German Joys

A Buddhist Looks at Angry Greens

I was recently reading Charles Taylor's 1996 lecture "A Catholic Modernity?" when I came across an amusing passage which I'll shortly excerpt. Taylor is a Canadian philosopher whose work focuses on the emergence of the modern identity and the changing place of religion in society. His 1989 book Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, is a massive edifice of learning that traces the emergence of the modern idea of the self -- how humans came to conceive of themselves independently of their role in society, with an interior space for reflection and a capacity to overcome our instinctual drives. I haven't read his latest tome (he writes big books), "A Secular Age," but it's sitting there on my bookshelf.

Taylor is also a practicing Roman Catholic. His religious commitment generally doesn't come out in his philosophical works (except in that he generally parts company with the anti-humanists). When he was invited to give the "Marianist Lecture" at Dayton University in 1996, though, he spoke from a more personal perspective. The lecture was reprinted in a short book with comments from several other thinkers, some Catholic, some not.

Taylor argues that, ironically, secular critiques of religious institutions were essential to the advancement of religious ideas beyond the confines of the church. Even in highly secular Western societies, for instance, people are expected to care about and donate money to people they doesn't even know, in far-away countries -- and regularly do so. In essence, the Enlightenment critique "broke the shell" of Christianity, permitting values originally identified with Christianity to seep out and inform the elements of the humanitarian, "civilized" secular world-view, such an aspiration toward universal respect for human rights, concern for the fate of people in less-developed nations, etc. (This seems to be to be similar to what Juergen Habermas has been saying recently). At the same time, the breakdown of the Catholic Church's ethical monopoly and the emergence of an independent secular world-view capable of developing ethical positions independent of religious dictates provided competition for Christianity, forcing it gradually to curb some of its abuses and abandon its theocratic pretensions. 

Of course, I'm not doing the essay justice. But this passage, in particular, struck me:

A Buddhist friend of mine from Thailand briefly visited the German Greens. He confessed to utter bewilderment. He thought he understood the goals of the party: peace between human beings and a stance of respect and friendship by humans toward nature. What astonished him was all the anger, the tone of denunciation and hatred toward the established parties. These people didn't seem to see that the first step toward their goal would have to involve stilling the anger and aggression in themselves. He couldn't understand what they were up to.

I've added this quotation to a storehouse of encounters between non-Germans (often English or American intellectuals) and their German counterparts, in which the  foreigner remarks on the what seems to be the superfluous bitterness of intellectual discourse in Germany. English speakers respect Heine's poetic achievements but are left bewildered by his cruel attacks on less-talented colleagues. Auden famously couldn't stand Brecht ("a most unpleasant man"). Fritz Stern, after surveying academic discourse in 19th-century Germany, expressed his relief at being able to return to the comparatively bland but much less overheated atmosphere of American academic discourse. Although most of the targets of Karl Kraus' polemical gifts were certainly deserving, the constant tone of sputtering hatred eventually tends to wear most non-German readers out. The examples could go on...

I also often feel a bit puzzled by the sheer bitterness of many ideological debates in the German-language public sphere. Three characteristics stand out in particular:

1. Overkill -- the use of more point-scoring sarcasm and vicious rhetoric than necessary to make the author's argument.
2. The utter lack of concern to find common ground with the opposing side. This may be due to the fact, noted by that long-time observer of European intellectuals, Tony Judt, that Continental thinkers frequently pontificate on subjectes they don't understand, such as monetary policy or genetic research. It's easier to have a measured, enlightening argument when both sides understand the basic tenets of the field they're addressing.
3. A certain creeping anti-pluralism: "Not only am I right, but the people who disagree with me are fools, and the world would be a better place if everyone agreed with me."

Note that I'm not saying that every public debate in Germany is conducted this way -- people who have genuine power (trade union bosses, politicians, public figures, and the like) are usually quite reasonable, and reach compromises all the time. No, this tendency seems most pronounced among intellectuals. Of course, intellectuals are famously acerbic in every culture, but it seems to me that they're just a little bit more so in Germany (and perhaps in continental Europe as a whole). Am I on to something here?

The Passive House People

Germany's "passive houses" are attracting interest across the Atlantic, as Kevin Drum notes:

The concept of the passive house, pioneered in this city of 140,000 outside Frankfurt, approaches the challenge from a different angle. Using ultrathick insulation and complex doors and windows, the architect engineers a home encased in an airtight shell, so that barely any heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a passive house can be warmed not only by the sun, but also by the heat from appliances and even from occupants’ bodies.

