Zunächst finde ich es bedenklich, wenn Politiker_innen den Glauben an ihr eigenes Tun verlieren, das erinnert mich an Sloterdijks Zynismus, ein Thema das ich sicherlich wieder aufgreifen werde.

Ich erlebe, dass Politikerverdrossenheit heute eine Ausweitung erfährt: nicht mehr nur von Bürgern gegenüber Politikern. Inzwischen sind Politikerinnen und Politiker häufig verdrossen, verdrossen über ihre eigene Tätigkeit und ihre Rolle, die ihnen noch zukommt, verdrossen über ihren schwindenden Einfluss.

Zum anderen war es gut für mich, ein zentrales Problem der modernen Politik auf den Punkt gebracht zu lesen: Es ist gut und in vieler Hinsicht unabdingbar, dass Politik zunehmend International passiert. Und es ist auch so, dass damit leider Demokratie geschwächt wird.

Intergouvermentales Agieren geht zu häufig auf Kosten von Transparenz und Nachvollziehbarkeit. Es kostet Vertrauen. Deshalb müssen Entscheidungen angemessen kommuniziert und erklärt werden.

Im Gegensatz zu Wulff sehe ich das Problem mit Transparenz und Kommunikation keinesfalls als gelöst an. Es müssen vielmehr in dem Maße, wie Entscheidungen eine höhere Entscheidungsebene als den Nationalstaat benötigen, diese höheren Ebenen stärker demokratisch legitimiert werden. Und für die EU haben wir da ja schon eine parlamentarische Struktur, die nur gestärkt werden muss. Noch internationaler ist natürlich kniffelig, aber in die Richtung sollten die Bemühungen gehen. Nationale Volksabstimmungen zu internationalen Themen können jedenfalls auf Dauer nicht die Lösung sein.

Zum Abschluss ein unerwartetes Lob für die Grünen, das ich teile und das ein zentraler Teil meiner Verbundenheit zu dieser Partei ist:

Ich empfinde es als positiv, dass die Grünen einen Parteitag zur Frage der Energiewende abgehalten und dort um ihre Position gerungen und darüber abgestimmt haben. Es hätte auch denen gut angestanden, zu einer solchen fundamentalen Richtungsveränderung der deutschen Politik einen Parteitag einzuberufen, die diese Veränderung jetzt vollziehen und noch vor Monaten eine andere Entscheidung – auf einem Parteitag – getroffen haben.

I bought it in Palo Alto before my real traveling started, and it has lasted me well into the second quarter of this year, of course as frequent visitors of my blog know with another big and some small readings in between.

Once again, my generally high esteem of artists‘ late work was reinforced — while the original book is funny, the later books are far better. I laughed my hardest reading the second last one, „So Long and Thanks for All the Fish“, and the last one, „Mostly Harmless“, apart from still being very funny, I found most insightful. That despite how I just read on Wikipedia the author himself describing this book as „bleak“, and saying he had a very bad year when he wrote it. I suppose that tells us something about the relationship between art and happiness…

Anyway, here are just some examples of important topics of life made understandable with the help of absurdity, Science-Fiction at its best.

Let’s start with Astrology, explained by a modern (you could say cynical) Astrologer, and en passant Parliamentary Democracy, Psychology and maybe life itself…

„I know that astrology isn’t a science,“ said Gail. „Of course it isn’t. It’s just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or, what’s that strange thing you British play?“

„Er, cricket? Self-loathing?“

„Parliamentary democracy. The rules just kind of got there. They don’t make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people. In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It’s just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It’s like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that’s now been taken away and hidden. The graphite’s not important. It’s just the means of revealing their indentations. So you see, astrology’s nothing to do with astronomy. It’s just to do with people thinking about people.“

In a similar vain, and maybe taking that thought one step further, we get a cosmology for Constructivism (or at least you can look at it like that)…

The first thing to realize about parallel universes, the Guide says, is that they are not parallel.

It is also important to realize that they are not, strictly speaking, universes either, but it is easiest if you try and realize that a little later, after you’ve realized that everything you’ve realized up to that moment is not true.

