Getting to the Point: technology

Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts

Thursday, October 2, 2014

Let Nothing Disturb Thee

Let nothing disturb thee,

Let nothing affright thee.

All things are passing,

God never changes.

Patient endurance

Attains all things.

Who possesses God

Wants for nothing.

God alone suffices.

St Teresa of Avila

Reflection – Yesterday’s post about Therese of Lisieux has put me in a Carmelite frame of mind, and so I woke up this morning with this prayer by Teresa of Avila on my mind. It is one I often revert to; I wrote a simple musical setting for it that we do from time to time here at Mass, and it is a prayer that has thus slipped into the collective consciousness of our community.

I have been concerned for some time about the degree of ‘disturbance’ in people these days. I do not live under a rock; I do know, quite well, what is happening in the world, and pay close attention to it, as best one can. There is great violence loose in the world, a spirit of war, as one of my wise brother priests puts it here.

In the face of great evil—beheadings and the like—and of all the lesser evils we encounter as a matter of course (corrupt venal politicians, weak or worldly leaders in the Church, and other sundry nonsense), the great tendency many of us have is to Get Mad, and in that to Get Loud.

The Internet has been the great accelerant of anger and volume in our day, of course. Every one of us who has access to technology has a giant megaphone with which we can trumpet whatever is coming out of our hearts and minds. In the past, only the words of the great and powerful could extend beyond the immediate earshot of the speaker; now, these very words I am typing will be read by someone in India in less than an hour’s time (hi, you know who!).

What this means for all of us is a great responsibility. ‘To whom much has been given, much will be expected.’ If I have been ‘given’ (in the sense that I certainly didn’t invent it), the ability to instantly communicate a message to the entire world, and if I in fact know that by the end of the day a couple hundred people anyhow will have read my writings, then I have to be very careful in choosing my words.

Those who have greater readerships, have greater responsibility yet. And this is where I personally am very concerned—there is just so much anger, so much vitriol, so much name-calling and seething contempt out there. And… I’m talking about the ‘Catholic’ blogosphere here, folks.

There is so much anger and hatred and fierce contempt and violence in the world. Do we really need to pour out from our hearts our own bile and venom and disdain? How does this serve the cause of Christ and the life of the Body of Christ, the Church?

‘Let nothing disturb thee, let nothing affright thee. All things are passing, God never changes. Patient endurance attains all things. Who possesses God wants for nothing. God alone suffices.’ Surely this is to be the starting point for every Christian engagement in the world, isn’t it? And out of this, we can find the right words to talk about Islamic terror, police brutality, the genuinely debased and diseased nature of politics in our countries, the rampaging agendas that threaten religious and civil freedoms, and so forth.

We do have to speak about these matters, and I have, to some degree, done so on this blog. But we have to speak with mercy, with patience, with respect for those who genuinely disagree with us, with respect for the basic human dignity and God-created goodness of those who we believe to be behaving wrongly.

We must never seethe with dripping contempt and vituperous abuse and insult, name-calling and blackguarding and ranting against how very, very lousy… everyone else is.

I, Fr. Denis Lemieux, am a sinner. I am lousy. Who am I to denounce the sin of my brother or sister? But with patient endurance I wait—we all wait—on the God who never changes, and hope to possess Him, and so want nothing. And so it must be in the Christian engagement with evil in the world, or we are just one more angry, violent voice doing nothing to make anything better, and doing quite a bit to make things a lot worse.

Lots of people can spew anger into the internet. We who are Christians are the only ones who can proclaim Christ into the internet. If we don’t, nobody will, and the world will be an angrier, colder, more polarized and hate-filled place. And we will not have to look far to know who is responsible for that.

Let nothing disturb thee. Patient endurance attains all things. God alone suffices.

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Book Review: I-Choice

Just when I thought my book had disappeared into the wilderness of the publishing world, never to be seen again by me or anyone else, along comes this book review from Fr. Jonathan Blake, who I was in seminary with.

Read it, and then, if you haven't yet bought my book, buy it here. Thanks, Fr. Blake!

Saturday, March 1, 2014

Cosmic Toddlers and Snow Falling on Cedars

Technical civilization is the product of labor, of man’s exertion of power for the sake of gain, for the sake of producing goods. It begins when man, dissatisfied with what is available in nature, becomes engaged in a struggle with the forces of nature in order to enhance his safety and to increase his comfort. To use the language of the Bible, the task of civilization is to subdue the earth, to have dominion over the beast.

How proud we are of our victories in the war with nature, proud of the multitude of instruments we have succeeded in inventing, of the abundance of commodities we have been able to produce. Yet our victories have come to resemble defeats. In spite of our triumphs, we have fallen victims to the work of our hands; it is as if the forces we have conquered have conquered us.

Is our civilization a way to disaster, as many of us are prone to believe? Is civilization essentially evil, to be rejected and condemned? The faith of the Jew is not a way out of this world, but a way of being within this world; not to reject but to surpass civilization. The Sabbath is the day of which we learn the art of surpassing civilization…

To set apart one day a week for freedom, a day on which we would not use the instruments which have so easily been turned into weapons of destruction, a day for being with ourselves, a day of detachment from the vulgar, of independence of external obligations, a day on which we stop worshipping the idols of technical civilization, a day on which we use no money, a day of armistice in the economic struggle with our fellow men and the forces of nature—is there any institution that holds out a greater hope for man’s progress than the Sabbath?

Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath

Reflection – This will be my last day with Heschel’s wonderful book. It is tempting to just go on quoting from a book like this—his writing is so lyrical, his insights so deep, his style so simple and accessible. But other subjects beckon (there’s a certain liturgical season starting next week that I mean to write about…).

Meanwhile on this day which is the day of the Jewish Sabbath, we have this most beautiful reflection on both the goodness of labor and civilization and its limits, its need to be surpassed. Heschel’s warnings on this point remind me of the Jewish legend of the golem, a sort of Frankenstein’s monster legend.

I am foggy on the details, and am writing this where I have no way to look it up. I believe the golem is created as a sort of perfect servant of its master, a being of great strength and power. As an act of piety the man who makes it carves the Hebrew word emet—truth—on its forehead. But the golem takes the chisel from him and blots out the first letter of the emet, the aleph, turning the word into met—death.

This symbolic legend contains the deep and tragic truth of humanity. We exert our minds and bodies mightily and marvelously in the work of creation, outdo each other and past generations in devising new and more powerful technological artifacts, unleash ever more and more the powers latent in nature and harness them to do our bidding.

All of this is truth, the delving deep into and extracting out of the true energies and true natures of created beings. But in his riches, man lacks wisdom, he is like the beasts that are destroyed (Ps 49:12). We are the eternal sorcerer’s apprentice, unleashing powers we only partially understand and cannot control. We are the eternal dwarves of Moria, delving too deeply into the crust of the earth for wealth, and unleashing terrible evils we did not know were there. We are the toddlers of the universe, smart and strong enough to climb up on the countertops and cupboards of the cosmic kitchen, but foolish enough to pull down whole shelves of dishes and cups, pots and pans upon our heads.

We make a mess. It is not that we should reject technological civilization (it would be mighty hypocritical and absurd for me to write anything like that on my MacBook Pro, eh?). But we should keep the Sabbath.

In other words (since we are not Jewish, most of us, and so I am not speaking literally, quite), we should find time and space and priority in our lives for contemplation. By this, I do not mean mystical prayer, although that would be nice, if you can get there. Rather, though, we need to enter a relationship with creation, which means a relationship ultimately with creation’s God, that is not defined by domination and control, mastery and might. We need to receive and rest in what is, rather than perpetually see what is not and throw our whole being and its powers into productivity and economic labor.

Right this minute, it is snowing. Again. Sigh. It is, actually, a rather dull grey day, but the trees outside my window, cedar and birch, are waiting for spring, as are we all. And they are lovely in their bare expectancy, their patient endurance through the long cold winter.

If I see the fall of snow strictly in terms of snow removal, and the trees as simply future firewood and am utterly indifferent to what these things are in themselves, right now, I miss so very much of what is, what is good, what is beautiful in the world. This is why the Sabbath is so key, however we in our personal religious lives take it in and live it out.

We must, we simply must, echo the declaration of God, that creation is good, and that it is so good that we can and indeed we must rest in that goodness, simply be in it, find a life and a way that is beyond and above doing and making, come into a space of beholding and praising, come to know in our contemplation of what is, the contemplation of One Who Is, and in that contemplation come to the deep peace and happiness we ourselves are made for, the what is of our own personal being, an identity and a life that is not defined by our production and economic worth, but by the love of our Father in heaven.

Monday, February 24, 2014

Into the Sacred Enclosure

Technical civilization is man’s conquest of space. It is a triumph frequently achieved by sacrificing an essential ingredient of existence, namely, time. In technical civilization, we expend time to gain space. To enhance our power in the world of space is our main objective.

Yet to have more does not mean to be more. The power we attain in the world of space terminates abruptly at the borderline of time. But time is the heart of existence.

To gain control of the world of space is certainly one of our tasks. The danger begins when in gaining power in the realm of space we forfeit all aspirations in the realm of time. There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern.

Nothing is more useful than power, nothing more frightful. We have often suffered from degradation by poverty, now we are threatened with degradation through power. There is happiness in the love of labor, there is misery in the love of gain. Many hearts and pitchers are broken at the fountain of profit. Selling himself into slavery to things, man becomes a utensil that is broken at the fountain.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath

Reflection – Well, we had Orthodox week two weeks ago, and Protestant week last week, so since I’m on an ecumenical/interfaith roll here, I thought this week could be Jewish week at TTP. I have long cherished the writings of Rabbi Heschel, and in particular this luminous little book on the Jewish Sabbath and its theological meaning. So I want to stay this week in this book, which is short on word count but long on meaning and depth.

First published in 1951, this book has lost none of its relevance. Technological mastery and the loss of time, the crowding in of ‘space’ and its exigencies, its demands, into the realm of sacred time, has only accelerated in the ensuing decades.

