Saving the world – the hate has been told

The world as snippets, as a mass of clips and posts. This is the promise of social networks. So why spend your life studying epic theories when Tiktok compresses the complexity in a crisp way? The fact is: You may be able to get individual, targeted information using search information and hashtags, but the big picture is becoming increasingly difficult for many people to grasp. Mainly because we have forgotten how to tell stories.

Words and sentences come together for Homo digitalis no more connections. Instead of knowledge architectures that build on each other, we are confronted with a juxtaposition of building blocks, which is why the media theorist Byung-Chul Han also speaks of a “de-narrativization of the world”. What seems all too paradoxical is what he explains in his essay “In the Swarm. Views of the Digital”: “There is a flood of publications, but an intellectual standstill. The cause is a crisis of communication. The new means of communication are admirable, but they cause an enormous amount of noise. On the one hand, the mountain of the latest research studies, for example on health and environmental issues, which can only be recorded with a lot of time is growing, and on the other hand, a large part of society is in dataistic gasp. In the era of hyper-acceleration, many people only consume scraps and bits of quotes that have been taken out of context.

This results in two speeds on the Internet, which political agitators in particular take advantage of. You benefit from shortening the user’s attention span because you can do without persuasion. For their purposes there is no need for a sophisticated cause-and-effect narrative. Rather, they want to create fronts. The binary opposition that declares strangers and dissenters to be enemies replaces the grays and shades. This very simple model is based primarily on hate. Subverting any coherence and balance, it finds its breeding ground in details on which the entire focus is directed. There is then only one nationality, one gender, one religious background and so on. The agitator ignores the rest of a biography – for example, in relation to certain people and groups – and throws the representation of a past and development overboard in favor of a look at the pure present, which has only degenerated into a fragment.

But: Stories can help to overcome the rush and the general simplification of things that comes with it. The philosopher Paul Ricœur, who died in 2005, pointed this out, for example. He compares the creation of personal identity to a narrative. The way a text is constructed, the way an author’s experiences and ideas are incorporated into it, each person creates their own career path. Ricœur includes interaction with others. Isolation and isolation have no place in the basic structure of this thought structure. Rather, it is constantly about encounters. So we move in a polyphonic space that is wide and open – in contrast to the often described echo chamber of the filter bubble on the Internet, which seems small and closed and in which you ultimately only hear the echo of your own words.

So telling stories could lead us out of the narrow corridors. However, the fact that we have partially lost the competence for “how” is reflected in what we tell each other. The literary scholar Martin Puchner, for example, criticizes the fact that in recent decades we have tied our rescue narratives particularly to superheroes. Whether Batman, Captain America or Wonderwoman – they are all characterized by their unique fight. One or one against all. However, since today’s crises are mostly global in nature and affect entire peoples and continents, these lone fighters with superpowers hardly serve as a proper orientation. On the one hand, they give the false impression that an omnipotent individual could help us to salvation, and on the other hand, there seems to be a great temptation to give up one’s own duty to act. Puchner therefore increasingly asks for stories that have communities as agents and addressees in equal measure. Books like the recently published »We are coming. Collective novel” (Dumont 2024), in which authors such as Olga Grjasnowa, Sirka Elfreude and Ulrike Draesner work together, definitely has a role model character. Less just because of the content itself and more through the commitment to create a creative cosmos together.

An entire society can relearn the cultural technique of storytelling through two main means: first, through idols who develop and explain political visions and win people over to them, and second, through reading. Read and read again. Reading outside of time constraints, and reading against time constraints. The fact that the recent results of the PISA study diagnose a steady decline in reading skills is striking evidence that we are increasingly finding it difficult to understand. Many of us can apparently no longer engage intensively with another person. This loss is even more dramatic at the level of interpersonal relationships. Because the most important resource for peaceful and successful coexistence is trust. And that takes time and requires the willingness to notice and get to know the other person. You have to read it like a thick book to see what it has become. This makes it possible to understand certain behaviors. You become empathetic and receptive.

This is also why, today more than ever, we should promote all disciplines and subjects that deal with narratives – beyond the dominant natural sciences. From German and ethics lessons to studying philosophy, we learn to grasp the often chaotic existence in an overarching order. It emerges from a past and enables projections into the future. Only those who understand, for example, what causes climate change will be able to think about the environmentally friendly cities of tomorrow. And so a chain could be put together again, link by link. On the other hand, to only accept fragments would mean remaining in a state of eternal standstill. And no fear of new things can be so great as to want to endure this discomfort.