Living the Answer Blog

From the moment of the Fall, when the forbidden fruit promised an earlier and easier entrance into bliss, growth, and knowledge, one of Satan’s favorite strategies has been to take some promised good and offer his own version; easier, simpler, and always, in retrospect, somehow diminished and corrupted. The golden calf offered Israel a safer, less demanding God. As Abraham waited for the promised son, Hagar seemed a simple solution to his wife’s infertility. Even Jesus himself was offered a far easier path to dominion if he would only bow before the evil one.

It’s not that “easy” is necessarily or even usually bad; merely that the appeal of the easy is a powerful lure into danger. One of the best ways to draw us off the straight and narrow path is with a shortcut.

I bring this up because this feeling of an easier path to a lesser good is a theme of many of the problems and potential problems in our interactions with modern technology. The whole appeal of technology lies in its ability to make things easier, whether in communication, calculation, learning, shopping, or transportation. Of course, as I said above, easier isn’t necessarily bad. In fact, it’s often good, allowing us to be wise stewards of our resources by saving time and money for other uses. (I certainly appreciate being able to type these observations on the keyboard of a handy laptop, rather than pounding away on a typewriter or scribbling with a pen.) With technology as with the rest of life, the danger lies in the appeal of the easier path to draw us away from the better.

Take television, for example. It’s hard to imagine a means of entertainment easier than simply flipping on the TV after a long day–and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. But what are we losing when the ease of TV watching makes it our habitual answer to moments of quiet? What about the reading and talking and walking and drawing and dancing and simply watching the fire or the rain or the stars that used to occupy a much more prominent place in our lives? The most dangerous thing about the television is not the programming that flows across the screen, but the fact that the programming flows across a screen that sits comfortably close to the couch.

What television does for leisure, video games do for achievement. For most of human history, a young man driven by the urge to achieve, to overcome obstacles and enjoy the satisfaction of hard-won gains, would have to actually do something. He could start a farm or a business, or a nation; he might lead men into battle, study medicine or the law, or simply carve out a good life for a wife and children in a world where mere everyday life has more than its share of challenges. But regardless of what he did, it would be hard.

Video games changed that dynamic. They offer a truly unprecedented opportunity to feel a real sense of achievement from doing… nothing at all. Increasingly realistic virtual worlds are populated with challenges and dangers tailored to generate a feeling of real struggle and genuine victory, creating a triumphant haze of energy and endorphins to obscure the reality that nothing is actually happening. Watching the guns-blazing trailer for the most recent Call of Duty game, the implicit message of the “There’s a soldier in all of us” slogan is clear: It’s easy to be a hero. As a soft-looking Jonah Hill charges into a hail of gunfire in the video’s finale, expertly wielding rifle, knife, and grenade against oncoming attackers, it’s easy to see why the lure of virtual valor is intoxicating. When we wonder aloud where all the good men have gone, at least part of the answer is simple–they’re busy playing Call of Duty, where, thanks to the marvels of modern computing, it’s easy to be a hero.

Even more than video gaming, perhaps the best examples of the sometimes-deceptive shortcuts offered by technology lie in the field of social media. Television makes leisure easy and video games make achievement easy, but Facebook makes relationships easy. It’s convenient, immediate, organized, and thoroughly controllable; always right there, omnipresent yet unobtrusive, providing a neat little window into our friends’ lives and offering them a window into ours.

In many ways, social networks even manage to convey a sense of greater intimacy than we feel in most face-to-face relationships. Our much-satirized tendency to overshare the mundane details of our lives actually makes perfect sense psychologically: what better indicator is there of the closeness between two people than the extent to which they know the boring minutia of each other’s existence? Nearly everyone knows I’m a teacher. Barely anyone knows how I like my eggs cooked. If I know what you had for breakfast this morning, a part of me smiles with companionable pleasure; and when I “like” your status update letting the world know that your hangnail is feeling better, you know that I really care. Sure, it’s not quite the same as actually seeing you, actually talking to you, but at least it’s something in the midst of a busy day. At least Facebook makes it easy to stay in touch.

But what if staying in touch has become so easy that it’s keeping us apart? What if the very ease of superficial connection dulls the desire for something more? Granted, very few people are going to give up an active, meaningful community life in order to become a hermit with a Facebook account, but in a world where we’re all moving too quickly to just stop and actually know someone else, surely there’s a temptation to sustain our need for human connection and companionship on a fast-food diet of mouse clicks and keystrokes.

Every need or desire given to us by God draws us toward some corresponding good. Whether we’re talking about the need for food and water or our hunger for ultimate meaning, mankind was created with a set of desires that match what we most need. The counterintuitive danger posed by technology is that, by too easily fulfilling certain needs on a superficial level, we lose the drive to pursue a deeper good.

But what are we to do about it? Certainly, much technology has eased our lives in entirely unobjectionable ways. (One finds few who rail against the evils of refrigeration, anesthesia, or indoor plumbing.) The answer isn’t to simply reject technology or blame it for failings that ultimately arise from the human heart. Instead, we need a way to accept the good in modern advances without losing anything better in the process.

While that’s a topic far too broad to be adequately considered here, and one which requires different answers for different situations, there is one generally-applicable and foundational principle. This is the rule that the best protection against desire for counterfeit goods is love of the true. Returning to the very beginning of human history, the answer to the serpent’s temptation in the Garden was not a carefully-cultivated distaste for fruit; nor, more seriously, a disdainful attitude toward the wisdom and knowledge which the serpent offered. The only thing that would have saved Adam and Eve was a desire for God so strong that even the genuine good of greater knowledge shone dim in comparison. And when the second Adam rejected Satan’s offers and passed the test which the first had failed, it was by holding fast to the words, “You shall worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.” As creatures created in the image of the God who is love, even false love is too powerful to be defeated by anything but a better love.

