Reading as an Antidote to Technology

Concerning technology, we wonder with some impotence how to uphold human dignity and spirit amid the proliferation of AI and the increasingly intimate connection between people and the limitless powers of the on-line world. It is possible that the most counter-cultural and liberating act we can pursue is shirking technology in order to read time-honored literature, prose, and sacred Scriptures. Writing shortly before the advent of iPhones and the rapid growth of social media, John Paul Russo in The Future Without a Past surveys cultural observers to offer a critical look at our lives in a technological age. There has been a dramatic decline of literary reading for people of every age, Russo writes, coupled with a dramatic decline of civic and cultural participation. Our modern age “is plagued by a weakened sense of the self,” an astounding observation given the attention we pay to the self and our mental health, with counsellors in all our learning institutions and present in every media form available. The self, Russo continues, is daily left with a choice between “pleasure or utility” without consideration for the virtues such as wisdom, justice, fortitude, honesty, courage, and prudence. The self has been lost at the same time as civitas has been lost, civitas meaning a community of citizens with a shared understanding of meaning and purpose, where the person is oriented by a sense of responsibility for the well-being of that community.

In The Priority of the Person, David Walsh suggests that we grow aware of our sense of self the moment we transcend it. This idea supports Russo’s observation that we live in a time of a weakened sense of self, because in this age of self-absorption we are guided by selfies, self-promotion, and self-interest. How can we experience the transcendence of self if we are transfixed by our self? In the Christian language of Luke 9:23-24, to name only one of a host of Bible verses rooted in this theme, when we lose ourselves to Spirit or service, we find ourselves. In our self-made worlds we do not always feel at home in the greater cosmos, and many of us do not feel comfortable even in our own skin. Tilo Schabert observes in The Figure of Modernity that in modern literature “literary existence is perceived mainly as an uncommitted and threatened existence.” A primary theme in our books and movies are characters who are either fighting with their culture or stumbling through it in a state of alienation. People seek a sense of self even if they have to purchase one, surrender to a self-destructive lifestyle, or enter into violent conflict with others.

Russo’s study continues, suggesting we have been well prepared for technology. A hundred years of bureaucratic culture, where people were turned into machines, made us ready to welcome technology that would replace this mundane work. So it is that the educated and employed jumped onto the technology bandwagon with hardly a moment’s concern for community, human relationships, the potential loss of an enchanted cosmos, and the spiritual well-being of children. Things are more efficient now, we remind ourselves, and we have increased our leisure time, although our leisure time is often surrendered to technology. We are hardly aware of this irony because technology is designed so that it is ever more invisible, working seamlessly with our day whether we are carrying out errands, parenting, being entertained, or trying to accomplish a task at work.

Every year, this notion of the seamless encroachment of technology compels me to provide a scenario for secondary students to consider: if you could have a microchip surgically implanted at the base of your skull so you could live in a virtual world, studying, working, and playing, would you? I up the ante: the chip would be attached to our adrenal glands, our muscles, and all our senses. You could fly like superman across the globe and party on a rooftop bar in New York, you could play in an NBA basketball game, date the celebrity of your choice, travel to Mars, or enter into games like Grand Theft Auto. It would all feel real! The work you did online could pay for the protein shake your corrupted body would need on a daily basis, served by a trusted hand from the third world. Would you enter into this virtual world?

The students are typically unsure. A couple boys usually get excited by the idea, and another handful of students say they would live there “some of the time.” The most interesting aspect of the problem is to watch students grapple for language to explain themselves, because most students are fearful of the scenario I paint for them. I prod them some more: You say you would enter into this virtual world “some of the time,” but what happens when you step out into the street and see no one at all? Or at least, no one except the servant class who cares for the bodies of the online citizens, or the people in charge of the electrical grid. If all the people you know are online in the virtual world, what would motivate you to stay away from that reality?

