Technology sells spiritual opium to the masses

Electronic poison afflicts the young, but the rest of society, too

More worrying information has appeared in the past week about the power and impact of the products and platforms of the world's tech giants. In my post last week I showed how they were reshaping the way we live, harming young people especially, but transforming the way everyone relates to each other, whether friends or in our working life, and often dividing children from their parents. 

The latest news about the damage to society caused by the money-making machines that the big tech companies are - their profit margins are well above the norm within business generally - involves the Chinese conglomerate Tencent, but also Apple.

Reuters reported that Tencent had been forced to set new curbs on youngsters' access to its top video game, "Honor of Kings", after a state media article described online games as "spiritual opium" and "electronic poison". This criticism, expressed in an accurate and powerful manner, sent Tencent's shares tumbling as investors reckoned that "robber baron" days for the company may be coming to an end.

Tencent was also battered when Chinese prosecutors initiated a civil public-interest lawsuit against the company's popular social messaging app WeChat, adding that this was because its "youth mode" does not comply with laws protecting minors. Young people have certainly been neglected by the dominant players in the tech world.

Another example of that was Apple's admitting, after long campaigns by groups and agencies tyring to protect children online, that at last it saw the need to scan US iPhones for images of child abuse in order to curb the trade in this form of pornography.

 John Clark from the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children said:

With so many people using Apple products, these new safety measures have lifesaving potential for children who are being enticed online and whose horrific images are being circulated in child sexual abuse material.

Children left to play with a smartphone in their hands can easily be persuaded to do what they would never consider if they were supervised by their parents. However, once again, parents can be too busy or distracted because of the impact of technology, or just unaware of its dangers, to keep up the necessary oversight that new tech devices demands of parents.

In all this, China is showing itself willing to rein in its capitalist-corporate aristocracy because it retains a spiritual perspective as to the common good even in the midst of the Party's atheistic ideology. 

 As Reuters reported: 

Chinese authorities have called for minors to be better protected from online dangers, a sentiment echoed by state media this week which criticised the video gaming industry as well as online platforms that help promote celebrity culture.

The Verge adds some detail:

Tencent did not immediately comment about the lawsuit, but it said last week it would place restrictions on its "Honor of Kings" game —which the Chinese news article specifically referenced—for players under 18, limiting how long they can play the game daily. 

From Japan's Nikkei agency:

In 2018, the release of all new games stalled for months as Chinese authorities screened titles for any potential "bad influence" over minors.

Tencent's gaming business generated 156.1 billion yuan (US$24.1 billion) in revenue last year, accounting for over 30% of overall sales and ranking as the leading segment. The company invested heavily in titles capable of in-game purchases, a high-margin business.

Of course, it was not just the disregard of tech companies for the need to be proactive over the impact they are having in young people's lives that stirred the Chinese authorities. There was also the abusive behaviour toward customers and other businesses. The Verge continues:

The lawsuit is likely part of a larger crackdown by China on its largest tech companies in recent months; in April, it levied a $2.8 billion (18.23 billion yuan) fine against Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba because it claimed the company stifled competition. In July, the Cyberspace Administration of China ordered app stores to remove ride-hailing company Didi Chuxing’s app, claiming the company was collecting users’ personal data.

 And this from the Wall Street Journal:

As a result of China’s regulatory crackdown, the country’s large tech companies have come under greater scrutiny this year for practices that previously went unquestioned. One such issue raised by the tech-sector regulator is the “malicious blocking of website links” to other company sites and products, which keeps competitors locked out of major tech ecosystems and has created hard lines between rival platforms.

The point I am trying to drive home for greater awareness is that "what previously went unquestioned" in the evermore intrusive realm of new technology, run as it is in many parts of the world by the Big 5 American names, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon, but increasingly by Chinese entities also, must not be allowed to continue. 

The moral injury, that is, the damage to our emotions and spiritual integrity, inflicted by the design of the technologies or their associated devices which have been thrust at us without enough consideration of human needs, as we're rapidly realising, must be eliminated in the next generation of invention. Science and technology make a pathetic contribution to human advancement if each depletes the quality of life and curtails the common good.

In brief, and this is serious, we need to "unGoogle" our lives, in the wide sense, to have a thorough digital detox,  in order to maintain our integrity and ensure our spiritual resilience.

Bloomberg offers an insight into how we can reduce our ties to technology - and imagine if all the billions of excess cash earned by the elite few in the technology sector were put to a community use:

The State Council, China’s cabinet, published a circular Tuesday that outlined how Beijing aims to promote participation in sports and get more of the population to exercise. Those steps include renovating more than 2,000 sports parks, fitness centers and stadiums, as well as supporting small- and medium-sized companies that facilitate exercise, organize sporting events and produce fitness equipment. Shares of Anta, Li Ning and other firms in the sector rallied in response. 

I will leave you with two further articles that show how our day-to-day decision-making can be manipulated through the neglect of protection from technology - see here; and how the titans of technology can aspire to create a world in such a way that it rewards their own conglomerate handsomely even while producing new forms of "spiritual opium" within society. 

