What are the links between uncritical uses of digital technology and the decline of freedoms? How do the pathologies of the virtual world and addictions to impulsive immediacy hinder the concrete exercise of secularism? What are the dangers of presentism and digital "culture" for the relationship to the world, to the self, to the other?
Social networks have never been so frequented and used, in very varied ways, but controlled and channeled by a few owners of digital industries (including the gafam) since Covid-19 confined and stopped the global movement of ideas and people in the world. The various classic media are increasingly abandoned by populations, all social classes and ages combined, even if the uses are to be differentiated according to training, intelligence, logic of action and habits (Bourdieu, 1970).
The fact remains that movements of nihilism, protest, defiance, secession, revolt or positive affirmation are multiplying on the Internet via applications, dedicated sites, more or less encrypted messaging and that the global economy is increasingly intended to take into account this computerization of information up to and including in the so-called virtual and digital economies (cryptocurrencies, bitcoins, etc.). However, postures, proposals, affirmations, dogmas also seem to be formed through this means: in the name of freedom or fundamental freedoms, certain movements are becoming radicalized, while claiming to be awakening (woke), care, ecology (greenwashing) or well-being (sophrology, return to nature, Gaia, etc.).
A certain uncritical irrationality, without judgment or not based on rational or reasoned analyses, affirms in a very dogmatic and almost religious way, truths considered untouchable and values affirmed as eternal and inviolable, for which one can go so far as to die. Intransigence and intolerance are often then inversely proportional to the degree of critical rationality and logical discussion of the parties involved.
We then witness the formation of groups or ideological groupings that reinforce their position by the pure collective affirmation of propositions proclaimed without prior verification (arguments of authority) without them being validated by logical, rational, critical processes, allowing to establish their validity and truth and to test their real coherence and historical or social relevance. New gods then appear: their temple is TikTok or Instagram or Facebook, etc.: everyone goes there with their personal mythology where insult and blockage take the place of ordeals or irrefutable proof of the sacred character of their ideas, reduced to emotion or the passion of more or less clear opinions. A real emotional contagion (Wallon) then takes the place of reasoned discourse and discursive "sesame"; a new order of discourse and language takes the form of a theology of affirmation in the name of a revelation on the truth of such and such affirmation relayed on posts or "liked" thousands of times.
The repetition and virality of opinion thus determine its truth: facticity is worth legitimacy and normalization then passes through the quantity of views or posts on the web. "Truths", "idols", are born by this process of contagion and these little lares gods are no longer questioned about their intentions, their philosophical birth certificate, their logic and their purpose. The seen takes the place of known and the posted is worth as official truth. Hence the question of fake news and post truth as real (and no longer virtual) risks for the social bond, the symbolic order and positive democracies.
There are ways of being to oneself, to the world, to the other that are induced by these postures of digital users that maintain a way of dogmatizing about the world, and thus allow the very idea of a common world to be dissolved, by posing propositions, images, remarks, becoming dogmatic fictions that are in fact worth untouchable and sacred divinities. Digital has risks:
Structural presentism due to the technological situation of the relative instantaneity of communication (which supplants information),
Absence of logical temporality and discursive causality, which causes cognitive dysfunctions (memorization, difficulty in handling the symbolic function or the play of cognitive abstractions – permutation, reversibility, lateralization, equivalence of volumes, masses, measurements, etc.)
Feeling of being merged with a collective that makes one unsociable and apolitical
Impression of anonymity and omnipotence developing the impulses of aggression and death (Thanatopratique and Thanatopolitique)
Disruption from the surrounding reality at the risk of an inability to bear the constraint and social norms of the law, of the Other
Sublimation of lived realities, phenomenon of addiction and impulse to the act of participation in the sphere of the net and in identity communities or tribes, disorders of perception of the world and risk of social and perceptive psychoses
Feeling of all technical and technological power (make the difference here) linked to the organization of the immediate and hyper-media diffusion of any impulse or representation or emotion,
Ontological distancing from the Real by the abolition of the historicity constitutive of meaning and human reality,
Breaking of the symbolic order, of the social bond and of the nature of the logos which supposes the other as a presence to oneself, constructing a world of common values experienced in the dialectical and critical confrontation with its reality, its point of view, its arguments, its truths,
Pathological development of the narcissistic and egocentric feeling of being (at and) the center of the world: process of permanent psychologization and inability to decenter oneself to think about the world and the surrounding reality (because I'm worth it, coach and personal happiness, oversized or extinguished ego, etc.)
Secularism is the critical use of reason in all areas: a decline in the rationalization of the world ipso facto leads to a decline in secularism considered as the exercise of judgment and a separation of churches and politics considered as a legal, philosophical, ethical and political common good. Because if cultural relativism is historical, the same is not true of sociological relativism: the universal cannot be dissolved in the subjectivism of passion or fusion in the pulsional. A theory of values presupposes a humanism of the universal that is not circumstantial or relativity of the point of view or of the doxa. This is the message of Plato, of the Enlightenment, of African wisdom but also of science when it reflects on itself and on the formal conditions of the production of its knowledge and its truths always linked to axioms, epistemological conditions and, structurally, conditioned by determined axiomatic contexts.
Critical vigilance consists of thinking of digital technology as a desire for knowledge and power embodied in technical instruments and standards of subjugation of the actors of the planetary network of transport, transfer, and control of communications. It is then difficult to separate the communication of information which depends on the way in which it is transmitted. Because the fascination for the immediate and belief without foundation or rational verification endangers the spirit of secularism: opinion is not right because it is majority and powerful and powerfully relayed by the hyperpresent and presentist tools of communication. It becomes a true affirmation when it is based on reasoning, proven by rationalities, even if they are random and uncertain, and when it opens to the Other and to his reception, to his hospitality in the discourse and not to dogmatic closure because he is not from the same group or the same chapel as oneself.
The digital age endangers deliberative democracy and the foundations of Enlightenment political reason, which, according to Kant's definition, consisted of using one's own understanding, daring to think for oneself in order to avoid alienation and the servitude of submission to authorities of any kind.
Thinking is done alone in order to be able to reach the universal in each of us which brings together our intimate and our differences in the common sense of this solitary appropriation of the meaning of the world and the enigma of life.
The furthest is the closest, and the closest is the most difficult to think because it is then necessary to make a conversion in the Cave of our passions, from the light of the Belvedere to the more interior one of our personal journey, more difficult and in no way written in a social network. Secularism allows and authorizes this journey by guaranteeing by law and republican law the strictest right to think for oneself and to let others do the same. In this sense, we are all strangers to each other and similar in our subjectivity in progressive construction.
Secularism is a distancing from transcendence or the sacred in the immediate and not a pulsional and emotional adherence to values confused with thoughtless impulses of adherence to norms without history, without foundation, without rationality other than the fact of proclaiming them as values in themselves. In this sense, the digital producing this disappearance of meaning, of history, of the symbolic can lead the mind into the confusion of feelings and make it think that the movement of its vital impulse within it corresponds to that of a truth outside of it.
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