Human Conversion in The Digital Age

Imagination, Memory, & The Digital Catastrophe | Pt. 1

This post is the introduction from the much longer post that launched this Substack: Human Conversion in The Digital Age: e-Platforms, Orthobros, & The Winsome Wars. I’ve gained a fair amount of new subscribers since then and have decided to break that post up into standalone pieces for a more manageable digital reading experience. This post is a good introduction to what Silver Door is about: bringing attention to the intersection between religion, technology, and art.

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Let God arise, let His enemies be scattered, and let them that hate Him flee from before His face. —Psalm LXVII

Among the credentialed class, it has become commonplace to hear the words “problematic” and “Bible” in the same breath. A glance through the books of the Old Testament quickly reveals why, not unreasonably, a deracinated, religiously illiterate individual would come to this conclusion.

You'll often hear imprecatory psalms cited as proof of the unacceptability of Scripture as a moral foundation for contemporary society. “Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.” That’s not very nice.

And “That’s not nice! That’s stupid!” was essentially the rallying cry of the new atheists in the early aughts. The seemingly urbane and rhetorically formidable Christopher Hitchens spearheaded this crew. A man who for some years trotted around the globe like a gleefully outraged Santa Claus, pulling from his velvety bag of insults one whiskey-infused lashing after another for whichever unsuspecting religious person had the misfortune of existing in his evangelical orbit.

The Bible is stupid and evil—more and more Americans, on the one hand, softened by the mass affluence of the 90s and, on the other hand, hardened by the full-frontal assault of a supercharged Simpsonesque irony, tended to agree. “Hey, this Bible really is filled with all sorts of unsavory characters, Homer!”

As a 90s kid raised in a household with a social worker mom who self-identified as a recovering Catholic, and an agnostic dad with no real religious background who taught toddlers with special needs, I was raised in something resembling the ascendant morality; this is a set of beliefs which researcher Christian Smith calls Moralistic Therapeutic Deism: Be nice, don’t judge, tell the truth, and of course pursue happiness—whatever that means. Oh, and if there is a God, it’s certainly not a God who talks to people or makes it rain frogs. This is a simplification, but I think a more or less fair one.

To be fair again, there are worse belief systems than MTD. My parents are thoughtful individuals who have spent most of their adult lives working with the underprivileged and inconvenient. They also raised two children in a loving, stable home and are upright, integrated community members by all other traditional measures of civil and familial duty. For that, I am eternally grateful.

Though we didn’t go to church, neither of my parents were atheists, and discussions surrounding religion were from a respectful anthropological point of view (both are former archeologists) with perhaps the occasional off-colored joke. We watched a lot of Monty Python.

Thankfully, I was blessed with a father who had an abiding love for old books. The Brothers Karamazov is his favorite novel, and I have a vivid memory of my father howling with laughter as he recalled the story from that novel of an atheist philosopher who, upon dying, was astonished to find himself in the afterlife, and sentenced by God to walk a quadrillion kilometers before he could enter paradise. Indignant, he laid down for a thousand years before finally giving up and walking the distance to receive his reward (I would find out upon reading the book that later in the story, the atheist declares that the walk was worth it for a few moments in paradise).

Our living room bookcase was lined with beautiful hardcover Heritage books, from Livy to Beowulf to Melville, which I was encouraged to peruse. My dad read me The Lord of the Rings trilogy as a bedtime story multiple times. By today’s standards, this would make him some species of right-wing extremist. My mother is also an artist, and we grew up with a ceramics studio in our garage. Growing up in a small town in Appalachia, I had a relatively cultured upbringing.

One Christmas as a young teen, I tore the glimmering wrapping paper off of what I surmised was some hefty tome. Revealed was The Complete Works of William Blake. I had been reading big, old books for a year or two and had quietly supposed this made me rather clever. But nothing I had read prepared me for the landmines I would stumble over that Christmas vacation, such as:

The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.

The eye altering, alters all.

If a thing loves, it is infinite.

Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.

I didn’t know what the hell any of it meant, but I knew it set my brain on fire. Possibly more. Within a few short months, I had converted—to what exactly, I’m not sure. But I secretly determined to become a poet of some renown, as you do, and embarked on an extensive reading list, in large part guided by my newfound master, Blake:

The stolen and perverted writings of Homer and Ovid, of Plato and Cicero, which all men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible; but when the New Age is at leisure to pronounce, all will be set right, and those grand works of the more ancient, and consciously and professedly Inspired men will hold their proper rank, and the Daughters of Memory shall become the Daughters of Inspiration. Shakespeare and Milton were both curb’d by the general malady and infection from the silly Greek and Latin slaves of the sword.

Rouse up, O Young Men of the New Age! Set your foreheads against the ignorant hirelings! For we have hirelings in the Camp, the Court, and the University, who would, if they could, for ever depress mental, and prolong corporeal war…We do not want either Greek or Roman models if we are but just and true to our own Imaginations, those Worlds of Eternity in which we shall live for ever, in Jesus our Lord.

(From the preface to Blake’s poem Milton).

First, I dashed through Paradise Lost in an unreflective fit of enthusiasm. I was mostly bored. I tried Shakespeare next, but in an instinctive act of ego-preservation, I decided to hold off for a spell. But after that, I made my way to what Blake called “The Great Code of Art,” The Bible.

Unlike Blake, who taught himself Greek, Latin, and Hebrew and who painstakingly crafted his own complex mythology, I was merely swept up in the thundering, richly imaged proclamations of the Hebrew prophets and the other poetic books of the OT, sifted through King James English: “He setteth an end to darkness, and searcheth out all perfection: the stones of darkness, and the shadow of death.” (Job 28:3). Very metal.

