Fratelli Tutti on Digital Democracy in the Philosophical Investigation
a) Introduction
Pope Francis called Fratelli Tutti an offer of a social encyclical that focuses on issues of fraternity and social friendship at a universal level. Before making proposals about a universal social life, which is also called a ray of light or of hope amid “dark clouds over a closed world,” starting from the second chapters to the eighth chapter, he describes, in general, in the first chapter, the phenomena of the actual social world which became “a source of grief and anguish for humanity.”
In this article, we highlight the first chapter, more specifically about the vision of a digital society, which, in reality, actually threatens universal solidarity between nations and, to a lesser extent, threatens every democratic nation. Accessibility and connectivity from the digitalization of society, unfortunately, do not make everyone more open and solider but rather more closed and mistrustful of each other.
b) Eleven Signs of the Times
At least eleven signs of the times show us what the dark clouds over a closed world would mean. 1) Recent history shows signs of a specific regression after decades of humanity that has learned from many wars and disasters, moving towards various forms of integration. Ancient conflicts thought to have been resolved were reignited, reviving myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism.[1] 2) “Opening up to the world” is an expression co-opted by the economic and financial sector, where the global economy tends to impose a single cultural model in favor of closed individualism, diminishing the identity of the weaker and poorer regions and viewing individuals as merely consumers and viewers.[2] 3) The spread of the culture of deconstructionism by a dominant ideology that ignores the sense of history and destroys the unique spiritual identity of each nation.[3] 4) Politics as an instrument to achieve the bonum commune becomes an instrument of domination to spread despair, discouragement, and polarization in human relations. The debate of ideas is replaced by fleeting marketing recipes that create permanent debate and conflict.[4]
5) A “throwaway” world manifests itself in neglect of the elderly, economic policies that ignore unemployment, racism, and modernization that reduces integral human development to economic growth.[5] 6) The realization of human rights is frequently not the same for everyone, especially in the case of the rights of women who are most vulnerable to being victims of patriarchal discrimination, abortion, and human trafficking by global criminal organizations.[6] 7) Conflict and fear take shape in wars and terrorist attacks for racial or religious reasons and because of the abuse of power for the sake of a “false sense of security” by creating a culture of walls without interchange of horizons with others.[7] 8) Globalization is proceeding without a shared roadmap between nations, so “the gap between concern for one’s well-being and the prosperity of the larger human family collective happiness is widening.” At the same time, the growth of scientific and technological innovation is not equivalent to more equality and social inclusion.[8] 9) The historical oblivion of global tragedies, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, which teaches that «no one is saved alone,» makes us fall again into consumerism and new forms of egoistic self-defense, such as gorging ourselves on digital networking.[9] 10) The problem of migrants is triggered on the one hand by Western culture’s attraction, sometimes with unrealistic expectations, and on the other hand by a xenophobic mentality that conditions an intolerant, closed, and racist way of thinking and acting.[10] 11) The illusion of communication and information without wisdom in the digitalization of social life fills human relationships with a tendency toward shameless aggression, fanaticism, and disregard for the meaning of life together.[11]
If we intend to describe the eleventh sign of the time in more detail, we will find many more negative excesses from the digitalization of every aspect of social life. Communication in the digital world becomes illusory because of the loss of distance that maintains the right to privacy.[12] Everything has become a spectacle to be examined and inspected under constant surveillance, while individuals become anonymous objects to be combed over, bandied about, and laid bare. Digital connectivity also increasingly distances everyone from developing authentic interpersonal relationships. Digital media, which can lead us to the risk of addiction and self-isolation, distances us from concrete reality, particularly from the need for corporeality, which nevertheless remains a fundamental prerequisite in human communication.[13]
This illusory communication cannot be separated from consuming information without wisdom, which tends to distance oneself from encounters with reality.[14] This tendency works based on a “mechanism of selection,” namely emotionally separating information that likes or dislikes, which is attractive or distasteful. The flood of information at our fingertips only revolves around the latest, merely horizontal and cumulative data whose truth is not verified. It can prevent us from carefully reflecting on the changing reality in silence and listening. The farthest consequence is that we feel “as if we are free” in a frenzy of texting, but this does not lead us to the meaning of our lives as humans.[15] There is no true freedom without wisdom.
