Is this not the attitude of the hedonistic Last Man? Everything is permitted, you can enjoy everything, BUT deprived of its substance which makes it dangerous. Today's hedonism combines pleasure with constraint – it is no longer the old notion of the »right measure« between pleasure and constraint, but a kind of pseudo-Hegelian immediate coincidence of the opposites: action and reaction should coincide, the very thing which causes damage should already be the medicine. The ultimate example of it is arguably a chocolate laxative, available in the US, with the paradoxical injunction »Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate!«, i.e., of the very thing which causes constipation. Do we not find here a weird version of Wagner's famous »Only the spear which caused the wound can heal it« from Parsifal? And is not a negative proof of the hegemony of this stance the fact that true unconstrained consumption (in all its main forms: drugs, free sex, smoking…) is emerging as the main danger? The fight against these dangers is one of the main investments of today's »biopolitics.« Solutions are here desperately sought which would reproduce the paradox of the chocolate laxative. The main contender is »safe sex« – a term which makes one appreciative of the truth of the old saying »Is having sex with a condom not like taking a shower with a raincoat on?«. The ultimate goal would be here, along the lines of decaf coffee, to invent »opium without opium«: no wonder marihuana is so popular among liberals who want to legalize it – it already IS a kind of »opium without opium«.

And the same holds for belief: we want others (our children, more primitive people) to believe for us, instead of us. Therein resides the stake of today’s reference to „culture,“ of „culture“ emerging as the central life-world category: we today no longer „really believe,“ we just follow (some of the) religious rituals and mores as part of the respect for the „life-style“ of the community to which we belong (non-believing Jews obeying kosher rules „out of respect for tradition,“ etc.). „I do not really believe in it, it is just part of my culture“ effectively seems to be the predominant mode of the disavowed/displaced belief characteristic of our times. What is a cultural life-style, if not the fact that, although we do not believe in Santa Claus, there is a Christmas tree in every house and even in public places every December? Perhaps, then, the „non-fundamentalist“ notion of „culture“ as distinguished from „real“ religion, art, etc., IS in its very core the name for the field of disowned/impersonal beliefs – „culture“ is the name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without „taking them seriously.“ Is this not also the reason why science is not part of this notion of culture – it is all too real? And is this also not why we dismiss fundamentalist believers as „barbarians,“ as anti-cultural, as a threat to culture – they dare to take seriously their beliefs? Today, we ultimately perceive as a threat to culture those who immediately live their culture, those who lack a distance towards it. Recall the outrage when, two years ago, the Taliban forces in Afghanistan destroyed the ancient Buddhist statues at Bamiyan: although none of us, enlightened Westerners, believed in the divinity of Buddha, we were so outraged because the Taliban Muslims did not show the appropriate respect for the „cultural heritage“ of their own country and the entire humanity. Instead of believing through the other like all people of culture, they really believed in their own religion and thus had no great sensitivity for the cultural value of the monuments of other religions – for them, the Buddha statues were just fake idols, not “cultural treasures”