“The driving cultural force of that form of life we call ‘modern’ is the idea, the hope and the desire, that we can make the world controllable.” According to Dr. Hartmut Rosa in The Uncontrollability of the World, “everything that appears to us must be known, mastered, conquered, made useful.” Consider marketing campaigns. Companies now have mountains of data stored in warehouses with which to analyze populations in minute detail, and instantaneous usage numbers with which to monitor online traffic. Or consider personal health. We have increasing numbers of biological factors we can measure in real time. We track our skeletal muscle index and our visceral fat levels. We have to sleep more, drink more water, drink less alcohol, consume fewer sugars, and increase our step count. ”Our life will be better if we manage to bring more world within our reach.”
According to Rosa, controllability as a process consists of at least four dimensions:
● Making the world visible, knowable
● Making the world reachable or accessible. In ancient times, it was Roman roads. In the recent past it was train tracks and the interstate highway system.
● Making the world manageable. Political/military control is an obvious example, but so are modern medicine, electric lights, and home monitoring systems.
● Making the world useful. “Here the point is not simply to bring the world under our control, but to make it into an instrument for our own purposes.”
However, Rosa states that our efforts at making the world controllable – knowable, reachable, manageable, useful – are backfiring. “The scientifically, technologically, economically, and politically controllable world mysteriously seems to elude us or to close itself off from us. It withdraws from us, becoming mute and unreadable.”
The more we attempt to control, the more the world “closes itself off from us…becoming mute and unreadable.” This contributes to a real sense of dissonance. Human beings are in the world and related to the world. We are made for connection and communion; we relate to other humans as well as other created beings. Rosa argues that “vibrant human existence consists not in exerting control over things but in resonating with them, making them respond to us…and responding to them in turn.”
He describes four characteristics of the “mode of relation” he terms “resonance”:
● Being affected. A person views another, human being or not, as important enough to allow oneself to be inwardly moved or touched.
● Self-efficacy. This touch prompted by the other is followed by an active response. Resonance involves our reaction to the other by reaching out towards that which moved us.
● Adaptive transformation. Whenever a person personates with the other they are changed by the encounter, even if ever so briefly. They are changed in how they relate to the world.
● Uncontrollability. A person cannot force resonance through an act of will. There is no method that will guarantee resonance with the other. Nor, should resonance occur, is there any way to predict the degree of transformation or to what ends the change will lead. Should we fully control another, it loses the ability to continue to speak to us. We cannot resonate with the magic of a beautiful scene should we seek to capture and control it in a picture. The other, once fully controlled, is transformed from a being, alive and vibrant, into an object, frozen and mute.
There is little question that our culture and our world are driven to dominate and control. As individuals, we may not question this direction. We may find it good, as proof of progress. Some, however, longing for real connection, for resonance, may find it difficult to resist this force in our own lives. While totally going against the flow may not be possible at all times and in every situation, we can take the moments to be curious about the other, to be open to their impacts on us. We can allow ourselves to be moved. We can seek to respond to the other, and to be transformed. And we can resist the desire to control, and to become more comfortable with uncontrollability.
