More Nobel scientists join Catholic academy

Emmanuelle Charpentier: credit - Bianca Fioretti of Hallbauer & Fioretti; and Jennifer Doudna: credit - Duncan.Hull and The Royal Society. CC BY-SA 4.0 Wikimedia

 Two more Nobel Prize winning scientists have been appointed to the Catholic Church's advisory scientific body. They are the co-inventors of the CRISPR genome editing technology. 

Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna discovered CRISPR about 10 years ago, sparking research into new treatments for cancer and other diseases, earning them the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

The technology simplifies the editing of human DNA, allowing scientists to use an enzyme called Cas9 to “cut and paste” gene sequences. 

This has been applied to experimental treatments for sickle cell anemia and certain cancers, but has also raised bioethical concerns, including its application in “designer babies.”

Rome-based journalist Courtney Mares offers some background to the Pontical Sciences Academy appointments, made under the auspices of the pope: 

One of the current members, who are known as "ordinary academicians," is Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project and is the director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Past members included Stephen Hawking and scores of Nobel Prize-winning scientists, such as Guglielmo Marconi, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger.

Religious belief – Catholic or otherwise – is not a criterion for membership in the pontifical academy. This open membership policy exists because the Pontifical Academy is conceived as a place where science and faith can meet and discuss. It is not a confessional forum, but a place where it is possible to have an open discussion and examine scientific developments.

Mares' article also gives more detail on the ethical issues arising from the gene-editing capability, so it's worth a read.

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.

High screen use, low life-satisfaction

Girls, especially, suffer from tech dis-ease. Photo by Julia M Cameron, from Pexels

A new set of evidence has come in on the abhorrent influence of tech devices and social media on young people, demonstrating again that parents and society as a whole must confront the problem of unsupervised access.

Research published in The Lancet found detrimental mental health impacts start after two hours of screen use for girls and after four hours for boys.

Screen use included television, video games and social media, but excluded screen time for school study. 

The research involved more than 577,000 children aged between 11 and 15 from 42 high-income countries, and it was conducted well before the pandemic altered our lifestyles. The last sample for the study is from 2014, so the impact of screen time on adolescents is likely to have become more pronounced since the early days of social media. 

The study's lead author, Dr Asad Khan, from Australia's University of Queensland School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, said they measured life satisfaction and  "psychosomatic" health, being where physical illness or other condition is caused or aggravated by a mental factor.

Khan said of the team's findings: 

What we found was that mental health is a big issue. We have also started seeing evidence coming through the scientific literature that overuse of screen time for recreation is also causing some issues in academic achievement, attention and other psychosocial problems like attention deficiency disorder syndrome.

We have also seen that it is linked with depression and anxiety in this particular paediatric population.

As to why negative mental health impacts kicked in after four hours of screen time for boys, but within half that time for girls, Khan said boys are generally more active with their screen time.

Boys are doing more of active screen time for computer, electronic games, whereas girls are not doing that.

Girls' [active] contribution is really low compared to the boys, so that may be why the passive screen time, which is television and social media, are the dominant component of the girls' screen time.

The study's summary states:

Mental wellbeing in adolescents has declined considerably during past decades, making the identification of modifiable risk factors important. 

Detrimental associations between screen time and mental well-being started when screen time exceeded one hour per day, whereas increases in physical activity levels were beneficially ... associated with well-being.  

Screen time levels were negatively associated with life satisfaction and positively associated with psychosomatic complaints in a dose-dependent manner. Physical activity levels were positively associated with life satisfaction and negatively associated with psychosomatic complaints in a dose-dependent manner.  

That means the more screen time, the worse is youngsters' feeling of well-being, and the more physical activity taken, the better youngsters feel.

The study's conclusion is:

Public health strategies to promote adolescents' mental well-being should aim to decrease screen time and increase physical activity.

That goes for parents' strategies as well! 

The Australian recommendations for parents is limiting electronic screen use to a maximum of two hours a day and encouraging physical activity of at least one hour a day for both boys and girls.

Khan said one hour of physical activity and no more than two hours of screen time a day provided "optimal mental well-being".