....Decades ago, attempts at creating sealed solar-heated homes failed, because of stagnant air and mold. But new passive houses use an ingenious central ventilation system. The warm air going out passes side by side with clean, cold air coming in, exchanging heat with 90 percent efficiency.

....In Germany the added construction costs of passive houses are modest and, because of their growing popularity and an ever larger array of attractive off-the-shelf components, are shrinking.

But be warned: no McMansion for you!

Most passive houses allow about 500 square feet per person, a comfortable though not expansive living space. Mr. Hasper said people who wanted thousands of square feet per person should look for another design.

“Anyone who feels they need that much space to live,” he said, “well, that’s a different discussion.”

I've seen a few documentaries on passive houses, and they're really engineering marvels. I still really don't understand how a heat exchanger works, but apparently it does.

The only problem is that some of the passive house's acceptance can be chalked up to the way Northern Europeans (here, Germans) think:

1. Most Germans grew up in apartments or modest houses and are used to living in small spaces. Most have probably never had much more than 500 square feet of living space to themselves. Eng und wohl (snug and comfy) is the watchword here.
2. You often encounter Germans who have an amusing paranoia about drafts and a surprisingly high tolerance for (what I would call) stale, recycled air. To these people, hermetically sealed house = paradise.
3. The kind of Germans who could afford passive houses are the kind of Germans who care -- and want to be seen to care -- about the environment. For these people, a passive house is a status symbol.
4. I'd be willing to bet passive houses probably don't get quite as warm as houses with traditional heating. But Germans love nature, and don't like to mess too much with what it dishes out (witness the aversion to genetically-modified food). This helps explain the scarcity of air-conditioning in Germany, even in places which could easily afford it and where it might be pretty handy for 2 months of the year.

When summer comes around, Germans just sweat! In fact, they seem to kind of like sweating. They vacation in really hot parts of the earth, and frequently visit saunas, places in which you actually pay to sweat. This attitude is inexplicable to people who come from hot, moist parts of the world in which you have no choice but to sweat like a French whore, day-in and day-out, for 9 months of the year.

An Orgy of Waste

I've blogged before about German garbage customs. When apartment-dwellers move out in Germany, they must make an appointment with the local Sperrmuell (oversized garbage) service to dispose of things too large to fit in regulation waste bins -- cheap furniture, refrigerators, TVs and the like. They stack them on the sidewalk, and wait for them to be picked up, either by the city or by a private contractor. Before the authorities arrive, though, roving groups of Eastern Europeans and Turks have usually thinned out the pile quite a bit, stuffing everything that might have residual value into cheap vans and whisking it away to their small apartments, or to flea markets in Lodz or Plovdiv. I call this informal recycling, and it's as important to urban ecology as mushrooms are to forest ecology. If any computers, refrigerators, or TVs are left after the informal recycling, they are sent to special processing facilities to be dismantled and recycled or otherwise disposed of in an environmentally-friendly way (g). It's these strategies that are behind Germany's ability to reduce (g) the amount of trash produced per person in recent years, and to re-process over half of all garbage.

Now let's cross the Atlantic. Below we see a poignant video report what happens when people lose their homes in the suburbs and exurbs that sprouted up during the housing bubble. The video's kind of long, so I'll summarize the key points: when they can't afford their homes anymore, many of these suburb-dwellers abandon their property disappear without leaving a forwarding address. They leave behind toys, large-screen TVs, computers, even family photos and urns full of relatives' ashes. After the homebuyers have vanished, the "trash-out" firms arrive. Their crews remove every single item from the house so it can be prepared for resale. Since the home-dwellers only lived there a few years, most of the things they own were new. All of it -- lamps, tables, toys, tools, mattresses -- gets dumped into a nearby landfill. No recycling, no donation to charity (though the owner of the trash-out firm, to his credit, tries occasionally). Seven hundred families a day lose their homes to foreclosure in Southern California. This one firm alone dumps fifteen truckloads a day into the landfill.

In a priceless bit of symbolism, a man then arrives to turn the dead brown grass on the lawn green...by spray-painting it. At least he uses biodegradable paint. 

Renewable and Uninterrupted

Researchers at the University of Kassel are testing a plant architecture that would provide uninterrupted power from 100%-renewable energy sources:

Germany gets about 8 percent of its energy from renewable sources, a share which is projected to increase steadily over the next few years.