Hartmut Rosa's Democracy Needs Religion

Resonance is a theological concept, if we will let it be

In August of 2023, my friend Chris Smith — editor of the Englewood Review of Books — asked me to review a book by two German sociologists titled Late Modernity in Crisis for ERB. I shared the review on this SubStack, which you can read here.

As I wrote in the review, that book was really two separate arguments. Andreas Reckwitz was offering a critique of sociological theorizing, which I very much enjoyed. Hartmut Rosa, on the other hand, was offering a critique of late modern society. Here are two paragraphs from my summary of Rosa’s analysis:

Hartmut Rosa draws inspiration from the classical sociological theorists blended with Charles Taylor’s critique of modernity. The heart of the social enterprise is self-description and self-interpretation: for societies, for institutions, and for individuals. Those self-interpretations are recursive in that they change the nature of the social units themselves.

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What is needed to resolve the alienation arising from these crises is what he calls “resonance”. Drawing upon musical imagery, resonance occurs when the various components of society are mutually reinforcing. The resonance would ideally occur with four dimensions: social relations, material relations, historical/natural relations, and self-resonance (diminishing alienation).

A couple of weeks ago, Chris asked me if I’d read Hartmut Rosa’s new book, Democracy Needs Religion. Since I was intrigued by Rosa’s earlier argument, I bought it right away.

Rosa’s book is short; just 66 pages. It is an extended version of a lecture he gave to the Diocese of Würzburg in 2022. And Charles Taylor wrote the preface!

Picking up on the themes of his earlier work, Rosa argues that the challenge of modern society is what he calls frenetic standstill.

[T]his is especially the case in today’s late modern society, whose condition, as I’ve argued elsewhere, might best be described as frenetic standstill. This expression is meant to imply two things. One the one hand, society is accelerating. Indeed, it is frantically rushing ahead; for structural reasons, in fact, in must rush in this way to maintain its structure. On the other hand, however, it has become mired or sclerotic. It has lost its sense of its historical (forward) momentum. This conflicted situation is, in a way, a core insight that informs much of my research as a sociologist (4).

The “standstill” part of his concept speaks directly to the loss of institutional trust that I have written about often on this site. There is a sense that things are broken in ways that are removed from our past understandings. And yet we are relentlessly driven forward.

What’s special about modern society, according to my definition, is thus not the fact that society is growing — its population, say, or its economic production — or that it is accelerating in many respects. Rather, what’s special about it is that it must keep growing and accelerating to maintain its status quo (13).

In reviewing Rosa’s argument in preparation for this writing, my imagination went to the Red Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass. Rosa says “Every year, we have to run faster and faster to avoid falling into the abyss that’s chasing us down (37).”

Rosa writes:

[T]he problem is that we have to keep growing in all these sectors or jobs will be lost, even though the fact of the matter is that the ongoing pursuit of this growth agenda stopped making sense a long time ago (20).

What I want to say is that it shouldn’t always have to grow in order to maintain the status quo. I find it truly absurd at this point to speak abstractly of growth without indicating where this growth should be achieved. When we ask concrete question about where, exactly, we should grow, we never receive a good answer (21-22).

Even more absurd is the fact that we, as humans, don’t even want all this growth because we’re greedy and insatiable. We need it because, without growth, we could no longer sustain the existing social structure (22).

Think about the ways in which growing economic inequality, corporate performance in the stock market, new technologies, and shifting information landscapes have to do new things, more and better than ever before. Knowing that something is wrong within our cultural spheres, we are distracted and deluded by culture war fights over corporate diversity statements and arguments over Greenland and the Panama Canal.

Modernity — the modern social system — was so successful and so promising because, and as long as, people had a feeling that htey were working toward a better future. You can see this in the data from all Western or early industrialized societies; There and then, parents always lived with the conviction — not only in the upper class but also deep into the middle and working classes — that their hard work, effort, and sacrifices would allow their children to have lives better than their own. This was a strong conviction and motivational force that also created intergenerational resonance and feelings of connection. We work hard and make many sacrifices, but our children will be much better off. This conviction is dead not only in the West but also in developed Asian countries (35-36).

I don’t have to be a brilliant political analyst to point out how this loss gets translated into existential concerns over the price of gasoline and eggs and bacon and rent. And when a man comes along to tell you that if you only trust him, then that growth will work again for everyone if you just give him the power. Of course, his solutions are either couched in the 1950s or 1890s, which means that he isn’t going to deal with the challenge Rosa is articulating.

So where does Religion come into play as part of the solution to the challenge? Well, not through dogmatic control through institutional strongmen in denominations. That is based too heavily in ideas of control and submission. What we need instead is resonance.

Resonance, to Rosa, requires having “a listening heart”. This is present in religion and should be present in democratic life. Democracy isn’t just about people having voice; it’s about people being heard. So, he says, our ears are essential.

Listening is how we fight the crisis of modernity.

It implies that while I’m working through my to-do list, exhausting myself of the hamster wheel in life’s frenetic standstill¹, I should listen up, be attentive to what’s out there, allow myself to be invoked and touched by something different, by a different voice that says something that diverges from my agenda and is not what I expected and thus represents an opportunity to engage with someone in a functional exchange of ideas² (43).

So what about religion (or perhaps, more correctly, spirituality)? As he makes the final turn in his remarks, he describes a normal Christmas Eve. After all the hustle and bustle of the holiday season with all of its demands, we go to the Christmas Eve service. There, we can — if we allow ourselves — enter “into a state of resonance with our family, the Holy Family, and with the message of the Gospels (51).”

Rather than being concerned about our agency, he says we “switch to a mode of patiency; a mode of receptiveness and perception (54).” I’m the first to confess that this doesn’t happen in every church service. But I know it when I see it. Suddenly, I’m not on the hamster wheel and I feel known not just by those present with me in the congregation but by the church universal and something more transcendent.

But let’s stick with Christianity for the time being. For me, its basic idea, to repeat, is that our existence is not defined by the cold mechanism of an indifferent universe or by pure chance or even by an inimical adversary; instead, the heart of our relationship consists of a reciprocal relationship: “I have called you by name, you are mine.” If that’s not a promise of resonance, I don’t know what is! Something has called me and referred to me even before I existed (59).

Some thirty years ago, I was writing on the limitations of a contractual relationship (based on the idea of breach) and that of covenant relationship. I find myself returning to those concepts to explore our resonance with the past, the present, and with those we travel with along the way.

Rosa concludes his remarks:

My concern in all of this is not about the question of whether it’s reasonable to have faith, whether there is evidence for the existence of God, whether the Bible explains the world or is even God’s word or anything along those lines. As a sociologist, I’m not only unable to answer those questions — I don’t even know how to pose them in a meaningful way. I am concerned, instead, with the question of what sort of relation to the world arises from or within religious practice, and my final word on the topic is this: Religion has the power — it has a reservoir of ideas and a ritual arsenal full of just the right songs, gestures, spaces, traditions, and practices — to unlock a sense of what it means to be called, to be transformed, and to live in a state of resonance. Without this sense, as I have argued, it is impossible for a living democracy to function (65-66).

To which I can only say, Amen.

1. I recently heard a great podcast where Kara Swisher interviewed Chris Hayes about his new book on the attention economy, The Siren’s Call, which I’m adding to my reading list.

2. This should have been the response to Bishop Budde’s comments to the preseident.