My dehumanization
I used to watch a lot of sci-fi movies when I was a kid. My dad was into the weird ’80s stuff, and let me watch things he probably shouldn’t have, like Dune, Total Recall, and Terminator 2. There are lots of sci-fi movies that warn us of a future where the robots will take over the world, and humanity will have to revolt, or face extinction.
Somewhere along the line, I stumbled upon the ’70s version of The Stepford Wives. It scared the heck out of me. It might just be the most terrifying robot movie of all, because it’s so much closer to reality. It paints a future where, instead of fighting the robots, we end up loving them.
I could handle space aliens and terminators. But I couldn’t handle good-looking women who were secretly robots.
After watching it as a pre-teen, I remember thinking to myself, “I don’t want to marry a robot. I don’t want to live with a bunch of robots. And I don’t want to become a robot.”
Things have changed since those days of yore when my family didn’t actually own a TV (we borrowed one once a month), and when the Internet wasn’t even a thing. In some ways, I can feel that tragic vision coming true.
Sometimes I treat other people like robots, just there to fulfill a function for me: serving food, pumping gas, providing a false sense of community at a coffee shop. Not to mention my uncanny ability to see women as mere sexual objects. I find it hard to connect with others, because I tend to care more about the people I see on screen than the ones I see around me.
Sometimes I feel like I’m becoming a robot too. I feel programmed. I shop to buy happiness, I watch TV to cure my boredom.
I stay busy and distracted in every waking moment in an effort to ignore, as the late David Foster Wallace puts it, “that constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”
I am dependent on a system where I feel connected to everything and everyone, yet disconnected from myself. From my heart, and from my dreams.
Something’s wrong.
i Robot
Everyday I feel my condition is getting worse. I notice I have a hard time talking to one person for very long, or doing anything for very long, really: reading, listening, working. I even walked out of a movie recently because I found myself playing games on my phone, feeling oppressed that someone would ask me to pay attention to them for a full two hours. I can hardly sit through a TV show if there are ads involved. I never buy entire albums anymore, because I usually get sick of most musicians’ sounds after a couple songs and want to hear something else. I can’t get through an entire book without buying three more.
I am addicted to the ever-changing glimmering sea of information and images before me, dancing relentlessly for my attention. I stand before it, motionless, mesmerized, and desperate for more.
I worry about what I am becoming, where my addiction is taking me.
Allan Bloom, a former philosophy professor at the University of Chicago, noticed the effects of this kind of overstimulation in his students. He likened it to drug addiction.
“In my experience,” he explains, “students who have had a serious fling with drugs — and gotten over it — find it difficult to have enthusiasms or great expectations. It is as though the colour has been drained out of their lives and they see everything in black and white. The pleasure they experienced in the beginning was so intense that they no longer look forward to the end …. They may function perfectly well, but dryly, routinely. Their energy has been sacked and they do not expect their life’s activity to produce anything but a living.”
The drugs may not be chemical, but over time, the result is the same. People who function dryly, routinely — their lives are sapped of creativity and maturity.
I notice my routine breaks down on Sundays when I go to church, if only for a little while. I fix a smile to my lips and politely sing along with uncomplicated choruses I’ve repeated hundreds of times before. I listen to a 30 minute sermon that taxes my patience while I resist the urge to play games on my phone. I brush shoulders with people of different ages, races, and stages in life who I don’t know through Facebook. Then I’m asked to give cash to support this second rate production and to fund missionaries in countries I’ve never heard of.
In these moments, I feel like I am caught between two religions. Two ways of thinking, being, living.
The new, and the old.
I suppose religion isn’t only comprised of your thoughts on God, or the morals you choose to believe are right. A religion is a way of life. It provides a vision of what you, and what the rest of humanity, should be.
I asked John Stackhouse, an old professor of mine from Regent College, whether religion is a decent metaphor for the technology I am experiencing in my day-to-day. “Well, your religion is what gets you up in the morning; occupies most of daydreams; triggers your deepest joys, sorrows, or angers; connects you with what ultimately matters; and consoles you when you’re lonely, sad, or frustrated. If your iPod, smartphone, tablet, or PC plays those roles, guess what?”
I suppose he’s right: if religion is a way of life, my way is directed much more by technology than by my professed God.
You might even call it an idol.
In the Old Testament, God was very upset any time the Israelites worshipped idols. It seemed to happen a lot, as if they preferred to worship a god they could actually see.
But God wanted his people to live differently: to “learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow.” (Isaiah 1:17)
He demanded from them a different way of being human.
