Sublime

We allowed ourselves to accept the politics of inevitability, the sense that history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy. After communism in eastern Europe

as knowledge became the most important economic resource, the profitability of war declined and wars became increasingly restricted to those parts of the world – such as the Middle East and Central Africa – where the economies are still old-fashioned material-based economies.

Europe’s expansion amounted in part to a deliberate assault on the modernizing ventures of other peoples and states. Perhaps it was not Europe’s modernity that triumphed, but its superior capacity for organized violence.

it may be better to call the last 70,000 years the Anthropocene epoch: the epoch of humanity. For during these millennia Homo sapiens became the single most important agent of change in the global ecology.5

After playing a crucial role in the shaping of modern Europe for more than two hundred years—think of Mendelssohn, Marx, Freud, Mahler, Kafka, Einstein—Jews will gradually leave center stage. The golden era of European Jewry will be over.

Obviously Reich’s influence went way beyond just me. Alongside other authors such as Anthony Giddens[411] and Jeremy Rifkin[412], he was instrumental in crafting the message of a new generation of progressive leaders that the era of the steady, lifelong job was over. In a more global and unstable world, lifelong education was the new key to providi