The Power of Pain | Peter J. Leithart – First Things

Korean-born philosopher Byung-Chul Han completed his dissertation on Heideggers concept of Stimmung (mood) in 1994, and his early books were meditations on death and dying. Since the 2010 publication of Mdigkeitsgesellschaft (English title, The Burnout Society), now translated into a dozen languages, hes produced a steady stream of slender, poetic works of cultural commentary that track the transformations of human experience weve suffered as we adjust to the digital age. My task as a philosopher, he says, is to explain what kind of society we live in. Philosophy is truth-speaking.

In Burnout Society, Han contrasted the immunological paradigm of the twentieth century with the neuronal culture of the twenty-first. In a politics of immunology, everything foreign is simply combated. . . . even if it has no hostile intentions, even if it poses no danger, it is eliminated on the basis of its Otherness. Weve outgrown all that, we in our twenty-first-century adulthood. More and more, Han claimed, we live in a society where otherness and foreignness have disappeared. Foreign has morphed into exotic, and weve become tourists of difference. Along the way, weve outgrown barriers. The old world was marked by borders, transitions, thresholds, fences, ditches, and walls that prevent universal change and exchange. The twenty-first century began a decade early with the removal of a wallin Berlinand globalized hybridization has since displaced the regime of immunization. We now live in a world without walls.

Hans reflections havent aged well. Walls are back in style, partly in reaction to a real pandemic. But his claim that our neuronal age will be plagued by pathologies deriving from an excess of positivity is more plausible. In place of threats from the Other, we face too-much-of-the-Same, surplus positivity. Han has in mind both the homogenization of culture and the surfeit of goods, the overproduction, overachievement, and overcommunication enjoyed by globalizations winners. Excess hasnt made us happy, or even free. Were no longer subjects of a Foucauldian disciplinary society; rather, hedonism has itself become a principle of domination, represented for Han by that omnipresent data-collector, the smartphone. A new form of human existence has emerged, the self-projecting, even self-optimizing subject, driven not by external compulsion but by the internal pressure to achieve and to display achievement. Always on, we suffer from exhaustion, fatigue, and suffocationin a word, Mdigkeit or burnout.

This overstressed achievement self in the neuronal age is in the background of Hans 2021 The Palliative Society, an elegant Jeremiad against algophobia, the fear of pain that now occupies our souls. Humans have always avoided painful conditions, but today our instinct to recoil has been institutionalized. Pain has no meaning; it lies entirely outside the symbolic system. Playgrounds are cushioned or cordoned for safety. Entertainment and social media keep us in a continuous state of anesthesia. We avoid the disturbances of art, reducing beauty to the likeable. Conflict and controversial thinkers are muted. Transhumanist philosopher David Pearce hopes well eventually eliminate the soul-destroying cruelties of traditional modes of love.

Algophobia detaches us from the Other, who is inevitably a source of discomfort. Our technologies train our seeing and regulate our reactions to what we see. Film permits an exceptional degree of cold cruelty, crueler than the ancient arena because more abstract and distant. We comfortably watch real and fake violence, becoming purveyors and consumers of violence porn that has the effect of an analgesic. Insensitive to the pain of others, we adopt the passivity and indifference of the silent spectator. Images overwhelm us, but instead of shocking us to action, they erode our capacity for shock: Our attention is so fragmented that such shock is impossible. Our souls form calluses.

Overshadowing our flight from pain is a universal imperative to Be Happy. We still experience pain, but pain isnt allowed to speak; its never given room to become eloquent, to rise to heights of protest or passion. Pain is depoliticized. It retreats to soothing screens or visits the doctors office for relief. The palliative society thus brings the end of revolution. Palliation transforms the exercise of power. Once upon a time, rulers ruled by inflicting bodily pain. According to Foucault, modern disciplinary power formed human beings into cogs in the industrial machine. The genius of palliative power is that it doesnt seem to be power at all; it feels like liberation. In the quest for self-realization, the achievement selves of the palliative society cheerily exploit themselves. Power decouples from pain and repression: Smart power operates in seductive and permissive ways. We live in a smart panopticon: We are constantly asked to communicate our needs, wishes and preferences. . . . Total communication, total surveillance, pornographic exposure and panoptic surveillance coincide. Freedom and surveillance become indistinguishable.

It cant work. Happiness must be fractured to be genuine. Without pain, happiness becomes reified into a boring repetition of the same. Pain bears happiness. . . . Any intensity is painful. Passion binds pain and happiness together. As Nietzsche knew, we cant think or discover truth without pain. Algophobia keeps us from scraping against the sharp edges of reality. We know it cant work, so we seek outlets from the numbing pressure of painless happiness. Girls cut themselves. Young men seek out fight clubs and gyms. Nietzsches anesthetized last men might suddenly turn into barbaric first men, recovering the ancient joys of pain-suffering and pain-inflicting heroism.

Hans books have been described as a form of philosophical haiku, and he illuminates by offering flashes in the darkness. Often enough, what Han exposes is recognizable. I came away from The Palliative Society thinking William Jamesian thoughts, with an ecclesial twist. James hoped to end war, yet, knowing that war alone arouses passions, virtues, and strengths that cannot be achieved in any other human endeavor, he searched for a moral equivalent of war. Heres one of the many ways the church can shore up and rebuild: Remember we cant be disciples of the crucified without carrying a cross of our own. Call Christians, especially young Christians, to strenuous, grueling, and, yes, painful service to the kingdom.

Peter J. Leithart is President ofTheopolis Institute.

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The Power of Pain | Peter J. Leithart - First Things