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Modernity Makes Us Spiritually Sick: Or Why You Should Read Byung-Chul Han
At the beginning of this decade, the entire Western world saw an existential intermission unknown in living memory. Like the wind and waves at Jesus’s rebuke, everything ceased. The COVID-19 pandemic was, as much as anything else, a global reset. Many wondered what it’d mean. What lessons would we learn? How would life look different after such a historic loss of life, capital, and identity?
In an April 2021 essay, German philosopher Byung-Chul Han gave a straightforward answer: It wouldn’t. “Covid-19 is a mirror that reflects back to us the crises in our society,” he wrote. “It renders more visible the pathological symptoms that already existed before the pandemic.” The disease and its cultural effects, Han wrote, illustrated a malaise that existed before it and would exist after it. Modern people are tired, not just of being sick or locked down but of the demands of an always-on society. The virus may weaken our brains or our arms, Han observed. But the way we live has been weakening our souls.
Han, born in South Korea, has become an essential philosopher for anyone wanting to diagnose what plagues the modern person. Though few evangelicals know his name, his philosophy ruthlessly deconstructs many beliefs and practices of the post-Christian age. Through more than a dozen short books as concise as they are dense, Han tears down the self-sufficiency illusion that prevents contemporary society from coming to terms with our mortality.
Shapers of the Self
One reason Han is little known to most of the world is that he wants it that way. He gives few interviews. He has described himself as Catholic and reclusive. Though religious language is sparse in his work, the assumptions of Christian anthropology are obvious. Humans, Han believes, are meant for far more than to spend themselves empty in the pursuit of maximizing profits or self-image. The crisis of modern life is that in “free” economies, we willingly become slaves of self-optimization.
The way we live has been weakening our souls.
Han’s project isn’t cultural apologetics. Yet the connection he draws throughout his work between the exhaustion we often feel in our souls and the structures and habits we willingly entrust ourselves to reveals the inescapability of God’s design of the world. The City of Man throws off the givenness of God’s design and in the process runs right into existential despair. Han’s philosophical work bears witness to that despair.
Han’s work covers a wide ground. But I’d summarize his most essential insights this way: In the modern, post-religious world, there are connected yet distinct “shapers” of selfhood. They have economic, political, religious, and cultural aspects; they exist within the plausibility structures of wealth, capitalism, technology, and belief. What are these shapers of the self? For Han, the three most important may be achievement culture, digitalization, and secularism.
Achievement Culture
The Burnout Society is Han’s most famous and foundational text. Han argues that the biggest plagues facing modern people aren’t extrinsic infection or foreign invasion but internal collapse. Citing French existentialist Michel Foucault on how a certain kind of society disciplines its members through punishment, Han argues that contemporary society’s members discipline themselves through willing self-exploitation. “Twenty-first-century is no longer a disciplinary society,” Han writes, “but rather an achievement society. . . . Also, its inhabitants are no longer ‘obedience-subjects’ but ‘achievement-subjects.’ They are entrepreneurs of themselves.”
Moral prohibition language—“Thou shalt not”—has been replaced by self-improvement language. Modern people no longer think primarily in terms of what they should do but what they can do. “The achievement-subject stands free from any external instance of domination,” Han observes. “However, the disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. . . . The achievement-subject gives itself over to compulsive freedom—that is, to the free constraint of maximizing achievement.”
Han’s point is that an achievement society appears to grant limitless freedom, since no moral restrictions define what we should or shouldn’t be. But this is an illusion. Achievement society uses the aspirational to compensate for the moral. Instead of sermons, we have self-help. Instead of confession, we have therapy. Every modern person feels it’s wrong to insist someone becomes religious, yet it’s common for corporations and books to push people toward fitness, self-care, and “becoming a better you.”
Achievement society explains some otherwise incomprehensible contradictions of contemporary life. For example, millennials and Gen Zers have more rights and flexibility with their jobs than any prior generation. Laws and social stigmas promote “healthy life-work balance” and corporate deference to workers’ needs and wants. Despite this, younger workers take comparatively little vacation time, spend large amounts of off-time responding to emails, and are more likely than their parents to take a “side hustle.” Economic necessity only goes so far. This compulsion toward more and higher performance defies our expectations because, as Han says, it’s part of how we see ourselves. Without achievement, our lives have no meaning.
Achievement culture redefines how we think of the relationship between our private selves and our working, performing identities. A person not thinking from the lens of achievement culture sees his labor in terms of a job that can be completed for a particular purpose. Once the job is finished, he stops working. But in achievement culture, the self becomes the job. We don’t have a task we must daily finish as much as an achieving identity that must be actualized and approved each day.
Digitalization
This is where digitalization comes in. For Han, digital society—the internet and social media, and the roles they play in daily life—is the superstructure of contemporary achievement culture. As life’s goal becomes an outward-facing optimization, modern people need the validation that comes from being online. This is a space where people can perform themselves (by posting photos, telling about their triumphs, or even oversharing their struggles).
Han uses the term Homo digitalis to refer to the contemporary online citizen. He writes that life on the internet has become a way for people to feel like they’re escaping obscurity. The digital native “expresses himself anonymously, [but] as a rule he has a profile—and he works ceaselessly at optimizing it,” Han writes in In the Swarm. “Instead of being a ‘nobody,’ he is insistently somebody exhibiting himself and vying for attention.”
We don’t have a task we must daily finish as much as an achieving identity that must be actualized and approved each day.
