CHAPTER 10
Man and the Machine
One warm spring weekend in 2016, I went to a Benedict Option conference at Clear Creek Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in deep rural Oklahoma. Once I arrived, I was unsettled to learn that we were so far from civilization, as it were, that cell phone reception was impossible. Wi-Fi was possible only if you went into a building on the conference site and stood in a certain place, or placed yourself in a single corner of the abbey’s guest quarters, and hoped for the best. For that weekend, I was largely cut off from the outside world.
I was startled by how anxious this made me. Twenty years earlier I wouldn’t have noticed. Not many Americans would have. In 2013, for the first time ever, over 90 percent of us had mobile phones, and by 2015, a stunning 64 percent of those were smartphones.1 The Pew Research Center has called the cell phone “the most quickly adopted consumer technology in the history of the world.”2 Having a mobile connection has become so normal that we don’t even notice it . . . until we don’t have one.
Over the course of the weekend, every time there was the slightest lull in conversation, my hand reached into my pocket reflexively to pull out my iPhone and check e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, and the news. But it was not there. I was unplugged and disconnected, having had a digital fast inadvertently imposed on me by this monastic-themed conference. This unplanned exercise in asceticism was revealing—and I did not like what I saw.
As I sat listening to speeches, the moment my attention flagged even in the slightest, I went for my iPhone. The speakers were quite good, but I still found it difficult to give them my full attention. Am I always like this? Yes, alas, that’s me. It had become so second nature that my addiction was invisible to me, in part because nearly everybody else I know does the same thing.
This is an enormous problem for all of us today but especially for Christians. That unanticipated technological weekend forced me to think hard about how the smartphone and the computer dominate my life—and what a massive challenge technology is to authentic Christian living in the twenty-first century.
There’s the simple matter of individuals not being able to manage their smartphone use, using online access to watch pornography, or flopping onto a basement couch and playing video games all day instead of getting on with the business of life. But it’s deeper than that. Online technology, in its various forms, is a phenomenon that by its very nature fragments and scatters our attention like nothing else, radically compromising our ability to make sense of the world, physiologically rewiring our brains and rendering us increasingly helpless against our impulses.
We think our many technologies give us more control over our destinies. In fact, they have come to control us. And this opens the door to the more fundamental point about technology: it is an ideology that conditions how we humans understand reality.
To use technology is to participate in a cultural liturgy that, if we aren’t mindful, trains us to accept the core truth claim of modernity: that the only meaning there is in the world is what we choose to assign it in our endless quest to master nature. As we saw in an earlier chapter, the early modern period birthed the idea that science should be used to conquer nature “for the relief of man’s estate,” in Francis Bacon’s words. And it was René Descartes who said that we could become “masters and possessors of nature” and whose philosophy taught Western man to think of nature (including the human body) as a kind of machine.
If we can use technology any way we like as long as the outcome results in our own happiness, then all reality is “virtual reality,” open to construal in any way we like. There are no natural limits, only those that we do not yet have the technological capability to overcome. This point of view is ubiquitous in modernity but profoundly antithetical to orthodox Christianity.
Benedict Option families and communities who remain apathetic toward technology inadvertently undermine nearly everything they are trying to achieve. Technology itself is a kind of liturgy that teaches us to frame our experiences in the world in certain ways and that, if we aren’t careful, profoundly distorts our relationship to God, to other people, and to the material world—and even our self-understanding.
Technology Is Not Morally Neutral
Most people assume that technology is nothing more than applied science, the moral meaning of which depends on what its user does with it. This is naïve. In a powerful address to a 2015 Catholic gathering in Philadelphia, philosopher of science Michael Hanby explained that “before technology becomes an instrument, it is fundamentally a way of regarding the world that contains within itself an understanding of being, nature, and truth.”3
What is Hanby getting at? For thousands of years humans have used tools to affect their environment. What gave birth to technology as a comprehensive worldview was the sense, beginning with nominalism and emerging in the early modern era, that nature had no intrinsic meaning. It’s just stuff. To Technological Man, “truth” is what works to extend his dominion over nature and make that stuff into things he finds useful or pleasurable, thereby fulfilling his sense of what it means to exist. To regard the world technologically, then, is to see it as material over which to extend one’s dominion, limited only by one’s imagination.
