their established place in Being. We could be tempted to think that from a philosophical viewpoint we are dealing with an order of weak reasons. If the world is an embodiment of options, it follows that its inhabitants are concerned with making decisions based on attitudes close to indifference, and with turning decisions into visible behaviour.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am deliberately linking these remarks on the postmodern system of frivolity to the ideas I shall now consider. Perhaps they can help to articulate an aspect of the dilemma about today’s specific topic. Cosmetics and environmental crisis – it is easy to see that this configuration combines things of unequal value or puts things of different weights on the same scale. There is no doubt that cosmetics, together with everything involved in today’s beauty industry, is the leading phenomenon of the world of weak reasons I mentioned earlier in terms of the reality of options. There is also no doubt that the present environmental crisis signifies a system of serious reasons in the background of the optional, frivolous designs of reality. We suspect, at least, that this system of reasons has not stopped existing. The easy things are trying too directly to join up with the difficult things, the system of unserious things wants to link up with ecology, which means the logical centre of knowledge about serious things. This cannot be achieved directly. The present author knows no method for solving this dilemma. To track down the solution to the riddle that has been set we either need paranormal forces or have to be prepared for a complicated investigation. There is much to be said, of course, for the first option.
The present author still remembers a memorable incident that occurred in an Austrian spa, Bad Aussee, in September 1993. This was the place where, owing to human error – which is the legal term for frivolity –, a green mamba escaped from its vivarium during a show with exotic snakes in a spa hotel. This is an extremely poisonous snake that enthusiasts regard as one of the most beautiful creatures in the snake world. It vanished under the parquet flooring in a corner of the room and could not be found for several days. The little world of Bad Aussee was in turmoil, and thanks to the media coverage, half of Austria was gripped by mamba fever. Police and fire-fighters arrived at the scene, tore up the parquet flooring and dug into the walls. Sections of the national army were deployed, snipers with shotguns secured large areas of the town and we may be sure that worried fathers within a radius of 50, 70 and 100 kilometres went around their houses on tiptoe attacking anything sliding, hissing, green or lethal. The local population sent in around a thousand tips on how to capture the snake. The majority of the advice, incidentally, came from the occult quarter – a fact that throws the incident into sharp relief in terms of social theory; one could have no more illusions about the methodical awareness of central Europeans in the period before the transition to the third millennium. The era of transpragmatism has dawned – anyone who achieves anything is right. The hunt ended on the third day. The creature was found approximately where it had last been seen, somewhere under the floor that had been removed in the meantime. The punchline of this happy rediscovery was yet to come: the Austrian public TV channel ORF interviewed a diviner who laid claim to the success in the snake hunt.2
I have never forgotten what the man said about his methods: he explained that the hunt had taken a long time because he had not seen the animal personally beforehand and he said that meant he could not make any direct ‘mental contact’ with it; that left only indirect methods. The green mamba’s owner had to concentrate on the snake, or, as people in such circles say, he had to ‘get mentally attuned to it’. Then the diviner, in turn, concentrated on the snake’s owner or got mentally attuned to him and could eventually localize the snake using his inner impressions. As the public could see, this procedure was soon successful. The green creature was back in its vivarium again and its owner had to bear the costs of the action – destroyed flooring, dismantled wall panelling, daily expenses for security officers, early departures and loss of bookings for the Bad Aussee hotel business. All these are circumstances that qualify Austria as an advanced high-risk society.
The present author admits that while working on this study he was forced to think more than once about the diviner from Bad Aussee; he was plagued by the dismal thought that the diviner was not morally worse off than he was when it came to investigating the ecological opportunities of a civilization of luxury consumers. I can imagine the mental chain extended by a few links like this: the diviner mentally attunes to Karl Lagerfeld; Karl Lagerfeld mentally attunes to Claudia Schiffer; Claudia Schiffer mentally attunes to her make-up artist; the latter mentally attunes to the head chemist of the cosmetic firm Schwarzkopf – and he or she is mentally attuned anyway to cosmetics in the area of debate between aesthetics and ecology. In our analogy he or she would be the person who knows the green mamba personally. If all goes to plan, we should be able to announce a model solution within a reasonable deadline. Unfortunately the present author is not very good at dealing with media in general and diviner-type media in particular; philosophy, it seems, is not yet the best preparation for the challenges of our times. Anyone who has studied the works of Plato and Adorno is fighting a losing battle; he or she comes up with solutions without asking themselves how and why. Success doesn’t care how you achieve it.
