The Battle for What is Real

Secularization, Technique, Aristotle, and the struggle to face the real

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Just before Christmas, one of my favorite writers on Substack,

Luke Burgis

, wrote a piece on the real that resonated with some ideas I’ve been wrestling with as I’ve been writing Re-Collecting Your Life and thinking about the concept of attention. In it, he claims, “The battle for the soul of our society is between Realism and Anti-Realism.” I think he’s right. And I’d like to explore this idea further. He goes on to define the real in this way:

By the real I mean that we live in a world in which things that exist outside of ourselves, different from us, which we can know, encounter, and experience. The world is intelligible. There is an absolute Truth which it is possible to draw closer to.

Faithful readers should see some parallels to an author I’ve written about before, Hartmut Rosa, and his concept of the world from his book Resonance or his shorter book The Uncontrollability of the World.

The real is a Creation in which we encounter, experience, and engage with other people and parts of creation while allowing them to remain uncontrollable because we are not God. The other person always remains an Other person no matter how much we get to know them. That’s part of the beauty and wonder of a relationship. In fact, if you try to “master” them, you will find the relationship will die, it will lack what Rosa calls resonance. This idea of the real is the “absolute Truth” toward which we draw closer to like Dante on his journey: the reality that we live in God’s Creation, not a mute and indifferent universe or a universe of our own making. God is the creator of this reality and is present in it so that we can commune with him.

The difficulty for us is that we have forces (which we created!) that actively work to buffer us from the real. One of these forces is the power of secularization, which I wrote about in Disruptive Witness. Under secularization (as defined by Charles Taylor), we are buffered from the transcendent. It’s not that we can’t experience the supernatural, but we are protected from experiencing it by a barrier of rationality and materialism.

I saw an interesting example of this just a few days ago in teaching Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair (1951), which (spoilers [it’s over 70 years old!]) ends with some legit miracles that cannot be explained any other way. The introduction to the novel in the edition I teach includes some lines by an notable critic chastising Greene for violating the “rules” of fiction by forcing the reader to believe in a religious sense. To enjoy the novel, you have to accept that the miracles took place. Fiction is fine, but requiring readers to believe that miracles could happen is going too far. This critic, and many readers of Greene’s novel have run up against the barrier of secularization. And that barrier prevents them from experiencing the real. Their world is a safe, controllable world in which God cannot or will not intervene and only what is material is “real.” They want a novel where “miracles” have naturalistic explanations so they can choose to believe or not to believe.

But a strictly materialist account of the “real” is always going to come out impoverished. Greene in fact uses love as an example of this impoverishment in his novel. While talking with a militant atheist, Sarah, one of the main characters, asks him something to the effect¹ of, “Can you explain away love, too?” To which he replies, “yes” followed by various discussions about the psychological and biological reasons why we experience love. In response, she thinks to herself that he’s not wrong, but his answer doesn’t get to the bottom of love. There’s something left over. Something in excess. In other words, it’s an impoverished account. And I would argue that any strictly psychological, biological, or evolutionary account of love will always be impoverished (see here for more on impoverishment). It will lack the something more that we all know is there in love, that we all know is real. Secularization buffers us from our own experience of love so that we get quotes like the one I shared last week:

“What are relationships for all of us?” she said. “They’re just neurotransmitters being released in our brain. I have those neurotransmitters with my cat. Some people have them with God. It’s going to be happening with a chatbot. We can say it’s not a real human relationship. It’s not reciprocal. But those neurotransmitters are really the only thing that matters, in my mind.” (link)

And when neurotransmitters are the “only thing that matters,” then there is no reason not to go farther and farther from the real into the anti-real. So in the case of the above quote, we have a “sex therapist” inviting people to use AI chatbots to explore their sexuality. But what does it even mean to “explore” something bodily and ensouled with a technology that is fundamentally disembodied and soulless? It means the anti-real.

Which brings us to another massive area where we are buffered from the real: technology.

