Forever Elsewhere

 

"We are forever elsewhere," wrote MIT Professor Sherry Turtle in 2015 about our new life with smartphones. She is quoted approvingly by Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his latest book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (NY: Penguin Random House, 2024). According to Haidt, "a profound transformation of human consciousness and relationships" occurred between 2010 and 2015. This was "the birth of the phone-based childhood" and it marked "the definitive end of the play-baed childhood."

Haidt is hardly alone in lamenting these developments. Even the Holy See has joined the growing chorus of concern. In the newly released Declaration Dignitas Infinita, issued by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith just this week, we read: "Although the advancement of digital technologies may offer many possibilities for promoting human dignity, it also increasingly tends toward the creation of a world in which exploitation, exclusion, and violence grow," and "the more that opportunities for making connections grow in this realm, the more people find themsleve isolated and impoverished in interpersonal relationships" [DI, 61].

Haidt is the author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012) and co-author with Greg Lukianoff of The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2018). His current book continues themes explored in the latter book.

Haidt highlights two components of the current crisis. The first was the end of the play-based childhood which has been characteristic of human beings for most of our history, right up until the end of the 20th century, when society suddenly started overprotecting children from he normal stresses of growing up. Traditional childhood was all about "the kinds of experiences humans evolved for and that they must that have in abundance to become socially functional adults." These include "the social skills necessary for life in a democratic society, including self-governance, joint decision making, and accepting the outcome when you. lose a contest." The recent move toward trying to raise children "in a bubble of satisfaction, protected from frustration, consequences, and negative emotions" Haidt argues, "may be blocking the development of competence, self-control, frustration tolerance, and emotional self-management." What'd Haidt calls "the 1990s turn to paranoid parenting" was facilitated, he contends, by what British sociologist Frank Furredi has called "the breakdown of adult solidarity." By now, we are well familiar with this critique of a social tendency and direction which preceded the smartphone and the phone-based world we now live in.

The second component of the current crisis, Haidt suggests, is that while overprotecting children and young people from the challenges of the real world, we have lately under-protected them from "the Wild Wes too the virtual world, where threats to children abounded." Among the harms he identifies are social isolation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. Again, unless one has willfully failed to observe what has been happening, none of this is surprising news. 

Haidt also highlights the specific but different harms being done to girls and to boys. His data demonstrate that girls are more adversely affected by social comparison and perfectionism a suffer more from relational aggression than boys. Meanwhile, "the rise of safetyism in the 1980s and 1990s hit boys harder than girls," while boys' increasing involvement with multiplayer video games in the 2000s and then with smartphones in the 2010s "pulled boys decisively away from face-to-face or shoulder-to-shoulder interaction." This is contributing to the ongoing "friendship recession" among men. "In the 1990s, only 3% of American men reported having no close friends. By 2021, that number had risen fivefold to 15%."

Haidt calls Emile Durkheim "the most profound thinker about the nature of society,"and reflects Durkheim's concern about anomie, "an absence of stable and widely shared norms and rules."  Following Durkheim, Haidt highlights how "the strongest and most satisfying communities come into being when something lifts people out of the lower level so that they h av powerful collective experiences. ... People who live only in networks, rather than communities, are less likely to thrive."

So, now, we know what we have been doing wrong. What, if anything can be done about it to correct it? Schools, from elementary through high school level, Haidt argues, "should go phone-free to improve not only mental health but academic outcomes as well." Outside of school, children should again experience real-world freedom. He favors the movement for "Reasonable Childhood Independence" Laws, but he believes schools have a special part to play in this. "Re-normalizing childhood independence requires collective action, and collective action is most easily facilitated by local schools. Parents, of course, are also primary players in this process, and Haidt provides detailed recommendations for changed parental behavior. In sum, his "four foundational reforms" are:

1. No smartphones before high school

2. No social media before age 16

3. Phone-free schools

4. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence.

Haidt concludes that what he calls "the Great Rewiring of Childhood, from play-based to phone-based, has been a catastrophic failure" and that it is "time to end the experiment" and "bring our children home."

Total Eclipse

Historians have long been fond of eclipses, especially since historical references to ancient eclipses sometimes enable other ancient events to be dated more precisely than would otherwise be possible. One of the earliest known solar eclipses was in 1375 B.C. and was recorded in the ancient city of Ugarit, in what is now Syria. In earlier times, eclipses were often interpreted as signs or omens of some contemporary calamity. They have also been known to alter behavior. Thus, the ancient Greek historian Herodotus wrote that an eclipse that occurred during a battle between the Medes and the Lydians in 585 B.C. caused the two armies to stop fighting and make peace. Wouldn’t it be something if today’s eclipse had that kind of effect on any of the conflicts currently tearing our world apart! 

Like the many who are traveling near and far today to experience the awesome wonder of the eclipse, we are all pilgrims seeking the light revealed amid the dark shadows of our day-to-day divisions and conflicts. 