What you are about to hear are approaches to the transitory subject that have been arrived at by completely conventional means, attempts to get closer to the present-day problem using detours in the history of ideas. Given the nature of the subject, digressions into philosophy of religion will be inevitable. I will confine my remarks to four relatively short sections: the first section reflects on the ancient European idea that human beings are creatures distinguished by irredeemable deficiency – including the idea of original sin. The second section looks at the methods sinners use to make the consequences of their deficit seem bearable – including the dual ideas of purgatory and indulgences as a retrospective purification procedure for persistent offenders. The third section considers the motif of ecological misanthropy, which can be regarded as the return of radical punishment for sins under non-religious auspices, followed by possible ways and means to evade the prophetic environmental economy. The fourth and last section deals with the possible psycho-ecological function of optimism.
Although I do not know whether there are studies on the ecological content of the concept of sin, it seems clear to me that in the right light we would see a meaningful connection. Leaving aside detailed rhetoric about classical sins and vices, particularly as they are represented in the Judaeo-Christian traditions, we can see, looking at both sexes in fact, a dark picture that still has some relation to present reality. Human beings are portrayed as creatures that have deep reasons for being disposed to or deciding to flout a given Great Order. The theory of sin in its classical form until the dawn of the modern age was a construct of Christianized late Antiquity. In the transition from pagan Antiquity to the Christian era, people first became interested in systematizing the anthropologically pessimistic themes of the Ancient World and incorporating them into the new economy of redemption. Certainly, Romans and Greeks in the days of myths and theatre, as in those of philosophy, essentially knew that humans were at risk from deficiency and vice. The word ‘hubris’ reminds us how early human beings became the object of critical eyes that saw them as creatures with self-indulgent tendencies. Yet it was one step further from the ancient critique of hubris to the early Christian teaching, the Augustinian doctrine of the condition of humanity as inheritors of original sin. It was the necessary step for destroying every possibility of the self-justification at the basis of the ancient teachings of wisdom and for convincing individuals to accept unconditional dependency on a doctrine of redemption and its apostolic intermediaries, the Catholic bishops. A way of thinking was established in the era of patriarchal theology that we call ‘theonomen’ rule. It held that the world is a cosmos of order created, maintained and ruled by a unique God, a cosmos in which each individual living being has been assigned its designated place and character. This is why ‘being in one’s place’ and ‘being in order’ basically mean the same thing. Human beings are the poignant exception in this beautiful topology. They are the only beings that do not stand – or no longer stand – in their pre-appointed place. Adam, originally installed in the middle of a garden of paradise as its permissive guardian and beneficiary, was unfaithful to his assignation, his placement, and we all know the consequences.
Since that time the whole of humanity has been ‘embodied in Adam’, as the biblical teaching of species and groups says, meaning mad about places or, in theological terms, ‘fallen’ or ‘expelled’, ripped out of its original localization and looking for new positions – and why not for regained paradises as well? Part of the strength of the Church Fathers’ analysis is that it examined the case of Adam in considerable detail. It was convinced that the only possible answers to the question ‘Where are you, Adam?’– the question that began the human game of hide-and-seek, and then the expulsion and deformation of human beings – were answers that were incompatible with the idea of the Great Order. Adam is always in the wrong place, always confused and contrary, always in a mask, lurking in the bushes, in exile, astray. He is at the place of resistance, in the realm of disobedience. Adam’s disobedience manifests the super-paradigm of human civilization since the Neolithic revolution – the revolt of a primate against the cosmic order. But what is disobedience to one’s own self? How could it creep into a world beautifully constructed by God? This question hits the nerve of the investigation. It goes without saying that to answer it people had to go beyond Adam to explore possible conditions of resistance against the law to their very depths.
