We Need This Virtue Because Screens are Changing Us

catholicgentleman.net/2020/01/we-need-this-virtue-because-screens-are-changing-us

January 29,
2020

Will you make it through this article?

You have been re-programmed in the media-saturated age of consumerism and internet
galloping to skim this article. You’re here to grab enough of it to sense a completion
after reading, perhaps gaining a sense of gained knowledge, maybe feeling part of a tribe
or something.

1/6
I’ve been trained as a “content” writer to keep this article skimmable (shallow), but with a
feel of depth and wisdom, but in a form that – if we’re honest – will pass quickly as you
move on to the next site. Writing for the internet is a specific gig and has very specific
(and effective) rubrics. I believe in the power of the written word, naturally, but I know
what’s going on here too.

I use very short paragraphs to allow enough white space to accommodate your
skimming. Things like that help.
2/6
Lest I seem speak down to you, the reader, let’s make sure we acknowledge the dance
we’re both in. I make you feel smart by chumming the internet waters with my writing,
knowing my niche. You make me feel accomplished by clicking on the article in large
numbers. We both move on to the next thing.

Meanwhile, we’re sold to advertise and sell products. We know this. We’ve made peace
with it or perhaps given a nihilistic shrug to the unchangeability of it.

So, we dance this routine. We’re in it together.

But I’m asking you to stick with me, and to break The System’s molds. Most articles are
“effective” somewhere between 500-1500 words. Right now, you’re less than 300 words
in. Will you make it through the whole 2000 words?

The science says is will be hard for you, because by spending a lot of time on the Web
you (and I) have been physically changed in the way we receive information, or don’t.
And, as Christians, this habit of quick and shallow reading hurts our ability to think,
concentrate, and focus – all of which makes it very hard to pray. I think this needs to
change.

A Physical Hurt
In his book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr traces how
our understanding of the brain has changed.

Scientists once adamantly claimed that after adolescence brains were “set” and no
further changes occurred. Further study, however, has shown the “wiring” of the brain,
the neurological paths that help receive and process information received through the
senses, change constantly based on what we are experiencing daily. As it turns out, the
brain is almost always developing and adjusting based on habits and regular
encounters. One example many of us might be familiar with would be the heightened
senses that can develop once someone becomes blind – that development has actual
physical changes that occur in the brain. In that case, the space on the brain used for
processing physical sight transitions over to heightened senses of hearing and touch.

The summary is that the brain, far from being “set,” is wildly pliable. Scientists call this
“neuroplasticity,” the adaptability and changeability of the brain. As our muscles grow or
atrophy based on their use, so too the brain itself adjusts to what we face and
experience daily.

Carr notes a paradox in this fact. On the one hand, not being “hard wired” frees us from
the idea that we’re just machines cranking out a function. But, once our habits and
experiences do engrain themselves, we can easily step on a sort of treadmill, repeating
behaviors “mindlessly” whether they are good or bad. As Carr puts it, “Routine activities
are carried out ever more quickly and efficiently, while unused circuits are pruned away.”

The implications are likely coming into focus. Our participation in The System that is a
3/6
media-saturated, consumerist ecosystem, is physically changing our brains to both adapt
to it and be hooked on it. (Pause. Consider the implications.)

Many people have observed how checking email and social media releases a dopamine
kick in the brain, a sort of “high,” but in the long run the effects are more than just quick
bursts of pleasurable distractions we become accustomed or addicted to. The more we
participate, the more we are being “wired” to participate. The more we do it, the more
we want it, because the more conformed to it we are. The question is, what neurological
pathways are turning off while others turn on?

More than a Brain

Before going further, we should note that, as Catholics, we know human persons are
more than matter – there is more to thought than the brain. The mind, which is a power
of the soul, operates through and with the brain, but the physical matter that is the brain
is not the totality of the mind. We are not our brains – we have brains. Unlike the
animals and like the angels, we have an intellect and free will, we have self-awareness
and human agency. We are neither empty mechanics nor animals of pure instinct. We
are body and soul, matter and spirit. The mind harnesses the brain, but it is not the
brain alone.

So, let’s return to the question. What is turning on and what is turning off in our brain
when we spend too much time on screens?

Carr admits in his own life, and confirms it strongly with scientific research, that
(speaking personally) “the Net seems to be chipping away at my capacity for
concentration and contemplation.” I underlined that sentence in my book. I can also
speak personally that I have known deeply the need for silence, reading, and
disconnected leisure, yet my work draws me to the screen, and the screen gladly receives
me, molding me to its forms and ways. I too have found that without disciplining the
presence of screens, I too have my capacity to concentrate and contemplate hampered.

That’s the crux of the matter…

Christians have always seen the pursuit of God as the ultimate end of all we do. Growing
closer to him happens in what is traditionally called “the interior life,” which is the life of
the mind and soul in communion with the deeper realities that have God as their true
end. It is not a stretch to say that the habits of scanning, scrolling, and skimming are
antithetical to the traditional means by which Christians have cultivated the interior life.

