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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Review

Art

Culture

17 May 2024

5 min read

Matthew Krishanu: painting childhood

Portraying family, memories and counterpoints.

Jonathan Evens

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

a painting shows Bengali celebrants of a Eucharist.

Preaching, Matthew Krishnau, 2018.

Peter Mallet.

The Bough Breaks by Matthew Krishanu at Camden Art Centre has been described as the most significant exhibition of his work to date because, by showing the drawings and works on paper that he calls the generative heartbeat of his work as well as the works for which he is best known, the exhibition is the fullest expression to date of the expansive world of his artistic practice.

His images are primarily personal stories told through layers of memory, imagination, and conversations with the history of painting, in atmospheric, pared-back compositions which focus particularly on his childhood years in Bangladesh growing up with his brother, and their parents who were a British Christian priest and a Bengali theologian.

He speaks of his images in terms of an ‘I-you-them‘ axis. The work he considers his first painting, from 2005, entitled ‘Boy on a Bed’ was originally a scene of an empty room. He recalls that “late in the night before I was going to be exhibiting it, I sketched in this boy with black hair, brown skin, and a little toy car behind him”. He continues, “I knew that was me, and I knew that there was something I wanted to communicate about the inner world of that child”. In 2012, there came another “fundamental shift” in that “I wanted to paint myself and my brother”. With the first ‘Two Boys’ painting, “I remember it felt like worlds had opened up”. He explains that “when you have a single child, you can project ideas of melancholy or loneliness” but “when you have two, they outnumber the single viewer” and “I think the fact that they are clearly brothers and both have brown skin and often a very direct gaze at the viewer, holds a certain power”.

He recalls being in a show called Painting Childhood: From Holbein to Freud where the very last room was of the ‘Two Boys’: “Having gone through room after room of European children, white children, then coming into a room where these two boys weren't othered in any way, but were taking centre stage in the narrative, was hugely important.”

Adults are excised from the ‘Two Boys’ series “because I want the boys to be out on a limb or up on a hill, without parental supervision”. However, within the ‘Mission’ series - paintings of church life in Bangladesh - adults are seen from the perspective of children. As a result, they are in the ‘them’ part of the axis: “I see the adults in the third person. I'm constructing them as in some way other to the child's eye. This brings in the strangeness of performance and ritual, the stiffness of it too, particularly when you're used to being barefoot on the ground in Bangladesh and, suddenly, are meant to sit still and quiet. For me, it was compounded by the fact that I was brown skinned, as was my brother and mother, and my father was white skinned, and he was a priest, and he was a man, and all the power that comes with being a white man in Bangladesh; just the way he is perceived by his congregation, and even strangers on the street.”

He recalls that: At the time I knew that wasn't right and I didn't like the depictions of God as this white man flying around the sky. As a child, you have quite a raw and immediate relationship to life and nature and spirituality and, for me, it was the religious art that was the fundamental barrier to entering the world of the church. Also, the gendering of ‘Our Father’ or Jesus, the ‘only son’. That's why, as a young teen, I decided I didn't want to be confirmed, because I didn't believe in that construction.”

‘For me, that is where my faith is, in love, in the love of family, in all that a baby calls upon us to give it.’

Matthew Krishnau

In a painting like ‘Preaching’, he is exploring what it is to centre, in a congregation of brown adults and children, “the four nuns and my mother preaching with the two female candle holders and have the men on the sides”. So, “It's all about constructing a world which is both a counterpoint to the world of the two boys and nature, but also a counterpoint to the religious hierarchy we see in the church now”. The ‘Holy Family’ series, “which is of Bengali nuns, priests, and bishops” “is a deliberate response to the white depictions of Christ, baby Jesus, and Madonna”.

He notes that: “It's part of my painting mission to offer a counterpoint on the widest possible framing of an ‘I-to-you’ axis of a brown child, which isn't seen through the lens of National Geographic or Comic Relief ‘white saviours’, but is taken and centred as the heart of a human story. And if there's any spiritual message, then it's about that; of love, of the divinity of children and babies, and the divinity of our beautiful world, the ecological world of trees, water, glorious sunsets and sunrises, and all that comes with the human form.”

He thinks that this show has “set up a kind of a world philosophy” for him: “The core, the heart of the show, for me, is family, particularly of my late wife and my daughter. In and amongst the drawings, there are some pictures of our baby, and my late wife holding our baby or, indeed, holding the tree that my daughter is climbing. For me, that is where my faith is, in love, in the love of family, in all that a baby calls upon us to give it. That is the closest thing to divinity. I won't even use the word God because it's too masculine in our language. The closest thing to the divine, I sincerely believe, is in the eyes of children, is in the eyes of babies, particularly.”

He concludes by saying he would love to expand his practice further in the future, noting “a figure that has really resonated in a way I haven't felt before is the Palestinian priest Revd Munther Isaac and his ‘Christ in the rubble’ sermon”. However, his art always “needs to come from a personal connection to something I've conceptually explored; it needs to have that heart first of immediate one-to-one human connection”.

Matthew Krishanu: The Bough Breaks, 26 April - 23 June 2024, Camden Art Centre, London.