A burgeoning literary genre in our times is the critique, at once empirical and philosophical, of the modern Westerner’s dependency on ever-multiplying digital technology, with all the destructive or at least problematic habits it engenders. Older writers tended to focus on technology in general and its effects on culture and humane ways of life — Marshall McLuhan, John Senior, Wendell Berry, and Neil Postman come to mind. These are now joined by many eloquent voices calling attention to the corrosive power of social media, smartphones, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.
Although this is not an area I have written much about, I am keenly interested in what others have to say about it. Two Substacks that I recommend very highly along these lines are Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel and Robin Phillip’s The Epimethean. The European Conservative continues to impress me with its interventions in this area as well.
In recent weeks I’ve been delighted to see a string of especially outstanding articles on technology, culture, and spiritual health that I cannot resist sharing with you. I try very hard not to exaggerate, not to inflate praise when only a mild pat on the back is deserved. But I am quite serious when I say that these are must-reads, if you are at all interested in the topic.
Being-in-place vs. being nowhere
First, there is Nicholas Rao’s profound and intriguing article “Overcoming Self-Exile.” Here he maps out his claims and his goal:
Ours is an age of chronic disorientation, when much of the technological euphoria of the early internet days has given way to weariness, anxiety, and cynicism. There is much talk of slowing down and living off the grid and of a technological detox. The phenomenon evokes many words: displacement, disengagement, alienation. I call it ‘self-exile.’ I like the imagery of exile because it captures the literal physicality of the experience and also because it helps us to appreciate the alternative, which I designate as ‘environment.’ My argument is that Catholics can best avoid and undermine this self-exile if we understand our own counterculture in terms of reestablishing true environments. Moreover, a proper understanding of what an environment is, and why it has spiritual worth, will help us differentiate ourselves from some of the other, secular critics of self-exile.
A taste:
Fear is the desire for control. It is no coincidence, then, that our age of anxiety is an age of technology, an age of attempts to control. Hatred of weakness and uncertainty can only exist where there is the expectation of control and certainty. Nihilism is a descendent of rationalism, because only the man who expects to know everything will throw up his hands in despair that he knows nothing.
Read the rest here.
Baffled grandparent of traditionalist granddaughter
A priest has written a brilliant response to a fictional grandmother’s letter complaining about her granddaughter’s wayward attraction to backwardism. This, too, touches on themes of technology and modernity:
Technological advances and hopes have given way to anxieties about the environment and AI. Many freedoms have made them feel life is directionless and meaningless; sexual freedom has resulted in sexual exploitation. These things, along with the resulting breakdown of family and society, have exacerbated mental-health issues. Far from coming of age, the modern world can look confused and does not “get along without God” after all. In short, modernity is experienced as nihilistic and empty.
When young people feel this about the world, they can move in one of two directions: they either decide the world is nihilistic and just try to get on with it (not every young person is a traditionalist), or they seek transcendence and something stable and substantial to help them resist the cultural pressure of nihilism.
Read the rest here.
The pause at the asterisk, or: finding stillness in leisure
Robin Phillips, though Eastern Orthodox, has written a most insightful piece about Gregorian chant and, in particular, the famous pause that should exist at the asterisk between the two halves of a chanted psalm verse. But this tremendous article is like a microcosm of the expanding universe, as it widens into fundamental questions of leisure and stillness, information overload and communication, and even breathing and the beating of the heart:
Pater Edmund on standing still
For someone coming from a different tradition, Phillips has been gifted with a lot of great insights into Gregorian chant and what it represents and fosters. But Pater Edmund Waldstein is a Cistercian monk who sings chant every day of his life as part of his basic work in the world. And this, perhaps, is why, or at least part of why, he can be so insightful about man’s relationship to the world, in his fine article “Christendom Standing Still”:
Smartphones and modern architecture enable and embody an endless supply of ersatz worlds with which to distract ourselves. We must resist the urge to flee from God into a multiverse of distractions, and learn to stand still in the presence of God.
