Perhaps the fascination exercised by great music – music that touches our heart just as much as it appeals to our intellect – stems from its ability to create the illusion that we are masters of time. Adagio and lento – that is what the score demands - and the magical hand of Sir George Solti or the small finger of Claudio Abbado make the world become peaceful, peaceful and quiet, only to gather speed again, allegro, allegro ma non troppo, presto and prestissimo, transforming time into a whirlwind of luxurious exuberance. It ends with a roar. We have admired Abbado’s command of the tempi and enjoyed with him dominion over the progress of time. We applaud and sink back into the rhythm of everyday life, our heart returns to its normal beat. But it is a restless heart yearning, as the great Augustine knew, for peace. "Our heart is restless, until it finds rest in you, oh Lord!"

God has all the time in the world, he is the true master of time because he created the world and he made time. When we speak of God’s eternity, of the fact that he is the guardian of time in both senses of the word – he preserves and suspends time simultaneously – we speak of something that is greater than our own spirit which cannot really grasp the concept of eternity.

We do not have all the time in the world, "seventy is the sum of our years, or eighty" as the bible says, and each one of us knows this.

For a while, I had the honor of studying for my PhD thesis with Karl Rahner in Munster, Westphalia – a city in which the philosopher Hans Blumenberg lived until 1996. He regarded the discrepancy between world time and our life-span as an primitive insult. World time and life-time are radically divergent. We see ourselves stretching from alpha to omega, from the big bang to the world’s demise from overheating. Some, like Stephen Hawking, go so far as to dismiss all temporal limitations in their theories. In our heads, we could impose order on the world if its time would only last for as long as we do. The world’s time and ours really ought to be co-existential.

The fact that the world simply keeps on turning after our deaths is hard for us to accept. What makes it worse, is that we know this all along. The endless resource of world time – all the time in the world – is given to us in a small finite portion and the longer we live, the shorter it seems. The shorter our remaining time is, the more there seems to be for which we no longer have time.

Hans Blumenberg realized quite rightly that this awareness of the dramatic assymetry between life-time and world-time is a generous motor of acceleration.

Of course, I could start out now on the great promise of religion which relieves us of this Zeitangst by allowing our lives to flow into God’s time. I shall not remain silent on this. But before I do consider this promise, I should like to add a few ideas on the concept of acceleration.

The chasm between life-time and world-time is as old as humanity. However, this century and the last provided new and additional acceleration factors. Change at an ever faster pace, inventions and improved technology help us to govern nature. Travel technology has opened up time and space. And now the internet promises us that we can be everywhere anytime. All these factors gel together, creating an experience of acceleration that colors our consciousness more and more. I quote:

"We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed…We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!…Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible. Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed."

This is taken from a notorious fascist text that you may know, from Marinetti’s "Futurist Manifesto". It is already 91 years old. But such rhetoric of the future sounds familiar. Acceleration makes for futurism.

This feeling of haste, that presto-prestissimo, has objective origins. A few thousand years passed between the invention of the wheel, powered by human muscle, and the invention of an artificial means of motorization. Since the development of tools that facilitate bodily work and the subsequent development of tools to help tools, the exponential curve of invention has become steeper and steeper and presented us, finally, with the super-tool of the computer. "Time and Space died yesterday." In real time we are everywhere at anytime – part of a new reality that we sometimes still call virtual but which influences our lives to an increasing degree.

Computers provide us above all with data: Data in such profusion that we can only grasp it as a mathematical quantity. We are quick to speak of "knowledge" and of the "knowledgeable society" and suddenly we become aware of the fact that all this knowledge is like time. The knowledge proffered by the new world of data and the knowledge that we can assimilate in our finite lives are on a dramatically different scale. A chasm has opened up between world knowledge and personal knowledge.

The desire to experience a divine kind of co-existentiality between world-time and life-time has always been unattainable – at least in our "seventy or eighty years". The realization that we are faced with the same conundrum with regard to knowledge is relatively new.

