Only the rich will experience reality

We’re extinguishing our real world

Simon Burton-Jones

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

A phone shows a picture of the real view behind it.

Josh Power on Unsplash.

It happens so routinely, no-one notices the weirdness anymore. Tourists in front of a majestic site like the Taj Mahal or the Niagara Falls place a camera between their eyes and the glory of the scene itself. Fans at a stadium concert hold cameras up to the singer rather than dance to the music. Witnesses to a disaster choose to film it rather than go to the assistance of the victims.

Our desire to experience the world around us is being limited by technology, especially the smartphone and there is a growing body of literature to show its harmful effects, the latest of which is The Extinction of Experience (The Bodley Head, 2025) by Christine Rosen. She is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington DC based think tank and she adds to the work of Jonathan Haidt in The Anxious Generation who identifies what social media is doing to young people. Rosen, however, has the adult population in mind, as well.

Every era has its subtle idolatries and perhaps ours is a slavish devotion to technology. It’s not that technology is wrong, but the expectation we conform to its development rather than the technology adapt to our humanity is slowly toxifying us. To paraphrase Jesus: the smartphone was made for humankind, and not humankind for the smartphone.

Mediating our relationships by screen leads to instant communication, but also makes us impatient and emotionally careless. Human empathy is an embodied virtue. We learn to pick up emotional clues by watching the subtle facial movements and body language of others as they speak and listen. The growth of emojis is no substitute for this and has all the finesse of a face pulled by Thomas the Tank engine. And we more easily tune out of another person’s problems when they are expressed online rather than to our face. US college students are around forty percent less empathetic than their counterparts only two or three decades ago, according to the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research.

There are growing signs that screens reduce human empathy, which may be the most disturbing thing of all and perhaps offers a clue why life is becoming angrier. We spend most of our time lamenting how algorithms polarise us, without addressing an even more fundamental problem: we no longer talk about demanding issues face to face, where listening skills are required, but shout across cyberspace, where listening barely happens.

But the momentum is for more of the virtual world. The software engineer, Marc Andreessen has coined the phrase ‘reality privilege.’ It belongs to those whose real-world existence is full of flourishing – relationships, wealth, housing, holidays, hobbies. The solution for those who lack these goods, according to Andreessen and others, is a migration to an ‘online world that makes life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in’.

It is a case of Silicon Valley solutionism, where every problem must have a technological answer. The outcome of migration to an online world is that we no longer need to focus on solving knotty, unglamorous policy issues like poverty, poor housing and low-paid jobs. It also carries a curious echo of the theology which prioritises saving souls from a corrupt world rather than inheriting an embodied resurrection life in a new creation.

In the two decades after 2003, in-person socialising between American adults dropped by thirty percent; among teenagers it fell by forty-five percent. According to Rosen ‘this changes our behaviour towards others, how we get along or don’t get along, how we resolve conflict, how we understand each other’. The de-incarnation of human life continues apace, yet it is the physical world is where we flourish, where millennia of brain development has taken place and where God embodied himself in Christ.

We may come to regret at length the rush to the virtual world, a bit like smoking in the twentieth century. But there is every chance we won’t, because technology is clever and so very cool. The meaning of the incarnation is up for grabs, only this time it’s human, not divine.

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Art

Culture

Identity

2 August 2024

5 min read

Controversial art: can the critic love their neighbour?

What to do when confronted with contentious culture.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

Two people run though a darkened art gallery towards a body lying amongst photography paraphanalia

Audrey Tautou and Tom Hanks, The Da Vinci Code.

Sony Pictures.

In the wake of the controversy over the Olympic opening ceremony, based as it was on a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of Christians as to what was being portrayed, you may be perplexed or confused by the different ways Christians respond to controversial art or media portrayals that are perceived to be an attack on core Christian beliefs. If that is you, here are some thoughts as to why it is that Christians react in a range of different ways.

Our responses are always underpinned by depth of relationship with and commitment to Jesus, the one who has turned our lives upside down and filled us with his Spirit. Our sense of what it is that Jesus has done for us and what it is that relationship with Jesus means to us is the determinative factor affecting our response when we perceive the One we love and who loves us to have been maligned or mocked.

