I’d like to take a break from the culture war for a post. You’re welcome.

As regular readers know, I’ve been lately into watching the films of the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky (d. 1986). They aren’t for everybody. They are heavy and complex, but I find them beautiful and challenging. One of Tarkovsky’s consistent themes is the spiritual decay of the modern world. To prepare to watch Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, I read the 1972 Soviet sci-fi novel on which it is based, Roadside Picnic. The novel is significantly different from the film version — far less abstract. I enjoyed them both, but found the novel to be more challenging in terms of the things it made me think about.

I’ll give you a brief summary of the novel, or at least the part that interests me the most. The book is set in the future, after an extraterrestrial visitation of Earth. The aliens came and went without people seeing them or making contact. The six “zones” they left behind appeared in a pattern that is meaningful, though nobody really knows what they mean. Here’s how Wikipedia frames it:

The novel is set in a post-visitation world where there are now six zones known on Earth that are full of unexplained phenomena and where strange happenings have briefly occurred, assumed to have been visitations by aliens, Governments and the UN, fearful of unforeseen consequences, try to keep tight control over them to prevent leakage of artifacts from the Zones. A subculture of stalkers, scavengers who go into the zones to steal the artifacts for profit, has evolved around the zones. The novel is set in and around a specific zone in Harmont, a fictitious town in a fictitious country (loosely resembling Canada), and follows the protagonist over the course of eight years.

All humanity knows is that it has been visited by a superior intelligence. It doesn’t really know what the artifacts they’ve left behind mean, though the government is trying to figure out how to exploit them for its own purposes. There is somewhere in the Zone in the novel a Golden Sphere said to have the power to give those who enter it the thing they.most desire. The thing is, it really does give you what you most desire, not what you say you desire.

One of the novel’s themes is the inability of humanity both to understand the meaning of the visitation, and to handle the technology the aliens left behind. The title of the book comes from a character speculating that maybe their is no higher meaning to the visitation, that the aliens treated earth like a “roadside picnic,” where they left their trash behind after stopping off to rest on their way somewhere else. Maybe, says the character, we view them as forest animals view us when they come across our trash from our picnics.

The novel is not a Christian work by any means, but reading it, I kept thinking about the Christian teaching of the Incarnation: that God became Man, and dwelled among us. This was a visitation. Nobody fully understood it when it was happening (that is, when Christ was on earth), and the Gospel of Luke relates an episode after Christ’s resurrection when two men curious about Jesus met him on the road to Emmaus, and didn’t recognize him. We certainly have far more insight now into the meaning of the “visitation” by God to earth than the people in the novel did about the aliens’ visitation. But still, we don’t know what to do with the “technology” Jesus left behind. Since his ascension into heaven, people have used his teachings for all manner of things, good and bad.

This comparison only goes so far. From a Christian standpoint, Jesus didn’t come primarily to give us information, so that we could add to the sum total of humanity’s knowledge. He came to defeat death, and to establish a bridge between finite, sinful, time-bound, broken humanity, and the infinite, perfect, eternal God. He doesn’t want us to know things, in the same way that we would know a book of philosophy, but to know him in the way we would know a person. The Word was made flesh. He came to visit us with a purpose in mind, unlike the aliens of Roadside Picnic (who may or may not have had a purpose, and if they did, the world still doesn’t know what it was). Still, there are parallels to the set-up in Roadside Picnic, one of which is that while nobody saw the aliens, everybody lives in the aftermath of their visitation and what it revealed. The entire town of Harmont is built around its relationship to the Zone. It is hard to be indifferent to it. You can’t not know that the aliens came.

Back in 2003, David Bentley Hart wrote a much-discussed First Things essay, titled “Christ And Nothing,” in which he made a similar point. You have to read the whole thing to grasp his argument, but he basically says that the triumph of Christianity was so thorough among the peoples of what we call “the West” that it annihilated any escape to the past. The visitation of the God-man, you might say, was so overwhelming in its consequences that life before the visitation is inaccessible. For the West, then, if it will not have Christianity, it must take nihilism. He writes:

Which is why I repeat that our age is not one in danger of reverting to paganism (would that we were so fortunate). If we turn from Christ today, we turn only towards the god of absolute will, and embrace him under either his most monstrous or his most vapid aspect. A somewhat more ennobling retreat to the old gods is not possible for us; we can find no shelter there, nor can we sink away gently into those old illusions and tragic consolations that Christ has exposed as falsehoods. To love or be nourished by the gods, we would have to fear them; but the ruin of their glory is so complete that they have been reduced—like everything else—to commodities.

