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A longer perspective of religious traditions can offer significant insights into what seems to have become a cultural cul-de-sac of social media.
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A longer perspective of religious traditions can offer significant insights into what seems to have become a cultural cul-de-sac of social media.

Iona Abbey, Easter 2013
Iona Abbey, Easter 2013 (Larger)

Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism (see previous long entry) has led him to "stumble across this growing tension between social media and religion" which he details in his April 8 post. The real issue is not the existence of social media itself, but the manner in which it fragments and dissipates focus and attention --and attention is a common element to religious practices in many streams of faith or traditions, both Eastern and Western.

I noted previously that Newport pays attention to figures as diverse as Aristotle, Thoreau, and Abraham Lincoln, and acknowledges the depths of the discussion of focus and human flourishing, "but he avoids getting pulled off task." Well and good --but the relation between focus, attention, and human flourishing (becoming a better human being) is a very old concern with a long, long literature (to say the least!). Newport's book is not primarily addressed to those in any faith community or tradition. Those who are such a community, however, cannot fail to pick up the resonances of this discussion.

One might first point out that social media is hardly the first significant distraction to come around, and the idea that "social media might be accidentally undermining religion" needs perspective. Religious practices, whether or not reified into something that contemporary Westerners understand as a "religion," have been around a very long time. Social media is not yet quite 20 years old ("The Facebook," launched February 2004; Friendster 2002). The view that social media can or will quickly and significantly undermine practices going back thousands of years so could be superficial. Intellectual ideas of about what a religion is have changed, and practices have changed; but those practices have been severely challenged before and somehow persisted. Will runaway social media usage really accomplish what centuries of pogroms, persecutions, and cultural coopting have failed to do? Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris might be so lucky.

This observation does not dismiss Newport's question. That social media do in fact seek to capture, control, fragment, and dissipate users' attention is a feature, not a bug. They do that by design, as Newport showed and skewered brilliantly. This is why the great Zuck's "regrets" about fake news and hate speech ring so hollow: those who write and spread fake news and engage in hateful communication are using social media exactly as intended. Social media was meant for everyone to share, and do the trolls share! The idea that platform does not foster content is ideological sleight of hand, a fib to deny culpability. Much of the content of social media is nevertheless utter poison, and it might be even more threatening to many religious traditions than the fracturing of attention itself.

A longer perspective can offer significant insights into what seems to have become a cultural cul-de-sac.

Decades ago I was privileged to study with Diogenes Allen at Princeton Theological Seminary when he was in a very productive period of his life. An Oxford (Rhodes) scholar, he was a searching and provocative reader of texts classic and modern, and three books in particular have stuck with me: Kierkegaard's Sickness Unto Death and Works of Love, and Simone Weil's Forms of the Implicit Love of God (and her related "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God"). These are my sources for the following reflections.

The fragmentation of attention was brilliantly and lucidly addressed by Kierkegaard in 1849 in Sygdommen til Døden (The Sickness of Unto Death). SK was deeply enamoured of the Danish language, and thoroughly embedded in Danish history: the events of unsuccessful revolution of 1848 in Copenhagen "have been of world-historical significance and have overturned everything . . . . Every system has been exploded. In the course of a couple of months, the past has been ripped away from the present with such passion that it seems like a generation has gone by." (From The Point of View for My Work as an Author, written in 1848 and later published in 1859, also below). In other words, a world not unlike our own in many ways.

But when "the threads of intelligence broke," and when "everyone who has, in various ways, been a spokesman in the past has been reduced either to silence or to the embarrassment of being forced to purchase a brand-new suit of clothing," a new way forward could break open, and SK searched for language and forms of life for that new world. He found it in his word for despair, fortvivlelse, an for- intensification of tvivl (doubt or question); for+tvivlelse is both mega-doubt and raises the stakes: meta-doubt. In despair, such meta-doubt is to be of two minds: not only split apart from one's self, but split apart from God. An anti-Hegelian, SK saw an irresoluble polarity of temporal/eternal, freedom/necessity, consciousness/unconsciousness in human experience, which is fundamentally an experience of divided-ness or fragmentation.

SK rings the changing forms of fortvivlelse (despair) through these polarities. All humans experience despair or fragmentation; the depth is despair is to live unaware that one is in despair: the fragmentation that admits no fragmentation. This condition is universal, and the only way out of this condition is for the self to live "by relating itself to its own self, and by willing to be itself the self is grounded transparently in the Power which posited it." (English transl. by Lowrie, p. 147) . To be "grounded transparently" is to do the works of love, which is the Summary of the Law.

