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After reading this rich and insightful review of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation over at American Affairs, I was struck by a quote from Sherry Turkle, who says, “We are forever elsewhere.” I’m sure I’d have many more inspired thoughts if I actually read Haidt’s new book, but unfortunately, we’re in the middle of moving and it got packed away. Turkle’s point is that the modern condition is a condition of displacement. We fail to exist in the moment. To some extent, we know this. The most obvious example, and the one poignantly used in the review, is when you are talking to someone face to face and they pull out their phone to respond to a text. This action signals that you are less significant than a disembodied person. It communicates that the person is not present with you.
But I think the problem is much broader than this. We struggle to be present in many areas of our lives. Our thoughts are scattered by podcasts, music, billboards, commercials, gas station video ads, plus the constant call of social media and text messages. It seems to me that this is a fundamental problem for our age. We struggle to be embodied. It’s not just that we are distracted, we are displaced from the present. We’re disembodied brains interfacing with digital systems. “We are forever elsewhere.” Sometimes that elsewhere is a text message, sometimes it’s mentally reviewing the various arguments about a Supreme Court Justice’s flag, sometimes it’s reflecting on how the experience we’re currently having is filtered by our mental health condition. We’re anywhere but here and now.
I’m reminded of the great book, Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in it, where Thomas de Zengotita argues that nearly everything we experience in the modern world is mediated through some social force, like the media. It was written in 2006, so it doesn’t take into account the way Instagram mediates all our meaningful experiences today. Rather than be present in nature, we feel compelled to document our experience in nature and post it, making it somehow more real and significant. The digital representation of you in nature is more real than you being in nature. Reflexive analysis of how an experience or event affects your mental health is more real and meaningful than the experience itself. I do think many people mediate their lives through a therapy-speech lens. Or a justice/oppression lens. Or a culture war lens. All taken from the narratives we find online.
Another example of this elsewhere-ness is the prevalence of online church services. It’s certainly the case that for a tiny minority of people, due primarily to health reasons, online services are a blessing. But they are the exception that proves the rule that church is designed to be embodied. We can’t encourage each other with spiritual hymns if we can’t be physically present. One of the results of COVID is that many people realized that they were missing nothing by watching a church service on a screen rather than showing up in person. And some of those people have not come back. Some have probably even stopped watching. If your church does not provide an embodied experience of worship in a community, then there is no loss in watching online. And once you just watch online, you begin to wonder what exactly church is for. Is it just another podcast? Does it do anything meaningful that you can’t get elsewhere?
None of this is surprising to anyone paying attention at this point, and I’ve discussed these ideas in my first book, Disruptive Witness. We seem to have reached a place where most of us are aware what the digital world is doing to us, how it’s sucking us away from embodiment and presence, but we feel helpless to do anything about it. The appeal to be drawn away from the present is so great, who can resist? There is, I think, something demonic about the seductive call away from this present moment. It’s a denial of the goodness of Creation and God’s active work in the moment. Paul tells us that in God we live and move and have our being, but we seem to be systematically placing our being elsewhere.
Another aspect to the crisis of presence is that it helps contribute to the wider crisis of meaning experienced in our culture. As Hartmut Rosa argues in his great book, The Uncontrollability of the World, the modern society seeks to master the world to make it explainable and programable. But to achieve “resonance”—a kind of meaningful experience of existence—we must position ourselves to accept that we are not masters of the world. I suspect that our drive toward perpetual elsewhere-ness is an intentional avoidance of resonance and an attempt to master discrete spaces. Because we are not present to the world as it is, we cannot be confronted by it’s uncontrollability, and we instead shift our attention to tools of control: technology, consumerism, entertainment. Spaces where my choice is paramount.
If we are living in a crisis of presence, then the most radical thing we can do is show up, fully, with our bodies, our faces, and our eyes fixed on another person. Giving your attention to someone is an act of love and a recognition of their imago dei. They deserve your attention because they are made in the Image of God. And that creation is fearful and wonderful. The human face is miraculous. And when we attend to the face of another, we pull ourselves back to the present and the particular, which honors God. And we are confronted with a being beyond our control, whose existence is dependent upon God, not us. A marvelous, uncontrollable mystery of being. It is through these embodied interactions that we can start to find a way out of the crisis of meaning, interacting with the real world as it confronts us in its power and wonder.