Category: society

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Metabolic harm

At the beginning of the 21st century the lack of physical activity for large parts of society has become a major risk of and cause of metabolic harm. We have become used to a sedentary lifestyle and the digital access to distractions and information have encouraged further immobility. Alex Broom et al. (2025) stress the importance to include social and governmental interventions into the many existing medical, pharmacological and technological interventions. The authors advocate a rather holistic approach to really make a difference. The obesity trends cause metabolic harm of an  unprecedented size. We have to rethink mobility patterns and other behavioral changes into our daily routines to bring back more stimulation to our metabolic system.

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Vaim and the sea

Vaim is not a person, it is an imaginary place, somewhere next to the sea, rather small in size, and in conventional terms nothing much is happening there, aging persons go about their daily routines in their more or less splendid isolation, speaking to someone is a rare act of achievement, most of the talk is speaking to yourself not even really thinking aloud, just ruminating on and on for days, sometimes weeks or maybe years in a person’s life 

Okay, my exercise in “slow writing”, a wee bit attempting to copy Jon Fosse, kept me going for 10 lines before the end of my paragraph. Jon Fosse keeps going without the end of a sentence  punctuation for 66 pages in the German translation by Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel. Reading the three phrases of Vaim, each as an extended poem and an “homage” to life from three intertwined perspectives, resembles a cubist painting and, maybe, at least for me, each one like the novella “The old man and the sea” by Ernest Hemingway. It is also a triptych in the religious tradition of paintings, just as much as “Vaim” follows in the footsteps of “Waiting for Godot” by Samuel Beckett. For all those who don’t care about any previous literature just read Jon Fosse as an endless love story of platonic relationships, silence and romance,  next to the sea. Please, don’t pass on your copy of Vaim to school-aged children as they might become very creative about punctuation. The only allowed end of a sentence are occasional question marks, which is a nice philosophical twist in Jon Fosse‘s literal exploration of time and love. 

 

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Dystopian Utopia

Anybody who had warned about the disastrous effects of global warming 10 years before 2025 would have been branded as telling a dystopian tale. However, according to the report by the climate scientist and the “World Weather Attribution Network”, the year 2025 has been among the 3 worst years for humanity with thousands killed and millions displaced due to extreme weather events on our planet. It is all to easy to turn the page and focus on a New Year for those unaffected, but the costs of these man-made disasters have reached dystopian levels already, much faster than projected 10 years ago. 10 years after the Paris Agreement the efforts to cut emissions haven proven to be insufficient. The consequences of this failure hit the poorest people and regions the hardest. Beyond the importance to monitor and to keep track of the events the compensation for people who suffer the “externalities” of unrestrained emissions has to be addressed with international solidarity as a basic human principle.

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Saint-Simon Utopia

Towards the end of the 18th century and during the early 19th century, the early signs of what the industrial revolution would mean for the working people became visible. Saint-Simon had lived through the ups and downs of the French revolution himself and had been to the Americas with La Fayette before he developed his utopian socialist vision of a unified class of working people, which for him included blue as well as white collar workers. At the advent of the 2nd industrial revolution through general and agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) in 2025, we shall most likely witness a renewed interest in utopian scenarios and grand ideas of what the future of technology, society and humanity might be like. In 2026 we shall re-read Saint-Simon quite a bit in order to learn about ways to make sense of arising trends and how to come up with a positive utopia that can motivate people to thrive again for more equality within and between societies. 

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Future of work

The beginning of the 3rd millennium has brought about several fundamental changes of work and employment. What had previously been thought of as utopian in the realm of work, has become a normal feature of work. Just like in the historically grounded, utopian perspective described by Bernard Gazier “Tous sublimes” (2003) we have a growing group of employees and self-employed persons who enjoy privileged positions on the labor market with sufficiently high salaries and access to mobility on the labor market at their own discretion. In addition to these examples described in Gazier’s utopian perspective, the 2020s added permission of remote work from anywhere and use of AI-assisted technology and robotics. A previously utopian view of the future of work has become a reality for many more people nowadays. The utopian element no longer is the how this world of work might look like, but how many people will enjoy the benefits of the technological progress. With a substantial increase of the efficiency and productivity of work, the distribution and sharing of the fruits shall become even more important. We have entered into a new phase of “the brave new world” of work as of 2025. (Image: Graffiti Berlin 2025-12).

