Barbie’s rift in the universe is no doll play

How to heal it at Lent, with some help from AA too.

Julie Canlis

Julie connects Christian spirituality with ordinary life in Wenatchee, Washington State, where she teaches and writes.

Barbie stands on a balcony and waves while looking out over her city.

Barbie in Barbieland.

Warner Bros.

The Barbie movie opens with Stereotypical Barbie having a Perfect Day in Barbieland – until she has an intrusive thought about death. Everything screeches to a halt (even the music). This intrusive thought is about to ruin everything for Barbie, unless she can restore the rift in the universe (and the now resulting threat of cellulite) that it caused.

Christians begin one of their most sacred seasons precisely here: facing thoughts of death. Refusing to name them as “intrusive” but instead acknowledging them, blessing them, and signing peoples’ foreheads with ashes as a reminder that they too will die. On Ash Wednesday, the worldwide church doesn’t rush forward to soothe this fear and move on to happier thoughts, but rather turns to face it and make the facing of it sacred. Annually, again and again. Barbie’s rift in the universe is no doll play.

We create our own trances not only with alcohol, but with culturally acceptable addictions like obsessive thinking, performance hits, binge-watching, TikTok scrolling.

The earliest Christians began their anticipation of Easter by taking time to fast during the 40-hour lead-up to the day, knowing the psychology of short-term deprivation for long-term transformation. They wanted to anticipate the day of their spiritual liberation (Easter) from fear and death, with not only their minds but also their bodies. It was a fully integrated longing. (What is easier to feel – a hunger in one’s soul or body?) They knew the role of their body in their spirituality and discovered that often the body helped the transformation of their hearts. By the fourth century, these culturally specific fasts for Easter merged into a international consensus of forty days. Forty days which began with ... meditations on death. Lent begins by facing our intrusive thoughts of death – the rift not only in the universe, but in each of our souls as we pursue death in one thousand little ways daily. Things which, using the language of Alcoholics Anonymous and the Twelve Steps, we have become powerless to control. We create our own trances not only with alcohol, but with culturally acceptable addictions like obsessive thinking, performance hits, binge-watching, TikTok scrolling. None of us enjoy facing reality.

And while freedom is at the top of our cultural priorities, for many of us it is not external things that limit our true freedom, but things internal to ourselves

As Richard Rohr tells us, the old-fashioned language for addiction is “sin” – something we can’t seem to resist, change, and which perpetually has us in undertow. All of us, to an extent, are in the grip of some addiction, some thing we cannot change and that we continually choose to our own (and our deepest relationships’) destruction. Death and sin have always been held together in biblical poetry, because in many ways they are the same. We are all held in their grip.

One of the most freeing things in AA is coming face to face with one’s powerlessness over addiction, to finally stop running from it. Step 1 says “We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.” But of course, there are other things we do to numb our pain. AA’s Twenty Questions regarding alcohol are a wonderful tool for diagnosing that neurotic thing lurking in the back of your mind as you read this article, and don’t want to face. Just fill in the blank:

Has ____ ever damaged your primary relationships?

Has ____ ever interfered with your work life?

Do you ever ____ alone?

For an alcoholic, the answers are easy: alcohol/alcohol/drink. But what about more socially acceptable numbing techniques: what about over-analysis? (Has thinking ever damaged your primary relationships – or interfered with your sleeping?) What about workaholism or an addiction to success? (Has an obsession with success ever damaged your primary relationships? Do you overwork to escape from worries or to build up your self-confidence?) Is there is something you do obsessively to relieve your anxiety, and is not working for you or those in your intimate sphere? Lent is the church’s annual invitation to take this obsession seriously, to stop making excuses, and to put yourself in an enforced recovery group with a bunch of other addicts for 40 days. Lent is not about restriction for its own sake, but freedom.

Of course, you can just fast for 40 days to see if you can do it. You can do a “dry March” instead of a “dry January.” You can limit your screen time. Everyone knows the wisdom in these. But Lent is a call to the deeper freedom that these restrictions are for. Every spiritual tradition knows that without restriction, there can be no true freedom. (Every athlete knows this as well. Every musician. Every artist). And while freedom is at the top of our cultural priorities, for many of us it is not external things that limit our true freedom, but things internal to ourselves. Our freedom is not jeopardized by politics to the left or the right, but by the person looking at us in the mirror.

To have our deepest hungers met, we have to clear away space. It is not a white-knuckling stunt.

Think of a time when you were in touch with your sense of being alive. Think of the feeling you have when watching a sunset. Or receiving the pure affection of a child. Think of that sense of happy satisfaction when you have just completed an unhurried project. Or a leisurely meal with friends. Or getting lost in a piece of music. Remember how experiences like this make you feel, and the feeling of being grounded and close to your true center.

Now think of a time when you were cut off from your center but felt powerful – when you were able to get in the last word in a fight. Earned the top score. Rationalized why you were right. Were admired. Successful. Think of how different the energy is behind the first feeling and the second. Many traditions would associate the latter with the false self. The addicted self. The sub-self.

Lent is about discerning each. Lent must be guided by our memory of freedom, as well as an awareness of what is keeping us from it. It is choosing a temporary restriction for the sake of being connected to our center, where God our Source is waiting for us. In the words of a famous addict from the fourth century, Augustine, “I was searching for you outside of me, but you were within me!”

Another word for restriction is surrender – letting go, embracing limits. (And as the Twelve Steppers know, whatever you let go of has claw marks on it). To have our deepest hungers met, we have to clear away space. It is not a white-knuckling stunt. Nor is it baptizing our culture’s fetish with weight loss or iron-man self-control. Lent helps us remember what it felt like when we felt absolutely alive, and to take clear steps towards recovering this sense. We might just find God waiting for us at our center when we do.