Let’s not complicate it. Just picture the icon of Christian learning and holiness: the monk
reading silently at a table. He’s not “getting through a book,” he is concentrating and
contemplating in his pursuit of God Himself. His interior man, the man that can go
below the surface, is very different in habit than the one that Carr describes as “Jet
Skiing” over information.

4/6
Books are a technology, like screens, but that does not mean that books are simply being
replaced by screens. As Marshall McLuhan has persuasively argued in his famous works
and quip, “the medium is the message,” new forms of media do not blend with old but
displace them – thy are message in themselves. The Web and all that it represents is not
a new way to present other messages. It is a new message about life altogether.

Lectio divina (sacred reading), the Rosary, mental prayer, and even the liturgy – all of
these things engage the mind in a spirit of concentration and contemplation, the very
thing Carr says he can hardly do anymore. The reason it gets harder for you to
concentrate and contemplate is that you have trained your brain to not need such
things. But you do.

(We’re 1200+ words into this article, and you might have arrived at “the point” and be
tempted to click away. Let’s finish though…)

Tempered Brains
Interestingly, St. Thomas Aquinas describes the virtue we need to discipline the mind as
falling under “temperance,” which we often think of as a “physical” virtue because it
tempers the bodily desires for things like food and sex. The virtue of the mind under
temperance is studiousness, which refers to a focused study of truth, a “keen application
of the mind,” as Aquinas puts it. As temperance disciplines the hungers of the body,
studiousness disciplines the hunger of the mind, because the mind does “hunger” to
know, and, owing to our fallen state, needs discipline.

The vice opposed to studiousness is curiositas (curiosity), which is, according to Aquinas,
a “sinful study.” For us, two of the ways it can be sinful stand out. The first is by seeking
knowledge not for the sake of knowing truth, but to be regarded as knowing truth – to be
seen as smart, a sad affectation. A second disorder that is more prevalent is simply
inordinate seeking – pursuing the wrong things or just wasting the power of the mind on
trivialities. Curiositas is scrolling.

Like temperance broadly, studiousness is not a complicated virtue – deny yourself what
is bad or inordinate and engage in what is good and ordered. If The System rewires our
brains to be indisposed to receiving the seeds of wisdom and faith that come, ultimately,
from God, then we need to turn the screens off. And, if the interior life is cultivated to
receive those seeds by silence and worthwhile reading, then we need to shut-up and
read.

In Fraternus, the apostolate I work for, we launched a magazine called Sword & Spade for
this very reason. The men of Fraternus are keenly aware of their roles as brothers and
fathers (a good definition of a true “mentor”), and feel the weight of St. Paul’s words: “…
you then who teach others, will you not teach yourself?” (Rom. 2:21). Sword&Spade has
general themes that allow a topic to be examined from many angles, and the writers are,
overall, men in the trenches of work, family, and leading – they’re real men. We want it
to be a stretch, intellectually serious but accessible. We also launched it in print because
5/6
we acknowledge that the form of the screen itself, as I’ve been arguing, makes it harder
to go below the surface. Obviously, we’re using the means of The System, but we’ve
taken up the mantra: “use the Matrix to escape the Matrix.”

Sam Guzman has done the audience of this website a favor by writing a book. As much
as I’ve enjoyed the website over the years, I can say I’ve more enjoyed getting to know
Sam as a person through our somewhat regular phone calls, and the voice of an author
almost always gets a different reception in print, and that was a project worth doing.

But, in closing, we ultimately need to band together with this. One of the reasons we
want people to get Sword&Spade alongside things like book studies is that reading must
be done in silence, alone, but study bears so much more fruit when the fire of
conversation blazes in friends. The very idea of a university, as St. John Henry Newman
said by his work by that name, is the idea of friends at leisure together, wrestling with
the great ideas of great men, of seeking wisdom communally.

Some of the greatest Christian works in recent centuries have come from small groups of
reading friends talking, arguing, and drinking together – think of Lewis, Chesterton, and
Belloc, and the beautiful story of John Senior, who revolted against the relativism of
1970’s colleges by creating a program centered around friends discussing classic books
like The Odyssey. From that small group, Senior’s students went on to found great
institutions like Clear Creek Abbey and Wyoming Catholic College.

In other words, we think our biggest impact is “out there,” in the connection of the Web,
but we can likely mount a truer rebellion against The System with a couple of friends, a
good book (or magazine!), and some beer.

Jason Craig works and writes from St. Joseph’s Farm in rural North Carolina with his wife Katie
and their five kids. Jason is the author of Leaving Boyhood Behind and Director of Program
and Training for Fraternus, a mentoring program for young men, and holds a masters degree
from the Augustine Institute. He is known to staunchly defend his family’s claim to have
invented bourbon.

Liked this post? Take a second to support us on Patreon!

6/6