Signs of Humanity in the Digital Age

As one who enjoys the benefits of the digital age, I am often looking for signs of the older technology, signs of human connection so often missing when two people think they are relating to each other electronically but really are not. 

So the news of progress in the retro world of games, paper and print, found in Bill McKibben's review of a new book by David Sax (The Revenge of Analog), is very welcome.

Sax, like so many others, is concerned that the internet and other digital media, instead of forming a community, has made us more isolated; two people on their laptops in the same room are in different worlds.

So it is good to know that, just as vinyl records have had a huge comeback, so has the Moleskine notebook, which like any paper notebook, invites the kind of creativity and spontaneous writing or drawing that Hemingway or Picasso would have used.  Many young people, along with their iPhones, carry a black notebook.  Why?  The digital world provides a lot of opportunity, Sax says, for wasting time, for dispersing our attention from one thing to another in an endless stream of information.

A paper journal, like a printed book, limits us, concentrates our attention, rather than disperses it.  Magazines that have increased their subscriptions in the old-fashioned print format realize that people still like to have a text with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It's not that consumers today are neo-Luddites, reacting against technology; it's that the older alternatives can be more inviting and more conducive to the imagination.

Consider the growth in board games. People want to be with other people, to share with them, to laugh and compete in real time, face to face.  The negative effect of video games on the imagination is an issue, so it is good to know that simple games that bring people together are thriving.

McKibben's piece in the current New York Review of Books is worth reading and might motivate you to check out the book by Sax.  Both agree with many other observers and experts that the computer revolution has real drawbacks in leading people to self-absorption, isolation, and to taking online classes that bore them.  Students want and deserve instruction that doesn't merely present facts but establishes a relationship, just as nearly everyone I know still prefers the concentrated focus that a printed book offers over an e-text.

I think the lesson here is that we can have the best of both worlds--and that, like the recent presidential campaign conducted extensively by tweets, the electronic form of communication by itself is severely limited. Even dangerous.

Understanding Catholic Ideology and Ecology

For Catholics and others trying to understand Pope Francis, the Jesuit writer and political scientist Thomas Reese is essential reading.

I say this because of two of his articles in the National Catholic Reporter: one in July showed in detail how thinking Catholics might respond to the cultural shock of same-sex marriage--and how the bishops should respond.  He writes about the "fanatical opposition to the legalization of same-sex marriage" by the U.S. bishops as a sure way for younger people to look on the church, and organized religion, as bigoted.

Just as Pope Francis relied on the scientific consensus when writing on the environment, Reese says, so the bishops should consult the best social science before making sweeping assertions about families and children. Arguing that children will suffer if they don't have a parent of each sex is not supported by evidence. Just as the bishops were wrong in opposing divorce a generation ago, they should, says Father Reese, accept the reality that gay marriage is here to stay; it doesn't mean the end of civilization.

It doesn't mean sacramental marriage is threatened.

The second Reese article, published this month, deals with a broader issue in less detail.  It shows how radically different Francis is as pope compared with his two immediate predecessors and what this means about the way the church deals with ideology.  Whereas John Paul II and Benedict XVI were men of ideas, who said reality must change if it does not reflect the unchanging ideal, Francis says that facts (and experience) matter more than ideas.  If the facts clash with the reality, he says, question the theory/theology.  This is Jesuit discernment, something Reese understands.

Case in point: the pope's widely praised encyclical on the environment, which begins with scientific facts, not theology. Among those environmental experts outside of Catholicism who have read and evaluated "Laudato Si," Bill McKibben (writing in the New York Review of Books for Aug. 13) offers an especially valuable and detailed commentary.  He calls the papal document one of the most important and influential statements of modern times.

McKibben shows how radical in the best sense Francis is in his critique of how we inhabit the planet and how sweeping this critique is on moral, political, social, economic, and spiritual grounds. The pope sees that underlying the ecological crisis is that a basic way of understanding "human life and activity has gone awry," as we in the modern world have come to believe that "reality, goodness and truth automatically flow from technological and economic power."

The pope is "at his most vigorous when he insists that we must prefer the common good to individual advancement," McKibben says, mentioning in passing how Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher thought the opposite (Thatcher once said, "there's no such thing as society").

This article, "The Pope and the Planet," is must reading; so are the pieces by Thomas Reese. I am grateful to have found them.