Garage sale this morning, 8:00 am. Leaving the country.
- recent email from a discontented soul
It’s not the first time, lately, I’ve heard of people pulling up roots and moving. A friend of mine recently wrote to say her cousins were fleeing to Costa Rica, and close friends had set up new lives for their families in Mexico, Ecuador, and Panama. I know of other families who are considering red American states.
Some are fleeing “woke” culture. Others are fleeing pandemic culture. Whatever the reasons, they feel the West is changing for the worse. As society’s structures and values mutate with increasing speed, the world they grew up in is being dismantled and rearranged, and they’re looking for better lives in distant places.
Even for those who aren’t fleeing, the question remains: How should we live in an age of disorienting change?
It’s the burning question of our time, with an apocalyptic urgency. And whether or not you believe we’re plunging headlong into a literal Apocalypse, or just experiencing a routine civilizational earthquake, the kind that snaps the rug from under the feet of empires and sends the wineglasses and silverware crashing—either way, people are desperate for answers. How, how should we live?
The question was recently posed at the Abbey of Misrule. There was a lively discussion with a range of answers; everything from getting land and learning to farm, everything from being a Buddhist to being a Benedictine to being a Hobbit. There was advice from a cat and advice from the writings of Fr. Stephen Freeman.
Coincidentally, that same morning—before I had slipped through the virtual doors of the Abbey with my virtual robes flapping about me—I was having my physical breakfast toast and was gazing out at our physical hens, who were pecking at dandelions in the yard, when my wife said to me, Your next article should be about how we’re supposed to live through these times. People want to know.
As if I had the answers for others.
Live like a Hobbit. There. That’s a good answer. And Fr. Stephen Freeman’s counsel was even better. There are many good answers, each a bubble-burst of inspiration that makes us think, Hey, maybe that’ll work for me?
Answers can inspire and help, but they can also be a misleading place to begin. Many of them are endpoints, the final product of another person’s thoughts or experiences, the final outgrowth and bloom from a soil different from our own. Another approach is not an exploration of these flowering endpoints, but to find a good starting point: the right starting assumptions and basic questions.
How should we live? Socrates and Aristotle asked the same question over two thousand years ago, and it’s surely older than them, for the question is not philosophical but deeply practical. It’s about purpose and meaning and flourishing, and—these days—about how to walk the pilgrimage of life in the shadow of the Machine without becoming uncertain, alienated, lost and despairing.
The Ju-jitsu Mirror
By “Machine” I mean the growing global apparatus of tech and power that promises (depending on how you look at it) order, security, and happiness for all, or else a social credit nightmare in which the world is barnacled in sensors that monitor our every word and move, and manipulate our perceptions and behavior. I’m inclined to the latter view, though a mixed result might be more realistic.
The Machine itself provides a curiously simple method for knowing how to live. I’ll call it the Ju-jitsu Mirror. Ju-jitsu is a defensive fighting technique that involves using an opponent’s force against him or herself. A Ju-jitsu Mirror is a thinking technique for thwarting the negative influences of the Machine.
It works like this. Pay close attention to the characteristics of the Machine. Then, hold up the Ju-jitsu Mirror to the Machine, and look in the Mirror to see the reflection in complete reverse. By turning the Machine’s inversion upside down, you come back to something more true.
Does the Machine uproot people from land and locality? Then buy land and live locally. Does the Machine weaken family? Then get married and have kids. Does the Machine replace physical currency with digital? Then find ways to barter goods or trade silver. Does the Machine turn public education into a therapeutic exploration where math is subjective and merit is evil? Then homeschool your kids or build a new school. Does the Machine seek to replace God? Then get down on your knees and pray to God.
The method is probably imperfect—not all tech, government, or social change is bad—and I’m not seriously advising we rely on it. Maybe the Ju-jitsu Mirror is more useful as a back-up test. The method also requires a lot of focus on the Machine, and I’m not sure it’s healthy to focus too much on the Machine, especially its main mouthpiece, the Internet, and its many smaller mouths—media, social media, and entertainment—which sing as hauntingly and beautifully as the Sirens of Greek myth, who lulled sailors close to shore only to dash them on the rocks.
Focusing on the mouths of the Machine can also lock us in a reactionary mode. We’ve all been there. Somebody sends us an upsetting Tweet, or we hear the fresh ramblings of some political stooge, and instantly we feel it—the snap outrage or the trigger nausea, the sense of being painfully misunderstood. We can end up being defined by these reactions, rather than living on a proactionary basis that keeps our mind focused on a better place.
And that is the first clue to a good starting point.
The gateway to the soul
Attention is the gateway to the soul, the doors to the inner stronghold. It’s what absorbs information from the world around us, the data filter that sifts out some things and takes in other things for processing, for memory, for meaning, and down lower, to the swirling sediment of our spirit.
How should we live? Protecting our attention, especially from Internet devices, seems critical to the answer. It’s not only the Siren song or reactionary content that’s the problem; not just the sleight-of-hand journalism that keeps us distracted from the real stories, not just the beguiling TV and film productions whose persuasive power is far beyond any church sermon. It’s how Internet devices alter the way our brains process information. As observed by author Nicholas Carr over a decade ago,
Our use of the Internet involves many paradoxes, but the one that promises to have the greatest long-term influence over how we think is this one: the Net seizes our attention only to scatter it.
This experience, both lulling and dulling, both hypnotic and concussive, is familiar to most. But if protecting our attention is the starting point, then the hypno-concussive effect of Internet devices might be one of the main barriers to our ability to think clearly about anything, and most of all about how to live through these times. So move to Panama or the Shire if you like, but you may not have moved very far if you haven’t protected your attention.
