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Category Archives: Book chapter

Saving the world

Posted on July 20, 2023 - 5:49 am by

Just shortly need to save the world / before I take the flight to you / have to check 148 mails / who knows what happens next / because it happens so much / Just shortly have to save the world / right afterwards I’m back with you…

These song lines by Tim Bendzko (2011, originally in German) ironically take up the idea of “saving the world” at a time when the world actually does not seem to be the quiet place it may have been in the past. But is that true? Or are we just imagining it? Is it perhaps an illusion that succumbs every decade or every generation over and over again? My personal answer is clear: Yes, we have a problem. No, we do not just imagine it.

Three steps shall illustrate my point: A look at the global environmental situation, one at the concept of saving the world in public debate, and a brief look at some other problems that concern the world as well.

Probably the most important reason why we currently need to “save the world” is the breathtaking speed with which mankind is currently destroying its natural basis of existence. The most important aspect is global climate destruction. It has changed again and again in the course of history – seven times in the last 650,000 years alone, most recently after the abrupt end of the last ice age about 7,000 years ago. But ice cores from Greenland, Antarctica and tropical mountain glaciers show that the Earth’s climate reacts to changes in greenhouse gas levels, and tree rings, ocean sediments, coral reefs and layers of sedimentary rocks show a similar picture: the current warming is about ten times faster than that after the ice age.

Since the late 19th century, the average temperature on Earth has risen by just under one degree (Celsius), mainly due to increased man-made emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (such as methane) into the atmosphere. Most of the warming has occurred in the last 35 years, including the five warmest years on record since 2010. 2016 was not only the warmest year since records began, but eight of the 12 months in that year – from January to September, with the exception of June – showed the highest temperature averages ever for the corresponding months. A large proportion of the heat was absorbed by the oceans, which have warmed by 0.2 degrees (C) since 1969 alone. Images of starving polar bears symbolize the decline of Arctic and Antarctic ice, the extent of which has been reduced by almost 4 percent in recent decades. And on the glaciers in the mountain regions of warmer continents, such as Switzerland, the decline in ice since the mid-20th century is even more evident.

In the entire temperate latitudes, winters are less cold and spring comes earlier. Other weather conditions have also changed: The American hurricane season is becoming ever more intense, in Central Europe the risk of floods and thunderstorms has roughly tripled since 1980, and the proportion of economic output accounted for by damage sums and insurance premiums has increased accordingly. It is also clear that flora and fauna are changing.

And the increase in co2 does not only lead to warming, nicely for the climate the oceans absorb a large part of it, but they acidify in the process. This threatens many marine organisms, as lime does not accumulate well in acidic water as shells in mussels and snails, for example. Continued high co2 emissions could result by the end of the century in oceanic pH values falling to levels not seen for more than 50 million years. Due to this acidification, pollution and overfishing, life in the oceans is massively threatened. And this does not only apply to water: If humans continue to destroy the biosphere as before, half of the world’s higher life forms will be extinct by 2100. And so on and so forth. The world faces massive problems, and it seems that the ability to solve them is not particularly pronounced.

To change that is only one of the reasons for Civil democracy. Read more in the Civil democracy book (from which this excerpt was taken) or on this website.

The Civil democracy book in overview (pt. 1)

Posted on July 20, 2023 - 5:46 am by

The book starts with an understanding of the way in which we got into the current problems. Having a problem is having something to do: so it is about the possibilities to shape the world and the decisions that are necessary for doing so. And it is about the „we“, hence the structure of human societies in relation to such decisions. Such decisions are never simply private, but they always influence other people. Thus it plays a role who has how much influence there, spoken in relation to the other: how much power. All big current problems of mankind have to do with power. Understanding how we got there hence needs a short history of power. It forms the first part of this book.

And this history of power presents itself in such a way that it is best told in four chapters that unfold in historical sequence. The „Beginnings of Power“ (chapter 3) lay down some foundations: man’s basic predisposition to freedom and responsibility, the technological distinction between concentrations and more equal distributions of power, the sources of power stemming from physical coercion, from scripture and from differentiation, and the „Axial age”  in which institutions were formed everywhere in the Old World to bring the sources of power from physical coercion and from scripture into different equilibria.

Chapter 4 takes a closer look at one of these equilibria, namely the specific form in which power became balanced in Europe. Europe became Europe by developing a very specific structure of society in the early Middle Ages. I call them „groups under roofs“: the structure that evolved in Europe divided people into groups and trained them to fit into these groups on the one hand and to accept higher institutions on the other. The innovation in the third century were the higher-level institutions, but what became specific about the European model in international comparison was that it retained groups in the denser and more densely populated continent that remained largely free of overlap. Mathematicians use the term partitioning here, and this aspect is so important in the current problems that I will continue to use this rather technical term in the following. For more than a thousand years, Christianity played a decisive role in partitioning „groups under roofs“. And by turning them into organisations and creating competition between them, this became a tremendously successful concept that co-founded Europe’s success.

In „The 20th century” (ch. 5) we see how the „groups under roofs” concept emancipated itself from Christianity and, in and after the great modernization crisis of 1914-1945, laid the foundation for the development of those institutions which quite successfully mastered the complexity of the emerging industrial societies. These institutions gave the blueprint for a Eurocentric understanding of modernization that spread sometimes for better, but often for worse, throughout the world. The year 1968 stands symbolically and practically for the fact that finally also in the West itself the society of groups and predetermined positions, with its necessary authoritarian aspects in daily life, was questioned. In between, a half century has passed in which the Western societies became structurally more individualistic, distancing themselves from the partitioning structure of the old Europe and, without noticing it, becoming similar to the rest of the world.

Political institutions, however, are still those that were designed for and fit the partitioning group structure of old Europe. We still vote in elections by assigning ourselves to one and only one partitioning group. And by running or not running for an election, and winning or not winning it, we partition ourselves into either participating or not participating in decision making – while group affiliations and desires to have a say in decisions, have become so diversely distributed for long. If, however, partitioning institutions meet a social structure that is not (or no longer) partitioning, but structurally individualistic, then various „Problems of partitioning representation” arise (ch. 6).  We will see how this combination automatically leads to ignorance of issues, to alienation between citizens and politicians, to unfulfilled expectations of representation, to the impression of a democratic deficit, and to polarization – completely independent of participants’ individual morale, simply because the institutions do not fit the structure of society.

For the second part of the book overview which discusses Civil democracy, its applicability, introductory requirements, and implementation strategy, see the next post.

To read more, buy the Civil democracy book (from which this excerpt was taken) or continue on this website.