All anger spent?

The winning smile of Joseph Muscat was throughout last week inclusively addressed to all "progressives and moderates". Were you among those who, from outside the magic inner circle of the Labour Party, were touched by his clarion call for unity?

It certainly spun out of the starry twinkling, almost invisible winking of his eyes with nearly as much loving pathos as used to resound in the voice of the late Chiara Lubich. But actually I was reminded rather more of a less saintly guru - Peter Sloterdijk, perhaps the most popular philosopher/whizz-kid in Germany nowadays.

Last year, Sloterdijk published a bestseller called Time and Anger. In it he claimed to outline the "conditions of possibility" of a post-Communist Left.

The classical Left, according to the Professor, in the past flourished on the anger (and hurt pride) of a downtrodden working class. But with the apparently chastened capitalism of the West in our times, the masses have lost their anger. That does not mean that they are happy, or even satisfied. On the contrary, the captains of industry have managed, through advertising and allied techniques, to instil in them an infinite and ever more avid thirst for consumption.

The collective feeling to which the ensuing surges of insatiable desire give rise, instead of the revolutionary anger of yesterday, is rather a kind of eroticism, in bluish, depressed keys.

The collective anger that had animated the Left throughout its historic existence seemingly survives today, in Sloterdijk's bespectacled eyes, only among Muslim fundamentalists. That lonely flame of ancient fury still brutally blazing out of the ashes and embers of the classical Left is producing a paradoxical result. It is enabling the classical Right to thrive on a vote-catching rhetoric: Resist Terrorism! But the anti-terrorist discourse, Sloterdijk says, is only a smokescreen. It serves to blind us to the transition occurring across the globe from Liberal to Authoritarian Capitalism.

Surely that line of thinking cannot possibly lead anyone to figure out an attractive New Left policy. You have yourself argued that we now live in an information society, in a knowledge economy. So the central task of the Left is to counteract the growth of a new form of gross inequality that now menaces us, in terms of the wealth and power that now go with the control of knowledge and of its dissemination. In other words the key challenge is to devise a system of governance that allows us to manage the new common heritage of humankind in such a way that it can be openly accessed and creatively used by everybody. How different from yours is Sloterdijk's proposal?

His premise is that the cause of greatest suffering for the majority of Western (and, soon, it will also be Eastern) citizens is increasingly the feeling of insignificance, aimlessness and consequently boredom with their everyday life. Therefore, the Left can best fulfil its traditional mission of lightening the burden of living for the greatest number possible by providing them with as much free, intelligent and even clever fun as it can.

Taking his cue from Nietzche, Sloterdijk pictures the political struggle between Right and Left as a sort of boxing match between a slow-moving heavyweight and an agile flyweight. Conservatives have always tended to ponderous action, solemn speech and powerful knock-out blows. The Left can only defeat them through sharpness of eye, deftness of foot and sleight of hand.

Hegel had said that philosophy was best done on Sunday afternoon. Sloterdijk adds that accordingly the long weekend was not only the most promising 20th Century Leftist achievement, but also a human conquest of supreme value for the fulfilment of the (philosophic) vocation of all human beings.

What was it that reminded you of Sloterdijk in Muscat?

First of all, he has really distinguished himself in the European Parliament mainly by his minute looking after consumer interest. He seems to seriously agree with Sloterdijk that Leftist politicians, like philosophers, should focus, or rather scatter their attention, mostly on the small matters of life - what he calls the micrological approach.

Secondly, from a formal point of view, the "Joseph" brand of charm is obviously the style that goes with the brightening up of the banality of daily life that is the essential content of the Left policy proposed by Sloterdijk.

Thirdly, and most significantly, consider the task he has had so far to engage in "micrologically" within the inner core of his own party. Was it not very similar indeed to that of the Leftist leader vis-à-vis the infinitely avid multitude? He was faced with a cast of desire-thwarted people, who alternately groaned and growled much more in pain than in anger. The equipment he needed most did not seem to be of the ICT kind, but bandages, ointments and anaesthetic devices. A first-aid box, with a few flattering phrases and odd job offers, neatly packed so as to be nicely administered, was plainly inadequate.

For instance, I mused: what role might be assigned, in a Sloterdijkian perspective, to an old-timer whose venerable bones fitted so badly into the new school uniform and hurt so humiliatingly that self-expulsion ensued?

Crystal Palace is the name of Sloterdijk's most consumer-loved book. I imagined a special room being furnished (and blessed) inside it. The queues of both local visitors and foreign tourists are welcomed (for a fee) to inspect and chat with a unique host: the world's last active and authentic socialist. Would that not be (with due apologies to Birdlife) killing more than two birds of prey with a single micro-stone?

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti