The Terrible Children of Modernity

What drives humanity? Are we progressing from a lower state to a higher one? Is progress guided by the lessons of history? Should history be understood as progress towards and in the conception of freedom?

Such out-dated questions and the corresponding incongruous answers to them tend to ignore the transition from one generation to the next, which now, at the beginning of the 21st century, is increasingly in danger.

The continued existence of civilization as we know it depends on the successful outcome of this transitional period, which is dominated in part by war and murder, and in part by scenarios in which the populations of entire continents are wiped out. Peter Sloterdijk’s new book is thus informed by extreme pessimism: a black book of the generations to come.
Modernity is characterised by the way the threads of tradition are continually severed and by the constant emergence of new vectors that will determine our progress into what is to come. As a result, individuals turn into »children of their times«, and in turn their children »break the mould«. Since modern parents tend to be labile civilisers, the formation of their offspring becomes a never-ending battle between potentially terrible parents and potentially terrible children.