The reason they are not universes is that any given universe is not actually a thing as such, but is just a way of looking at what is technically known as the WSOGMM, or Whole Sort of General Mish Mash. The Whole Sort of General Mish Mash doesn’t actually exist either, but is just the sum total of all the different ways there would be of looking at it if it did.

The reason they are not parallel is the same reason that the sea is not parallel. It doesn’t mean anything. You can slice the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash any way you like and you will generally come up with something that someone will call home.

Please feel free to blither now.

Next up, a painfully accurate description of the history (and in many ways present working) of scientific Psychology:

Now logic is a wonderful thing but it has, as the processes of evolution discovered, certain drawbacks.

Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else which thinks at least as logically as it does. The easiest way to fool a completely logical robot is to feed it the same stimulus sequence over and over again so it gets locked in a loop. This was best demonstrated by the famous Herring Sandwich experiments conducted millennia ago at MISPWOSO (The MaxiMegalon Institute of Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious).

A robot was programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches. This was actually the most difficult part of the whole experiment. Once the robot had been programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches, a herring sandwich was placed in front of it. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, „Ah! A herring sandwich! I like herring sandwiches.“

It would then bend over and scoop up the herring sandwich in its herring sandwich scoop, and then straighten up again. Unfortunately for the robot, it was fashioned in such a way that the action of straightening up caused the herring sandwich to slip straight back off its herring sandwich scoop and fall on to the floor in front of the robot. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, „Ah! A herring sandwich…, etc., and repeated the same action over and over and over again. The only thing that prevented the herring sandwich from getting bored with the whole damn business and crawling off in search of other ways of passing the time was that the herring sandwich, being just a bit of dead fish between a couple of slices of bread, was marginally less alert to what was going on than was the robot.

The scientists at the Institute thus discovered the driving force behind all change, development and innovation in life, which was this: herring sandwiches. They published a paper to this effect, which was widely criticized as being extremely stupid. They checked their figures and realized that what they had actually discovered was „boredom“, or rather, the practical function of boredom. In a fever of excitement they then went on to discover other emotions, Like „irritability“, „depression“, „reluctance“, „ickiness“ and so on. The next big breakthrough came when they stopped using herring sandwiches, whereupon a whole welter of new emotions became suddenly available to them for study, such as „relief“, „joy“, „friskiness“, „appetite“, „satisfaction“, and most important of all, the desire for „happiness“. This was the biggest breakthrough of all.

Vast wodges of complex computer code governing robot behaviour in all possible contingencies could be replaced very simply. All that robots needed was the capacity to be either bored or happy, and a few conditions that needed to be satisfied in order to bring those states about. They would then work the rest out for themselves.

Also one of my favorites, and very suitable to the recent debate about (former) Pope John Paul II’s Beatification:

He had discovered that the reason for the carnival atmosphere on Saquo-Pilia Hensha was that the local people were celebrating the annual feast of the Assumption of St Antwelm. St Antwelm had been, during his lifetime, a great and popular king who had made a great and popular assumption. What King Antwelm had assumed was that what everybody wanted, all other things being equal, was to be happy and enjoy themselves and have the best possible time together. On his death he had willed his entire personal fortune to financing an annual festival to remind everyone of this, with lots of good food and dancing and very silly games like Hunt the Wocket. His Assumption had been such a brilliantly good one that he was made into a saint for it. Not only that, but all the people who had previously been made saints for doing things like being stoned to death in a thoroughly miserable way or living upside down in barrels of dung were instantly demoted and were now thought to be rather embarrassing.

So much for the more or less deep thoughts. Here’s something that became relevant to me in trying to get the concept of definite (e.g. „the“) and indefinite (e.g. „a“) articles across to people who’s native language doesn’t feature articles at all:

Ford shouted in Arthur’s ear, „Where did he say we were going?“

„He said something about a King,“ shouted Arthur in return, holding on desperately.

„What King?“

„That’s what I said. He just said the King.“

„I didn’t know there was a the King,“ shouted Ford.

„Nor did I,“ shouted Arthur back.

