The Hermits, the Heroes, and the Hearth

Beyond spiritual practice

Albert Anker "Old Feissli with child by the stove" c.1901

High above Los Angeles, hidden in the San Gabriel Mountains, is a Rinzai Zen monastery. One day, an aspiring Zen monk named Ellis is seated on a bench, waiting to meet with his teacher. There is a window nearby, and Ellis hears a bird singing in a bush outside, and then something strange happens. Suddenly, Ellis is no longer on the bench; suddenly he is the bird, perched in the bush and singing.

The experience is one of intense unity: Ellis is the bird, and the bird is Ellis. It is a glimpse of Buddhist enlightenment.

Ellis has been practicing meditation for years, and it is not the first time he has had such an experience. He has a special sensitivity, perhaps inherited. His grandfather, a Swedish osteopath, claimed he could diagnose patients by looking at their auras.

Many years later, Ellis finds himself in front of an audience of influential and wealthy parents at a Swiss boarding school. The event is a debate on the following question: “How do you know that God exists?” The debaters include a Jewish rabbi, an Islamic imam, and a Presbyterian pastor.

When it is his turn to get up and speak, representing Zen Buddhism, Ellis says: “I do not know that God exists, and I do not know anything else”—which is a very Zen thing to say.

The audience replies with great applause, and Ellis ends up winning the debate—except there is a problem. He is no longer a Zen Buddhist. He only agreed to represent Zen with the consent of the organizer of the debate, with the understanding that once the debate was over, he would reveal that he had become a Christian.

I have known Ellis for years, and he still has an ironic sense of humor. He also still recognizes the positive aspects of Zen, though he has never gone back to it, and has been a conservative pastor for decades and gives talks on comparative worldviews—which is not a very Zen career path.

Despite the ironic humor, there is still something Zennish about Ellis, as if he has always had the heart of a monk: a gentleness of spirit and an eternal perspective on life.

Not everybody is a monk, but certain people like poets and artists, and those who love silence and nature, and those who pray and think deeply, can have similar sensitivities. They are the hermits of the world, not because they are reclusive, but because they carry a solitude inside them.   

I suspect I fall into this category, and there are a lot of other digital Inklings who do as well, including readers of this and related Substacks. And yet, as hermits we may hear cynical voices around us, or encounter them in our own minds: Here we are, meditating on deep thoughts or rambling in these essays, and nothing happens in the end. We say what we say, and the world remains just as it was before.

And yet, things do happen. As we share our observations with each other, we give life to ideas, which become the foundation for how we might better understand and respond to the roaring techno-industrial juggernaut overshadowing our society.

One of those responses, explored in my last essay, is a disruptive spiritual practice, which is the equivalent of building spiritual caves inside the Machine that shelter us from its pummeling. But other responses are possible, bolder ones that confront the system.

My friend Dietrich comes to mind. Dietrich is a Latino man with German roots. Think of a cross between a Visigoth and a ballroom dancer, a Schwarzenegger with a splash of salsa. This past summer, on his way back from a trip to South America, he was stopped at the Canadian border.

“Did you fill out your information on the ArriveCAN app?” asked the border guard, referring to the mandatory app that—at the time—was required of anyone trying to enter Canada, in order to track people’s vaccination status.

Dietrich is a Canadian citizen, and his reply went something like this: “No, I did not fill out the app. Here is a printout of my vaccination status with a QR code. Here is my passport. I am a citizen. That is all I need to enter my own country. I don’t need to fill out the app.”

The border guard was maybe twenty-one years old, a part-time summer employee perhaps, her uniform frumpy and oversized, but she was no pushover. “I’ll let you into the country,” she said, “but you’ll need to leave a phone number where you can be reached.”

“I do not need to negotiate with you to enter my own country,” Dietrich said, unflinching. “You have my passport. You have my vaccination papers. That is all I need.”

The border guard sniffed at this muscular bravado. She retreated into her booth, picked up a phone, gesticulated animatedly for one minute, then returned and said, “I’ve spoken with my manager, and if you don’t give me a phone number, I will have to report you a Public Health Officer, who will fine you $6300.”

Was it true? Or was the phone call a ruse, a bluff?

Dietrich was also accompanied by his wife and three daughters, so the $6300 fine would apply to each of them, for a total of over $30,000. That is about one-third of the average household income in Canada.

Still, Dietrich refused to comply, and proceeded to cross the border, daring the official to call in the fine.

When I asked Dietrich why he was non-compliant, he said that after two years of oppressive Covid mandates, he was not going to compromise any more of his liberties as a citizen, even if it cost him. He also did not trust the app itself, which he feared was hastily and badly designed, and might put his personal data at risk. Dietrich himself works in a software design field.

When his fine arrived, the initial price of Dietrich’s resistance was around $15,000, prompting him to sell one of the family vehicles to cover the cost. The fine was later reduced to about $8000—evidently some technocrat had a bit of mercy—but a report by the border guard, sent later, was filled with omissions and “lies”.

Dietrich still refuses to give up. He is going to fight the fine before a judge.  

Whatever you may think of his behavior, it would be a mistake to dismiss Dietrich’s experience as an isolated or irrelevant event. As new technologies penetrate our daily lives, we will all sooner or later encounter something we cannot accept because it violates our beliefs about what it means to be human—or just frustrates us out of our wits.