Explainer

AI - Artificial Intelligence

Culture

Digital

16 July 2024

6 min read

Tech has changed: it’s no longer natural or neutral

The first in a three-part series exploring the implications of technology.

James Lawrence

James is Canon Missioner at Blackburn Cathedral. He researches technology and theology at Oxford University.

A caveman holding a hammer looks at a bench on which are a broken bicycle and a laptop.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

My son was born in February last year and it seems that every day he is developing new skills or facial expressions and adorable quirks. Just the other day he was playing with some wooden blocks and when they inevitably fell over, he let out the most adorable giggle. As you can guess I immediately reached for my phone so that I could capture the moment. Moments like this happen all the time in the life of a modern parent- we want to share with our spouse, family, and friends or just capture the moment for ourselves because it’s something we treasure. And yet, in this series of articles I would like to consider this moment, and the thousands like it that take place in a technological society, and ask: is everything as benign as it seems?

There are two ideas that often come up whenever people talk about technology. The first is that technology is basically ‘neutral’, that technology only becomes good or bad depending on what you are doing with it. “Look at a hammer,” someone might say, “there is nothing intrinsically good or bad about this hammer, only the end result is good or bad depending on whether I’m using it to hit nails or people!” On this reading of technology, the only important questions relate to the consequences of use.

If technology is neutral, then the primary concern for users, legislators and technologists is the consequences of technology, and not the technology itself. The only way to ensure that the technology is used for good is to ensure, somehow, that more good people will use the technology for good things than bad people using it for bad things. Often this idea will present itself as a conversation about competing freedoms: very few people (with some important exceptions, see this article from Ezra Klein) are debating whether there is something intrinsically problematic about the app formerly known as Twitter, most discussion revolves around how to maintain the freedom of good users while curtailing the freedom of bad users.

We assume that these tools of social interaction like Facebook and Instagram are, in and of themselves, perfectly benign. We are encouraged to think this by massive corporations who have a vested interest in maintaining our use of their platforms, and at first glance, they seem completely harmless: what could possibly be the problem with a website in which grandma can share photos of her cat? And while the dark underbelly of these platforms has violent real-world consequences – like the rise of antisemitism and anti-Muslim hatred – the solution is primarily imagined as a matter of dealing with ‘bad actors’ rather than anything intrinsically problematic with the platforms themselves.

Jobs here draws a straight-line comparison between the bicycle and the PC. As far as Jobs is concerned, there is no quantitative difference in kind between the two tools.

The second idea is related but somewhat different: Advocates of modern technology will suggest that humanity has been using technology ever since there were humans and therefore all this modern technology is not really anything to worry about. “Yes, modern technology looks scary,” someone might say, “but it’s really nothing to worry about, humans have been using tools since the Stone Age don’t you know!” This view proposes that because hammers are technology, and all technology is the same, there is, therefore, no difference between a hammer and the internet, or between the internet and a cyborg.

This second idea tends to be accompanied by an emphasis on the slow and steady evolution of technology and by highlighting the fact that at every major technological advancement there have been naysayers decrying the latest innovation. (Even Plato was suspicious of writing when that was invented). Taken as part of a very long view of human history, the technological innovations of the last 100 years seem to be a normal and natural part of the evolution of our species which has always set itself apart from the rest of the animal kingdom in its use of technology.

Steve Jobs gives a good example of this in an interview he gave about the development PC:

“I think one of the things that really separates us from the high primates is that we’re tool builders. I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condors used the least energy to move a kilometer. And humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list… not too proud of a showing for the crown of creation… But then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And a human on a bicycle blew the condor away – completely off the top of the charts.

And that’s what a computer is to me… It’s the most remarkable tool we’ve ever come up with… It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds”

Notice that Jobs here draws a straight-line comparison between the bicycle and the PC. As far as Jobs is concerned, there is no quantitative difference in kind between the two tools: one is more complex than the other but otherwise, they are just technologies that expand human capacity. “A Bicycle for our minds” is a fascinating way to describe a computer because it implies that nothing about our minds will be changed, they’ll just be a little bit faster.

And yet, despite the attempts of thought leaders like Jobs to convince us that modern technology is entirely benign, many of us are left with a natural suspicion that there is more going on. As a priest in the Church of England, I often have conversations with parishioners and members of the public who are looking for language or a framework which describes the instinctive recognition that something has changed at some point (fairly recently) about the nature of the technology that we use, or the way that it influences our lives. That modern technology is not simply the natural extension of the sorts of tools that humans have been using since the Stone Age and that modern technology is not neutral but in significant ways has already had an effect regardless of how we might use it. How do we respond to such articulate and thoughtful people such as Steve Jobs who make a compelling case that modern technology is neutral and natural?

I often have conversations with parishioners who are looking for language or a framework which describes the instinctive recognition that something has changed about the nature of the technology that we use, or the way that it influences our lives.

Thinking back to that moment with my son when he giggles and I take a photo of him, at first glance it seems completely innocuous. But what resources are available if I did want to think more carefully about that moment (and the many like it) which suffuse my daily life? Thankfully there is a growing body of literature from philosophers and theologians who are thinking about the impact of modern technology on the human condition. In the next two articles I would like to introduce the work of Martin Heidegger, outline his criticism of modern technology, showing how he challenges the idea that technology is simply a natural extension of human capacity or a neutral tool.

Heidegger is a complex character in philosophy and in Western history. There is no getting around the fact that he was a supporter of the Nazi Party during the second world war. His politics have been widely condemned and rightly so, nevertheless, his insights on the nature of modern technology continue to this day to provide insights that are useful. His claim is that modern technology essentially and inevitably changes our relationship with the world in which we live and even with ourselves. It is this claim, and Heidegger’s suggested solution, that I will unpack in the next two articles.