Religion in The Shallows

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows has been a recurring topic here the last few weeks.  Jonathan Walton takes an important angle on Carr’s thesis in his post, “This is Your Brain (and God) Online,” at Religion Dispatches:

Carr did not broach the topic of religion (well, maybe his chapter on the “Church of Google”), but I couldn’t help but think of the growing number of congregations that have embraced texting and twittering during worship. What does this mean for deep theological reflection and nuanced notions of the sacred?

If we can barely breathe without compulsively checking email and status updates 24/7, shouldn’t there be a time and space where we disengage and disconnect from our “networks”? It seems to me that when discussing matters of ultimate value and concern, this is the one area we can ill afford shallow, superficial engagement and hurried and distracted thoughts!

Here are some related links:

“Twittering in Church, with the Pastor’s O.K.” from Time

“US Churches use Twitter to reach a wider audience” from the UK’s Telegraph

“The State of Social Media, Part 1 and Part 2” from Christianity Today

“Are People More Likely to Interact with Religious Leaders on Facebook?” from Science and Religion Today

Briefly, two things come to mind.  First, Marshall McLuhan famously observed, “The medium is the message.”  Churches have traditionally believed themselves to be, among other things, the bearers of a message.  It may be worth their time to consider what new media will do to that message.  Secondly, churches are also, among other things, communities of moral formation or discipleship.  Social media, like all tools, are not merely used; they also shape the users.  Churches should also consider what sorts of communities are formed by social media, what habits (virtues/vices even) they inculcate in participants, and how these relate to their vision of a faithful and well-formed life.

Shared Sensibilities

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

Rochelle Gurstein captures in lovely prose a handful of thoughts I have attempted, with less eloquent results, to express in recent days.  “The Perils of Progress”, a brief essay appearing in The New Republic, opens with a story about “a lecture by an exquisitely sensitive, painfully alert poet friend of ours about how we live today” which elicits tired labels contemptuously applied.  As Gurstein puts it:

These days, even a few well-considered, measured reservations about digital gadgetry apparently cannot be tolerated, and our poet friend was informed by forward-looking members of the audience that she was fearful of change, nostalgic, in short, reactionary with all its nasty political connotations.

And this presumably from a learned and sophisticated audience.

Gurstein goes on to challenge the same NY Times editorial by Steven Pinker which drew some of my own comments a few days ago.  She observes that in …

… disputes about the consequences of innovation, those on the side of progress habitually see only gains. They have no awareness that there are also losses—equally as real as the gains (even if the gain is as paltry as “keeping us smart”)—and that no form of bookkeeping can ever reconcile the two.

Gurstein concludes with some poignant reflections on the materiality of the book and the difference it makes to the experience of reading and the reader’s relationship to the author.  The essay truly is worth a few minutes of your time to read.  Also reading the few comments posted in response to Gurstein’s essay tends to reinforce her concerns.

At one point in the essay Gurstein spoke of Pinker’s “stacking the deck against” her sensibility.  That word, sensibility, struck me.  This is I think near to the heart of matter.  What Gurstein and others like her attempt to defend and preserve is not merely a point of view or a particular truth.  It is more subjective than that, but is not merely preference.  It is not at all like a preference, which, I suspect, is precisely what those who do not understand it will try to label it.  It is, well, a sensibility — a certain disposition or way of being in the world.  It is an openness and a sensitivity to certain kinds of experience and to certain dimensions of reality.  Because of this it resists description and facile reduction to the terms of a cost/benefit analysis.  Consequently, it can be difficult to convincingly defend a sensibility to those who know nothing of it.  Maybe it is best described as a “seeing the world as” or, perhaps better still, a “feeling the world as.”  A sensibility is a posture toward life, a way of inhabiting the world.

What all of this groping for words may have at its center is the experiential quality of a sensibility, and experience is, after all, incommunicable.   Unless, that is, two people share the sensibility and then words may even seem superfluous.  In this sense, those who share a sensibility, share the world.  Those who lack or fail to appreciate the sensibility Gurnstein articulates know only to shake their heads in condescending bemusement.  What those, like Gurnstein and her poet friend, who grieve the passing of a culture that nurtured their sensibility fear may be the onset of a long loneliness.

