It’s been a long time since I wrote on here. Sorry. The truth is, I’ve had the heart for all the usual thinking (and even writing) that goes behind the articles that end up gracing these pages, and I’ve even written a few. But something has stopped me actually exposing them to the world. It’s not that I don’t want my words to have the kind of permanence that publishing them inevitably creates. It’s more the opposite, actually: I fear the transience, the elusiveness, of digital thought. It’s like it doesn’t exist, somehow.
I went to a Mary Harrington talk a few months ago. She talked of how inevitable it was that she, having been an awkward, not-well-integrated teenager obsessed with the usual teenage nerd hang ups (lots of Tolkien, with the early days of PlayStation thrown in for good measure), would fall so emphatically for the internet once it came onto the scene. She drew a straight line from the world of ideas contained in books and the daydreams of a geeky tomboy to the placeless, bottomless data horde of the modern web. But that seemed to me rather off. There definitely is a world of ideas made in books and musty libraries; a world I can’t help but love. It is disembodied, in a sense, as anyone who’s asked a daydreamer like myself to do the washing up can attest. But it’s different – really, seismically different – to the ever bulging world of the web.
Let me try to set out why I think that is. I suppose the Mary Harringtons of this world would point to how books, in general, point beyond themselves, and beyond the immediate environment of the reader. As I lie in bed reading Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, I am transported (in spirit, I suppose) to another world: a world of point-to-point racing that is strangely hierarchical, in a comforting sort of way. This world is a collaborative enterprise: Sassoon, many years ago now, laid the groundwork, fashioned the materials – now my own imagination finishes it off. The same of course, when you read this blog, or anything on the internet, really; and that’s where the path of the line drawn by Harrington goes, at least supposedly. The idea is that the web is just the same – only more, so much more, is available to you.
But: how is a book any different to anything else in the world? Let’s think about how a book works. It’s all about signs. We’ve agreed, collectively, that certain shapes ought to map onto certain sounds; put them together, and you can outline more complex sounds that we have assigned to objects and abstract concepts. That is how written language works; but it is also how the world works. Wherever humans leave their mark – and, at a more significant level, everywhere God has left his mark – signs and symbols abound. Every object is laced with meaning. So is every body part, of course, when used in particular ways. My point is that ours is a semiotic world: what differs about books is merely the concentration within then of symbols with very particular socially-assigned meanings.
A word on a page is an object the same way a statue, a table, a drinks cabinet are objects. All of them are laced with meaning, though the precision of their significations differs. But a computer screen is completely different. The object is just a whole load of lights which change colour when you touch them. The ‘pages’ of this blog, which I mentioned at the top of this article, aren’t pages at all: they’re representations of pages. The illusion, if you like, of something tangible. That’s how screens work. They kid us into thinking we’re seeing something which we’re not seeing, which isn’t actually there.
Why does the distinction matter? Well, for one thing, I am concerned that we have lost our grip on reality. Books represent some of the most complex encoding of abstract thought into physical objects. But they are still no more than objects – every single idea you read on a physical page has been expressed as a physical entity (paper and ink, shaped in a certain fashion). In this way books fuse together the spirit and the flesh. Not so with our screens. The spirit is there by illusion, by a trick of lights; the flesh is absent. And, perhaps even more insidiously, this illusion is unstable. It does not last; it does not obey the laws of physics. The lights that are producing the screen on which I write this (and yes, there is a double dose of hypocrisy to this article) can portray a near-infinite array of different images that impress their own ‘realities’ upon my mind. Connected to the internet, screens don’t just break the weddedness of flesh and spirit, they make us susceptible to the influence of any ‘spirit’. They are windows into limitless claims upon reality. The beautiful and the sublime, the contorted and the desecrated, are all just a few taps away. In seconds, right now, I could be watching cat videos or child pornography, Nobel prize ceremonies or Isis beheadings. And all that is stopping me is the continual action of my will – not a thought that always fills me with confidence. It is the emotional and spiritual equivalent of living in a house full of semi-automatic rifles, or of having a nuclear warhead launch button on my bedside cabinet.
No wonder we are so anxious! Screens, wedded to the internet, cause ruptures in reality. They are portals from one part of reality to the next, and they create the constant threat that some unforeseen event could impinge itself upon me at any moment. There is no peace in this world. There is no mountain on which Christ can pray. Everything is everywhere, all the time, and there is no escaping it. And hence the irony, that in an era of unprecedented peace (understood as the absence of violence or the threat of violence) we are left crippled by constant anxiety. We thought that more choice would mean more freedom. But as voice upon voice demands our ears, and plies our attention from that which is before us, we have found that there is only a deafening noise.
What shall we do? I have written this on a smartphone. You are reading it on a screen, too. This is our world now. The scary thought is that it is all I have known. I was born after the internet was invented; I can’t even begin to fathom how much my mind has been shaped by this order of things. Gen Y and Gen Z are the Guinea pig generations, participating in a trial for which we never signed up. And I’m not sure I like the results.
But let me make some suggestions. Start by turning off your phone, and all your devices, a little earlier tonight. Let reality obey its time-hallowed laws. Don’t jump to the techy way to do something; and certainly don’t assume the myth of technological neutrality. Read a book. Buy the poster of that piece of art you like. Scribble a bit.
But the biggest step that Christians need to take is to excise screens from public worship. How does Jesus pray? Not on the street corner, of course. But apparently a secluded room in a house wasn’t tranquil enough, either:
And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed. (Mark 1:35)
Prayer requires focus. Worship needs peace (which is why, as Jean Daniélou once argued, it is a political problem). To behold the face of God by faith; to hear the preaching of the word of God (which is the word of God); to lift our voices, in the power of his Spirit, to bring our petitions before the throne of glory – in short, all that is sacred – all this requires a lack of interruption. Worship is intimate, and it leaves the soul vulnerable. But screens connected to the internet break any possibility of peace. They expose the gathered people of God to the potential for any interruption – for any rupture. There is no chance of the sacred in such a setting.
I genuinely believe that the use of screens in public worship has been deeply detrimental to the spiritual life of God’s people. All that is good in life involves the marriage of flesh and spirit, of body and soul. Our technological revolution has been built on the false claim that that is not true: that we can (and perhaps even ought to) bend reality to our will. Mere mind is given primacy over pretty much anything. Our technologies are built to aid that; it’s why PornHub is the 12th most used site on the internet. Let’s not naively assume that we are not profoundly influenced by them.
I have rambled on long enough; perhaps a short article would have been better. Maybe this is my drop the mic moment, but I hope not. I would like to publish more of my writings on here. But I will do so with my heart a little heavier than usual. If this could be an analogue blog, then I dearly wish that it were. For the time being I shall press on with the tension of living in a world whose basic structures I have come to lament. But if I can encourage a few more people to turn away from their screens, if only for a time, then I shall be happy. Let us together seek the peace to worship our God.
The Fourth Discourseman
The Four Discoursemen 