Until the mid-eighteenth century there still existed the type of person referred to as uomo universale. People believed that it was a sensible and realistically achievable objective for individuals to acquire a universal education, meaning that he (or she) would know everything there was to know. Until the beginning of the 18^th century, there were about 700 species of animal known to man. One hundred years later, mankind was already able to identify 1700 species of ichneumon yellowjackets. This exponential increase in the amount of knowledge led pedagogues and educational experts on a search for the right answer to this new "condition humaine".

Encyclopedia and dictionaries were created. Since it is no longer possible to know everything, it is no longer necessary to do so. Ultra posse nemo tenetur is an old scholastic proverb. Should implies could. What cannot be done does not have to be done. It is enough to know which book to consult.

However, we now know that knowledge is like time. Time and knowledge are so infinitely great and our own capacity is so immeasurably small that we find ourselves facing not only the drama of diverging world-life and life-time but also the drama of dealing with the difference in world knowledge and personal knowledge.

I must confess that I am not equally interested in both these kinds of knowledge. The kind of knowledge that no longer has any relationship to mankind, what Karl R. Popper called "objective knowledge" that is perhaps no longer even produced by men but by machines, interests me far less than the kind of knowledge that I can acquire. This knowledge that helps me and my fellow men to deal with life is what interests me. My basic perspective from which all other considerations stem is the following: how can world knowledge be transformed into personal knowledge?

The explosion of data caused by new communication technologies and the techniques decisive to our future in helping us deal with and use this data have led to the catchword "knowledgeable society". But what exactly is knowledge? We can only really speak of knowledge once we have succeeded in assimilating objective data into our own knowledge – when we have used those structures available to assist us in realizing our objectives and selected the data that really interest us from the infinite amount of information out there.

The term "knowledgeable society" thus implies an imperative. "Knowledgeable society" is a programmatic term that stipulates the transformation of data into knowledge, of world knowledge into personal knowledge. What should we want to know? That is the decisive issue of the future.

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II

I have not spoken yet of another acceleration factor. This is the market factor.

There is an obvious comparison to be made here between the market, driven by competition that rewards the quickest and creates acceleration, with the evolution of life in nature. It seems that the market is an installation that succeeds because its principle of "survival of the fittest" mimics the natural laws of evolution. There is, of course, a fundamental difference between theses two worlds – the world of life and the world of the market. Both systems are driven by different laws. The primary criterion in evolution is survival of life itself, whereas the market follows the law of return on investment. Its main criterion is profit.

The market is also characterized by competition amongst the fittest that seems to direct market forces on the principle of auto-organization. Adam Smith called these forces the "invisible hand". It would seem that this method of auto-piloting which boils down to a complete absence of method, is superior to the use of method in directing or planning an economy. That is why the concept of competition has triumphed in the global conflict between market economies and planned economies – a conflict that was ultimately also a competition.

Following the end of planned economies that were supported by political structures we are now witnessing the world-wide recognition of the market economy. It has been accepted – albeit with bad grace - even by those who once fought it. Acceleration is increasing. The transition from an agrarian to an industrial society spanned some generations in our latitudes, where it all started. Since then, things have speeded up considerably. In some regions of Malaysia and Indonesia, progression from the stone age to an industrial society was completed perforce within the time-span of one generation.

Some forms of society will not accept such change. The industrialization enforced from above by the regime of the Persian Shah mobilized the revolutionary forces of fundamental Islam and helped them achieve political victory. The example of Iran is particularly interesting for us because it provides such a good case study of what could happen if the tempi, the different speeds at which societies operate, are not given due consideration.

If there really is something like an inner evolution of the market, it follows that the economy creates its own speed. Production cycles and turnover are becoming faster and faster. We speak in metaphorical terms of the "n"th generation of computers. Whilst we are busy accessing the internet with a newly installed appliance, we are already anticipating the arrival of its successor. We note, then, that computer generations and human generations are not analogous.

Marketing also responsible for the increase in turnover speed. The fact that we constantly need new cars, "new generation" cars, is not based on technical innovation. Sometimes, only the design changes.

It used to be the case that the market existed to satisfy the so-called basic needs: food, clothing, housing. Even then, acceleration was a force behind the desire to be the first to satisfy these needs. Now there is an additional factor in the equation. We are concerned less about satisfying needs than about discovering, maybe even inventing new needs. Turnover, production cycles and the return on investment are becoming faster and faster. Things have speeded up to the extent that we no longer have that familiar feeling of being in a state of flux (Heraclit), that some things will change tomorrow, some in a few weeks and a lot will change in a few years. Our feeling now is that everything will be different tomorrow and that is what we call revolution.

