Rage Entrepreneurs

02-25-2018

Rage Entrepreneurs

[caption id="attachment_19554" align="alignright" width="300"] By Rainer Lück http://1RL.de - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0[/caption] Thomas Meaney profiles Peter Sloterdijk, the brash celebrity philosopher who has a love/hate relationship with Germany’s right-wing Alternativ für Deutschland. Sloterdijk is a brilliant and brutal critic of the hypocrisy of liberal democracy. And he has explained and justified the rage so many feel against liberal social norms. He understands that those left out by liberal capitalist democracies are possessed by a “loathing of liberal democracy by nativist, populist, anarchic, and terrorist movements.” This means, for Sloterdijk, that we are living in an age uniquely susceptible to rage entrepreneurs.

“Shortly after the German federal elections in September, I met Sloterdijk for lunch, at a small Italian restaurant in the west of Berlin. “This is a restaurant where Gerhard Schröder used to come,” Sloterdijk told me with satisfaction. The former German Chancellor began inviting Sloterdijk to gatherings of intellectuals in the nineties, when his broadsides against left-leaning public moralists were first winning him a following among conservative and centrist politicians. After our lunch, Sloterdijk was going to see the country’s current President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. I asked if he ever saw Angela Merkel, and he laughed, saying, “She’s got to this point where she exudes the persona of a woman who no longer needs anyone’s advice.” Since I had last seen Sloterdijk, Merkel and her party, the C.D.U., had pulled off a narrow victory in the federal elections, but major gains achieved by previously marginal parties were making it hard for Merkel to assemble a governing coalition. The leftist party Die Linke had made inroads into the youth vote, recalling the successes of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. The libertarian F.D.P., which Sloterdijk had praised months before, had done well, too, but eventually turned down the opportunity to join Merkel in a coalition government. Overshadowing everything else in the headlines were the advances made by the nationalist AfD. When I brought up the AfD, Sloterdijk sank his head in his hands, and his expansive manner gave way to something more cautious. For years, the German media have been making connections between Sloterdijk’s thought and new right-wing groups, and he’s become used to rebutting the charge of harboring far-right sympathies. In my conversations with him, his political preoccupations seemed closer to libertarianism than to anything more blood and soil, but he has a habit of saying things that, depending on your view, seem either like dog whistles to the far right or like the bomb-throwing reflexes of a born controversialist. When Sloterdijk said, of Merkel’s refugee policy, that “no society has the moral obligation to self-destruct,” his words called to mind Thilo Sarrazin, a former board member of the Bundesbank, who, in 2010, published an anti-Muslim tract with the title “Germany Abolishes Itself,” which became a huge best-seller and made racial purity a respectable concern of national discussion. I asked Sloterdijk about Marc Jongen, a former doctoral student of his who became the AfD’s “party philosopher” and recently took up a seat in the Bundestag. “In a perfect world, you are not responsible for your students,” he said. “But we live in a half-perfect world, and so now people try to pin Jongen to me.” I asked if there was any common ground between him and Jongen, and he replied with an emphatic no, calling Jongen “a complete impostor.” He went on, “He came to the university to study Sanskrit classics like the Upanishads, but then he gave it all up. A political career is the way out for him.” The response was unequivocal, but couched less in terms of moral abhorrence than of professional disdain. Sloterdijk deplored the rise of the right, but he couldn’t resist seeing something salutary in the spectacle. “It’s been coming for a long time,” he said. “It’s also a sign that Germans are more like the rest of humanity than they like to believe.” He started talking about “rage banks,” his term for the way that disparate grievances can be organized into larger reserves of political capital. He described this concept in his 2006 book “Rage and Time,” an examination of the loathing of liberal democracy by nativist, populist, anarchic, and terrorist movements. The book follows his usual detour-giddy historical method, comparing political uses of anger, and of related emotions such as pride and resentment, from Homer to the present. In premodern societies, he argues, vengeance and blood feuds provided ample outlet for these impulses. Later, loyalty to the nation-state performed a similar function, and international Communism managed to direct class rage into utopian projects. But modern capitalism presents a particular problem. “Ever more irritated and isolated individuals find themselves surrounded by impossible offers,” he writes, and, out of this frustrated desire, “an impulse to hate everything emerges.” It was this kind of rage, Sloterdijk believes, that was on display in the riots in the banlieues of Paris in 2005. In “Rage and Time,” Sloterdijk writes that the discontents of capitalism leave societies susceptible to “rage entrepreneurs”—a phrase that uncannily foreshadows the advent of Donald Trump.”