St Augustine, in his analysis of the First Egoism, pioneered an in-depth diagnosis of subjectivity as a negative form of diabolical self-assertion, being hunched up or curled up in oneself, in idiosyncratic positions. It is not just Adam, of course, but actually, far ahead and above him, Satan himself who initiated the intrusion of the negative, the ‘no’, into the cosmos of order that had been initially set up for saying ‘yes’. The first denier, as the inventor of nothing, parodied the divine creation, so to speak, by producing his ‘no’ ex nihilo, out of nothing. The first devil – and this is the key to everything – had no ulterior motive for his choice, just like any poor second- or third-rate devil. He acted out of abundant lack of motivation: because he wanted what he wanted, and that’s all. He chose himself and his separation for no reason, from the depths of a mood, just as fashion designers decide on their colours for the season. It was that simple and simply that. St Augustine discovered anarchy, so to speak, in the First Negation; this is the first time that philosophical reflection illuminated the absence of a beginning of something that wilfully began of its own accord. St Augustine emphasized that the devil’s ‘no’ was not based on any conditioning experience and rival principle; the negative angel would not be excused by pleading that he had a bad childhood before the Fall; nor was he the vassal of a second, evil God. He made his refusal freely: its freedom empowered him to completely turn against the Great Order of things and orientate towards free will. The angel of contradiction is basically an artist. Lethally elegant, as lightly as a model at the end of the catwalk, Satan turned his back on his origins. As he turned back again, people could almost imagine his long, carefully tended curls swinging around his shoulders – he was said to be an effeminate type. For Augustine, the first half-turn, this original perversion, held the destiny of humanity; everything that would later be called history is merely the explication of this turn away and its possible correction by a turn back. From the Christian viewpoint, World history is essentially a game of perversion and reconversion. We could say it is the drama of human statements about a truth which they, human beings in the shape of Satan and Adam, initially and mostly turn their backs on – with God’s help and with the aid of suffering – in order finally, perhaps, to return to it.
That truth is something that is generally not found and fixed at the first attempt but can only be discovered after a distortion – this view already belonged to an earlier phase of Jewish literature on wisdom. The so-called Old Testament contains weighty interpretations of the theme of sin and repentance, not least in relation to female vanity; it is easy to see that this gives us the pattern of Satanic self-referentiality. The oldest of the Jewish writing prophets, Isaiah, emerged with the first critique of women’s stubborn attachment to cosmetics:
The Lord said: Because the daughters of Zion are haughty and walk with outstretched necks, glancing wantonly with their eyes, mincing along as they go, tinkling with their feet, therefore the Lord will strike with a scab the heads of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will lay bare their secret parts. In that day the Lord will take away the finery of the anklets, the headbands, and the crescents; the pendants, the bracelets, and the scarves; the headdresses, the armlets, the sashes, the perfume boxes, and the amulets; the signet rings and nose rings; the festal robes, the mantles, the cloaks, and the handbags; the mirrors, the linen garments, the turbans, and the veils. Instead of perfume there will be rottenness; and instead of a belt, a rope; and instead of well-set hair, baldness; and instead of a rich robe, a skirt of sackcloth; and branding instead of beauty. (Isaiah 3, 16–24 ESV)
We can see clearly that the prophet suspects hair as the basis of the first separation, curls as the beginning of the first curling up inside oneself, and the hairstyle as an agreement to take a particular path. Because of this, remorse must begin with the scissors. If I read the passage correctly, it says that the Lord cuts off the hair of proud women with His own hands – this is the only cosmetic treatment that satisfies the Great Order which has been violated. Come off the catwalk, throw your clothes on the floor, wipe off your make-up and get rid of that highly original hairstyle – these gestures are inspired by an early passion for reconstituting what zealots have always regarded as simpler, initial, true relationships. Nowadays we would most probably see this passion as radical-ecologist.
