Kraft

by Jonas Lüscher

  Kraft kept his word and, over Ruth’s weakening resistance, intruded into their lives and came to collect both of them at least twice a week for a joint outing. Unfortunately for him, with regard to the shape of family life, he had many abstract ideals but very little practical imagination, so that the visits to the zoo, to museums and ice cream parlors, were becoming repetitive and he was forced to leave the planning of their afternoons together to Ruth. Deep down, he was grateful and, freed from this burden, he was able to fully recognize and appreciate the natural maternal quality that had made such a deep impression on him at their first meeting.

  Things took their expected course in this historical-biographical constellation. Ruth’s intrinsic weakness developed in sync with what one could call Kraft’s “good run.” There were hardly any academic conferences willing to do without a lecture by this dynamic young thinker, whose stupendous learning, elegant rhetoric, and bold propositions captivated his audiences and whose essays filled the best specialist journals at a frightening tempo. His name was mentioned whenever there was an important chair to fill in Germany. Kraft managed to give everyone the impression that he was the man of the hour, that he was one of the few thinkers around with an intellect able to grasp and comment upon the age adequately. The invitation to fill the chair in rhetoric at the University of Tübingen and follow in the footsteps of the great Walter Jens resurrected in Kraft the utterly bourgeois dreams of family life he had buried years before when he sat next to István on the sofa on Grunewaldstraße. He blathered on about them to Ruth until she yielded to him out of sheer exhaustion and was soon pregnant for the second time.

  Kraft dragged the defenseless woman to the registry office and made a Lambsdorff into a Kraft—incidentally, the only thing he occasionally reproached himself for in later years. He traveled to Tübingen without Ruth, who suffered from chronic placental insufficiency, a condition which surprised him in light of her broad hips, and there he bought an apartment near the banks of the Neckar River, on the top floor of a sixteenth-century house—such a perfect and gratifying stage set for his familial dreams that he went heavily into debt to acquire it. His future home office had a view of the Tübinger Stift, the Evangelical seminary, and if he leaned out the window a bit and craned his neck, he could see the top of the Hölderlin Tower. His newly acquired property included a spacious garret with beams of fir from the Black Forest. Kraft promised his wife he would turn it into an atelier for her to take up her artistic work again.

  Kraft’s small family moved to Tübingen before the birth of their second child. The parquet floors gleamed, the autumn sunlight shone through the finely mullioned windows, the sandstone floor in the vestibule, crossed by thousands of steps, promised them a part in history. After lengthy negotiations with the monument-protection authority, craftsmen had brought natural light into the garret by installing two large skylights. Kraft promised to take care of the insulation and the interior construction himself, very soon.

  Ruth packed up her apartment in Kreuzberg without resistance and, with a feeling of relief that surprised her, she turned her back on Berlin, which was busy preparing for the reunification celebration, to bear a second child of Kraft’s with the difference that this time, following his idea of a modern bourgeois marriage, he devotedly took care of her whenever his new position as full professor allowed.

  Did he do the right thing? Maybe so, but probably for the wrong reasons. Who can say for certain? Things weren’t that simple.

  chapter twelve

  Doubt the brightness of the sun, doubt the light of the stars, just do not doubt my truth and your stupidity.

  —FRIEDRICH WILHELM JOSEPH SCHELLING

  Fat chance Kraft knows what he has to do. Doubts come faster than he’s able to marshal the previous night’s euphoria into a consistent train of thought. Failing euphoria, he struggles instead to grasp the thread through pragmatism and systematic thought, because, if he remembers correctly, that was precisely the source of the energy that had filled him in McKenzie’s room. I must obtain freedom for me, for Heike, and for the twins, Kraft tells himself. For that, I need to bring home one million dollars. In order to bring that million home, I have to answer that blasted essay question and do it better than everyone else. But what does “better” mean in this context? To Erkner’s greater satisfaction, since he has the last word.

