A plea for sensuousness

"Accidental or not: Since the beginning of modern times each turn of a century has been an extraordinary creative period in which - through human spirit and will - new and sign posting perspectives were discovered with fantasy. Robert Jungk, the deceased future researcher and publicist, has emphasized this remarkable but also unnoticed fact.

In deed: At the end of the 15th century Columbus discovers the „New World“; the first step on the way towards a global world is done. One century later Galilei opened the way to a rational view of the universe; Cerbantes (with „Don Quichote“) writes the first modern novel, Shakespear writes his exciting dramatic work. At the end of the 17th century Newton laid the foundations for the exact sciences as the basis of the later technical age. In 1789 the French Revolution ends the age of feudalism and opens the door to democracy. The end of the last century was finally marked by industrial founders and social workers´ movement; economic-technical progress and social responsibility become the basic structure of social market oriented societies.


No doubt: Such sign posting perspectives of a century, a  „fin-de-siècle“-effect with similar epochal boosts is what we would need more than ever today. Since the post-war era which we were used to has been turned upside down and the world  has become more or less borderless, the old certainties and clearnesses have been replaced by new megatrends: Globalization here, and in parallel to that a pluralization which is contrary to the global world.

Economic universalism has become the new constant – just like a fundamental „driving force“: Welshmen build their houses in Düsseldorf; Hungarians renovate Vienna´s Art Nouveau; byelorussian foreign workers weld hulls in Stettin; German turbines originate in the Ukraine; Munich text works are done in India and Malaysia; an enterprise for medical technics buys raw material in Indonesia, produces off shore Fidschi and distributes from Australia; from the prize of a Pontiac 38% remain in the USA, more than 60% go to supplier and components´ manufacturers all around the world; and Tycoons like Murdoch, Rupert, Kirch or Berlusconi are already representatives of universally interconnected media companies...

This transition from national economies to transnational service networks and the dependency for national market conditions from international ones with the result of merciless competition is unstoppable and it will lead to far-reaching changes within the European welfare societies, which are nor prepared for this. The dimension of the challange can be shown by the facts that in Europe 15% of the people are unemployed, that the German unemployment has reached the dimensions of the Weimar Republic, that affluence and need, poverty and wealth exist next to each other in paradoxical proximity....  (...)