Pedigree Collapse

Tomorrow, everything is going to be better: Since the Age of Enlightenment, this slogan identifies disciples of social progress, while those of the dark ages bark about how everything was better in the olden days. Some bank on science and technology to enhance freedom, wealth, education, and beauty, others on tradition, blood, land, family, fatherland, and other such ancestral chatter so that it won’t all become even worse than it already is.

This book claims that each period of time, each act, and each thought actually contain more possibilities for self-improvement than is obvious on first glance. The internal connection between the hidden degrees of freedom is what the book calls »pedigree collapse«. The term denotes a model with which one may explain how progress is realised in the efforts of actual people. It makes understandable why only eras that allow for certain fallacies are able to find certain truths, and it shows that the Enlightenment has bequeathed tools for emancipation, unknown even to itself, to present times. And finally, it illustrates what it is that remains valuable about this theory and other practical and theoretical legacies of the historical left until today.

En route to these findings, the book undertakes journeys into realistic research and fantastical art, introduces known and unknown revolutions, wars, types of injustice and of resistance, and sheds light onto periods of time for which it is not easy to discern whether they are future, past, or present.