I’ll finish with two little quotes that are well worth becoming aphorisms (and which I have, accordingly, added to my growing Quotes Collection). The first can be seen as relevant to psychological practice, but certainly at least as much to a traveller in different cultures like myself:

It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else’s point of view without the proper training. — Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Mostly Harmless, p. 742, 1992

And the second, which has the beauty and limitation of perspectivist thought in a nutshell:

“I think we have different value systems” – “Well, mine’s better” – “That’s according to your… oh, never mind.” — Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Mostly Harmless, p. 772, 1992

Maximum City had been recommended to me by several people who’s judgment I trust, and still my expectations have been surpassed. I can’t remember when a book last spoke to me so strongly on so many different levels of observations, experiences and feelings. I can basically use some quotations from it as a sort of diary of many of my own experiences. A non-fiction book of almost 600 pages, a report of an Indian expat to the US moving back „home“ to Bombay with his family, but to me that is only the starting point, for especially continuing to read it now that I have taken in my first week of Nairobi I can assert that it’s topics reach much farther. The book starts with some very good glimpses of what a newcomer sees in India:

India is the Country of the No. That „no“ is your test. You have to get past it. It is India’s Great Wall; it keeps out foreign invaders. Pursuing it energetically and vanquishing it is your challenge. In the guru-shishya tradition, the novice is always rebuffed multiple times when he first approaches the guru. Then the guru stops saying no but doesn’t say yes either; he suffers the presence of the student. When he starts acknowledging him, he assigns a series of menial tasks, meant to drive him away. Only if the disciple sticks it out through all these stages of rejection and ill treatment is he considered worthy of the sublime knowledge. India is not a tourist-friendly country. It will reveal itself to you only if you stay on, against all odds. The „no“ might never become a „yes“. But you will stop asking questions. (p. 19)

I like the connection between the very practical experience described here, and an old and (to me) surprisingly alive tradition of thought, seeing complete subordination as an important value in spirituality, and also in life itself. I have heard several people who teach comment on how difficult it is to work with Westerners, who never stop critically questioning what you want them to do. And I must say that despite a substantial fascination for the Indian concept, I don’t think I could (would want to, could want to) suspend my own judgement like that.

Along with that goes the hierarchical structure of society, apparently much stronger in the North, but to a Westerner already shocking enough in the South:

Every day the flat gets cleaned and scrubbed. We learn the caste system of the servants: the live-in maid won’t clean the floors; that is for the „free servant“ to do. Neither of them will do the bathrooms, which are the exclusive domain of a bhangi, who does nothing else. The driver won’t wash the car; that is the monopoly of the building watchman. The flat ends up swarming with servants. (p. 23)

Another experience I shared to a certain extent, even though luckily the rage didn’t quite get murderous with me:

We also have to learn how to stand in line. In Bombay, people are always waiting in line: to vote, to get a flat, to get a job, to get out of the country, to make a railway reservation, make a phone call, go to the toilet. And when you get to the front of the line, you are always made conscious that you are inconveniencing all the hundreds and thousands and millions of people behind you. All this takes most of our waiting time. All these irritations add up to a murderous rage in your mind, especially when you’ve come from a country where things work better, where institutions are more responsive. (p. 25)

And indeed I was very shocked by many Westerners, I feel women even more so then men, eventually developing a very harsh way of dealing with Indians, like Suketo recommends:

Every morning I get angry. It is the only way to get anything done; people here respond to anger, are afraid of it. In the absence of money or connections, anger will do. (p. 32f)

Even though I found that actually I got very far with being nice but persistent. I actually have beautiful stories of that niceness paying off in the long run, like my regular fruit and vegetable store lady putting back the fruits I had chosen and bringing me different ones, that at home turned out to be just perfect.

