Ghost Maintenance
This Lent, my wife and I gave up all digital screens (computers, cell phones, television, anything with an LCD screen or connection to the net), with the general exception of, of course, work hours and maintaining my writing. For those unfamiliar with it, Lent is a religious observance through the six weeks preceding Easter in which Catholics give up something in their life that’s preventing them from a closer relationship with God.
I don’t plan to discuss our Lenten sacrifice as much as to apologize for my lack of writing and set the stage for my thoughts.
GHOST PARENTING
Waiting in line at Chipotle today, I noticed a fairly regular sight: a mom and two young daughters (probably age 5 and 3?) saving a table, presumably waiting on their father, who would be, like me, ordering the food. Even more familiar were the two large, rubber-cased iPad screens that the young girls were drowning their souls into — the screen now a frequent addition to the modern family.
I believe that had I simply moved on I wouldn’t have given it another thought, for these occurrences are more than normal. But then I noticed that mom was screening it up too! Mom was playing 2048, a favorite game of mine, on her cell phone. Again, had I also been trapped in my own screen (usually Twitter), my confirmation bias would have overlooked this small family and I’d have gone about my day. But instead, I was saddened.
MAINTENANCE CHECK
Abstaining from the devices I listed creates a great tension — the type of grimace reserved for an Amish family traveling by horse on a one-lane highway or the family without a television. Similar to how our Christian faith creates conflict within secular society, so too does questioning the safety, stability, and health of the interconnected family of the 21st century.
Perhaps the specific family that I saw spends 1 day a year with their devices, flushing their stimuli in a huge binge. But it is far more likely not.
The modern family no longer seeks togetherness but toleration through loneliness, a separated distraction from hardship as opposed to a unified commitment to sacrifice. The separation is only bolstered by our society which esteems to bring about the “independent man” or “independent woman,” free from the oppression of tradition or authority.
This self-sufficiency, however admirable in its naivete, is what drains the imagination and hardens the brain. In Allan Bloom’s terms, we are destroying the best parts of what make us human:
The possibility of separation is already the fact of separation, inasmuch as people today must plan to be whole and self-sufficient, and cannot risk interdependence. Imagination compels everyone to look forward to the day of separation in order to see how he will do. The energies people should use in the common enterprise are exhausted in preparation for independence. What would, in the case of union, be a building stone becomes a stumbling block on the path to secession. The goals of those who are together naturally and necessarily must become a common good; what one must live with can be accepted. But there is no common good for those who are to separate. The presence of choice already changes the character of relatedness. And the more separation there is, the more there will be. Death of a parent, child, husband, wife or friend is always a possibility and sometimes a fact, but separation is something very different because it is an intentional rebuff to the demand for reciprocity of attachment which is the heart of these relations. People can continue to live while related to the dead beloved; they cannot continue to be related to a living beloved who no longer loves or wishes to be loved. This continual shifting of the sands in our desert — separation from places, persons, beliefs — produces the psychic state of nature where reserve and timidity are the prevailing dispositions. We are social solitaries.
THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND by Allan Bloom
In the face of popular opinion, it may be difficult. But it’s never too late to re-evaluate the structures that we create in our own families and lives. After all, no one else is accountable but us.
