The Metamorphosis of the World

The aim of this book is to try to understand and explain why we no longer understand the world. To this end, I introduce the distinction between change and metamorphosis or, more precisely, between change in society and metamorphosis of the world. Social change, routinizes a key concept in sociology. Everyone knows what it means. Change brings a characteristic future of modernity into focus, namely permanent transformation, while basic concepts and the certainties that support them remain constant. Metamorphosis, by contrast, destabilizes these certainties of modern society. It shifts the focus to ‘being in the world’ and ‘seeing the world’, to events and processes which are unintended, which generally go unnoticed, which prevail beyond the domains of politics and democracy as side effects of radical technical and economic modernization. They trigger a fundamental shock, a sea change which explodes the frame of our previous existence and understanding of the world. Metamorphosis means that what was unthinkable yesterday is real and possible today.

We have been confronted with metamorphoses of this magnitude in recent times, in a series of ‘insane events’, from the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 9-11 attacks, catastrophic climate change all over the world, the Fukushima disaster, and the financial and euro crises to the threats to freedom by totalitarian surveillance in the digital age denounced by Edward Snowden. We are always confronted with the same pattern: what was ruled out beforehand as utterly inconceivable is taking place – as a global event, mostly observable in every living room because it is transmitted by the mass media.