It’s a powerful essay.

All of this is a lead-up to an extraordinary short story I read recently: “The Basilisk,” by the English writer Paul Kingsnorth. It’s not so much a story, really, as it is the exchange of letters between two fictional characters — an uncle, Richard, and his niece, Bridget. It’s about the apocalyptic spiritual meaning of Internet technology — and it’s haunting. I can’t stop thinking about it. Here are some excerpts. It begins like this:

I would not normally write to you in this way. I would not normally write to anyone in this way. I gave up writing letters some years ago after my correspondents mostly stopped replying. When one of my friends sent me a two-line text message in response to a five-page, handwritten letter—to add insult to injury, it even had one of those smiley face things at the end—I knew the game was up. I am not convinced that people know how to write letters anymore, or even to read them. I won’t bore you with the facts about the ongoing measurable decline in our ability to concentrate. You of all people know what the screens are doing to our minds.

That, as you might already have guessed, is the subject of this letter.

It will be a long letter, but I beg you to bear with it. Do not skim it: sit down and read it carefully. You may know why I am writing, but you do not know what I am going to say, and this is why you must—you must, Bridget—read this letter right through to the end, and you must make the effort to take it seriously, however hard it may seem for you at times. When it gets hard, if it begins to seem ridiculous—well, I will ask you to indulge me. Indulge your old uncle. I have known you since you were in nappies. I have watched you proudly from afar. I never had children, as you know, nor wanted them, but I have been glad that we have remained—can I say friends? I hope so. As I hope, dearly, that our friendship will survive these words.

He’s a historian and a college professor, and he’s writing to warn her of what the smartphone is doing to her mind, and to the minds of everyone. More:

Of course, all of this affects their brains. I see it in my students daily. Twenty years ago, my undergraduates had no problems reading and writing long texts. Now, they can’t absorb ideas.

This is measurable, too. For instance, in one study it was found that children who use screens for more than two hours a day achieved lower scores on thinking and language tests than those who did not. They can’t even escape at night. Did you know that people go to bed with their phones under their pillows? With radioactive waves pounding through their skulls all night long? The blue light pouring from the screens all day disrupts their circadian rhythms, so people are not sleeping anyway. If they can’t sleep, they can’t dream. They are stuck in an endless present, a terrible ongoing now.

I read the preceding paragraphs back to myself now and I can see how they will come across to you. Another old man complaining about the internet, in the same way his parents used to complain about the television. Actually, your gran and grandad watched more television than I did; the telly, as they called it, was a perpetual background hum. I used to hide in my room and read war comics. But in any case, I am not alone here, Bridget. Even the people suffering from this malady—and it is a malady—know they are ill.

And:

We know what this is, Bridget, of course we do. We have a word for it: addiction. Tobacco, alcohol, gambling, hard drugs—the pattern is always the same. Over-indulgence, dependency, inability to stop or control your behaviour, self-loathing, shame. You see it in Sarah every day but you will not name it. These children, like so many of their parents, have been enslaved.

This we know. But then the question arises: what is enslaving them? What could cause this behaviour to grip an entire population in under two decades? To spread like a virus, to change people and their society so utterly? What could enslave so many people against their own will, rewire their neural connections, alter their worldview? What could make such a swift and terrible change to our public and social behaviour? Do you remember when the British were renowned for their manners, Bridget? For their stoicism, their “Blitz spirit,” their stiff upper lip? I know, I am showing my age again. But what a swift and terrible change it has been. The hatred, the anger, the division, the abuse, the insults, the proud stupidity, the mobs rampaging through the virtual avenues. It has all come about so quickly. It is as if people are possessed.

Possessed. This single word, for me, was the spark.

Keep reading. This is when it gets spiritual. Uncle Richard doesn’t write as a Christian, but as a historian:

But here is a question for you, Niece, a gauntlet cast down: what if modernity was wrong all along? What if our way of seeing is a cul-de-sac from which we will be forced to retreat; if our precious Enlightenment was not an escape from a superstitious past, but a pulling of the wool over our own eyes?

What if humanity, for hundreds of thousands of years, in its myriad cultural forms, on its countless continents and islands, in its multiplicity of languages and speech patterns—what if that old humanity, rooted as it was to the Earth, to the source of all life and mystery, understood the world better than a group of arrogant, autistic men in seventeenth-century Europe? What if those men—those founders of our world—were so blindsided by their left-brain cleverness and their sense of cultural superiority that they fooled themselves into believing the world was something other than it actually was?