And then, of course, there is the way of putting an extra human layer between you and that hostile or at least cumbersome environment. The main reason for my night in the unreserved seating train (which I hope to write about soon) was that the queue for the reserved tickets was filling half the trainstation hall, and the professional „waiters“ there looked like they were prepared to spend the day. With my friends in Bombay, I got confirmed that calling the travel agency of your trust and paying a little extra is enough to have the travel agent do the waiting for you:

You can find a maid and pay her a monthly salary smaller than the cost of breakfast at the Taj. „Send your man“ I am told again and again, when I need service for my mobile phone or money picked up from the bank. „I have no man“, I respond. „I’m my own man.“ They do not understand. In business, in politics, in government, those who can afford it never go in person. They send their man. (p. 82)

Suketu also does a good job of explaining that curious attachment to small amounts of money you develop as a foreigner in poorer countries:

We haggle over minuscule amounts that have no value for us: ten rupees is only forty cents. If we lost forty cents in New York we would never notice it; here it becomes a matter of principle. This is because along with getting ripped off for ten rupees comes an assumption: You are not from here, you are not Indian, so you deserve to be ripped off, to pay more than a native. (p. 32)

To finish off the Indian observations (even though there is much much more to tell both from the book and myself), an interesting twist in perspective on the gender differences in Indian society. And the author’s explanation for the attraction of organized crime for these young man, in the absence of legitimate jobs despite good qualification. Indeed an explosive combination:

It is an exact and precise hell, the life of an unemployed young man in India. For eighteen years you have been brought up as a son; you have been given the best of what your family can afford. In the household, you eat first, then your father, then your mother, then your sister. If there is only so much money in the household, your father will do with half his cigarettes, your mother won’t buy her new sari, your sister will stay at home, but you will be sent to school. So when you reach the age of eighteen, you have your worshipful family’s expectations behind you. You dare not turn around. You know what is expected of you; you have been witness to all the petty humiliations they have suffered to get you to this place. You now need to deliver. Your sister is getting married, your mother is sick, and your father will retire next year. (p. 77f)

Now on to something that I didn’t see in India, but saw in Nairobi — slum life:

We tend to think of a slum as an excrescence, a community of people living in perpetual misery. What we forget is that out of inhospitable surroundings, they form a community, and they are as attached to its spatial geography, the social networks they have built for themselves, the village they have recreated in the midst of the city, as a Parisian might be to his quartier. (p. 59)

And I was especially touched by this emotionally honest encounter with the parallel life of beggars and street people. I have to admit that I most of the time shield myself from letting these encounters reach my feelings like that, and usually don’t give, for fear of a dam breaking I think. The „obscenity of the two currencies“ is something that it is very hard to consciously live with, and life in Kenya confronts me with it even more strongly than India.

I am walking on the road leading to the Strand bookstore when I see a little family: a mother with wild and ragged hair, walking with a baby boy, maybe a year old, fast asleep on her shoulder and leading by the hand another boy, maybe four or five, who is rubbing his eyes with the fist of his free hand. He is walking the way children walk when they have been walking a long time, his legs jerking outward, his head nodding in a circle, to beat the monotony, the tiredness. They are all barefoot. The mother says something gentle to the older boy, still clutching her hand. I walk past them, but then I have to stop. I stand and watch. They come up to a stall on the sidewalk and, as I expect her to, the mother holds out her hand. The stall owner doesn’t acknowledge them. Automatically, I find myself opening my wallet. I look for a ten-rupee note, then take out a fifty instead and walk up very fast to them, my mind raging, thrust the fifty in her hand — „Yes, take this“ — and walk on very fast without looking back, until I get to the air-conditioned bookstore, and then I stand in a corner and shut my eyes.

All day long I feel ashamed of spending money. Everything I spend that day becomes multiples of that fifty-rupee note. Within twenty minutes of my giving money to the mother I have spent six times as much on books. The pizza I order in the evening is two of those fifties. The rent I will be paying per month on my flat will be two thousand times fifty. And so on. What had my giving them fifty rupees changed? For me, it meant nothing: pocket change, less than a New York subway token. But it would probably be a whole day’s earnings for the mother (I can’t think of her as „the beggar“).

And that’s the obscenity here: Our lives have two entirely different systems of currency. (p. 39f)

And in the part of the book I am reading just now, I found many things that I could relate to my observations of and conversations about Nairobi’s lively nightlife, which was quite disturbing and thought-provoking. The first quote comes very close to an account of the nightlife’s benefits from a local friend, even though the African variant doesn’t stop at looking at the girls (Sapphire is a dance bar):

Over time, I started liking Sapphire. I liked the happiness there. Here were people who came after a hard day in a brutal city, and there was music they liked, and booze, and lights, and pretty girls dancing. The girls were enjoying themselves too, making money, being fawned over. (p. 339)

My objections to that practice are also voiced, and partly answered:

„When you spend money on a girl and she comes to you, she’s coming to your money. She’s not coming to you for your conversation or your looks or your good heart,“ I point out to Minesh.