Trying to resist this virtual world, the typical response from students is, “we need challenges in life. The online world just isn’t real. There wouldn’t be challenges there.” This answer is a good start, leaving aside for a moment that many of these students are already spending more than 8 hours a day in a virtual world through their phones, and shrink away from the challenges their teachers lay before them. I believe the language the students are struggling to find involves the life of their soul, including the orienting virtues of truth, goodness, and beauty. The subtle, luminous experiences like contemplating the sunset with a warm breeze on our face, remembering a grandparent while visiting a farm, the first time holding hands with our lover, breaking bread with family and friends, or doing something charitable to help another person mean more than the technological world. Forgiving someone or being forgiven, recognizing beauty, creating something with our hands, or raising a child with love—being loved—we want all of these experiences to be real, not manufactured by a programmer. Yet people young and old are enticed by the digital world every day, and we surrender our time to this world routinely, to the point of being addicted to it.

I recently found a Canadian Reader for grade four students. It was published in 1961, and includes stories from almost every part of the world, including religious myths, folk tales, poems, and short histories. There are hardly any pictures in the book, just text. I do not believe that more than a quarter of today’s grade twelve students could handle this grade four reader. “Reading literature,” Russo suggests, “can protect children from market-based television and media.” Russo is not suggesting that modern technology be despised or enjoyed, only that children be capable of judging it and placing it within a much larger context of human experience now and through history. However, the reading of Scripture and literature from other times, from Homer to the Holy Bible to Shakespeare to the great nineteenth-century literary works, has largely been lost in our schools and in the lives of the adults who oversee our schools. “Today’s education,” Russo observes, “has become a means of technical adaptation to society—it mirrors society. Ideally, humanistic education holds the mirror up to human nature over vast spans of time, enabling students to study their own age from critical vantage points, both within and without the age.” Working to grasp writing from other ages, learning of human experience and the universal wisdom realized through the ages, can help us become “masters of time,” connecting “what was, is, and is to come.” The substance of a single age does not offer “the fullness of meaning.”

The loss of reading and the rise of technology has led not only to an impoverishment of language, Russo writes, but to the rise of images, an “avalanche of images” that “smothers literary culture.” The principle of least effort now guides school work and the development of textbooks. Instead of the occasional image to emphasize the text as happened in old textbooks, now words are used to explain the images. Like technology, “images shine,” but “like technology, they have no insides, no interiority.” In his letter, On the role of literature in formation, Pope Francis discusses the role of literary reading in both the maturing of self and the prayerful experience of finding peace even amidst personal struggle. “Time spent reading may well open up new interior spaces that help us to avoid becoming trapped by a few obsessive thoughts,” he writes. The Pope also contrasts reading with technology: “Unlike audio-visual media, where…the time allowed for enriching the narrative or exploring its significance is usually quite restricted, a book demands greater personal engagement on the part of its reader. Readers in some sense rewrite the text, enlarging its scope through their imagination, creating a whole world by bringing into play their skills, their memory, their dreams and their personal history, with all its drama and symbolism… A literary work is thus a living and ever-fruitful text, always capable of speaking in different ways…”

Instead of books, Russo writes, there are now video games for our leisure time. These games are easier, more immediate, and more fun, despite suffering from a lack of content. In our schools, there are now computers on every desk, often with games to help students learn about numbers or grammar. In Ontario, the teaching of language now apes technology’s needs and methods. Learning to read is now called “decoding.” From kindergarten to grade eight, teachers have their lessons and time organized for them by centralized planners that can observe the teacher’s compliance through the student’s computers. The mechanics of language are now emphasized, while the reading of poetry and literature has been pushed to the periphery. One grade eight teacher has tried to save the written word by doing a “read aloud” with their class, since studying novels and short stories will not happen otherwise. “I would like to teach my students a unit on poetry,” another teacher told me, “but I am not given the time.” The question that Russo asks is, has the use of technology helped students become better readers and writers? Extending the rhetorical question, has technology helped students learn more history than students of previous generations? Has technology helped students become better mathematicians, or better citizens? The liberating influence of literature, suggests Russo, has been lost to a formulaic computer language that refers to a technological environment. Now we risk becoming controlled by the calls and alerts of technology, the language and speed of technology, and the shallow stimulations from entertainment that comes to us through technology. And in the age of AI, teachers and students are both at risk of further eroding their capacity to think by allowing AI to generate their work.