The person who truly admits, holds on to, and focuses this despair (fortvivlelse) will open oneself to the Reality of world (or creation) it its beauty, order, in service to others, in respect for practices that focuses this attention, and in friendship. These are, in Simone Weil's terms, the forms of the implicit love of God. God (the Power which posits us) seems absent, and we can only love (or focus upon) God through the forms of Reality by which God's presence is implicit and mediated. The "right use of school studies" develops a lower kind of attention, which is "extremely effective in increasing the power of attention that will be available at the time of prayer, on the condition that [studies] are carried out with a view to this purpose and this purpose alone." Weil writes, "the key to a Christian concept of studies is the realization that prayer consists of attention." (Waiting for God, p. 105)

When I read Newport's Deep Work three years ago, I was very much struck by the sense in which deep work could be extremely effective training to the power of concentration and attention. (Deep work is "professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limits. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.") Deep work rightly undertaken can train a form of energy (a habitus) for prayer and focus upon the "meta:" Reality, God, Emptiness, Submission, Torah among other names in varied traditions. This is not really the "deep work" that Newport meant, who was writing at a different level for a different audience. The resonance is unavoidable for those who have ears to hear.

As a librarian, my work is collaborative and can sometimes feel trapped in the shallows, not the depths. My writing and focused reading helps me to return to the depths. Library service, at its best, is a soul-craft that provides a glimpse of the sacred trust of learners, teachers, and traditions as they undergo necessary and unavoidable change. That glimpse does not substitute depth for mere metrics of productivity. A librarian's deep work is not necessarily solitary, but does require clear boundaries for time with colleagues and time alone.

This sounds high-flown but it has direct, practical implications. During "crunch time," students do in fact limit digital social media. Project Information Literacy learned in 2011 (.pdf) that "students use a “less is more” approach to manage and control all of the IT devices and information systems available to them while they are in the library during the final weeks of the term." Further study (.pdf) has shown that they use a "hybrid approach to conducting research and finding information. " While this study needs to be updated --students in 2011 had a different experience of social media on smart phones than do students in 2019-- the PIL study suggests that at least the seeds are present for a successful critique and debunking of the casual "the more sharing, the better" slogan, beginning with high-stress times like the close of the semester.

Shifting focus away from the forms of despair that feast upon distraction, and towards purposeful existence, is always going to be a tough sell for many. As Annie Savoy says about Ebie Calvin "Nuke" LaLoosh in Bull Durham, 'The world is made for people who aren’t cursed with self-awareness." By contrast I know three young individuals who voluntarily went off social media this past year, because they wished to serious attention to learning surgical nursing, biochemistry, and vocal performance (music). In the words of one, "enough of the self-created drama." If that insight is possible for a few, it might be possible for just enough at a tipping point.

To return: does social media in fact undermine religion?

If by "religion" one means what one sees in an ordinary church, synagogue, or mosque on an ordinary sabbath, then on a superficial level the answer is yes. The great mass of those who lead lives of quiet desperation may never become aware of their own fragmentation or despair --and social media is intended to fragment, to snuff out any intimations that something is not right (almost in the sense of Neo's choice to accept the blue "normal" pill in The Matrix, further reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland's choice of potions).

If by "religion" one goes further not only into self-reflection and self-awareness, but into active contemplation of the order of the universe, then the answer is probably no. In that perspective, social media shrinks to a mere mosquito-buzz level of irritation, or worse, a poisoned well. Despair is a general condition of the human race, neither created nor extended by mere social media. But social media can be its tool.

Social media as a channel of despair will admit no alternative. It becomes reality; reality's fragmentation is both its content and its platform. No wonder the Silicon Valley elite will not allow their own children near it. Only true disruption (not mere "innovative disruption") will reveal fragmentation and despair for what it is --and disruption, "moving fast and breaking things" is what social media was originally all about. In the polarity of despair, its infinitude of disruption has become a finitude of being shared: a world in every way Zucked-up.

