Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine. He is also the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute.
Yes, they were all men, and still mostly white, chanting solemnly as they filed into the Sistine Chapel, elegantly enrobed in matching scarlet regalia, to elect a new pope. Yes, there are all the well-known issues of the Catholic Church with women, gay people, sexual and financial scandals. Yet, there was something about the age-old rituals surrounding the conclave that was profoundly affecting for consumer societies, unmoored in their facile strivings from anything meaningful to anchor the flurry of existence.
The philosopher Byung-Chul Han has understood more than most how modern consumer societies are emptying their souls — tossing out tradition and ritual in the name of the next new thing. “Everything that binds and connects is disappearing. There are hardly any shared values or symbols, no common narratives that unite people,” he told Noema in an interview in 2022.
In a time “characterized by an excess of openings and dissolving boundaries, we are losing the capacity for closure, and this means that life is becoming a purely additive process,” he wrote in “The Disappearance of Rituals.” “Symbolic perception is gradually being replaced by a serial perception that is incapable of producing the experience of duration.”
If the experience of duration is replaced by the fleeting ephemera of transitory constancy, “dwelling” that anchors meaning in time and space has no firm footing. “We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world,” as Han puts it. “They transform being-in-the-world into a being-at-home. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space.”
When we spoke, Han told me, “I would not promote a reactivation of past rituals. This is simply not possible because the rituals of Western culture are closely associated with the Christian narrative, which is everywhere losing its power.” Yet, “in a world that is completely without rituals and wholly profane, all that is left are consumption and the satisfaction of needs.”
He continued: “What we need most are temporal structures that stabilize life. When everything is short-term, life loses all stability. Stability comes over long stretches of time: faithfulness, bonds, integrity, commitment, promises, trust. These are the social practices that hold a community together. They all have a ritual character. They all require a lot of time. Today’s terror of short-termism — which, with fatal consequences, we mistake for freedom — destroys the practices that require time. To combat this terror, we need a very different temporal politics.
Every narrative develops its own rituals for the purposes of making it habitual, embedding it in the physical body. Culture founds community. “
Whether one’s faith resides in Christianity or not, the millennia-old rituals of burying and selecting a new pope are precisely not a spectacle but an abiding presence in time that is a reference point for all humanity. In that way, the Catholic Church remains a kind of ark of temporal endurance in the sea of accelerating modernity, now led, for the first time, by an American pontiff.