Living by and for The Machine
Paul Kingsnorth is of course no stranger to readers of Substack: his Abbey of Misrule is read by over 50,000 readers, and his critiques of the modern world are by now well-known.
The European Conservative summarizes a recent address he gave, and while the summary belongs to the subgenre my wife describes as “how to feel depressed naturally,” Kingsnorth’s lapidary analysis captures in few words the magnitude of the revolution taking place:
Kingsnorth told a room of international writers, critics, and academics, “You are living in what I have come to call ‘The Machine.’” In this brave new world, we are witnessing the “triumph of the mechanical over the natural, the planned over the organic, the centralized over the local, the system over the individual and the community. This is the tale of our time.”
Kingsnorth argued that, since the Industrial Revolution, the Machine has been enveloping man and disenchanting his world. Now the process is nearly complete. The old world is dying, if it’s not dead already, “And the one that is manifesting to replace it is a kind of left-brain paradise. It’s all straight lines and concrete car parks … there’s no arguing with it, because it makes perfect rational sense.”
Look no further than the consolidation of global corporate and ideological power. Kingsnorth explains that, “Ever-tightening restrictions on certain types of speech and assembly, smartphone-enabled health passports, track-and-trace apps, state-issued digital currencies, cash-free economies, widespread surveillance by facial-recognition camera, access points controlled by eyeball or fingerprint scan, artificial intelligence: all of these are here already.”
The Machine severs man from nature—from the Earth and the present—as well as from God. “In their stead,” Kingsnorth said, “we are offered an anti-culture, an endless consumer present: planned, monitored, controlled, smart, borderless, profitable, soul-dead, increasingly detached from messy reality, directed by who-even-knows, mediated through monitored screens.”
“Aiming toward utopia,” he observed, we find ourselves “dipping towards hell instead.” This fall is entirely volitional and idolatrous. Kingsnorth thinks the “ultimate endgame … is the replacement of nature with technology, the rebuilding of the world in purely human shape … to fulfill the most ancient human dream, which is to become gods.”
Read the rest here.
Political gnosticism in pursuit of self-deification
In a Venn diagram overlap with Kingsnorth, Archbishop Charles Chaput gives us a wonderfully written and cogently argued article on the new gnosticism of our political elites (if one indulgently overlooks some of the Americanism):
Man’s oldest and most persistent sin is idolatry. And if the human story teaches us anything, it’s that idolatry has an infinite wardrobe of disguises—and an endless number of victims. In the modern era, the go-to idol is the state, usually in the liturgical vestments of science....—all to create a new world and restart history from “Year Zero,” cleansed of any memory of the past, and based on a model of man as his own master; humanity as the real and only god.
Any political party or ideology that claims to create a new kind of man, a self-sustaining, self-redemptive humanity, is a fraud. It’s just the latest installment in a very old gnostic fairy tale. Gnosticism grew up alongside Christianity, sometimes intertwining with it; and the modern gnostic zealot, whether he calls himself a fascist, a Nazi, a Marxist, or even a certain brand of “progressive,” is never really irreligious. And he’s certainly not an “unbeliever,” even when he says he is. He’s a particular kind of believer; a man convinced he has the secret knowledge, the gnosis, that unlocks the power to fix a broken world. And he clings to that sacred knowledge just as religiously as any 14th century monk clung to his Bible.
All that Chaput goes on to argue has, it turns out, an exact ecclesiastical application to the Francis regime. Chaput does not make the connection himself, but intelligent readers can and will see it without difficulty. Read “On the Power of the Powerless” here.
Is any of this related to the traditional Liturgy?
Robert Lazu Kmita, author of the philosophical adventure-story The Island Without Seasons, answers a resounding yes. The best minds of the twentieth century knew what was at stake in the attempted abolition of the TLM:
This was an elite that stood up for the liturgy: artists and philosophers who knew that this cult of the Incarnation was the seminal and founding work of art in Europe.
