Paths to a solidarity-based society: Morality at the tipping point

»What ideals shape us? What errors and crimes?” With these questions in her “Legacy of a Pacifist,” the Green Party politician Antje Vollmer, who died in 2023, asked us to examine the moral foundations of our actions in times of internal social turbulence and great dangers for humanity.

A Great Transformation that saves humanity from ecological suicide, that radically turns away from wars, overcomes world hunger and ends the erosion of democracy requires a renewed morality. Humanity in all actions should be the core and standard.

Part of the West’s hubris, which Antje Vollmer vehemently rejected, is the claim by Western leadership circles that their democracies are already the true repository of moral values. The Russian war of aggression against Ukraine is used to stylize the resistance of Ukrainians as a fight for freedom and democracy against servitude and autocracy. In this way it is hidden that the spokesmen in the dominant discourse have long been in the process of discarding the original humanistic meaning of morality. Dealing with two dangers of the century, environmentally destructive growth and war, illustrate this.

“Centered around the USA”

Most people see growth as a crucial condition for prosperity – even at the price of selfishness, ruthlessness and intolerance, but also of their own existential fears. For a long time, growth actually led to greater prosperity for large parts of the population in rich countries and is now indispensable for overcoming poverty in poorer countries. But it has long since turned into the destruction of the natural foundations of life. It has become normal habitus to “market yourself” and “sell yourself well” in order to assert yourself in the competition. As a requirement for that growth that tends to expansion, even in the form of wars, and destroys nature. Capitalism has anchored the market as a reference system in the individuals themselves – turning human morality into its opposite. Michel Foucault described the combination of aristocratic rule from above with the self-regulation of individuals according to internalized norms as governmentality.

The prevailing foreign and security policy discourse is based on a similarly emptied morality as in internal social contexts. The Western power elites strive for a “rules-based world order” with their “values-based foreign and security policy”. Putin also appeals to values, to the concept of “Holy Rus.” The “Russki Mir” must preserve its cultural roots and values ​​against the decadent West. Morality is invoked from all sides to justify one’s own actions.

However, the United States Congress offered a rare clarification. In 2021, he characterized the “rules-based world order” as a “world centered around the USA, its allies and partners, to enforce their common values ​​and interests, to maintain and promote free, open, democratic, inclusive, rule-based, stable and diverse regions.” . If the decorative epithets are left aside, what remains is: “centered around the USA,” “to advance its interests.” This is the true content of the morality that this order claims for itself. Even wars come in the moral garb of the “responsibility to protect” and, if necessary, as “humanitarian interventions.”

A careful distinction must be made between the invaluable civilizational gains of democracy in modern societies – freedom of expression and organization, pluralism, the rule of law, individual freedom and diversity of lifestyles – and the use of democracy as a form of rule by the power elite. Of course, every form and achievement of real democracy must be defended against the competitive interests of large corporations, against right-wing extremism and right-wing populism, racism and anti-Semitism. Of course, this includes defending against attacks from outside powers, as in the case of Ukraine.

But the current intellectual-political atmosphere is heated up with images of enemies, hatred, exclusion, refusal of differentiated thinking, suppression of rational arguments, polarization, suspicion of willingness to reconcile as a betrayal of one’s own interests and conspiracy theories. Democracy is eroding underneath. A breeding ground for this is the widespread uncertainty in the wake of the multitude of crises and the complexity of connections that are difficult to understand. But there is more to this anti-human change, namely a strategy of those in power. This is “cognitive warfare,” which integrates an empty and distorted morality into the instruments of “war training.” Precisely in a historical situation that requires humanitarian measures to be taken more urgently than it has been for decades, NATO is proclaiming the incorporation of morality into warfare.

On June 21, 2021, at a NATO symposium on the continuation of cognitive warfare, the “human domain”, the human sphere, was defined as a qualitatively new sixth theater of war alongside war on the ground, at sea and in the air, in space and in cyberspace . There, war is being waged over the consciousness, the subconscious, the psyche and the entire emotional world of individuals and masses. It’s about the attitude of the whole person, about how they are guided in the interests of the respective warring party, about the worldview of individuals and entire societies. All means of information and communication technology, the Internet, artificial intelligence and the data monopolies and control potential of IT companies are mobilized for this psychological warfare.

Wars, environmental crises, hunger – the world is on the brink

The greater weight for the large and small decisions of our time is given as a counterpoint to strengthening all elements of humanistic morality in public intellectual debates and to clearly base practical decisions by democratic actors: “that man is the highest being for man” (Karl Marx) that human dignity is the highest moral principle (Immanuel Kant), respect for life is a basic value as is the preservation of nature, free personal development of each and every individual, solidarity, recognition, empathy, tolerance, willingness to compromise, respect for rational argument, willingness to self-correction.

While the fundamentally dangerous abuse of morality for psychological warfare has a disorienting effect on society, in the executive suites of big business, from the parties of the bourgeois camp, in the majority of the media to left-liberal intellectuals, the impression is being fostered that a new social-ecological and reason open to peace is already determining the actions of the economic and political elite in the West. The power elites act in two ways. Whether in the advance of e-mobiles, in the “National Hydrogen Strategy” or in the form of the “Industrial Policy 2030” – reason is prevailing everywhere, even if accompanied by party bickering. A “moral revolution” as the core of a great transformation, supported by the economically powerful and the top of the political class, by managers, has already progressed to such an extent that major breaks in the basic structures of society are no longer necessary. This is why, for example, even from such a progressive representative of social-ecological change as the long-time president of the Wuppertal Institute, Uweschneidewind, one can read: “The path is evolutionary and not revolutionary.”

But the war in Ukraine, the Israeli army-Hamas slaughter and other wars, ongoing environmental crises, world hunger and the spread of anti-human ideologies are signals that we are at a tipping point between the rise or decline of human civilization. Disasters that have occurred in the past and those that will threaten in the future entail the imperative that morality that is committed to humanity must first be enforced in the future.

The depth of the social ruptures necessary for survival certainly requires a change in values ​​in the cultural and intellectual sphere of society that is committed to the bonum humanum. This change in values ​​affects rational thinking, but also the internalization of moral values ​​committed to life by individuals. The cold flow of sober rational thinking will have to be combined with the warm flow of human feelings, thought Ernst Bloch. However, such a moral change will never come about or its approaches will ultimately have no consequences if it does not lead to drastic breaks in ownership and power relations.

But the economic laws of capitalism set the limits where large capital ownership and the centrality of profit are seriously questioned. Then the rulers tend towards authoritarian and militant forms of rule by capital. Therefore, a humanistic morality must be anchored so deeply in society that the power elites can no longer dare to use brutal forms of violence to strengthen their rule in the future. However, this requires freeing the media from the control of those in power and breaking down the current narrowing of thought spaces.

Antje Vollmer pointed out in her “Legacy” that “the tremendous and unique achievement of the Soviet leadership under Mikhail Gorbachev (…) was the greatest miracle in a series of miraculous events.” Ensuring that such a miracle will support the peaceful course of transformation processes on the path to a solidarity-based society in the future is one of the great challenges for humanistic morality.