It is clear that the invention of the computer, the establishment of the internet and the many other innovations in communications technology have catapulted us into such just such a revolutionary burst of qualitative development. I need mention only the fusion of gene technology and communications technology, nanotechnology and the connection between brain research and data management.

These new communication technologies obviously constitute a tool with unprecedented qualities, a super tool able to optimize all functional systems. This increase in the performance levels of tools has led to further acceleration in the already accelerating system of the market economy: we are experiencing an acceleration of acceleration.

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III

The mere fact that everything is happening at a quicker pace in the closely knit complex of economy, science and technology does not constitute a qualitative improvement per se. The qualitative difference lies in the fact that whilst the market economy used to influence only one aspect of our lives – the production and distribution of goods and services – we are now witnessing spill-over effects on a large scale. Whole areas of our lives hitherto untouched by competition are subject to re-structuring and organization based on the principles of the market economy.

Americans have traditionally viewed the market economy as something highly positive. Industry and the market economy made life much easier for those living in the west. It helped them overcome hunger and sickness and it would be cynical to forget this. That is why we trust the market and are prepared to entrust everything to the directions given by an invisible hand.

The American media were privatized much earlier than in Germany. Based on the classic criterion of providing a return on investment, they aimed exclusively at satisfying customer demand. The older state-owned media channels in Germany were initially freed from the constraints of having to make a profit. In the meantime, private radio and television channels have been established and a real media market has developed in Germany as well. Public radio and television studios now have to compete with private channels and their programs have become market-oriented. They are adapting their products. Where is the "invisible hand" leading us?

Whilst I was a student in Munster, Germany, I observed the slow transformation of sport from the time when it was carried out largely by amateurs into a commercial enterprise. Post and telecommunications as well as the railways have now been restructured along market economy lines. Fine Arts, which had received their commissions from the state, the local duke or the Church for centuries, have long since begun working with all the tricks of the marketing trade.

The clearest example of change wrought by the market economy has taken place in the area of leisure and culture. Leisure time used to be free time during which individuals were liberated from the constraints and obligations imposed by the fight for survival and were free to amuse themselves and celebrate. The German word "Feierabend" which refers to the time after work, expresses this opposition very nicely. Where we once had a time of "non-work", we now find ourselves ruled by the law of supply and demand. Holidays and leisure time are marketed by the entertainment and tourist industry for all they are worth.

Agriculture, which had long been operated as an industry in America has always been a economic undertaking in good old Germany. But before it was commercialized, it was also an individual way of life with its own cultural forces.

Are there any areas of life left today that are not impregnated and determined by market ideology?

I am not telling you all this to advertise the "American way of life". It is clear that the industrialization of all areas of life is bound to and has indeed involved losses. Jürgen Habermas, of whom some of you may have heard, once spoke of a "colonization of life". I have no wish to start a discussion that pits unrestricted liberalism as a universal principle of organization for all areas of life against the concept of a social market economy – as you do in your European and German tradition. I am interested above all in pinpointing the way in which certain market forces that were once specifically linked to the production and distribution of goods and services have now spilled over on life in general – insofar as this life is functionally organized.

Obviously it is not only the market economy that is responsible for these spill-over effects. It required the further component of the super-tool, the computer. Equipped with the appropriate software, the computer is able to functionalize and optimize everything. It makes for far greater efficiency and does so at a far greater speed.

To recapitulate: these are the acceleration factors identified thus far:

 

• The life-time/world-time dilemma articulated by Hans Blumenberg becomes an existential acceleration factor unless it is defused by a religious response.

 

• The market economy is propelled by the motor of competition which also results in acceleration. The exponential curve of acceleration becomes even steeper as a result of industrialization.

 

• The market economy in conjunction with new communications technologies increases the speed and spills over into all areas of life.

