Idols used to be hulking things, creatures of wood and metal that lived in temples dark with a terrible holiness. Now they're sold by Apple and fit in our pockets.
So says Andrew Bacevich, a Boston University history professor, in the latest issue of the Catholic magazine Commonweal. His piece, subtitled "Of Idolatry & iPhones,"makes his conclusion quite clear.
Bacevich draws on the old Henry Adams claim that the symbol of Western society was, for centuries, the Virgin Mary. With the coming of electricity and the rise of science, Adams identified the new symbol of society with the dynamo. Electricity served as a proxy for freedom, for progress, for liberation from drudgery. (See chapter 25 of the autobiographical The Education of Henry Adams.)
Today, the smartphone has supplanted the dynamo, but Bacevich argues that such devices fulfill a similar talismanic role in our lives as we worship the freedom and power than they and other computing machines grant us. But thinking we are free, we become enslaved.
As successor to the Machine Age, the so-called Information Age promises to empower humanity as never before and therefore to complete our liberation. Taking the form of a wireless handheld device, the dynamo of our time has truly become, as Adams wrote, “a symbol of infinity.” Rather than spewing masses of stone and steam, it offers instant access to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
The Information Age does something else as well, however: it displays in stark terms our propensity to bow down before freedom’s reputed source. Anyone who today works with or near young people cannot fail to see this: for members of the present generation, the smartphone has become an amulet. It is a sacred object to be held and caressed and constantly attended to. Previous generations fell in love with their cars or became addicted to TV, but this one elevates devotion to material objects to an altogether different level. In the guise of exercising freedom, its members engage in a form of idolatry. Small wonder that aficionados of Apple’s iPhone call it the Jesus Phone.
Bacevich's thesis is a stronger version of the old claim that we spend too much time staring at screens, that life was meant for so much more. This has been a special concern for religious leaders; this year, an interfaith group including the National Council of Churches, the US Catholic Conference of Bishops, and the Islamic Society of North America held a "media fast" during Holy Week. They asked people to step away from smartphones, TVs, laptops, desktops, and e-readers for a week in order to "enter into the 'brave old world' of unmediated connection," as one minister put it.
The argument also has distant shades of agrarian Christian writer Wendell Berry, whose famous short 1987 essay "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer" also lamented that that technology could become an idol distracting us from what truly matters in life. "I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work," Berry wrote.
Only when someone has used a computer to write a work superior to that produced by Dante will Berry "speak of computers with a more respectful tone of voice, though I still will not buy one." (One of his 9 theses about new technology was that "it should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools," which suggests he would not be a fan of smartphones, either.)
For both Bacevich and Berry, computer technology runs the risk of sapping "real" connections to place and to people. Offering us freedom, our devices enslave—or at least distract us so badly that we have limited time left for sustained interpersonal effort and honest labor.
One thinks of T.S. Eliot's lines in the first of his Four Quartets about people who are "distracted from distraction by distraction." Instead, Eliot sketches a two-fold path into spiritual meaning. The one way requires the focus that comes from darkness
to purify the soul Emptying the sensual with deprivation Cleansing affection from the temporal.
But, in a line that whose wording was far more prescient that Eliot could ever have known, he noted that modern life gives no quarter to the inner stillness necessary for contemplation, self-knowledge, and divine connection:
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.
The wrong target?
Incessant screen time poses real concerns, of course, but Bacevich's brush sweeps a bit broadly, even for his fellow Commonweal readers. "This very day I exchanged several text messages and photos with my children, using the iPhone that Mr. Bacevich considers such an item of depravity," said one."Indeed, I've been formulating a letter to Steve Jobs to congratulate him on having devised such a marvelous device. I have never heard of the apparatus being called a 'Jesus phone'; that seems disrespectful. On the other hand. I can imagine that Jesus would have liked one; he could have rung up Mary and Martha and explained that he'd be late for the funeral, but would put things right when he got to town. St. Paul, surely, would have found use for the technology."
Another defends smartphones, saying, "I"m an old woman, and i won't go into details, but mine is helping keep me out of a nursing home. What more can you ask from a mere machine? Oh, yes, and it makes it very easy to call the cops or ambulance if necessary."
Still others think Bacevich has the right answer but the wrong target. "If we talk about the idol of technology, we need to talk about Facebook (the [iPhone] is simply a delivery system for content)." A similar critique was also leveled against Berry: when he loathed computers because they ran indirectly on strip-mined coal (used to produce electricity), his target should have been the method of power production, not the device that uses electrical power.
All of which raises the question, especially for the "younger generation": can you use a computer or a smartphone without turning it into a amulet? Or is the nature of modern, Internet-enabled connectivity so addicting that, given access to gadgets, many people will prove unable to use them with the proper self-mastery?