I came across the work of German sociologist Hartmut Rosa recently. His thinking had so many connections with things I find meaningful that I decided to do a deeper dive, which for me often means trying to gather some strands on this blog…

I would like to talk about Rosa in three parts, which will form three blog posts. The first will concern itself with ‘the problem’. In case this might seem negative, I would argue that sometimes we need a new perspective on things we already see. I think that Rosa’s work offers this in a new an fresh way.

On a personal level, Rosa’s thinking maps very closely to the narrative arc of my last poetry collection After the apocalypse. I will say more about this later, but for this reason, this post features some of the wonderful illustrations that Si Smith contributed to this book.

A return to the idea of modernity

The first insight I found interesting was that rather than the incessant talk about postmodernity (which has often felt like an elitist affectation to me) Rosa anchors his analysis of our society on a definition of modernity, along these lines;

Modernty is a form of society that (in order to survive) has to constantly speed up in order to stand still. It seeks to control all forms of human existence within the world, to constantly innovate and increase efficiency in all tasks.

In this way, modernity is always speeding up, or accelerating, if it did not do so, it would lose stability and things would fall apart. Rosa calls this phenomenon dynamic stabilization.

We should linger on this idea for a while. Firstly, it feels correct, particularly in light of growthism in our economics, or the phenomenon of planned obscelecence. We live with a strong sense of hurtling forward towards… well who knows, but it often feels out of control, as if it can only end badly, for us and for our non-human neigbours.

We can trace the way modernity affects our human relations in many ways. Here are a few examples;

1. We look at a mountain and feel moved by beauty and form, so climb it. It is hard work so we build a road to get up easier and quicker. We build a sheter at the summit so we can enjoy the view from protection. We open a cafe there. We cut trees to preserve the view. It becomes popular. There are more eating places, shops selling things. It gets busy, polluted. The mountain is no longer beautiful.
2. We feel stressed and exhausted in our work which makes ever more demands, so that we find it hard to spend time with our children. Nevertheless, we push them into an educational machine that makes the same demands of them, so that they too can get jobs that will exhaust them in the same way.
3. Our religion, once a place of mystery and wonder, has been through a series of protestant improvements and innovations, in which each new and ‘better’ iteration has been seen as ‘true’.

Controllability

Rosa argues that modernity has at root a desire to control the world. With a nod to Charles Taylor, he describes this as a spiritual declaration of independence from nature.

This desire for control could be concieved of in terms of accumulation and greed, but arguably, it stems more from fear. Consider the degree to which the super wealthy might be regarded as ‘greedy’. Do they feel themselves to have ‘enough’? Or are there other more powerful drives to do with the fear of being left behind, of being less significant?

Wherever we come up against things that are not controllable – a pandemic for example, or the common everyday experience of death – modernity has a problem.

It is perhaps worth remembering here that Rosa is a sociologist, rather than a psychologist. he is less concerned with individual reasoning and more concerned with the dynamics that drive mass consciousness and mass behaviour. Often the logic of these dynamics is masked, even though they drive us in ways that are hard to understand.

Perhaps now is a good time to suggest watching this video, which attempts to sketch out Rosa’s ideas in wider form…

In part 2, I intend to consider the implications of Rosa’s ideas, and what his ‘solution’ to the problem might be…