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IV

This then, is my proposition:

Following the end of the obscurantism associated with National Socialist totalitarian ideology as well as various forms of religions fundamentalism and after the failure of a totalitarian planned market ideology, we now find ourselves heading for universal functionalism. It is to be feared that this might also prove totalitarian in a new, subtly devious subject-less manner.

Are there still white spots on the maps of our lives that are not (yet) ruled by functionalism? Are there still enclaves that are not governed by the dictates of advantage and benefit?

They do still exist, thank God! We can still perceive that there is another way. Maybe the family is one such enclave? I still know families in which individuals are valued even after they have stopped serving a purpose. Naturally, the relationship between parents and children is sometimes determined by utilitarian principles and psychological mechanisms which could be termed functional. But the real center of family life is love that is simply there and cannot really be explained. Love is trans-functional – it is the trans-functional counter-force.

However, I also know families in which even personal relationships are governed by functionalist attitudes more in keeping with the market-place: dealing with the family budget is one thing. Keeping records on how long one or other has been on child duty or how much time he or she has spent doing the household is quite another. Behavior like this shows that economic thinking has crossed the family threshold. It is my impression that economism or rather, economistic functionalism and market-oriented thinking is well on the way to conquering the last white spots in our society.

I hope that you won’t think me an unwordly theologian. How could I be, as President of one of America’s great universities, whose importance is derived largely from the reputation of the Department of International Business Studies? The seminar rooms and some of the passageways in Georgetown have openly accessible internet connections. I am in no way an opponent of the market economy and the computer and if it is true that the interplay of demand, supply and competition really is the best and most differentiated mechanism for steering all function systems then I am no fundamental opponent of functionalism either. The market economy is the best economic system that we have ever had. I simply don’t want functionalism to become totalitarian.

Adam Smith’s "invisible hand" is not the hand of God. It is a hand without a body, a hand without a head, a hand attached to nothing. That is the crucial difference.

It is a difference that makes all the difference. Fundamental issues are at stake here and when this is the case, any suspicion that somebody may be trying to gain absolute control is always justified. No doubt a market given a free rein and accelerated by the New Economy communications technology that knows no other criteria than that of a return on investment would constitute a completely new kind of totalitarianism. We would not need to fear a megalomaniac treading in Hitler’s shoes but rather the "invisible hand" that is not the hand of God. We must be aware of the dangers that lurk when forces such as these threaten to tear themselves free of their moorings. If we want to maintain politics as such, we must put a limit on the functionalisation of all areas of life.

The decisive question to ask in this context is whether there is anything left outside the reach of functionalism. Never has this question been as urgent as it is today. Is there such a thing as an "interruption principle", a way of abrogating the rule of usefulness.

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V

Yes. Such a principle of interruption or possibility of abrogating the rule of usefulness has existed for 2,500 years. As far as I am concerned, it is the most important tradition and one that provides an answer to the questions I ask of life. It is the tradition that Germany has recently begun referring to under the banner-term "Jewish enlightenment". I personally do not really like the unreflected coupling of Judeo-Christian because it fosters the misunderstanding that we want to appropriate Judaism. In this case, however, we are indeed referring to something that we definitely owe to Judaism.

Israel enlightened first itself and then humanity on the fact that self-made Gods are no Gods. Wherever human action is confronted with its own limitations, people tend to try and project their interests beyond the bounds of reality. Deities develop on the basis of functional utility. Israel realized early on that these Godheads owe their existence to their functional purposes. Modern criticism of religion as formulated by Feuerbach, Marx and Freud has illuminated the way such projections work. Strangely enough, they never took account of the Jewish Enlightenment.

In antiquity, sailors starting out on a sea voyage would make a sacrifice to the God Poseidon. The farmer hoping for a good harvest began a process of exchange and sacrifice with the god of fertility. There was a divine address for sickness and love – for every kind of human interest. The critique of religion expressed by Isaiah, Ezekiel and Amos that runs through the Old Testament like a red thread and is the backbone of Jewish Enlightenment clearly revealed the mechanism of useful Gods for what it was.

Israel’s God is radically different. He is not the projection of human needs, he is not a function of the world – he created the world. He is not just another name for the ideal of usefulness, for that which we might call the Good from our point of view. Because he is situated outside and above human estimates of usefulness, he himself is not calculable. He is secretive and contradictory. His signs are contradictory signs: "The burning bush that does not burn", "the virgin that gives birth", "the lion that lies with the lamb".

