Anxiety and the modern compulsion to control the world

At the root of it is our relationship to time. (Part of the vitalism seminar)

Note to readers: As you may have noticed, I have fallen behind in posting this series of articles commenting on the readings for the vitalism seminar. The in-person seminar meets weekly, but I haven’t been able to sustain that pace in synthesizing each weeks’ readings into a finished essay. I apologize. To catch up, I have skipped two sessions; we now resume with last Thursday’s readings. I think these books help us unearth important, subterranean structures of thought and feeling that shape contemporary experience. Thank you for your continued interest (or at least indulgence). — Matt

Do you still remember the first snowfall on a late autumn or winter day, when you were a child? It was like the intrusion of a new reality. Something shy and strange that had come to visit us, falling down upon and transforming the world around us, without our having to do anything. An unexpected gift. Falling snow is perhaps the purest manifestation of uncontrollability.

-- Hartmut Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World (2018)

Hartmut Rosa is a German social theorist who first became prominent with his thesis that modern life is marked by unceasing “acceleration” on every front, making it hard to experience repose in any settled lifeworld. The result is a kind of deep, existential homelessness. He followed this with a big book titled Resonance (2016), in which he reflected on an elusive type of experience. The magic of a first snowfall, as in the passage above, would be one example of “resonance”.

Some experiences cannot be summoned at will. Other examples include falling sleep, or falling in love. Or the outcome of a soccer match. Rosa writes that “the driving cultural force of that form of life we call ‘modern’ is the idea, the hope and desire, that we can make the world controllable. Yet it is only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world. Only then do we feel touched, moved, alive. A world that is fully known, in which everything has been planned and mastered, would be a dead world.” (The Uncontrollability of the World, p. 2)

Because we, as late-modern human beings, aim to make the world controllable “at every level -- individual, cultural, institutional, and structural— we invariably encounter the world as… a series of points of aggression, in other words as a series of objects that we have to know, attain, conquer, master, or exploit. And precisely because of this, ‘life’, the experience of feeling alive and of truly encountering the world – that which makes resonance possible—seems to elude us. This in turn leads to anxiety….” (p. 4)

The compulsion to render the world controllable has a number of elements: making things visible, making things reachable or accessible, making them manageable, and making them useful. All of these imperatives are thoroughly “entrenched in the institutions that form the basis of modern society,” from science and technology to economics to legal regulations and administrative apparatuses. We take them up in our private lives as well, subjecting the serendipities of love to the optimizing logic of dating apps, for example. But all of this is attended by a characteristically modern anxiety -- that of the “world’s falling mute, becoming grey and colorless.” If the world is falling mute, it is because we are loosing our ability to hear its “call” or “appeal”. The ability to be touched and moved by the not-self. When we do find ourselves moved – by a landscape, a melody or an idea, for example -- the experience sheds light on our usual condition.

Something suddenly calls to us, moves us from without, and becomes important to us for its own sake. The person or thing from whom or from which we experience such a call appears to us to be not just of instrumental value, but intrinsically important. We know we have been affected in this way when, say, our sorrowful countenance abruptly becomes radiant, or when we suddenly find that we have tears in our eyes. Such signs indicate that the shell of reification behind which we usually operate in a world oriented toward escalation, optimization, calculation, and domination has, for a moment, been punctured and we have left the mode of aggression.

At such moments, we escape our usual background state of alienation through “a kind of double movement between subject and world.” We develop an intrinsic interest in some part of the world and, reciprocally, we feel ourselves somehow “addressed” by it. Uncontrollability by itself – mere contingency -- is not enough to create resonance. It occurs when something uncontrollable speaks to us, and we respond.

Time

Pual Sherz did a Ph. D in bio-chemistry at Harvard, then another doctorate in theology at Notre Dame. He is one of the rare thinkers able to speak in a scientific register who is also informed by the rich human tradition of puzzling through the deepest matters of existence. His 2022 book Tomorrow’s Troubles is a meditation on anxiety, risk, and our attitude to the future. He writes about an epochal move that the Western mind made, one fruit of which is our compulsion to control the world.

At some point, we began to use spatial metaphors when we think about time. In risk analysis, the future is envisioned as a decision space, with branching nodes at each point of action and consequence. Time is thus spatialized and multiplied: there are multiple possible futures, and our task is to trace an optimal path through these possibilities. This is not just an activity of decision-theorists gaming out war scenarios, or actuaries tabulating risks. It reflects an understanding of time that shows up in many areas of philosophy and popular culture, and is codified in institutions. The problem is that it doesn’t correspond to the way we actually experience time. But it does feed back into our experience of time and infect it, as it were. It does so in such a way as to exaggerate the role of our own will, and make it seem imperative to control the future. Resonance recedes, anxiety increases.