How is this relevant to the right use of technology? Simply in this: that our best protection against losing the good in the easy is to so carefully cultivate a love for what is genuinely good that we instinctively recognize and reject its diminution. If we learn to use our time well and to love the good that results, we are relatively inoculated against the danger of TV. If we cultivate a taste for actual work and true achievement, the virtual triumphs of video games will seem so diminished by comparison that we can safely enjoy them for what they are. When we know the joy of true fellowship, Facebook ceases to be an enemy and may even be transformed into a pleasant eddy in the flow of our real relationships. And if we do find ourselves losing something worthwhile in our use of these or other fruits of technology, a healthy love of what is better will make it easier to find a new balance without being drawn away by the lure of the easy.

Rereading G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy recently, I was struck by the essential distinction he draws between the balanced, moderate Aristotelian idea of virtue and that of Christianity. Discussing “the paradoxes of Christianity,” Chesterton writes,

Nevertheless it could not, I felt, be quite true that Christianity was merely sensible and stood in the middle. There was really an element in it of emphasis and even frenzy which had justified the secularists in their superficial criticism. It might be wise, I began more and more to think that it was wise, but it was not merely worldly wise; it was not merely temperate and respectable. Its fierce crusaders and meek saints might balance each other; still, the crusaders were very fierce and the saints were very meek, meek beyond all decency…

All sane men can see that sanity is some kind of equilibrium; that one may be mad and eat too much, or mad and eat too little… But granted that we have all to keep a balance, the real interest comes in with the question of how that balance can be kept. That was the problem with Paganism tried to solve; that was the problem which I think Christianity solved and solved in a very strange way…

Paganism declared that virtue was in balance; Christianity declared it was in conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite. Of course they were not really inconsistent; but they were such that it was hard to hold simultaneously.

The tempered, moderate virtue of the Greeks ends up respectable but lifeless.  Seeking, for example, the virtuous balance between pride and abasement, the Greek “would merely say that he was content with himself, but not insolently self-satisfied, that there were many better and many worse, that his deserts were limited, but he would see that he got them. In short, he would walk with his head in the air; but not necessarily with his nose in the air.” “This is a manly and rational position,” Chesterton agrees, but, “Being a mixture of two things, it is a dilution of two things; neither is present in its full strength or contributes its full color.”

This proper pride does not lift the heart like the tongue of trumpets; you cannot go clad in crimson and gold for this. On the other hand, this mild rationalist modesty does not cleanse the soul with fire and make it clear like crystal; it does not (like a strict and searching humility) make a man as a little child, who can sit at the feet of the grass… Thus it loses both the poetry of being proud and the poetry of being humble.

In contrast, Christianity manages to save both. “In so far as I am Man I am the chief of creatures. In so far as I am a man I am the chief of sinners… Christianity thus held a thought of the dignity of man that could only be expressed in crowns rayed like the sun and fans of peacock plumage. Yet at the same time it could hold a thought about the abject smallness of man that could only be expressed in fasting and fantastic submission, in the gray ashes of St. Dominic and the white snows of St. Bernard.”

Chesterton argues that this paradoxical wedding of extremes goes to the heart of Christianity; a religion which promises, after all, that “whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it,” and founded upon the Christ, who “was not a being apart from God and man, like an elf, nor yet a being half human and half not, like a centaur, but both things at once and both things thoroughly, very man and very God.”

In fact, this principle characterizes Christian ethics. Take, for example, man’s relationship with the natural world. On the one hand, a wondering joy, alternately exuberant and hushed, at the beauty of creation; on the other, a gritty hatred for the evil and wrong intermingled with the good. Or Augustine’s Just War theory, which holds that violence can be right and good… so long as it is motivated by love of our neighbor.

And what of romantic love? Commenting on Christ’s command to “hate” one’s own wife (Luke 14:26), C.S. Lewis writes in The Four Loves, “He says something that cracks like a whip about trampling them all under foot the moment they hold us back from following Him… To hate is to reject, to set one’s face against, to make no concession to, the Beloved when the Beloved utters, however sweetly and however pitiably, the suggestions of the Devil.” And yet, this submission to a higher love in no way diminishes the love that Scripture anticipates between man and wife. After all, they are told to love one another “as Christ loved the church;” an overwhelming idea even when considered only in light of his sacrifice on her behalf, which is itself a mere expression of the inexplicable delight which led prophets from Isaiah to John of Patmos to speak of Christ “rejoicing” in his bride. And of course, the vast majority of scriptural discussion of marriage takes the form, not of commands or propositions, but of a book of love poetry considered so inflammatory by colonial Americans that their youth were not allowed to read it until they reached adulthood!

Why does all of this matter? Two reasons. First, there is the obvious fact that a better understanding of our God and our faith is always valuable. Secondly, a renewed attention to that element within Christianity “of emphasis and even frenzy… the collision of passions” which Chesterton notes might serve as a corrective to the tendency within comfortable American Christianity to be exceptional largely for our dullness. This is not to suggest an artificial fanning of passion, but rather a simple recognition that, contra the intuitive, classical view, virtue is not necessarily found in moderation, in a Goldilocksian “not too hot and not too cold;” that the faith which Dorothy Sayers called “the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man” has not lost the spirit of the Creator who decided to stage a play, and spun a universe from nothing to serve as the set.