In the classical Christian understanding, true freedom for humankind, according to its nature, is to be found in loving submission to God. Anything that is not of God is slavery. In his 1993 book Technopoly, Neil Postman explained that premodern cultures allowed their metaphysical and theological convictions to direct how they used their tools. It is only in modern times, with the rise of technology, that our tools have turned the tables on us and gained the power to direct our metaphysical and theological convictions.
That’s because Technological Man understands freedom as liberation from anything that is not freely chosen by the autonomous individual. This likely explains why Americans are so naïvely optimistic about technology. As philosopher Matthew Crawford has observed, the seeds of the technological worldview are embedded in the Enlightenment ideas upon which America was founded.
In one sense, technology truly is neutral. After all, the same bulldozer used to build a hospital can be used to build a concentration camp. More deeply, though, technology as a worldview trains us to privilege what is new and innovative over what is old and familiar and to valorize the future uncritically. It destroys tradition because it refuses any limits on its creativity. Technological Man says, “If we can do it, we must be free to do it.” To the technological mind, questions of why we should, or should not, accept particular technological developments are hard to comprehend.
In a provocative but insightful formulation, Hanby says that the Sexual Revolution is what happens when we apply the ideology of technology to the human body. We have made biology subject to human will. Contraceptive technology sets women (and their male sexual partners) free to enjoy sex without fear of pregnancy. Reproductive technology extends the mastery of procreation by liberating conception from the body entirely.
Consider in vitro fertilization (IVF), a breakthrough technique allowing infertile couples to conceive. The 1978 birth of Louise Brown, the first “test tube baby,” caused great controversy at the time, especially among religious leaders, many of whom denounced it as unnatural and warned that it would lead to the commodification of childbearing by separating conception from sexual union. But most Americans did not agree. A Gallup poll at the time found that 60 percent of the public approved of IVF.4
By 2010, when Robert G. Edwards, the British scientist who helped pave the way for IVF, won the Nobel Prize in medicine for his efforts, IVF was widely accepted. A 2013 Pew survey found that only 12 percent of Americans see IVF as morally wrong. The numbers are roughly the same with American Christians.5
As to the commodification of childbearing, consider the childless Tennessee couple who had donor eggs fertilized with the husband’s sperm, creating ten embryos. Four babies later the couple decided they didn’t want the remaining embryos and took to Facebook to offer them to a good home.
“We have six good-quality frozen six-day-old embryos to donate to an amazing family who wants a large family,” the wife posted, according to the New York Times. “We prefer someone who has been married several years in a steady loving relationship and strong Christian background, and who does not already have kids, but wants a boat load.”6
According to orthodox Christian teaching, these are six human persons. The embryo donation community has developed a cute euphemism for these unborn children: “frozen snowflakes.”
Meanwhile British government statistics made public in 2012 revealed that 3.5 million embryos were created in UK laboratories since 1991, when record-keeping began.7 Ninety-three percent never resulted in a pregnancy, and about half were thrown away without even trying. The United States has no reliable records for the sake of comparison, but with a population five times larger than Britain’s, a parallel number would mean 17.5 million unborn human beings were brought into existence in a laboratory, with 16.2 million dying, and 8.8 million thrown into the trash can without an attempt at implantation.
Imagine every man, woman, and child in New York City, or the population of Houston times four, and you will understand the immensity of the death inside fertility clinics. That is, if you believe that life begins at conception, as 52 percent of Americans in a 2015 YouGov poll affirm.8
Clearly there are millions of Christians not putting two and two together. Many conservative Christians strongly oppose abortion and back laws restricting it. There is no movement to ban or restrict IVF, even though from the life-begins-at-conception point of view, it exterminates millions of unborn lives. What enables this hypocrisy? The technocratic mentality.