Consequently, illusory communication, information without wisdom, and loss of identity make shameless aggression and fanaticism spread more quickly in social life via mobile devices and computers. They, in turn, affect wider social life, where information regimes act shamelessly in the digital world, creating mechanisms to manipulate conscience and the democratic process.[16] Up to this point, we will reflect philosophically on Pope Francis’ three main concerns regarding the digital world in relation to the context of the democratic crisis.
c) Infocracy or Democracy
To find opportunities in the digital world, humans are naturally easy to be fascinated and obsessed with learning technically new things. However, we often need more time to predict the unintended negative consequences of a new technology. We need to look more critically at the challenges of the digital revolution rather than viewing it with excessive optimism. Byung-Chul Han, in Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld, philosophically highlights the harmful excesses of the digital revolution in the form of an onslaught of information, as follows:
“These non-things are called information. We are today experiencing the transition from the age of things to the age of non-things. Information, rather than things, determines the lifeworld […] Information’s fleetingness alone can account for the fact that information destabilizes life. It constantly attracts our attention. The tsunami of information agitates our cognitive system […] We now consume more information than things. We are literally becoming intoxicated with communication. The result is infomania. We are all infomaniacs now.[17]
Information is undoubtedly essential, but not all of it contains the truth, and it is wildly untrue when information is used to spread lies (firehouse of falsehood). It is like we are being sprayed with misinformation until we have no time to filter and select it. No matter how intelligent a person is, he will not be capable of controlling it. On the other hand, we are not really free under the control of information. As we see in the history of civilization, freedom has various meanings, such as being free from slave status and then being free to act as an autonomous subject. However, today, freedom is reduced to simply choosing and consuming information by sliding a finger and tapping a mouse. For Han, this is an illusion of freedom for several reasons.[18]
Firstly, information does not bring a person to the richness of human narratives in their joys and sorrows. It is addictive when someone is spoiled by choosing pleasant information. Second, time is no longer used to search for meaning and truth, which always departs from human facticity. The chaos of information floating around turns the truth into “wasting time.” In the third point, communication is dominated by feelings and emotions, so it becomes shallow. People are already used to paying attention to information and notifications without having time to pay close attention. We accumulate friendships and followers without experiencing concrete encounters with “the other.” Fourth, there is a danger that humans’ ability to use their entire body will be reduced to just using their fingers. The hand, an organ for work and action for centuries, was replaced by fingers for playing around and choosing things to indulge oneself.
In another work, Infokratie: Digitalisierung und die Krise der Demokratie, Byung-Chul Han elaborates further on the mutation of information dominance that creates illusory freedom into a political regime, which he calls infocracy. He starts by criticizing Foucault’s thinking, which, for him, was no longer adequate for analyzing the condition of democracy under the widespread influence of digitalization:
The target of biopolitical disciplinary power is the body: ‘For capitalist society, it is biopolitics, the biological, the somatic, the corporeal.’ In a biopolitics regime, the body will be reduced in production and surveillance machinery that optimizes it through disciplinary orthopedics. The information regime, by contrast, whose emergence Foucault appears to have missed, does not pursue a biopolitical. It is not interested in the body. It seizes the psyche by way of psychopolitics. The body is mainly understood in terms of aesthetics and fitness.[19]
In contrast to the Panopticon system, where the occupants feel constantly watched, in the information regime, a person does not feel being spied on but feels free.[20] Paradoxically, it is only this feeling of freedom that guarantees power, where the fundamental difference between an information regime and a disciplinary regime arises: Power perfects itself in the momentum when freedom and surveillance merge.[21]
The workings of this information regime can bring democracy into crisis by tearing down the foundations that support it one by one. The dataism of the information regime makes knowledge of the classical narratives that provide legitimacy for representative leadership in democracies no longer relevant. On the other hand, through the operation of algorithms and not by propaganda but by possession of information, dataism does not aim to unite the actions of the masses but rather a digital swarm so that citizens no longer follow leaders but many influencers.[22] It is a new form of totalitarianism without any ideology narratives.
The stages towards infocracy periodically undermine rational discourse in the public sphere as one of the foundations of democracy.[23] In the first stage, mediacracy operating through electronic mass media began to destroy the rational discourse created by book culture, which was the driving force behind the birth of modern democracy in the 18th century. The more sophisticated and second stage is telecracy, which, through television, keeps the audience immature to exercise rational judgment and satisfied with all the accouterments of entertainment literature. The reading public (Lesepublicum) becomes an audience that chooses leaders based more on their better self-presentation than on the better coherence of rational arguments. Here, the Thought Police and the Ministry of Truth are still effective in preserving power over citizens but superfluous in the third stage, infocracy.