We have now identified the enemy and marked off the front line. There is a clear trail from Satan’s bottomless rebellion and the original foundation of self-referentiality to Adam’s disobedience and from there directly to the pretty, inward-winding curls of the daughters of Zion. The devil likes himself better than God – the tragedy opens with an act of aesthetic dissidence that begins as moral and ends as ecological. As we have said, the fact that human beings as embodied in Satan and Adam like themselves better than anyone else arouses a tendency towards dangerous originality. The Church Father Tertullian had distinct views about the problem of fashion or, as he expressed it, of women’s trappings – cultus feminarum –, which had a threatening dynamic for all forms of the Great Order: ‘Was [God] unable to create crimson or steel-blue sheep? Even if he were able to, he did not want to; but things God did not want to do, human beings should not do either [. . .].’3 This should not be confused with advocacy of natural colours – what Tertullian, the rigorous theologian, had in mind was a veto against interest in any colourful fashions at all. In his opinion the business of colour involved entering a terrain of originality that aimed towards supplementing what was God-given in a way that was far from innocent; human originality is based only on implicit and explicit resistance to the works of God’s own hand. Tertullian expressed it in formal terms: ‘Anything that does not come from God must necessarily come from his adversary.’ People familiar with the Great Order realize that this means: the way to hell is paved with original ideas.
As for the idea that hell is the exact description of the future empire of the devil and his original followers: this came to be the dominant conviction in the works of the Church Fathers during late Antiquity and remained unchallenged until the high Middle Ages. The thousand-year empire of the Catholic belief in hell is one of the most powerful facts of European consciousness. It was an immensely extensive psycho-political regime that made a dubious connection between terror and control of the soul. Human beings are rotten from the beginning and are consequently not upset at being threatened with the worst. The early Middle Ages had no qualms about using terror as a method of education. As St Augustine realized, to make the notion of hell seem extremely serious it was imperative to keep emphasizing that punishments in the nether world were eternal and to insure against objections from merciful advocates of laxity. Examining the formal guarantees that people would burn for ever in hell, he came upon the question of infinitely reclaimable energy sources. It is not a trivial matter for God to secure the incombustibility of a sinful body in the eternal fire; when we seriously consider the questions of fuel technology in eternity, we come close to nothing less than a breakthrough to the conception of the self-refuelling reactor. In the twenty-first volume of his work The City of God, St Augustine achieved an impressive feat of constructive imagination by designing an energy concept along the lines of a closed plutonium cycle to ensure that the flames of punishment will remain burning for all time. With almost loving precision, the bishop Augustine envisaged in detail how the sinful body would smoulder like an eternal briquette in a kind of torture that would preserve its form – a last Christian tribute to the Greek morphophilia, the love of boundary and shape. St Augustine also wrote unforgettable commentaries on the problem of the combustibility of disembodied demons and wicked angels. What concerns us here is the inexorable correlation of sin and punishment in hell – in the present context we are not interested in issues of repentance and paradise. It is true that the works of the Church Father of Hippo also include references to the possibility of post-mortal purification; in principle, however, his teachings on the Last Things – like all the teachings of the Church until well into the twelfth century – are based on a harsh dualism of paradise and hell, salvation and damnation.
This only changed fundamentally in the high Middle Ages when the idea of purgatory began its triumphal march. Thanks to the ground-breaking studies by the French medievalist Jacques Le Goff,4 we know today that the ‘birth of purgatory’ was more than a retrospective ornamental addition to Christian eschatology. It is probably not exaggerating to describe it as the greatest event in the European store of ideas between Bernhard von Clairvaux and Luther. Under the banner of purgatory the West discovered the synthetic energy that it has still not exhausted today. The establishment of the third place between hell and heaven also gave historical validity to the idea of the third way. Europe has been both things since then: the mother of the revolution and the emporium of interim solutions. We do not forget that since then everything that people of the modern age, especially in Eastern Europe, have had to sacrifice for the future in the name of revolution and transitional periods has been a purgatorial suffering that has become immanent. As long as Europe thinks about its world history, it sees the future as essentially purgatorial; it is actually the people of the former ‘Second World’ who will soon realize that in making their present leap from one transitional period to another they have merely changed their purgatory, so to speak. The adventures of the dialectic have their source in purgatory. It is where Europeans first learned to say ‘both … and …’. It is where they discovered the magical synthesis that constructed a common element to bridge over an irreconcilable contradiction. And above all: under the banner of purgatory they learned to