Men with Digital Chests
Worship, Education & the Occult Dangers of the Electronic Age
It has taken more than two years for the impositions of masking to subside, nor is there any certainty that they will not be revived again. Whether or not there is a human conspiracy at work behind the scenes to perpetuate this ongoing concealment of God's image, there is certainly a diabolical one. But that is not all the devils are up to. The days are evil, and hell worketh overtime.
Faced, at least in some quarters, with new lockdowns and a dystopian present of seemingly endless face covering, some Christians have taken solace from the digital technologies that allow us to traverse the waste spaces of the internet and gather in back-alley cyber rooms, where the online simulacra of our faces can be seen. In the last two years, the phrase "in person" has curiously become part of our lexicon to describe what we all used to expect as part of human life. Now churches have shifted their services to "livestream" for those at home. Enrollments in online academies have boomed. And working "remotely"—a word literally meaning "removed" from public space—has become a new norm for employers and employees alike.
A Cause for Rejoicing?
Some have praised the advent of such changes. What a boon. What would we do without Zoom or Google? Such electronic tools allow us a space in which to gather and should cause us to rejoice. Happy is he that hath the internet for his strength, whose refuge is gathering online, and who finds his meetings not canceled. An online "ecclesia," one might argue, simply augments the Great Commission, to which we are called. After all, we have all been blessed by lectures and sermons we otherwise could not have attended. Couldn't this simply be analogous to the advent of electronic amplification in church facilities in the late nineteenth century?
The same arguments are applied to education as well. Are there not great benefits to an online education? Consider the recent years of growing homeschool movements, especially those of the "classical" designation. Whatever weaknesses parents might have found in the choices of their local brick-and-mortar schools (public or private), online schools have offered a way for students to learn under some of the most qualified instructors in the country. Parents could "transcend" their bodies and their physical location to find excellent teachers.
In light of the battery of covid shutdowns, however, many brick-and-mortar Christian schools now find themselves forced to contend with a new global market of online schools. Parents who chose their local school for years have now had the economic opportunity cost of -doing so increased by orders of magnitude. A literal utopia of classical learning options has opened to them, a placeless place where excellent faculty can teach from nowhere and everywhere. Those parents who have historically been committed to their local Christian school are increasingly being confronted with a question: "Why attend a local school (with potentially weaker instructors) that costs more than an online Christian academy (with excellent faculty)?"
A Bit of Pessimism
Such questions arise when people are faced with the accelerated disintegration of our cultural values. Many parents have been forced to choose between two repugnant options: send your children to your local Christian school masked and vaxed, or keep them shut up in your home for an indefinite period of online education—as well as online church attendance. It may not be obvious to some that both options seem rather advantageous to the State. But it should be obvious to all that both options are advantageous to the devils. Moving these traditions online isn't bad simply because "Big Tech" can monitor and surveil everything we do, see, hear, and say. It goes deeper than that.
A bit of pessimism, as Roger Scruton has taught, can be put to good use here. Indeed, a healthy social order depends upon some prophetic institution to be the organ of conservative reason, tempering whatever optimistic movement might destroy its own capital. Any prophet worth his salt has shown us this, from Moses to Jeremiah to Sophocles. And Plato's warning came long ago, that all technology costs us something, giving with one hand some new thing and taking away with another some part of our humanity.
In the last century, the voices crying in the wilderness were not silent about the effects of the electronic age and the digital deluge that followed. Though some of us may find solutions to our current problems of schooling and church, we ought to temper the ebullient expectations of those who might wish to embrace online gatherings as an equal or propitious alternative to the real thing. As much as it is a great convenience to meet and assemble online, the price we pay may be much greater than we realize. Just as there are good theological reasons for Christians to be wary of going masked world without end, there are equally good reasons to view online gatherings as simply another diabolical tactic of Screwtape.
One of modern man's reductive habits is to think that education is simply imparting information. There is of course some truth to this. But if education is nothing more than transmitting information from Point A to Point B, then it follows that online school is a more than adequate educational enterprise. But education is a human thing, and human things don't always travel well, especially through digital time and space. "In the sense in which freedom is a value," writes Roger Scruton, "freedom is also an artefact, which comes into being through the mutual interaction of people." In his book, How to Be a Conservative, Scruton reminds an amnesiac world about the forgotten benefits of simply gathering in person together:
The mutual interaction is what raises us from the animal to the personal condition, enabling us to take responsibility for our lives and actions, to evaluate our goals and character, and both to understand the nature of personal fulfillment and to set about desiring and intending it. This process is crucial to the growth of the human subject, as a self-knowing agent, capable of entertaining and acting from reasons, with a developed first-person perspective and a sense of his or her reality as one subject among others. It is a process that depends upon real conflicts and real resolutions, in a shared public space where all of us are accountable for what we are and do. Anything that interferes with that process, by undermining the growth of interpersonal relations, by confiscating responsibility . . . is an evil. (150)
Devin O'Donnell is the author of The Age of Martha (Classical Academic Press, 2019), a book on leisure and education. He served as Research Editor for the Bible publishing project Bibliotheca (2015) and has taught and worked in classical learning for over 15 years. He writes for the CiRCE Institute blog and currently is the Director of Family & Community Education at The Oaks Classical Christian Academy. He continues to teach Great Books and write because he can’t help it. He is a classical hack, who came up through the manhole covers of learned society to find wisdom.
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