At what point do we refuse? Where do we draw the line and say, “No, I won’t accept that, I’m going to resist”?

An air of resignation can hang over such questions. The challenge can seem too big, the effort to face it futile. There is no clear answer, but resignation is not a safe refuge.

In an essay that has gone viral, though its conclusions are not surprising, Jon Haidt has shown that the mental health epidemic among teenage girls exploded around 2012 due to social media use, so that by 2015

it was becoming normal for 12-year-old girls to spend hours each day taking selfies, editing selfies, and posting them for friends, enemies, and strangers to comment on, while also spending hours each day scrolling through photos of other girls and fabulously wealthy female celebrities with (seemingly) vastly superior bodies and lives. The hours girls spent each day on Instagram were taken from sleep, exercise, and time with friends and family. What did we think would happen to them?

I bet a lot of hermits were asking that question, even before 2012.

So what do we do? Organize a protest? Take Big Tech to court and sue them for spraying the psychological equivalent of mustard gas over the minds of our youth?

A group of teens in New York has formed the Luddite Club, which has reverted to using flip-phones. Is that the answer? A neo-Amish revolution?

Meanwhile the new technologies keep coming. ChatGPT is poised to vaporize the writing skills of an entire generation, and AI could slip out of our control. Should we wait for another social cataclysm, or do something?

There will always be people, like Dietrich, who confront and resist, even at great personal cost. We might call their actions “heroic”, although admittedly, the difference between heroism and folly is dangerously thin.

To avoid folly, it might be good for heroes to cultivate their inner hermit, giving them balance. Hermits, likewise, might benefit from a sprinkling of the heroic. But the relationship between these two extremes is uneasy.

Heroes tend to see hermits as ineffectual, too absorbed in silences and meditations, and at worst brooding and depressive like Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Hermits tend to see heroes as impulsive, headstrong, and too easily consumed by passion, like Othello.

Brooding Hamlet, Passionate Othello

Despite their mutual opposition, the inward gravity of the Hamlet and the outward push of the Othello might find their equilibrium through the wisdom of an old saying, attributed to St. Ignatius of Loyola: “Pray as though everything depended on God; act as though everything depended on you.”

Still, this balance is precarious in a world of upheaval, and always at risk of tilting to the extremes. The hermit wants to ignore the chaos and pray; the hero wants to shout and run out and fight. In a recent post, Jack Leahy cited a memorable remark from Elder Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov on whether we should combat sin in the world by force or by humble love. Zosima’s counsel is love, for “loving humility is a terrible force: it is the strongest of all things, and there is nothing else like it”.

When love binds the hermit and the hero, the result is not a person who fights against the world, but one who is willing to suffer within the world to safeguard its beauty, truth, and goodness.

Talk of suffering is heavy. It brings to mind martyrs, like one of the Orthodox warrior saints, some of whom were soldiers in life, and preferred to die rather than to bend their knee to the Roman Machine. But not all suffering is brutal.  

At Bethany Joy’s Substack, Bethany recently mused on the relationship between heroism and hospitality—and casseroles. She points out that mythologist Joseph Campbell popularized the idea that we must undertake a journey of transformation away from home if we are to discover our inner hero, but, in Bethany’s experience, there are limits to that conception:

I’ll admit, though, that like many women, I never felt quite “at home” in Campbell’s paradigm: his journey might work for an unfettered woman like Eowyn, but for those us caring for little ones, or aging parents, or gardens, the idea that we need to abandon everything for a call to adventure sounds like abandoning the responsibilities God has given us. We wonder: can there be a hero who bakes a thousand casseroles and changes the sheets on the guest bed a thousand times? Who spends a thousand hours in the garden with her little ones, inviting anyone who passes to harvest a tomato or share a cup of tea?

It is easy to overlook the heroism of home and hearth, though it is no less heroic when expressed in its fullness. It also reminds us that family is a natural rebellion against the Machine. Family resists the uprooting of tradition and collective memory. It provides free-range social spaces that are protected from the outside world—a world in which our perceptions and behaviors are becoming increasingly scrutinized and micro-managed.

Having been a member of two families, once as a child under authority, and once as a parent with authority, I try not to have illusions about this tribal institution. A few days ago, meandering through a thrift shop, I chanced upon a game from the 1960s or 70s, whose cover picture featured a pen suspended from a swinging contraption, drawing colorful patterns on a paper. Yet that was not the part of the picture that held my attention, but rather the blue-eyed mother, the conventional looking father, the perfect boy and perfect girl, all gazing upon the little device with pleased faces.

It was, I know, just a corporate image of family, but it made me cringe, because it hid the complicated truth that when a man and woman get together and roll the genetic dice, there is much anticipation but no guarantees that all will turn out as imagined.

For all the uncertainties, we need children and families. We need them not so much to ground society, but to ground us as human beings. The arrival of a child forces us to live within history, because the child turns us into history, turns us into tradition. We lose freedom in the process, and a lot of sleep, yet everything gains significance and hope.

We do not all have children, but that does not relieve us of our responsibility for them, any more than we can renounce our stewardship of nature because we did not give birth to the trees. Children watch us. They take after us. AI will not make them heroes or hermits. Only we can do that.

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Who do you relate to the most, the hermit, the hero, or people of the hearth?

Are there any lines of technology that you would find very difficult to cross?