The argument goes like this: babies are good things, so anything technology does to help people have babies is therefore good. Love, as they say, wins. The technocrat decides what he or she wants and, once it is available via technology, rationalizes accepting it. Concealing what technology takes away from us is a feature of the technocratic worldview. We come to think of technological advances as inevitable because they are irresistible. Just as “truth” for the technocrat is what is useful and effective, what is “good” for him is what is possible and desirable.
Technological Man regards as progress anything that expands his choices and gives him more power over nature. Americans admire the “self-made man” because he has liberated himself from dependence on others by his own efforts and is his own creation. For Technological Man, choice matters more than what is chosen. He is not much concerned with what he should desire; rather, he is preoccupied with how he can acquire or accomplish what he desires. The seed that was planted in the fourteenth century with the triumph of nominalism reaches its full ripeness in Technological Man.
The Internet as the Floodgate of Liquid Modernity
The most radical, disruptive, and transformative technology ever created is the Internet. It is the ultimate facilitator of liquid modernity because it conditions the way we experience life (“as a swiftly moving stream of particles,” says writer Nicholas Carr) and frames all our experiences. The Internet rapidly accelerates the political, social, and cultural fragmentation process that has been under way since the mid-twentieth century and profoundly compromises our ability to pay attention.
This is a bigger deal than it sounds like. As we learned in Chapter 5, media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously said, “The medium is the message,” a cryptic statement that has confounded many. What he meant is that the changes a new medium cause in a culture are often more important than any information carried through that medium. Why? Because the medium alters the way we experience the world and interpret it.
To go through the screen of your computer or smartphone is to enter a world where you don’t often have to deal with anything not chosen. You can be invisible on the Internet or create your own identity. There is no linear logic at work on the Internet: you can skitter from site to site, dipping in and out of social media, as you desire. I work as an online journalist and spend most weekdays doing exactly that.
And guess what? It’s wonderful. It has made my life better in more ways than I can count, including making it possible for me to live where I want to live because I can work from home. The Internet has given me a great deal and does every day.
But the Internet, like all new technologies, also takes away. What it takes from us is our sense of agency. Matthew Crawford identifies a paradox intrinsic to the Internet as technology: it tells us that it is giving us more freedom and more choice, but in fact it is seducing us into passive captivity. The experience of inner compulsion I had at the abbey repeats itself in some small way every day.
There’s a scientific explanation for that. At the neurological level, the Internet’s constant distractions alter the physiological structure of our brain. The brain refashions itself to conform to the nonstop randomness of the Internet experience, which conditions us to crave the repetitive jolts that come with novelty. Writes Nicholas Carr:
One thing is very clear: if, knowing what we know today about the brain’s plasticity, you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the Internet.9
The result of this is a gradual inability to pay attention, to focus, and to think deeply. Study after study has confirmed the common experience many have reported in the Internet age: that using the Web makes it infinitely easier to find information but much harder to devote the kind of sustained focus it takes to know things.
Compounding the problem, the technological mentality denies that there is anything important to be known, aside from how to make things that help us realize our desires: in ancient Greek, techne, or “craftsmanship,” versus episteme, or “knowledge gained through contemplation.” Techne refers to knowledge that helps you do things, while episteme refers to knowledge of how things are, so that you will know what to do.
Both contemplation and action are necessary to human flourishing. The Middle Ages prized contemplation, which is why medieval societies, including products of their technological knowledge, were ordered to God. The icon, thought to be a symbolic window into divine reality, is an apt symbol of that age. Contemplation is alien to the modern mode of life. The iPhone, a luminous portal promising to show us the world, but really a mirror of the world inside our heads, is the icon of our own age.
Under the rule of technology, conditions that make authentic Christian life possible disappear. And most of us have no idea what’s happening.
Take on Digital Fasting as an Ascetic Practice
In the traditional Christian view, Truth, Goodness, and Beauty are objective realities, qualities of God and therefore intrinsic to Creation itself. To be free is to be able to see and participate in these supreme goods, thus realizing our true natures. As Christians, we behave virtuously not merely because God commands it but because acquiring virtue helps us to see Christ more clearly and in seeing Him, to reveal Him in turn to others. The early church sought nothing more than to see the face of God. Everything else followed.