So that is the first seed. At the very least it means radically limiting our exposure to the mouths of the Machine. Shut down, delete, minimize, stuff it in a Faraday pouch—there are many ways to silence the mouths. All of these ways require discipline, of course, against the addictive yearning to hear the Siren songs.
And that is where another seed may help.
A certain kind of sacred
If we want to know how to live, we must live more fully as human beings. So the obvious next question might seem, What does it mean to be a human being? But it’s not the most fundamental question. If we stop there, we may fall into a materialist view that sees us only as complex biological mechanisms. Remarkable, yes, capable of compassion and concertos, but still mechanisms, each of us a little machine. Machines in a Machine, if you will. Will a machine vision of life help us be more free of the Machine?
So we won’t stop with What does it mean to be a human being? We’ll take it a step further and ask, What does it mean to be spiritual? I won’t pretend to have any full answer to that, but I will suggest we need a certain kind of sacred.
From the perspective of the Christian worldview, which is the one I follow, human beings carry the imprint of God. Through faith and prayer and Sacrament and Scripture, we open ourselves to God, and our awareness of the imprint is deepened. We emerge with a better understanding of who we are and how we are called to live.
So the pattern of this path is a movement inward and then a coming outward, like a planted seed whose roots go down and whose stalks go up. I don’t hold to the view that all sacred paths are “basically the same”, but whether Christian or not, spiritual practice tends to ground an individual more intentionally, more consciously, in their values and purpose.
What is the most important part of a spiritual practice? Some might say prayer or meditation. Some might say ritual, liturgy, or scripture reading. Visiting sacred places is another candidate. But there’s one so vital and yet so ordinary it’s easily overlooked: human relationships.
Poised at the great intersection
If the divine Reality is like a tree rising far above our heads, our relationships are the landscape spreading around us; the one is vertical, the other horizontal. But these two dimensions, though distinct, cannot be separated.
In the Christian view, the divine, which is God, includes three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Each of these Persons is independent and unique, and each is fully God. At the same time, none of them can be divided from the others. They are not three separate gods but a single God. Their center is love.
If relationships of love are built into the divine Reality, then that Reality is the imprint for human life: relationships whether in marriage, parenting, and/or friendships, with neighbors and coworkers, and with people who are different, even people we don’t like. Love your enemy, Jesus says. Do good to those who hate you. I can’t think of many words that are so instinctively unnatural, and yet so true.
And we’re talking about relationships with real people, those startlingly tangible, non-virtual humans who can’t be truly loved or dismissed with a click.
Real relationships can be hard and dysfunctional, and sometimes they fail or we have to let them go. Love, even failed love, intersects them all. In The Four Loves C.S. Lewis observes,
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even an animal…lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
When we love, we risk keeping our hearts vulnerable, open not only to other people, but receptive to the Spirit of God. We cannot make contact with this transcendent Reality with a heart of stone. Not unless we want to reside in Hell. Only a heart of flesh will do.
To be spiritual—and to be fully human—means to be poised at the intersection of the transcendent and the relational. Here is the center of our lives, the proverbial narrow path or “tightrope” as one Abbey commentator put it; the high balance-point from which we can see most clearly when we ask, How should we live?
And just to be sure we’re on the right track, hold up the Ju-jitsu Mirror as a back-up test:
Has one of the main influences of the Machine, especially the Internet, been to pull our attention away from real, physical, local human beings?
Check.
Does the Machine relentlessly direct our attention toward virtual interactions and virtual people in media, social media, TV and film?
Check.
Have these virtual social realities tended to erode rather than develop our ability to express complex emotions and ideas with each other?
Check.
Have they tended to reduce us to tribes, inflaming hate and division more than they’ve bridged differences?
Check.
The virtual reality offered by the Machine has distorted our social world by inverting it—turning our experience of it upside down. But by inverting the inversion with the Ju-Jitsu Mirror we return to a truer image.
Here are some practical implications:
Seek out real relationships, which root us in reality. Separation and virtual relationships move us in the direction of unreality.
Love is at the core of real relationships. Love and the skills it develops—patience, empathy, language, assertiveness, discernment, emotional awareness, and much else—cannot be fully exercised on virtual platforms. Real relationships are nourishment for the mind and heart.
Real relationships are demanding, but it’s these very demands that shape our character, values and identity. They can also discipline our commitment to avoid the mouths of the Internet.
Real non-virtual relationships root us in a common space with the people we’re in relationship with. They overlay physical place with emotion, meaning, and purpose. They can overlay spiritual power onto places and settings.
People over place
I have left “places and settings” last, because I wanted to point something out. Notice that in seeking an answer to the question, How should we live? we didn’t start with, Where is a better place to live? or even Where is a more spiritual place to live? Place is a tricky starting point, susceptible as it is to a certain romanticism, even a spiritual romanticism. The grass always looks greener over there.
And it can cause us to overlook relationships. If we move away to another place, what people or local connections are we losing? Who are we taking with us and how will it impact them and their own relationships?
It’s easy to fantasize about how much more wonderful it would be to live in Panama, or the Shire, or wherever—anywhere but here. But here is the place to start, here is where we guard our minds and pray, here is the holy ground where we struggle to live in relationships of love. From these starting points, we can better formulate the right questions for how to live in an age of disorientation, and come up with the answers that fit our situation best.
And some of us may discover, after all, that we do need to move. But not all of us. Some of us may remain where we are, cultivating the soil beneath our feet.