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Imprisoned by the Czech communist regime in 1979 on trumped-up charges of subversion, playwright Vaclav Havel was allowed to write only four pages of heavily censored correspondence per week to his wife. The circumstances seemed mind-numbing at best: repetitive labor, relentless harassment by warden and guards, chronic ill health. And yet in confinement, writes Quentin Schultze in his new book, Habits of the High-Tech Heart: Living Virtuously in the Information Age (Baker), Havel found his thinking deepened and sharpened—as became clear after his release, with the publication of Letters to Olga.
The lesson Schultze draws from this for our media-saturated lives is not that we should abstain from technology but rather that we should make wiser use of it. Still, after reading about Havel, I wondered if it may be time to introduce a new term to our vocabulary: technological asceticism, self-denial of technology for the good of the soul, the mind, and the Church. In a new digital century, our circumstances are nearly the opposite of Havel's: textual communication is unfettered, unlimited, and often thoughtless. Adrift in an ocean of information, would we not be better off gaining a new appreciation for dry land?
It turns out that my proposed term has already been used, by John Muether of Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando. "By recklessly pursuing the tangible and the visible, we can all too easily forget that faith is being certain of what we do not see," Muether writes in a Christian webzine. "Christians must place limits on the lusts of their senses, and restrain themselves by developing technological asceticism." (And how did I discover this earlier usage? By searching the web, of course.)
Douglas Groothuis, associate professor of philosophy at Denver Seminary and author of The Soul in Cyberspace, has been conducting a relevant experiment.
"I routinely require my students to engage in some kind of 'media fast,' in which they abstain from an electronic medium for at least one week," he says. "The results have been nothing less than profound for the vast majority of the students. Having withdrawn from the world of TV, radio, computers, they find more silence, time for reflection and prayer, and more opportunities to engage family and friends thoughtfully. Yes, we need areas of asceticism."
But where do you draw the line? Could this sort of thinking gradually promote a withdrawal into cultural irrelevance, repeating the error of Christian colleges decades ago when students were forbidden to watch movies? Schultze himself has long represented the antithesis of such separatism, as in his 1995 book Redeeming Television, which advocates an activist approach to reforming a seemingly soul-consuming social medium. Is he beginning to have second thoughts?
Yes and no. In a derisive reality check, Schultze writes that the salvific rhetoric of the digital technology boom of the 1990s was a bill of goods—and that we bought it at great moral cost. In a fragmented age of instant information, we become detached from traditional systems and communities of moral wisdom. It is a message that Groothuis sometimes feels lonely in promulgating, as society carelessly embraces technology assuming it brings inherent improvement, and churches make the same mistake.
"To my knowledge, there is no other book that calls the cyber-world to account before the higher realities of God, the moral law, and the imperatives of virtue—outside of my own book," says Groothuis. "Schultze's book contributes what is nearly always lacking in discussions of cyberspace technologies: a strong sense of moral order as it impinges on our informational habits, the crucial importance of character and community for all our communicative endeavors, the need to critically assess the nature and effects of new technologies instead of merely ratifying their innovations and their potential to 'change everything,' and the theological imperatives regarding our souls, beliefs, and behaviors."
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