What is new and different about this God is that he cannot be pictured empirically. In order to safeguard his uniqueness and dissimilarity, no image can be made of him. On the contrary, his presence is characterized by an unwillingness to demonstrate his presence.

The sign with which we acknowledge God’s presence is respect for the day on which no goals may be pursued, on which the ideal of utility is suspended, on which no work may be done: the Sabbath.

"No work may be done on this day".

To work means to pursue objectives. The world of work is the world of functionalism. But the Lord’s day is the day of great repose. It is definitively removed from the continuum of time and the continuum of purpose. All of this applies in equal measure to Sundays, heir to the Old Testament’s Sabbath, as well as to Islam’s Friday. The Lord’s Day is time out, it is an institution outside the reach of normal time during which the forces of acceleration are at work.

For more than 2,500 days, Jews have experienced this other time, the time devoted to a different God. Christians have experienced it for two thousand years and Moslems for fourteen hundred years. Friday is the holy day for Moslems and they too belong to the great monotheistic family of religions that celebrates every seventh day.

What then, are our experiences? It is worth taking a closer look at them: what exactly do we do, when we are not working? We play, we celebrate, we luxuriate. For authors such as Huizinga, Hugo Rahner and Gadamer, playing indicates the transcendental structure of human life. And this day, dedicated to a different God, is hightened through the "holy game" of worship. In praising the creator of all life, the individual leaves the gravitational field of his own self. In prayer, he entrusts himself and the objectives he pursues to his counterpart. In this sense, the Council was right to emphasize the Eucharist as a pinnacle of Christian life. (In another sense, a greater pinnacle is of course achieved through active love, uniquely exemplified in the sacrifice of one’s own life).

Strictly speaking, we can never really do nothing. So what exactly does happen, when we do not work and cannot not do anything else?

The busy worker with his eyes trained on the horizon of purpose can lift them up and has time to consider himself and his situation. The Sabbath is the day of reflection. Re-flecting in this context means re-viewing the past week, re-tracing events, assessing and evaluating experiences. Sometimes, it is only possible to see connections with hindsight. Our memory helps us make judgement calls on past actions. We resolve to do better next time if we did badly last time.

As a time of re-flection, the Sabbath also gives us time to ask important questions. Questions on our origins. Where do I come from? Where do we come from? How did everything start? We look back. Then we turn around and direct our gaze to the future. Perhaps now is the time to speak of Sunday as the first day of the week on which everything is bathed in the glow of Easter. It is the day of resurrection, the day on which we can celebrate the future. Now we can think about our goals, life’s big goal and next week’s small ones. We resolve not to make certain mistakes again. Problems that need solving come to mind and we think of solutions – solutions we would never have found had we not been free from the constraints of incessant work. We need distance and a clear head to find solutions. We need Sundays. The Sabbath and Sundays, those are the days on which good ideas can surface. Those are the days of innovation and invention.

So let’s ask ourselves whether this day really is a day of no use? In his novel, "Joseph and his Brothers", the German writer Thomas Mann found a wonderful word to fit this context: "das Übernützliche", the super-useful. Sundays are "super-useful", they are trans-functional.

But here’s a suprise: the Sabbath presents us with something akin to a trans-functional paradox – let’s call it "the Sabbath-paradox". Abolishing the constraints of utility allows us to view the calculation of usefulness in a positive light, it enables us ask about the usefulness of utility – it opens up new vistas on the future. The time-out that interrupts the short time of work becomes an agent of long-time time.

Tempi, tempi! We live in times of different speeds. Sometimes it is right to hurry: Presto, prestissimo! Sometimes we have to step on the brakes and sometimes we need to step out into Sabbath-time. The issue at stake here is nothing less than the restitution of freedom. But freedom is not a monad. The Sabbath was given to a whole nation, a whole community; there is no such thing as a private Sabbath or a private Sunday. We all need to learn not to submit to the conformity of acceleration. Such one-dimensional conformity destroys the abundant variety of life.

