Zaslepená společnost

All the essays in this collection revolve around the question of what ethics, what political culture, and what form of government correspond to the Anthropocene—the age of human responsibility for planet Earth. If we simplify our ideas about democracy, it can be defined as a form of government that maximizes the likelihood that people will choose change over catastrophe. In every free society, on the one hand, those who try to accelerate change in order to avert impending catastrophe compete in the public space, and on the other, those who declare the heralds of catastrophe to be dangerous radicals who intimidate “ordinary people” and stubbornly defend the status quo. The climate change controversy is an instructive example of this. When “public intellectuals” draw attention to fateful issues and they begin to resonate in the public space, majority and minority “opinion groups” are formed, which are not just a collection of tastes and preferences. Opinions are what has been exposed to the disputes of the public use of reason, has withstood them and thus gained weight in the public space. In the age that we have called the Anthropocene since about 2000, the fight for the Nomos of the Earth is such a fateful question: 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 endanger the habitability of its home planet? The transformation of the slow public space into the fast mediasphere has brought the threat that “majorities” will emerge from elections, the formation of which 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 contradicts liberal democratic ideals. All regimes – even democratic ones – have their mainstream normalizing vocabularies. But it would be a tragedy without measure and limits for democracy if the Western tradition of the public use of reason (Kant) were reduced out of fear of the anarchy of the media sphere to one of the normalizing vocabularies: critical reason would begin to warn against “distrust of the system”, instead of spreading an argument-based vigilance 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 infectious radically reformist energy for centuries. Perhaps it is not just an old delusion to believe that this collection of essays can also contribute to its defense.