They thought they had de-souled the universe, those men. They thought they had killed God, dispelled the demons. Men like that still do. Men like that work every day to bring us paradise, and instead they bring us Birkenau and Hiroshima. Soon, they will eliminate life itself from this Earth in their quest for a rational map to replace the chaotic territory. Forgive me, Bridget, I rant and rave: but you see, if the ancients were right, there are multiple layers of reality. There are planes and veils and sephirots, abysses and hollow hills, and we are far from the smartest creatures inhabiting any of them.

Uncle Richard lays out his belief that the Internet and the smartphone open a vector inside us through which demonic spirits of hatred, conflict, lust, and so forth, pour in. You might think this sounds crazy, but read the story; it’s chilling. Bridget’s response includes this:

Read it all. You can also hear Kingsnorth read the story aloud at that link.

The basilisk is a mythological creature, the king of serpents, who can cause death by its gaze. Clearly Kingsnorth thinks that the smartphone is a kind of basilisk. It’s also a technology that we cannot master, and can’t un-know; it shapes who we are and where we live, even if we are one of the few people left who don’t have one.

You don’t have to believe in demons, or in the alternative theory proposed by Bridget, to recognize that the effects Paul Kingsnorth are talking about are quite real. If demons do exist, and if they wanted to destroy humanity, would the technology of the smartphone (and the Internet) be a fantastic way to accomplish that goal? What Kingsnorth is trying to do is not to get the reader to believe in demons. He’s trying to illuminate the work of destruction by this form of technology. Kingsnorth, who moved with his wife and children from England to rural Ireland, is a fascinating writer — imagine Wendell Berry mixed with a generous dash of Tolkien. Go to his website and read some of his essays.

Thought experiment: Do you think that the self-destruction of American society now underway would have happened without the Internet and the smartphone, which allows it to be with you constantly?

UPDATE: Reader Nate J.:

No, this doesn’t sound crazy. It is, however, one of those things that is so true and profound and undeniable (and anyone who tells you that they cannot recognize this obvious truth in his own life or family is kidding himself and rationalizing) that it may drive you mad to think about it too much.

Whether or not you believe in literal demons and the real existence of evil in this world, or whether you think “demons” should be understood more metaphorically, it is clear that technology is changing humanity in ways we are fundamentally not equipped for. If I could sum up the prevailing mood of the times right now—the thing that most people feel, but perhaps cannot properly articulate—it would be this: we know we are facing one of history’s great turnings or upheavals, the type that only happens once every century or so, and yet we know that we are not ready for it.

I’m not saying that any generation is ever truly ready for these great historical upheavals (or else these types of events wouldn’t be that history-changing, would they?), but we also seem to intuitively understand that healthy, strong, dynamic, vibrant societies are able to get through adversity or, in some remarkable cases, even become stronger by it. “Iron sharpens iron.” The people who experienced the last historical overhaul (1914-1945) are known as the greatest generation for good reason.

You cannot help but see that the vitality and hardness and resiliency of our culture has been totally drained out of us. Even those who appear to have all the vitality going in their favor right now, the radical left, I mean… come on. Look at them.

These people have PTSD style panic attacks from mild confrontation with opposing views points. The socialist party gathers and waves their fingers in the air effeminately to avoid the “triggering” sound of applause. Young activists go blockade railways and highways while making TikTok dance videos. After spending a breezy day chanting pre-made BLM slogans in the inner cities, our cultural warriors withdraw back to the cozy suburbs, stop in at a Starbucks, leave the signs outside the door, and sip a latte as a hard-earned reward for fighting the man. With any luck, they came away with an iPhone or two from the smashed window of a store.

Isn’t it the perfect metaphor for society that a movement ostensibly about justice, peace, civil liberties (big, weighty issues and ideas) got so easily distracted by looting and scoring a stash of fleeting material riches? The uncle in “The Basilisk” is absolutely correct when he says that not only can we as a culture not write anymore, we have trouble absorbing ideas presented in any capacity or medium. Ideas are not and, more importantly, cannot be (even if we wanted that) the driving force anymore.

We are left facing great turmoil and every single person reading this knows we have no special skills, abilities, or basic moral character to carry us through it. We know we are navigating into an unavoidable storm, and yet we’re sitting in a cheap, low-quality dinghy, probably made in China. There is no getting through this storm with the boat we have, and yet there is no time to build a better one. It is what it is. Alea iacta est.