Finding God in the HTML

So, here is a picture of me. For two hours, on January 22, this was my new Facebook Profile Picture. I thought I looked distinguished. Unfortunately, within a few minutes of posting it, Facebook Friend Paul responded and said, “C’mon, John, nobody’s going to buy that.”

An overly dignified John Suk 

Now, I have never met Paul. He lives in Southern California. He once wrote me a letter when I was editor of The Banner. It wasn’t an angry letter. It was funny. So I never forgot it. But now Paul did not like my picture.

Ten minutes later, my sister Janet wrote, “Maybe a little too serious bro. Show some of that Suk charm!” So, only two hours later, I took my new Profile Picture down and put up this one instead.

Reaction was immediate. “Nice to see you, my friend,” said Alejandro, a Nashville book editor I used to work with. “Wow, that is awesome,” said Shelly, a Vancouver pastor. She was referring to my grandson, Taps. Within hours forty likes and comments rolled in. I could feel the love.

Taps and Opa Suk

Or could I, really? As I was watching the “likes” pour in, Irene was also in the living room, also on her computer. We spoke to each other, briefly—about whose turn it was to take out the dog and about who would go shopping the next day. Honestly, however, we were not feeling the love from each other. I was too preoccupied with my 600 Facebook friends, many, like Paul, people I haven’t ever met, or like Alejandro, who I haven’t seen in years. Irene was preoccupied with Search Engine Optimization for her business webpage. We sat together in that room for hours, and hardly had a thing to say to each other until we were in bed together. And this happens more often.

But that’s a Snapchat of social media, isn’t it? We’re there, but then, we’re not. We like people we haven’t seen in years, but don’t love the one we’re with. And it isn’t just social media. Who wants to be disturbed when we’re binge watching old episodes of West Wing or Modern Family? And God forbid that we fail to reach the next level of Minecraft or Titanfall because dad wants to know how our day at school was.

You know what I mean. Honestly. The two-year-old whose gaze is fixed on an iPad. The typical cell-phone carrying new mom who spends six hours a day tweeting with one hand while holding the baby in the other—at least according to a recent article in The Psychotherapy Networker, Irene’s professional journal (“The Rise of the Two Dimensional Parent: Are Therapists Seeing a New Kind of Attachment?” By Ron Taffel, Sept/Oct 2014). And there is the co-worker checking Facebook and Kijiji on the firm’s clock. The date who actually pulls out his iPhone at a restaurant table and places it face up beside the lit candle. The busy exec checking email while the car idles at a red light. And the teen who tragically kills two people in an oncoming car while texting and driving.

What’s going on? Have we lost our minds? Well, in a way we have. Neuroscientists have discovered that human brains are plastic. That is, our brains can be shaped by how we use and exercise them. If we consume a lot of social media, our brains rewire themselves to want even more social media. It is a very complex process. It involves growing new neurotransmitters and the expression of brain chemicals like dopamine or oxytocin that give pleasure. One way to think about what happens is that when our brains are on social media they become addicted to social media—not in the exact same way we are addicted to alcohol or drugs, perhaps—but our need to check-in begins to interfere with our normal relationships. If we stop using social media and other screen-based platforms for any length of time, we may suffer from withdrawal--mood swings, distractedness, even depression.

Another concern is that research demonstrates that watching screens, whether it be an iPad or computer monitor—watching screens not only bulks up our new social media neurons, but watching screens starves the very different and complex neural pathways that get used for reading. It’s a little bit like pretty dandelions taking over your lawn.

As a result, people who are preoccupied with social media read less, less deeply, and with less understanding; they have more trouble listening to linear, rationally organized presentations like a (good!) sermon, and they have more trouble thinking slowly, deliberatively and strategically.

Among neuroscientists, such findings are not controversial. Among teachers with long experience, such findings reflect their everyday frustration with today’s students. But let’s be honest—these findings are hard for most of us to accept. We say things like, “well, my daughter loves to read,” or, “we hardly ever watch TV in our house,” or, “my son still does great in school!” At the same time, this defensiveness suggests, I think, that we are pretty shy of really confronting the deeper issues that surround our social media and Internet use. We are primed to ignore the virtual elephant in our homes, because it is sort of scary.

