The Crisis of Modernity- Disenchantment and De-ritualization of Society

The rise of modernity resulted in a slow, insidious process of disenchantment, characterized by the decline of belief in miracles, mystery, and magic[1].

The Gods disappeared from the earthly realm, and the world became denuded of its divinity. The enchanted cosmology of the ancient world that had an element of mystery and wonder was subject to a rigorous rationalization and scientific temper during the Protestant Reformation. The profanation of religion and culture brought about its further disenchantment. Ritual has been relentlessly attacked as being irrational and ineffective. This rise of rationality and iconoclasm coincided with the emergence of capitalist economy as a systematized means of mass production. In this sterile environment, apart from religion and culture, the arts are also rendered profane and disenchanted, and increasingly politicized. Magic and enchantment – the true sources of art — have also disappeared from culture. Moreover, as modernity transforms social structures and identities, spirituality has replaced ritual-centric religion. As Carrette and King state in Selling Spirituality:

…in a context of individualism and erosion of traditional community allegiances, ‘spirituality’ has become a new cultural addiction and a claimed panacea for the angst of modern living.

This piece focuses on the work of Byung-Chul Han, a Korean philosopher and acclaimed cultural theorist, on the gradual relinquishing of ritual by modern society and the resultant sequelae.

Crisis of Meaning

The crisis of meaning and a crisis of identity are the hallmarks of our age. The rejection of community and culture has created further fissures in society and has resulted in the deepening of the identity crisis. With the state and its institutions modeled after Western theories of governance, there is a further deepening of the dichotomy between identity and lived reality. In Han’s work, The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present, translated by Daniel Steuer, Han offers an insightful appraisal of contemporary times, drawing from both Western and Eastern thought to offer wisdom for navigating the peculiar problems of modernity. The crux of his work revolves around the disappearance of rituals as one of the features of modernity which has led to various crises, the destabilization of society at the community and the individual level. Rituals, according to Han, are symbolic acts, constituted by symbolic perception, and have served a crucial function since time immemorial. Symbolic perception, in turn, is seen as recognition, a perception of the permanent or eternal in a transient object: the world is stripped of its contingency and acquires durability. Han observes that rituals stabilize life and make life last, due to their constancy and repetitiveness. They transcend the individual and their self-serving psyche. Rituals also confer identity, and they -

…produce sociocultural axes of resonance along which may be experienced three different kinds of resonant relationship: vertical (e.g. to the gods, the cosmos, time, or eternity), horizontal (within one’s social community), and diagonal (with respect to things).

Rituals create a strong bond with the world by allowing for the elevation of the self. Rituals therefore “disburden the ego of the self, de-psychologizing and de-internalizing the ego”. Closure and stability are needed because he believes that every aspect of life today in the neoliberal regime has been “colonized by the economic”. Han is no revivalist or traditionalist, however, he suggests a turn to rituals to overcome the erosion of community and bring beauty back to a capitalist lifestyle shorn of meaning and symbolism. He states that rituals “bring people together and create an alliance, a wholeness, a community.. The disappearance of symbols points towards the increasing atomization of society.” Rituals are imperative for the formation of social bonds; they slow time, and allow for contemplative moments. The neoliberal pursuit for individualism and authenticity in a globalized world is marked by the rejection ritual and undermining of culture — in favor of symbol-poor homogeneity.

The Cult of Authenticity

According to Han, the rise of authenticity as a neoliberal slogan creates narcissistic individuals who are inward-looking, reject social norms and customs such as politeness that build community bonds, since they do not consider them to be of any immediate transactable value. The narcissism of authenticity, therefore, undermines community. The cult of authenticity shifts the question of identity from society to the individual, thus atomising society. The compulsion of authenticity leads to narcissistic introspection and self-centrism, a permanent occupation with one’s own psychology. Han turns to ritual for the re-enchantment of life:

Rituals and ceremonies are the genuinely human acts which allow life to appear to be an enchanting, celebratory affair. Their disappearance desecrates and profanes, transforming life into mere survival. We might thus expect a re-enchantment of the world to create a healing power that could counteract collective narcissism.

