In a late essay, Arnold argued that the prayer book “has created sentiments deeper than we can see or measure. Our feeling does not connect itself with any language about righteousness and religion, but with that language.” But this does not mean that we believe the prayer book’s teachings in any traditional way: “Of course, those who can take them literally will still continue to use them. But for us also, who can no longer put the literal meaning on them which others do, and which we ourselves once did, they retain a power, and something in us vibrates to them.” Arnold thinks this appropriate, since “these old forms of expression were men’s sincere attempt to set forth with due honour what we honour also”; therefore “we can feel” the doctrines of the prayer book, “even when we no longer take them literally.”It’s an old, and sad, story: the deep desire to hold on to whatever vaporous comforts remain in religious rites or words after belief has departed. It reminds me of a scene from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets …
The “free speech” aspect of this is largely nonsense. Reddit is not a public utility or a public square; it’s a privately owned space on the Internet. From a legal and (United States) constitutional point of view, people who post on Reddit have no “free speech” privileges; they have what speech privileges Reddit itself chooses to provide them, and to tolerate. Reddit chooses to tolerate creepiness and general obnoxiousness for reasons of its own, in other words, and not because there’s a legal or constitutional reason for it.Personally speaking, when everything is boiled down to the marrow, I think the reason Reddit tolerates the creepy forums has to do with money more than anything else. Reddit allows all those creepy subreddits because its business model is built on memberships and visits, and the dudes who visit these subreddits are almost certainly enthusiastic members and visitors. This is a perfectly valid reason, in the sense of “valid” meaning “allowing people to be creepy isn’t inherently illegal, and we make money because of it, so we’ll let it happen.” But while it makes sense that the folks at Reddit are either actively or passively allowing “we’re making money allowing creeps to get their creep on” to be muddled with “we’re standing up for the principles of free speech,” it doesn’t mean anyone else needs be confused by this.
Many critics lay the blame on the College Board itself, a huge “non-profit” organization that operates like a big business. The College Board earns over half of all its revenues from its Advanced Placement program – more than all its other revenue streams (SATs, SAT subject tests, PSATs) combined. The College Board’s profits for 2009, the most recent year for which records were available, were 8.6 percent of revenue, which would be respectable even for a for-profit corporation. “When a non-profit company is earning those profits, something is wrong,” says Americans for Educational Testing Reform. (The AETR’s “report card” on the College Board awards a grade of D and cites numerous “areas of misconduct” by the College Board.)It’s clear the College Board has the mentality of a voracious corporation, charging $89 a shot for an exam to millions of students who have no business taking it. The college admissions process today is a total crapshoot. At least for the most competitive colleges, nobody in the applicant pool has any certainty anymore as to what will secure admission. In the face of that uncertainty, one rational form of behavior is to take the shotgun approach, blasting away at the admissions committee with every weapon in the student’s armory: multiple AP courses, ridiculous amounts of extracurricular activity, and do-gooder volunteer work rivaling Mother Teresa’s.
Lots of guidance counselors will advise families and students that a rational alternative is to opt out of that race. Concentrate on one or two things. Excel at them. I agree. But it shouldn’t be the customer’s responsibility to stop a scam. The customer buys into it because the con artist is so skillful and the world is so uncertain. The only way to stop the College Boards of the world is to expose them. Tell people to be wary.
Let me put it this way: I would not let the moderators and fans of the Reddit creeper forums around my daughters; I’d worry they would sexually assault the girls. I don’t worry about Gawker writers and editors molesting my girls. However, if my girls were molested, I’d expect Gawker writers and editors to try to find ways to monetize it, use it to drive traffic, come up with banal, weakly ironic hipster-douchebag quips about it, pay witnesses to offer lurid details about it, and try to find clumsy and demi-literate ways to connect it to politicians they don’t like.