Under the information regime, the discursive public sphere is threatened not by the entertainment formats of mass media but by the viral spread and proliferation of information, thas is by an infodemic. The last informs every voter of manipulative electoral advertisements and, often, fake news based on psychometrical marketing in politics (micro-targeting).[24] Consequently, the public sphere disintegrates into private space or evenly into polarization, and our attention is dispersed rather than directed towards issues relevant to polis:
Discursive rationality is today under threat from affective communication. We allow ourselves to be easily affected by fast sequences of information. Affections are quicker than rationality […] Telecratic mediacracy is based on show and entertainment, not on false news and disinformation […] In infocracy, by contrast, the electoral battle degenerates into an information war […] They (armies of internet trolls or social robots) create voices (Stimmen) that produce a mood (Stimmung) and thus severely disfigure the political debate. They may not directly influence voter decisions, but they manipulate the decisions’ environment […] Because images (of the memes) do not argue or justify, the increasing visualization of communication impedes, in addition, democratic discourse. [25]
In a direct democracy, three fundamental conditions are required: representation of the other, rational discourse, and communicative rationality. In Hannah Arendt’s theory, political thinking is representative in that it involves making ‘present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent.’[26] Therefore, true discourse must be mindful of the position of others. It aligns with Habermas’ theory, which emphasizes that discourse actors qualify their statements in debates with other actors or through other voices.[27] Discourse, which etymologically means walking around, presupposes the ability to differentiate between opinion and self-identity consciously. Whenever the other’s opinion contradicts mine, I realize that the confrontation does not threaten my identity but enhances it. Therefore, discourse is nothing but the practice of listening and caring for empathy. The other’s representations make discourse always assume a wider context, namely the pre-reflective horizon of shared interpretative patterns, or what is also called the lifeworld (Lebenswelt).[28] Within this horizon, discourse becomes a communicative act that seeks to reach an understanding in the face of differing validity claims. Communicative rationality, then, is an attempt to validate my claims with the claims of others so that we can reach a shared expression that has a closer relationship to the facts.
Today, real-time digital democracy is a democracy of presence obsessed with improving communication and more direct, constant feedback. However, in reality, that does not happen.[29] Information on the internet is produced and sent to the private sphere without passing the public sphere. Because they enter into communication without community, followers are depoliticized. The presence, which is the nature of digital democracy and does not require the power of imagination to represent the other’s voices, brings discourse to an end. Opinions are self-absorbed, doctrinal, and dogmatic, and everyone falls into self-referential information bubbles. So, the more specific the algorithmic personalization of the internet, the more accelerated the defacticization and the decontextualization of the lifeworld (Defaktifizierung und Dekontextualizierung der Lebenswelt).[30] From here, the establishment of internet spaces replaces the role of the lifeworld, which once formed a shared identity in society. However, the internet fulfills the need for identity by forming digital tribes in which everyone does not share knowledge but conspiracy theories, not discursive opinions but sacred opinions, not with valid claims but absolute claims. Society accelerated into a process of disintegration when communication loses its nature of rational discourse with the other.
d) The Experience of Language for Democracy in the Future
In many ways, Francis’s propositions in Fratelli Tutti parallel Han’s philosophical investigations. From Han’s perspective, what is called information without wisdom is opinions that are never contested in the public sphere. Meanwhile, illusory communication is the loss of communicative rationality due to digital tribalization, which is removed from the Lebenswelt and does not involve discourse with other people. However, both of them also anticipate the future conditions of democracy. Generation Z, in particular, which has played an essential role in democratic formation since the last decade, is more likely to stutter when building authentic communication. They are also vulnerable to getting hurt in confrontations with others and avoid risking human relationships by running to social media. Smartphones that consume children’s attention from an early age have displaced the importance of “transitional objects” such as dolls and toys.[31] Playing with transitional objects, in fact, is an essential stage for children to recognize reality outside themselves by hugging, kissing, and tasting. The cell phone can never be embraced like that, apart from being an object of autism and narcissism. The decline in sensitivity to corporeality in relationships harms the foundations of democracy.
Anticipatory action requires, among other things, a focus on the democratization process in the pedagogical realm. Theoretical research in the classroom is only sufficient with more significant space and time for young people to contact society in social projects and laboratories. It is from a programmatic point of view. However, there is something more fundamental, namely a reorientation of the nature of language in political communication.
Habermas’s communicative action theory focuses on language within the framework of rational discourse but seems to give less place to other dimensions of communicative language. This theory is a remnant of the Enlightenment vision, which envisioned a modern democracy based on sheer rationality. Meanwhile, digitalization and algorithms that precisely target the emotions and sentiments of each individual also make us aware that these two dimensions are no less important in political anthropology. Criticism of modern language precisely targets the neglect of bodily and psychological dimensions. Therefore, rational language is no longer adequate for anticipating psychological manipulation in digital democracy
We should remember again that reforms and revolutions only change institutions and laws in democratization but do not question the most profound layers that shape our vision of the world and that need to be achieved for such changes to be truly radical: “We will then see that in the experience of language, the openness of the world and our relationships with others are at stake and that the experience of language is, in this sense, the most radical political experience.”[32] Just as language manifests our way of producing society and culture, a reorientation in language will give us possibilities for responding to forms of communication in the digital world.