Crisis of Communication

In a particularly beautiful section of the book, Han refers to Hungarian writer Péter Nádas’ poignant and nostalgic description of a village with an ancient pear tree at the center, which for Han is an example of “a ritually closed place”:

The old wild pear tree is a centre of gravity that creates a deep unity among the people. It is where the villagers meet and sing: ‘On warm summer nights, quiet singing can be heard from under the wild pear. The villagers sang quietly. They probably did not want to behave inappropriately and disturb the night. There is not much to communicate in this place, and so no communicative noise disturbs the silence.

Gathered underneath the pear tree, villagers indulge in ritual contemplation, a content silence, underlined by a collective consciousness. Han says that rituals of closure stabilize the village, producing a cognitive mapping which is dissolved in the course of digitization and globalization. He writes:

There is a tacit agreement in the village, and nobody disturbs this agreement with their personal experiences or opinions. No one tries to be heard or to attract attention. Attention is primarily directed at the community itself. The ritual community is a community of common listening and belonging, a community in the quiet unity of silence. Where such primordial closeness disappears, excessive communication takes its place. Community without communication gives way to communication without community.

Han quotes the quietly wistful final line of Behutsame Ortsbestimmung, which reads: ‘Today, there are no chosen trees, and the song of the village has faded.’ This is a melancholic and apt metaphor for today’s age of communication. Social media is noisy, yet hardly incentivizes real conversation and the formation of community bonds. Han juxtaposes community without communication — where the intensity of togetherness in silent recognition provides structure and meaning — with today’s excessive communication without the formation of community. The crisis of communication today is that conversations are vacuous, marked by the diminished formation of collective emotions, leaving individuals exposed to exploitation and manipulation by neoliberal psychopolitics.

Punctuating Time

Paul Connerton, a British anthropologist, in his work How Societies Remember and How Modernity Forgets analyzes and interprets the evanescence of ritual as being crucial to recognizing their value in the encoding and transmission of culture. It is his position that social memory, consisting of images and recollected knowledge, is formed and retained through ritual, commemorative ceremonies and performativity, which in turn are primarily bodily or corporeal, stemming from habits and body automatisms. Han also writes along similar lines, that is, that rituals are processes of embodiment that create a bodily knowledge and memory, an embodied identity, a bodily connection through physical experience and consolidation.

Our experiences of the present largely depend upon our knowledge of the past, with participants of a social order having a shared image of a past, a collective history and experience — both of which serve to legitimize the existing social order. The persistence of unconscious collective memories and grand master-narratives in societies speaks to the cruciality and value of symbolism and ritual. He states that rites are not merely expressive acts; rather, they are formalized, stylised, stereotyped and conspicuously repetitive. Importantly, he states that rituals are not limited in their effect to the ritual occasion — that which is demonstrated in rites permeates non-ritual behavior and affects worldview. They are purposeful and affect the whole community, offering value and meaning to those who perform them. Connerton states that all rituals are repetitive, and repetition implies continuity with the past. Han agrees that rituals are characterized by repetition, and that “repetition differs from routine in its capacity to create intensity”. Moreover, he states that -

The neoliberal dispositifs of authenticity, innovation and creativity involve a permanent compulsion to seek the new, but they ultimately only produce variations of the same. The old, what once was and what allows for a fulfilling repetition, is expunged because it opposes the logic of intensification that pertains to production. Repetition, by contrast, stabilizes life.

For religious ritual, each day — and by extension, time itself — is given a narrative tension and made meaningful by the overarching narrative. On the other hand, the capitalist production economy lacks narrativity, and deprives time of all meaning. A society or a life without rituals is one where every single moment and day blurs into the next. The lack of milestones and rites of passage marking the end of one activity or phase of life and the beginning of another removes autonomous time. Rituals offer structure to life, and “give a rhythm to, articulate, and even narrate space and time”.

Han states that:

Rituals give form to the essential transitions of life. They are forms of closure. Without them, we slip through. Thus, we age without growing old, or we remain infantile consumers who never become adults. The discontinuity of autonomous time gives way to the continuity of production and consumption.

