In the early 1990s, the German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger prophesied that what would follow the end of the global Cold War is an endless series of never-ending local civil wars, a kind of civil war epidemic. He saw the race riots in Los Angeles and the wars in Yugoslavia, Chechen commanders and Liberian warlords as expressions of one and the same disintegrative trend. What brings them together are “the autistic nature of perpetrators, and the inability to distinguish between destruction and self-destruction…Violence has freed itself from ideology”. Violence has stopped to be an instrument for achiving certain political goals, it has become the way to express one’s identity. The smashing of the hospital in Mogadishu in Enzensberger’s view is the best example of this new molecular civil war. The armed band destroyed every X-Ray machine and killed all doctors and nurses, knowing well that this is the only hospital in the region and that if they need a medical help, there is no one left to help them. “One is tempted to call this the reduction ad insanitatem”—wrote Enzensberger—“In the collective running amok, the concept of ‘future’ disappears. Only the present matters. Consequences do not exist”.
It is in this context that I want to reflect on Améry’s idea from “Enlightenment as Philosophia Perennis” that Enlightment at the end of the day is the art of not being afraid of the future.