Consider trolls’ deeply contentious but ultimately homologous relationship with sensationalist corporate media. For example, when trolls court emotional distress in the wake of a tragedy by posting upsetting messages to Facebook memorial pages and generally being antagonistic towards so-called “grief tourists,” they are swiftly condemned – and understandably so. But when corporate media outlets splash the most sensationalist, upsetting headlines or images across their front page, press the friends and families of suicide victims to relive the trauma of having their loved one’s RIP page attacked by trolls (and in the case of this MSNBC segment, by forcing them to read the hateful messages on camera), or pour over every possible detail about bullied teenage suicides, despite the risks of “copycat suicide,” the only objectively measurable media effect, and in so doing slap a dollar sign on personal tragedy, it’s just business as usual. In both cases, audience distress is courted and exploited for profit. Granted, trolls’ “profit” is measured in lulz, not dollars. Still, the respective processes by which these profits are achieved are strikingly similar, and in many cases – which I chronicled throughout my dissertation – indistinguishable.
Christianity and the Future of the Book
Last year I led a seminar on this topic for some faculty colleagues here at Wheaton. Just before our last meeting I sent to the group a list of Theses for Disputation. I thought I might reproduce them here, in case anyone is interested.
No particular technology can be usefully evaluated in isolation from the whole network of technologies to which it is inevitably related.
Technologies have become the chief means by which networks of power and influence — what Michel Foucault called “power-knowledge regimes” — are sustained.
Brian Brock refers to the current regime as “technological modernity,” while Neil Postman calls it “Technopoly,” but both of them help us identify the key features of the regime: a commitment to rationalization and regularization of human behavior; a confidence that tools can direct human will into proper channels, with what is “proper” being wholly accessible to autonomous human reason; a belief in the inevitability of progress; and an insistence that technologies are always neutral, equally capable of being used for good or ill.
Stanley Hauerwas has rightly said that to be a Christian is to work “with the grain of the universe,” but none of those core commitments of Technopoly run wholly (or at all) with the grain of the Christian story.
Therefore, while working against the grain of anything is wearisome, to that we are called. Any thought that we can create a form of life that will allow us to live always with the grain, and therefore without struggle and tension, amounts to a wish-fulfillment fantasy. Paul’s images of “running the race” and “fighting the good fight” do not just concern internal “spiritual” struggles.
One branch or department of technological modernity is called “higher education.” As individual teachers and scholars, we have, in order to be in the world though not of it, chosen some degree of accommodation to the standards of this regime in order to achieve its accreditation and recognition. As an institution, Wheaton College has done the same.
Walter Ong points out that no society that has achieved literacy has even voluntarily returned to a condition of primary orality. This is a specific example of a general rule: When a once-dominant technology yields to a new one, it does not disappear, but its cultural role changes and it never becomes dominant again. Similarly, there is no point in imagining that either we as individuals or Wheaton as an institution can fully, or even mostly, extricate ourselves from the regime of higher education. This is the specific form the burden identified in point 5 takes for us.
So our daily vocational prayer might be something like this: “Lord, I want to work with the grain of your story, your Creation, your Way. Teach me to discern the direction that grain runs, and help me to identify what runs against it. Through your indwelling Spirit and the common life of your Church, give me courage and strength to follow the path that you set before me.”
Any thoughts about the role of the book in our professional lives and more generally our lives as Christ-followers must be pursued within the parameters of the reflections above. We should not revere the book or any other technology in itself, but value it insofar as it helps us to work with the grain of God’s universe.
As a corollary, any decision to stick with paper codices instead of digital texts will be a trivial decision if in most other respects we are unreflective participants in Technopoly.
The codex certainly seems to have been especially well-suited to the preservation and transmission of the Gospel, but we don’t have a control group for purposes of comparison, nor can we roll back the tape of history and replay it with the codex taken out. A Church without codices might have been worse than the one that arose; it might have been better; it surely would have been different, with a different mix of virtues and vices. There’s no way for us to know.
There is no power-knowledge regime under which the Gospel cannot be preached and the Christian life practiced. God will not leave us comfortless, even if He allows our codices to be taken away.
If we value codices, we should strive to preserve them. But we can only do this if we first think critically and seriously about why we love them — what virtues they embody that we do not want to lose.
If we do this, then we will be better prepared to adapt if codices (or other technologies that we like) decline. Being practiced in working against the grain of our social order, we will remember that even unfamiliar and unpromising technologies can be turned to godly purposes.
This does not mean that those technologies are neutral, only that they are to some degree redeemable. Remember, our decision to accept, even if only provisionally, the rules and standards of our disciplines and institutions means that we have given up a full range of choices about our technologies.
“I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead!” — Lesslie Newbigin