Liberate Yourself from E-Slavery - By Christopher Check

In the March 14, 2006 edition of the Chicago Tribune appeared “Swan Song for an iPod,” by a Kevin Pang, whose device had crashed. The author recalled all the “good times” he and his iPod shared. These
included the time that he “jogged along the lakeshore with Outkast blaring its Deep South brand of hip-hop” and the time he escaped the chatter of office life aided by Coldplay. The panhandlers on the
streets of Chicago his iPod helped him ignore. In other words, Pang’s world did not encompass the crash of the waves of Lake Michigan, the humanity of office life, or the tragedy of a beggar, but rather an alternate reality created through portable modern media.

The Age of Technology

During the thousand years between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance, what defined human life in the Western world was the Christian religion. People’s daily actions and experiences aligned to the
liturgical calendar, which itself proceeded throughout the year in harmony with the rhythms of the natural world. People knew that this life was preparation for the next, but they also knew that this
world was a part of the world to come. The great political and cultural achievements—the magnificent cathedrals, the poetry of Dante—could only have been created in such an age. Historians call this
time the Middle Ages, but a more accurate term would be the Christian Age.

The Christian Age began to pass as the Renaissance begat Protestant rebellion, the Enlightenment (or perhaps more accurately, “Endarkenment”) begat revolution. Human life no longer was informed at its center by worship of God but by worship of man. Whole nations exhausted themselves and shed horrifying amounts of blood in pursuit of promises impossible to fulfill: man’s autonomy and man’s perfectibility.

In his book Progress and Religion, Christopher Dawson shows that the age of the worship of man has also passed and that the age in which we now live—The Age of Technology—is its effect. Storytellers from Aldous Huxley to George Orwell, from Mary Shelley to Dean Koontz, have grappled with the horror of man’s effort through technology to become—as our first parents sought to become—gods. In the process man has become a slave. C.S. Lewis called this “the abolition of man,” and his book thus titled explained how three technologies—the radio, the airplane, and the contraceptive pill—all promised greater freedom for mankind but instead became the means for a few to control the lives of the many. Lewis saw these inventions serving the designs of totalitarian regimes. Half a century later,
many of us have of our own choosing surrendered our freedom to technology.

Faithful Catholics see well enough the tyranny of technology in the wicked laboratories where human reproduction is torn asunder from human love. They recognize that the first device aimed at this end, the contraceptive pill, is the bastard offspring of the previous age’s two lies: the perfectibility of man (eugenics) and the total autonomy of man (unlimited sensual gratification without consequences). Where Catholics are less able—or less willing, perhaps—to see technology’s tendency to enslave is in the operation of the machines and systems of modern communication technology: computers, iPads, smartphones, e-mail, social-network pages, chat-rooms, blogs, Web forums, Twitter, the Internet, texting, and so on. We have given our lives over to these devices and habits. My colleague Aaron Wolf has coined a term for this condition: e-slavery.

These devices and systems too often deliver, like the contraceptive, the opposite of what they promise. They  promise freedom but create dependence. Rather than strengthening human relationships,  they make them more trivial and more abstract. They addict us to novelty. Far from making the truth easier to uncover, they make the truth harder to discern. Worst of all, they are obstacles to our  relationship with the divine.

The personal, social, cultural, and spiritual costs of living in the Age of Technology are interrelated, and they demand more analysis than a single article can offer, but the reflections of G.K. Chesterton on the technology of his own day provide an excellent point of departure for reconsidering what we have so uncritically welcomed into our lives.