be agile in a new metaphysical way – they acquired their typical mobility in sin and the recklessness that comes from being conscious of deficiency that has influenced the moral profile of Europe from its foundations to the present day. Purgatory taught the Christians of Europe – more precisely, the lay people, city dwellers, traders, profiteers, scholars, captains, princes and artists – a lesson that could be called the first modernism. Flames of purification flickered out of the nether world into the different parts of the human world and spoke with a thousand pink, yellow and green tongues: it is not necessary to be radical to thwart evils at the root; it is not necessary to seek the ‘truth’; it is not necessary to take the monk’s habit and the cross to avoid serious temptations; it is not necessary to place one’s life with every tiny little gesture under the literal authority of the Great Order. It is enough to keep out of the way of the most blatant rogues; it is enough to be moderately sinful; it is enough to be available for retrospective accounting; it is enough to settle one’s debts to the Great Order in a pay-off scheme sometime later. This lesson contains everything that countless people wanted to hear from the late Middle Ages onwards in order to put things right with the world and themselves: they were people who were not entirely indifferent about their good conscience, yet did not feel called upon to live a life of austerity. Purgatory opened the way of salvation for moderate, easy-going, bourgeois sinners. Its fire gave the green light to a type of layperson in Europe’s courts and cities who was not wholly without expectations. It gave a start to the diligent average sinner. In those days even profiteers could acquire blessedness by roundabout routes.5
Although a consciously committed sin is unforgivable, it is still forgivable if it is linked to a bond for years of purification torture in the nether world. It is here that we find the modus operandi of modernity: the salvation of the unholy came into prospect. Still under Catholic patronage, the first signs emerged that the regime was easing up; a risky venture. People predicted an era of galloping progress, a time of nearly unlimited credit, a time of sin with limited liability. Commit your sins now, suffer later and still be blessed after all: this was the basic formula for the European-Catholic economy of salvation for laypersons. Purgatory secured the ecological solvency of the average evildoer. Because he or she was destined to be tortured enough and retrospectively purified after death in a temporary hell, the Great Order, although violated, would still receive its due in the end. The establishment of purgatory created an acceptable means of payment out of the sinner’s pain multiplied by the time factor; years in purgatory could be weighed up against the suffering of the Great Order caused by our transgressions. And since the Great Order only ever suffered relative damage through individual sins, punishments in the nether world were wholly adequate as reparation. From that moment on, ecology was possible in the actual sense of the word if it meant the operations of the most comprehensive domestic economy – including the lowest and highest. Nowadays we would speak of systemic external costs.
In these oblique preliminary ideas about the history of ecological reason it may suffice to say that the idea of purgatory marked the beginning of an effective Christian world economy: it allowed the Catholic practice of indulgences as a prelude to modern capitalism by showing the spirit of commerce as a perpetuation of the spirit of the victim; it prefigured the controversial ecological idea that defaulting on payment in the present meant that borrowing could be done against the future; and it cleared the way for the notion that such credit could be repaid with reparations in the fires of purgatory, always on the premise that the biggest evil, eternal damnation, would continue to be recognized and feared in human consciousness as the epitome of what should be avoided. Purgatory opened a window for human originality in the normative world of the Middle Ages. Purgatory highlighted the key figures of future generations: persistent offenders, witty innovators, followers of economic fashions and, last but not least, the people who charged interest, the brokers, the proto-capitalists who usually had success with the principle of unnatural profit. It is not far from the rescue of profiteers to the Protestant sanctification of lay work.
All that is missing now is the theological justification for originality, an acquittal for the vain extra invention of works that were not contained in the first edition of the Creation – better known today as innovations. Then all the necessary themes would be assembled for European world actors to make their definitive break-out from the shell of the idea of the Great Order. By justifying, indeed canonizing, original people, human beings would have a good conscience about using inventive practice to seize power; they would be convinced that there is no Being before the deed, no norm before the will, no essence before existence. These desires began to be fulfilled in the early Renaissance philosophies of art, from Nicholas of Cusa to Marsilio Ficino; this is where the productive layman and the inspired genius first received their metaphysical consecration. The result was that the privileged characteristic of the Absolute – creativity – was passed on to human beings. Modernity is the age of creativity, the age of enterprise, the age of projects – an era that could only come to an end because it became incapable of adequately handling the side-effects of its own rich inventiveness. We are now ready to turn the pages to the present state of the problem.