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Stories from the grateful and the living dead

Robert Webb in his London garden. Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer (cropped)

Instead of rushing madly back into "life" as the various impacts of  Covid-19 wane, I hope we make a deliberate effort to take stock of what the lockdowns and isolation and perhaps the fear of looking foolish by wearing a mask have taught us, or can teach us. As Winston Churchill said at the end of World War II: “Never let a good crisis go to waste". This was in the context of the effort to establish the United Nations organisation. 

Many people have found that their "life" pre-Covid was anything but fulfilling, rather, what was "normal" was a mess of misplaced goals, self-defeating moral decisions, superficiality and loneliness. Part of that superficiality was that unrestrained activity gave no time to assess what was really important in their life.

On the other hand, there have been those who have had - maybe still having - a rough time of it with the Delta variant of the virus now rampaging through cities and nations, but who have been led to see that there are important features of their life that make their life satisfying, that these provide a new direction for the future.

These features of life are prominent in lists of what enables a person to thrive: Relationships within the family and with friends, knowledge that the drive to earn more money is a killer when it comes to true happiness, time given instead to lasting works of literature or to the sweep of the cultural world, developing a personal skill or talent, and having an opportunity (and reason) to pray and meditate. 

That these features definitely are the key to a fulfilling life is borne out by the experience of people who have had a life-threatening condition. There is a symmetry between what they are grateful for and what is most important. We can look at two cases that highlight this point.

The first personal account was published this week where Andrew Stafford, a 50-year-old, talked about coming out the other side of open-heart surgery. He had had mental health difficulties over many years and he "had been warned of possible depression in the wake of the surgery".

However, he has been surprised at the outcome:

These days [...] I feel like a Zen master. Not that I’d recommend heart surgery as a solution to psychological trauma, but if nothing else it gave me a radical sense of perspective and gratitude, an attitude I wasn’t previously on familiar terms with.

For sure, gratitude is a neglected quality, firstly as it relates to being thankful for what exists or what happens in our life, but also as it extends to a readiness to show appreciation for something, and to return kindness.

Stafford states that he is newly grateful to his true friends, identified through their support amid the messy circumstances of his life, and also to strangers who stepped forward to carry some of his burden at the time of his surgery. In addition, he discovered that he could forgive those who let him down:

So I found forgiveness. I had always been harsh on myself. Now I realise how hard I had been on others, too. It was all just sweet life, and humans being human: magnificently multidimensional, maddeningly inconsistent. I was no different.

And joy: "Every second is a second chance. [...] I find fleeting moments of joy everywhere."

Finally, the practicalities of surviving a heart defect were another cause of gratitude: 

Most of all, I am grateful that I live in a country where, in the middle of a global pandemic, I was admitted to one of the best cardiac hospitals in the country, under the care of a brilliant surgeon and medical team, and walked away with a bill for $74 in medications.

The new perspective that his ordeal has given him allows Stafford to conclude:

I am outrageously lucky. The randomness of my good fortune is never lost on me. And yet I nearly threw away my own life more than once. I had to have it nearly taken away to rediscover my lust for it.

The second case of gratitude bubbling forth after a life-or-death situation involves a writer and actor who through a fortuitiously timed medical check was also found to need heart surgery to save his life.

Robert Webb reports one of his steps forward after his surgery, a change in the life he had been living: "Trying to be nicer on social media, limiting my contact with the news, turning inwards [...] the world feels new." Another: "I really did stop to smell the blossom in the trees; I listened to the songs of birds and admired the daffodils in all their trembling grace." 

The nutshell view:

Mainly I’m overtaken by gratitude. I was insanely lucky to get this over with before the virus struck, and my mended heart goes out to all those left waiting for treatment. I’m grateful for the Back [TV show] medical and to all the doctors and nurses, the ones we applaud on our doorstep every week and perhaps always should have. I wrote a book about someone getting a second chance and I thought at the time it was a work of fiction. I feel re-blessed by my children. I thank what higher will brought me to a wife like Abbie.

It's right and proper to thank that "higher will" who guides us in our lives, calling us from time to time to reflect on how we should live in order to be the best person we could possibly be, and to live life abundantly - see John 10:10.  In all, gratitude should prominent in our life as we use the Covid-19 crisis to set our life in order with a fresh perspective.

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Responding to "Social Justice" rhetoric

Language can be used well, meaning beautifully and accurately, or abused. To point out the difference here's an all-new Combatting Social Justice Rhetoric: A Cheat Sheet for Policy-Makers: 

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Catholic academy appoints new scientists

Priest and monk Gregor Mendel - discovered basis of genetics

There's no way to argue that religion is in conflict with science, certainly with regard to the Catholic Church, whose scientific members have included the founder of the study of genetics (Mendel) and the "Father of the Big Bang theory" (Lemaître).

In 1603 the Church supported the opening of an academy to bring scientists together and to encourage the study of the glorious world God has created. This academy faded after the death of its founder, but was reestablished in 1847 by Pope Pius IX and reconstituted in 1936 by Pope Pius XI.

