Episode #189 ... Everything that connects us is slowly disappearing. - Byung Chul Han pt. 2
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Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Thank you to everyone who supports the show on Patreon. For an ad-free version of the show, sub at any level at patreon.com slash philosophizethis. So whenever you hear people talking about dystopian futures or digital panopticons, one of the ones that's always going to get brought up is George Orwell's 1984.

It's a classic. It's like the Casablanca of dystopian futures. I mean, I'd like to die in it if I could. It talks about a surveillance state that's all-encompassing, not unlike the one we just referenced on the freedom versus security episode we did. But to the philosopher we're talking about today, Byung-Chul Han, 1984, for a lot of people out there that are talking about this stuff, may actually end up being a bit of a red herring.

See, to him, there's a lot of different types of dystopian futures that could happen out there. And if you're only looking for one of them, you may end up missing the one you're actually living in.

To Hahn, the far more accurate literary example of a dystopian future that resembles the world we're in is not Orwell's 1984, but Aldous Huxley's 1932 book called Brave New World. See, in Brave New World, totally different vibe than 1984. First of all, all the people in the book live under a single unified global world state. Everybody is one in the book.

And when someone dies, there aren't people having babies to be able to replace them. The government replaces them by growing a new human inside of a hatchery. Far less messy. Then this new person from birth is psychologically conditioned and engineered by the government for a particular role in the society depending on what's needed. After a certain point, once people come of age in the book, the government gives everybody a hallucinogenic drug called soma that they take every day. Now, it's not mandatory to take soma in the book, but basically

But basically everybody in the society does. It makes you calm. It makes you compliant. It makes you free of any sort of negative emotions that might otherwise come up and mess with the stability of the society. And to Byung-Chul Han, this is a far better metaphor for how our digital panopticon is operating. Because in our world, it's not a matter of guilting people by pointing cameras at them all day and forcing them to fall in line. You just make people dependent upon a drug and then watch as they continue to take that drug voluntarily day after day after day.

It's funny, a lot of people enjoyed last episode of the show, a lot of comments. Some people didn't like Han so much, a lot of people did. But one interesting comment that was recurring from the people that liked what he had to say was simply, "Why haven't I heard of this guy before? I mean, it's strange, he has such a powerful message. Where is he in the news media?" Well, there's a few reasons for that. For one, his work really hasn't been translated into English until fairly recently.

But maybe the main reason that an informed person like yourself wouldn't have heard about Han before this is that his ideas don't really fit in neatly to the often oversimplified political narrative that dominates Western media. I mean, if Byung-Chul Han's work could be reduced into something that was 100% conservative or 100% progressive, he'd be a superstar right now. The problem is his work isn't that simple. And if your work isn't that simple, it's tough for media that's driven by ideology to know where to even place you.

It's tough for them to know whether you're actually an ally or not. Like, are you fully committed, son, to agreeing with us on literally everything that ever comes out of our mouth? Are you going to play ball? They don't like his answer to that question. The good news, though, is that for a show like this, we're driven by an ideology of curiosity, if anything. We're just trying to entertain ideas without necessarily accepting them, right? So in that context, he fits in perfectly here. Now, I have an obvious statement to lead this episode with, but it needs to be said.

Because Han is a guy that's doing his work in today's world, he's often commenting on things that are going on in today's world. So over the course of this episode, there's going to be several things we're talking about that no doubt you're already going to have heard about, and more than likely, you're already going to have intelligent explanations for why these things are occurring. That's fine. But just know that Byung-Chul Han sees many of these things through a totally different lens than other people in the media landscape. He sees them through the lens of his work that we started talking about last episode.

So whether it's the crisis of democracy, conspiracy theories, fake news, rites of passage, there's going to be several things we talk about in this episode. Just know that Byung-Chul Han sees all these things as manifestations of that ethos we talked about on last episode. And that in this episode, we're talking about the actual examples, the actual points of contact he sees and how society is changing.

And because there's going to be several of these, if I had to sum it up and put it into a thesis to give this episode some initial structure, I'd say this: that the rise of narcissism, the rise of authenticity as a neoliberal slogan everyone should be aiming for, and the rise of this technology everyone uses that makes everyone's experience of reality far more shallow, all these things combined to Byung-Chul Han are making several very important things that bind and connect society completely disappear.