These references to the past would be superficial if they did not contain the complete basic structure of the present ecological conflicts. In fact, the timespan from the end of the Middle Ages to the ecological twilight of the late twentieth century can be described as a stage play with the title ‘Decline and Return of the Idea of the Great Order’. Its plot echoes a periodic movement in the history of ideas and customs that led to the collapse of original sin and the emergence of sinning against the environment. Between these two end points is the total process of activity – involving economics, weapons technology, transportation technology, epistemics, information technology and aesthetics. What is striking about this process is how the theme of fundamental sinfulness moved from heaven to earth. In line with modernity’s principle of secularity, a religious difference between God and human beings has ceased to impress us. Faced with a rupture of primary importance, we have to ponder on the historical difference between the human species and its ‘living space’, which we could also call the difference between the techno-system and the ecosystem. The crucial issue is that the theme of fundamental human misalignment which theology calls ‘sin’ has returned under different auspices. It has returned as the perception of the visible break in the way of life in the industrial age between the human sphere’s mode of existence and how the rest of Nature is ordered. Sin that has become immanent can still be sin, serious, deeprooted and deadly. Recognizing this forces people in the advanced industrial countries to provide answers to the major question of the age of industrialism: how do we obtain a merciful Nature? A reform of the system on every level is on the agenda of world history. The ‘human beings’ in the industrial system, the far-reaching, polyvalent end consumers eager for experience, increasingly seem like beings whose rift with their natural preconditions is just as fundamentally evil as the relationship between the angel who invented negation, on the one hand, and the holy totality, on the other. In the same way that Satan was poisonous for the pyramid of creation, what human beings have issued, at least since 1750, has been poisonous for environmental cycles, whether on a large or a small scale. In other words, anybody who wants to decontaminate the world has no choice but to start with the hypertrophic human factor.
And now we can see how the two Catholic European styles of order – the brutal early one that demanded hell for seasoned sinners and the moderate later one that opened a purgatorial third way – became valid again for processing immanent sins committed against the order of the ecological system. The severe method was based on the idea that people who received the news of their approaching end unconditionally retreated into themselves – those who acted otherwise could expect the reduction of humanity through autogenous hell; they could reliably expect Nature’s revenge on a purely causal basis. This may be the truth, but who wants to hear it? The authors of the moderate style are very understanding towards environmental sinners who are unable to hear; they offer them the prospect of a purgatory in which everybody who persistently sins and intends to continue doing so can acquire a clear conscience provided he or she is willing to pay the price of the sin, either in advance or after the event. This introduces the decisive concept into the debate: the price. Anybody who talks about the third place between heaven and hell should not be silent about indulgences. In principle, the late medieval system of indulgences or writing off sins was nothing but an impressive price system for accredited Church penalties and periods in purgatory. It prefigured the European market as a system of overseas trading with more or less holy goods (on the basis of Roman contracts, we hardly need add). Think of saints’ attempts to appease God with intercessory prayers for the sinners in hellfire, the mitigating effect of back payments by the relatives of the deceased, deathbed donations to the Church, price lists for all manner of crimes and transgressions, ransom payments for missed crusades, broken oaths, avoidance of confessions and neglected fasting duties, special funds for dykes and church buildings, and much more. In 1521 Archbishop Albrecht von Mainz, who was still Luther’s highest superior at the time, wanted to finance ambitious construction plans for the city of Halle. He announced a special indulgence in the form of a gigantic catalogue of relics that listed forty-two whole bodies of saints and nine thousand individual items, mostly bones, with a total value of nineteen and a quarter million years in purgatory. The catalogue’s main attractions were the shoulder blade of St Christopher, a handful of the earth from which Adam was created, and the basin in which Pontius Pilate washed his hands; branches from the burning bush and manna from the desert were among the other items from what could be described as Germany’s first mail-order company. To this day the little manual by Pater Arnold Guillet Die Ablassgebete der katholischen Kirche [The Prayers for Indulgence of the Catholic Church] states quite clearly:
The indulgence is best compared to a share. The more shares a person owns the greater the share of the firm’s capital and profit he receives. The ‘firm’ we belong to is the Church; a person who gains an indulgence becomes a ‘shareholder’ in the Church.6
It would have been even better if the author had talked about a central bank that issues a currency or bonds from its holy treasury and uses its subsidiary banks to control transfer flows from the mercy borrowers to the mercy owners. As we know, it was the reformist theologians of Calvin and Luther who removed the basis for that monstrous but effective salvation economy by completely transposing God’s mercy into the realm of the unconditional, the incalculable and things that cannot be bought.
