BlomCast

Kenan Malik is simply one of the most nuanced and profound thinkers about race and cultural identity I know. You may have seen his columns in the Observer or his books The Quest for a Moral Compass or Not So Black And White. Here we talk about when and why the idea of different races was invented to justify slavery and turn people against one another and how this arbitrary distinction between people became a bedrock of populism, and how cultural essentialism and the cult of purity have affected not only the political right, but also the left.Support the show

Ist die Polykrise eine Nebenwirkung des Fortschritts und eines siegreichen Liberalismus? Der Sieg der liberalen Welt transformierte das Leben auf diesem Planeten innerhalb kürzester Zeit auf dramatische Weise. Dabei sind viele der liberalen Grundideen zur Unkenntlichkeit verzerrt worden. Ist das liberale Projekt also Opfer seines eigenen Erfolgs und, wenn ja, ist es damit zum Scheitern verdammt?Support the show

Is the polycrisis a side effect of progress and victorious liberalism? The victory of the liberal world has dramatically transformed life on this planet in a very short space of time. In the process, many of the basic liberal ideas have been distorted beyond recognition. Is the liberal project a victim of its own success and, if so, is it doomed to failure?Support the show

Almost exactly a generation ago, the triumphant West proclaimed the victory of the liberal world, of the liberal project. From now on, there would be only one model for societies: liberal democracies in a global market. Things have turned out quite differently. The world is in a polycrisis and today the core ideas of the liberal project - individual freedoms, tolerance, progressive ideals - are fighting for their political survival. How did it come to this?Support the show

Vor ziemlich genau einer Generation verkündete der triumphierende Westen den Sieg der liberalen Welt des liberalen Projekts. Von nun an würde es nur noch ein Modell für Gesellschaften geben: liberale Demokratien in einem globalen Markt. Es ist ganz anders gekommen. Die Welt steckt in einer Polykrise und heute kämpfen die Kernideen des liberalen Projekts — individuelle Freiheiten, Toleranz, progressive Ideale — um ihr politisches Überleben. Wie ist es so weit gekommen?Support the show

Philipp Ther erforscht Transformationen in der Geschichte. Der Wittgenstein Preis-Träger und Autor historischer mehrerer Bestseller beschäftigt sich besonders mit Phasen, in denen die Welt sich radikal verändert. Ich frage ihn, ob wir in der Gegenwart in so einer Phase sind, welche transformativen Momente in den vergangenen Jahrzehnten besonders zu unserer gegenwärtigen Situation beigetragen haben und ob das liberale Projekt sich totgelaufen hat.Support the show

For this episode, I am delighted to welcome the distinguished philosopher Michael Sandel, whose Harvard course on moral philosophy has been followed by millions of people online. Michael’s book The Tyranny of Merit trenchantly analyses the perversion of meritocracy  and what the rule of the credentialed and of technocrats is doing to our democracies. While the social and political elite claims for itself to rule through merit alone, the idea of merit itself has not only been corrupted by mechanisms of exclusion, it is also a fraught concept in itself. In our conversation, we explore the politics of humiliation, the theological dimension of thinking that we get what we deserve, the populist backlash against a sense of entitlement, and how to address these fault lines which threaten to split our societies in two.Michael Sandel will appear at the Vienna Humanities Festival 2023: https://www.humanitiesfestival.at/sandelSupport the show

The idea that humans can dominate nature and rule over it has popped up quite recently in human history and has come to sweep the planet, and to change and degrade its natural systems. But where does this idea come from, how has it influenced human history and what will come after its collapse amid the climate crisis?Support the show

What part do our collective stories play in historical turning points? Can new narratives change a culture, a society, a political structure, or do narratives react to changes to explain them afterwards? What do narratives inspire, and how are they disseminated? Martin Puchner, professor for comparative literature at Harvard University and author of, among others, The Story of Culture, is the person to ask. We speak about the importance of technologies such as writing and print, but also of creative misunderstanding and appropriation, a political minefield, as well as a main mechanism of cultural transmission. What can we learn from this convoluted history, and is it possible to initiate a narrative turn today, away from destruction and domination towards a more symbiotic understanding of culture?Support the show

a conversation with Andrea WulfSometimes the world is reinvented and turned upside down not in a glittering metropolis, but in the provinces. This was the case in Jena, a tiny German town, at the end of the eighteenth century, as a gaggle of young and unconventional poets, scientists and philosophers descended on the university there. The result was the kernel of German Romanticism, Andrea Wulf tells me. She has written a stunning group biography on the German romantics, their ideas and their personal lives. In this episode, we discuss the importance of German Romanticism, its idea of the self and its new ways of relating to nature, a historical turning point that is still colouring our current debates and our thinking about ourselves, and the climate crisis.Support the show