Today, the members of the academy are eighty women and men from many countries who have made outstanding contributions in their fields of scientific endeavour. Many are not Catholics. Three new members have just been appointed, one a Nobel laureate in physics. They are:

Chen Chien-jen, an epidemiologist credited with handling Taiwan’s outstanding response to Covid-19. He earned his doctorate in epidemiology and human genetics from Johns Hopkins University in 1982. His research has focused on the long-term health hazards of environmental agents, such as arsenic, and on cancer risks of various hepatitis viruses.

Susan Solomon, a chemist and professor of environmental studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She worked for decades at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, conducted research in Antarctica and was a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore. She is the founding director of MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative, a university-wide coalition of experts working to address the challenges posed by climate change.

Donna Strickland, an optics physicist and professor at Ontario’s University of Waterloo; in 2018 she and Gérard Mourou won the Nobel Prize in physics for their development of chirped pulse amplification, a process for creating the intense laser pulses now used in industry and medicine, including for laser eye surgery. She has worked as a research associate at the National Research Council of Canada, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and at Princeton University’s Advanced Technology Center for Photonics and Opto-electronic Materials. In 1997, she joined the University of Waterloo, where her ultrafast laser group develops high-intensity laser systems for nonlinear optics investigations.

Since the conferences, deliberations and studies which it undertakes are not influenced by any one national, political or religious point of view, the academy constitutes an invaluable source of objective information upon which the Church can draw.

An objective assessment of new ideas arising in science is certainly required if monk Gregor Mendel's experience is anything to go by. In 1866 he published his conclusions from many years of experientation on the transmission of genetic traits only to be ignored: 

The science community ignored the paper, possibly because it was ahead of the ideas of heredity and variation accepted at the time. In the early 1900s, three plant biologists finally acknowledged Mendel’s work. Unfortunately, Mendel was not around to receive the recognition as he had died in 1884. (Source) 

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I agree! 'Imagine' is a stupid song!

John Lennon's song 'Imagine' came out in 1971 when I was in my early twenties. I loved the music, but as much as it's idealism appealed to me, the lyrics jarred because, as Lennon himself stated, the ideas could be out of the Communist Manifesto. That's not pleasant company. The song was used with a children's choir at the finale of the London Olympics in 2012, and now it appears at the opening of the Tokyo Olympics. Enough already! The song is a  failure - at least as an appeal for a united world. What Lennon proposes would destroy the unity of humanity.

The song's revival in Tokyo has prompted a video retort that dives into why 'Imagine' fails. From Los Angeles, Bishop Robert Barron, opens up how Lennon is way off track with his key ideas. In a slightly edited form, here's what Barron says: 

I’ve been a Beatles fan since I was about 12. Their songs have worked their way into my soul. In fact, I would say they probably provide my idea what good pop music sounds like, and of the four Beatles my favourite is John Lennon, who I consider to be perhaps the greatest popular songwriter of the 20th century. I love John Lennon with the Beatles, I loved him in his solo work.

I remember when he died in 1980 when he was killed. I was a college student in Washington and I deeply and sincerely mourned him.

now i say all that… just to let you know I’ve got absolutely nothing against the Beatles or against Lennon's work, But I must say I do not like the song “Imagine”.

This came to my mind when at the opening of the Tokyo Olympics the song was played and was sung by children's choir and then there were pre-recorded versions by different pop stars.

It was done as a kind of secular anthem. It was very clear that it was a song that should bring us all together.

I love the music. I think it's got a great arrangement. I love the way Lennon sang it - but I hate the lyrics of ‘Imagine’ and I bemoan the fact that it seems to become something of a secular anthem.

Look at some of these words: It begins this way, “Imagine there's no heaven. It's easy if you try. No hell below us; above us only sky”.

Frankly, I can't imagine anything worse than that! To say “imagine there's no heaven, there's no hell”, means there is no finally absolute criterion of good and evil. There's no way finally to measure the difference between one person's private inclinations and another person's private inclinations.

There's no final moral judgment and, therefore, it's an invitation into a very dangerous space, the space described by the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky.  Once you stop believing in God then anything is permitted – a very dangerous space!

If you doubt me on this score, take a good hard look at the 20th Century. There were a lot of people in very influential political and cultural positions who imagined there was no heaven, and they piled up millions upon millions of corpses [under Hitler’s regime and the Communist powers in Russia and China]. This is nothing to get dreamy about. It’s a very dangerous proposition.

“Imagine there's no countries. It isn't hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion, too.”

First of all, I find it very amusing that they were singing this right after the parade of nations! So, into the Olympic stadium come all the different nations of the world and yet we're singing “Imagine there's no countries…”.

Again, the problem is not countries in themselves - that's just a way of naming what you know is particular to a given people. There's particularity to one's culture, one's political arrangement…, nothing wrong with countries in themselves.

The problem is when you bracket any moral consideration [with the idea that] there's nothing by which we can judge the activities of nations. We can say, “Well, that behaviour by a given country is no good and that one's better.”

