Jürgen Habermas Defended Reason in a Darkening Age

Habermas emerged from the uncompromising Frankfurt School, but his work was considerably less fatalistic.Photograph by Max Scheler / Max Scheler Estate / Ostkreuz Archiv / Redux Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story You wake up and brace yourself for the barrage of toxic gibberish that constitutes the modern public sphere. Your e-mail is overrun with spam, scams, and smut. There are voice mails from no one about nothing. A glance at the news reveals that the President is continuing to spew lies and obscenities; that a trillionaire is peddling white-supremacist propaganda on a social-media platform he owns; that a chart-topping musical artist is praising Hitler, or apologizing for praising Hitler, or praising Hitler once again. Publications from the Times on down employ clickbait headlines that treat you like a starving rat in a Pavlovian experiment. A.I. systems simulate the experience of talking to an arrogant ten-year-old boy who knows far less than he thinks he does. When pressed, the chatbots admit that they cannot “naturally understand human morality, dignity, culture, or meaning.” It all adds up to a continuous discursive tinnitus—a buzz of random, fake, stupid, sinister chatter that nobody wants and nobody can stop.

The person who should have been best able to explain how we got here was the great German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who illuminated how a feisty, principled public sphere is integral to democracy. But Habermas died in March, at the age of ninety-six, and, although he remained active until his final months, commenting on Ukraine, Gaza, and Eurobonds, he struggled to understand the turn history had taken. As a teen-ager in 1945, he had witnessed American soldiers enter his home town of Gummersbach, near Cologne, carrying messages of freedom and openness. Eight decades later, he watched American voters choose a leader who had advertised his fascistic bent in blood-and-soil rhetoric, fantasies of punitive violence, and a taste for bombastic architectural kitsch. The far right was making inroads across Europe, including in Germany. The print-based media culture that once anchored Habermas’s public sphere had devolved into a digital sludgefest that proved better at circulating racist memes than at fostering morality and dignity. A couple of years before his death, in a conversation with the historian Philipp Felsch, Habermas said that his world was being dismantled “step by step.”

None of this would have surprised a previous generation of German thinkers—the group known as the Institute for Social Research, or the Frankfurt School. The institute emerged in the nineteen-twenties, went into exile during the Nazi period, and returned to Germany after the war. Its leading figures, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, saw capitalist society not as the antithesis of totalitarianism but as its more affable, aw-shucks twin. Citizens become commodities; technology increases the power of an already powerful few; pop culture serves up mechanized slop; truth and lies commingle. Their default mode was apocalyptic: “The fully enlightened Earth glows under the sign of triumphant disaster.” Now, with gig workers frantically self-branding, tech barons amassing unthinkable wealth, algorithms dictating consumption, A.I. infecting reality, and Earth itself turning feverish, Horkheimer and Adorno’s worst-case scenarios begin to seem overly optimistic.