Well, a near miss! Debacle postponed until further notice. I've read the letter from the CDF which was what was published on Thursday and, frankly, wondered what on earth had prompted it. Here we are in the middle of a nasty doctrinal storm and we get what looks like an interesting sideshow. Sure, pelagianism in anything but name is always relevant. There has probably been a kind of pelagianism attested in every period of the Church, even before Pelagius! Human agency is a universal phenomenon arising from our status as moral beings. It's always relevant to talk about it, except when perhaps there are more important things to talk about. Just saying.
Meanwhile, we're snowed in where we live in the UK. After days of inaccurate weather forecasts, they finally got it right, and when the Beast from the East met Storm Emma - which sounds like a mixed wrestling match - the snow came down in relentless flurries. I love this kind of moment. I'm not moving the car because the handbrake freezes in sub-zero weather. The roads are treacherous in any case because, as far as I know, they have not been gritted. At least I don't have to go to work. I've told my children that all we have to do this weekend is snuggle for warmth and make it to Mass. They have responded by going into a fit of cabin fever and are now taking it in turns to sing loudly down opposite ends of a physiotherapy roller. The joys of childhood!
There is something therapeutic when the natural elements reduce our freedom and squeeze us into some creative corner. The contemporary instinct is to reach for a device and enter it (damn it, much as I have done now). Albert Borgmann, the German-American philosopher, talks about the device paradigm: the network of options and actions that flow from and to a device, organising our activity (and, let it be said, reorganising our spiritual palettes). Normally, when people use the word 'paradigm' these days, it makes me want to reach for my copy of Thomas Kuhn and whack them with it. Borgmann isn't a pretentious theologian, however, so we'll let him off. We'll let him off also because the contrary of the device paradigm is no kind of paradigm at all but what he labels a 'focal practice': an action creative or otherwise that serves as a focus of attention individually or collectively. Watching a TV talent show locks us in a device paradigm; singing together would be a focal practice. Surfing my neighbours' Facebook page would encase us both in a device paradigm; inviting them in for a cup of tea and a chat around the fire would be a focal practice.
You see, one of the problems with seeing pelagianism everywhere - and I'm not saying there is not quite a bit of it about - is that one risks being insensitive to what technology does to human agency. What I mean is that the more we force our actions through a technological instrument, somehow the more we are exposed to a phenomenon of vicarious substitution where our agency is transferred to some artifice. Google will save our passwords for us; electronic diaries will remind us of appointments; we bank online (well, I don't but the rotten banks are making things increasingly difficult for people like me). That is all well and good but the same kind of transfer in other areas of life can only be an impoverishment. I have letters written to me twenty-five years ago that I treasure but oddly enough no texts from even twenty-five months ago. Friendships forged around a dinner table and bottles of wine somehow (mostly) go deeper than their electronic equivalents. Worse still, people you thought were electronic friends sometimes disappear like a fart in the wind when pressed into real life.
This last phenomenon could be indicative. One of the troubles with technology is that the more complicated the instrument the more we are capable of divorcing ourselves from engagement with its outcomes. Technology allows us to colonise spaces that are a thousand miles away but also to hold those that occupy them at a distance. I have no doubt this appeals perversely to certain personalities and even cultures, the British in particular. Yet I cannot help but reflect not on the gains but on the losses. If there is more rejoicing in heaven over the return of the one lost sheep than over the ninety-nine faithful ones, I wonder if there is also more rejoicing at one real human connection than over ninety-nine digital ones. Sometimes even the most digitally connected of us longs for that digital connection to elicit a truly human response.
And so we arrive at these curious paradoxes: first, that in the age of connectivity we are often less connected, and second, that humanly connecting more might mean digitally connecting less. I was reading yesterday a text written in the late 1920s that was lamenting the domination of technology. "Men are now the slaves of machines, to the point of even becoming one body with them," the writer lamented. Perhaps this is yet another paradox of the technological culture: that as we distance ourselves more from our bodies through our technologies, we become the vicarious bodies of artificial intelligences. After all, we are all unwittingly working for the big internet companies who process our data trails, repackage and sell them on for profit. Oh, glory of the age of Zuckerberg! We are the living, breathing beasts of digital burden, investing our time by chomping our way through clickbait, and leaving a surprisingly exploitable slurry behind us in our wake. Behold the digital man!
At this point, there is only one thing left for me to do, which is to disconnect and intervene in my children's game which has now reached some extraordinary flight of fancy, based somewhat disturbingly on the abduction of Persephone...I wish my reader a snow-free, and more especially a technology-free, weekend (when you're finished here of course!)!
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