The Sabbath-paradox is a cultural experience that helps explain why the belief in progress has become so dominant in the Judeo-Christian hemisphere. No other culture has been so innovative. This also applies to science and technology. A comparison between cultures shows that there have been many differentiated forms of society and highly developed cultures. But only the culture determined by Judeo-Christian thought as well as periodic phases of Islamic culture favored the development of modern civilization.

The God of the Ancient of Days, the God whose day is the Sabbath and Sunday, makes sure that those intent on discovering and doing his will can remove themselves from the here and now – now and then. The world, as it is, is not everything. The world needs to change. Existing schemes are transcended, exodus from the slavery of now is a basic pattern in Christian escatological practice.

Once again: what we fear is not functionalism. On the contrary, we are particularly successful at a functionalistic level. What we oppose is an absolutist functionalism and that is why we are successful. If it really is the case that a functionalistic economic totalitarianism presents a danger, the monotheistic tradition of interruption will prove a surprisingly valuable asset in our times.

The Sabbath then, has two faces:

The Sabbath, or Sunday, is the day of interruption on which the faithful gather to worship. It is God’s sign in today’s world. It allows us to step into the garden of memory and remembrance. It establishes a distance to the world of functional utility. The great issues in our rich but finite lives are reflected upon, salvation is proclaimed, Zeitangst disappears. Consolation is administered, God is praised. This is the real, the faithful side of Sunday.

Sunday’s other side becomes visible when we recognize the positive effects of superimposing transfunctionality on the functional world. That is why clever economists are quick to defend this day of super usefulness. It is a sign of economic intelligence to realize that stepping out of everyday life is better suited to serve certain economic objectives than the unthinking perpetuation of habitual activity. Perhaps some economists do not even know that this clever rule is part of our monotheistic heritage.

If we want creativity we must defend the Sabbath and Sundays. The usefulness of super-usefulness has this secular side as well. Seen from this point of view, it is really very easy to argue in favor of Sunday/Sabbath. Agreement between the faithful and the pragmatists will be easily achieved once there is widespread acceptance that the interruption of absolute functionalism is functionally useful. And why shouldn’t the pragmatists be faithful and the faithful pragmatic? For us Americans, this is hardly a new concept. We are transeconomic economists and transfunctional functionalists. By the way, I am not talking about shop closing times, which really don’t exist in America. Nonetheless, most Americans go to a Church or Synagogue on the Sabbath or Sundays.

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VI 

What does the Sabbath mean for us? What does it mean to recognize the paradox inherent in Sundays and their super-usefulness for our educational institutions?

What does a transfunctional approach signify for our educational system with regard to the new challenges it faces? If we agree that the invisible hand of the market is not automatically the hand of God, it follows that we are hardly likely to accept an insensible industrialization of the educational system with open arms.

Since Tony Blair proclaimed education the "mega issue", a fundamental debate has been going on in Europe. There are no doubt real problems at the heart of this debate. On the one hand, we have the globalization of the markets that has led to competition on a world-wide scale. On the other hand, we have the related problem of unemployment. Many politicians have recognized that in the absence of real natural resources, education is the only acceptable substitute. Some were shocked to hear that the findings of the TIMSS study showed their countries lagging far behind their international competitors when it came to performance in scientific and mathematical subjects. The economy needs more software specialists. The following question was thrown up: "How can an educational system be adapted to the needs of an employment system characterized by rapid change and tough competition?" The Federal Association of German Banks summarized the tasks that lie ahead in reforming education in the programmatic statement that it sent out with invitations to a symposium on education. I quote:

"The working world is undergoing fundamental changes. The key to economic performance lies increasingly in the areas of education and knowledge. The German educational system faces the following challenges: what knowledge must schools and universities teach and which institutional reforms are necessary for Germany to keep pace with developments in the New Economy?"

The way the question is formulated makes it clear that schools are regarded as the economy’s Kindergarten. This could lead to disputes between those who support traditional educational content and structures and those who wish to designate schools as supply stations for employment systems – a dispute between modernization and traditionalism. Perhaps we face a displacement struggle between new and traditional school subjects – or at least between the "hard" and the so-called "soft" subjects that would doubtless fall victim to the new quality control procedures.