  Here Kraft hesitates, because in the light of day, his train of thought lacks the profundity night had lent it and is revealed in all its unspeakable ugliness: vulgar, common, and functionalist. It can’t possibly be that simple, can it? Simplicity born of opportunism, have I come to this? Kraft has to ask himself, and Rumsfeld seems to be smiling at him less scornfully than usual. Maybe, with a bit of goodwill, you could even call the smile encouraging. And isn’t that a trace of compassion in the former secretary of defense’s features? Has it come to this? Yes, indeed, it has.

  Kraft pulls himself together, tears the scribbled pages from the pad, and writes in capital letters on a fresh sheet of paper: THEODICY AND TECHNODICY: OPTIMISM FOR A YOUNG MILLENNIUM. WHY WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT AND WHY WE CAN STILL IMPROVE IT. And underneath: What would Erkner answer? He circles the latter question several times with his fountain pen and, after some thought, at a loss, he adds an exclamation point.

  For God’s sake, he can do this!

  Assuming for a moment that this is the best of all worlds, then evil must necessarily be part of it. Erkner’s God … Or is it Erkner himself? No, first God, then Erkner … He’ll get around to flattering Erkner’s cult of genius later. Erkner’s God, therefore, has realized the world not as good liberated from evil, but as the best of all possible worlds in which evil still and necessarily exists. Kraft can get this much from Leibniz. Absolute perfection is an attribute only of God Himself; in the realm of creation, however, it is for that very reason an impossibility.

  That’s really very good, for a beginning … Of course, some of his colleagues will find him ridiculous, but at least he’s setting out his line of reasoning for Erkner’s satisfaction on a religious foundation right from the start. And he can iron things out later when he brings it all back to the ground of reality. Erkner doesn’t seem to have any problem with contradictions.

  Come on … Keep going …

  Evil—it is thus necessary … and it IS … of this there is no doubt. Now it’s a matter of pointing out why evil isn’t so bad. Maybe he should move straight to the Great Chain of Being … Chain is good, it sounds so mechanical, so neatly structured and tangible: link by link, one after the other, you can pull yourself backward until the spade of knowledge buckles on hitting the bedrock of the ultimate truth.

  Kraft gazes pensively at the fluorescent light and indulges in a brief daydream about that ultimate truth, which appears in his mind’s eye as a silvery boulder, massive, heavy, harder than any other substance, of a flawless splendor and with a surface as smooth as glass, so sheer that not a single particle of dust sticks to it. An object in whose existence he can only believe in rare moments, but what moments they are, moments of consummate purity …

  All right, back to the chain … Of course, you can also use such a chain to drag yourself forward, you can follow it link by link into a future that has been forged like the chain. The future, Erkner likes that.

  The Great Chain of Being. Here Kraft can elegantly turn to Pope, originator of the phrase they are meant to prove correct: Whatever is, is right. Mankind’s ability—no he’d better talk about value rather than ability, so that the monetary aspect resonates from the beginning; he can close the circle later—so, mankind’s intrinsic value, but also the value of the individual, is commensurate with his position in the All, in the Great Chain of Being. And, as Pope writes, man is at a middle state between god and beast. And this in-between state is the source of his inner strife. Strife, that’s good, it will speak directly to Erkner’s subconscious. On the other hand … man as a deficient being? Erkner would certainly have trouble recognizing himself as such. Maybe
better to leave that out. Kraft writes poss. leave out in the margin and adds an exclamation point. Then he crosses out the exclamation point. What is it with all these exclamation points, which he otherwise avoids? Avoids on principle!

  But he needs these weaknesses and deficiencies to pursue his argument. Naturally, mankind’s position is not determined solely by his weaknesses, but also by his strengths. Maybe he should just emphasize the strengths more. Kraft writes emphasize strengths in the margin and adds a question mark. That’s tricky, though, it’s precisely the individual’s weaknesses that guarantees the cohesion of the chain since they must be compensated for by the strengths of others. But, and here Kraft finds the solution for his minor difficulty, it’s exactly through this mechanism that weaknesses become for Pope happy frailties that function as a kind of cement for the entire marvelous construct. Weaknesses may well be a great evil for the individual, but they are, so to speak, a necessary condition for the good of the whole. And somehow, this is, indeed, true, or so Kraft tries to convince himself. The suffering of an individual is nothing next to the greatness of the whole. This—Kraft is suddenly struck by the flawless logic—is indisputable, because, after all, it’s not for nothing that the statement says Whatever is, is right.

