We Need a New Religion
In conversation with philosopher, author Christoph Quarch on ideas that can help us lead a meaningful life today.
by R. Teresa O’Connell
In an interview published in Der Spiegel in May 1976, Martin Heidegger famously stated that “only a god” could save us from the dangers of technology. The philosopher believed technology was causing the decline of mankind by constricting our experience of things — nature, but also human relationships — to the detriment of other realms of existence.
Half a century later, another German thinker and House of Beautiful Business resident is reviving this idea. In Christoph Quarch’s view, the totalizing drive of technology diminishes our comprehension of the complexity of existence, and inhibits our ability to tackle the challenges of our time. The solution, he maintains, is a “new religion.”
A philosopher, author, speaker and company CPO (Chief Philosophy Officer), Quarch draws on the canon of Western philosophy to identify relevant ideas that can help us lead a meaningful life today. On a recent sunny morning, we talked about his vision and why business is the perfect place to plant it.
How did you first come up with the idea of a “new religion”?
The idea is partly inspired by Homo Deus, the book by Yuval Noah Harari. He describes the philosophy of Silicon Valley as a new religion. This really struck me. The spiritual complex, or mental movement coming out of there can be described as a movement to fill the vacuum left behind by what Nietzsche called the death of God. Religion is no longer a key factor in Western civilization. But when we think about this kind of philosophy, this technological and economic movement coming from Silicon Valley, it’s important that we frame it in terms of religion. Religion defines the way we think, how we consider ourselves as human beings. If we want to talk about our common future as mankind, it better be cruising at the altitude marked by the term religion.
It feels a bit provocative to be talking about founding a new religion in our day and age. What does “religion” mean for you exactly?
I think about it in an uncommon way, linked to the original meaning of the word: the Latin re-ligio, reconnection. The question is: Which idea or vision should we reconnect with in order to face the challenges of the twenty-first century? These include climate change, the fall of the political and social concepts we used to have in Western civilization, technological inventions, and artificial intelligence.
We need a powerful spiritual framework from which we can derive our key values, in order to judge what is good and what is bad, in order to define what it takes to be human and what we don’t want to sacrifice on the altar of modern technology. It might be provocative to talk about religion but it’s also connected to the idea of some of the main concepts of religion, namely of god.
The German theologian Paul Tillich has a brilliant definition of god as “what unconditionally affects you.” God is a quality of our relationship with reality, and this can be described as a conversation in which we find something that hits us in the depths of our heart and soul. The new divine or the new god is aliveness: That’s what we have to reconnect with. We have to judge whether a new technology or economic system or political idea is capable of preserving the aliveness of the world or if it has a tendency to diminish or destroy it.
How do we reconcile this individual measure of god with the collective action needed to tackle the challenges we face as a species?
Because humans in the twenty-first century have a strong sense of individuality, I think it’s the right concept to start with. It doesn’t mean religion is merely an individual thing — whenever something unconditionally affects you, you are more or less forced to answer to. By this need to talk, community is generated. A religious community is grounded in similar experiences, a sense of being reconnected, and for that it needs language. The ancients called this mythology. We’re lacking that, and the question which most interests me is how we might generate a new mythology by which we can utter or express our connection with the dimension of reality which affects us so much that we can’t help but call it divine.
I want to work collectively on new forms of expressing the experience of divinity so it doesn’t remain an individual relationship, but a movement capable of transforming societies.
In other words, it’s not about personal judgment, but about universal principles?
The ancient Greeks sought to find out what life is about by trying to understand what life actually is. The idea of philosophy is to get criteria and norms for human behavior and the organization of life and society not by moral and religious imperatives, but by asking questions. Apollo, the god of philosophers in Delphi, asked anyone who came to his site: Who are you? What does it mean to be human? These two questions called Western civilization into being.
If the ancient approach is correct, by reflecting on the major principles of what I call aliveness, we can find the criteria to organize our relationship with nature to govern technology. I’m looking for universal principles by which we can synchronize our societies and our individual realities, and which give us a chance to live in a way that suits the plain reality of the cosmos which we are all a part of.
Do you believe humanity can do away with the idea of a greater intelligence and find meaning in the simple fact of being alive?
I don’t think it’s that difficult — it requires inviting humans to reflect on what is really important to them. In our modern world there is a growing sense of being incomplete. The life of entertainment and consumption does not grant real fulfillment. Whenever you start a conversation with people, you’ll find there is something missing, something they don’t have the proper language for. When you ask them, What is life all about? Is it really about material things and constant economic growth, being entertained twenty-four hours a day? Most people would say, I don’t know!
What it’s really about is being fully alive, unfolding the potential that life presents you, to grow, blossom and flourish, just like we can observe in nature everywhere. Being so makes it far easier to accept the fact of being plainly mortal and to letting go of life one day. But if you’ve never been fully alive, it’s harder to let go of your physical existence and easier to fall into the trap of those who promise an extension of life by digital or other means.
How is this vision, which seemingly goes against the logic of business, relevant to the House of Beautiful Business community?
There’s a feeling that something is missing in the corporate world as we established it at least in the last twenty-five years. We optimize corporate efficiency and functionality, but we neglect the growth of aliveness. The rising number of cases of depression and burnout are obvious symptoms of a general lack of purpose or lack of ability to identify with the place of work. I have a talk about a paradigm shift in entrepreneurship from engineering towards gardening. The first understands business as machinery: you have resources, you put them into a process by which a certain output is generated. Leadership is about optimizing the process to maximize output.
The paradigm of gardening is completely different. A garden is not a machine, it’s a place where you cultivate life. It’s also about growth, fertility, prosperity. The outcome is similar but the way it’s generated is different. It’s not about exploiting, but rather about cultivating resources to help living things unfold their potential and bear fruits. The growth of a garden is limited. The growth of the machine is seemingly unlimited, but by this basic error we have caused so much collateral damage that we are destroying our habitat and nature. It is not really that difficult to plant gardens in corporations. I’m not talking about literal gardens, but about spaces of conversation where the development of human potential is nurtured, people can be creative, play, talk, and reconnect with the divine. This is the practice of the new religion — it’s simple. You have to start somewhere, and I suppose corporations are the best places to start.
R. Teresa O’Connell is a contributing writer to the Journal of Beautiful Business.
The Journal is a production of The Business Romantic Society, hosts of the House of Beautiful Business. Sign up for the monthly newsletter at https://www.beautifulbusinessletters.com/
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