Susie Orbach and Stefano Carpani on “The Age of Shocks”
April 16, 2024 at 01:47PM
Cultivating the Soul in the Supersociety
Psychosocial Conversations on the Age of Shocks
This series of psychosocial conversations aims to explore the concepts of soul and supersociety, addressing topics such as Climate Change, Populism, Pandemic, Fake News and Post-Truth, War, Energy Crisis, Inflation, and Recession. It also delves into themes like social justice, sustainability, ecology, integration, diversity, and more.
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With the advent of the 21st century, we have entered – bypassing what the German sociologist Ulrich Beck (1996) referred to as the “risk society” – what Italian sociologists Giaccardi and Magatti term the “age of shocks,” characterized by abundant technology (algorithms) but a scarcity of soul.
According to sociologists Chiara Giaccardi and Mauro Magatti, the supersociety is based on at least three dimensions: firstly, “it is constituted primarily by the intensity, density, and extension of technical mediation in the relationship with reality,” where “almost all the daily life of billions of people is intricately dependent on and regulated by a techno-economic organization without gaps, operating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, driven continuously by scientific research and technological innovation; the increasingly complex problems associated with a fast and interconnected global social life can no longer be addressed without the essential contribution of technology and the parameters it entails. The technological environment, organized on a planetary system, now coincides entirely with global social life, fully mediating the relationships between humans and with the biosphere” (Giaccardi and Magatti, 2022, p. 80). Secondly, “with the supersociety, the framework of interdependencies is such that it becomes unrealistic to think separately about social organization and the planetary ecosystem. A new condition summed up in the term ‘Anthropocene,’ which captures the interdependence between social life, technoscientific progress, and the fate of the planet, with its inhabited living species. Social life has always been linked to environmental conditions, but now the situation has changed: the highly destabilizing and increasingly relevant side effects produced by social organization have consequences that can no longer be ignored” (Giaccardi and Magatti, 2022, p. 81). Finally, “the supersociety is characterized by the level reached in the human self-production capacity. Subjectivity has always been constituted within a specific social world… The novelty lies in the fact that the supersociety tends to incorporate the entire human organism, in all its biological and cognitive dimensions, into its dynamics. In a world of material prosperity, the most precious commodity to produce and sell is life: health, longevity, security. But also physical prowess, beauty, cognitive abilities. The digital bubble prevents and absorbs every thought of ours…” (Giaccardi and Magatti, 2022, p. 81).
With the decline of ideologies, as pointed out by Jungian psychoanalyst Luigi Zoja, “no longer are grand themes addressed, true differences between right and left are no longer noticeable; what seems to be involved is only the particular and the variable, what matters is individual need. Yet, merely reintroducing something universal and eternal with the necessary freshness (Shakespeare in cinema, for example) results in an unexpected success (but why unexpected?). This, perhaps, has to do with the need to cultivate the soul.” According to Zoja, “For those who want to grow, the past exists as something to be overcome,” and the person “who observes places their point of view at the center of the observed vision.” This is the “price they pay for being a person and not an impersonal cognitive apparatus.” Zoja emphasizes that “Psychological truth does not develop upward but into the depths,” and this is because “Not only instinct guides humans in growing. The animal comes into the world almost self-sufficient; it just has to wait for the instincts already present in it to manifest. But for us humans, growing is much more than physically consolidating and letting instinctive needs operate: it is knowing, understanding, learning, knowing. It is the interweaving of physical growth – almost unchanged since the appearance of Homo sapiens – with psychic growth…” In the book titled “Cultivating the Soul,” Luigi Zoja explores the theme of personal and spiritual growth through psychological analysis and philosophical reflection. Zoja addresses topics such as individuation, the meaning of life, and the connection between mind and soul. Zoja proposes the idea of cultivating the soul as a process of personal and spiritual development, involving deep self-awareness, the pursuit of meaning in life, and exploration of the deeper dimension of existence. Soul cultivation may involve reflection, connection with others, and the pursuit of an authentic and fulfilling life.
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