Dread of the Unread

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 5 Comments

Several years ago I came across a well-known line from Erasmus: “When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.”  Apparently this is a variant, the line from one of Erasmus’ letters dated 1500 runs thus:  “I have turned my entire attention to Greek.  The first thing I shall do, as soon as money arrives, is to buy some Greek authors; after that, I shall buy clothes.”  Although the variant is more pithy, the sentiment seems to me largely the same in either case. I clipped the quote and stuck it in my wallet.  It would serve as a gentle reminder of where the money went.  Book shops perpetually tempt, and used book stores in particular tempt beyond my power to resist.

All that is fine and well.  It may be a vice, but it is a splendid vice.  However, there is a dark side to the book shop; entering therein incites a certain anxiety and sadness.  A sign should hang over every book shop declaring, “Abandon all hope, all ye who enter in … you cannot read it all.”  The sentiment is ancient.  Ecclesiastes warned, “of making many books there is no end” … to say nothing of reading them.  I’ve thought in the past that I had overcome this anxiety, this psychological burden of the unread.  In “The Pleasures of Reading,” Joseph Epstein’s writes,

Gertrude Stein said that the happiest moment of her life was that moment in which she realized that she wouldn’t be able to read all the books in the world.  I suppose what made it happy for her was that it took off a fair amount of pressure.

And so I thought, upon reading that testimonial, that I too had now suddenly come to terms with the awful realization.  But no, it was a false dawn.  While the angst fades, it still abides and from time to time reasserts itself with a certain gleeful vengeance.  Epstein went on to say,

I have finally come to the realization that I shan’t be able to read even all the good books in the world, and, far from making me happy, it leaves me, a naturally acquisitive fellow, a little sad.

I rather sympathize.

With all of that in mind, consider Will Self’s column in the New Statesman that came to my attention via Alan Jacobs this morning.  Here’s a sampling:

Back then, I laboured under the healthy delusion that, although I could not be as well read as Coleridge (who was said to be the last man to have read everything), I might yet read all that truly mattered.

Now, just as the possibility of joyous congress among the stacks retreats on hushed puppies, so the idea of all those unread books has become a screaming torment. Even the most innocuous of local libraries feels to me like Borges’s library of Babel, with its infinite number of texts ….

If the consciousness of unread books was bad enough, what about the consciousness of unread web pages?

It all puts me in mind of the Cha’an meditation illness: an incontinent recall of Buddhist texts that is the symptom of a Zen pupil’s overstrained psyche, and which can only be rectified by his master hitting him on the head with a stick. Otherwise, the texts proliferate across his visual field, while the meaning of every word is instantly grasped by him. At first, there are just texts the pupil knows, but soon enough these are joined by others he has only heard of – yet these, too, are comprehended in their entirety.

There is worse to come, as flying from all angles wing still more texts that the pupil is compelled to include in his screaming wits – texts he has never heard of at all, texts he didn’t know could exist, texts written by alien civilisations, texts doodled on the Etch a Sketch of God by archangels peaking on acid! No stick is big enough to beat this pupil – Humanity. So the maddening and delusory library expands, while the real and useful one is shut down.


What are universities for?

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 2 Comments

Not too long ago I noted two essays that appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, one by Martha Nussbaum and the other by Keith Thomas, on the topic of the humanities and the university.  In his piece, “What are universities for?”, Thomas regretted the loss of the art of teaching within the context of an academic culture that put a premium on research and publishing.

In a recent interview, Wendell Berry expressed similar concerns:

I think [the University of Kentucky] has gone astray first with its long emphasis on research instead of teaching. If you promote research, which can be quantified, and make it the paramount issue with promotion and tenure and salary raises, then you diminish the standing and importance of teaching necessarily, which can’t be quantified. … Administrators have to find a way to reward professors for teaching.

