The Situation

Why rage is increasing

I think we’re in a bit of a situation.

Here’s the deal:

1. We live in a time defined by our ever-increasing desire (and ability) to engineer and control every single aspect of our lives.

2. The good life is inherently unable to be engineered, purchased, predicted, or controlled.

3. Because our increasing pursuit and attainment of control is not yielding a better life, we grow increasingly enraged at the incongruity.

In his book The Uncontrollability of the World, Hartmut Rosa writes about “resonance,” which he has a whole other book about on its own. To oversimplify it, “resonance” is what we might call “the good life.”

To achieve resonance with the world is to resound with the world, to feel in tune with our existence. You might even call it “shalom,” at least on a personal level.

Rosa writes about resonance:

…resonance cannot be manufactured or engineered…..

We can never predict whether or not resonance will transpire and, if it does, how long it will last. Resonance is inherently uncontrollable. Just as with falling asleep, the harder we try to make it happen, the less we succeed.

It is a peculiar characteristic of resonance that it can neither be forced nor prevented with absolute certainty….

The uncontrollability of resonance further means that it cannot be accumulated, saved, or instrumentally enhanced…

Uncontrollability implies, moreover, that we cannot fight or compete for resonance….

We purchase commodities (cruises, safaris) and hope to experience resonance with nature, but while the former can be guaranteed, the latter cannot, and may even become more unlikely the more we strive to engineer it.

Okay great, so resonance is inherently uncontrollable and unachievable by any sort of striving, which is part of what makes it so great.

So here’s the punchline from Rosa (bolding mine):

My sociological theory…is that modernity is culturally geared and, given how its institutions are designed, structurally driven toward making the world calculable, manageable, predictable, and controllable in every possible respect. Yet resonance cannot be made controllable through scientific knowledge, technical mastery, political management, economic efficiency, and so on. That is the great aggravation inherent in this social formation, and its essential contradiction, which produces ever new waves of enraged citizens.

So, I think we’re in a bit of a situation, as I described above:

1. We live in a time defined by our ever-increasing desire (and ability) to engineer and control every single aspect of our lives.

2. The good life is inherently unable to be engineered, purchased, predicted, or controlled.

3. Because our increasing pursuit and attainment of control is not yielding a better life, we grow increasingly enraged at the incongruity.

Every god we grasp disintegrates in our hands because the one, true God cannot live in submission to us, be earned, or achieved.

The good life, resonance, shalom, requires us to open our hands and receive the grace of God in Christ.