It is by no means insignificant that the phrase Midas touch went from having a negative to a positive meaning in the West. I don’t know exactly when this shift happened but it is sure to have coincided with the rise and triumph of the image over the idea. It is likely, in other words, to have coincided with the collapse of communities and the rise of the individualist’s visual bias in Western culture. Nowadays, in using the language of an ancient idiom, the insatiable greed of King Midas and the murderous spell that caused him to turn everything into gold is forgotten. Granted, idioms are becoming rarer in this age of literalism. Still, if we hear about anyone who has the Midas touch, we are coaxed into thinking more of their ability to make a success of all they do than of their capacity to transform the world into a mere play of light on beautiful surfaces.
The tale of King Midas is the masculine echo of the feminine image of Medusa turning men into stone—a symbol that keeps cropping up in our time. It is— like that image of Medusa’s stultifying, bureaucratizing gaze—prophetic of the invention of photography. Midas’s story clues us into something of what happens when the image dominates consciousness. Most notably, his tale shows us how what is at first regarded as salvific often turns out to be the opposite of salvation. “I will be saved,” Midas seems to think, “if only I can turn everything I touch into gold!” But when he touches food, it becomes as inedible as a photograph of food. When he turns his daughter into gold, he is left with only her image; and an image cannot love him back, no matter how many “likes” are stuck to it.
Any perceived source of salvation comes at a cost, of course. Sacrifice must accompany enlightenment as we intuitively know. If you want to get fit and healthy, for instance, you have to sacrifice both slothful lounging and gluttonous eating. Put in more spiritual and existential terms, if you want to save your life, you need to be prepared to lay it down (cf. Matthew 10:39 & 16:25). But Midas represents the demonic flipside of this principle, also articulated by Jesus. He tries to save his life. No wonder he ends up destroying it. The richness of life is sacrificed for something lesser and worse.
It is not difficult to find examples of similar displays of strategic self-destruction in our time. However, the type I want to focus on here is the kind of self-destruction that is linked to the image itself. This is no new thing. The ancient story of Israel trading its faith in the Transcendent Source of Reality for the temporary pleasure of bowing down to a shiny homemade cow is one example (Exodus 32). The idolaters there ended up barred from reality itself and were later met by a plague. Closer to our time, with us wandering around in a very different sort of desert, Gabriel Marcel talks about the role of the image in Man Against Mass Society (1952). This rather potently echoes what happens in so much obsessive image-worship today:
“The incredibly sinister role of the press, the cinema, the radio, has consisted in passing that original reality through a pair of flattening rollers to substitute for it a superimposed pattern of ideas and images with no real roots in the deep being of the subject of this experiment.”
In thus being “deprived of their own proper reality,” Marcel suggests, people become especially susceptible to propaganda. This is a plague of the hypermediated kind. Social contagion becomes the norm in a world of depthlessness. The more uprooted people are, the more manipulable they become. Propaganda seems at first to supply the meaning that has been excommunicated from the realm of surfaces. It does this by repeating the glory of the image in a different key. It offers false transcendence. It affirms the image as sufficient now that we have lost the real; we were just, apparently, looking for the “right” image. But propaganda has no solid being of its own. It is almost pathetically flimsy because it rests on mere mental projection and the support of a consensus that will dissipate when the winds of fashion change direction. It will naturally die if not for the fanaticism that maintains it.
Fanaticism is a direct result of emptying reality of its actual content and thus reducing it to a mere image—that is, to what is now ironically called content. We should bear in mind that even religious fundamentalisms are profoundly modern phenomena, as even bad historians notice. Why is this? Modernity, among many other things, generated the atmosphere within which it became possible to believe that we could fabricate not only things but also ourselves. We could even fabricate experiences and, as Edward Bernays taught America, manufacture consent. One of the most telling consequences of this, discussed at length by Daniel Boorstin in his brilliant book The Image (1961), was the triumph of the image over the ideal. As if to tell Plato off, this suggests the triumph of mere mimesis over intellection.
Some interesting features of the triumph of images over ideas include but are not limited to the following: the rise of values or pseudo-ideals over virtues and real ideals, the triumph of ownership over duty, the triumph of rights over virtues, the triumph of replication over the fleeting moment, the triumph of the synthetic over the natural, the triumph of curation over spontaneity, the triumph of will over knowledge, the triumph of the hyperbolic over the understatement, the triumph of instantaneous believability over thoughtful investigation, and the rise of the doctored or falsified over the generous act of letting things be. The triumph of the image over the ideal means that attention gets reconfigured around consumption rather than being allowed to linger as appreciation. Attention becomes the master, not the servant—and so attention soon becomes a slave. As I’ve already suggested, understanding the triumph of the image over the ideal is impossible without understanding the theological notion of idolatry.
The idea of idolatry is perfectly summed up, as G. K. Chesterton notes, “in the one unanswerable formula: ‘They worship the work of their own hands.’” (Illustrated London News, 14 April 1934). This formula means that “the fetish-worshipper” can take a lump of clay and make something out of it. However, “instead of thanking God that he has made it, he worships it as the God that has made him. The moment after the masterpiece is completed, the relations between the master and the masterpiece are mystically reversed. The last and newest thing in the world becomes the first and oldest.” It becomes “the maker of his own maker.” Chesterton is clear that while this sounds—and is, in fact—ridiculous, “this is exactly what all the most advanced modern philosophers are doing now.” Unlike the ancient fetish worshipper who at least tries to make his idol “as unlike himself as possible,” the “professor of sociology and ethics so often makes his ideal exactly like himself.”