Here, we may refer to Marion’s philosophical analysis of “les mots pour ne rien dire,” an erotic language born in the flesh experience. It does not carry out the function of reporting and declaring the world categorically but refuses to formulate the world by describing it, affirming, or negating it. It primarily has a performative function, namely, “doing what I say.”[33] Alternatively, in the language of Fratelli Tutti, Francis encouraged politics not to be subject to the dictates and economic and technocratic paradigms but to enter the broadest field, namely social love. This political love presupposes the development of a social feeling that goes beyond an individualistic mentality and appreciates each person’s face correlatively.[34]
Finally, the question that will be the task for the pedagogical process in the days to come is: Where can every citizen, especially young people, find a language that trains the maturity of passion, emotion, and feeling, which includes corporeality, so that in this way they still able to develop communicative action in democratization in a digital society? Even though it is often echoed, and that does not mean it is ineffective, we need to return to the origins of the birth of philosophy, namely a tradition of thought that embraces classical literature, poetic language, and mythical stories. The synthesis between philosophy and literature is a fundamental way to bring us back to the original status of Poesis in our humanity: Humans who engage in politics by producing technology without being separated from efforts to maintain a harmonious social life.***
[1] Cf. Francis, Fratelli Tutti, I § 10-11, p. 3-4.
[2] Cf. Francis, Fratelli Tutti, I § 12, p. 4.
[3] Cf. Francis, Fratelli Tutti, I § 13-14, p. 4-5.
[4] Cf. Francis, Fratelli Tutti, I § 15-17, p. 5.
[5] Cf. Francis, Fratelli Tutti, I § 18-21, p. 5-6.
[6] Cf. Francis, Fratelli Tutti, I § 22-24, p. 6-7.
[7] Cf. Francis, Fratelli Tutti, I § 25-28, p. 7-8.
[8] Cf. Francis, Fratelli Tutti, I § 29-31, p. 8-9.
[9] Cf. Francis, Fratelli Tutti, I § 32-36, p. 9-10.
[10] Cf. Francis, Fratelli Tutti, I § 37-41, p. 10-11.
[11] Cf. Francis, Fratelli Tutti, I § 42-50, p. 11-13.
[12] Cf. Francis, Fratelli Tutti, I § 42, p. 11.
[13] Cf. Francis, Fratelli Tutti, I § 43, p. 11-12.
[14] Cf. Francis, Fratelli Tutti, I § 47, p. 12.
[15] Cf. Francis, Fratelli Tutti, I § 49-50, p. 13.
[16] Cf. Francis, Fratelli Tutti, I § 45, p. 12.
[17] B. Han, Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld, trans. by Daniel Steuer, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2022, p.1-2.
[18] Cf. B. Han, Non-things, p. 4-9.
[19] B. Han, Infokratie: Digitalisierung und die Krise der Demokratie, MSB, Berlin, 2021, p. 9.
[20] This illusory freedom arises precisely because a digital magnifying glass in Big Data can watch and register everyone without them realizing it. Here, Byung-Chul Han elaborates on Walter Benjamin’s theory of the camera lens, which first discovered the optical unconscious –as in the work of psychoanalysis revealing a patient’s unconsciousness–, to become the digital unconscious. Cf. B. Han, Infokratie, p. 19-20. Cf. W. Benjamin, L’opera d’arte nell’epoca della riproducibilità tecnica, a cura di Francesco Valagussa, Einaudi, Torino, 2014, p. 30.
[21] Cf. B. Han, Infokratie, p. 12.
[22] Cf. B. Han, Infokratie, p. 17-19.
[23] Cf. B. Han, Infokratie, p. 22-38.
[24] Cf. B. Han, Infokratie, p. 32-33.
[25] Cf. B. Han, Infokratie, p. 31, 34, 35, 38.
[26] H. Arendt, Truth and Politics, in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, Viking Press, New York, 1954, p. 241: “Political thought is representative. I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I represent them […] The more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusions, my opinion.”
[27] J. Habermas, Vorstudiem und Ergänsungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1995, p. 588: “The concept of communicative action requires us to consider the actors as speakers and listeners who relate to something in the objective, social, or subjective world and thereby make mutual validity claims that can be accepted and disputed. The actors no longer directly refer to something in the objective, social, or subjective world. Instead, they relativize their statement about something in the world by the possibility that other actors contest its validity.”
[28] Cf. B. Han, Infokratie, p. 44-46.
[29] Cf. B. Han, Infokratie, p. 44-45, 47-50.
[30] Cf. B. Han, Infokratie, p. 47
[31] Cf. B. Han, Non-things, p. 18-28.
[32] G. Agamben, L’esperienza del linguaggio è un’esperienza politica, in Rubrica di Giorgio Agamben, Internet (10.03.2024): https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-l-u2019esperienza-del-linguaggio-n-u2019esperien.
[33] Cf. J. Marion, Le Phénomène érotique, Grasset, Paris, 2003, p. 246-249.
[34] Cf. Francis, Fratelli Tutti, V § 180-182, p. 45-46.