Wolf proposes and defends a “fitting fulfillment” view, that what can truly give meaning to one's life is an activity that one feels answers a deep internal need for engagement and has a certain kind of objective worth to others. Why does it matter? --because meaning can give shape and direction to one’s life that transcends simple self-interest or universal, objective good. Wolf proposes that such a life can have objective value, but also recognizes a need for modesty (“Who’s to say? The elites?”).
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Meaning In Life cover imageMeaning in Life, and Why It Matters, by Susan Wolf.  With Commentary by John Koethe, Robert M. Adams, Nomy Arpaly, and Jonathan Haidt.  Princeton University Press, 2010.  143 pages.  ISBN 978-0-691-14524-2.  Sacred Heart University Library BD431.W77 2010

A colleague who noticed Meaning in Life on my desk asked, “Really? Is there any?”  Influenced by this book, I responded, “Yes there can be, but you have to think carefully.”  Susan Wolf carefully formulates an enlightening and at least partially persuasive case that yes, there can be meaning in life, and if you feel your life has none, you should reflect on that.  This long review takes a careful look at her thinking, because her questions cut to the core of a liberal arts education (see the closing remarks, below).
 
The book is a kind of symposium.  Wolf’s two essays (“Meaning in Life,” and “Why It Matters”) are followed by responses from four distinguished scholars: John Koethe, Robert M. Adams, Nomy Arpaly (philosophy), and Jonathan Haidt (psychology), to whom Wolf then replies.  This give the entire work a texture, range, and collective impact beyond any one or two essays.
 
Wolf starts by righty questioning the two predominant models that we often have in the background when we evaluate our actions (or the actions of others): the egoistic perspective (it’s in my self-interest) or impersonal perspective, “from the point of view of the universe.”  But there are situations where either model or both are unconvincing, and as models of motivation and practical reason they seem to leave out a lot of the many motives and reasons that shape our lives.  These could be “reasons of love” or “reasons of pleasure” that will be distorted if pressed into an iron grid of self-interest or universal disinterestedness.  A proper reason of love will be directed towards a worthy object of love, and when the idea of meaningfulness is introduced, can give reasons for finding meaning beyond duty or love.
 
“Love” as “being gripped by” or actively engaging with a valuable object, to promote and protect it, is an apt example of Aristotle’s endoxic method, agreed-upon “things which are accepted by everyone, or by most people or by the wise.”  But what are those things? 
 
One prominent “fulfillment” view (popularized by Steve Jobs, whom Wolf does not mention) is that it does not matter what you do with your life as long as it is something you love: “Follow your passion,” figure out what turns you on, and go for it. (p. 10)
 
A second view says that a truly satisfying life involves something that is “larger than oneself,” a two-fold view of something independent of oneself and has its source outside of oneself.  Wolf uses excellent examples: Sisyphus has a meaningless existence objectively even if he magically believes that he is fulfilled by eternally rolling a rock uphill.  Spending a life smoking pot, conceivably an independent good with its source outside of oneself, does not contribute any benefits to anyone else.
 
Wolf proposes and defends a “fitting fulfillment” view, that what can truly give meaning to one's life is an activity that one feels answers a deep internal need for engagement and has a certain kind of objective worth to others.  The feeling of being occupied with something of independent value, that takes one out of oneself, is vital to our social natures and a certain human tendency to try to see oneself of an external point of view. (Nagel’s “view from nowhere” or Gods-eye point of view). This subjective desire is balanced with a sense of objective value: meaningfulness is a matter of active and loving engagement in projects of worth.
 
Why does it matter?  --because meaning can give shape and direction to one’s life that transcends simple self-interest or universal, objective good.  Wolf proposes that such a life can have objective value, but also recognizes a need for modesty (“Who’s to say? The elites?”) and she acknowledges that great care and reserve must be taken when assessing aesthetic, idealistic, and essentially private projects.  Weeding a garden might be very meaningful to a dedicated gardener but meaningless to someone who finds it a chore. 
 
Wolf returns to her insight that “much of what we do is not obviously justified by either morality or self-interest.”  She names various activities that by those criteria only would appear irrational or mistaken.  She then rejoins, “Yet to regard them as morally valuable, much less as morally better than alternatives, is to puff them up in a way that seems both pompous and hard to sustain.” (p. 50)   By comparing and contrasting meaning with self-interest and morality, Wolf sustains “reasons of love,” but with great modesty, and recognizes that her argument needs an idea of objective value.  “One can find the question, What has objective value? intelligible and important while remaining properly humble about one’s limited ability to discover the answer and properly cautious about the uses to which one’s partial and tentative answer may be put.” (p. 63)
 