See, [with] “imagine there's no heaven”, … there is no way to adjudicate disputes among nations.

Warfare comes from that much more than from countries in themselves. But what particularly rankles me in that verse – “no countries…nothing to kill or die for” - that's what we're always fighting about. But then the line at the end “and no religion, too” …

So, we've imagined there's no heaven, therefore there's no transcendent, there’s no God and now very clearly John Lennon wants us to imagine in this sort of dreamy-eyed way that there's no religion.

The implication common to many people on the secular left is that … nationalism is bad enough, but the real source of mischief is religion - that’s what people fight about.

Since about the 16th century [it’s been the] standard view that religious warfare is the source of all of our struggles. There was a study done about 20 years ago, a very, very careful objective study of all the wars in human history of which we have records. The conclusion was something like six percent of all the wars fought in human history could reasonably ascribe to religion. Far more deadly were tribalism disputes, political and colonial disputes.

In fact, look at the 20th Century again. Atheistic ideologies were responsible for far more violence than religion, so to this canard that religion is what we have got to get rid of if we want peace, I'd say au contraire: it's precisely when we bracket God, we bracket the transcendent, we bracket a sense of objective morality - that's when we have trouble.

Now I must admit the one that made me laugh out loud was when all these celebrities … singing this line: “Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can. No need for greed or hunger; a brotherhood of man”.

I think all a lot of people hear is “brotherhood of man”. Now that is a wonderful thing, but go back to that opening line “imagine no possessions” and i tell you every single person singing that song was a multi-millionaire and I don't think it takes too great a leap of imagination to say that they probably all have multiple homes and fleets of cars and closets full of clothes.

In other words, I'd be willing to bet you a lot of money that they've got lots of possessions and I will give up my possessions the minute they give up theirs, and let's not hold our collective breath on that one.

Catholic social teaching would say there's nothing wrong with possessions in themselves. In fact, we defend the legitimacy of private property. The problem is if I lack a moral vision that allows me to place my own possessions within a wider moral context of the common good. That's when possessions can indeed become problematic - not possessions in themselves, but possessions apart from heaven.

Finally, if you want, apart from religion, apart from considerations of God, … to dream about that brotherhood of man [you have know] it is simply impossible to have a brotherhood and sisterhood of all human beings if you bracket our common Father.

We can have economic and political and social and cultural organizations, and bonds with one another, but if you're talking about real brotherhood and sisterhood, in other words, a relationship of siblings, then that's impossible apart from a common father. If you bracket heaven, and bracket religion, you also ipso facto bracket anything like a brotherhood of man.

So, here's the bottom line: I love the Beatles, love John Lennon, love the music of ‘Imagine’; I mean, when it comes on the radio I still listen to it and sing along with it, but I don't take the words seriously.

We know that John Lennon was "a dreamer" - Lennon said he wanted a "nice" Communism - that he had a big heart, and a sharp social conscience, but this song showed he lacked a strong mind, the insight into the impact of sin that is needed to create a world where truly we all live as one. 

[] Subscribe to Bishop Robert Barron’s YouTube channel here

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How the tech monsters mutilate our lives

For one, parents, children are disconnected. Photo: Tanya Goodin source

Under the headline "3 tech giants report combined profits of more than $50B", the Associated Press reported on July 28:

Three tech companies — Apple, Microsoft and Google owner Alphabet — reported combined profits of more than $50 billion in the April-June quarter, underscoring their unparalleled influence and success at reshaping the way we live.

Although these companies make their money in different ways, the results served as another reminder of the clout they wield and why government regulators are growing increasingly concerned about whether they have become too powerful.

The massive profits pouring into each company also illustrated why they have a combined market value of $6.4 trillion - more than double their collective value when the COVID-19 pandemic started 16 months ago.

That "reshaping" of our lives - and each and every one of us is impacted - is getting a lot of serious-minded attention, so concerning are the effects on the well-being of individuals and of nations as a whole.

One solid reflection on how the new technologies, especially the smartphone, which allows any user to easily connect to the worldwide web, and to social media, comes from a social commentator who has been sounding the alarm for several years.

Last year Rod Dreher was at a conference where he talked with friends who teach at Christian colleges:  

I wish — do I ever wish! — that most of you could have been sitting in on this. These are professors who are on the front lines, and what they report ought to blast to smithereens the complacent piety of most older American Christians.

Pornography is destroying a generation. It really is. One of the profs told me that his female students can’t get dates. Young men aren’t interested in relationships. Those who do ask women out tell them at the outset that they (the women) have to be cool with their pornography habits. From what I gathered, we are dealing with a generation of males who are failing to become men. Slavery to sensory input from screens — porn and video games — is keeping them stuck at around age 14. These are young males who attend conservative Christian colleges. This is a problem so far beyond our usual categories that we can scarcely comprehend it. 