If seeing the face of God, and becoming Christ-like in the process, is our greatest desire, then we must stay focused on that ultimate goal. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, the pilgrim protagonist (also named Dante) learns that sin is disordered love. The source of all disorder is loving finite things more than the infinite God. Even loving good things, like family and country, can be a source of damnation if one loves them more than one loves God and seeks fulfillment in those things rather than in the Creator of those things.
It is very hard to stay focused on contemplating God. The pilgrim Dante discovers that he lost his way in life because he loved a woman, Beatrice, who was good, true, and beautiful, thinking that she was these things in herself. In the afterlife, Beatrice, who died young, chastises Dante, telling him that any good thing in her pointed to the Source of all goodness. His inability to see that led to his near-destruction.
William James, the founder of psychiatry, wrote, “My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.” Our thoughts really do determine our lives. Tech writer Tim Wu, reflecting on James’s insight, observes that religion has always understood that directing human attention toward what is holy is supremely important. This is why medieval Christendom was filled with prayers, rituals, fasts, and feasts: to keep life, both public and private, ordered around things divine.10
That was then. We are not going to return to a broad Christian culture as thick as that in the foreseeable future. But that doesn’t let us Christians off the hook; it simply means that as individuals and communities, we are going to have to do a lot more work to keep our eyes focused on God.
Developing the cognitive control that leads to a more contemplative Christian life is the key to living as free men and women in post-Christian America.
The man whose desires are under the control of his reason is free. The man who does whatever occurs to him is a slave. Untold billions of dollars have been spent by advertisers over the past century to convince people that we can know our true identities only through fulfilling our desires. Say the advertisers, buy this object or experience, and you will know yourself—the self you want to be, not the self you are.
It doesn’t work. Everything returns to the mean of everydayness. So we try something new, thinking this, finally, will be what makes us happy. On and on we go, flitting and darting our way through life, running from God and ourselves, terrified of quiet, of stillness, of our own thoughts. We are like the wandering monks Saint Benedict condemned in his Rule as the worst sort of monastic, led only by their own restless wills. “Of the miserable conduct of all such, it is better to be silent than to speak,” wrote the saint.
Monks find true liberty by submitting to a rule of life, which is to say by ordering themselves to God in a structured way. And not only monks: almost anyone who lives by his own choice in a sustained, disciplined way will find true freedom. The woodworker who has given himself over to learning the traditions of his craft has far more liberty to exercise his creativity within the craft than the foolish amateur who thinks he can make it up as he goes along.
If you don’t control your own attention, there are plenty of people eager to do it for you. The first step in regaining cognitive control is creating a space of silence in which you can think. During a deep spiritual crisis in my own life, the toxic tide of chronic anxiety did not began to recede from my mind until my priest ordered me to take up a daily rule of contemplative prayer. Stilling my mind for an hour of prayer was incredibly difficult, but it eventually opened up a beachhead in which the Holy Spirit could work to calm the stormy waters within.
A Jewish organization called Reboot promotes a nonsectarian concept they call “digital Sabbath.” It’s a day of rest in which people disconnect from technology—particularly computers, iPads, and smartphones—so that they can reconnect with the real world. The digital Sabbath is not a punishment but rather a means through which one can lay aside the world’s cares (at least the ones communicated to us via digital technology).
This is akin to the ancient Christian habit of ritual fasting, which is still observed with relative strictness by many Eastern Orthodox Christians. Faithful Orthodox Christians observe Great Lent—the forty-day period before Holy Week—by abstaining from meat, fish, dairy, and other foods, according to their strength. They must also increase their prayer, repentance, and worship. As with Jewish observance of the Sabbath, none of this is meant to be punitive but is rather for the good of humankind.
“When a man leaves on a journey, he must know where he is going,” writes the Orthodox priest Alexander Schmemann in his study of Lent.11 This is why all serious believers must engage in periods of asceticism. They teach us to rid ourselves of accumulated distractions that keep our eyes from seeing our goal. Neil Postman, though a secular man, praises religious ascetics, saying that they “destroy” information that diverts their gaze from their ultimate end. To paraphrase the title of Postman’s most famous book, the practices of religious ascetics prevent them from amusing themselves to spiritual death.