In philosophical terms, what he says is disappearing are constructive forms of negativity. And each one of these things that's disappearing is going to have a different book that he writes that's dedicated to it.

Now, we'll know what he means by constructive negativity by the end of the episode. Point is, to say that everything that binds or connects people is being destroyed by the structure of society, that's a pretty big statement to make. So I want to start with that big statement, and I want to take some time here to give a few examples of what he's talking about. And just so we don't skip anything, I want to start from the place that we ended last episode on.

It seems pretty uncontroversial to start this episode by saying that what happens when you give people this message that they're a project to be optimized, that they're a commodity that needs to improve their market value by constantly learning and growing, that they are the sole person that should be determining who they are, and that if anybody ever tries to tell them who or what they should be to not listen to that person, when you divvy out that message to people en masse,

Byung-Chul Han would say it should not be surprising to you if what emerges from that is a society where people generally just consider the existence and opinions of other people less because they're focused on themselves, and are more skeptical towards community bonds that try to tell them what to do because they should decide what to do.

And if these inwardly focused people are more skeptical of things that bond communities together, then one of the common things in the world this type of person is naturally going to be antagonistic towards are the very rituals and traditions that communities often participate in.

Put another way, to Byung-Chul Han, a trap that's common for a narcissistic person to fall into is that they will reject social norms, mores, customs, and politeness. And they will reject these things simply on the basis of who are any of these people to tell me how I should be acting anyway.

If you want a good example of the kind of thing he's talking about, think of something like not using swear words in public. All right? On the one hand, not swearing in public at bottom is a completely arbitrary thing to just impose upon people from the outside. Oh, what? What? You got your little list of forbidden words I'm not supposed to say?

What, did they make the old people around you uncomfortable? Tell grandma to go eat her lemon drops and do her crossword puzzle over there and let the adults talk the way we're gonna talk. I'm not just gonna grovel at your feet because you have certain sounds your parents told you were bad and it makes you feel uncomfortable. That's nonsense. But on the other hand, Byung-Chul Han might say, arbitrary as it may seem, not using swear words in public is actually a token of respect to a collective social agreement we all have that binds us all together in some way.

I mean, what are we really doing when we have an unwritten agreement that we're not going to do something? Anything? In part, what we're saying is, look, we're all out here, okay? We're all still alive. We're all waking up every day, taking a shower, going to work, trying to make this whole thing operate. This whole thing, by the way, that we all recognize when it comes down to it, is a pretty fragile experiment we're running on a razor's edge that in many ways relies on the cooperation of everyone continuing to play along.

Not using swear words in public in some societies. This is an example of one small thing we all do that's part of the glue that holds that society together. In other words, the function of the ritual in this case is that it binds and connects people together in some way. Now, from the perspective of the narcissist, they don't see it that way, or at least it's hard for them to. From their perspective, this is just something that's being imposed upon them from the outside. This is people telling me what I can and cannot do. Nobody should be doing that.

And because they see everything only in terms of that immediate transactable value to them, it's harder for them to see the value this has to the group more broadly. And obviously this extends far beyond the use of swear words in public. Take another example of something in the realm of being polite to each other. You're walking through the grocery store, a little too fast with your cart. You come to an intersection. Someone from another aisle comes to that exact same intersection. You almost hit each other, but you don't. You guys both give the wave. Pardon me. Sorry about that. The smile. And then you move on.

Why do we do that? Why waste your time doing that? From a narcissistic point of view, that person doesn't own the grocery aisle. I have every right to be there just as much as them. Why should I pay deference to any other person on this planet? I didn't ask them to be in the store. Who are they to have a problem with me? If they have a problem with me, then they never have to see me again. This inward obsession, right? You could certainly see it this way, but rituals, customs, norms to Byung-Chul Han...

These are things that have served an absolutely crucial social function all throughout human history. And again, the prevalence of this sort of narcissistic rejection of them, amplified by technology, is leading to their disappearance. So let's get down to it. What is a ritual to Han? Because the examples I've given so far have just been in the domain of politeness, but as you can imagine, rituals fall under a much broader class of definition.