What would a clever modernizer have to say in such a debate? A modernizer who wants to make schools a functional factor of economic life? The clever modernizer would have to notice a connection to our topic of different tempi. Why? Because there are at least two speeds at play here: economic speed and the pace of our own lives.

No matter how quickly computer generations succeed each other. No matter how short turnover and production cycles become – children and young people will not grow up any quicker because of it. The history of our species has given us a life-time. It provides us with a framework which cannot be adjusted – or only minimally so. Thanks to medical progress, we are able to live on average for longer than has ever been previously possible in the history of humanity. But childhood and youth – they cannot be speeded up.

A clever modernizer, initially intent on nothing more than making schools a functional factor of economic life, will recognize that the fast rate of economic change and the likelihood of its becoming even faster will make the working world into which a young person steps when he leaves school vastly different from the one he is dealing with today. He will have to differentiate between facts with a short utility span and that which is of more permanent value.

The debate on education has spawned a metaphor that glitters impressively when you first hear it. I mean the term "half-life knowledge" which refers to the decreasing value of knowledge that supposedly ages more and more quickly. Aren’t we mistaking knowledge for production cycles here? Of course, there is a kind of knowledge that ages quickly. This includes manuals for disposable equipment, descriptive data that describes rapidly changing processes, the population of Cairo, telephone books. But how quickly does basic arithmetic or the period system of the elements age?

Basic knowledge, dispositional knowledge and the so-called key competencies are not really subject to a process of aging. That is why our modernizer is likely to concentrate upon them. But what exactly is a key competence?

Do mathematical skills fall into the category of key competencies or basic knowledge? It is easy to agree on the fact that math and logic are important. Unless you want to go into science or technology you will only need basic calculating skills. Logic, on the other hand, is closely linked to language.

The ability to express oneself in one’s own language, mastery of its grammar, its metaphors and images will not be obsolete in fifty years time. Neither will knowledge of other languages. We Americans and the whole family of English-speaking nations are at an advantage here in that we speak the lingua franca as our mother tongue. For everybody else, the global economy is making it all the more important to speak English. Europeans, now part of an increasingly successful integration process, need to be able to understand their neighbors and that means speaking their language. Surely a clever modernizer would take all this into consideration. Learning under the rule of rapid change means learning for the long-term. Learning for the long-term means acquiring not only enduring types of knowledge but above all, learning how to learn. This is what the clever modernizer will need all his life and that is why he sees it as the decisive, mega-cognitive key competence.

There is a lot involved in the process of learning: the ability to concentrate, diligence and knowing how to use learning aids. Successful learning also requires certain personal characteristics such as self-discipline and self-motivation. Learning also has a definite social dimension. Some things can only be learnt in cooperation with others and this requires mastery of a whole range of behavioral patters from imitation to controlled conflict but above all, the ability to work in a team. If learning is connected to character, then it must also be linked to upbringing. In the last analysis, a good upbringing is defined by the ability for personal growth – not only in the promotion of one’s own interests but as part of a community for the community.

Of course, learning also presupposes mastery of the computer and the internet. But the clever modernizer will have no worries on this score because he knows that this new medium is so enticing and gratifying that it will take care of itself. Some people fear that society will find itself divided into those who use this new medium to their own advantage and the rest who are left behind. The clever modernizer, the really clever modernizer endowed with a sense of social responsibility, will observe this. But he knows that the new medium is so well equipped to assert itself on the market that schools will no longer be called upon in a few years time to acquaint their students with its importance. The computer, therefore, is not so much a subject of education as an aid to education.

An important topic in German politics is the demand for soft-ware specialists. This issue will resolve itself on the basis of market mechanisms. If specialists are scarce, they will be well-paid. If they are paid well, there will be more of them. There is no need to change the structure of the educational system to deal with this issue.

It will not be long before all German schools are on the internet, but the clever modernizer knows that this is only the beginning of educational reform. The more important issue is the role to be played by computers and the internet in schools and universities.

This issue will be resolved, in part at least, by a process of trial and error. But we can say even now that the rapidly increasing amount of knowledge and the process of aging that will make some of it redundant will require us to concentrate on keeping an overview and refrain from stuffing ourselves with ephemeral data detritus. We will need to separate the wheat from the chaff and maintain a kind of mental porosity that allows unnecessary information to be filtered and forgotten.

