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Living In Unreality

Narcissistic WEIRDoes getting WEIRDer, thanks to technology + ideology
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On the Dictatorship of the Dimwits post, a reader writes:

I teach religious education to third graders in my parish. These children are 8 and 9 years old, a mix of boys and girls who have self selected themselves at gender specific tables. Boys on one side, girls on the other. Nothing can make them sit together. Boys have cooties and so on. And yet…there is a boy in class who wants everyone to call him Princess Insert-Name-Here. When my co-teacher and I pointed out that we wanted to use our given names in class and that he would go by that, a lively discussion ensued wherein the children wanted to know why he couldn’t be called princess, he wants to be a princess, therefore he IS a princess and we should all just recognize that, and refer to him as he wishes. Apparently it’s ok for him to go by that title at school, and everyone complies with his wishes there. This could not have been more shocking to me. I tell this story only as a warning. These children have been socialized in this manner since birth. It is not going away in my lifetime.

Another reader writes on the same post:

I run an outdoors business in Central Asia. The younger our customers from the West are the more problematic they are. They literally have problems walking in anything but smooth surfaces. Seriously. It is easier to guide a sixty year old down a narrow and difficult mountain path than a twenty year old. ALL Western customers have a problem with raw food. That is not precooked perfectly natural food. But the younger they get the more problems. Same with allergies. The younger the worse. We can´t let them have any natural milk. As a rule older people can still stomach “normal” milk especially if they grew up in the country. The biggest problem though is mental. In most of the country there is no or only intermittent cell phone coverage. It is hell if these youngsters realize that they will be without their connection to the outside world.

What all of that says to me is that modern technology has resulted in a total disconnect from physical reality. First this generation has grown up almost without contact with nature. When they exercised their bodies they always did it in artificial surroundings. They mostly ate factory processed foods and never drank milk that hadn´t been rendered lifeless by various processes. And finally their social interaction is mostly by electronic means. Then it really doesn´t matter whether you are man or woman, 6 or seven feet tall, Chinese or European. The electronic world happens to be their reality and they are bringing the rules of this reality into the physical world.

That is how I view the conflicts that are happening on campuses all over the Western world.

That this will end terribly is another story.

This weekend I’ve been reading a wonderful book by the Duke theologian Norman Wirzba: From Nature To Creation, which is featured on the current issue of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. These passages from the book are what came to mind when I read the reader comments above:

Media platforms and technological devices are not simply neutral tools that we use to move through life. Their power is much more extensive, because they shape and frame what we perceive and understand the wold to be. When people spend enough time in front of screens, it becomes all but inevitable that the whole world takes on the character of something to be watched. Given the technologies we now have for manipulating screens in whatever fashion we like to suit our own particular tastes, if we find the Mona Lisa boring, no problem. We can run the image through the Fatify app or add the graphics and colors we like to make it amusing or better than the original! Should we be surprised that people often find the world uninteresting and dull?

Wirzba says that in our time, “idolatry has become the dominant mode of perception.” More:

By idolatry I did not simply mean the fabrication of statues of monuments to our own self-glorification, though there is ample evidence of that. I meant, rather, a form of perception (and thus also a capacity for apprehension) in which what is seen reflects the ambition, anxiety, insecurity, hubris — the deep desire — of the one perceiving. To gaze at things idolatrously is to put in motion ways of naming and narration — and thus also practical and economic forms of engagement with the world — that establish us as the centers and bestowers of value and significance. … The effect of so much of our culture’s training is to convince us that we really are the center around which the world moves.

Narcissistic WEIRDoes getting even WEIRDer. The core of the Benedict Option will be the urgent necessity to remember how to see reality, and to live in it. The mass forgetting forced by modernity is going into hyperdrive now.

I’m starting to change my mind a little bit about the desirability of heading for the hills. Seriously. This culture is going insane, and calling it Progress.

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