Ladies and gentlemen, our times have been called the period of decision-making in relation to the history of civilization and even natural history. In fact they should be called the years of triumphal indecision. During the past decade the moderate deal in ecological affairs has become the rule worldwide. The uncompromising voices who warned us to turn back, the penitents who criticize the system and the green heralds of the apocalypse have been pushed into the background and find an audience only among noble and mad, marginal people, among excitable types with extremist tendencies, people who are receptive to the ideal of ecological sanctity. Today, as in the Franciscan Middle Ages, they are not mainstream characters. The only thing that can happen in their circles is extreme outrage for the benefit of maltreated Nature; this is where the sense of justice flourishes in catastrophe. It is true that in the present state of things people who love whales and dragonflies become enemies of humankind. Radical ecologists are ashamed of their species. In their metaphysical, sensitive way they dream of the earth empty of human beings once again. Their sense of order even goes as far as seeing the dissipatio humani generis, the extinction of the human genus, as a welcome trend in the world’s progress. In their case, ecological misanthropy culminates in the paradox that humanity will be likeable only after active self-criticism has caused it to vanish from the face of the earth. It is no exaggeration to say that this high-minded love of spaces empty of humans is not a majority option at the moment. The persistent offenders on every continent, the originals not prepared to do penance, the developed and the developers, the creative and the stylized people, the beautiful and quick people, including the broad majority of consumers and producers, owners and voters, drivers and travellers in the First World, at least after they have given up denying, are demanding a different way, a way into the way out, a third way in peril. And it is precisely the outlines of this way that have won out with irresistible logic in recent years. A constitutive purgatory has been born, and we ourselves are its first clients. After a phase of dualist turmoil between economy and ecology we, too, have incorporated a third place into our world view, a place where ecology is no longer opposed to economy; aesthetics is ethics; consumption is conservation; and going onwards is turning around. The new third place makes it all possible. The economy insists on its legalities and habits but still puts on ecological airs: it purifies itself and its products – in fact it launches a hypermarket for everything that purifies, lowers, filters, reduces, detoxifies, extracts and miniaturizes. The dialectic is once again on track towards defeating dualism. All the same, there is just as little fun to be had with the ecological way of purification as there once was with the religious way.
The religious way is also associated with the awesome seriousness of the revived idea of the Great Order, a seriousness that is simultaneously distant and present, and this idea may now be presented, without explicit metaphysical perspectives, in bio-systemic languages and with all kinds of scientific reservations. When the clearest analysts of our situation are the very people who become converted to such ideas, this shows our monumental embarrassment more clearly than anything else. With a realism worthy of the label of Catholicism, present-day purgatorial ecology incorporates the major moral and physical factors of our situation into its analysis: sustained sin and its gamble on the continuation of a life full of cheer; the neglect of consciousness about procreation in nearly every human population; the cracks in structure of the Great Order – the state of the ground, water bodies, fauna, flora and the atmosphere; the shortage of time; the cowardice of people who hold office; the perpetrators’ fear of becoming victims; their reluctant readiness to let their persistent sinning cost them something. These moments can combine to form the outlines of a new total economy, something under the heading of ‘eco-social market economy’, ‘ecological realpolitik’, ‘Marshall Plan for the Earth’ or ‘the economy of sustainability’. Such approaches involve thinking with commendable logic about the total costs of original lifestyles, including funding models for persistent sins against the ecosystem. The most important programme in this direction was written by Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker.7 The cover picture of this study shows the globe divided into quarters. The Atlantic is recognizable on the left with a ribbon of soft white clouds; on the upper right is Europe, graceful and brownish in colour; and below that is the yellow land mass of Africa. It is the visual design characteristic of the new Great Order. Anybody who can look at the sea and earth from that perspective can harbour few illusions about his or her place in the space. The book’s title says a great deal all at once: Earth Politics: Ecological Realpolitik on the Threshold of the Century of the Environment. Not only does the word Realpolitik indicate that the time of reckoning has come; the reference to the approaching ‘century of the environment’ is certainly not modest in terms of the philosophy of history and has a clear purgatorial meaning. In an ‘epoch’ like this, actors of all persuasions have to show unprecedented commitment in determining a price system for the prevention of catastrophic effects. Von Weizsäcker had good reason to give the systemic central chapter of his book the heading: ‘Prices Must Speak the Truth’.8