In his book called The Disappearance of Rituals, Hahn says he thinks a good way to describe the function of a ritual is to call it a temporal technology for housing oneself. Now on the surface, to some that can sound overly philosophical, like cringe levels of effort are going on here to try to sound smart, job interview level cringe, but it actually makes a lot of sense if you take a second to break it down. If a technology is something we often make that provides some sort of use for us as people,

Then a temporal technology, temporal meaning related to time, a temporal technology, a ritual, is something that does something useful for us when it comes to the progression of time. To get closer to what he means, Hans says rituals are in time as things are in space.

Let's think about what he means by that. Imagine being in physical space with no physical things around you. What would that be like? Well, it'd be like being in parts of outer space. You'd just be floating in whatever direction you were. There'd be nothing to walk on. There'd be nothing to reach towards. There'd be no structure to any of it at all.

Well, so too with rituals when it comes to the passage of time for Han. A society without rituals, or an individual life without rituals, is one where every single moment blurs into the next. There's nothing to mark the end of one activity or period in life and the beginning of another. There's no closure for Han. Think of the common complaint you'll hear in modern society of people that say there's no such thing as a rite of passage anymore. They'll say there's no ritual or no specific moment that graduates someone from being a child into an adult, for example.

But when that's a possibility for someone, the result of this is sometimes that it becomes possible to just sort of sit in adolescence for a decade of your life until you become so embarrassed by your life that you finally move on to the next stage. It's a bad look. But more importantly to Han, it's a tragic look. Because this is just one example of hundreds in the modern world where people don't ever get closure on one period of their life so that they can be fully immersed and present in the next period of their life. They just get stuck in purgatory in a lot of ways now.

The reason these transitions between different moments in life and moments in our day are important is because at a deep, deep level, we are narrative creatures to Han. We make sense of our lives, we get meaning from the things that are going on in the world around us when they fit into some larger structured story that we have. To Byung-Chul Han, rituals provide that structure. They are the things that give meaning to time and turn time into anything other than just an endless succession of separate moments that are all unrelated to each other.

How does any one moment come together into a meaningful plot point in the story of your life? When Han says that a ritual is a temporal technology for housing oneself, this is what he means by it. Which is also to say, in more philosophical terms, that they provide a certain amount of what Han calls constructive negativity.

They slow time down in a way to Han. Things that bind or connect communities together, things like trust, integrity, commitment, faithfulness, these are not instantaneous things. These are things that take time to develop, which then allows deeper connections within the group as a whole to develop. To Han, life loses all stability when everything in it is short-term. Rituals provide that more long-term structure.

So again, from a narcissistic perspective, when you're just wrapped up in your own life, it's so easy to be a critic of a ritual that's not immediately benefiting you in a transactional way. It's so easy to make fun of these morons doing a flash mob. Really? Did that make you feel special? Waving your hands around, messing with people's day? Or how about the morons doing the 10 millionth gender reveal party this year? Ooh, I wonder if it's going to be blue.

On one hand, it's so easy to make fun of them. But on the other hand, if you're somebody whose life is practically devoid of rituals...

Go do a flash mob. Tell me how you feel afterwards. Laugh at the sheep that are all going off to university, for example. But on the other hand, go to a university, immerse yourself in that ritual completely, and tell me how you feel afterwards. To Byung-Chul Han, we need daily and lifelong rituals to help bring that narrative structure into our lives in a world that's making it increasingly hard to be able to get those things by default.

Now, since we're at this point in the discussion, I want to pivot to another one of these things Han thinks is disappearing from society, something else that historically has provided narrative structure and bound and unified people in the process. What I'm talking about is truth. The ability for people to arrive at truth or knowledge is starting to disappear as well. He writes about it in his book called The Information Society. First of all, it should be said, truth and knowledge disappear.

These are also not things to Byung-Chul Han that can get instantly injected into your head with a TikTok or a YouTube video. You know, in the same way that when it comes to rituals, where life would otherwise be a sea of moments that are all unrelated to each other if rituals didn't give them that context as part of the narrative of your life, when it comes to developing knowledge or truth or a cohesive narrative about how reality works,

Looking down at your phone and being fed an endless stream of these fragmented bits of information, news stories, social media posts, videos, none of this stuff is being presented to you in a way that even attempts to link it to any context that makes it enduring. That's a problem to Byung-Chul Han. You know, in former societies, you'd get a piece of information about reality, but

And then you'd have a while to sit with it. You would contemplate it. You'd consider what it means within a larger narrative framework. You'd weigh those ideas up against the narrative framework of other people and come out the other side of that whole process with something that was actually illuminating about reality. But in today's world, he says, with this constant stream of information, the stream of information rushes past the truth.

