“You’ve Got Self:” How the Internet Cultivates Expressive Individualism in All of Us
Written by Samuel D. James |
Sunday, April 10, 2022
As Christians remind each other of the gospel, we will build in one another the capacity for richer joys, deeper identity, and lasting meaning that digital technology promises but never delivers. The permanence of the gospel, revealed in a book, proclaimed by a community, and demonstrated through love, is more than enough ballast for screen-weary souls.
Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film Inception tells a story about a technology called “dream-sharing,” invented at some indeterminate point in the future, that allows participants to enter into one another’s dreams via their subconscious. The main character, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, assembles a team of dream “hackers” to invade the mind of a billionaire business heir and convince his subconscious to break up his father’s commercial empire. In one of the film’s mostly subtly metaphorical scenes, the team visits a chemist who can make an especially potent sedative to allow for vivid and prolonged dream-sharing. The chemist takes the team downstairs, where they’re led to a dimly lit room where dozens of people are sleeping, connecting to dream sharing devices. The chemist explains that these people come to spend hours every day dreaming together, as their subconscious selves construct an alternative life in their dreams. Stunned, the team asks, “They come here to fall asleep?” “No,” the chemist replies. “They come here to wake up.” The dream has become their reality.
There are no real-world dream sharing devices, but there is one real-world technology that connects billions of people in a dream-reality: the Internet.
As Carl Trueman brilliantly lays out in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, expressive individualism has its origins in a complex collision of history, philosophy, and politics. Today, however, the most powerful vehicle for shaping people in its image is not the classroom or Supreme Court, but the Internet. To see this more clearly, we need to think of the Internet less as a singular tool or hobby, and more like what it is now: an immersive epistemological habitat in which hundreds of millions of people have regular, active membership. The Internet has transformed the way humans read, learn, communicate, labor, shop, recreate, and even “worship.” No other technology is as disruptive to traditional forms of human activity.
Membership in the online commons has formative effects on us, just like membership in a local church. The liturgies of assembled, embodied, gospel worship point us toward one set of beliefs and values, while the liturgies of Internet membership point us toward a different set.
While secular technology critics have been talking this way about digital life for a while, Christians largely have not. Instead, we’ve focused not on the form of the Internet, but on its content, encouraging one another to avoid pornography, slander, and envy on the various website and social media platforms we navigate daily. This encouragement is good and necessary, but much more is needed. Pastors and church leaders in particular need to see online technologies as powerful instruments of personal formation that push us in a certain spiritual and epistemological direction.
Before going further, we should take careful note of something important. The Bible’s vision of human flourishing as divine image-bearers and Christ-followers is a deeply analog vision. By this I mean that Scripture both assumes and prescribes doctrines, attitudes, and practices that are tied to our embodied, physical existence. For one thing, Christians believe that divine revelation is expressed in a physical book, the Bible, and that this book features language with objective meaning.[1] Further, the very first thing we learn from the Bible about ourselves is that we are created in the image of God, male and female. This means that our fundamental identity as people is tied to our bodies. God creates physical image-bearers who have embodied sexual identities, and in submission to God these image-bearers come together to marry, make love, and bear children that fill the earth (with their physical selves) and subdue it. Family is not an abstract concept, but a flesh-and-blood institution that is ordered according to real, embodied persons.
The Internet, by contrast, is radically disembodied. To be online is, in a very real sense, to escape the givenness of created existence. The social critic Laurence Scott writes:
If our bodies have traditionally provided the basic outline of our presence in the world, then we can’t enter a networked environment, in which we present ourselves in multiple places at once, without rethinking the scope and limits of embodiment. While we sit next to one person, smiling through a screen at someone else, our thoughts, our visions, our offhand and heartfelt declarations materialise in the fragments in one another’s pockets. It’s astonishing to think how in the last twenty years the limits and coherence of our bodies have been so radically redefined.[2]
The Internet’s disembodied, “fragmented” character is not merely interesting trivia. It is a massively important part of the way being online shapes our beliefs, intuitions, and habits.
Consider now three distinct “digital liturgies” that shape all of us in the image of the disembodied Internet.[3]
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“My Story, My Truth”
Online technology’s flattening, democratizing character means that the most valuable social currency is not expertise, wisdom, or character, but story. When a truth claim goes up against a narrative, the narrative wins every time. Personal experience is the authoritative norm in digital discourse, and in many cases no amount of evidence or argument can trump it. To suggest that someone’s story may be relevant but not necessarily authoritative is often seen as a grossly unacceptable attack on their personhood.
The power of individual story to provide justification for desires and thwart any criticism is powerfully evident to Gen-Z. In her book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, journalist Abigail Shrier describes how large and growing numbers of teen and preteen Americans are learning to question their given gender through transgendered influencers, particularly on YouTube, Reddit, and Tumblr.
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Testament: The Story of Moses
The series purports to offer a history of Moses, but it’s a history lacking in scholarly rigor because it grants any source that mentions Moses equal authority regardless of authorship or date of composition.People unfamiliar with the Bible will finish this series confused about who the Moses of Scripture was, but Christians firm in the faith might be interested in watching the show to learn about Jewish and Islamic teachings.