On an earlier occasion Dreher told an Australian audience during a book tour how the new technologies have created a social environment where "radical individualism is the new normal":

The old bonds of family and community have mostly dissolved. It is no longer surprising

news that we in America don’t know our neighbors...[An old liberal friend] teaches high school in a small town in the South – deep Trump country. She told me about a year ago that things are getting better and better. Why’s that? I asked. “We have more and more gay couples in the school,” she said. “And more kids are coming out as transgender.” 

I asked her how that played in her small, conservative town. She laughed. “These parents have no clue what their kids are into.” 

Stories like this are playing out all over America. I could give you a thousand examples of 
fragmentation, but that one sticks in my mind, for a couple of reasons. The town where this
takes place is in the most conservative part of the U.S.. This is the place to where people like to think they can run to escape the decadence. The local school – the main institution in the town, the one that holds the local society together – has taken it upon itself to identify and exacerbate the break between the parents’ values and their children’s, on the matter of sexual orientation and gender identity.

Dreher's punchline is this:

Parents are so disconnected from the lives of their children – who are being catechized not by church or family, but by social media and popular culture – that they aren’t aware of the deep crises of identity these kids are having.

The role of the many platforms beyond, but including, Facebook and YouTube, that young people tap for their daily news of whatever world is their focus has been highlighted by the explosion in gay and transgender cases. School clusters of "coming out" are of such frequency that the phenomenon has been termed the "contagion" effect, where opinion leaders excite young people over a bold but fashionable idea. 

Dreher has given as an example of this the homeschooled daughter in a Christian family who was allowed to spend a little of her free time at the home of a friend whom the parents regarded as "safe" because the parents were of a high regard. Soon after, it became obvious there was a different reality behind the friend's four walls when the daughter came home and declared to her parents that she had never been happy as a girl - despite her parents' knowledge of how false this was - and wanted to become male. Her argument was full of internet gender talk. The link to the source of  her sudden dis-ease was the other girl's use of a smartphone.

The Digital Revolution has been rightly named. It has produced one of the most comprehensive transformations of society, both in depth and in extent, that humans have had to contend with. It's in its  early days yet, but the impact has been felt at home, at work, and in the manner in which businesses and governments connect with members of the public.

Andrew Willard Jones is an academic who has written The Two Cities: A History of Christian Politics. He describes the titans of the digital age as "exaggerated kings of the ancient variety, sons of gods":

They create the world, order it, and, according to their own interests, manipulate the fate of those who inhabit it. 

In the Digital Revolution man is building a virtual world, a world where he is the sole creator. In this world, things do not have natures through which they participate in the ideas of God but are rather, merely, the ideas of men. It is a perfectly nominalist world in which man holds the potentia absoluta: the absolute power of God. 

Within the confines of the virtual, the helpless individual—who “owns” next to nothing—is facing alone the creators of the world’s very structure, those who manage what is true and false, just and unjust, right and wrong, good and evil, and who control its rewards and punishments. The builders of the virtual world need not violently conquer the physical, truth-bearing world of real relations. They need only shift social life into their domain—and allow reality to either assimilate into the structures of their control or simply fall out of view, simply be pushed outside the new world. Unlike the ideological totalitarians, they need not physically destroy rival centers of human solidarity—networks of friends, for example. They need only shift friendship onto their “platforms,” where it becomes an extension of their power rather than a mitigation of it.

They need not attack the family directly, removing children from the care of their parents, as did the totalitarians; they need only let parental authority decay in disuse as both children and parents increasingly live in the world of the screen. And this is indeed the path that the postmodern order seems to be taking.

It is the most formidable strategy for victory that the City of Man has yet devised. It is a strategy of making mankind anxious and uncomfortable in the real, natural world—the world of human-to-human and human-to-nature contact, where bottom-up power can emerge and be maintained—and of making us desire instead the stability, the seamless order, the safety, of the virtual world: the “peace” of slavery.  

Here, then, the final eclipse of the modern political architecture is occurring. The days of the dominance of the nation state—of ultimate power being the direct, political ability to marshal the physical and human resources of large geographical areas—are passing. Increasingly, these physical things are read through and ordered by virtual things that transcend them and connect them in new power structures: structures that stand above the persisting, but now demoted, political and economic forms.

The old forms are not simply annihilated. That is not how history works. Armies, factories, farms, churches, courts— all continue. They are just re-ordered as pieces of something new, as they have been time and again through history. The deconstruction of old social architectures is the simultaneous construction of new social architectures: the inhabitants of old cities slowly disassemble the structures of their past to gain materials with which to build the structures of their future. This is a subtle process that mostly goes unnoticed unless it finally explodes in violence.  

It is quite clear that the various dimensions of social life are no longer under the umbrella of order provided by old-fashioned national “politics.” Indeed, who could be so foolish as to mistake our politicians for the ones actually “in charge” of our social, political, or economic world? The rulers of the virtual world cut across all these old lines; and their rule is potentially more complete, more seamless, and more profound than anything the twentieth-century totalitarians could manage with their propaganda, bureaucracies, and armies. It remains to be seen whether this postmodern transition can be accomplished without the type of blood-letting that has accompanied similar changes throughout history. 

