Lucidity Watch

Berlin, 13 September 2001.

Goehler: “The historian against the psychologist…”

Benz: “They are, after all, also…”

And before Benz can finish his sentence, Goehler shouts:

“They are also phallic! I forgot to say that!” – whereupon uproarious laughter in the amphitheatre completes the humoristic ejaculatio praecox.

A gathering of German intellectuals react. Like disappointed radical feminists of a decade or two earlier. John Rosenthal translates Henryk Broder’s report.

The woman responds that they don’t have to be: “I’m not at all for killing people. But children are starving all over the world and I know where the people are to be found who are responsible for that.” The audience apparently knows too and shows its approval with applause.

So an evening of shared, whipped-up anger at “the house of world cultures” turned out, as everything would in any context the Berlin citizenry would think intellectual, to realistically be less enlightening as a random conversation at the International House of Pancakes.

It ALWAYS comes out smelling and sounding the same. The paucity of reason, facts, and diversity of thought never EVER change. Not now, not 20 years ago, and not likely any time in the distant future. As usual, naming something “the House of World Cultures” is a mask for the single most predictable feature of “iintellectual” European life – the only world culture they have any interest in is a narrow but influential part of their own sub-culture, and any of its’ temporary or ongoing obsessions.