These are the dark days before Christmas, and those are times when many people become a bit melancholic. Or of course go on holiday to Ibiza, but they probably won’t read this piece. I am always impressed by Eternity Sunday, the last Sunday of the church year where the names of those who have passed away this year are read out (not All Souls’ Day, which is the commemoration day of all deceased souls in general). In such a moment of silence you are confronted with the concrete presence of something that we often rush past: the realization of loss. Let us also reflect on this in this column. Not least because the Berlin sociologist Andreas Reckwitz has written a beautiful book about it (unsurprisingly titled Delighted) that was recently published in a remarkably good Dutch translation (Loss).
What makes loss such an interesting and complex phenomenon? According to Reckwitz, who explained this last Thursday in Amsterdam at the Germany Institute, because it says something about our understanding of time, our understanding of meaning and narrative and because it does something with our emotions.
First the emotions. Suppose I give you a hundred euros for a right answer, but then I take away fifty euros for a wrong answer. Or, we do it the other way around, I give you fifty euros for a right answer, and for the wrong answer you get nothing. You have done exactly the same thing (answered two questions), and you have exactly the same amount of money left over (fifty euros). Yet you will be happier in the second case than in the first. Or worse, in the first situation you may even be angry. This is what we loss aversion to call. People get more upset about what they lose than they get happy about what they get, and it goes even further: people also take action more quickly to prevent loss or to repair, than to gain anything.
Then there is meaning, or ‘narrativity’, as Reckwitz calls it. Loss is the driving force behind the unrest and dynamism of our time, Reckwitz believes. In Delighted he explains that this is the case, why that is the case and why it is not good that we are far too little aware of it. Reckwitz sees this unrest and dynamism on all sides of the political spectrum. He cites the major protests against the loss of biodiversity. He also defines the success of right-wing populists as resistance to experiences of loss. He detects the fear of loss in the demonstrations against the anti-Covid measures, which caused people to lose their autonomy and control. And indeed, the examples he mentions are also fully recognizable here in the country. ‘They want to take your country’, that was one of the slogans with which the BBB used to start the election campaigns. “They want to repopulate you,” suggested right-wing populists in the ranks of the PVV and FvD. And the SP warned its supporters: ‘They want to abolish the Social Employment Act’. In short, taking action against real or perceived loss can be an effective mobilizer. And according to Reckwitz, it is indeed the right-wing populists who succeed better than anyone else in translating anger, frustration and desperation (being ‘disengaged’, as we call it in the Netherlands) into narratives of resistance and protest. ‘It’s the elites who took away your land/bus stops/Sinterklaas.’
That in itself is not a new insight, that man in itself is driven by fear of loss. Social psychologists have known since Freud that people suffer from this fear, which can be deeply traced back to a sense of transience (triggered, according to the Viennese psychologist, by unresolved conflicts in their childhood). In fact, in The Denial of Death (1973), cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker states that man is the only mammal that is aware of his mortality and continues to struggle with that realization throughout his life.
But if the struggle with loss is such an anthropological, psychological and even biological constant, why should it only become a problem now? We can surely say that the experience and fear of loss has moved humanity from the beginning, and that this fear is responsible for both the most terrible wars and the most heartbreaking poems and novels. And closer to home, why would people be more concerned about war, unemployment or disease now than, say, a generation earlier? I recently read the historian Frank Bösch’s very convincing book, Zeitenwende 1979: Als die Welt von heute begann. Bösch states that the German fear of war, Islam, polarization, climate crisis and overall economic Abstieg already started back then and was perhaps felt much more widely and intensely (Abstention anxietythe Germans call it in an unparalleled German way) than now.
Which brings me back to Reckwitz and Eternity Sunday. It is very obvious, but it is still good to have this explained in precise, neutral German sociologists’ prose: it is not just the concrete losses. Yes there are. But what is much more pressing is… on the one hand the loss of collective templates (the historical rituals and repertoires) to deal with those losses productively and on the other hand the introduction of templates that very consciously mobilize the negative aspects of loss – shame, indignation, attribution of blame to third parties and bitterness.
That is the loss paradox of progress: we try to drown out our losses with a radical belief in progress in more and more technology, medical interventions and consumerism, or with a frenetic defense of what we never had. That real or perceived loss is then used as a weapon in the political struggle. Therefore, says Reckwitz, it is time to stop “rashly relying on a supposed but never actually available automatism of progress” and learn to “walk the tightrope after looking into the abyss.”
In short, it is time to sit still, not to flee or fight, but – together rather than alone – to commemorate what we have lost this year.
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