Blinded society

All the essays in this collection revolve around the question of what ethics, what political culture and what form of government corresponds to the Anthropocene – the age of human responsibility for planet Earth. If we simplify our ideas about democracy, it can be defined as a way of governing that maximises the probability that people will choose change rather than catastrophe. In every free society, there is a contest in the public space between those who try to accelerate change to avert an impending catastrophe on the one hand, and on the other, those who declare the harbingers of catastrophe to be dangerous radicals intimidating “ordinary people” and stubbornly defend the status quo. The dispute over climate change is an instructive example of this. When “public intellectuals” draw attention to fateful questions and they begin to resonate in the public sphere, majority and minority “opinion groups” are formed, which are not just a cluster of tastes and preferences. Opinions are what have been subjected to the controversies of public reason, have stood up to them, and have thus gained weight in the public sphere. In the age which, approximately since the year 2000, we have called the Anthropocene, such a fateful question is the struggle for the Nomos of the Earth: will it be possible to enshrine in some “constitution of all earthlings” the planetary limits that humanity must not exceed in building its world, so as not to irreparably jeopardise the habitability of its home planet? The transformation of the slow public space into a fast mediasphere has brought the threat that elections will produce “majorities” whose formation will be significantly influenced by disinformation and conspiracy theories. Their rule would be a democratic paradox: it would be legitimate ex titulo, but illegitimate ex modo. They would have a legitimate title to rule, but the manner of that rule would be illegitimate, because it would be contrary to liberal-democratic ideals. All regimes – even democratic ones – have their mainstream normalising vocabularies. But it would be a tragedy beyond measure and bounds for democracy if the Western tradition of the public use of reason (Kant) were reduced, for fear of the anarchy of the mediasphere, to one of the normalising vocabularies: critical reason would begin to warn against “distrust of the system” instead of spreading a vigilance based on argumentation towards all systems – those “brothers in lies”. Distrust of the system, conceived as a syndrome of pathological civic consciousness, would thus definitively end the long tradition of the free-thinking public use of reason, from whose anti-conformism Euro-American democracies have drawn their contagious, radically reformist energy for centuries. Perhaps it is not merely senile delusion to believe that this collection of essays, too, can contribute to its defence.