The crisis of religion today stems not simply from the fact that certain tenets of faith have lost their validity for us, or that we no longer believe in God. The crisis of religion has a deeper source: it is rooted in a crisis of attention, a crisis of seeing and hearing. It is not God that is dead, declares Byung-Chul Han, it is the human to whom God revealed himself that is dead.
For many people today, attention has been displaced by perception, and perception, in our age of information overload, has become voracious – it has become 'binge watching'. It is flattened with junk information and communication, with sonic and visual waste. We 'eat' but we no longer 'look'.
Our voracious perception has no need of attention; it is controlled by addiction and dopamine and it devours whatever is presented to it. And a soul that only eats without looking loses its contemplative capacity. Only the soul that fasts can start to contemplate deeply, to observe things without wishing to appropriate or absorb them.
Religion presupposes an attention to the things that elude availability, elude consumption. If we looked attentively, with pure attention undisturbed by the frenzied distractions of our digital culture, we would encounter God. Through a dialogue with the thought of Simone Weil, Byung-Chul Han shows us that beyond the immanence of production and consumption, beyond the immanence of information and communication, there is a higher reality that can lead us out of a life that has lost all meaning and grant us an exhilarating fullness of being.
