A historian is also someone who rescues voices, and when listening to them we discover that ideas spring from them that have remained on the margins of history, thoughts that at some point society did not want to hear for whatever reason, we are probably peeking into a work by Phillip Blom (Hamburg, 1970). As he passes through Madrid in the framework of El Foro de la Cultura, he is as charming in front of the camera as he is a good conversationalist. Talking with him is an opportunity to find out where the author of Fracture. Life and culture in the West, 1918-1938 (Anagram), where, to immerse us in the interwar era, he offers us a journey through the electricity and indecency of jazz, through slavery and speakeasies [donde se vendía alcohol durante la ley seca americana], for so many lives on the edge exposed to the dazzling acceleration of time. In another of his great works, Dangerous people, from the same publishing house, reveals to us the true illustration, that of radical thought that, ahead of its time, challenges everything that has not been questioned. So the first question is a must.
QUESTION. Where is that radical thought today?
ANSWER. We are living a fascinating moment. With covid we have realized how vulnerable we are. We have suddenly learned that we are part of nature and that we are not as exceptional as we would like to believe. We are a Pyrrhic part of an extraordinarily large system. Plankton, ants are much more important than human beings, but this is a tremendous psychological process. Asking people to accept that they are not who they think they are, that they have to give up the mechanism through which they have created their identity, that their values are not what they thought, is something too big to digest in just one generation. But now this change has to happen in just one generation. The psychological resistance against this is very great.
Q. You are not very optimistic…
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R. The moment when a system begins to crack is the moment when the worst energies in a society can gain power and gain momentum. We have to be very vigilant. I think this is the moment we are living. The good news is that we can also breastfeed. We can bring our imagination forward and create new societies that do not force us to work within a system, within a market that is not satisfying our needs. I think that philosophically speaking it is an exciting moment because it requires us to rethink our conditions, how we want to live with others, where we are. But it is also a very dangerous time because people are reluctant to get involved because life is already hard enough.
Q. What lessons can we draw, then?
R. This stupid little virus has changed the world’s most powerful economies in a few days. Actually, we can make political decisions. We don’t have to leave all decisions to the market. If a decision is important enough, we can make it. We can say that we have to do that now. We always talk about free markets. Have you ever seen one? And, on the other hand, crises are always a temptation for the dictatorship; it will be increasingly difficult to defend open-mindedness and open-mindedness. The only alternative is radical change.
Q. What is the alternative?
R. Living in societies where consumption is much less important, where the market is less dynamic. That is the society I am interested in. What will happen to our identities after consumption? If we can no longer buy our identity in a store, how will we build our identities in those societies? We will return to static identities. But can we develop positive identities?
P. What is more dangerous for democracy, populism or the arrogance of liberalism?
R. Populists have emotional solutions that are not real. But I think I’m more worried about the manipulators: those who take the debates where they want. Unless we engage politically with Asian countries on how to limit the climate crisis, unless we engage with Brazil, we can be as vegan as we want, but the real solutions are on another level. If we can start thinking about the climate debate in terms of what we decide and not what or who we decide against, imagining the world we are choosing, not banning, I think the debate will go in a whole different direction.
“Crises are always a temptation for dictatorships”
Q. Is the crisis in the West the crisis of liberalism?
R. I think we are experiencing a deep crisis of liberalism in the broadest sense of the word. For example, there have been European states that have renounced liberalism through elections, Hungary and Poland. China has a system that has lifted millions of people out of poverty. They are not interested in liberalism. Most Chinese say, “no, we don’t want it.” The second reason is that the liberal project itself has been somewhat exhausted. When I went to school they asked us to make a caricature: we were democratic and that’s why Europe was rich. There was no talk that we had been stealing from the rest of the world for 400 years, enslaving millions of people and destroying natural habitats to an unparalleled degree to reach this level of wealth. And suddenly the liberal project doesn’t seem so bright. It has become a much more complex idea in this new world, in the sense of deciding if this is the society that we want to live in, if this is the only model of society that we want. Perhaps it is still the best model, but many more arguments are needed.
Q. Pessimism again…
R. Why can’t we imagine the world we are choosing? This is obviously not working. People take antidepressants, the elderly die alone… do you think it’s an ideal society? We must be able to do better, but we need some utopian energy for that, for hope and experimentation.
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