Are modern uncertainties fragmenting our shared sense of reality?

Sci­ence is under increas­ing attack. How­ever, rad­ic­al groups attack­ing uni­ver­sally accep­ted truths would have no audi­ence if they were not in tune with a major trend in con­tem­por­ary soci­ety: demand­ing that real­ity con­form to our desires or feel­ings. Gérald Bron­ner, a soci­olo­gist spe­cial­ising in beliefs and social rep­res­ent­a­tions, helps us to under­stand this trend.

Gérald Bron­ner. First, our indi­vidu­al per­spect­ives – and there­fore, col­lect­ively, the aggreg­a­tion of these per­spect­ives – have turned inward. In doing so, they have turned away from the dis­tant hori­zon of a shared hope for the future. One of the signs of this shift is the decline in the use of the term “pro­gress”, a decline that can be observed in all forms of lit­er­at­ure and in many lan­guages. Google’s lin­guist­ic applic­a­tion, Ngram View­er, shows a decline start­ing in the 1960s, fol­lowed by an irre­vers­ible drop. Some­thing invis­ible to the people of the time was hap­pen­ing: a depar­ture from the myth of pro­gress, the mod­ern ideo­logy that the future would be bet­ter than the present. Gradu­ally, our per­son­al com­pass refo­cused on the present and on observing ourselves.

Great col­lect­ive adven­tures have been replaced by anoth­er adven­ture, just as excit­ing, but with its own pit­falls. Self-dis­cov­ery, with the haunt­ing ques­tion “who am I?” And above all, “who could I have become?” This second ques­tion responds to a vague feel­ing of frus­tra­tion: I could have become some­thing bet­ter, but I didn’t really optim­ise my poten­tial. In this sense, why? What pre­ven­ted me from doing so? Thus, along­side the decline of the myth of pro­gress, we are see­ing an obses­sion with per­son­al devel­op­ment and the pur­suit of indi­vidu­al hap­pi­ness. This can be seen in sur­veys con­duc­ted by soci­olo­gists and poll­sters, but also in advert­ising slo­gans and fic­tion. This quest is becom­ing increas­ingly import­ant to us, and as it takes hold, the tem­por­al dimen­sion of our out­look seems to be shrinking.

With the excep­tion of a past that is very close to us, when people are asked when they would like to live, they tend to answer the present

Almost no one wants to live in the future, barely 4% of our fel­low cit­izens. And when people in 50 dif­fer­ent coun­tries were sur­veyed, as Ipsos did, 62% agreed with the idea that “the future can take care of itself, only the present mat­ters”. There are cer­tainly vari­ations from one coun­try to anoth­er, but almost every­where, the idea that the future can take care of itself is held by the major­ity. Even in films and fic­tion, the encour­age­ment to enjoy the present is presen­ted as a form of wis­dom. It affects our abil­ity to be cit­izens who think about pub­lic interest and the com­mon good. The present has devi­tal­ised the future. And can­cel cul­ture, this mor­ally indig­nant view of our his­tory, shows that it also deval­ues the past. With the excep­tion of a past that is very close to us: when people are asked when they would like to live, they tend to answer the present and, curi­ously, the 1980s. The dom­in­ant feel­ing is what I call nowstal­gia – a kind of nos­tal­gia for the present.

Cer­tainly, with hind­sight, yesterday’s world seemed more con­trol­lable, more intel­lec­tu­ally man­age­able. It was not mul­ti­fa­ceted: two blocks were pit­ted against each oth­er, which allowed for a sim­pler mor­al inter­pret­a­tion. The camp of free­dom could be placed either on the side of NATO or on the side of the Warsaw Pact, depend­ing on one’s sens­ib­il­it­ies. The notion of nation­al sov­er­eignty was also much stronger, of course. Indi­vidu­als felt that polit­ic­al decisions were under­stand­able and with­in their reach, which led to much great­er con­fid­ence. There were far few­er media out­lets and much less inform­a­tion flood­ing our world. There were far few­er tele­vi­sion and radio chan­nels, not to men­tion the massive dereg­u­la­tion asso­ci­ated with the rise of the Inter­net. Even though every­day tech­no­lo­gies are much safer today, we can no longer dir­ectly inter­vene in this tech­no­lo­gic­al world: if my phone mal­func­tions, I have to replace it; I can­not repair it as I would change a light bulb or, if I were some­thing of a handy­man, the engine of my car.

