Bo listened to last week’s Jamie Smith conversation and came back this Friday with a follow-up on his own — Jamie has been Bo’s favorite frenemy for a decade, and the dark-night processing changed the conversation in ways Bo did not see coming. Which turned out to be the perfect on-ramp for the actual topic of the hour: Byung-Chul Han, the Korean-German philosopher I have been walking my Luther Seminary class through this month, whose diagnosis of late modernity is the closest thing anyone has written to a technical explanation of what Jamie is describing pastorally. The core move is the expulsion of the other. The self forms in relation to genuine otherness — the friction, distance, mystery, and resistance of another person or an unfamiliar tradition. We have used technology to eliminate that friction and chosen the frictionless comfort of the self. Han’s word for what we get instead is the hell of the same. The elevated rates of depression, burnout, loneliness, ADHD, and narcissism running through our culture, Han insists, are not infections from something external. They are infarctions — internal blockages from an excess of positivity. Along the way: Bo’s blood-hymn story from his non-religious Canadian friend’s first time in a church, the paragraph in the United Methodist Book of Discipline that mandates ministering to the neighborhood not the ghosts of the past, Bo’s discovery that in a red state most of his congregants are the only Democrat they know, Bo’s Strava confession, and the smartphone as modern rosary. If you have the itch to smash the machines by the end of the hour, Han’s own solution is not Luddism — it is the recovery of friendliness. Come sit with this one.
Highlights from the conversation
Bo’s James K.A. Smith debrief. Jamie has been Bo’s favorite frenemy for a decade — the Reformed philosopher whose analysis of continental thought Bo has taught with, whose critique of modernity Bo respects, whose Augustinian Eucharistic solution in chapter four Bo has always thought was cheating. Then Bo listened to the dark-night episode from last week and the pastoral heart won. Bo’s summary of modern spirituality after Jamie: it is a new smart monitor plugged into an old computer. Sometimes the monitor cannot even recognize the computer. The algorithm and the soul are not communicating.
Han’s core move: the expulsion of the other. The self forms in relation to genuine otherness — the friction, distance, mystery, and resistance of another person, another tradition, another body. Han’s diagnosis: we have used technology to eliminate the friction and chosen the frictionless comfort of the self. What we get instead is the hell of the same. Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another is the anchor citation. Ryan Burge’s data on how congregations used to be where you sat next to people who cancelled your vote — until we self-sorted them into age-and-politics-and-demographic tribes and started cancelling each other for the smallest heresy inside our own.
Infarctions, not infections. Han’s core diagnostic move. The elevated rates of depression, burnout, loneliness, ADHD, and narcissism running through late-modern culture are not infections from something external — they are infarctions, internal blockages caused by excess positivity. Without the resistant presence of the other to give the ego form and measure, the self exploits itself. It burns out under a culture that mistakes constant self-optimization for freedom. You track your steps. You track your workouts. You are your own surveillance state.
Bo’s Strava confession — and why the app becomes the master. Twenty years ago Bo gave up his watch collection (calling them chrono handcuffs) as part of an early conversion into rhythms of time. But Strava kept sneaking back in. Turn on GPS to turn on Strava to know how far and how fast — and Bo caught himself performing for the digital slave master. The longer and faster he rode, the more shareable the numbers became. He turned Strava off. His friends thought he had stopped biking. The subsequent conversations with them about performing for smartwatches and step counters are the point.
The smartphone as modern rosary. Han’s central image, unpacked. Hard, smooth, compliant. Sits in your hand and mediates every encounter with the world. In three minutes you swipe from a Palestinian child burned by bombs we paid for, to your friend’s new puppy, to a hair-loss ad, to a Peter-Thiel-hating Lord of the Rings meme. The medium has already filtered the encounter, held your attention, and monetized it. And the tragedy never gets to be metabolized. Communication without community. The swarm without the soul. Absolute zero degree of perception.
Scent time and point time. Han’s last-slide contrast. Scent time is narrative time — anchored by rituals, overarching narratives, and durable things that hold memory (your mother’s hymnal that still smells like her). Point time is the frantic succession of unmoored moments — the feed, the whizzing by, the endless acceleration. The end of memory is one of Han’s most useful moves for clergy: the undead archive of big data replaces living memory, which is why the tradition still has to live in a person. Han’s constructive answer is not Luddism. It is the recovery of friendliness — the practice of lingering, listening, welcoming boredom, welcoming the other, silencing the ego machine so that the world can speak again.
