Addicted to Diversion

JUSTIN TAYLOR|9:46 AM CT

Addicted to Diversion and Afraid of Silence

Some people write out of their strengths; others out of their weaknesses, because they care most about what they struggle with most. I’m aware of my own temptations toward distraction and busyness, so I care about calls away from our cultural addiction to diversion.

Blasie Pascal (1623-1662) has been a good mentor on these issues. I’d recommend getting Peter Kreeft’s edition, Christianity for Modern Pagans, Pascal’s Pensees Edited, Outlined, and Explained, where his thoughts on God, man, and diversion are all gathered in one section (pp. 167-187). Kreeft writes that when he teaches this material, his “students are always stunned and shamed to silence as Pascal shows them in these pensees their own lives in all their shallowness, cowardice and dishonesty.”

Here is one line from Pascal (from #136) that it worthy of a lot of meditation::

I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.

Kreeft’s restatements and commentary are also worth reading. For example, here is an excerpt from pp. 167-169:

We ought to have much more time, more leisure, than our ancestors did, because technology, which is the most obvious and radical difference between their lives and ours, is essentially a series of time-saving devices.

In ancient societies, if you were rich you had slaves to do the menial work so that you could be freed to enjoy your leisure time. Life was like a vacation for the rich because the poor slaves were their machines. . . .

[But] now that everyone has slave-substitutes (machines), why doesn’t everyone enjoy the leisurely, vacationy lifestyle of the ancient rich? Why have we killed time instead of saving it? . . .

We want to complexify our lives. We don’t have to, we want to. We wanted to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very things we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hold in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.

So we run around like conscientious little bugs, scared rabbits, dancing attendance on our machines, our slaves, and making them our masters. We think we want peace and silence and freedom and leisure, but deep down we know that this would be unendurable to us, like a dark and empty room without distractions where we would be forced to confront ourselves. . .

If you are typically modern, your life is like a mansion with a terrifying hole right in the middle of the living-room floor. So you paper over the hole with a very busy wallpaper pattern to distract yourself. You find a rhinoceros in the middle of your house. The rhinoceros is wretchedness and death. How in the world can you hide a rhinoceros? Easy: cover it with a million mice. Multiple diversions.

Douglas Groothuis (Professor of Philosophy at Denver Seminary) has written wisely on these issues. In his essay “Why Truth Matters Most: An Apologetic for Truth-Seeking in Postmodern Times” (JETS, September 2004) he takes his cues from Pascal:

In the middle of the seventeenth century in France, Blaise Pascal went to great lengths to expose those diversions that kept people from seeking truth in matters of ultimate significance. His words still ring true. In his day, diversion consisted of things like hunting, games, gambling, and other amusements. The repertoire of diversion was minute compared with what is available in our fully-wired and over-stimulated postmodern world of cell phones, radios, laptops, video games, omnipresent television (in cars, restaurants, airports, etc.), extreme sports, and much else. Nevertheless, the human psychology of diversion remains unchanged. Diversion consoles us—in trivial ways—in the face of our miseries or perplexities; yet, paradoxically, it becomes the worst of our miseries because it hinders us from ruminating on and understanding our true condition. Thus, Pascal warns, it “leads us imperceptibly to destruction.” Why? If not for diversion, we would “be bored, and boredom would drive us to seek some more solid means of escape, but diversion passes our time and brings us imperceptibly to our death.” Through the course of protracted stupefaction, we learn to become oblivious to our eventual oblivion. In so doing, we choke off the possibility of seeking real freedom.

Diversion serves to distract humans from a plight too terrible to encounter directly—namely, our mortality, finitude, and failures. There is an ineluctable tension between our aspirations and our anticipations and the reality of our lives. As Pascal wrote,

Despite [his] afflictions man wants to be happy, only wants to be happy, and cannot help wanting to be happy. But how shall he go about it? The best thing would be to make himself immortal, but as he cannot do that, he has decided to stop thinking about it.

Pascal unmasks diversion as an attempt to escape reality, and an indication of something unstable and exceedingly out-of-kilter in the human condition. An obsession with entertainment is more than silly or frivolous. It is, for Pascal, revelatory of a moral and spiritual malaise begging for an adequate explanation. Our condition is “inconstancy, boredom, anxiety.” We humans face an incorrigible mortality that drives us to distractions designed to overcome our worries:

Man is obviously made for thinking. Therein lies all his dignity and his merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought. Now the order of thought is to begin with ourselves, and with our author and our end. Now what does the world think about? Never about that, but about dancing, playing the lute, singing, writing verse, tilting at the ring, etc., and fighting, becoming king, without thinking what it means to be a king or to be a man.

