About 1.5 years after we moved into our current house, a major bridge construction project began two blocks away. This led the city to divert traffic through our neighborhood. As the project drags on, it is creating more and more problems in the neighborhood from the volume of traffic it was never meant to handle. We reached out to the city but were met with the indifferent bureaucracy that is prevalent in our times. Instead, due to multiple factors, we decided to look for another house and are now in the process of moving out into the country to a place of blessed quiet.
The months on end of traffic and angry drivers outside of our small neighborhood have been a source of meditation for me on the state of our culture. The frenetic pace we are supposed to live at, coupled with the instant gratification of smartphones, social media, and a society where everything is immediately at our fingertips, are eroding our patience. On an almost daily basis people scream at one another right outside our door because they can’t be bothered to stop at the stop sign for oncoming traffic. There have been multiple occasions when I became concerned that a road rage incident would happen in front of my house.
The instant gratification culture that we are a part of leads us to believe that we are the center of the universe. It is very rapidly teaching us to dehumanize one another and to view people as an impediment to our plans. We see this in the constant push to digitize everything. Why should we have to carry on a conversation with a cashier or bank teller? We should be able to move quickly and efficiently throughout our day without people getting in our way. We are the center of everything, and the world should be at my beck and call.
My husband and I were chatting about this on our 16th wedding anniversary on the Feast of St. Augustine. We went to breakfast together, then to various home improvements stores in search of flooring and kitchen cabinets for our new home that we need to remodel before moving in. My husband experienced the worst customer service of his life at one of the stores. He found himself in a serious situation during which no one wanted to help him. I was across the store and had no idea. The staff couldn’t be bothered to help him. There was no common decency or common sense. The store is almost entirely automated.
As we walked out of the store, I explained to my husband why I shop at a certain grocery store in our area even though it is slightly more expensive and doesn’t offer fuel points. I explained that the people who work there are friendly and offer great customer service. To me it is absolutely worth the extra dollars to encounter friendly and helpful staff. He saw this on display when we went to the next home improvement store where everyone went out of their way to help us. It was a more human experience. It made us want to shop at that store for our home remodel.
How are the traffic on my street and our experiences at the two different home improvement stores connected? They each reveal how our digital age is destroying our ability to see the people in front of us as fellow human beings. The people screaming at one another at our street corner dehumanize the person in the car that is a law-abiding citizen who stops at the stop sign. Our smartphones give us an erroneous sense of control and play into the worst parts of our egotism. The minute something doesn’t go our way in the real world we lash out at other people. The digital world also allows us to ignore people and to simply use them in our incessant desire to stroke our own egos. If something doesn’t directly impact us then we ignore it or refuse to respond, which is what happened to my husband in a dire situation.
As Christians, we should be highly leery of anything that leads us from virtue to vice. We are not made for ease, comfort, and egotism. As Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI famously said: “We are made for greatness.” This greatness does not come about through impatience, indifference, and selfishness. It certainly doesn’t come about through laziness and egotism. If we are honest with ourselves, most of us have experienced growing impatience or indifference when we spend most of our lives online. When we walk out into the real world, people become a source of annoyance because they do things outside of our control, like stop at stop signs or ask for our help when we’d rather stare at our smartphone and get paid for it.
We as a Church have not done our due diligence in discerning the technologies coming out in the last 20 years. We jumped on every bandwagon without considering the consequences. Our culture is not better because of all these technological advances. For all of the touting about the way this will revolutionize our lives—which is what every utopian project promises, and the fallout is usually horrific—healthcare is considerably worse and more dehumanizing in my area of the country; people are more impatient with one another; acedia and indifference are present in every place that has digitized everything; the culture continues to polarize; psychiatric disorders and suicide are on the rise; and we ignore the flesh-and-blood people sitting in the room with us on a regular basis. There are countless other issues that we have ignored in our rose-tinted optimism that has forgotten how fallen human beings operate without Christ.
I write and say it often, and I will do so again now: We must reclaim our prophetic vision as a Church guided by the Holy Spirit in order to discern prudently how these technologies are used and how they impact us. The technocrats are working on another utopian project; the same utopian dreams that are reminiscent of the French Revolution, Communism, and Nazism except they imagine an entirely digital world. We are being promised less suffering and to live forever through the transhumanist myth. The fruits of the project are not what has been promised.
Healthcare is one of the big fields technocrats promise revolutionary improvements, yet the hospitals in my area are terrible. The younger staff do not care about patients. They spend their days staring at their smartphones while treating patients like a nuisance. I’ve witnessed this both as a patient and through the testimony of my spiritual daughter and others who work in hospitals.
The promised technologies have dehumanized healthcare and have not delivered on the promises of Artificial Intelligence saving countless lives and delivering us from suffering. The more things digitized the more the staff stop caring about patients and doing their jobs well. This is coupled with a culture that has turned from Christianity. What do we really think the consequences of a re-paganized and/or atheist society will be on healthcare and other helping professions? It’s as if we have forgotten why Christ had to come to save us in the first place. Fallen human beings easily slide into darkness and evil without grace.
The only option we have as Catholics is to seek to live more human lives, which is the call to holiness. We should not be seeking ease and comfort through constant technological dependency. We should not be like the rest of the culture and ignore the flesh-and-blood people around us. We should make every effort to greet others while we are running errands and to frequent the businesses that prioritize customer service and the dignity of the human person. We should make sure we aren’t the ones screaming at someone for stopping at a stop sign and aggressively pushing around people who get in our way. We are supposed to be light in the darkness, and there is a lot of darkness in the world at present. We all have bad days, but if it becomes routine, we need to examine what is leading us to habitual sin in this area. Chances are, it is social media or some other technology addiction that is distracting us from living in the real world.
Sentimental views of the world get us nowhere. We should be on guard against the lies of the present age, and we should be seeking to see with the eyes of the Holy Spirit rather than the tech overlords. There is a wide gap between how current technologies can be utilized in a virtuous culture versus these technologies in a culture that is re-paganizing and/or atheistic like our own. We need to stop ceding the high ground to the atheist materialists in Silicon Valley and start taking our guidance from the Holy Spirit and the Church. We should be calling for a more human society rather than giving into the current zeitgeist just because we want to be relevant and a part of the crowd. If we are seeking the esteem of the crowd, then we have turned from Christ who warned us we would be hated by the world (see John 16). We don’t live in a sentimental, ideologically driven bubble. We live in the real world of fallen men and women who have not been taught how to virtuously employ the constant flow of new technologies at our fingertips.
The bad fruits are everywhere if we have eyes to see. In-person relationships are suffering as more and more people choose the isolation of social media and AI chatbots. People are aggressive and hostile to others or indifferent when needs arise. Look at all the people who video recorded assaults rather than helping the victim. Healthcare is becoming more and more about greed, and the staff have grown indifferent to human suffering. We scream at each other in traffic even more because social media, streaming services, and short videos have destroyed our attention span and patience level. These are only a few examples, but there are countless more.
As Catholics we should be seriously asking ourselves if we are helping make our culture more human by leading people to Christ, or if we ourselves are part of the problem.