Learning to use the computer does not, of course, imply learning only how to press the right search button. It also means resisting some offers. There is a lot that is of no value whatsoever on the net. Some offers are dubious to say the least. It also a medium of dissipation, a commercial for the superfluous and the criminal.

A clever modernizer will give priority to an educational policy that is directed towards the individual and his ability to determine his own role and integrate himself in the community. If such a policy is serious about the individual and his freedom, it should contribute towards establishing a competency that encourages user independence or, to put it more simply, his freedom from the medium.

One of the computer’s more sensational capabilities is that it connects us not only with other persons but can itself take on the guise of a quasi-person. Because it can simulate interaction, we need to make sure that the difference between people and computers is not disregarded. The world of the new media is a world of interconnected worlds with the capability to (pro)create more and more of these worlds. However, the variety of these possible worlds remains contingent upon the real world and in the end, it is always the one individual sitting in front of the computer. He, or should I say, we, must maintain dominion over the machine. And now we come to the question: how would a clever modernizer conversant with the interests of the employment system, deal with the Sabbath-paradox? What kind of person does he think he would be dealing with? What kind of educational concept would he develop if it were initially geared solely to economic life? Naturally, he would take the lessons of the Sabbath-paradox to heart. He would include many aspects that are not directly linked to the issue of utility. Perhaps his well-educated individual would write poems or be creative at some other level – maybe he would collect pre-Columbian ceramics or photographs from the 1905s. His well-developed capability for assessing political events would doubtless be the result of a wide-ranging knowledge of history. His favorite composer might be Archangelo Corelli. He himself plays the saxophone – sometimes with old friends from the university.

The clever modernizer would deal with the challenges presented by acceleration by concentrating on those cultural goods that form the bedrock and stabilizers of our culture and are becoming increasingly rare and increasingly valuable. When changes take place so rapidly, there needs to be a nucleus that guarantees identity. It is precisely in order to withstand the pressure of acceleration that we need to behave independently of it. Economic life needs steadfast, mature leadership personalities. But what about the majority of the population? It too needs continuity and identity. It needs the communal structure provided by life both in and as a community with values that bind the community together. It is therefore very much in the interests of the economy that there be a public education system working on a compensatory level independent of daily market concerns. A public education system and the economy can only complement each other if they are not mutually contingent. There is a useful lesson in the division of labor to be learnt here.

An economy that needs to earn money in the short-term is not in a position to take into account everything it will need in the long-term. That is why schools and universities are in a position to help the employment system by providing an education that serves to sharpen the collective memory of a cultural identity and encourages continuity. The Sabbath-paradox has shown that in some cases, instruction in music, art and literature, even in Latin and Greek have more long-term uses for the economy than a schooling in business studies precisely because of the unspecific diversity they stand for. We need to set aside time, subjects and spaces in our schools for the pursuits proper to the Sabbath-day – they are islands of reflection and self-awareness that widen our horizons. In the long-term, they also serve the employment system. Their biggest contribution, however, is to living a fuller life.

If we respond to the new threat of a new kind of economistic-functionalistic totalitarianism by calling upon the traditions of the monotheistic Sabbath-tradition, if we realize how eminently topical the trans-functionalistic forces of our Christian heritage are, we are not anti-modernists casting scorn on the New Economy. On the contrary, by demonstrating that life and not the return on investment is our top priority, we can prove our extrinsical usefulness for the economy.

Let’s leave the considerations on adroit functionalism behind us now, as we come to an end. There is a knowledge that signifies more than knowing "about" or "how to"! I have always been impressed by Kant’s term of "disinterested pleasure". By observing the world around me not with a view to gaining control of it but gaining pleasure from it, I am able to feel my affinity with its creator. We have a distant memory of an old story, in which there was a tree, the tree of good and bad knowledge. We no longer inhabit the Garden of Eden – and we need to remember this. But we would still like to know what it’s fruit tastes like – a foretaste, that’s all we would need to get an inkling of divine pleasure. I am convinced that for this too, there is a time.