As in the story of Midas, the triumph of the image or idol is ultimately part of the way of death. In Capitalism and the Death Drive (2021), Byung-Chul Han generates a fascinating and provocative chain of associations, connecting the rise of terrorism to the coldness of neoliberalism and self-production and auto-exploitation and narcissification, and finally to the taking of a selfie. In other words, he suggests that the loss of the value of life itself is bound up in Western ocularcentrism and its compulsive mechanical and digital reproduction. Han writes:
“The [terrorist] attacker has the same psychogram as members of the general population. His suicide is a form of self-production, imagined as the ultimate selfie. The pulling of the trigger that detonates the bomb is akin to the push of the camera’s button. The suicide bomber knows that, immediately after the attack, his photograph will circulate in the media, and he will then receive the attention he had previously missed out on. A suicide bomber is a narcissist with an explosive belt. Thus, terrorism can be understood as the ultimate form of authenticity.”
I think here of a tragedy repeated in America so often of a school shooting or other mass shooting, but Han is most obviously talking about suicide bombers. I’m not sure there is much of a conceptual or psychological difference between them in the end. What is central to these events is the aftermath, where the terrorist gains notoriety through mass media. And what is notoriety but the culture of narcissism and fame-mongering persevering?
At first, Han’s blunt collection of assertions may be jarring. Is he not connecting things that ought to remain separate? Still, I think there is a kinship between the suicide bomber and, say, the influencer or average Tiktokker. I’d even go so far as to say that there is probably a rather strong psychological identity between the terrorist and the average adolescent gender bender. They’re all eternally caught in the act of taking a selfie. They are reducing themselves to an image of themselves. They are all killing themselves, at least in a certain sense. It is not easy to have a life once you have eternalised yourself in a selfie. By no means do I mention this to denigrate anyone. I pity anyone caught in mimetic contagion. I mention this because it strikes me that very few are aware of the fake salvation structure at work in such things.
We can see this everywhere—in the terrorist, the mass shooter, the influencer, or anyone else trapped in the flatland of unbridled and often rather dull vainglory. They cling to what represents their lives as an image, a clear unambiguous image of salvation. It’s as if salvation will be found in looking a certain way, posing a certain way, getting enough fans, acquiring the relevant social points, and so on. They take a photograph and destroy themselves all while secretly or not-so-secretly hoping to destroy the world. It is no wonder that so many people have quite literally died while taking selfies. They climb impossible heights and, oh, the view is so lovely and their youthful faces are so pristine in the glow of the screen. They climb up to heaven on their own towers of Babel. But afterwards is only a deathly silence. The most extreme exhibitionists are so desperate to save themselves, to establish their own immortality, that they cannot help but set up their own demise. Cling to your life and you will lose it. Cling to your life and discover that all that is gold does not glister.
To be clear, this is not just evident in these extreme cases. Already in subtle instances, we find examples of a kind of suicide of being, all thanks to trusting in the image for salvation. Recently, Jacob Philips noted something on Twitter that I find very telling with regard to this. He wrote,
“One of the most striking things about speaking to people who have, for one reason or another, not grown up around technology is the lightness of being of their body language and facial expressions because they haven’t had digital reproductions of their image repeatedly shown to them. The first person experience of reality is still primary over a projected third-person perspective of their responses to reality, a simultaneous imagining of others viewing them undergoing the experience as it happens.”
In contrast, you might notice how people particularly immersed in the mediasphere easily become caricatures of themselves. The image, whether photographic or videographic, arrests our very modes of engagement with the world. It is telling that many people have started to emulate the rhythms of their entertainment. They pause as if to wait for the canned laughter track to kick in. They emote and gesture as if they are being filmed on a talk show or presenting a vlog. Mary Harrington, in response to Jacob’s tweet, noted the strange rise of Pixar-like mannerisms in so many online videos, with people contorting their faces in bizarre ways. It’s as if the self is less authentic when expressing normally. Perhaps authenticity really has been replaced in many quarters by profilicity.
As Iain McGilchrist notes in The Master and His Emissary (2009), the more people have become immersed in technologies, the more they have started to think like machines. Long before him, McLuhan predicted this would happen. Way before McLuhan, a Psalmist sang about idol-makers who create dead, dumb, mute, useless images, only to “become [exactly] like them” (Psalm 115:8).
Perhaps this was destined to happen. The takeover of the image has been catastrophic for civilisation. A camera, after all, if only in the realm of the symbolic, retrieves the technology of a gun. We shoot our subjects, just as we shoot ourselves when taking a selfie. We can easily turn the world into an image: dead, static, a ghost of sorts of what we saw or didn’t see, a sign of our absence from the world we are or were capturing. But does this state of affairs have to persist? Of course not. And, in fact, it cannot persist.
At the end of his story—at last, seeing that he is killing himself and destroying his world—Midas goes to ask the god Dionysos how to undo the curse. The god tells him he has to get to the source of the river Pactolus in Lydia and wash in it. The river is difficult to find but when Midas eventually gets to it, he does not hesitate to immerse himself in it. The curse is lifted and his life is restored. Christians are likely to see this as a mythical foreshadowing of baptism—of reentering the primordial waters of chaos, of facing Leviathans and other sea dragons, and so also of dying to self. There are various ways to think about this, but I imagine that a crucial step in Midas’s recovery of his ability to taste real and not just simulacrum food again is found in a willingness to eat more than a little humble pie.