This "subtle process" of constructing new social structures confounds even members of the social and professional elite. New York Times journalist Shira Ovide, who writes the On Tech newsletter - "a guide to how technology is reshaping our lives and world" - stated on July 29:

My colleagues and I have written a lot about the unreal sales, profits and oomph of America’s five technology titans — Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook. [...]

I know that lots of odd things are happening in the U.S. economy right now. But I cannot adequately explain how not normal these numbers are from the tech superpowers. Maybe that’s why Bezos wanted to touch outer space; the Big 5 tech giants have outgrown Earth.

What’s clear more than ever is that America’s tech titans have formed a separate universe in which they are the sun, and everyone else — billions of humans, other companies, entire countries and governments — are mere planets that revolve around them.

Perhaps even more surprising than the size and scale of these companies is how they have mostly grown more profitable in what could or should have been economic conditions that hurt their profits.

I have been befuddled that Amazon and Apple have shown higher profit margins than those companies have had for years — possibly ever. That has happened even though the pandemic has forced those companies to reorganize factories or warehouses, deal with disrupted global shipping, scramble for parts in short supply and spend a fortune to keep their workers safe. [...]

What does all this mean? Well, for one thing, members of Congress or state attorneys general might look at the numbers and ask: If, as the Big Tech companies say, they face stiff competition and could die at any moment, how could profit margins keep going up like this?

Logic would suggest that if the companies are fighting off lots of rivals, they might have to cut prices and profit margins would shrink. So how does Facebook turn each dollar of revenue, nearly all from ads it sells, into 43 cents of profit — a level that most companies can only dream of, and higher than Facebook posted before the pandemic?

I’ve asked over and over in this newsletter whether America’s Big 5 tech titans are invincible. As the gap keeps widening between the super rich tech superstars and the merely super, I’m starting to believe that the answer is yes.

That invincibility is worrying for sure! At the heart of the concern is that the "oomph" these companies wield extends beyond the business sphere right into the home. Right into your home!  They are banning books, curtailing information, and proposing Instagram for Kids. Therefore, it's imperative for everyone to block the reach of the tech titans by reducing screen time, and rejoicing in personal (physical) rather than virtual contact, which will help to defeat the fragmentation that Dreher refers to. 

We need to take control of how we conduct our lives and not become slaves to algorithm-driven platforms that serve foremost the demands of the tech titans. This is a work of mercy that protects the young and prevents the outbreak of violence that Andrew Willard Jones foresees, given the lessons of history. Lastly, with more time to pray, we can learn to enjoy life abundantly.  

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Scholarship for a personal life with God

Matthew the Evangelist, the Ebbo Gospels c. 816

The reality of God taking to Himself a human existence is central to Christian belief, and this same kind of act, of the divine joining with the human, is key to understanding God's word recorded in the scriptures. Therefore, we need to take care in studying the stories, poetry, historical accounts, narratives and other genres to get a clear understanding of the message from God that the inspired writer conveys to us. 

The Church supports the scholarship needed make clear the message expressed in human forms. Pope Paul II stated "The Church takes the realism of the incarnation seriously, and this is why she attaches great importance to the 'historico-critical' study of the Bible. Far from condemning it...my predeccessors approved" (Address on the Interpretation of the Bible in the Church). 

However, he goes on to state the need to ... "avoid becoming lost in the complexities of abstract scientific research, which distances them from the true meaning of the Scriptures. Indeed, this meaning is inseperable from their goal, which is to put believers into a personal relationship with God."

When it comes to the gospels, we find ourselves wondering how Jesus' words and message were accurately preserved to be communicatied to all nations till the end of time. Dungan and Kloppenberg, in reviewing the Q source theory versus the two gospel hypothesis, which keep New Testament scholars busy, state: 

All of the ways of accounting for the composition of the gospels are hypotheses - that is, heuristic models that allow us to imagine the compositional process. None of the currently viable hypotheses is "proved" beyond a reasonable doubt and each admits to strengths and weaknesses. [*]  

In this and other debates on the origin of the gospels scholars tend to concentrate on the internal evidence, almost dismissing the external evidence as to the provenance of the work. Central to that external evident is the body of information preserved by the Church, and referred to as Tradition, a pillar supporting the beliefs and values we have received from Jesus and the early Church.

The Catholic Church understands the apostolic Tradition about Christ as the rock on which the Church is founded. It is in this sense that St. Paul, for example, speaks of the Church as “built on the foundation of the Apostles and the prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone” (Eph 2:20). The apostolic Tradition is first and foremost the witness of the Apostles about the person, life, and teaching of Jesus Christ. The Church has always held that this apostolic witness is contained in a preeminent way in the four Gospels. [**]

The Second Vatican Council states in the document Dei Verbum:

The Church has always and everywhere held and continues to hold that the four Gospels are of apostolic origin. For what the Apostles preached in fulfillment of the commission of Christ, afterwards they themselves and apostolic men, under the inspiration of the divine Spirit, handed on to us in writing: the foundation of faith, namely, the fourfold Gospel, according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. (#18 - available here)

Mark and Luke are the "apostolic men" referred to, given they transcribed the oral tradition derived from Peter and Paul;  and it's interesting to note that for the Church there is a single gospel delivered by the four different agents of God.

