A ZEIT Poll of Scientists, Artists and
Intellectuals
[The Apocalypse lives. Sinister prospects on the end of the world dominate our
minds and imaginations. Amid Chernobyl and Bhopal, Aids and DSI, it seems there
is no room for hope any more. Hope, as we know from Ernst Bloch’s “The
Principle of Hope,” is a political category. Hope was the confidence that we
could gain enlightenment about its dialectic and end our homemade infantilism at
last. Hope was the certainty that we could bring about the freedom of all
through the power of critical and political action. Today the horizons have
dimmed. The following responses are translated from the German in DIE ZEIT,
Nr.1, January 2, 1987, http://www.zeit.de.]
(rem.: the print edition published it already in December 1986)
NORBERT ELIAS
Philosopher, b.1897
Hope for what future? I have never shared the great dream and also the
disappointment that this dream has not been fulfilled. I sympathize with those
who have endured this disappointment and hope that their strength for the new
projects of this age will not be taken from them.
Only a blind person can misunderstand that this is a time of the greatest
dangers; only one psychically broken can deny that it is a time full of
promising tasks. However the center of the gravity of hope has shifted. No
longer does the center lie in domestic policy and diverse party ideals in the
national framework. It lies more and more in international politics, in the
human or international setting. The problem of the balance of power between
social classes within one state is increasingly overshadowed in urgency by the
balance of power between states and groups that become states. The question
whether communism or capitalism will disappear in an individual country suddenly
loses meaning before the question whether and how international conflicts can be
settled without murder and manslaughter, that is without the hegemony of a
particular group of states.
The greatest goal to which we should be working in the first place, the goal of
hope, is a world society without war within which the national inequalities of
living standards gradually diminish, not through the impoverishment of the
wealthier but through the growing prosperity of the poorer countries.
Peacelessness and group violence, including wars and revolutions, produce and
prolong poverty.
Goals that delude with false hopes can bring about short-term improvement in
human distresses through the kettledrum of a revolution. Nevertheless the
awakened false hopes leave behind hosts of disappointed people, cynics to whom
every goal seems narrow. Many people today find only short-term goals worthwhile,
only hopes that can be realized in their lifetime. What a pity! The great social
problems can only be solved in the course of generations.
Humanity can be seen in a long-learning process. Most people of the earth learn
much through bitter experience and little through insight. Perhaps the bitter
experiences of a great war are needed before international murder is outlawed as
a punishable offense. How wonderful if people and their prominent politicians
would do what is necessary without this bitter experience, namely work
tenaciously and persistently across the generations for a pacified world society
with diminishing inequalities, flexibly ready for compromise and advancing
undeviating toward the goal!
The question how we can bring about the voluntary subordination of all states,
the smallest and the largest, under the control of supra-state tribunals has a
high place among humanity’s problems. Insight in the limits of the sovereignty
of the individual state, absent today, is imperative. In the present state of
technological development, the idea of the unlimited sovereignty of an
individual state is de facto nothing but a dangerous illusion. Before our eyes,
a perceptible shift of the center of gravity has occurred from domestic to
international, multinational political movements, parties and goals (Movements
commonly called multinational are in truth with few exceptions not multinational
but controlled by members of a single nation.). This shift is not confined to
politics but includes concrete educational goals. The traditional orientation of
education to the national horizon required changing sociality more and more. A
multinational perspective on education and transmission of knowledge with a
human horizon are now imperative.
The disaster of our times is that the educational policy of many governments
does in the opposite direction. Educational policy often inclines to the
narrowing of the horizon of knowledge of coming generations, to the computer,
practical economic discoveries and knowledge that is restrictedly national. This
is all useful. At the same time it is a testimony to the extent to which
governments, plagued with burdensome short-term present tasks, lose sight of the
long-term future of their own people. This future demands that future
generations have a wide horizon and a thoughtful understanding for the problems
of the developing world society.
The global peaceful competition of the nations will intensify if a great war
does not occur. Only those nations have a chance of maintaining their position
in the contest of nations where future generations have the advantages of a
far-sighted and realistic education. Governments that assign a low place among
the priorities of their countries to their youth and their teachers show that
hope and prospect for the future are lost to them. For those who only understand
economic language, capital investments in people are as important as investments
in docile machines for French, German or Dutch Europeans. Seen concretely, they
are vastly more important.
translated by Marc Batko
source: http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/01/1714030.php