We need to recalibrate our kids' behaviour towards a healthier lifestyle, meaning that when we can, [we should] replace the screen time with some outdoor activity.

Targeting both behaviours simultaneously is likely to give us the best benefit.

We are urging parents to actually minimise screen time as well as maximise the physical activity so we could give a better life to our kids.

The data was collected long before the COVID-19 pandemic where dramatic reductions in physical activity and increases in screen time have been observed globally.

...This is a wake-up call for us as parents, as a community, or as a society to look into this and try to help our kids to do more physical activity, to move more and sit less on a screen.

We need to invest in this if we want to see a healthier lifestyle for our kids in the future.

These findings confirm those of a study published late last year in which excessive screen time for young children under five years was found to be more often associated with poor cognitive outcomes, understandable because at that age they're developing cognitive abilities like language.

In adolescents, there was more association between mental health outcomes like depression and anxiety.

This second study focused on the benefits to children of getting some "green-time", concluding:

Nature may be an under-utilised public health resource for youth psychological well-being in a high-tech era.

Additional guidance for parents is given in response to both these findings by clinical psychotherapist Victoria Matthews, who works with teenagers and children at her Queensland practice. She urges parents to show their adolescents understanding and compassion.

[Children] stay home, they do their homework, but the socialisation that would happen in person is now online.

It used to be all about peer pressure, but now it's 'FOMO', or fear of missing out. What they fear missing out on is the conversation going past them and them not being involved in it.

It becomes a source of distress for them, because what we're not appreciating is that that's how they now socialise — and we've done that to them.

We do have to come out with some compassion and say, 'We've actually created the situation because we've deprived them of the ability to go out.'

Therefore, sports and other club activities are important for young people to get away from their screens but also have that chance to participate in a variety of "conversations" with peers. Matthews says this gives young people opportunity to build a variety of friendship groups.

They're getting their self-esteem built from interacting with people in multiple environments, not just one. Whereas now they go to school and they're still dealing with all that stuff until 9 o'clock at night.

Without that extra interaction, some may come home and head straight for a screen:

They come home, they lie on the bed, and they're just swiping, swiping, messaging, and swiping. [However,] we can't live a life without tech — we just can't.

If that is the case, then it is because the older generation/s and the self-interested corporate influencers have created the wired world the young generation finds itself in.

Therefore, these same confederates must create a fresh environment to preserve the well-being of the young. It's a serious responsibility that parents, as central figures in the core cell of society, have to accept, starting with the task of forging strong connections with their children so that family standards are set, and constructive habits formed from the youngest years. Parents also have to be the role model.

See other posts on this topic here, here and here.

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.

Dr. Carl Trueman: Plastic People, Liquid World

What a sorry state science is in!

Neuroscience has its credibility problems, too. Photo: Anna Shvets at pexels

Science isn't what it's cracked up to be. From the methods used, to the manner in which findings are published, the scientific realm has shown repeatedly that it certainly is in a sorry state. What it comes down to is that research findings as reported cannot be believed! 

The "replication crisis" is the term given to the worrying fact that the conclusions in a large proportion of  studies cannot be reproduced when other scientists try to confirm the original findings. The paper by John Ioannidis in 2005 that sounded the alarm had the astounding title, "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False".

As The Guardian's science editor, Ian Sample, points out, since then "three major projects have found replication rates as low as 39% in psychology journals, 61% in economics journals, and 62% in social science studies published in the Nature and Science, two of the most prestigious journals in the world". 

This is serious stuff:

The influence of an inaccurate paper published in a prestigious journal can have repercussions for decades. For example, the study Andrew Wakefield published in The Lancet in 1998 turned tens of thousands of parents around the world against the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine because of an implied link between vaccinations and autism. The incorrect findings were retracted by The Lancet 12 years later, but the claims that autism is linked to vaccines continue.  (Source)

The new study, by the University of California San Diego's Rady School of Management, was published in the journal Science Advances. Ian Sample states that the study highlights the extent of ongoing reference to the false findings:

Studies in top science, psychology and economics journals that fail to hold up when others repeat them are cited, on average, more than 100 times as often in follow-up papers than work that stands the test of time.

