Sometimes I'm Gothic. Other times, Tudor-ish. In the morning I might be Romanesque, but by the afternoon I'm Bauhaus.
The architecture of my mind changes day-to-day, hour-to-hour, sometimes minute-to-minute. As a good Catholic, I generally want to live a life of holiness, good deeds, uplifting counsel, and noble thoughts. But as a typical human being, the mental architecture of a particular day or hour might be more inclined to make me obsess about money, be loud, and tell ribald jokes.
The most troubling thing: the architecture I wake up with or shift into during the day isn't a conscious choice. I don't wake up and say, "Well, yesterday I was Gothic: grand, prayerful, elevated in thought, word, and deed. Today, I want to be Victorian-like: noble, demur, of fine dress. Tomorrow, I'll be Romanesque: sleek, elegant, and a temple to the pursuit of money." It doesn't work like that. I wake up or find myself in the middle of the day with a mental architecture that I didn't choose.
Pretty much the only thing I can do is work with it the best I can. The ease or difficulty of working with it depends on what I want to do. If the architectural style that day is Romanesque and I want to make a lot of money, it's a great fit. But if I want to be in church and meditating on the Bible? That's tough. It'd be like living a life of chastity at the Heffner mansion.
Our mental architecture is crucial to determining whether we'll be holy or sinful, noble or mean, courteous or abrupt. Although we don't have control over the architectural form like we do our day's clothes, we can sway it. We can supply the building materials that cause us to find ourselves in a Gothic structure with flying buttresses, pointed arches, detailed with gargoyles. Or we can supply the materials to be Modernist: plain, flat roofed, black and white.
In one sense, this is no more than recognizing the age-old understanding of the deadly sins: certain actions and thoughts create a disposition to sin. It's also recognition that the spiritual masters are right: guard your thoughts carefully, because thoughts have a way of growing and morphing into words and deeds.
But I think it's more than that. I think it's more McLuhanish.
A Catholic convert and daily communicant, Marshall McLuhan was a household name in the 1960s. He built a career around examining the way "media" — extensions of ourselves, from wheels and roads to phones and computers — change the way we think and behave, altering us in ways we often don't perceive.
His message can be illustrated well by the saying, "To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
A hammer is a type of media, an extension of ourselves. It increases the power of our muscles. The man who buys a hammer normally does so for a set purpose: to strike a nail. But if he carries it around with him enough, everything will start to look nailish: perhaps a stuck bolt, maybe the skull of a boor.
Imperceptibly, the man with a hammer starts thinking differently.
Every medium has that effect. Problem is, a lot of people don't realize it, and even those who are aware of it often have a hard time figuring what the effect is. And if they figure it out, they can't explain it convincingly to others. In efforts to examine the effects of a medium, a person normally relies on introspection, anecdotes, and other forms of evidence that don't translate well empirically.
If the modern world has one dominant characteristic, it's media. New tools, machinery, technology, toys. They flow out of corporate R&D like water from a fire hose. Every calendar year brings a handful of novelties that could be standard household items in a few years. Think of the cell phone and email: novel in the mid-1990s, ubiquitous now. Same with the VCR in the early 1980s. iPods and MP3 players are hitting the same levels today.
What are the effects of these media on our mental architecture?
I honestly don't know, but I have hunches.
I think all the popular technology from the past 15 years has one thing in common: speed. The Internet: speed of information. Email: speed of written communication. Digital music: speed of access. Blogs: speed of publication. Even those media whose primary improvement isn't speed offer greater efficiency, which is simply a kind of speed. Cell phone use isn't speedier than its landline ancestor, but the overall efficiency associated with it (immediate access and voicemail) saves time.
Speed and efficiency are the products of the new technology. We use the new technology, we become speedier and more efficient. We also start valuing speed and efficiency. I know I have, often to the point of frenzied living.
By contrast, what are the inputs of religious life? What do these things have in common: life in the monastery, attending Mass, reading the Bible, meditation, cultivating virtue?
Those things conjure up certain images, and they're not images of speed and efficiency. The images are of slow and deliberate things: hooded monks walking slowly, kneeling, patience, stillness. Calm, not frenzied.
If everything starts to look like a nail to a man with a hammer, how well is he going to deal with a crying newborn? How will the religious life look to a person with email, cell phone, and iPod?
Don't get me wrong, all the new technology can help in the religious life. I, for instance, religiously listen to Benedict Groeschel's Sunday Night Live (EWTN) while I walk for exercise, using my iPod to download the pod cast. It provides great fodder for religious thinking. Without the iPod, I would rarely get a chance to hear Groeschel.
But I'm not interested in how a technology is used. The observation that each technology can be used for good or bad is so commonplace that it barely needs stating.
I'm interested in how technology shifts our mental architecture. What role does it play in the type of mental architecture I'll wake up with tomorrow or find myself in tomorrow afternoon? Those are the most interesting questions.
And for people who, like me, enjoy the modern technology but also want a religious life, they're crucial, even disconcerting, questions.