The Council declaration continues:

Holy Mother Church has firmly and with absolute constancy held, and continues to hold, that the four Gospels just named, whose historical character the Church unhesitatingly asserts, faithfully hand on what Jesus Christ, while living among men, really did and taught for their eternal salvation until the day He was taken up into heaven (Acts 1:1). (#19)

These Council statements assert, against those who exercise form criticism to excess, especially those who are part of the demythologization movement, that in the time that passed from the time of Jesus' preaching till the final redaction of the gospels, the guiding hand of the apostles, under God's inspiration, preserved the historical truth of Jesus' actions and words with regards bringing everyone into a full relationship with God.

To take the example of Matthew, the Pontifical Biblical Commission has determined that “the testimony of tradition sufficiently supports the opinion that Matthew wrote before the other evangelists and that he composed this first gospel in the native dialect then in use by the Jews of Palestine, for whom this work was intended.”

 There is a sufficient amount of evidence that those who were in a position to know about the Church's initial documents, the Fathers of the Church, vouched for Matthew as principal author, and so too for the other evangelists. The consensus of those figures of authority and erudition, the Fathers of the Church, is recognised as a sure witness of the Tradition handed down from the time of the apostles. Tradition combines with Scripture to produce the one Deposit of Faith.

As for John the apostle as author of the gospel bearing his name, the Church is adamant that this is so because of the “constant, universal, and solemn Tradition of the Church.” 

The Pontifical Biblical Commission states that this Tradition is manifested in four sources:

(a) from the testimonies and allusions of the holy Fathers, ecclesiastical writers, and even heretics, which, having been certainly derived from the disciples or first successors of the apostles, are linked by a necessary connection to the very origin of the book;

 (b) from the fact that the name of the author of the Fourth Gospel was received always and everywhere in the canon-lists of the sacred books; 

(c) from the most ancient manuscripts, codices, and early translations of the same books; and 

(d) from the public use in liturgy obtaining throughout the whole world from the very beginnings of the Church.

The reliance on internal factors for judging the historicity of New Testament works has led to the disorder we see in biblical scholarship which, to a large measure, creates more of a disservice to Christians than a service.  Such sentiments were expressed by Pope Leo XIII:

There has arisen, to the great detriment of religion, an inept method, dignified by the name of the “higher criticism,” which pretends to judge of the origin, integrity and authority of each Book from internal indications alone. It is clear, on the other hand, that in historical questions, such as the origin and the handing down of writings, the witness of history is of primary importance, and that historical investigation should be made with the utmost care, and that in this matter internal evidence is seldom of great value, except as confirmation.

To look upon it in any other light will be to open the door to many evil consequences. It will make the enemies of religion much more bold and confident in attacking and mangling the Sacred Books; and this vaunted “higher criticism” will resolve itself into the reflection of the bias and the prejudice of the critics.

It will not throw on the Scripture the light which is sought, or prove of any advantage to doctrine; it will only give rise to disagreement and dissension, those sure notes of error, which the critics in question so plentifully exhibit in their own persons; and seeing that most of them are tainted with false philosophy and rationalism, it must lead to the elimination from the sacred writings of all prophecy and miracle, and of everything else that is outside the natural order.

For these reasons, not a few scholars in recent decades, Protestants and Catholics, have called for greater caution in the use of internal indications and for giving greater importance to external testimony. See, for example:

John A. T. Robinson, Redating the New Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976); and E. Earle Ellis, History and Interpretation in New Testament Perspective (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 50–51: “The literary criticism of New Testament literature accepted by most scholars today, and the New Testament chronology based upon it, has underpinnings that are tenuous and that in some cases can be shown to be historically false. If this is so, the dating of the documents must perforce rely less upon internal literary characteristics and more upon the book’s attributions of authorship, upon early Patristic tradition and upon historical correlations such as those that J. A. T. Robinson pointed to.” 

Among others, Jean Carmignac, The Birth of the Synoptic Gospels, trans. Michael J. Wrenn (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1987); Craig L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, 2nd ed. (Downer’s Grove: IV Academic, 2007); Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of John’s Gospel: Issues & Commentary (Downer’s Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2001); and Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids. Erdmans).

The loss of respect for Tradition is highlighted in The Decline and Fall of Sacred Scripture: How the Bible Became a Secular Book, where authors Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker "trace the various malformations of scripture scholarship that have led to a devastating loss of trust in the inspired Word of God". They find that, having shed adherence to the Church's teaching authority based on Tradition, Protestants fought amongst themselves on whose interpretation of scripture was correct. The results were twofold:

[Luther's] doctrine of sola scriptura collapsed in less than a century, as disagreements about what the Bible actually said caused seemingly irreparable splintering, which had political ramifications. “By the middle of the sixteenth century,” notes Michael Legaspi, “the Reformation had remade societies and governments: churches and territories across Europe lay in a patchwork of state-sponsored confessions, with the division between Lutheran and Reformed [Calvinist] often as rigid as the one between Catholic and Protestants.” 