Thresholds are temporally intense, even transformative transitions that are being erased and replaced by an accelerated and seamless communication and production. Han observes that “…information and commodities prefer a world without thresholds: unresisting smoothness accelerates circulation. Today, temporally intense transitions are disintegrating into speedy passages, continuous links and endless clicks.”

In his chapter on festivals, Han writes that festivals are days for both intense celebration and rest, days that punctuate life and force time to stand still and us to linger. On festivals, an excessive, overflowing life is represented, which relates to itself instead of subordinating itself to external purposes such as work. To Han, the festival is an exalted time humans spend with the gods. He writes that:

During festivals, humans come close to the gods. A festival founds a community among humans and between humans and gods: it allows humans to participate in the divine. It brings forth intensities. The gods embody precisely the intensities of human life. Life that exhausts itself in work and production is an absolutely atrophied life.

This is in stark contrast with today’s ceremonies or events, which are consumerist affairs, and have little to do with exalted time. They are temporal, arbitrary, and non-committal and do not create community bonds.

Knowledge vs. Data in the Information Age

Han observes that universities are no longer centers of learning, but have transformed into places of production, factories of human capital, where students pursue professional training rather than formative education. He writes:

The university of the Middle Ages was anything but a place to receive professional training. It was a place of ritual. Sceptres, seals, doctoral caps, chains of office and gowns were the accoutrements of academic ritual. Today, universities are abandoning rituals. The modern university, understood as a business that has to serve its customers, no longer has any need for them.

There has been a transformation in the method of production of knowledge, and its manner of transmission — in the chapter titled “From Myth to Dataism”, Han describes this phenomenon. There has arisen, especially since the Enlightenment, a morbid compulsion to turn everything into data and information. Humans are no longer producing knowledge, but rather, ceding their sovereignty to data. He states that

…the human being is no longer the sovereign subject of knowledge, the originator of knowledge. Knowledge is now produced mechanically. The data-driven production of knowledge takes place without the involvement of the human subject or consciousness.

In the ancient world, humans vivified and solidified myth as the foundational knowledge of a community. From beauty to functionality, myth to data, storytelling to calculation, play to work — modernity has ushered in a paradigm shift in the way we process, view and inhabit the world around us.

Conclusion

Modern irreligious man is prone to existentialism, refusing to believe in the transcendence of the spirit through religion and ritual. In effect, human existence and the world around us is desacralised according to this philosophical position. The sacred then becomes the prime obstacle to his freedom, and seeks the demystification of the world. He believes that he will not truly be free until the last God is killed. This is the context in which Han is able to incisively isolate the phenomenon of the disappearance of ritual and disenchantment as the pathology of modern day. When rituals conflict with work and production, they are subordinated, and if present, are purely decorative and impotent, reduced to opportunities to revel in one’s own achievements or self-aggrandizement. The construct of community has eroded, atrophied, and commoditized due to the reluctance to take part in ritual. Life has been deprived of all its contemplative elements, suffocating us with our own hyperactivity. Today, though mantra and ritual form the bedrock of Hinduism, Hindus are rejecting them in favor of an abstract spirituality that borrows from Protestant thought. One of the perils of modernity is that religion is being defanged, re-branded and re-packaged as spirituality. To counteract this, what must be won back is our ability to engage in contemplation and ritual acts at the individual and community level. The revival of a symbol-rich, ritual economy is the antidote to re-enchant the world and re-create meaning. Ritual cosmicizes the chaos of life, sanctifying the space religious man chooses to inhabit, creating there a replica of the cosmos, the world of the Gods.

References

1. Carrette, Jeremy R.., King, Richard. Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion. United Kingdom: Routledge, 2005.
2. Connerton, Paul. How Modernity Forgets. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
3. Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
4. Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. United Kingdom: Harcourt, Brace, 1959.
5. Han, Byung-Chul. The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present. United Kingdom: Polity Press, 2020.
6. Yelle, Robert A.. The Language of Disenchantment: Protestant Literalism and Colonial Discourse in British India. United Kingdom: OUP USA, 2013.

Footnotes

^[1] Weber, Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, p. 105