But it isn’t just that we read less, or follow complex arguments with greater difficulty. Along with the new neural pathways, there is something else happening to us, I think—something I can get at best, I think, if I retell the myth of Narcissus.

The myth is told and retold in many versions from both ancient Greece and Rome. It basically goes like this. Narcissus was an extremely handsome and athletic hunter. One of his parents was an Olympic God, so he was half-divine. Anyway, one day, while hunting, he leaned down to drink water from a pool. Doing so, he caught a glimpse of his face. It was, as I said, beautiful. He stopped drinking, so that the water would stop rippling, and he looked at himself again. Absolutely drop dead gorgeous. And as he looked, and looked, he found he could not tear himself away from his reflection. He stayed there, on his knees, for days, totally in love with that image of himself, absolutely taken by how his beauty made him feel, unable to respond to the love overtures of the beautiful nymph Echo who sat by and watched. He stayed there, by the pool, gazing at his face, until he died of hunger and thirst.

Of course, we get our word Narcissism from this story. Narcissism is defined as an unnatural preoccupation with our self and our image, a preoccupation troubling because it interferes with our relationships to those nearest to us.

The reason it kills us to be interrupted while we’re lost in our laptops or monitors is that Social Media—the texts, the tweets, the emails, the likes, the selfies we endlessly post—all of it is a way of focussing attention not on our neighbours, but on our own inner need for fleeting affirmation. We get a little high every time someone suggests, electronically, that we are pretty special, handsome, beautiful, funny or whatever. We enter into an implicit pact with our electronic friends—I’ll notice you if you like me. We may lose ourselves, and lose track of our neighbours, and the families we live with under the same roof, all because we cannot tear ourselves away from the electronic mirror we gaze into, hoping without even realizing it, that the mirror will tell us just how special we are.

Look. Many theologians and philosophers, including the philosopher I’m reading now, Joseph Needleman (What Is God), make a big point out of the fact that one of the greatest ills that humans suffer through—often without realizing it—is that we never actually wake up to who we really are and the shocking gift of a life to actually live. Instead, we live our lives half in a daze. We go along to get along. We are swept away by cultural fads and wants and ads and artificially induced needs and passions. We are running like crazy in a rat cage, never getting anywhere, just trying to stay even with the bill collectors and responsibilities and obligations. And our preoccupation with social media satisfies our need for affirmation just enough so that we slumber on, focussed on our nagging little need for a ping or a poke; we never step forward, seize real life, or real learning, or real commitments on behalf of people that might matter to us if we did. So even as our brains are changed, our souls slowly waste away, and we and our neighbours become shades of the person we could or should be. We have found god in the HTML and it is us.

I know. There is an important other side of the story. And I don’t want to totally loose track of that. The truth is, few of us can live without engaging social media or the Internet. I would be wrong to fault people here for spending the odd evening learning how to play a new video game. And sure, there’s nothing wrong with answering a few texts during the course of a day or checking your status update at lunch. My life, for example, is truly enriched by hearing regularly from colleagues and friends around the world, as we discuss things like faith and music and worship and writing books.

So, I don’t want to be heard here as someone who says, “no, this social media and Internet stuff is no good, you should stop it.” Not at all. But I am saying that there is a body of scientific research—and our own experience, if we’re honest with ourselves—that teaches us that social media is like fire. There is a place for it, in the hearth. Only then—only when it is controlled, properly contained, and behind an ember screen—only then can a fire offer warmth and serve as a gathering place for family and friends. We need both fire and social media—contained and thoughtfully controlled.

But I also confess that in my own life it is sometimes hard to contain that fire and to leave it where it belongs. I know my own struggles to read as much as I really want, to stay focussed on writing a sermon, and to not be distracted by my various social media accounts.

