Hi and welcome to Episode 17!

Sometimes an essay changes your life. This week we discuss Peter Sloterdijk’s 1999 essay “Rules for the Human Zoo.” We have individually spent a decade in thought with this essay. Its gifts are endless. But before we launch into the essay, we take a small detour to Flavortown:

A recent rewatching of Guy Feiri’s Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives launched Seth through a dizzying reappraisal of Guy’s work. In 2012, back when Seth and Alex were still in grad school, Pete Wells wrote a scathing review of Guy’s Times Square restaurant Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar. The review indulged in purple prose in the same vein as Guy’s decadent american fare: “did your mind touch the void…” Wells framed his review as an interrogation, a series of questions aimed at unraveling the gimmicky exuberance of Feri’s NYC vision. The New York Times review became something unto itself. We each remember reading it and howling with laughter. Guy seemed to embody everything wrong with America: an over-the-top, in-your-face style that freely borrows (steals) international fare and haphazardly smashed together in a 10,000 calorie offering; a monstrous form of the idyllic fantasy of the American fantasy.

As 2020 comes to a weary end, all we have to say to Guy is this: forgive us. In a moment fear has gripped our culture and metastasized into violent outbursts and outright rejections of basic scientific facts, Guy represents a vision of a better America, one where local businesses blend cultural techniques and traditions into local staples. His show is a celebration of the best our culture has to offer. Indeed, Diner’s, Drive-Ins, and Dives may represent the 21st century’s most sustainable theory of cosmopolitanism: unpretentious, celebratory, local, and global. We call this inland cosmopolitanism. 

Our conversation moves to our main topic: Peter Sloterdijk’s essay “Rules for the Human Zoo.” Our consideration is framed around the decade we’ve spent thinking about the essay. In many ways the essay speaks to the hopes, dreams, and disappointments that anyone engaged with the humanities is bound to. We take some time to consider how this essay has aged from the time it was written, to when we first encountered it a decade ago, and to how it reads today. 

On the one hand the essay is deeply cynical: the tradition of the humanities is presented as an effort to domesticate human society; in this light the history of humanism is a history of a series of rhetorical one-upmanship where each generation enacts its oedipal revenge on the past through its framing of the future. On the other hand the essay affirms the enlightenment’s deepest and most durable insight: the project of critical thinking is never over and each generation contains the capacity to break the man-forged manacles of the mind. Sloterdijk is right to point out that this process looks more grim today, as the heart of this work is simply archived in some dusty room. It’s easy to slip into the nihilism that the essay invites. While it’s important to be realistic about the state of things, it’s also important to see the greater cycles at work. “And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.”

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