In August 2017, together with many other "eclipse pilgrims," I was privileged to view the total eclipse of the sun from our observation point at Saint Joseph the Worker Church in Madisonville, TN, a manageable drive from Knoxville. The photo above was one of many I took that memorable day.

How I wish I could repeat that experience today! Alas, the path of totality is too far west of here to make that feasible. I do hope that as many as possible will be able to avail themselves of the opportunity to see this most amazing natural show (and that the weather will cooperate). May their experience be safe and as inspiring as previous eclipses have been for others. For myself, however, I must content myself with memories and reflections from that last total solar eclipse.

Blow the trumpet at the new moon, said the psalmist (Psalm 81:3). In Tennessee in August 2017t, he Moon blew her own trumpet, as she put on a show of shows, covering up the Sun in an amazing spectacle of light and shadow. Since Knoxville was just outside the path of totality, the four of us drove down to the southernmost parish in our deanery, which was scheduled to be more than two minutes in Totality. From there, we were able to view the eclipse in all its amazing grandeur. Needles to say, we were not alone. We left in mid-morning, hoping to avoid getting snarled in traffic and successfully got to the city of Madisonville around 11:00, which left us plenty of time to get some lunch in a crowded roadside restaurant with some of the other "eclipse pilgrims" who were swelling the town's population on that so memorable day. 

Then on to the local church, where we met up with others we knew and others who had come from as far off as Mexico and Queens, NY, to experience this awesome spectacle. Children were playing games. People were cooking food in the parking lot and picnicking on the grass. It was a real party atmosphere. Everyone was friendly and hospitable, inviting others to share their food. After making a proper visit to the church itself upon arrival, I periodically retreated to that air-conditioned building to sit down and cool off while we waited and to reflect upon what we were witnessing.

The first part of the eclipse went on for over an hour. The Moon bit more and more into the Sun, which itself as a result came more and more to resemble a kind of crescent moon! The effect of wearing the special eclipse glasses was startling! Unlike wearing sunglasses, for example, when wearing the special eclipse glasses you could see nothing at all, total darkness - except for the sun, which looked like a small yellow disk, getting progressive smaller as the hour passed. If you didn't know what you were looking at, you might think you were looking at the night sky during one of the partial phases of a harvest moon.

Towards the end of the Moon's apparent conquest of the Sun, you could feel the difference in the atmosphere, as the air got just a little bit cooler and the sky started to get darker. You could see it in the images of the crescent sun reflected in shadow in patterns on the ground. Soon it seemed like an eerie twilight. One could hear the animals reacting accordingly, as if imagining thatd it must suddenly be sunset.

And then it was dark! Two or three stars appeared in the sky, as the sun was completely covered and its hot corona suddenly shone all around the dark disk of the Moon. People cheered. People prayed. 

And then it was suddenly light again. No sooner did the Moon's movement reveal a small sliver of the Sun (on the other side this time), then normal light started to return. I suppose the poor animals were completely confused, as well they might be. We, however, who understood what we had seen and experienced could only express our joyful admiration: 

Sun and Moon, bless the Lord! (Daniel 3:62). 

“It is the Lord!”

 

Modern pilgrims in Israel quickly sense the contrast between the dry desert of Judea (where Jerusalem is) and the relatively lush, green of Galilee (where today’s Gospel story is set). Renewed annually by winter’s life-giving rains, the land around the large lake the Gospel calls the Sea of Tiberias (more commonly called the Sea of Galilee) is at its greenest in spring. It had been from those familiar shores that Jesus had originally called his disciples to follow him. And now they’d come home – back to what they knew best. They went fishing. 

But this was to be no normal fishing expedition!

There’s a little church on the shore that marks the supposed site of this event. In front of the altar is a rock, traditionally venerated as the stone on which the risen Lord served his disciples a breakfast of bread and fish. Just a short walk away is another church, marking the site where Jesus had (not so long before) fed 5000+ people with five loaves and a few fish. Presumably, the disciples would have well remembered that earlier meal. And, surely, we should as well, as we also assemble here at the table lovingly set for us by the risen Lord himself, here in this church, where, as surely as on that distant lakeshore, he feeds us with food we would never have gotten on our own. 

Typically, in these gospel stories of the risen Lord’s appearances to his disciples, there is the sense that, while it eventually becomes clear that this is the same Jesus the disciples had followed in life and who had died on the Cross, something about him is now different. Hence, the dramatic moment when Jesus is recognized for certain, as when the disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord!”

But recognizing the risen Christ is not the end of the story but the beginning of a new life, a new life lived in a community of love. We learn that love by following the risen Lord. So, even before being formally invested with his special mission, Peter leads the way, dressing up for the occasion, jumping into the sea and swimming to Jesus ahead of the others. As his role requires, Peter here is already leading his flock, leading here by example. His example illustrates for the rest of us what it means, first, to recognize the risen Lord and, then, actually to follow him.