In Romans 14, the apostle Paul says that followers of Jesus ought not conform themselves to the world. That is, we ought not mindlessly and soullessly live for and do what everyone else is doing, just because they’re doing it. Instead, says Paul, we ought to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. And what I think is true for me, as it is probably true for many of us, is that when it comes to the grip that social media and electronic entertainment are always trying to exert on us and our neurons, we could all use a little less conforming, and a bit more transformation. We could, and should, really choose to live in the world rather than settle for the pixel lands.

One more thing. The people most affected by social media are children. They suffer when we engage in distracted parenting—a growing problem, according to the same Psychotherapy Networker article I mentioned above. And their young brains are at greatest risk of not learning to read deeply and with pleasure by overexposure or much too early exposure to social media, or to its older cousin, the TV screen.

So parents, parent. Take control not only of your own consumption of Internet entertainment, TV, and social media, but of your children’s. Neil Postman once said, “With the Second Commandment, Moses was the first person who ever said, more or less, 'Don’t watch TV; go do your homework.'” His words could easily be applied to Internet and social media use as well. Similarly, that high priestess of contemporary pagan culture, Camille Paglia, once called for “the enlightened repression of our children,” by which she means rigorous word-centered education to the near total exclusion of electronic media, if we want our kids to become all they can be—if we want them to wake up to real life, rather than live in the shadow land of virtual reality.

The Problem Is in the Pew

Last week I wrote that the reason many people leave church—well, a key reason—is that preachers are not giving them a reason to stay. That is, preachers are too boring, too judgmental, too irrelevant, and too pragmatic (by which I meant to insinuate they are too focused on offering advice and not enough on lovely mysteries). In general, people leave when what they hear from the pulpit doesn’t make them put on crash helmets and strap themselves in the pew.

So that was harsh. Perhaps a bit too sweeping.

This week I will blame the current malaise in churchgoing on the churchgoers themselves. People today, by and large, just don’t know how to do any of the things we used to expect of churchgoers. In particular, when they get to church, they can neither hear nor understand. Worship doesn’t translate into anything that makes sense.

I’ve suspected this for a long time. When I was studying communication theory in grad school, I became aware of the work of Walter Ong. He belonged to a small school of scholars who insisted that the development of widespread literacy changed what and how people knew things. Before literacy you knew only what you remembered; after literacy you could learn new things from books. Before literacy, churches taught the basics with drama, art, song, pilgrimages, icons, and so on. The kinds of media that worked for oral people also profoundly shaped what their “faith” was. After literacy, in large parts of Europe, these methods of transmitting and defining faith gave way to linear, rationalistic definitions of the content of faith, as found in books and tracts. That rationality and content rich data, in turn, came to define what was essential about literate faith. In my book, Not Sure I outline this process at some length. And I suggest that in our new, post-literate era, we need as preachers to recover many of the pre-literate strategies the church used to transmit and share the faith. These methods are many, creative, can be lots of fun, but also require way more work and imagination and honing and preparation than most preachers are used to. In fact, if I look at my own preaching, I know that it often falls short of the ideals I have in my head for it.

So now I’ve read another book, by a scholar who owes a large debt of gratitude to Ong, to Marshall McLuhan and his disciples, and also to modern neuroscience. His name is Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. This is not a religious book, but consider its closing words of the last chapter before Carr’s  epilogue. He begins by quoting Martin Heidegger, who observed that the technological revolution could “so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking.” He adds that, the frenziedness of technology threatens to “entrench itself everywhere.” To which Carr adds a secular “Amen,” stating, “We are welcoming the frenziedness into our souls.”

It is the frenziedness of our souls that is keeping people out of church. Worse, if we think by offering an unfrenzied hour we might help people calm down, the real news is that people are addicted to that frenziedness, and won’t give it up to go to church. Put differently, people are staying away from church because they don’t know how to do faith, or mystery, or awe, or worship anymore and are too distracted even to consider it. Their brains are no longer equipped, and all the great preaching in the world won’t bring them back in. In his only other quote of scripture, Carr compares modern technology to the idols of Pslam 115, and modern Netizans to their worshippers:

They have mouths, but the speak not;

Eyes have they, but they see not;

They have hears, but they hear not . . .