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How could this have happened

The latest thorough reflection on how the Nazi-terror could have stopped or being prevented remains an important question in our time. The more we see countries descend into the authoritarian regime types, the more we have to know our lessons from previous historical experiences. Götz Aly made a great contribution to this literature. He points our attention to the collective euphoria the Nazis (NSDAP) managed to make people believe, by at the same time blaming others for the past crises. People just wanted to believe the fake narrative of a promising future (p. 175) for a society based on social exclusion. The pattern, unfortunately, seems to find its replication in other parts of the world nowadays. This is a very slippery road which often leads to disaster rather than relief. Easy or catchy answers are preferred by many people rather than the nuances of well-informed differentiated options. Patience in social development is a collective virtue, but often misunderstood as a form of conservatism, which is is something very different.

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Documentation Inclusiveness

If we don’t measure it, it will not improve. Many public institutions and private organizations make great efforts to improve inclusiveness in day to day operations, but many barriers are still all around us. Both need monitoring in form of data bases and visual documentation. In a Berlin museum inclusiveness appears to be the most natural thing, nothing to worry about or to call out “wokeism”. Just small improvements in basics and everyone feels welcome.

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Rilke’s Advice

One of the poems by Rainer Maria Rilke is entitled “You don’t have to understand life”.
And the first line of the first paragraph just repeats the programmatic sentence of the quite revolutionary romantic movement. Following a century of the enlightenment, which narrowly developed and focused on rationality and Kant’s “Critic of pure reasoning”, the authors of the romantic movement were eager to explore the world beyond reasoning again.
“Du mußt das Leben nicht verstehen,
dann wird es werden wie ein Fest.”
Rilke brings back the exuberant, Dionysian element into literature and captured the new spirit of his time. After a period of fast innovation in the sciences and applications of them in day-to-day life, Rilke revels in the innocent days and years during childhood, where youth is simply asking for more without hindsight. In doing so: “Life will be a like a feast”. So be it, we should like to add. (Rilke wrote a poem « Das Karussell » with subtitle Jardin du Luxembourg, Image below)

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Generation Hope

The whole of Europe has good reasons to take a careful look at the stunning protests organized by the young generation in Bulgaria (Le Monde, 2025-12-13). With spectacular repeated demonstrations in the center of Sophia, the young people attempted to stop a government that is likely to sink further into corruption. It is this generation of young people that have experienced and/or lived in other European countries or in other Western-style democracies around the globe that have enough of corruption in politics and social systems more generally. The well-educated Bulgarian youth has managed to overthrow a government that had been subject to pressure from corrupt forced. It is not easy to get rid of corrupt politicians and powerful business interests as a system based on merits rather than ability to pay remain fragile in the first few years of such a transition. It needs a sizable “Generation Hope” as I would like to call these young enthusiasts of democracies. The message reaches well beyond Bulgaria and gives hope to all those whose political systems deteriorate into authoritarianism across the globe. It took 20 years to build this “Generation Hope” and mobile youth that takes home the messages and learnings from other democracies. Based on statistics from Eurostat we know about the strong in-migration from Turkey and Russia into Bulgaria. Youth is particularly likely to leave authoritarian regimes to seek a better future in democracies, for example as part of the Generation Hope” in Bulgaria. (Image: Cour constitutionel Paris) 

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Jewish book art in Berlin

One of the treasures of books in the collection of the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin is the Hebraica collection. It is currently presented in the museum space of the library. The curators Martini and Eichhorst have succeeded in the task to present the sanctuaries in a form that a larger public can better understand the skills needed to produce these fine pieces of art and worship. Similarly, great care has been taken to explain the formidable task to preserve and sometimes restore these precious pieces. The exhibition explains in an accessible manner what place each piece has in the Jewish tradition and regional varieties. Examples of annotations to assist interpretation of the texts or graphical annotations complement the original documents and sacred texts. These exhibits allow a  for a starting point for a better understanding of the importance of the Hebrew Bible and the scrolls of the Book of Esther in the practice of Jewish rituals. A more permanent exhibition could greatly enhance inter religious understanding and respect of traditions.