We are ‘busy’ people. Busy, busy, busy. There is a frenetic pace to life in 2014 that has only been augmented by technology. Every moment we do not spend working, we spend plugged into the devices our labors have purchased for us. Economic life—life measured by outputs, productivity, metrics—is increasingly the only life people know.

And the economic model, the model of the market, which has its proper place and its own limited goodness, can be imported into places where it has no business, where it can do no good. We import economic models into relationships, even the most intimate and sacred relationships of marriage and family. There has been a certain amount of internet chatter lately about ‘marrying up’ vs. ‘marrying down’ – as if marriage is really a business merger where the balance of power lies solely in who wields the greater share of economic power.

The economic model can extend into the whole of life, everything person and every thing evaluated by the value he/she/it brings me and the cost he/she/it exacts from me. Life is about power, and mastery, and extracting maximum value from minimum cost—and we have no idea whatsoever what the real and devastating cost we pay by extending the values of the market into the realm of human love and friendship.

There has to be something carved out of life that is not governed by the ceaseless and heartless demands of economic reality, the essentially impersonal profit-driven world of the market. Now I repeat – the market is not evil, and profits are not evil. Goods and services must be exchanged somehow, and if they are not exchanged at a profit, there can be no sustainable business model or viable way of life.

But this very business of business and profit and the market is precisely for the sake of what is not the market. People work hard to provide a living for themselves, and, precisely, for their families. And it is the home, the family, the sacred enclosure of the domestic, that is meant to be the place where the market ends and communion begins.

And so, as Heschel will develop, there is this beautiful reality of the Sabbath—in Judaism, of course the seventh day, with its magnificent domestic rituals and rest—but for us non-Jews something we need to touch and grasp hold of, something that perhaps we can enter on a Sunday, or at any rate somehow. A time, a sacred time spent in a sacred space that is not governed by the slavery of the profit motive. And this is what we will be looking at this week.

Thursday, January 30, 2014

The Narrowness of the Internet

It is not fashionable to say much nowadays of the advantage of the small community. We are told that we must go in for large empires and large ideas. There is one advantage, however, in the small state, the city, or the village. The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world.

He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery.

There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique. The men of the clan live together because they all wear the same tartan or are all descended from the same sacred cow; but it in their souls, by the diverse luck of things, there will always be more colors than in any tartan. But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell.

A big society exists in order to form cliques. A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness. It is a machinery for the purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises. It is, in the most literal sense of the word, a society for the prevention of Christian knowledge.

GK Chesterton, Heretics

Reflection – This entire essay, entitled “On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family” is so insightful, prescient and at the same time uproariously funny that I will stay with it for a couple days after this—yet another essay well worth the price of the book.

Chesterton anticipates here some of the more unsavory and unwholesome effects of the Internet. The Internet is, of course, just about the biggest society ever devised, the most extensive and varied ‘city’ in human history. And it is well known, well observed, and a very serious problem indeed that the Internet which is supposed to connect us all together into one big human family instead at least tends to be the greatest clique generator possible.

We have all seen (in fact, it’s become rather trite and tiresome to point it out) the phenomenon of people withdrawing from their families and immediate environments into the digital world – the whole spectacle of people gathered around a dinner table or some other social setting all staring at their smart phones, abstracted and ‘alone together’, in the words of Sherry Turkle.

And of course, people can indeed spend their time on the Internet talking with people who are completely different than them, who share absolutely different views on life, different temperaments, different basic attitudes and approaches to things… but they don’t, mostly. People tend to group together on-line with those who think like them, talk like them, laugh at the same jokes, get the same references, use the same shorthand… and it all tends towards precisely the narrowing of vision, the narrowing of human knowledge and breadth of experience that GKC describes here.

Some would object here, I suppose, that I am a fine one to talk, as I after all joined a Catholic religious community 25 years ago and have in consequence lived my life among people who share the same beliefs and essential world view as myself. These are people who have never been to Madonna House. We may all be Catholics, and indeed we do have the same religious beliefs… but that’s about it, ‘having things in common-wise’!

Without getting into inappropriate on-line sharing (I always assure my MH brothers and sisters that just because I’ve decided to put myself on-line by blogging, they haven’t, and I respect their privacy, and so don’t tend to blog about MH too much), we are just about the most diverse and wildly divergent group of people, and a good deal of our community life is well described as the ‘experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises’ that is the lot of all who bind themselves to a small community like a family or a village.

The fact is, it is the constant struggle and effort to understand, relate to, and get along with the people who happen to be in the immediate vicinity that challenges and broadens a person, far more than flying around into various digital cliques and clubs where everyone either thinks just like you, or if they don’t and you get offended, a click of the mouse whisks you away.

You can’t click the mouse to get rid of your snarky next door neighbor, your obtuse cousin, your infuriatingly narrow minded brother, or your fussy foolish niece. You have to just deal with them, as they are dealing with you, and there is nothing more salutary and wholesome than to have to do just that together. Alas, more and more nowadays the smart phones come out, everyone retreats back to the digital cliques, and the rich possibilities of growth and tempering recede from us. It’s a serious problem, and will have serious consequences if it is not recognized and addressed, as some of us have tried to do.