It is into this tension of the modern world that Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation arrives for our reflection on contemporary teenage culture. The ultimate finding presented by Haidt is that teenagers who spend more time using social media are “more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, and other disorders” than those teenagers who participate in traditional practices like playing sports and being involved in religious communities. There are many layers to Haidt’s study. Cellphones and social media have a disorienting and disembodied effect on our connection to one another and to the cosmos generally, for “we are forever elsewhere.” Filters and editing software, continual alerts, like and dislike icons, disembodied communication, and algorithms that can lead unaware teens onto dangerous messaging sites that include suicidal fantasies, leave teenagers feeling lonely and isolated in their own schools. When these teenagers look for guidance in order to escape the conforming pressures of social media, there are often no role models for them except social media influencers.

Besides the “micro-dramas” pervasive in the online teen world, Haidt draws attention to the fragile sense of self that can be formed online, contributing to a victim culture and young people who can be “triggered” by any type of statement or subject. There is now an attitude, perhaps most prevalent on university campuses, that one “should not have to experience negative emotions because of what another person said or did.” Haidt suggests that the online world contributes to bad sleep habits, extreme health problems like anorexia, stunted emotional, social and intellectual growth, avoidance of the real world, poor social cohesion, suffering friendships, and a fivefold increase in loneliness. Roughly a third of internet traffic is dedicated to hardcore pornography, Haidt reports, and it is no surprise that much of that traffic ends up being viewed by teenage boys, malforming their capacity to enter into mature relationships with women, to find love, real intimacy, marriage, and real sex with a real partner. In the sexualized atmosphere of the online world, girls also suffer their own unique forms of manipulation and abuse.

The Anxious Generation is in some ways a naïve product of its time, enabling the attitudes and inner orientations of people that have led us to our current problem state. The science-based approach to the good life, which Haidt’s work is rooted in, is the approach that derailed family life and traditional culture to begin with. To be clear, it was not the science itself that has caused the disorder we experience today, but our uniquely modern attitude about science, sometimes referred to as scientism; the belief that science can unveil every mystery of our universe and the human experience, coupled with the belief that our science can save us from ourselves—an oxymoron if ever there was one. This uniquely modern attitude, as Tilo Schabert shows, has its roots in the seventeenth-century when scientists like Francis Bacon brushed aside concepts like “the kingdom of God,” where people lived within a cosmos. Bacon declared a new age, a “kingdom of man, founded on the sciences,” that would make man master of all, in part by “existing outside nature.”

This disordered way of thinking influences Haidt. On the one hand, he encourages his readers to consider spiritual life as an antidote to the disorienting powers of cellphones and social media. Yet when he talks about the human love of beauty, spirituality, or the transcendent call to venture closer to our Creator, he cannot help but reduce these human experiences to neural pathways and genetic coding developed through natural selection. In Haidt’s study, we are not wonderfully mysterious icons of the divine with untold breadth and depth to our being, rather we are machines that have been programmed through evolution. When Haidt talks about the necessity of spirituality to right our listing ship of culture and self, he first declares himself to be an atheist before reducing the wonders of religious experience to calendar quotes that are divorced from their traditions and engendering experiences. It is a breathtakingly vacuous understanding of spirituality. Haidt displays little awareness of the 4000 years of Western culture behind “spirituality.” The result is that the reader is left suspended over a chasm with nothing but their fragile sense of self, and maybe their cell phone, holding them up. Why should we approach a shallow spirituality that is not even real?