It started with worship, because, as the Psalmist said:
“their idols are silver and gold,
made by the hands of men.
Those who make them will be like them,
and so will all who trust in them.”
NT Wright says, “You become like what you worship. When you gaze in awe, admiration, and wonder at something or someone, you begin to take on something of the character of the object of your worship.”
I admit I spend a lot more time “gazing in awe” at my screens and machines than I do at my proclaimed Lord. I look to them for my everyday salvation from what ails me: boredom, meaninglessness, even suffering.
Does not compute
There is an old ’80s TV mini-series called The Decalogue, where each episode roughly corresponds to the Ten Commandments. The first commandment is (say it with me), “I am the LORD your God … you shall have no other gods before me.” And the first film just happens to be focused on technology.
It features a story about Krzysztof, a mathematics professor, and his young son, Pavel. Krzysztof teaches his son there is no problem a computer cannot solve. When Christmas comes around, Pavel gets some skates and wants to go skating on a nearby lake. So Pavel and his father use the computers to predict when it will be safe enough to venture out on the ice. When that time comes around, Pavel, trusting his father’s science and technology, goes skating on his own, without his father’s permission.
And then the ice breaks. He drowns.
Krzysztof, an atheist, makes his way home, inconsolable. However, his computer companions can’t help him. So he leaves, and finds a church. Falling upon the altar, he violently pushes it over. A candle drips wax on a painting of the Virgin Mary, just below the eyes. Here, suffering is received and engaged.
This film reminds me what Sunday mornings have to offer, what real faith has to offer. God uses methods that may seem difficult and boring to shape us into people who can handle suffering. He does this so that we may grow into people who understand what it means to be truly human. Instead of running from suffering through endless distraction, He asks us to go through it, and lets it shape us into better people.
Whenever I go to church, I see lots of kids running around. What would it be like to raise a child in this age of omnipresent screens? Kids are bombarded with images of how they’re supposed to look, and what gadgets they’re supposed to use; advertisers target them to buy into the newest game, song or film. Companies are spending almost $17 billion yearly to garner their attention. How, as a parent, could I teach my children to value the really important things in life? How could I raise them to become people who don’t just live dryly, routinely, but instead “defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow”?
I suppose I’d start by making them go to church. I’d make them brush shoulders with people of different ages, and sing songs about more timeless, important things than they hear on the radio. I’d take away their iPads and ask them to listen politely to a sermon about the Ten Commandments. And even if they were uncomfortable, crying out for their screens, I wouldn’t give in, because I’d know what is good for them. I’d know what kind of person I’m trying to bring them up to be.
The same applies to me. There is a part of me that is immature, spoiled, and scatterbrained. I must learn to discipline that voice: to stop feeding it whenever it cries out for its fix. To take it to church and make it listen. And to not let it shape that man that I become.
Restart mode
This morning, I sat on my computer, restless and straining myself to come up with a non-clichéd conclusion to this article. You can only hear “so go be a better Christian!” so many times before it starts to lose its potency.
As I sat in Starbucks, a woman across the table smiled at me, asking me about my day. I’d seen her a few times before. Her hands were shaking.
“Fine. You?” I replied politely.
“I had a CT scan done this morning. They stuck a big needle in my head. It hurt.”
Every nerve in my body screamed out to me to shrink from her comment with a cursory “That’s too bad.” I wanted to open my computer, put my headphones on and finish my article about how I need to be a better human and show love to people.
It’s easy to write about such things.
Instead, I asked her tell me more. She told me how the doctors think she has MS, and how she gets a new test done every week; how she lives by herself and doesn’t talk much to people. We chatted for a while, and I resisted the urge to check my phone when it started buzzing. She left, smiled, and thanked me for the conversation. Then she brought me back a cinnamon bun.
I could feel something change inside of me. Through this connection, I felt a little bit more human.
God created us for connection: with each other, and with Himself. He didn’t create us to be robotic Stepford wives, programmed to say “I love you.” He didn’t create us to be people who shrink from conflict or collapse under the weight of suffering.
He made us to be mature beings who reflect his image, through and through.
He wants us to experience everything life has to offer through our lives, rather than our screens. And He does not want us to treat others like robots, people who we feel are just there to fulfill a function for us. Instead, we’re created to invest deeply in them, to carry their burdens and build deep relationships with them.
He expects more of us than our technology does. He expects us to be human. To reflect His image, rather than the ones we see on our screens.
Illustration by Jacob Kownacki