We can deduce from this that future history will only be able to retain minimal coherence in terms of world history if it leads to a world domestic economy regulated by markets. In this economy, money would be spent as the price for indulgences for acts of revenge by the damaged environment. The persistent appetites for sin would be fed into the market and a generalized practice of paying penalties would lead by way of market mechanisms to self-stabilizing cyclical processes. It is an open question whether such a system of prices for environmental damage could work on a sufficiently global basis – it would mean the effective introduction of a new quality of political economy that would simultaneously be a world economy and a rescue economy. The only comparable historical example that is not doomed to fail from the start is the Catholic economy of indulgences. It is an exciting model with a bizarre coherence that makes it almost grandiose, and its success was unrivalled for centuries until something better was found. Today, as we witness the fall of short-lived profane economism, we are becoming more aware again that prices can affect even indirect, invisible things operating in the background. The sky is not for free, and even the chemical composition of the stratosphere must be financed; from now on budget decisions will become confessions of faith in a future life. We have to take into account that vast majorities of people who half-believe, who believe only a quarter and who do not believe at all will not stop doing what they should not do under any circumstances in the sense of the biospherical global order whose outline is now vaguely emerging. The costs of this will increasingly tell the truth. The god of immanence, the money which moves everything, is facing turbulent times ahead in which it will have to reveal itself as never before.
Ladies and gentlemen, my conclusions mostly concern those people who are surprised that they are happy and cheerful. I think our train of thought up to now has prepared us for this surprise. We can now see more clearly why human beings are animals in whom frivolity and constructiveness converge. When Homo sapiens occidentalis looks in the mirror nowadays, he does not see an original animal that likes itself. He is looking at a constructivist who is making encouraging signs to him from behind the mirror. Constructivists are people who want to derive extreme consequences from the facts of human productivity, both logical and material. They teach that there are no Great Orders in existence that we would have to enter only to be submissive and conform; we are already co-productive to begin with. Wherever people claim order, construction is always to be found as well, and wherever construction exists, fields open up for the interplay of indeterminate processes and the use of energy vectors.
This is the systemic reason that makes it possible for prophetic activism to support a cause that seems lost from the start. Human beings are auto-flexible animals to the very end – they can become almost anything they can sustainably imagine themselves to be. But can we successfully imagine an effective, environmentally friendly mode of being that is also pious about being global? As we have seen, in the system of industrial frivolity, originality works as the fuel and engine of the wide-awake movement. It is this originality that seems preordained to take a constructivist turn in the future. We have reasons to cease being randomly inventive; instead, we have to receive the outputs of the original animal constructively in big cyclical processes. This condemns system construction to planetary orders of magnitude. Constructivism is the objective idealism of frivolity – which accounts for the predestined form of thought of the age of eco-realism. If anyone is looking for an epistemological anti-depressant, here it is, available on the market in various forms. It will help to foster successful real-life illusions of environment-friendliness, or at least to reduce hostility to the environment. A changed concept of technology on a new horizon of invention is emerging among today’s intellectual avant-garde in engineering and ecology; we can detect a second kind of originality that will bring the consequences of the first kind under control. The second kind of originality shows us that hope should not be blind – this is true today more than ever. As a mechanism of the second kind of originality, the new self-critical invention would mean a conversion of the system. Its axiom is the realization that reproductivity goes deeper than mere productivity. Thinking about originality and sustainability together can bring a completely unknown idea to light – that of a new kind of Nature that human analysis has helped to mediate with itself.
The unparalleled situation we are in justifies people today looking in the mirror. We look at our own external appearance to keep fit. In the battle against entropy, little gestures often have a big effect – keeping fit is half the business of politics. For people plagued by doubt, make-up can also become a gesture of primal trust. If a Great Order could smile, it would do so in the face of this gesture. This is how beings with originality stay fit for the long working days of the third way.