„But it’s the power of my money. I can feel proud of how much money I have!“ One of his fellow customers in the industry once gave him an accounting of his relationship with his steady girl at Sapphire: I’ve spent so much on Ranjita, and I’ve slept with her so many times. So I’ve paid three thousand rupees a night. And I love her. (p. 329f)

Apart from that cynical explanation (save that curious „I love her“), I’m coming to think that attraction is always a mixture of „money, conversation, looks, heart“, or something like that, but in different circumstances different weights seem reasonable. That there are things happening beyond money even in this nightlife is illustrated by the description of „the contest“, and how it can collapse:

It is a contest; the girls try to make chutiyas of the customers [„milk them dry“] and the customers try to get the girls to sleep with them after blowing the least possible amount of money or, best of all, to fall in love with them. (p. 329)

I came across many such stories, of bar girls supporting some deadbeat for years, because they had given their hearts to him. In the end, the biggest suckers — ulloos, dhoors chutiyas — were the bar girls, and the people who made ulloos of them — lovers, parents, siblings — used the same confidence trick the dancers did: love. (p. 314)

I’m aware this post is cluttered with quotes, and still there have been many passages I also marked that I had to leave out. There is a lengthy description of organized crime and the almost equally criminal response by the police (the legal system is described as completely defunct, so the police resort to „encountering“ the suspects and shooting them) that I couldn’t put down. Suketu somehow got access to all the sides in this game — different gangs (there’s a Hindu-Muslim divide, but not only), and open conversations with the „encounter specialists“ and much more about the peculiarities of Indian culture. My only wish for improvement would be some footnotes for the many Hindi terms — the book is a little like the India described in that respect, exclusive of foreigners. Still, as should be clear by now, a strong endorsement from me!

ABSURDITY, n. A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one’s own opinion. — Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906, http://j.mp/gmLTUn

APHORISM, n. Predigested wisdom. — Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906, http://j.mp/gmLTUn

PRAY, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy. — Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906, http://j.mp/gmLTUn

PRESENT, n. That part of eternity dividing the domain of disappointment from the realm of hope. — Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906, http://j.mp/gmLTUn

PRICE, n. Value, plus a reasonable sum for the wear and tear of conscience in demanding it. — Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906, http://j.mp/gmLTUn

SELF-EVIDENT, adj. Evident to one’s self and to nobody else. — Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906, http://j.mp/gmLTUn

TRUTH, n. An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance. — Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906, http://j.mp/gmLTUn

CONSERVATIVE, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others. — Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906, http://j.mp/gmLTUn

CARTESIAN, adj. Relating to Descartes, a famous philosopher, author of the celebrated dictum, Cogito ergo sum – whereby he was pleased to suppose he demonstrated the reality of human existence. The dictum might be improved, however, thus: Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum – “I think that I think, therefore I think that I am;” as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made. — Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906, http://j.mp/gmLTUn

Eight in 10 fathers now take a third of the total 13 months of leave — and 9 percent of fathers take 40 percent of the total or more — up from 4 percent a decade ago.

Vor dem Hintergrund macht auch eine durchaus gewagte und diskussionswürdige Aussage der Vorsitzenden der Sozialdemokratischen Partei dort Sinn, die als vielleicht bald erste weibliche Regierungschefin dort die Monate, die nur von Vätern abgerufen werden können, auf vier verdoppeln will:

Sometimes politicians have to be ahead of public opinion.

Und dann kann man noch einen Kommentar über ein groß aufgezogenes Casting von Mädchen in Verbindung mit Wetten über die meisten sexuellen Kontakte lesen, das von Jungs an einer Privatschule in einem Vorort von Washington betrieben wurde. Und das meine amerikanische Freundin nicht überrascht und nur wenig empört hat …

Interessant auch, dass es ein empörter Vater eines der Mädchen ist, der in dem Artikel zu Wort kommt. Muss man das als weitere Reproduktion von sozialer Verfügungsgewalt von Männern über Frauen einordnen?