Digitalization transforms human society psychologically and politically. Though many people online are angry at unjust systems and ideological enemies, the energy of the internet doesn’t translate to real-world revolution. Why not? Because when human thought and language is translated online, the loss of shared physical presence results in a loss of actual solidarity. Contrasting online “swarms” to physical gatherings at concerts and sporting events, Han observes that “digital inhabitants of the Net do not assemble. They lack the interiority of assembly that would bring forth a we. They form a gathering without assembly—a crowd without interiority.”
This philosophical language may seem confusing, but Han is simply pointing out what’s obvious to many of us: There’s a profound disconnect between life online and life offline. The two spaces aren’t incompatible, but neither are they synchronous. What elicits our outrage on the screen may not even merit a thought at work. What we’d clearly identify as a cheesy advertisement if we saw it on a poster can trigger insecurity and envy in us if we see it in the feed.
Online people together form “the transparency society,” a culture that disregards the distinction between public and private and willingly surrenders identity, likeness, and secrets to the technocratic regime. Han connects the rise of “surveillance capitalism” to the psychological demands of achievement culture. Modern people cannot exist without existing online, and they cannot exist online without surrendering their privacy. “Under the information regime, people do not feel that they are under surveillance,” he writes in Infocracy. “People expose themselves out of an inner need.”
Christian critiques of technology (including my own) often focus on the moral dimensions of technological formation. For example, we might say outrage isn’t a Christian virtue and that the internet cultivates outrage. Or we might identify sins like lust or envy as tied up with the technological life as it exists now. These are fine critiques as far as they go. But Han offers a compelling explanation as to why we return to these technologies even after we agree about what they do. It’s because without them, we feel invisible. To live is to post. To know is to scroll.
Secularism
Han’s critiques of achievement culture and digitalization aren’t Christian critiques, per se. His analysis of modern society is more phenomenological than theological. But for Han, these two social phenomena are connected to a general loss of meaning. Achievement culture exists because we moderns inherit a sense of meaning to our lives through our output rather than our religion. Digitalization is a sort of liturgical expression of the achievement-culture religion. And the modern world— with its performance-oriented, digitally mediated vision of the good life—is a world where the things of transcendent meaning are disappearing.
In The Disappearance of Rituals, Han observes that post–Industrial Revolution society has no use for the kind of festivals or religious observances we find in the Bible. Why not? Because such events achieve nothing. The goal of a festival isn’t productivity or achievement, only participation in life. The festival’s logic is inherently religious. People assemble at a festival hoping to receive something meaningful that they cannot themselves produce. But by erasing the Giver, secular culture makes such gatherings nonsensical.
One illustration of this point is American weddings. On the one hand, weddings have become exorbitantly expensive, with wealthy couples often spending tens of thousands of dollars to showcase luxury and status on their wedding day. On the other hand, these increasing costs have resulted in some rethinking weddings altogether. Both groups see their weddings in economic terms: either as lavish parties or wasteful events. What’s missing from both perspectives is a sense that the wedding isn’t actually about either spending or saving money but about spiritual realities. Post-Christian society doesn’t know how to think about a wedding in anything but material terms, which renders it ultimately meaningless.
Time itself is, without transcendence, meaninglessness. Han writes that the individual who sees himself in relation to God has a sense that he isn’t a master of time but is “thrown” into time by a God who is Master. In The Scent of Time, Han argues that by placing the human individual, rather than God, at history’s center, the Enlightenment made time itself achievement-oriented. The point of history apart from God is to progress, to continue on and on toward an indeterminate future. In that endless quest for the future, time loses its meaning.
Social media is of course the preeminent example of how time becomes meaningless in modern, post-Christian society. Every day’s worth of posts, videos, controversies, outrages, and viral curiosities seems to erase the memory of the day before. Immersed in the digital ecosystem, we can mindlessly scroll, becoming emotionally entangled in things we likely won’t remember even hours later.
Recent renewed interest in the church calendar suggests modern Christians desire a more ancient way to see their lives unfold. Rather than a meaningless succession of days that merely bring out more things to consume, Christians have a theological narrative that infuses every season of life with purpose and meaning. Han’s observations about the relationship between achievement culture, secularism, and our heedless push into the future remind us that the gospel’s narrative brings hope and purpose to even the most mundane days. Nothing is pointless when it’s a chapter in God’s great narrative of salvation.
True Virus
Han labeled the COVID-19 pandemic “the tiredness virus.” For Han, the image of billions of people who couldn’t do normal life without being exhausted was a fitting metaphor for the state of modern culture.
Immersed in the digital ecosystem, we can mindlessly scroll, becoming emotionally entangled in things we likely won’t remember even hours later.
Indeed it was. In the same way that the novel coronavirus separated people from each other, our modern lives centered on career, curated consumption, and autonomy have isolated us. But these viruses can’t be treated with medication. These spiritual sicknesses emerge from the stories we believe about ourselves and the habits those stories have created.
Han’s philosophical insights don’t feature many positive recommendations. He’s primarily interested in diagnosing, not treating, a sick modern society. Yet the ghost of the Christian story haunts Han’s work. It highlights Jesus’s warning that whoever sins is a slave to sin. Modern culture’s rejection of divine authority hasn’t liberated us but made us willing slaves.
What does the church do with this? Han’s work on burnout and achievement culture in particular could change how Christians assess the health of their lives and institutions. Pastors, after all, report feelings of despair and burnout more often than ever before. If Han is correct, this could be because too many Christian seminaries and churches treat frenetic activity as a barometer of holiness or worthiness. The church has an opportunity to proclaim good news of great rest to a weary world, but this can only happen if we’re experiencing that rest for ourselves.
Freedom, Christ promised, begins with knowing the truth—including the truth about our state. To that end, Byung-Chul Han is one of contemporary philosophy’s most important truth-tellers. Follow the line of his thought all the way to the gospel that tells us who we’re made for and how we can flourish.
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