Without grace, it is no easy thing to humble oneself to a traditional religious practice. However, many self-made spiritualities are simply self-serving, risking further disorientation of a person’s pilgrimage—when those spiritualities are not first abandoned the moment a temptation shows itself. Haidt struggles to comprehend this. But while it may be difficult for a non-religious family to suddenly become “spiritual” by entering humbly into the necessary discipline of a traditional faith practice, a non-religious family can certainly start reading, or enjoying the arts, or at the very least engaging with the natural world. If classic, or timeless, literature is read together and talked about around the supper table, then indeed a type of spirituality will be practiced. The act of reading text that has survived the test of time could very well help a young person look objectively at the technology in their hand. The simulations of technology can be differentiated by the person who is sensitive to the evocations of the good, the true, and the beautiful in all their transcendent and concrete forms.

The absence of depth in Haidt’s work is obviously a product of our technological age. His reductive approach to the human experience seems to be a typical mistake many psychologists make, contributing to the materialist world-view that has stranded so many people on lonely islands of meaninglessness. The first religious experience may well be that very human moment of anxiety or wonder when, confronted by the mystery of life and death, a person feels in their bones the question, why? What is this mystery and beauty I am confronted by, and why does it move my soul? In reducing the human experience to a mechanical understanding, Haidt demonstrates a desire for control over a reality that he certainly does not control.

Haidt proudly writes that in 2010, “teens, parents, schools and even tech companies didn’t know that smartphones and social media had so many harmful effects. Now we do.” This statement is bewildering. Spiritually sensitive adults have always been wary of the screen. For example, many of us were raised with limits to television. The moment teenagers were witnessed obsessively texting with flip phones in 2002, many parents and teachers understood the corrosive effects of cellphones. The dangers of social media have also been known since this media form first showed itself in the many instances of online bullying. Writing as someone who argued unsuccessfully with board administrators to keep libraries in our schools and computers out, the loss of commonsense regarding technology in education and parenting is a tragedy that has unfolded over the past twenty-five years. Too many people in power were guided by the idea that improving the state of education meant growing our relationship with technology. In the Ontario curriculum, for example, cursive writing was removed because it was assumed writing would forevermore be done with a keyboard, or by speaking text to the computer. Now it has been realized that cursive writing helps students learn to organize their thoughts, express themselves, and to better learn sentence structure and spelling. Mimicking our relationship with technology, the average teacher is now at the mercy of data and the language of “experts,” and education continues to turn away from traditional forms for the allure of the next best thing.

Paradoxically, the strength of The Anxious Generation is that Haidt’s work is informed by data. Holding up his book, it will be easier for teachers, administrators and parents to make the point about limiting cell phone usage and social media generally. In this age of tribalism and cancel culture, Haidt can also talk about issues with supporting data that a philosopher or commonsense observer cannot talk about safely. For example, social media’s role in the rise of mental health issues like gender dysphoria absolutely needs to be discussed more openly in society than it is now, and Haidt has the capacity to raise the issue because his book is grounded in twenty-five years of observed fact.

Haidt’s suggestion that governments and tech corporations limit children’s use of cellphones and social media is a good suggestion. In Ontario, the provincial government’s new restrictions on cellphone use in schools has had a positive impact thus far. Technology is difficult to limit, however. While cellphones have now been banned in high school classes, there are already students wearing smartwatches that keep them linked to social media when the school-provided laptops on their desk cannot. Most interestingly, there are many adults, including parents and educators, who are themselves addicted to their phones. In The Figure of Modernity, Schabert identifies the desire for an existence free of limits as the primary end-goal of modernity. Free of community, and standing above creation so we can create ourselves in our own image, we do not want anyone or anything to restrict us. We do not even want our own bodies to limit our imaginations. Because reality continues to limit us anyway, some people are quite enchanted by the allure of the cellphone and the internet generally. Technology offers a way of escape from this vale of tears and toil without needing to physically destroy the mortal body.

Russo recognizes that human civilization in the West was once saved by the medieval ascetics in monasteries who for centuries copied books until the world could appreciate those books once again. He suggests it may be ascetics amongst us today who will again provide the service of saving us from our growing ignorance of the wonders and mystery of the human person, history, and of Spirit and creation. Today’s ascetics will probably not be monks and nuns. The ascetics will be those people who keep technological marvels at arms’ distance, while treasuring the human experience through the millennia, and the books and Scriptures that reveal that experience.

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