Laut Googles Angaben sind es aber anscheinend 0,0003 kWh, also Strom nur für eine Brenndauer der Lampe von nur 18 Sekunden. Immer noch nicht nichts, aber es macht doch deutlich dass die sonstigen Stromsparbemühungen im Haushalt nicht entwertet werden durch die Benutzung eines Computers. Und in die Richtung geht das Gefühl oft, das durch derartige Legenden erzeugt wird. Weshalb ich an dieser Stelle auch auf meinen Eintrag zur „Macht des Zweifels“ und das Thema Zynismus verweise.

Traditionell ist man geneigt, das Zweifeln als eine Tugend anzusehen, es ist in der Vorstellung fest mit der Aufklärung verbunden. Und nun tritt — meiner Meinung nach — der Zweifel immer öfter als reaktionäres Element in Erscheinung, was mich zunächst verstört hat. Ich denke, das liegt an den Folgen, die wir für unser Handeln ziehen, wenn eine Sache in Zweifel gezogen wird. Das aufklärerische Ideal ist ein wissenschaftliches Hinschauen, kritische Reflexion auf der Basis von empirischen Erfahrungen, und eine fundierte neue Entscheidung.

Was in der übermäßig komplexen modernen Welt dagegen oft passiert ist ein resigniertes Wegschauen, „ich kann es ja eh nicht wissen“, und — das ist der Knackpunkt — ein Handeln im Sinne des geringsten Widerstands. Am Beispiel Klimawandel sieht das so aus:

Die Experten sind sich nicht einig, bzw. sah es eine Weile so aus, als wären sie. Aber dann wird ihr kollektives Werk in Frage gestellt, da sind Unsauberkeiten, Mauscheleien, Interessenkonflikte, vielleicht sogar eine Verschwörung. Wie also soll ich als kleiner Mensch mit begrenzter Zeit und Klugheit wissen, was dran ist an der Klimawandel-Sache? Solange ich es aber nicht weiß, strenge ich mich lieber nicht unnötig an und schränke mich ein, um einem Klimawandel abzuhelfen, der vielleicht gar nicht kommt.

Und damit wird der Zweifel zum Agent der Nicht-Veränderung. Des Althergebrachten, des Einfachen, des Egoistischen.

Dass dieser Zweifel sich nicht immer ganz von alleine einstellt, ist auch klar. Aber welches schockierende Ausmaß das Geschäft mit dem Zweifel mittlerweile angenommen hat, ist mir erst auf einer kleinen Internetrecherche klar geworden. Sehr empfehlenswert ist in diesem Zusammenhang der Artikel „Doubt is Their Product“, der 2005 im Scientific American erschienen ist. Dort liest man zum Beispiel nebenbei von „Product Defense“ Firmen, die gezielt wissenschaftliche Evidenz verzerren, um gesetzliche Regulierungen bestimmter Produkte zu vermeiden oder zu verzögern — einige „Erfolgsgeschichten“ im Artikel. Und dort bin ich auch wieder auf ein Zitat aus der Tabak-Lobby von 1969:

Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public.

Alles in Allem bin ich geneigt, die Verschwörung im Falle des Klimawandels wenn überhaupt auf der anderen Seite zu vermuten. Aber es fällt mir schwer, bezüglich des Umgangs mit Zweifeln und Unsicherheiten allgemein eine Empfehlung auszusprechen. Vielleicht fällt ja jemandem dazu was ein?

Die These des Artikels ist eine direkte Konfrontation des „Freiburger Lebenswandels“, auch des meinigen. Die Idee der glücklichen Oase. Kurze Duschen mögen hierzulande weniger revolutionär klingen als in den USA, aber die Idee die Welt besser zu machen (und möglicherweise zu retten), indem man Wasser spart, Müll vermeidet, fair oder regional und biologisch einkauft, möglichst nicht fliegt, … blüht gerade auch in unserer WG.