The subsequent four comments focus upon particular questions, applications, and examples.  Koethe asks whether artists can have meaningful lives even when they are almost unknown, possibly delusional, or troubled by disturbing psychological compulsions.  “It is difficult to distinguish (from the viewpoint of an artist) between successful achievement of serious aesthetic aims and the delusion that one has them, and they’ve been achieved.” (p. 71) Is that life meaningful or wasted?  If it is art, is it significant?  “Even if (delusion or self-deception) jeopardizes my ability to derive satisfaction and comfort from a life based on aesthetic commitments . . . it is simply a predicament I have to live with.” (p. 73)
 
Adams raises the complex and morally important example of Claus von Stauffenberg’s project of rescuing Germany from Nazism, culminating in his attempt to assassinate Hitler and lead a coup d’état in July, 1944.  He failed, but “did Stauffenberg himself, in the end, find his life meaningful because of his project, despite its failure?”  It was certainly an objective value independent of himself, recognized by others,
but it did lead to feelings of fulfillment?  He was described on that evening as looking “indescribably sad.”  Stauffenberg recognized the moral ambiguity of patriotic love, which has inspired both admirable achievements and enormous wrongs and follies. (p. 82) He could see a path that held at least a slight hope of leading to a better future.  Those who shared his insights (and, in some measure, the plot) also recognized meaningfulness even in defeat, most famously Dietrich Bonhoeffer, peripherally involved but nonetheless convicted and executed (my example, not Adams’).  On the day of his death, Bonhoeffer was reported to have said, “This is the end –for me the beginning of life,” not simply a proclamation of Christian faith, but an assessment of his own life at the moment he faced torture and death.  It is important to recognize “a very important kind of positive meaningfulness in life that responds to objective goods with motives of love that are not impartially moral motives.”
 
Nomy Arpaly questions the necessary role Wolf claims objective worth has in providing meaning in life.  What appears as worthless (a “goldfish nut” wholly devoted to her goldfish) may be more circumstantial: a mentally disabled person may find great meaning in such activity. A plethora of values complicates the case, there is no “top” moral value among values. Is there a truth about which love to value when loves conflict?
 
Jonathan Haidt asks whether the ideas of vital engagement and hive psychology can help solve the problem of objective meaning.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has written about vital engagement as “a relationship to the world that is characterized both by experiences of flow (enjoyed absorption) and by meaning (subjective significance.”  The quality of the connection is vital; but does Wolf really need a theory of objective value?  Hive psychology suggests that social sciences (and philosophy) have been plagued by methodological individualism, but if the fundamental unit of psychology is not the individual but the group, then perhaps the modern, independent sense of self is an anomaly.  As Enlightenment bees we busted out of the hive and burned it down, and the great challenge of modernity is to find hives for ourselves. “We can co-create or join into, something larger than ourselves.”  The challenge we face is to choose the right kind of hive, and why it matters that we choose rightly. (pp. 100-101)
 
Wolf’s response is nuanced.  She maintains an interest in objective meaning, but recognizes its difficulties, and that no one is thereby authorized to assess it decisively on behalf either of oneself or others.  Haidt’s response suggests that there may be a reconciliation of objective value and subjective interest in the larger structures and sets of activities that a meaningful life can create (examples: sports, games, the arts).  Value emerges from from the interests and commitments of people who share such activities, and this recognizes a continuum of value upon which a sense of a meaningful life may lie.  Through concepts of objective value and subjective fulfillment we can come to understand some of our longings and sources of satisfaction, and properly assess some of our moral and evaluative intuitions, ask questions, and form hypotheses.  These concepts allow us to move closer to examining what kinds of projects and what kinds of lives are (or can be) meaningful.
 
Christopher Eisgruber, the President of Princeton University, asked each incoming first year student (class of 2018) to read Wolf’s book in the summer of 2014.  He then discussed this “pre-read” with students in Princeton’s residential colleges through the subsequent year.  He chose it for two reasons, because “it is a superb example of engaged, ethical writing, and I hope that it will introduce the freshmen to the kinds of scholarship they will encounter at Princeton,” and because “a key point in Wolf's argument pertains to the objectivity of value and why it matters; that question is important, and it inspires lively argument among undergraduates.”
 