Berry’s comments came in the wake of his decision to remove his papers from the University of Kentucky’s archives  in protest against the university’s recent emphasis on becoming a Top 20 “research university” and their acceptance of a sizable donation from a major coal company. Later in the interview Berry makes the following reasonable assumption:

And so the University of Kentucky has for some time had a program to become a top-20 research institution. Every sizable university in the country has that program, as if the present top 20 is going to stand back while the others pass them. I don’t think that’s going to happen for most of them. Well, let me not speculate.

In his essay, Keith Thomas observed that

Only a minority of academics can hope to achieve any real advance in their discipline, but all have the possibility of making an enduring “impact” on the minds of their pupils.

Combining Berry and Thomas yields the following formulation: only a minority of universities can hope to become Top 20 research institutions, but all have the “possibility of making an enduring ‘impact’ on the minds of their pupils.”  But this can happen only if they make teaching and “scholarship,” to borrow Thomas’ term, a priority.

You can read more about Berry’s decision at University Diaries and the Lexington Herald-Leader.

Cute Robot, Let’s Have a Baby

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

Couples in developed countries are having fewer and fewer children.  It has been widely observed, for example, that the average fertility rate of most developed nations is well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children.  This generally means that, immigration apart, populations are on the decline.  The trend has been particularly pronounced in Europe with Germany, Austria, Spain, Portugal, and Italy among others very near the bottom of the list.  Asia, however, has not been immune to the trend.  Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong also inhabit the bottom of the list.  African nations are near the top and the US, something of an exception among developed nations, maintain a fertility rate right at 2.1.

A number of factors have contributed to this state of affairs, a good number of them economic.  A quick search on the internet for the “cost of having children” will yield over 8 million hits, and a quick “unscientific” glance at the leading results seems to suggest that the cost is quite high and that this is on the mind of a lot of people.  Young couples also seem to struggle with the loss of independence, career costs, and the responsibility that children entail. Generally speaking, social scientific data and quantifiable cost/benefit analysis seem to suggest that children are not conducive to overall happiness.

This, however, is only one side of the story.  Bryan Caplan’s recent Wall Street Journal article, “The Breeder’s Cup,” summarizes the argument of his forthcoming book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids.  He concludes his article with the following summary:

If … you’re interested in kids, but scared of the sacrifices, research has two big lessons. First, parents’ sacrifice is much smaller than it looks, and childless and single is far inferior to married with children. Second, parents’ sacrifice is much larger than it has to be. Twin and adoption research shows that you don’t have to go the extra mile to prepare your kids for the future. Instead of trying to mold your children into perfect adults, you can safely kick back, relax and enjoy your journey together—and seriously consider adding another passenger.

Admittedly, this is comes off as a less than ringing endorsement of childbearing.  “Have children, it’s not as bad as you’ve been led to believe” is not quite a rallying cry.  But then again, social scientific data and quantifiable  cost/benefit analysis also frame Caplan’s argument, and it seems misguided to capture the meaning of a child’s life and the experience of parenting with its tears and joys in a simple statistical survey or a budget line item.  Perhaps it is the reduction of social life to economic life, that accounts for the changing patterns of childbearing; perhaps it is an almost narcissistic view of personal fulfillment.

None of this is intended as a brief for perpetual pregnancy.  However, it is a lament of sorts for the state of affairs which renders a child something of a burden and measures the meaning of life statistically.  Something has gone wrong when in Japan hopes are pinned on a robotic baby, and a rather eerie one at that, to encourage couples to have a child.  And this after a cash bonus from the government seems not to have done the trick.

While the market language is still problematic in my view, there is perhaps some encouragement to be taken from one piece of evidence Caplan cites in his article:

The only high-quality study of parents’ satisfaction dates back to a nation-wide survey of about 1,400 parents by the Research Analysis Corp. in 1976, but its results were stark: When asked, “If you had it to do over again, would you or would you not have children?” 91% of parents said yes, and only 7% expressed buyer’s remorse.