Der Autor sagt natürlich nicht, dass das schlechte Sachen wären. Er sagt nur, dass sie nicht die richtigen Mittel sind, um die Welt aus dem Schlamassel, das ihr (ökologisch) bevorsteht, zu retten. Seine Einleitung macht deutlich, aus welcher Perspektive er das Problem betrachtet:

WOULD ANY SANE PERSON think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”?

Zu Recht stellt er weiter fest, dass der Großteil der Appelle, die mit den Warnungen vor der nahenden ökologischen Katastrophe verbunden werden, an das private Verhalten, insbesondere das Konsumverhalten adressiert sind. Und ebenso zu Recht führt er aus, dass für alle relevanten Bereiche (Wasser, Energie, Abfall) der Großteil der Umweltverschmutzung nicht durch private Haushalte sondern durch Industrie und industrielle Landwirtschaft verursacht werden.

Seine Folgerung scheint naheliegend:

If we choose the “alternative” option of living more simply, thus causing less harm, but still not stopping the industrial economy from killing the planet, we may in the short term think we win because we get to feel pure, and we didn’t even have to give up all of our empathy (just enough to justify not stopping the horrors), but once again we really lose because industrial civilization is still killing the planet, which means everyone still loses.

Eine weitere Anmerkung zu dieser Konsum-Philosophie finde ich sehr spannend und nachvollziehbar:

The third problem is that it accepts capitalism’s redefinition of us from citizens to consumers. By accepting this redefinition, we reduce our potential forms of resistance to consuming and not consuming. Citizens have a much wider range of available resistance tactics, including voting, not voting, running for office, pamphleting, boycotting, organizing, lobbying, protesting, and, when a government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we have the right to alter or abolish it.

Das bringt uns auch schon zu dem enttäuschenden Teil des Artikels — wenn es also nicht das kleine, private Verhalten und Konsumverhalten ist, das die Welt retten kann, was dann? Der vorangehende Absatz klingt nach guten alten politischen Methoden, mit nur einem sanften Anklang von richtig wildem politischem Umsturz. Der Ton wird im Schlussabsatz aber schärfer:

The good news is that there are other options. We can follow the examples of brave activists who lived through the difficult times I mentioned—Nazi Germany, Tsarist Russia, antebellum United States—who did far more than manifest a form of moral purity; they actively opposed the injustices that surrounded them. We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.

Und so bleibe ich ein wenig ratlos zurück. Auf der einen Seite ist es unbestreitbar, dass unseren Protest und Änderungswillen im Konsum auszudrücken bedeutet, die im Rahmen der Regeln des „Systems“ zu bleiben. Auf der anderen Seite folge ich der Kritik nicht, dass der industrielle Teil der Umweltverschmutzung mit dem privaten Haushalt nichts zu tun hat — wenn ich weniger konsumiere fällt auch dort weniger Abfall an, wird weniger Energie und Wasser verbraucht, am Ende gibt es sogar weniger Geschäftsreisen im Flugzeug. Und mit den Alternativen bin ich ziemlich skeptisch. Die politischen Systeme die wir haben ausnutzen ist schön und gut, aber abgesehen vom Wählen muss man sich da auch fragen, ob man sich nicht zum Teil eines Systems macht, das einem nicht gut tut. Ganz zu schweigen vom gewaltsamen Widerstand, der da anklingt.

Ich glaube, in der Position des Autors kommen zwei Probleme zusammen: Kurzsichtiges Denken (die industrielle Zerstörung existiert unabhängig von unserem privaten Konsum?) und dieses:

Any option is a better option than a dead planet.

Das würde Sloterdijk „Zynismus der Mittel“ nennen. Ich hoffe, dazu bald mehr schreiben zu können. Es führt jedenfalls dazu, das moralische Urteil über die Mittel, die ich verwende, durch das angestrebte hehre Ziel ausgehebelt wird. Und Sloterdijk zeigt sehr schön, dass genau dieses Denken im Kern der Katastrophen des 20. Jahrhunderts liegt.

Golemans Botschaft ist eine andere: Ein industriell hergestelltes Produkt ist nicht einfach grün oder nicht, sondern mehr oder weniger „grünlich“. Auch wenn die Ökobilanz gemessen an den Alternativen günstig ausfällt, sollte es immer noch mit Bedacht benutzt werden.