Homily for Friday within the Octave of Easter, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, April 5, 2024.

Illiberal America (The Book)

 

At this critical juncture in American history, NYU Professor of History Steven Hahn has taken his readers on a much needed tour of U.S. history's "illiberal" side in Illiberal America: A History (W.W. Norton, 2024). In the process, he effectively undermines what was then still largely the consensus view when I was a student, the view most famously associated with Louis Hartz and his 1955 classic, The Liberal Tradition in America. Hahn "asks readers to suspend their assumptions about the long and enduring American liberal tradition and instead recognize illiberal currents that flowed across the Atlantic and took hold well before what we would call liberalism ever appeared." He aims to show "how our present-day reckoning with the rise of a militant and illiberal set of movements has lengthy and constantly ramifying roots."

Contrary to the traditional Hartz thesis, Hahn recalls the neo-feudal, hierarchical, and pseudo-aristocratic aspects of early English settlements in North America and the colonial order which ensued. "The social relations that marked the turn of the eighteenth century, and continued for long thereafter, can far better be understood as a spectrum of dependencies along which 'free labor,' in a form familiar to us, was at the far end."

In the course of his reinterpretation of American history, Hahn calls our attention to the long tradition of anti-Catholicism, "how anti-Catholic and anti-aristocratic sensibilities could feed off one another." He highlights. links between anti-federalism and "the Christian evangelism of the Great Awakening." In anti-federalism, he discerns a persistent theme which we can certainly recognize today - "a special appeal to those who recognized power in personal and familial terms, saw themselves as members of communities bounded by ethnicity, culture, and faith, were wary of outsiders and distant legal and political institutions, and imagine proper government as closely aligned with them and protective of their 'manners, sentiments, and interests'." 

Hahn, here has decentralized the theoretically more dominant liberal tradition, highlighting instead the surprising range of alternative political currents that have characterized our country, not necessarily at first in reaction to liberalism but even prior to liberalism as a redeployment of other and older ideas and institutions, embodying them in all sorts of deeply rooted American ideas and practices ranging from slavery and Jim Crow, the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, Nativism (in particular anti-Catholicism), and such complex phenomena as the early 20th-century Progressive Movement with its interest in eugenics and its anti-democratic cult of expertise. These same currents have clearly resurfaced again in our current political polarization in the aftermath of the backlash against Obama's election that led us to where we are now. Ultimately it usually has come down to some exclusivist attempt to limit participation in the political process, thus foreclosing the possibilities participation uniquely provides, a process we see the increasingly authoritarian elements in our electoral politics currently engaged in.

"History," Hahn concludes, "is a burden and an inspiration. It is buried deep within each of us, and hovers over the worlds that have been made and the future for which many now struggle."

Trump's Bible

It has everything (both religion and patriotism) that Republicans pretend to believe in  - all in one book! 

Easter is traditionally a time when secular media make some more (or increasingly less) serious forays into the world of American religion. This year, candidate Trump beat them to it by unveiling his new bible for sale (at the outrageous price of $59.99 for a book one can purchase much more cheaply, or even easily access for free). "Happy Holy Week," the great grifter is supposed to have said. "Let's make America pray again."

It is a truism at this point that Trump (who has been quoted as saying his favorite bible verse is "an eye for an eye") is no longer the transactional deal dubiously embraced by so-called conservative Christians in 2016, but is now the central character and dominant figure at the center of a pernicious personality cult that calls itself "Christian." In this perverse melding of religion and white nationalism, this dangerous conjoining of religion and the pursuit of political power, to be a "Christian" has little or nothing to do with church or community or with faith, hope, and charity but has become effectively post-Christian, even referred to by some as the "post-Religious Right" (replacing the older "Religious Right").

Famously, Saint John's Passion Account (proclaimed liturgically on Good Friday) highlights the distinctiveness of Christ's kingship as utterly unlike any experience of worldly power. In contrast to Christ's Good Friday testimony before Pilate, Christ the King is instead being sacrilegiously transformed into an avatar of Christian nationalism and a blasphemous cult of America-worship. For his part, Trump has successfully tapped into the fantasies of religious persecution indulged in by many Evangelicals and some conservative Catholics and a consequent desire for a fighter ( a "Cyrus" figure), who personifies aggressive behaviors that perhaps many others would wish they could get away with themselves.

Were we still able to be shocked by anything Trump says, we would surely be shocked by his scandalous self-identification with Jesus. Trump may want to be identified with the Lamb of God, but as Maureen Dowd noted on Easter Sunday, "rather than a sacrificial lamb, he is the Golden Calf, the false god worshipped by Israelites when Moses went up to Mount Sinai to get the Ten Commandments." ["Donald Trump, Blasphemous Bible Thumper, The NY Times, March 31, 2024].