There's no time anymore for anyone to truly think. There's no constructive negativity. Because by the time someone gets done reading one of these self-referential news stories, it's now time to read the next news story so they can stay up to date. Your life really does become kind of like a Mr. Beast video where, you know, three seconds can't go by without explosions going off. And, oh, look, now there's a treasure chest full of money on the screen. Oh, now they're shooting at each other in an Apache helicopter.

Byung-Chul Han would say, you know, just try to appreciate how truly different that is from the way almost every other human being has ever lived. If you were a peasant living during the Middle Ages, for example, the content that you consumed, if you had any, the external information that you consumed that was potentially going to influence you, you literally thought it was the word of God. Like your news anchor was the creator of the universe in your eyes.

But now, now that we live in the age of information, now we just have CNN and Fox. Now we have fake news. Now all we have is an endless stream of unverified, contingent, surface-level information that doesn't really illuminate anything about reality. In fact, it does the opposite to Han. It further disorients people. It just produces anxiety. It fragments perception. Every piece of information relies on surprising people.

Like if you were the weirdo that reads a news story in today's day and age and you sat on it for a week contemplating it, deliberating, by the time you got back to the news cycle, you'd be so far behind, the story wouldn't even matter anymore. And what you'd realize in that moment is that these stories are not some hard-hitting journalism that people have put a lot of effort into. They really are just surface-level information so that the news outlet could have something to put up there on the screen to surprise people and get them clicking.

And it's because of this reality and this age of information rather than knowledge that people are just more susceptible to things like fake news than they've ever been before. 200 years ago, fake news could have never been this effective. But because people don't even have time to verify the last story and connect it to a larger narrative before they have to get back to their news app to be informed about the next story...

That speed, that access, that excess positivity to Han creates an environment where fake news is not only possible, but it's proliferating. This also creates the environment, he thinks, where the rise in conspiracy theories in recent years starts to make a lot more sense. Because people are lacking that binding, connecting narrative of truth that's always existed before this.

Now people become so desperate to actually have a narrative that they even start creating their own narratives or latching onto others that aren't necessarily very sound, but their followers will never realize it anyway as long as we keep feeding them so much information that they stay in a frenzy of whatever's being talked about right this second. If rituals are the constructive negativity that slows down time enough to create trust and integrity and other necessary social bonds...

then in this world where we're just fed cursory raw information, contemplation is going to be the thing that slows things down enough to allow for truth and knowledge to be possible. Once again, Farhan, what's disappearing from society is at bottom this constructive negativity.

He says, quote, So to move on to another area of life that Hahn thinks is being disintegrated,

The removal of this negativity, he thinks, has actually started to undermine culture at a fundamental level and all the places where people in the past have gotten their sense of identity altogether. So if anyone in recent years has made the claim that we're in a period where people feel like they're in a crisis of meaning and a crisis of identity all at the same time, if that's said to be a hallmark of our age, here's where Byung-Chul Han's work can start to explain why he thinks that's occurring.

Because when this neoliberal ethos of questioning outside rituals and norms, when that gets applied at the level of culture, what you get to Han is what we commonly call in normal everyday conversation, globalization. You get an attitude by people of, hey man, hey, what's with all these arbitrary lines in the sand, man? What's with all these borders between people? We got to open these up. We got to stop pretending like these races and nationalities mean anything. We're all one thing. We're all the same.

Now, it seems like a very inclusive sentiment there. But the subtext of saying that none of these boundaries between people are real is that you're also saying your perceived individual culture, the kind of thing historically people have used for thousands of years to get big pieces of their sense of identity and meaning. The subtext is that, yeah, that isn't real either. You just got to get over all these arbitrary differences you're focusing on.