Kmita brilliantly uses the extended metaphor that the “traditionis custodes”—a phrase that can be translated as “prison-guards of treachery”—are rather like the soldiers appointed by the high priest to guard the tomb of Jesus to make sure He would stay good and dead. They were foiled, as anyone will be foiled by that which exists by divine power and contains divine power to live and to give life.
Read his article “The Patient Who Refuses to Die and the Quixotic Intellectuals who Defend the Liturgy of Ages” here.
Parents’ guide for rolling back a “phone-based childhood”
Jon Haidt of After Babel recommends a video by Catherine Price, saying:
It is powerful, brilliant, and clear. It’s a talk that every parent should watch. I have posted a few videos of talks I gave to education audiences, but Catherine’s talk is better than mine as a talk for parents.
Watch her presentation “Kids, Smartphones and Social Media: The Risks and The Solutions” here, then follow up with Jon Haidt:
Weekly roundup
OnePeterFive
Sebastian Morello’s provocative series at the European Conservative on the theme “we don't need a very different St. Benedict” led to an intensive exchange of letters between him and me on grace, vocations, and the modern Church. This exchange was then published at 1P5, here. Readers may find especially interesting the discussions of nature and supernature, the argument over whether priesthood is a vocation in the same way as religious life, and if Christian marriage can legitimately be seen as a “natural phenomenon.”
New Liturgical Movement
As we wrap up today the Octave of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, we may turn to the following subtle and difficult question. The claim is often made, in devotional works, that Our Lord suffers when He is sinned against in the Most Holy Eucharist. But considering His risen, glorified state, beyond all suffering, can we make theological sense of such a claim? This week at NLM, I argue that we can (article here).
YouTube channel
In 1998, a great pilgrimage was organized to Rome to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Ecclesia Dei and of the founding of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter. An excellent video documentary was made and put out on VHS cassette (remember that?), but it has never been released in digital format—until now.
Watching it today is a walk down memory lane, as we see Cardinal Ratzinger expounding on his vision for what would become, in 2007, Summorum Pontificum, and watch footage of pontifical Masses when they were still very rare. Bittersweet, yet reminding us of how far we have come amidst great adversity.
Reviews
Stuart Chessman of The Society of St. Hugh of Cluny posted a nice review of the new anthology Unresolved Tensions in Papal-Episcopal Relations.
I feel the tension of the overabundance of modern technology. And yet, many of these authors and publications use technology to publish their ideas. I often feel that reading things via the internet is the most realistic option of keeping abreast of the latest commentary in the Catholic world, and yet my aching eyes protest at any more screen time. If only we could bring back newspapers and magazines on a larger scale.
What a plethora of interesting topics to get lost in. Some I have found myself continually grappling with, like technology. Others, like Ecclesia Dei, I have made up my mind long ago.
The latter, I'm convinced was the ultimate modernist own goal. In an attempt to destroy tradition via the obvious target in the SSPX, the hierarchy offered a tethered alternative which not only broke loose to take on a life of its own, but has alongside the SSPX has become the new genie they can't put back in the bottle. Despite Pope Francis' jiggery-pokery, he will end his life with the sure knowledge that tradition is flourishing.
On pervasive digital technology. I see it as a toxic cloud. Unless cloistered, it is almost impossible to live the secular life without accessing it for paying bills, banking, healthcare, everything. Then, that is just a drop in the ocean, when you consider the real damage. The slavery, the addiction, to the notification. The interruption or complete abandonment of leisurely study. Despite reading and rereading Sertillanges, I find the conditions necessary for uninterrupted study, almost impossible to create and stick to, but perhaps that is a failing of my own.
But hope remains as I sit here smoking a bowl and reading Smith of Wooton Major, both in physical and original form: briar and leaf, paper and ink. So different from paper and phone. Perhaps this juxtaposition is not so far removed from the Mass compared to Bugnini gathering.