And part of the reason for this predictably ambidextrous answer can be seen in Sloterdijk’s choice of George Schulz’s cynical oil painting, Industrial Farmers, a painting that for some would combine Grant Wood and Georg Grosz.

 Georg Schulz, Industrial Farmers, 1920 (Von der Heydt Museum Wuppertal)

What is of interest in the painting is its cavalier depiction of perversity, of cupidity in the case of the father and exploitative intimacy in the case of the mother and the piglet on her lap (and what one knows of its destiny -- the stainless steel mesh on the mother’s hand seems to show the threat that awaits the thus poised suckling pig). And the famer’s progeny, head tilted to show a literal mindlessness, torturing a frog. In the small window on the opposite side of the twisted flystrip handing from the ceiling, a figure with a strangely convex hollow core sporting what seems to be star in the lower part of the round barrel of his coat stands next to a mechanical harvesting truck in a field harvested clean.

The vision of the farmer exemplifies what Heidegger will later, infamously and inexcusably and precisely accurately name “industrial agriculture.” 

 And for Sloterdijk,

A new provincial consciousness emphasizes that enlightenment cannot pledge itself for all time to a blind alliance with the scientific-technical-industrial complex, even if the latter has been its inseparable companion for centuries.  
The social forefront of enlightenment today aims at a qualification of that technical enlightenment with whose unleashing the hot phases of our history began. In it can be discovered traces of myth, dreams of a rational-magical mastery of nature, omnipotence fantasies of political engineers. (CCR, 95)
 

We can also call this as we increasingly do, globalization and the imperative of “urban imperialism” or sustainable development.   

But what is in a name?