Pascal notes that “if man were [naturally] happy, the less he were diverted the happier he would be, like the saints and God.” Diversion cannot bring sustained happiness, since it locates the source of happiness outside of us; thus, our happiness is dependent on factors often beyond our control, so that we are “liable to be disturbed by a thousand and one accidents, which inevitably cause distress.” The power may go off, the screen freeze, or the cell phone connection may break up. Worse yet, our own sensoriam may break down as sight dwindles, hearing ebbs, olfactory awareness fades, and all manner of bodily pleasures become harder to find and easier to lose. As the Preacher of Ecclesiastes intones, “Remember your creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come, and the years draw near when you will say, ‘I have no pleasure in them’ ” (Eccl 12:1).

Diversions would not be blameworthy if they were recognized as such: trivial or otherwise distracting activities performed in order to temporarily avoid the harsh and unhappy realities of human life. However, self-deception often comes into play. In the end “we run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us seeing it.” According to Pascal, this condition illustrates the corruption of human nature. Humans are strangely not at home in their universe. They cannot even sit quietly in their own rooms. “If our condition were truly happy we should feel no need to divert ourselves from thinking about it.” Woody Allen highlights this in a scene from the movie “Manhattan.” A man speaks into a tape recorder about the idea for a story about “people in Manhattan who are constantly creating these real unnecessary neurotic problems for themselves because it keeps them from dealing with more unsolvable, terrifying problems about the universe.”

The compulsive search for diversion is often an attempt to escape the wretchedness of life. We have great difficulty being quiet in our rooms, when the television or computer screen offers a riot of possible stimulation. Postmodern people are perpetually restless; they frequently seek solace in diversion instead of satisfaction in truth. As Pascal said, “Our nature consists in movement; absolute rest is death.” The postmodern condition is one of oversaturation and over-stimulation, and this caters to our propensity to divert ourselves from pursuing higher realities.

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Book Review: The Next Story

In exchange for a copy of the book, I am participating in the promotional blog tour of Tim Challies' The Next Story (2011, Zondervan). I offer up my thoughts having just finished this most enjoyable read.

Do you own your technology or does your technology own you? Tim Challies explores this question in his recent book, The Next Story (Zondervan, 2011). While the question he poses may seem silly to some, but it is a given that everywhere we look people are addicted to texting, unable to sit and enjoy dinner with their spouse without being interrupted or taking a phone call at dinner in a nice restaurant, and entire generations are spending what seems to be 90% of their time staring at glowing rectangles and neglecting to interact with the natural or real world, it seems that we are not masters of our technology, but that our technology has mastered us.

We invent technology, he pontificates, to become our servants, to aid and improve our lives, as a means to take dominion over creation, and to make us more productive and efficient. But in an elusive reversal, the digital have become the master and we are often stuck reloading and trouble-shooting, spending countless hours unwillingly obsessed with the trivial and many more hours willingly obsessed with the boorish and mundane (i.e. YouTube’s “David After the Dentist”).

Challies writes with a very thoughtful tone, offering to consider a “middle-way” (though he does not employ that term) with regard to our response to the outpouring of new technologies. He does not advocate blindly accepting technology, as if we should not be critical or analytical about how it affects our behavior. Nor does he advocate a Luddite/retreatist attitude, as if we should burn all our cellphones, notebooks, and iPads and go back to the horse and buggy, thus ensuring our moral purity. Rather, he reminds us that anything in our life can become an idol—food, sex, money, power, or digital gadgets. For the Christian, it is important to think seriously about our use of technology, as well as how it reflects our commitment to biblical living.

Challies reminds his readers that man was created to take dominion over the earth (Genesis 1) and technology is one way that mankind obeys that mandate. It is important to remember that cell phones and computers are not the only thing that constitutes “technology”, but any created item that man uses is “technology” (chalk, wagons, plows, spears, nuclear bombs) and it is important to be critical and thoughtful about its intended use, knowing that any technological power can, ultimately, be used for good or ill; the same power that can be used to fuel a nation with energy for 100 years can also be used to destroy an entire city in one detonation.

While avoiding the anti-technological bent of the Luddites (of which he gives brief historical background and suggests that the term, though it is usually one of derision, ought not to be necessarily), he reminds his readers that advances in technology (i.e., the printing press) have been met with resistance and that people from all ages, not just our own, have called out for careful, thoughtful reflection before accepting all technological developments uncritically.

He explains how information, in of itself, came to viewed as a commodity and that with the progression from the Pony Express to the telegraph, telephone, TV, and Internet, its value has been determined by the speed at which it is disseminated, and people have had to re-evaluate social etiquette (the interruption of a telegraph delivery is not unlike the interruptions we constantly receive with the beeping and buzzing of our cell phones. Challies also explores the advent of social media and its effect (good and ill) on our lifestyles, how it has shifted our priorities and even, ironically, impaired our ability to communicate with our fellow man.