When we abstain from practices that disorder our loves, and in that time of fasting redouble our contemplation of God and the good things of Creation, we recenter our minds on the inner stability we need to create a coherent, meaningful self. The Internet is a scattering phenomenon, one that encourages surrender to passionate impulses. If we fail to push back against the Internet as hard as it pushes against us, we cannot help but lose our footing. And if we lose our footing, we ultimately lose the straight path through life. Christians have known this from generation to generation since the early church.
But with us, this wisdom has been forgotten. Laments Nicholas Carr, “We are welcoming the frenziedness into our souls.”
Take Smartphones Away from Kids
My wife once asked a new Christian friend why she homeschools her children, given that they live in a good public school district. Said the friend, “The day my fifth-grade son came home from school and said his friends were watching hardcore porn on their smartphones was the day my husband and I made the call.” It wasn’t the school’s fault. Smartphones were forbidden there. The boys were accessing pornography on their free time—and there wasn’t a thing school authorities could do about it.
When parents hand their children small portable computers with virtually unlimited access to the Internet, they should not be surprised when their kids—especially their sons—dive into pornography. Unfortunately, with boys at least, it’s in the nature of the hormone-jacked beast. Moms and dads who would never leave their kids unattended in a room full of pornographic DVDs think nothing of handing them smartphones. This is morally insane.
No adolescent or young teenager should be expected to have the self-control on his own to say no. Earlier in this book, we discussed the catastrophic impacts pornography can have on the brains of addicts. According to the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center, 93 percent of boys and 62 percent of girls have seen online pornography in adolescence.12 It may be impossible to guard their eyes constantly, but it is irresponsible of parents not to try. Plus, parents in peer groups should work together to enforce a smartphone ban among their kids.
Moreover, teenagers are far too immature to understand the serious legal trouble they can get into with sexting. In many jurisdictions, sending sexually explicit images of minors counts as transmitting child pornography. Is it fair to put an impulsive tenth grader in the same category as a pervert? No, but that’s a call for the district attorney and the judge. Even if your child avoids conviction, to be dragged through the legal process with the prospect of sex offender status hanging over his head, potentially for the rest of his life, can be financially and emotionally devastating to a family.
Finally, though most teens who sext will never find themselves in legal jeopardy, the moral dimension can be ruinous. The habit trains kids to objectify the opposite sex, treating them as commodities, and to regard their own sexuality as something to be marketed for status. A single illicit image that hits social media can destroy a teen’s reputation and set them up for bullying and abuse.
Aside from the risk of pornographic content, there is the critical problem of what too much online exposure does to a young person’s brain. If we don’t treat our homes and schools as monasteries, strictly limiting both the information that comes to our kids (for the sake of their own inner formation), as well as their access to brain-altering technologies, we are forfeiting our responsibilities as stewards of their souls—and our own.
Did you know that Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs did not let his children use iPads and strictly limited their access to technology? Jobs was not the only one.
Chris Anderson, a former top tech journalist and now a Silicon Valley CEO, told the New York Times in 2014 that his home is like a tech monastery for his five children. “My kids accuse me and my wife of being fascists and overly concerned about tech, and they say that none of their friends have the same rules,” Anderson said. “That’s because we have seen the dangers of technology firsthand. I’ve seen it in myself, I don’t want to see that happen to my kids.”13
If that’s how Silicon Valley tech geniuses parent, how do we justify being more liberal? Yes, you will be thought of as a weirdo and a control freak. So what? These are your children.
“The fact that we put these devices in our children’s hands at a very young age with little guidance, and they experience life in terms of likes and dislikes, the fact that they basically have technology now as a prosthetic attachment—all of that seems to me to be incredibly short-sighted and dangerous,” says philosopher Michael Hanby.
“It’s affecting their ability to think and to have basic human relationships,” he said. “This is a vast social experiment without precedent. We have handed our kids over to this without knowing what we are doing.”