Moreover, the attempt of each theological party to vindicate its cause in the Bible necessitated a turn to the original languages, not just Hebrew and Greek but Aramaic as well. That, however, meant a search for, and confrontation with, multiple manuscripts in the original languages that brought to light variant readings, which themselves became part of the battle over what the Bible actually says.

A key result was that no one could hope to participate in this increasingly divisive conflict unless he was very well versed in the ancient languages and the science of philology. The simple believers among the priesthood of all believers were soon left far behind. 

From the Reformation and then the Enlightenment the stress in biblical studies has been on the external factors relating to a scriptural text. But Gutwenger, having reviewed the sad result, states: 

The important point to be noticed is the easy way in which the savants of the age [the Enlightenment] separated themselves from the historical evidence provided by the documents of early Christian literature. On the whole it must be said that both in its origins and in its later development higher criticism has signally failed in respect for external historical evidence about the composition of the gospels. Right from the beginning it put its trust in its power of literary analysis rather than in the broader approach which includes analysis and historical tradition alike. [***]

The fact that Tradition, the patristic sources, have not been utilized in biblical study is another deep fault in the work of today's scholars. In effect, they have limited their own sources of insight. Edwards highlights one example that is as true today as when it was written: 

In defining and investigating the Synoptic Problem, modern scholarship has by and large favored literary evidence and hypotheses over historical testimony from the church fathers. Since Schleiermacher, approaches to the problem have limited themselves almost exclusively to internal evidence among Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Little reference has typically been devoted to the evidence of the church fathers relating to the formation of the gospel tradition.

Several reasons contribute to this neglect of the early tradition, among which are the elevation of Scripture over tradition in Protestantism, a bias against Roman Catholic scholarship and dogma that has characterized some streams of Protestant scholarship, and a predisposition in favor of Greek over Hebrew origins of the Christian tradition. [****]

So the case is clear enough that the distortion of approach, the ideological heuristics, concerning the manner in which the gospels were generated and so their accuracy as providing the truth as to the teaching and life of Jesus, makes the product of that scholarship a joke compared with the more historical evidence that the Church treasures because it arises from the careful research of the Fathers at the birth of  the Church.  

The information available from the Fathers is extraordinary. In his introduction to St. Irenaeus of Lyons: Against the Heresies; Book 3, Steenberg writes:

For Irenaeus, the oral origins of the Gospel are part and parcel of the common voice of the Church’s true witness—for the four gospel accounts do not emerge out of the independent textual or historical traditions, but out of the same, common oral preaching that was the product of the apostolic experience of Christ. … In the same way, Irenaeus is keen to identify and stress the apostolic origins of each account of what he does not call ‘the four Gospels’ (as we are wont to do today), but, rather, the ‘fourfold Gospel which is held together by the one Spirit’ (3.11.8)—stressing its common and divinely united proclamation.

Gutwenger adds:

Not only did the Apostolic Fathers allude to our canonical gospels, but Papias, c 120, reports the words of the Elder who almost certainly is identical with John the Apostle. We are told that Matthew wrote in Hebrew (= Aramaic) and that Mark, the interpreter of Peter, wrote down what Peter had preached in Rome about Jesus. ... But our chief witness is St Irenaeus. For he knew the tradition of Asia Minor, where he came from, of Rome and Gaul.

Besides, he was conversant with the writings of Papias, and as a youth had heard St Polycarp the disciple of the Apostle John. He again c 185 testifies to the authenticity of the gospels and to the order in which they were written. It is the traditional order. In all this he is supported by the tradition of Italy, Africa and Alexandria as represented by St Justin († c 165), the old Latin prologues, the Muratorian fragment (c 180), Tertullian († 220), Clement of Alexandria († c 215) and Origen († 253).[***]

Of course, we must give respect where it is due in the realm of biblical scholarship - I'm using the labours of biblical scholars to make my case here - but those of us who love the word of God in the Bible have to always bear in mind that many scholars have gone far from the source of food that Jesus left for the health of His people in the Church, and through them for everyone in the world.  The Bible is a witness to the supernatural activity of God in the world, and through the Bible God reveals Himself to us. If certain biblical scholars do not leave us with the knowledge that puts "believers into a personal relationship with God", shun them. Christians can be proud of, and feast from, the heritage that God's providence in history has left us.

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[*] David L. Dungan and John S. Kloppenborg, "The Synoptic Problem: How Did We Get Our Gospels?" in The International Bible Commentary,  ed. William R Farmer. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press,  1998.

[**] Lawrence Feingold,  Faith Comes From What Is Heard: An Introduction to Fundamental Theology,  Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2016.

[***] E. Gutwenger, “The Gospels and Non-Catholic Higher Criticism,” in A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture, ed. Bernard Orchard New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1953 (753).

[****] James R. Edwards, The Hebrew Gospel and the Development of the Synoptic Tradition, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2009 (1).