  But isn’t that rather unjust? someone objects from the audience. (Kraft likes to picture an audience when he’s thinking.) Certainly not, Kraft retorts to the impertinent simpleton, because this is merely a question of distributive justice, and:

  (a) Pope has already established that “some are, and must be, greater than the rest, More rich, more wise…”

  And furthermore:

  (b) we can have complete confidence in the trickle-down effect. The more the ones on top possess, the more will trickle down to those below … more of everything: money, intelligence, education, etc. This is, to some extent, a well-known law of nature … A chain, even … and obviously it should not be thought of as horizontal, but as vertical, like those chains that hang from the roof gutter into a rain barrel, just as it should be thought of simultaneously as diachronic and synchronic—this last remark has nothing to do with the matter at hand but works wonderfully well as an argumentum cerei nebulosi.

  Tying together the trickle-down effect and the Great Chain of Being, why hadn’t he thought of this before? Now he was coming into his own. It would be easier going from here. Now he could simply bludgeon his audience with the timbers of neoclassical theory and market liberalism. Supply-side economics, laissez-faire, the invisible hand, self-regulating market forces, individualism, utilitarianism, personal responsibility, et cetera and so on. And the best part will be that no one expects this from a professor of rhetoric. He just has to be sure he takes up a cudgel for the monopolies Erkner praised so enthusiastically in the bar and that somewhere he adds that competition is for losers. He doesn’t have to worry about inconsistencies. Maybe he can even justify inconsistency, somehow. Maybe he’ll just say that coherent reasoning is self-evidently indispensable, but contradiction is an element of reasoning, too, as this sentence itself proves. He’ll have to put it more elegantly, of course. State more elegantly, he writes in the margin, fecundity of contradictory modes … / poss. Eristic Dialectic → Schopenhauer / Topics / or something in this vein.

  And then, then he can also bring in Vogl and his concept of oikodicy. Just as theodicy advances the idea that it’s possible to justify God’s goodness despite the obvious presence of evil in the world, Vogl proposes, in analogy, that oikodicy advances the idea that the justness of capitalism can be defended, despite the obvious presence of evil in the world, as, so to speak, an economy of salvation, if one embraced it as a law of nature, with a quasi-religious conviction. Poverty, hunger, injustice are all, as it were, of inherent necessity to the system in service of the whole. The system organizes the social order, which then becomes tantamount to a natural law, and because it’s all so wonderfully systematic, everything can be calculated and predicted, ergo … the future can be planned. Kraft can almost see how Erkner’s gaze during his lecture would finally, after a lifetime of wandering, come to rest and hang on his, Kraft’s, lips.

  Vogl, to be sure, meant it all critically and presented the replacement of theodicy, that is the justification of God, with oikodicy, the quasi-religious justification of capitalism, as one of the great problems of our time, but where Vogl speaks of phantasms and denounces the religious, imaginary, and spectral aspects of economic events, Kraft can speak systematically of their visionary aspects. This will all point wonderfully to a still better future and reframe Vogl’s sotto voce Berlin pessimism as a concrete optimism to Erkner’s taste. If Vogl catches wind of this, he will never say another word to Kraft, but Kraft is quite willing to accept this as a pleasant side effect.

  So, now he just absolutely has to work in technology and technodicy as the essay requires. Technodicy seeks to justify the existence of technology in the face of the evil in the world. A bit difficult, Kraft fears; after all, in this case, it isn’t God sitting in the dock, or some economic system that’s been dressed up with an aura of divine ordainment; no, it’s mankind in person. Sure, you can claim, along with some cultural critics and technological pessimists, that technology isn’t actually a human invention, but something already extant in the realm of ideas, ready-made, as it were, and, subject to a dynamic of its own, developing autonomously, with mankind merely its slave, panting in pursuit … But surely this isn’t what Erkner wants to hear. No, Kraft has to present technology as mankind’s means of self-empowerment: the brilliant, inventive engineer—and his equally brilliant and daring financial backer—who will create a better world with the help of technology. And the evils that are brought into the world by technology, well, Kraft will have to declare them necessary for the purpose and the good of the whole.