The Unexpected popularity of The Chosen, Dallas Jenkins’ series about the life of Jesus, sparked the entertainment industry’s interest, causing it to pay more attention to faith-based projects over the last few years. Movies and series with religious overtones have improved in quality, and many are finding bigger audiences. But Netflix’s new docudrama Testament: The Story of Moses shows what can happen when religious entertainment is designed for the widest possible audience.
The miniseries comprises three 80-minute episodes. The first episode, “The Prophet,” begins with Moses’ life as a prince in Egypt and takes him into the land of Midian where he fled after killing an Egyptian taskmaster. “The Plagues” recounts Moses’ attempts to convince Pharaoh to let the Hebrews go and the various calamities God unleashed on the stiff-necked ruler. The third episode, “The Promised Land,” feels misnamed, considering Moses never makes it to Canaan. The episode begins with the Israelites’ crossing of the Red Sea and culminates with Moses’ giving of the Ten Commandments.
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Don’t Waste Your Waiting
There is both purpose and tremendous benefits to being in God’s school of waiting. For waiting: Is a stark reminder that we are not in control of things. This is very positive. Trying to be master of your own life will prove to be exhausting. Calls for honesty. It involves facing up to, and confessing, the struggles, pain, and doubts of our own hearts.
I’m sitting at OR Tambo International Airport, waiting for my flight back home. And I’m thinking about my hatred of waiting. I think to what degree my actions are determined by my desire to do things as quickly as possible; avoiding as much fuss as possible. The airline is Safair, reputedly the least delayed airline in the world. We checked in online, to save time and bother. When queuing, I have carefully studied the four lines, figuring out which will be quickest. The lines must keep moving! Then we have booked seats right at the back of the aircraft. These are for a quick getaway after landing. And, of course, we only have hand-luggage. Who in their right mind wants to watch the stupid carousel going round and round?
I don’t want to wait. Waiting is pure agony.
I Have the Need for Speed
My issues with time seem to be typical of the Western world. Time is precious. Time is money, say the experts. Waiting is therefore a waste of time and money. “Quick and easy” are two words with enormous seductive, even magical, powers. How can we ‘do life,’ maximising it with the least fuss and bother? We have fast food, eating meals on the run or in our cars. We covet huge internet speeds. Every fix must be instant. The latest diet promises incredible results with minimal effort. The self-help bestselling book is subtitled: Discover Yourself in Less Than 30 Minutes.
‘Make life happen, don’t let it happen to you.’ The real thing is the next thing, we want to live from peak event to peak event. Eat dessert first! When life gets very tough, skip the unpleasantries and take instant gratification. Forget the potatoes, go straight for the ice cream. ‘Just do it!’ What are you waiting for? One life, live it! Carpe Diem. There is something appealing about these slogans. Yet there is also something potentially very misleading.
As usual, the church follows the world. It simply rebrands the psychobabble: “Simple devotions for the busy Christian;” “Quick sermons for the over-worked pastor;” “Five keys to spiritual victory;” “Three Steps to Holiness.” But those titles are false. They’re dangerous! Robust faith can’t be microwaved!
Churches are filled up with people looking for rapid, painless paths to change and growth. Congregants are given formulaic answers and offered express spirituality; a trite, formulaic, and franchised faith. The world has McDonald’s. So the church offers McFaith. We want shortcuts, comfortable answers to vexing problems.
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Supreme Court Hands Religious Freedom Win To Postal Worker Who Refused To Work On Sunday
In ruling for the government worker, the high court overturned its 1977 precedent that said employers had to “reasonably accommodate” an employee’s religious beliefs and practices, so long as it did not create an “undue hardship” on the business. The new decision tightens the “undue hardship” standard, and could make it easier for some individual employees to secure a religious accommodation in the workplace.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled unanimously for a postal worker in Pennsylvania in an important religious liberty dispute, over now far employers should go to accommodate faith-based requests in the workplace.
Gerald Groff, a Christian mail carrier, from Pennsylvania, asked the court to decide if U.S. Postal Service could require him to deliver Amazon packages on Sundays, which he observes as the Sabbath. His attorney, Aaron Streett, argued in April that the court should revisit a 50-year-old precedent that established a test to determine when employers should make accommodations for their employees’ religious practices.
In ruling for the government worker, the high court overturned its 1977 precedent that said employers had to “reasonably accommodate” an employee’s religious beliefs and practices, so long as it did not create an “undue hardship” on the business.
The new decision tightens the “undue hardship” standard, and could make it easier for some individual employees to secure a religious accommodation in the workplace.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires employers to accommodate employees’ religious practices unless doing so would be an “undue hardship” for the business. A Supreme Court case from 1977, Trans World Airlines v. Hardison, said employers could deny religious accommodations to employees when they impose “more than a de minimis cost” on the business.
Streett argued that the court should scrap the “de minimus” test, which he suggested has been abused by lower courts to deny religious accommodations, in favor of the plain language of Title VII, which would define “undue burden” in the same way it is defined in other federal laws, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
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