A better future?

A better future?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkaomPzaKrU

Peter Kopa, Prague, 20.10.2024

We offer a review of the recently published book in German by Andreas Reckwitz, Professor of General Sociology and Cultural Sociology at the Humboldt University, Berlin. He addresses the “fundamental problem of modernity,” as the subtitle of his book “The Loss” reads. He presents an analytically precise sociology of the concept of loss, which goes far back in history and also includes contributions from philosophy and religion. It is the first extensive study on this topic.

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Terrorism, pandemics, climate change and wars: the beginning of the 21st century has witnessed an increase in social crises with global repercussions. These are deep wounds that refuse to heal. With the accumulation of negative events, there is a growing awareness of irretrievable losses, as if paradise had been lost. https://thinktanklatam.org/que-pasa-con-nuestro-mundo/

At the heart of his argument, Prof. Reckwitz explains that Christianity is initially based on an “anthropological story of loss”, namely the fall of man and the consequent expulsion from paradise. However, the promise of the future eternal kingdom of God then introduces a paradigm shift. The history of salvation profoundly marks the Christian worldview throughout the centuries.

Consolation or bitterness

In the century between 1750 and 1850, following the historian Reinhart Koselleck, Prof. Reckwitz argues that the intellectual movement was then future-oriented and became the guiding idea of the early modern age. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel provided the formulation of the historical-philosophical model that later inspired entire generations of thinkers and economists: that history moves decisively towards its end following a dialectical process. The philosophers of German idealism, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel have inspired Marx and Feuerbach in the formulation of dialectical materialism, which is the basis of Marxist ideology. https://thinktanklatam.org/la-conspiracion-de-la-logia-p2-en-italia/

Not everything that disappears is perceived as a loss but only when the disappearance is evaluated negatively. This negativity is fundamental to understanding loss. It can be argued that such negative experiences already existed in the past. Andreas Reckwitz does not deny this, but points out that they were better cushioned: in a religious world, losses could be assumed better, and the consolation of a future paradise was above all else. This mitigated both individual and collective grief. The impact of the experience of loss was thus prevented from leading to trauma.

In late modernity, on the other hand, the Christian elements of consolation and hope are eroded. While Jean-François Lyotard speaks of the “end of the grand narratives,” Jürgen Habermas, for his part, observes a “depletion of utopian energies. Dystopias are replacing utopias, which influences the cultural ‘industry’: the drama of the end of the world appears profusely on screens and enriches literature to a certain extent.

The limits of progress

Rationalist conceptions also play a significant role in secularized worldviews: the transition from the present to the future is not due to divine providence, but to social self-organization. But at bottom, all belief in progress has, as the term suggests, a religious basis and motivation. “In Western modernity, the narrative of progress takes the place of Christian faith in terms of discursive logic.”

In late modernity, the beginning of which Reckwitz places Reckwitz in the 1970s, when the limits of growth were widely discussed, crises of global proportions are increasingly occurring. The strategy of understanding them as mere interruptions of the civilization process or even suppressing them no longer works: the idea of constant progress is no longer able to neutralize negative experiences.

As a result, confidence in technology, the cornerstone of modernity, is faltering. What was once plannable and feasible recedes further and further away, and with it we lose a future that promises more and better than the present. “As the promise of progress loses credibility in late modernity, the experience of loss loses its historical-philosophical protective shield,” writes Andreas Reckwitz.

Victimhood or triumphalism

The societies of late modernity are more sensitive to experiences of loss and definitive damage, due to a lack of future prospects. Two other factors contribute to this: on the one hand, aging societies are more sensitive to loss as they are close to death, in contrast to younger people, who are more focused on their self-affirmation.

For Prof. Andreas Reckwitz, all these are clear indications that we are currently facing a real “escalation of loss” that questions the root of the imperative of constant progress, which is the structural characteristic of modern societies. Instead of continuing to work for a “reduction of loss” or even for a “liberation from loss”, the author advises to move to an offensive attitude towards negativity, in order to find a way out. And in this process he is most likely thinking about returning home to the Christian faith.

Some comments

Prof. Reckwitz seems to refer only to the Western world, which is correct because it is still the model historically admired and followed by the Near East, Africa and Asia, even if certain countries are manifesting today a remarkable material progress. The West will at some point regain its cultural leadership because other peoples and nations have sought to build on this model. The great scientific inventions and technical developments have taken place in Europe and the USA, as the fruit of a previous secular history of unique social coexistence, the Judeo-Christian culture. Thanks to their openness to reason and freedom of thought, unique phenomena also took place: the colonizations, which, despite their errors and defects, brought progress and a way of life to so many nations that had never before shown signs of constant progress, comparable to the West. https://thinktanklatam.org/la-familia-y-el-auge-de-occidente/

The invention of the steam engine quickly triggered a long sequence of further inventions, such as the internal combustion engine, the discovery of electricity etc., which have caused the industrial revolution. Since then, European, and later American, science and technology have only progressed constantly, producing a retro effect on Christian culture in the form of a world proud of itself and at the same time seductive, tending to forget God.

Today it is well known that Christian culture depends on each one of us personally nourishing ourselves with the sap offered by our traditional roots, or else we will sink into the pestilent mire of relativistic materialism. This kind of search for paradise lost is today strongly present in the media, full of the theme of God in very varied and even overlapping forms. There are more than one hundred million Chinese converts to Christianity, for example.

The current persecution of Christianity is again the prelude to its revival. It is enough to think of the persecution of the Jews by the Egyptians, in the Red Sea, or the Roman persecution. Then followed the threat of Attila, the Ottoman Turks defeated at Lepanto and the sieges of Vienna, the communist persecution and today the globalist persecution in its madness to establish a new world order.

The initial link, below the title, is an example of how everything is seen negatively, when the open window of faith, which lets in sunlight and fresh air, is missing: it is an 8’interview between Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson.

Source: NZZ, Zuerich