Keep Social Media Out of Worship
Some churches encourage Tweeting and texting during worship services. The idea is that this is simply another way to share the Gospel. They may be right as a general matter, but it’s a huge mistake to invite this technology into worship.
For one thing, there is zero chance that people Tweeting and texting during church will restrict themselves to commentary on the sermon or Scripture readings. More importantly, the last place anyone needs to have his attention divided is during Sunday worship. Social media divides our attention with the razor’s-edge efficiency of a sushi chef. Many people, especially the young, live all week immersed in the fragmented headspace that is today’s norm. Bringing social media into Sunday worship exacerbates the problem, in part by denying that it is a problem in the first place.
Neuroscience has demonstrated that remembering a thing depends on sustaining attention to it. Engaging in social media during worship all but guarantees that anything the pastor says will be ephemeral. Plus, encouraging social media use during worship works against the contemplative state of mind one needs to bring into church.
More deeply, pastors and worship leaders who justify incorporating social media into worship should ask themselves: How does this serve the Gospel? If “sharing the Gospel” means simply disseminating information about Jesus, then that makes sense. But we see that becoming a disciple of Christ is about submitting to formation, not absorbing information. In that sense, social media acts like a gale-force wind that prevents the seed of the Gospel from taking root in the soil of one’s soul.
Do Things with Your Hands
For over a decade, my friend Andrew Sullivan was one of the most prolific and influential bloggers on the Internet. Then one day in 2015, at the height of his fame and success, he suddenly dropped out and fell below the radar.
A few months later, when we both happened to be in Boston, Andrew and I met for coffee. I could hardly believe how good he looked. He was fit and glowing and had a startling sense of serenity about him. Andrew told me this was the fruit of getting off the Internet.
A year later, in a New York Magazine essay, Andrew explained his dramatic epiphany:
Every minute I was engrossed in a virtual interaction I was not involved in a human encounter. Every second absorbed in some trivia was a second less for any form of reflection, or calm, or spirituality. “Multitasking” was a mirage. This was a zero-sum question. I either lived as a voice online or I lived as a human being in the world that humans had lived in since the beginning of time.
And so I decided, after 15 years, to live in reality.14
It is not feasible for most of us to abandon the Internet entirely. But at the very least we can impose on ourselves a discipline similar to the Benedictine monks, who, observing the Rule, strictly limit themselves to particular tasks during certain hours.
We can also do more things with our hands. Put that way, it sounds almost childish, but there’s a serious point here. Technology enables us to treat interaction with the material world—people, places, things—as an abstraction. Getting our hands dirty, so to speak, with gardening, cooking, sewing, exercise, and the like, is a crucial way of restoring our sense of connection with the real world. So is doing things face to face with other people.
We have to work hard to fight back against the technology that makes our everyday lives so easy, so that we can be human beings who live in reality. Brother Francis of Norcia says heaving big sacks of grain in his monastery work has been great for him “because it helps me remember that the human person is body and spirit, not just a spirit.”
Question Progress
On the other side of that equation, the body is not simply wetware, a biological form of the computer. The habit of thinking mechanistically about the body causes us to let down our moral and ethical guard. Technological progress is not the same thing as moral progress—and in fact, can be its opposite.
In a tense conversation about bioethics, a prominent Christian medical researcher said to me, “The things we are going to be facing in the next decade or so shock the conscience.
“My colleagues can’t see it,” he continued, referring to scientists he works with. “Most of them aren’t Christians, but even the Christians, when I try to engage them on the topic, I get nothing but blank stares.”
These are scientists whose minds have been captured and disarmed by technology, which trains us to think of ourselves in instrumental terms. In the early twentieth century, the most progressive minds in the American establishment embraced eugenics—the pseudoscience of improving the race through controlled breeding. Leading churchmen endorsed the idea, saying it would improve society through applied science. It fell to Catholics and Protestant fundamentalists to object to eugenics on grounds of human dignity.
