Ulrich Beck, the renowned sociologist who died earlier this year, captured the contemporary zeitgeist, the spirit of our time, like few others. His worldview is best summed up by the title of his book Risk Society. He painted society as an inherently destructive force, and felt that humans were prone to destroy nature and, ultimately, one another.
The fact that Beck, born in 1944, was German is essential to his role in defining the zeitgeist. For his generation, living in the shadow of the Holocaust, the world revealed itself as a failure of the Enlightenment and of progressive thought. For Beck, social experimentation in the name of progress was a source of risk, a threat, a danger. His views had precedents. The slogan of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the 1957 German General Election was ‘Keine Experimente’ (no experiments). Although the CDU’s leader, Konrad Adenauer, used the slogan to discredit the Social Democrats, the sentiments ‘Keine Experimente’ captured – risk aversion and distrust in human reason – were to dominate not just German politics and culture, but also the outlook of the West.
Matthias Heitmann is also German, but he’s from a very different school of thought to Adenauer. He takes on the zeitgeist in his new book Zeitgeisterjagd, or ‘hunting the zeitgeist’. He is not just interested in defining the current zeitgeist; he’s also intent on exploring the consequences of the current zeitgeist. And, for Heitmann, the consequences are dire. Risk aversion has infused public and private life to such an extent that we now think of ourselves as too incompetent to act upon the world. And this ultimately renders us incapable of overcoming the problems and challenges that face us. The result? We have become unfree.
Heitmann develops his thesis by dissecting contemporary attitudes towards identity, tolerance, education, enjoyment, emancipation, environmentalism and victimhood. He shows how these attitudes constitute a zeitgeist in which humans are seen as incapable, irrational and irresponsible.