They that make them are like unto them;

So is every one that trusteth in them.

What is the basis for the frenziedness that Heidegger warns against, according to Carr? Well, you have to read the book to get the nuanced, carefully annotated, and compelling case Carr makes. But some key factors are these. The internet is designed to make us consume as many different pages as possible, all in the service of showing us more ads. It is made for scanning, cherry picking information, and moving on to something else. This overloads our short-term memory to such a degree that we are unable to remember much, in detail, of what we have read. This sort of reading also breaks up narrative, and invites superficial reading. This in turn develops a whole set of neural changes in our brains that in turn also make reading deeply more difficult. The time we spend on the internet detracts from the time required to develop similar deeply practiced and active neural pathways (we’re talking actual cell changes here) that allow for deep reading, creative thinking, deep empathy, contemplation, imagination, and so on. My take away is that the internet and all other forms of contemporary media have so changed our brains that we generally can't do religion, or faith, or worship, or awe, or contemplation anymore.

Look, the bottom line is that you have to read the book to get the whole argument. I find it compelling because of the massive amount of clinical evidence Carr marshals from many science labs and experiments to make his case. I find it compelling because, as I said in my own book, I’ve believed for a long time that consumption of even a small amount of contemporary media makes it much harder to read deeply and contemplate what you’ve read as well. I find Carr compelling because in his own mea culpa about his reading and study habits he describes how his own reading has suffered from being too plugged in. I know what he’s talking about.

But what it means—I’m drawing from several sources now, and not just Carr—is that people have incredibly short attention spans. They thrive, emotionally, on fractured and shallow stimuli bombarding them; but they are averse to sitting down, paying careful attention, and then considering what they have heard—Daniel Kahneman’s “slow thinking.” They are adept at following only the simplest narratives, and are unable to recognize the several levels of meaning you will find in all great literature, much less contemplate those meanings. They believe all but won’t commit to learning anything. They can’t study. They can’t remember. They know how to use the Internet as an adjunct to memory and study, but no longer think creatively in the deeply linear and rational ways that are the basis not only of science, but also of 99% of contemporary theology, catechism, and church law. In one of his summaries, Carr states that, “It would not be rash to suggest that as the Net reroutes our vital paths and diminishes our capacity for contemplation, it is altering the depth of our emotions as well as our thoughts.” That can’t be good for church as usual.

So what is the answer? Although Carr warns against thinking that the methods used in the preliterate oral cultures of our ancestors provide the answers for teaching today’s post-deep-literate  people, I do think the “psychodynamics of orality,” provide many helpful clues for how we might reframe the gospel so that those who are deaf to traditional Enlightenment means can hear it, or parts of it, again. Use of rhyme, rhythm, visuals, pilgrimages, relics, space, memorizing a few key sources, drama, music, and so on could help preachers craft sermons and services that at least have a chance with today’s new audience. But, ironically, the sort of preachers who could do this need to spend far more time imagining and creating sermons than most of them have—and they need to be personally free of the Net’s siren song to even imagine such things.

This much is sure. We need a lot of discussion and creative thinking in this area if we’re going to speak the good news in a language—Netspeak, let’s call it; or The Shallows—that a majority of today’s people can understand. We need to rethink how we do worship—keeping in mind that one formula will not satisfy every audience niche. And we will need, in view of the general decrease in ability to contemplate deep mystery and complicated truth—we will need to rethink what comprises the essentials of the faith. Probably not the ordo salutis. Maybe the command to love God and neighbor, the story of Jesus, and the words of the Lord’s Prayer are about as much as we will be able to reliably get across.

Which would be an accomplishment, because even now, I’m sure there are many, many tens of millions of people in North America who probably can not explain even two out of these three.