And notice the connection to last episode when Han was talking about the terror of the same and how this whole attitude eventually smooths everything out and takes away the rough edges so that nobody's disagreeing anymore and everything can keep on being economically productive and efficient. The endgame of a neoliberal ethos of authenticity to Han is not a bunch of different groups that are all coexisting, but seven and a half billion narcissists all with their own worldviews competing with each other in complete peace.

But one thing should be clear: this is not uniting everyone to Byung-Chul Han. This is homogenizing everyone. When you push for globalization, by turning everything into the same thing, you're not dealing with the actual differences between you and the other. You're just making it so that you never have to encounter the other ever again because now everybody's the same.

But to Hahn, this is a bad move. Because there's such a thing, he says, as healthy boundaries between truly different cultures. That's what we should be aiming for. What we need, Hahn says, is more of what he calls eros. Now eros is a term that's been used at several points throughout human history. First introduced in ancient Greek mythology, eros represented the forces of love and desire at that time, I believe.

It was used by Freud, Jung. We talked about it in our Frankfurt School series. The important point here, so we don't get too far off track, is that it represents another one of these things that bind and connect us together in human relationships that's disappearing to Byung-Chul Han.

Han doesn't define Eros as love and desire. He writes about it in his book called The Agony of Eros, and he calls it at one point, quote, "...the relation to the holy other." End quote. Not holy, like in a biblical sense, but holy, like the entirely other is what he means.

We've obviously touched on this piece of his work last episode, and we talked about trying to listen to someone as they are, not just in terms of how they transactionally benefit you or compare to you, but in their total difference from you, feeling, sitting with how uncomfortable that may make you feel, and not trying to get away from it. Eros is the formal name that he gives to it. And notice how easily something that historically embodied love quickly turns into something that truly acknowledges real differences in other groups as they are.

If you're a poetic sort of person, you can really start to see how the two terms overlap with each other. Differences to Han are absolutely crucial for any kind of healthy human relationship that you're ever going to try to have. On a personal level, if you're hanging out with a bunch of people that you have zero real differences with, that's probably not a good thing.

Well, in the same way, when a society doesn't have this eros, a society without these counterweighting voices that truly questions itself, a society that has nothing to shake it out of its narcissistic inwardness, that is an unhealthy society as well. It is a horrible thing for the immune system of a society for everything to be exactly the same, he says.

We need that immunological response. We need uncomfortable differences to exist between groups if we want things to remain balanced. Again, what we don't want is just seven and a half billion narcissists all screaming their own personal religions at each other. Starting to lose my voice here. I'm going to fight through it, though. Sorry about that.

So another more political part of the reason it's important to preserve the differences that make communities possible to Han is because just from a historical perspective, if there was ever a group that was being treated badly throughout history and the people in those groups wanted to do something to try to change their situation, in the past, it was possible for them to organize, band together, and then rise up to try to make their circumstances better.

But as he says, if we get to a place in the world where there is no we to be able to rise up, in a world where people feel like all they do is play, and if anything seems wrong in their life, it's their individual fault for it being that way, that is a form of positive power where it becomes confusing as to how to even get out of it. We need communities for people to be able to have that leverage point.

And to combine this idea with what we were just talking about with the rise of information and the decline of truth and knowledge, these are going to be two cornerstones of what's absolutely necessary if we ever want to have a functioning democracy.

So if we're experiencing anything in today's world that anybody out there may refer to as a crisis of democracy, Byung-Chul Han is going to point to this as part of the reason why. Because the possibility of a democracy ever working presupposes the idea that people can be reasonably informed about the world and then can have reasonable amounts of intelligent conversation with other citizens so that the people can decide where society goes next. But that's practically impossible anymore to Byung-Chul Han.

We already talked about the absolute dumpster fire of a situation when it comes to staying informed. Well, most of our communication with each other within modern democracies these days goes on over the bandwidth of social media. In other words, they go on in a place where nobody really even tries to communicate effectively ever.

Social media certainly doesn't incentivize real conversation. There certainly are no real communities being developed on there. Now he says it's interesting. Communities of people used to exist historically, and the very thing that bonded them together were things that nobody in the community really needed to speak about because everybody knew what connected them. It went unsaid. He says we used to have communities without communication. Nowadays, we have communication without community.