The finding ... has led the authors to suspect that more interesting papers are waved through more easily by reviewers and journal editors and, once published, attract more attention.

Put more clearly:

...findings from studies that cannot be verified when the experiments are repeated have a bigger influence over time. The unreliable research tends to be cited as if the results were true long after the publication [of the experiment that] failed to replicate. [Source]

In addition:

"We also know that experts can predict well which papers will be replicated," write the authors Marta Serra-Garcia, assistant professor of economics and strategy at the Rady School and Uri Gneezy, professor of behavioral economics also at the Rady School. "Given this prediction, we ask 'why are non-replicable papers accepted for publication in the first place?'"

Their possible answer is that review teams of academic journals face a trade-off. When the results are more "interesting," they apply lower standards regarding their reproducibility. [Source]

Take note of the next statement, and then the explanation for giving prominence to what is interesting over what is true:

It has been claimed and demonstrated that many (and possibly most) of the conclusions drawn from biomedical research are probably false. 

A central cause for this important problem is that researchers must publish in order to succeed [in academia], and publishing is a highly competitive enterprise, with certain kinds of findings more likely to be published than others. Research that produces novel results, statistically significant results ... and seemingly 'clean' results is more likely to be published.

As a consequence, researchers have strong incentives to engage in research practices that make their findings publishable quickly, even if those practices reduce the likelihood that the findings reflect a true ... effect. 

The writers of this journal article - it's in Nature and authors include John Ioannidis, cited above - suggest scientists often attempt to game the system in order to achieve high publication numbers against their name to impress superiors.

As Ian Sample states:

The academic system incentivises journals and researchers to publish exciting findings, and citations are taken into account for promotion and tenure. But history suggests that the more dramatic the results, the more likely they are to be wrong.

Methods used can also be fault. The Nature article quoted above is titled,  "Power failure: why small sample size undermines the reliability of neuroscience". Wow! What a mountain of implications that statement sets down in the middle of those who are trying to reconcile the brain/mind conflict that a few scientists loudly promote. 

A further important issue is highlighted in that key Nature article as part of its conclusion.

Small, low-powered studies are endemic in neuroscience. ... Nevertheless, we should not assume that science is effectively or efficiently self-correcting. There is now substantial evidence that a large proportion of the evidence reported in the scientific literature may be unreliable. Acknowledging this challenge is the first step towards addressing the problematic aspects of current scientific practices and identifying effective solutions.

Finally, we need to consider another challenge to the reliability of  what is purported to be a scientific conclusion. And that challenge is wokeism, which arised from the Critical Justice Theory derived from the Frankfurt School's social theory approach in analysing society and the roots of injustice. By way of explanation:

On the political left, wokeness sometimes drifts into wokeism—a system of thought and behavior characterized by intolerance, policing the speech of others, and proving one’s own superiority by denouncing others. 

Within American society especially CJT has taken hold of academia, the mainstream news media, and largely, the Democratic Party. A feature of the American practice of this theory is the soft totalitariansm shown in enforcing its manifesto, which covers the diminishing of the status of the traditional family, and the rejection of the male/female reality of each human person. 

How this affects the reliability of the scientific endeavour was made clear by the capitulation of a heretofore reputable scientific website to the wokeism afflicting the United States. I'm referring to the website Science-Based Medicine, which has betrayed its previously principled goal of "evaluating medical treatments and products of interest to the public in a scientific light, and promoting the highest standards and traditions of science in health care". (Source)

This is what has happened:

If you read the site’s recent coverage..., you will come away thinking there is a big, broad, impressive body of evidence for youth gender medicine, that there isn’t any actual controversy here at all. Rather than evaluate the available evidence carefully, SBM defaults to just about every activist trope that has come to dictate the terms of this debate in progressive spaces. This is a disturbing example of what complete ideological capture of an otherwise credible information source looks like. Science-Based Medicine has “bought into the hype and failed to ask the hard questions”.(Source)

The topic that gave rise to SBM's loss of reputation is "how to best help gender dysphoric children and adolescents — that is, young people who feel a great deal of distress about their biological sex, which they will often (though not always) describe as a sense of profound identity mismatch and/or being “trapped in the wrong body”. (Source)  

This website's meltdown is chronicled by Jesse Singal, who has built up a formidable expertise on this issue. He has written a long account of how SBM's principals ran a book review of Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. The reviewer, Dr Harriet Hall, who had written 700 articles on the website, was favourable in her review.