  And what about the bomb? The great sin of Hiroshima? The same presumptuous voice from the audience interrupts Kraft’s lecture again: Do you consider that a necessary evil, too?

  Ah, the bomb, Kraft replies with glee. Thank you for your question because, you see, that’s a perfect illustration of how things are never so simple, since, considered in the right light, there is no sin of Hiroshima. It’s Ivan’s light that he imagines he’s shining into this dark corner, the same brilliant beam of light Ivan had shone into the world in a whole series of scientific works. The so-called sin of Hiroshima, he’ll be able to reason, along with Ivan, is nothing more than an empty phrase, given that recent computer simulations of the subject unequivocally show that the invention of the atomic bomb and the demonstration of its destructive power in Hiroshima prevented a third world war. Only the threat of an atomic holocaust kept the Cold War from escalating into a hot one, since neither of the two blocs was willing to pay the price of total nuclear annihilation. Just imagine that the atomic bomb had never been invented. Say nuclear fission, whether controlled or uncontrolled, was impossible. What then? The answer is obvious and is confirmed by all the computer modeling. Absent the threat of nuclear escalation, there would unquestionably have been a war with conventional weapons between the blocs: a third world war, with machine guns, tanks, bombs, fighter planes, and other such armaments, but far more devastating than the Second World War due to the more highly advanced non-nuclear weapons technology developed between 1978 and 1982, the period during which the predictive model (Pánczél, et al.)—an extremely complex model, as it had to take the influence of nuclear technology on history out of the equation—considered the probability of conventional war to be greatest. Yes, armaments between ’78 and ’82 had become significantly more effective than those utilized between the years ’39 and ’45, so you had to calculate the number of victims in such a hypothetical war to be around seven hundred million (+/-8 percent). Ergo, the invention of the atomic bomb has, summa summarum, if you subtract the conservatively estimated one hundred thirty thousand dead in Hiroshima (he’s not sure at the moment how to justify the dead in Nagasaki, he’ll have to ask Ivan that tonight), saved six hundred mill
ion eight hundred seventy thousand lives. It was for the greater good, so to speak. Once again: what the individual experiences as evil proves to be a necessity for the whole and can therefore be justified.

  So much for the sin of Hiroshima. Kraft sees the troublemaker in his mental audience buckle under the force of his reasoning and sink into embarrassed thought.

  The best thing would be to present technology as a synthesis of faith and capitalism because it most clearly manifests mankind’s divinely ordained self-empowerment—the use of mankind’s God-given freedom, freedom … right, he’s rather neglected freedom. In the margin, Kraft writes Freedom manifests itself in technology!

  And from here it is but a small step to the ultimate self-empowerment, defeating mortality with technology and making man a god. Everything Erkner said the night before about death as a disease that could be overcome suddenly makes sense to Kraft. He can also no longer see the contradictions he thought he’d found between Erkner’s profession of Christian faith and his desire for earthly immortality. Substantiating it theologically would be a piece of cake. Man must become a god sooner or later, otherwise God wouldn’t have created man in His image and wouldn’t have granted him freedom and the potential for development. And the analogy has an absolutely astonishing beauty: God created man in His image just as man will create robots in his image, and at some point (soon, he hoped, Erkner had said) the robot will become man (or the other way round? Kraft notes in the margin)—and just as God will welcome man’s divine transformation, we humans will welcome the human transformation of technology: the Singularity. These will be the fireworks Kraft will set off to conclude his essay: the Singularity, that moment, so often invoked, when technological progress will accelerate and artificial intelligence will overtake the intelligence of its creator: the melding of man and machine … transhumanism, posthumanism, the transcendence of our species, Kraft notes, as well as posthuman transtheotechnism. A new age will dawn, so new and so different that no one, not even a visionary of Erkner’s caliber, can as yet describe it. But one thing Kraft can promise, it will be good … so good!