German sociologist Hartmut Rosa characterizes modernity as the product of a triple acceleration. Technology speeds up movement and communication, technological change itself keeps accelerating, and, as a result, social life moves faster as generations shorten, families break up, and jobs last only a few years instead of developing into a career. Daily life turns frantic. Despite the flood of labor-saving devices, we don’t eat in a leisurely way. We eat more quickly, sleep less, communicate less with others. Acceleration subverts the political promise of modernity. For democracy to work well, we have to slow down, deliberate, consider, but modern acceleration won’t let us. Before leaders formulate a solution, the problems change. Modernity promises freedom but leaves us feeling like rats trapped on a spinning wheel.
“Resonance” repairs the damage of acceleration. In his most recent book, Democracy Needs Religion, Rosa offers a charming musical illustration of social resonance:
When thinking about resonance, one could hardly find better inspiration than a flute or woodwind ensemble, and this is simply because resonances become directly audible and physically palpable in their presence. Music produced in this way literally causes the material, social, and spiritual conditions around us to vibrate. In a sense, our breath begins to resonate with the instruments, but also with the musicians themselves, with the room, and with each other as listening and meaning-processing beings.
Society harmonized like the woodwind section of an orchestra: it’s a consummation devoutly to be wished. But how do we get from acceleration to resonance? We must, Rosa insists, cultivate what Solomon calls a “listening heart” (1 Kings 3:9), an open, receptive, responsive stance toward the world and others. And we need religion because it makes us responsive.
I’ll return to Rosa’s treatment of religion in a moment. He begins his book with a swift, deft analysis of contemporary society, which he describes as a state of “frenetic standstill.” We push forward, innovate, strive for disruptive change, yet along the way we’ve lost any sense of forward momentum or progress. Progress depends on “energy capture.” Storing food gave our distant ancestors enough bodily energy to survive the winter. As technology advances, we achieve more with less output of human energy. We’ve captured energy when we can heat the house by flicking the thermostat and no longer have to spend hours chopping wood.
Nowadays, though, we need more and more energy just to stay in place. We have to increase productivity, optimize, innovate to maintain current living standards. The auto industry churns out new cars, new models of cars, new gadgets and gizmos to stay afloat. If they don’t stay afloat, thousands lose their jobs and the economy twists into a tailspin. We need more houses, more and better computers, more and better smartphones—or these industries collapse. We throw away perfectly good clothing and buy new clothes, and we need to if the fashion industry is to survive. We don’t want new things because we’re greedy. We’ve constructed a society where we can’t meet existing needs without inventing new ones. Rosa finds our mania for growth irrational: “I find it truly absurd . . . to speak abstractly of growth without indicating where this growth should be achieved.” We can’t keep it up or keep up, which produces a crisis of mental health and burnout.
Our addiction to growth assumes an “aggressive relationship to the world.” We’re continually alarmed, always ready to attack. Politics shrieks, as each side regards the other as “loathsome enemies who need to be silenced.” Democracy can’t function in a mode of aggression; to give everyone a voice, we have to lend everyone our ears. We must allow ourselves to be addressed. We face a “crisis of invocability.”
Which is where religion comes in—not, Rosa hastens to add, dogmatic religion that closes us off from one another, but the kind of religion that facilitates listening, interpersonal connection, transformation, and humility. Religions provide spaces for resonance to perform its magic; religions furnish practice halls for the woodwind ensemble. The Eucharist provides an example of “a rite that activates the three axes of resonance at the same time: one between people (a social axis of resonance), one between people and things (a material axis of resonance), and one of the all-encompassing Other (an existential or vertical axis of resonance).” The fruit of the Eucharist is “communio, a relationship between people and a relationship to the all-embracing whole.”
Rosa’s diagnosis of our social crisis is worthy of attention, and his promotion of religion is attractive, to a point. But there are serious problems. For starters, Rosa makes “resonance” the master concept, to which religion is subordinated. If religion advances resonance, well and good; if not, not. One would have thought that God, rather than resonance, should be the measure of religious life. Rosa, though a Christian of some sort, doesn’t care which religion supports democracy, except that he knows it’s not a religion that defines, catechizes, or dogmatizes God, not a religion with the confidence to say “God says” or “God wants.” The phrase “all-encompassing Other” is a giveaway. For Rosa, religion ends as soon as someone states what he believes: “To assert what religion says is to transform it into a monstrosity.” Apparently, we shouldn’t close our ears to any voices; apparently, Rosa doesn’t believe in talking snakes.
Once or twice, Rosa acknowledges that all religions are identical or equally compatible with democracy. Democracy Needs Religion began as a 2022 address to the Diocese of Würzburg. Speaking to Catholics, Rosa admits that “many ideas that required great effort for me to conceive as a sociologist . . . have already been formulated in a theological context”—resonance itself being a leading example. His book would be vastly improved if he reflected more deeply on which religion yielded those insights.