Once again, it's also overly positive in today's climate. It's all just talking and ranting and access to information and none of the constructive negativity that slows things down and leads to productive discussion or actual consensus. As you're no doubt seeing by this point, to Byung-Chul Han, there are just areas of human life that are different when the world is dominated by positive power and this shallow kind of technology.

And the effects of this spread into practically every corner of society that you can possibly imagine. So in his book, The Transparency Society, he talks about how society sees transparency as this undeniable good, how everyone should have no secrets. If they do, then they must be hiding something. How access to information should be ubiquitous. And how could anybody really argue against that otherwise? Again, there's this obvious excess of positivity that he thinks symbolizes this age we're living in.

But to Hunt, he's always trying to ask the question, what is taken away from a human life when we value these positive virtues so much more today? When it comes to transparency in particular, what's taken away there? How about the very need to trust another person? Does that become obsolete in a society of total transparency?

To give an example along the lines of our digital panopticon, let's say you're going to parent your kids and the way you decided to do it was you're just going to put up a security camera in their playroom and make them know that they're being watched all the time. You know, giant poster of you on the wall like you're the Fuhrer of the house. Got it on Etsy. Well, that solves the problem, right? They're behaving now. But does it solve the problem? Are you really being a parent there? Or does the security camera destroy something that's more vital to that whole process of becoming a young adult?

This excessively positive attitude, as Hahn would call it, that everything is supposed to be available to everyone all the time, and how that's seen as an undeniable good that there can be no downside to. Some of my favorite parts of Hahn's work is when he talks about how there's just something deeper that's going missing when that worldview actually becomes a reality. Public spaces are starting to disappear, he says. You know, in former societies, there were physical places where you had to go if there were particular things that you wanted to get done. For

For example, if you wanted to get a rare piece of information, you had to go to the library, or to the school, or to the bookstore. These were places that embodied that learning spirit. But in a world where every piece of information in the history of humankind is available to you all the time on your phone, that's wonderful and all. But there's something different about your experience of the world when there's some sort of negative friction worked into the equation of getting a piece of knowledge.

For example, where you're looking for a book, it has this piece of information you want. You go down to the library, but they don't have the book. Oh, but a branch 20 miles away has it. So you take three buses, you go down there, only to find out they just rented out the last copy five minutes before you got there. Then on your way home, you stop at a random bookstore and you find the book there. There's something to that loss of negativity, that loss of friction, that changes the subjective experience of being a person in the modern digital world.

But anyway, one of my favorite things that Han says about any of this stuff is what he thinks you should do about it personally if you recognize that it's going on and you don't want to participate in it. Part of his advice to you would be to be an idiot. Be an idiot.

Though he doesn't mean it like he should just be stupid. In fact, the pejorative use of the word idiot is actually a fairly new thing in human history. Back in ancient Greece, for example, the equivalent of the word we now use as idiot really just meant someone who was a common person who didn't really participate in public affairs or ever aspire to hold public office. It didn't mean they were stupid. But nonetheless, more recently, being called an idiot means that you're seen as dumb by the conventional wisdom of the society that you're living in.

But for Han, if the wisdom of the society you're living in is one where people are these self-obsessed achievement hunters that get fed an endless stream of surface-level information and then instantly swap over to social media to scream their half-baked narcissistic take on it at other people that are all doing the same thing, if that's the conventional wisdom of the world we're living in, be an idiot in that society.

Be the moron that's going to slow down and truly contemplate things and how they connect to a larger world picture. Be the idiot who's okay with not being entirely sure about how you feel about an issue, even if it's an issue that's super important to you.

Be the idiot that's okay with being bored sometimes for a while instead of just being entertained all the time. In a society that tells you that you constantly need to be optimizing and improving your mind, be the idiot that's okay with accepting your own mental limitations sometimes. Be okay with not being the smartest person who's ever lived.

Be the idiot that can allow yourself to feel negative emotions sometimes, like sadness or rage or fear, in a society that tells you that all those things somehow need to be fixed. Be the idiot that can experience real struggle and uncomfortable moments in life without having to always run from them so you can be at one with the society of comfort and instant gratification. Because if that's what an idiot is in this society, then maybe someone calling you an idiot is actually a pretty big compliment.

Next episode is going to be out in six days on the 9th of October. Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.