Eugenics fell into disgrace after the world saw what the Nazis did with these racial theories. Now, in the twenty-first century, eugenics is making a comeback, thanks to rapidly advancing biotechnology that promises to give parents the ability to make designer babies. Will contemporary Christians find their prophetic voice? Not if they have ordered their minds according to the technological imperative.
The connection between a future technologically driven dystopia and the suburban shopping mall is closer than you think. As we saw in Chapter 1, sociologist Christian Smith found that only 9 percent of Millennials surveyed thought consumerism was a serious moral issue. For most Americans, desire is self-justifying. For consumers, if you can afford it, why not buy it? For citizens of a technocracy, if the technology exists to give you what you want, no one has a right to object.
The mind of Technological Man cannot resist his heart’s desires, because he has been trained by his culture not to question them. Technological Man comes to believe that the limits on what he can do to nature lie primarily in his capacity to subdue it to his will. The Christian must rebel against this. The only impregnable fortress is metaphysical, the conviction that meaning transcends ourselves and is grounded in God. There are boundaries beyond which we cannot go if we want to live.
Thinking that the world mediated by technology is the real world is a fatal error. We don’t see reality then; we only see ourselves. If we do not understand this, if we don’t believe that all things exist independently of our desires, that there is a world beyond our heads, then there is no reason to pay attention, because there is nothing to contemplate. If feeling defines reality, then contemplation is useless, and so is resistance. If we live as if boredom were the root of all evil, we will not be able to fight back, and if we do not fight back, we will find that our machines have mastered us. Perhaps they already have.
In Chapter 1, we saw that authentic Christianity has been taken over by a parasitical form of spirituality called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, one effect of which is to culture Christians to believe that God blesses whatever makes them happy. In this way, technology becomes a kind of theology. It is a protean theology, because the god to whom it bears witness is the ever-changing Self that is seeking liberation from all limits and unchosen obligations.
Every time the church embraces a new fad, especially trends that turn worship into electronic spectacle, it yields more of its soul to this false theology. Before long—and we may be at this point already in some places—the church becomes fully possessed by the spirit of this world. Authentic orthodox Christianity can in no way be reconciled with the Zeitgeist. To the extent the church invites the technological mindset to take up residence within it, the conditions for Christianity will cease to exist.
The core reason is that immersion in technology causes us to lose our collective memory. Without memory, we don’t know who we are, and if we don’t know who we are, we become whatever our momentary passions wish us to be.
No regime is trying to steal our cultural memory and Christian identity from us. We are giving it away ourselves. Neil Postman counseled a strategy of resistance, saying that “a resistance fighter understands that technology must never be accepted as part of the natural order of things.” Otherwise the war is over.
If Christians today do not stand firm on the rock of sacred order as revealed in our holy tradition—ways of thinking, speaking and acting that incarnate the Christian in culture and pass it on from generation to generation—we will have nothing to stand on at all. If we don’t take on everyday practices that keep that sacred order present to ourselves, our families, and our communities, we are going to lose it. And if we lose it, we are at great risk of losing sight of the One to whom everything in that sacred order, like a divine treasure map, points.
That has been the main argument of this book. In these pages, I have attempted to sound the alarm for conservative Christians in the West, warning them that the greatest danger we face today does not come from aggressive left-wing politics or radical Islam, as many seem to think. Those are dangers that our Christian brothers and sisters in China, Nigeria, and the Middle East face. For us, the greatest danger comes from the liberal secular order itself. And our failure to understand this reinforces our cultural captivity and the seemingly unstoppable assimilation of the next generations.
The Benedict Option is not a technique for reversing the losses, political and otherwise, that Christians have suffered. It is not a strategy for turning back the clock to an imagined golden age. Still less is it a plan for constructing communities of the pure, cut off from the real world.
To the contrary, the Benedict Option is a call to undertaking the long and patient work of reclaiming the real world from the artifice, alienation, and atomization of modern life. It is a way of seeing the world and of living in the world that undermines modernity’s big lie: that humans are nothing more than ghosts in a machine, and we are free to adjust its settings in any way we like.
“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines,” writes Wendell Berry. Let’s take our stand on the side of creatures, and the Creator.