Lo and behold, in response to pushback to the positive review, the principals "decided to retract the review entirely, replacing it with a statement that it had failed to meet SBM’s normal editorial standards and denying that the move was related to political pressure from the SBM community or anyone else".   

Singal states:

SBM has, in the wake of this retraction, published three articles about Shrier, Hall’s review of her book, and the broader controversy over youth gender medicine...

All three articles contain major errors and misunderstandings and distortions, ranging from straightforward falsehoods to baffling omissions to the re-regurgitation of inaccurate rumors first circulated years ago. Activist claims that stretch or violate the truth are repeatedly presented in a credulous manner, while the myriad weaknesses in the research base on youth gender medicine are simply ignored. 

And this brings us back to my starting point as to reasons for the sorry state of science. Singal identifies the political, the human, factors in play in doing science, especially in the present climate: 

The basic problem here is what Scott Alexander calls “isolated demands for rigor”. This is a standard aspect of human nature, a close sibling of confirmation bias. When it comes to claims we don’t want to believe we will insist the evidence isn’t actually as strong as it appears, demand more and more clarification, shift the goalposts of the debate, and nitpick if necessary; for claims we do want to believe, we’ll wave weak evidence right through the gate without interrogating it too harshly, even if it suffers from exactly the same problems. 

In an outstanding piece of scholarship, Singal goes through the "thought pieces" subsequently run on SBM, pinpointing where statements offered in rebuttal to Shrier's information fail to achieve that goal. Here is the link to the second part of  Singal's effort to bring accuracy and truth to the debate. 

By truth, I refer to Singal's discovery of made-up quotes in one of the pieces that SBM ran after Hall's review was retracted. Though the principals did make some alterations to the pieces SBM ran when notified by Singal, it seems that the professional standing of the principals - one is academic clinical neurologist at the Yale University School of Medicine and the other is professor of surgery and oncology at the Wayne State University School of Medicine (to keep it brief ) - is no safeguard in what should be a clear-cut case of applying science-based medicine to a controversial topic. 

Without defenders from within science, the public is on its own. Bravo! Jesse Singal.

 Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.  

How many children to have? Be generous!

More children or a home off the street? Photo by VnExpress/Quynh Tran

Freddie deBoer, an American writer and academic, queries what it means to be pro-natalist. Does it mean that couples should have as many children as possible? He declares his support for the pro-natalist stance of "more humans, more human flourishing" - however, he poses a problem:

Isn’t that an argument for having all the babies, not just some babies? Wouldn’t this compel us to do everything we can to produce as many progeny as possible during our prime child-rearing years?

His challenge comes down to this:

If you think there’s a moral duty to have babies, by what rationale could you defend only having one or two or three?  

It's a good point to raise and it's worth looking at what a pro-natalist philosophy is. First, it's a philosophy of life where children are a blessing (from God) and where the family is set as the fundamental structure in society. Society and the state exist to support the family, given the essential contribution the family makes to society by way of caring for the needs of children and inculcating ethical, cultural, spiritual and social values so that they reach adulthood willing and able to serve the community.

Therefore, to answer deBoer, because of those duties, parents have to be responsible in weighing all the elements of their circumstances in order to make a responsible decision about parenthood. Here's an example of Church guidance for couples considering the number of children:

[Parents] will thoroughly take into account both their own welfare and that of their children, those already born and those foreseen. For this accounting they will reckon on both the material and the spiritual conditions of the times as well as their state in life. Finally they will consult the interests of the family group, of society and of the Church. (50)

So there is nothing rash about such a decision. That is why pro-family policies can have an impact on family size decision-making. France has been particularly active on this, and its birthrate is significantly higher than comparable countries. [*]

In fact, many have commented on the statistics that show that women in particular want more children than they believe conditions allow. The New York Times reports on the finding that parents often feel overwhelmed:

As a result, the gap between the number of children that [U.S.] women say they want to have (2.7) and the number of children they will probably actually have (1.8) has risen to the highest level in 40 years. (From 1972 to 2016, men have expressed almost exactly the same ideal fertility rates as women: In a given year, they average just 0.04 children below what women say is ideal.)