For some, we feel a need to stand with or defend Jesus whenever we perceive that he is under attack, and we have seen that instinctive response apparent in reactions to the Olympic opening ceremony. However, instinctive emotive responses run the risk of pre-empting more reasoned or reflective responses. That has certainly been the case here, as what many Christians perceived to have been a parody of the Last Supper was not actually that at all. Instead, the sequence was a portrayal of the feast of Dionysius, so had nothing to do with the Last Supper at all.

Christians, as here, are often too quick to make allegations of blasphemy without actually understanding what is being portrayed. I have, unfortunately, seen many similar examples within my lifetime. In the 1970’s and 80’s films like Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ resulted in thousands of Christians demonstrating outside cinemas, while Christian organisations, like the National Viewer’s and Listener’s Association headed by Mary Whitehouse, lobbied for those films to be banned.

God does not need human beings in order to be defended, particularly from perceived mockery.

However, interestingly, the release of The Da Vinci Code in 2006, although it dealt with similarly controversial material for Christians, did not result in mass protests. Instead, through seeker events, bible studies, websites and booklets, churches encouraged discussion of the issues raised by the film while clearly contesting the claims made about Christ and the Church.

The protests against such films often did not tally with the content of the films themselves and displayed a lack of understanding of them, their stories and meaning. As Richard Burridge, a former Dean of King’s College London, has said of Life of Brian, “those who called for the satire to be banned after its release in 1979 were ‘embarrassingly’ ill-informed and missed a major opportunity to promote the Christian message”. Life of Brian portrayed the followers of religions as unthinking and gullible and the response of Christians to that film reinforced that stereotype.

As a result, the Church had to learn again that the way to counter criticism is not to try to ban or censor it but to engage with it, understand it and accurately counter it. The Da Vinci Code events, bible studies, websites and the like that the Church used to counter the claims made in The Da Vinci Code featured reasoned arguments based on a real understanding of the issues raised, making use of genuine historical findings and opinion to counter those claims. These created a conversation with the wider community that was far more constructive than the kind of knee-jerk reactions we have seen to the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.

Some of these knee-jerk reactions derive from a sense, in the West, that the dominant place Christianity used to have in society has been eroded leading some to think that our values and beliefs are under threat. This reveals an underlying insecurity which it is surprising to find in those who believe that God is all-powerful and in control of human history. God does not need human beings in order to be defended, particularly from perceived mockery.

Indeed, the reverse is the case, as, in Jesus, God deliberately entered human history to experience human life in all its facets, including real mockery and suffering, to show that such experiences are not defining and can be transcended through love and sacrifice. Such a God does not require those who follow to become defensive themselves when the path of mockery is actually the path to resurrection and renewal.

Cultural comment is as much about love for neighbour as any other aspect of Christian life.

So, what might a more constructive and productive response to controversies entail? Taking time to reflect and to understand what it is we are experiencing would be a much better place to start. The Olympic opening ceremony was a celebration of French culture, which highlighted images from the Louvre in particular. Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’ is in Italy and does not include a blue Dionysius. With some reflection and investigation, that would quickly have become apparent. Similarly, the scene to which Christians objected in The Last Temptation of Christ was just what it said on the tin, the last temptation Jesus faced. It was a temptation that he rejected, and the film was all the more powerful as a depiction of the incarnation as a result.

Then, we can see that what the Christ who embraced human life through the incarnation calls us to is a charitable hermeneutic (how we interpret), when it comes to receiving, understanding and commenting on the culture around us. Cultural comment is as much about love for neighbour as any other aspect of Christian life. Our charitable hermeneutic was summed up for us by St Paul when he wrote of going through life looking for “whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable”. Sister Wendy Beckett, the cultural commentator who most recently has best exemplified this charitable hermeneutic achieving huge popularity as a result, wrote of “a beautiful secret … that makes all things luminous … a precious gift in this confused and violent world”.

With the beautiful secret of a charitable hermeneutic, we might, perhaps, look again at the Olympic opening ceremony and appreciate the intent of Thomas Jolly, the artistic director behind the ceremony, when he said that religious subversion had never been his intention: “We wanted to talk about diversity. Diversity means being together. We wanted to include everyone, as simple as that.”