The solution to the issue of fundamentals lies in exposing a widely held and rather old-fashioned fallacy that the human sciences inherited form the nineteenth century, a view about the relation between biology and culture. In that version, culture was conceived as an „overlay“ on biologically determined human nature. The causes of human behavior were assumed to lie in that biological substrate. What I want to argue instead is that culture and the quest for meaning within culture are the proper causes of human action. The biological substrate, the so-called universals of human nature, is not a cause of action but, at most, a constraint upon it or a condition for it. The engine in the car does not „cause“ us to drive to the supermarket for the week’s shopping, any more than our biological reproductive system „causes“ us with very high odds to marry somebody from our own social class, ethnic group, and so on. Granted that without engine-powered cars we would not drive to supermarkets, nor perhaps would there be marriage in the absence of a reproductive system.

But „constraint“ puts the matter too negatively. For biologically imposed limits on human functioning are also challenges to cultural invention. The tool kit of any culture can be described as a set of prosthetic devices by which human beings can exceed or even redefine the „natural limits“ of human functioning. Human tools are precisely of this order – soft ones and hard ones alike. There is, for example, a constraining biological limit on immediate memory – George Miller’s famous „seven plus or minus two“. But we have constructed symbolic devices for exceeding that limit: coding systems like octal digits, mnemonic devices, language tricks. Recall that Miller’s main point in that landmark paper was that by conversion of input through such coding systems we, as enculturated human beings, are enabled to cope with seven chunks of information rather than with seven bits. Our knowledge, then, becomes enculturated knowledge, indefinable save in a culturally based system of notation. In the process, we have broken through the original bounds set by the so-called biology of memory. Biology constrains, but not forevermore. (S. 20f, Hervorhebungen im Original)

[…] What I want to argue in this book is that it is culture and the search for meaning that is the shaping hand, biology that is the constraint, and that, as we have seen, culture even has it in its power to loosen that constraint. (S. 23)

Und Bruner zeigt auch wie ich finde sehr schön auf, welche praktischen Implikationen diese Perspektive hat:

But lest this seem like a preface to a new optimism about humankind and its future, let me make one point clear before turning, as promised, to the issue of relativism. For all its generative inventiveness, human culture is not necessarily benign nor is it notably malleable in response to troubles. It is still customary, as in the fashion of ancient traditions, to lay the blame for the failings of human culture on „human nature“ – whether as instincts, as original sin, or whatever. Even Freud, with his shrewd eye for human folly, often fell into this trap, notably in his doctrine of instinct. But this is surely a convenient and self-assuaging form of apologetics. Can we really invoke our biological heritage to account, say, for the invasive bureaucratization of life in our times, with its resultant erosion of selfhood and compassion? To invoke biological devils or the „Old Ned“ is to dodge responsibility for what we ourselves have created. For all our power to construct symbolic cultures and to set in place the institutional forces needed for their execution, we do not seem very adept at steering our creations toward the ends we profess to desire. We do better to question our ingenuity in constructing and reconstructing communal ways of life than to invoke the failure of the human genome. Which is not to say that communal ways of life are easily changed, even in the absence of biological constraints, but only to focus attention where it belongs, not upon our biological limitations, but upon our cultural inventiveness. (S. 23f)

Diese Ausführungen verweisen neben der oben besprochenen Lesart noch auf zwei interessante Anknüpfungspunkte. Erstens liegt in der Behauptung von kulturellen Möglichkeiten, unsere Gesellschaft zu gestalten, die Frage nach unseren wahren Absichten – wenn wir nicht sehr erfolgreich sind, unsere Schöpfung dorthin zu steuern, wo wir vorgeben hin zu wollen, steuern wir vielleicht in Wahrheit ganz anders?

Zweitens verweist Bruner auf Ausführungen zum Relativismus und Konstruktivismus, und lustigerweise ist das auch das Thema, mit dem ich mich in nächster Zeit intensiver beschäftigen möchte…

Literatur:
Bruner, J. S. (1990). Acts of meaning. Harvard University Press. (deutsch: Bruner, J. S. (1997). Sinn, Kultur und Ich-Identität. Kulturpsychologie des Sinns. Heidelberg: Auer.)