The question of meaning in life, and why it matters, is at the heart of a liberal arts education, whether at Princeton or elsewhere.  It would be interesting to converse with Wolf in the context of the “Catholic Intellectual Tradition” examined and queried at Sacred Heart University, because there are important points of convergence and divergence.  Certainly, that tradition is concerned with assessing the whole of life, and might also be in need of Wolf’s salutary reminder to reflect modestly when assessing what might make another’s life meaningful (or wasted), and prudent caution about the uses to which one’s partial or tentative answer might be put.   Theories of objective value can be linked superficially with theological claims of revealed value, a confusion that does neither intellectual tradition any good. Wolf’s question is important from any Christian point of view, whether Catholic or other, and this book is a remarkable conversation both in its scope and its lack of pretension.  Her book engages questions that many undergraduates seem inclined to avoid, but could nevertheless frame the engaged insight that is the point of the liberal arts.

 

 

Jaron Lanier's book Who Owns The Future? is (in the words of one of my beloved college professor's), "quite a read."
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Jaron Lanier's book Who Owns The Future? is (in the words of one of my beloved college professor's), "quite a read." (Lanier visits SHU on October 9, 2013.)  It's a wild, occasionally bumpy ride through simultaneous developments of technology, economy, and social thinking occasioned by the massive computing power ("big data") of arrays of servers.  When such an array achieves dominance in such a manner that it can aspire to omniscience, Lanier calls it a "siren server" --a software-mediated social vision that believes it's the only game in town, marked by radical information assymetry and outsources risk as much as possible.

There are so many elements of this book that I will pick out several for consideration, but one at a time. This piece concerns the religious elements of the social vision that advanced software engineers (called by synecdoche "Silicon Valley") seek to monetize and compell social acceptance.

Lanier does take this on in his fifth interlude, "The Wise Old Man in the Clouds," with the double meaning intact. Silicon Valley (or at least, many there) anticipate The Singularity, when software comes to write itself and computers outstrip human interaction, when the memories, emotions, and thoughts of an individual can be uploaded into "the cloud" and when the body died, the person lives on --when illness, death, scarcity (want), and human limitations of every kind are overcome (p. 325-331), when robots can provide satisfying sex.  (Really! --see pages 359-360)

As a technologist Lanier (who is both a technologist and a philosopher) wants to skitter away from religious questions.  Speaking for technologists, "We serve people best when we keep our religous ideas out of our work." (p. 194) --and yet this book is shot through with religious sensibility and ideas, including non-traditional human development ideas famous in the Bay area.  The questions of limits and Ultimate Concern, of human closed-in awareness and the unexpected in-breaking of The Other, keep returning again and again.  No one has yet successfully addressed these questions as regards technologists.  (And by "successfully," I don't mean that I would agree with that writer, but that such a writer both acknowledges these questions and moves discourse forward.)

Lanier's makes frequent reference to visionaries (H.G. Wells, Alan Turning, Ted Nelson), philosophers (Aristotle, Hobbes, Malthus, Marx) and science fiction writers or characters (Philip K. Dick, Dr. Strangelove, Star Trek the TV series, especially the original series).  All of these raised questions broadly classes as theological or religious --although apparently in the Silicon Valley "religious" means such Concern as narrowly defined by California-flavored evangelicalism, western Mormon sensibilities (whether orthodox LDS or not), and the spectre of fundamentalisms of every stripe.  ("Spiritual" is a very different word, suggesting all the happy feelings of Eastern philosophies mixed in with self-affirming slogans.) No wonder Lanier wants to restrict technologists to keep religious ideas out of their work.  

But does "religion" have to be defined that way?  (The fact that violence-prone religious fundamentalists share a small bit of thinking in common with "religion" makes other religious people guilty of crimes against humanity to the same but narrowly limited extent that chemists are guilty because they share a small amount of thinking with DKFarben, makers of the poisons used by the Nazis.)  The Silicon Valley amounts to being the paradigm of, among other things, "spiritual but not religious."  But that's a feint, simply deflecting attention.

On the one hand, "what does it mean to be human" (which Lanier re-phrases as, "whether people are 'special'", p. 196) is not a technological question and can't be answered in those terms and limitations.  On the other hand, those terms and limitations beg that question.  The adjustment of software and information to reality is imperfect --reality consistently outstrips human ability to encode it.  (For all the hype that information lies at the heart of the universe --such as DNA encoding for example-- it takes humans to translate that reality into symbols or code.)  The religious and philosophical questions raised by massive "cloud" computing are inescapable, and only a resolute will to face them for what they are will sing a song over against the Sirens strong enough to modify their behavior.