Another factor to consider in the pro-natalist sphere is that there are areas where the Church condemns the decision to have a child. 

For example, the Church pleads with society not to condone, let alone encourage, the unfortunately common practice these days of "technological reproduction", or of single people or single sex couples contriving the birth of children that they wish to "have as their own". 

Here's how one Church document addresses the situation:

The desire to be a mother or father does not justify any "right to children," whereas the rights of the unborn child are evident. The unborn child must be guaranteed the best possible conditions of existence through the stability of a family founded on marriage, through the complementaries of the two persons, father and mother.[**]

And another document puts it this way:

A child is not something owed to one, but is a gift. The "supreme gift of marriage" is a human person. A child may not be considered a piece of property, an idea to which an alleged "right to a child" would lead. In this area, only the child possesses genuine rights: the right "to be the fruit of the specific act of the conjugal love of their parents,"  and "the right to be respected as a person from the moment of their conception." [***]

Still, the most common reason why pronatalists in developed countries do not have more children must have to be that society is a captive of consumerism and greed, pleasure and fame, and individualism. Parents are often distracted by the busyness and distorted expectations generated by social customs arising from these false values.

A change in values is also affecting Asia, including Vietnam where I live. A clear expression of this appeared in a Vietnamese newspaper article getting people's views on officials' appeal for families to have more children because Vietnam fears it will succumb to the social dis-ease linked to depopulation as in Japan and Korea. The newspaper report states:

Vu Gia Hien, a culture expert, said the low birth rate is also a matter of attitude. There has been a rise in materialism and individualism, he said. More people in [Ho Chi Minh City], the most modern in Vietnam, are focusing on finding a good job and and enjoying life, rather than dedicating themselves to a big family.

He said the city is adopting an increasingly materialistic view from more developed Asian countries [especially Korea and Singapore]. Beliefs about a child’s filial duty have also changed, he said. Fewer people now expect to depend on their children when they get old, and more are relying on insurance and savings.

However, the article does make clear that HCM City's birthrate of 1.46, the lowest in Vietnam, is severely affected by the high costs for a family trying to improve its living conditions. 

 The Church understands the difficulties of family life but urges generosity:

Trusting in Providence and refining the spirit of sacrifice, married Christians glorify the Creator and strive toward fulfillment in Christ when, with a generous human and Christian sense of responsibility, they acquit themselves of their God-given duty to procreate. Among the couples who fulfill their God-given task in this way, those merit special mention who with wise and common deliberation, and with a gallant heart, undertake to bring up suitably even a relatively large family. (50)

A very real example of why the Church encourages families to  life is given on deBoer's Substack post on this subject, where a comment by a mother naming herself Deco spells out the benefits a child can bring to parents and through them to society:

The biggest transformation was making me thoroughly invested in this world. Before I had my daughter, I could not care less about schools, neighborhoods, ideologies, politics, the future of our country, our culture, our world. I sat on the sidelines, watching in giggling amusement, feeling blessed that I was able to largely insulate myself against much of the annoyances in the ass-clown act that was life. 

I was going to do my time here on earth, have fun, be and do good in my tiny spot in the world, in my tiny social and professional circles, and check out when my time came. Having a child, the love of my life, has made me vulnerable and heavily invested in the world far beyond the tiny corner of it I'd previously carved out for myself.

...Before her, I was the quintessential selfish person, living only for myself. Now the stakes are sky high. There are many like me, people who don't focus on the long game because nothing tethers them to the future. 

For sure, children are a sign for society of fruitfulness, hope and solidarity. 

[*] See the New York Times report linked to on this post.

[**] Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, 2005, Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, U.S. edition (Washington).  

[***] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1994,  Libreria Editrice Vaticana, CEPAC edition (Fiji).

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.

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. 

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.  

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.

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.