Form more information visit: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/26/a-celebrity-philosopher-explains-the-populist-insurgency

Quantifying Human Reason

[caption id="attachment_19557" align="alignleft" width="300"] By G ambrus (talk) - Self-photographed, CC BY 3.0[/caption] Peter Harrison argues that Steven Pinker’s defense of the  enlightenment gets the enlightenment all wrong.

“The Enlightenment may seem an ambitious topic for a cognitive psychologist to take up from scratch. Numerous historians have dedicated entire careers to it, and there remains a considerable diversity of opinion about what it was and what its impact has been. But from this and previous work we get intimations of why Pinker thinks he is the person for the job. Historians have laboured under the misapprehension that the key figures of the Enlightenment were mostly philosophers of one stripe or another. Pinker has made the anachronistic determination that, in fact, they were all really scientists - indeed, "cognitive neuroscientists" and "evolutionary psychologists." In short, he thinks that they are people like him and that he is thus possessed of privileged insights into their thought denied to mere historians. The latter must resort to careful reading and fraught interpretation in lieu of being able directly to channel what Enlightenment thinkers really thought. This brings us to Pinker's other methodological novelty - quantification. He declares that Enlightenment ideals can be defended "in a distinctively 21st-century way: with data." This is consistent with his previous advice to practitioners of the humanities: more counting (and, presumably, less reading). Advocacy of the data-driven approach also comports with his earlier work in The Better Angels of our Nature, in which a number of long-standing questions about human nature are answered with a series of graphs. Certainly, he cannot be accused of not following his own advice in the present book, which is similarly adorned with graphical "data."”

Form more information visit: http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2018/02/20/4806696.htm

The First European Cosmopolitan Intellectual

Michael Massing finds contemporary overtones in the 16th century controversy between Erasmus and Martin Luther. Erasmus was a cosmopolitan universalist who wrote in Greek and Latin. Luther was a German nationalist who preached in the vernacular. Erasmus is the source of the idea of a “united Europe in which people of differing beliefs share a common citizenship.” But Erasmus’ cosmopolitanism eventually fell prey to Luther’s populism in the Reformation.

“The term “Erasmian” came into use to describe those who shared his vision. But those Erasmians represented only a small sliver of society. Erasmus wrote exclusively in Latin, for the highly educated, Latin-speaking elite. Dazzled by his readings in ancient Greek, Erasmus began promoting knowledge of that language as no less essential than Latin. “Almost everything worth learning is set forth in these two languages,” he wrote in one of his many educational texts. In these, Erasmus proposed a new curriculum for Europe, with instruction in Latin and Greek at its core. Knowledge of geography, history, astronomy, and nature was all to be imparted through readings in the classical authors specified by Erasmus. His educational program was, in short, highly elitist, seeking not to prepare ordinary citizens for a productive life but to train an aristocracy of culture and taste that could guide the rest of society. This curriculum became the basis for upper-class schooling in Europe until well into the nineteenth century; through it, knowledge of the classical canon would become a ruthlessly clear indicator of class…. “It is important for scholars to confine themselves to those languages that have almost exclusively been used in learned writing,” he declared. “The reason is that they do not depend for their guarantee on ordinary people. The people are poor custodians of quality.” In short, Erasmus—that champion of a common humanity—was a world-class snob.”

Form more information visit: http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/02/20/luther-vs-erasmus-when-populism-first-eclipsed-the-liberal-elite/