One of the high points of Challies’ book is his discussion of mediated vs. immediate interaction. Created in the image of God, man was intended for immediate (that is, no mediator, no go-between) relationship with God, which Adam and Eve had in the Garden. Since the Fall, man’s sin has created a need for a mediator, a medium, a go-between man and God: first Moses and the Law, then the Aaronic priesthood, and now, in these latter days, Jesus Christ, who is God himself. And now Christians await the last day when they shall have no more need for mediation but shall see God face to face.

Challies, rightly, argues that face to face communication and interaction is superior to all mediated forms of interaction, since that is how man is designed.  Yet, this current trend seems to be seeking ways to place more media between one another (Aside: media is the plural of medium, it is not synonymous with “news/press outlets”. A medium is anything, in this context, like a cellphone or computer that is a go-between; it serves as a tool of communication with another person).

It seems as if we are frighteningly favoring distance and ambiguity rather than rich, personal, bodily interactive community. Our generation seems to prefer sending a text message over having a conversation on the phone, or favoring email over a face-to-face conversation.  Strangely, when people wrote letters, they would often mention how they longed to be in the presence of that individual, not the other way around. Yet that is what seems to be the trend today: people genuinely aim toward and prefer inferior forms of interaction and “community.” Digital technology, with all of its boons, is serving to drive us as humans further apart. It is distorting our humanity, marring the imago Dei in one another and destroying our perception of the beautiful and the rich.  It is an ugly thing that is causing us to love ugliness and we are allowing ourselves to become self-developed cyborgs, an identity that is tragically reflected in our human relationships.

Challies also has several very helpful chapters discussing distraction, our love of distraction, how to protect our homes and families from such, the idolatry of gadgets, the idolatry and over-valuing of speed vs. the value of pondering and careful thoughtfulness, truth and authority or relativity, and the need for privacy in the midst a world where the entitlement to privacy is quickly diminishing.

As well, he gives some extremely helpful musings on intellectual authority, the advent of the power of consensus/popular opinion in the age of Wikipedia, and on “data trails.” The fact is that transparency and integrity are of even greater import now since Google/Bing/AOL have on digital record forever the pattern and history of one’s Internet searches. These data trails tell a story, they give an insight, and, to many, they may even bring shame and conviction.

To elaborate further on the contents of the book would be tipping too far into the realm of summary and leaving the realm of review. Suffice to say, The Next Story is an enjoyable read; it is succinct, concise (under 200 pages), and thought-provoking. I highly recommend it to any thoughtful Christian, family, Sunday School class, or book group for reading and discussion of its many commendable, intriguing pages.

Challies writes with a lucid, flowing, and logical style and for those of you who have heard him preach or speak at conferences, you will notice how his writing style is very much akin to his manner of speaking. Woven throughout the book are various sections on application where he discusses the interaction of our theory, theology, and experience with much of the subject matter (i.e. social media).

As noted, Challies gives due focus to an oft-overlooked blemish in contemporary Christendom: idolatry. Nobody likes to talk much of idolatry these days and when they do it is often in reference to ancient, pagan peoples who once bowed to wooden and stone statues. Challies’ book is more diagnostic than prescriptive, and he echoes Calvin’s diagnosis of the perpetual factory of idols that man’s heart is by noting our tendency to idolize (inadvertently worship?) our gadgets.

A caveat? I would not recommend this book to a non-believer. If you are a person who is concerned for his non-Christian friend or family member and their idolatry/misplaced priority on digital technology, this is not the book to give them for conviction. Granted, God works in mysterious ways and can use anything as an instrument in regeneration/conversion. However, Challies writes with various presuppositions in mind such as the Image of God, the inerrancy of Scripture, and other biblical values that a non-believer is not likely to share. Since those presuppositions are often the basis from which he draws his conclusions, the Christian is likely to give a hearty “Amen!” or feel convicted because he is convinced of Challies’ arguments, but the non-Christian is not likely to be persuaded since he probably does not share the same worldview.

Be that as it may, evangelical Christians are indeed his target audience, and as one who shares Challies’ concerns and perhaps has even greater disdain for the invasion/enslavement of humanity to digital beeps and buzzes, I heartily recommend this book for all to read. I hope and pray that the tech-savvy among us will be thoughtful in their reading and not arrogantly dismiss his concerns and conclusions and go on about their uncritical use of gadgets and gizmos. My hope is that many readers will be convicted and begin to use their technologies in a way that reflects man’s dominion over the device, not the other way around, and that we can soon begin to see the imago Dei restored, rather than ravaged, by the advent of otherwise useful, helpful devices.