All this gives a feel­ing of ali­en­a­tion from the world. And this excites a part of the demo­crat­ic soul. Toc­queville already noted the tend­ency of demo­crat­ic sys­tems to pro­duce frus­trated indi­vidu­als. This demo­crat­ic mel­an­choly is exacer­bated today by two phe­nom­ena. The first is the tech­no­lo­gic­al revolu­tion in the inform­a­tion mar­ket and in the mar­ket of cog­nit­ive objects, such as arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, which pro­foundly dis­rupts who we are as human beings and how we view the world. The second phe­nomen­on is the rise of these major nar­rat­ive trends, which allow us to look obsess­ively with­in ourselves and con­stantly ques­tion our feelings.

Why is this dan­ger­ous? Quite simply because the next step is to demand that my feel­ings bend real­ity. In oth­er words, to make oth­ers accept that the expres­sion of my feel­ings is a stand­ard of truth and real­ity. This affects the bound­ar­ies between our ima­gin­a­tion and the world as it is. This is how our era attacks reality.

There is the face of the era, and there is its grim­ace. But my point is not to warn about the mad­ness of today’s world by choos­ing to see only its grim­ace. I don’t think we’re all going to become ficto­sexu­als (i.e., only feel desire for fic­tion­al char­ac­ters) or theri­ans (people who identi­fy as non-human or not entirely human). Rad­ic­al examples allow us to refine our explor­a­tion; they allow us to trace the peri­met­er of this ter­rit­ory, which often expresses itself in much more innoc­u­ous forms, even if they are dra­mat­ic for indi­vidu­als, such as the ebb of desire.

Some of these groups, moreover, num­ber in the mil­lions: they are social phe­nom­ena that require our atten­tion, or at least mine, since I am a soci­olo­gist. Take the shifters, or rather the shifter­ettes, as they tend to be girls: they prac­tise “real­ity shift­ing”, a men­tal prac­tice sim­il­ar to lucid dream­ing, through which some indi­vidu­als claim to be able to pro­ject them­selves men­tally into ima­gined, altern­at­ive uni­verses. The explo­sion of this prac­tice since the early 2020s is a social phe­nomen­on, which some experts link to the exper­i­ence of lock­down dur­ing the Cov­id pan­dem­ic, but which is more gen­er­ally part of the “assault on real­ity” that I describe in my book.

How­ever, this assault takes many forms, which did not start with the pan­dem­ic. But these forms have one thing in com­mon: a grow­ing dif­fi­culty with oth­er­ness. Wheth­er we pro­ject our ego every­where in the uni­verse, in the hyper­bol­ic man­ner of the most rad­ic­al transhuman­ists, or wheth­er we want to absorb the entire uni­verse into our own ego through the feel­ings we impose on oth­ers, what dis­ap­pears? It is the other.

Desire seeks to impose itself on real­ity; this is the com­mon thread run­ning through all these phe­nom­ena. But this desire can ebb away. This is what Alain Ehren­berg poin­ted out in his book La Fatigue d’être soi (The Wear­i­ness of the Self, 1998). He showed that, in our soci­et­ies, which have removed many of the pro­hib­i­tions of the past, depres­sion has replaced neur­os­is as the new mal­ady of the cen­tury. Many psy­chi­at­rists agree that we are cur­rently exper­i­en­cing an epi­dem­ic of depres­sion. How­ever, depres­sion is not so much about being unhappy as it is about the absence of desire and, incid­ent­ally, pleas­ure: anhe­do­nia. This ebb in desire is at the heart of the exper­i­ence of cer­tain com­munit­ies men­tioned in my book, such as the hikiko­mor­is, who appeared in Japan in the 1980s, young people – mostly boys in this case – who, faced with the pres­sure to suc­ceed in the school sys­tem and con­fron­ted with the first major eco­nom­ic crisis Japan had exper­i­enced since the Second World War, gradu­ally gave up leav­ing their bed­rooms. These com­munit­ies then spread under oth­er names to oth­er developed coun­tries. What do these hikiko­mor­is have in com­mon? Their desire recedes to the point where they want to avoid real­ity and spend their entire lives in their own rooms.

This drift has an extraordin­ary advant­age for those who aban­don them­selves to it: it allows them to con­trol uncer­tainty. Hikiko­mor­is have a way of ritu­al­ising their daily lives that makes them little domest­ic tyr­ants: they must eat at a cer­tain time, etc. Their entire exist­ence can be inter­preted as a reduc­tion of uncer­tainty. And what is uncer­tainty? It is the clear aware­ness of the open­ness of pos­sible times. If you make tomor­row resemble today, which resembles yes­ter­day, time becomes a line without a range of uncer­tainty and pos­sib­il­it­ies. life becomes an etern­al present.

Interview by Richard Robert