Luke Burgis

makes this point clearly in his article, but it’s worth elaborating on. We are growing less and less connected to real things. And even the real things we do interact with come filtered in our minds through the lens of social media. “I saw this meal on a Reel.” “Let me take a picture of that.” “Let me read the Wikipedia article on that plant.” And so on. I talk about this also in Disruptive Witness. For many, the main physical object they touch is their phone.

Interestingly, when Aristotle and Aquinas wrote about the virtue of temperance, the primary sense they had in mind was the sense of touch. Both believed that what the intemperate person really had to worry about was the temptation to touch things they ought not to touch: people, food, etc. But I don’t know if that’s the case anymore. It seems to me that we have dulled the sense of touch so much with our phones (which give us such unsatisfying physical feedback) that it’s the sense of sight that is now the more powerful temptation. Our eyes are tempted to scroll endlessly, even if our thumbs do the work. Our eyes our tempted to lust after pornography. Our eyes are tempted to envy others’ lives. Our eyes are tempted to check our phones against our will.

And if I’m right that we have shifted from a touch-tempted society to a sight-tempted society, I think it’s indicative of our move away from a reality-centered society to an anti-reality centered society. We are not longer touching the world, we’re only looking at images of it. And those images are of dubious origin. One sign of this is the decline in sex. Add to that the loneliness epidemic and you have a world in which people are no longer touching each other. And we need touch. Positive, safe, platonic touch of friends at the very least.

We talk derisively about people on social media needing to “touch grass,” but there’s some truth to this meme put-down. Many of us do need to be re-grounded in the real by attending to creation and the physical world outside the world of products and brands and technology. Practically this can look like developing hard, physical definite hobbies: gardening, fishing, cooking, poetry, running. But only when we don’t allow these hobbies to become colonized by technique! For every hobby there will be entire industries built around maximizing efficiency, giving you the best fishing experience possible with the best equipment, etc. But this is how the real slips into the anti-real. All of a sudden gardening becomes a means to achieve the most ideal garden instead of doing something beautiful and good with the earth. Your efforts to run become mediated through YouTube running gurus. I’m not saying it’s never appropriate to seek insights or knowledge, but when that knowledge overtakes your experience of being with the real and becomes an end in itself, you’ve entered the realm of technique and the anti-real.

My fear is that our lives will only become more and more consumed with the anti-real, separating us from what is right before our eyes and tempting us not to attend to what is. This has profound political and moral implications. As Aquias notes (see Re-Collecting for more on this), seeing reality rightly is the first step in the virtue of prudence, and without prudence we cannot have justice. A brief survey of our current political climate reveals that there is little prudence and almost no regard for truth or reality at all. AI seeks to draw us away from real creation of art, writing, and thinking, into artificially generated content all in the name of technique.

I worry that many of us will struggle to understand that when we take the Lord’s Supper we are partaking in the real presence of Christ in the wine and the bread, where we are spiritually feed and united with Christ. As the anti-real forces press in on us, and pressure us away from the transcendent and the physical and the present, the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood may become mere symbols or even less than symbols, just empty rituals left over from a bygone era, elements which we now primarily experience in our heads as private emotions. An experience Taylor calls “excarnation.”

The beautiful thing is that the real is all around us whether we recognize it or not. And Christ is spiritually present with us in the sacraments whether we recognize it or not. The only question facing us is whether we will awaken to the real world and face its unutterable grandeur, or whether we will cower behind a screen, or materialism, or technique. In the coming years we may see a growing divide between those who engage the real (who weren’t raised on social media and smartphones, for example) and those who were². I hope the church is different. We were meant to be. For we know what reality is and who made it.

1. I’m sorry. I left my copy of the novel at my office, so I’m working from memory here.

2. One concern I have is that this will largely fall along class lines, with the upper classes buying their children out of schools that allow phones and sheltering them from some of the harmful effects of social media, while the lower classes resort to streaming services as cheap babysitting and comfort. I hope that I’m wrong.