Job Rebuked by His Friends by William Blake

Compared to MTD, my covert albeit ramshackle poetic enterprise provided a meaningful mission with the bonus that it allowed me to play the part of the prince in disguise, a temporarily satisfying form of perverse private boasting. Most high school students weren’t reading Blake and those boring poetry bits of the OT. But like it never occurred to me that I wasn’t the only high school student writing bad poems, little did I know I was certainly not unique in being swept up in the current Zeitgeist, which, unbeknownst to everyone, was soon coming to a close.

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Imagination, Memory, & The Digital Catastrophe

In my senior year of high school, I bought a t-shirt with an illustration of Albert Einstein on the back, decked out in Hawaiian regalia, complete with sunglasses and a ukulele. At the bottom was a quote from this obviously super cool outsider: “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” a declaration that could have come straight from the mouth of my visionary master Blake. Now is not the time to get into the weeds of the Blakeian worldview; it’s enough to say that through his illuminated manuscripts, Blake saw himself battling against what he considered the deadening and dehumanizing effects of an increasingly mechanized, calculating worldview (see Industrial age London) ushered in as he saw it through such heralds as Newton and Descartes.

His weapon of choice against these “Dark Satanic mills” was the self-centered Imagination: “All Forms are Perfect in the Poets mind. but these are not Abstracted nor Compounded from Nature but are from Imagination…” and he saw the Hebrew Prophets as the examples par excellence of men of the Imagination, emboldened through inspiration to confront the powers that be in defense of the downtrodden. I thought joining this battle was obviously way cooler than being nice and not judging people.

In his mind-bending book Human, Forever, James Poulos juxtaposes conceptions of imagination against those of memory. He notes that after the fall of the Third Reich, the ascendant American Empire made it clear that the German people's collective and personal memory must be scrubbed. The heart of Nazism was, in turn, traced back to fascism, a sufficiently nebulous and nefarious category spawned in the murky, patriarchal past. Umberto Ecco associated fascism with “the cult of tradition.”

In its place grew a new, seemingly interconnected world led by America and made possible through the imagination-centered electric media like the television, a world Marshal McCluhan famously called the global village. At the vanguards was Disney. The company's fantastical and sterile world, a quasi-mythological stand-in for America, could safely be disseminated across the globe. Yes, we see Mufasa die. But we are not shown the blood.

After the Disney princesses and their Hollywood collaborators seized control of the means of imaginative production, foreign lands were helpless before the electrically-infused American way of life, which came flooding in to fill refrigerators, dresser drawers, and garages, all while emptying and rerouting bank accounts.

In 1999, Time Magazine chose German-born Albert Einstein as the Person of the Century. Back to my old t-shirt, the full Einstein quote reads:

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.

After WWII, Einstein became a leading figure in the World Government Movement, his tongue-out photograph serving as one of the emblems of Imagination, Inc. and its seeming triumph over the oppressive and, possibly worse, stuffy old world.

Photo of Albert Einstein taken on his birthday in 1951 by Arthur Sasse

In The Gutenberg Galaxy McCluhan stresses that The Reformation would not have been possible without the printing press, setting the sacred word equally before all believers without mediation from church, university, or monastery. One of the many transformations the mass replication of texts would unleash was the formation of more homogeneous cultures. A good deal of idiosyncrasy and oddity was left on the printing press room floor. At the same time, part and parcel of the Gutenberg revolution was the inevitable overwhelming flowering of competing interpretations as individuals gained access to knowledge and traditions from which the old scribal order had once shielded them.

In the 20th century, the electric medium took a world conditioned by print and turned it into Global Village Studios, where movies and TV quickly overpowered the old stories that had been gutted of much of their strangeness, texture and horror—the middle realm of angels and demons—through centuries of emphasis on the printed word and its accompanying visual-bias.

(During his life, it was said that John Milton’s Paradise Lost was on the bedside table of every landlady and shopkeeper in England. This is likely an exaggeration, but it makes a point. In the hands of a master of the print medium (17th cent.), the extra-Biblical account of an angelic rebellion before creation was too good to resist, despite having no scriptural backing and the apparent effort involved in engaging with Milton’s titanic verse. Now imagine trying to convince some Joe off the street from the 1960s to read Paradise Lost for two hours instead of watching 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s preposterous.)

Paradoxically, that very strangeness propped up the old stories and made them comprehensible and compelling to your average Tom and Sally. As many are now relearning in the digital age, the world is far more bizarre and occupied than the comparatively uniform straitjacket of print or pre-digital electric media would have us believe or imagine. Although I wouldn’t recommend it, you can see in the internet demon, Loab, a precursor to a phenomenon that will becoming increasingly common as we “play” with AI.

Poulos points out that digital phenomena share many characteristics once reserved for spiritual forces, such as being in two places at once, passing through walls, or inhabiting various household items. He also sees the worst as having already happened. I graduated high school in 2007, the year the first iPhone hit the market. That year, Poulous says, without realizing it, “we all became cyborgs.” Instead of providing the means for total dominance, the digital "betrayed us...against our faith that our imagination was everything highest, truest, and best in ourselves." What particular danger does our technology pose to our human being? In short, a crippling existential doubt in the face of an unfeeling, unquestioning, unsleeping machine memory, exact and unfleshed in its recall and propagated by its hosts’ insatiable appetite for “social” media. Through this silicon sieve must pass all of recorded human tradition.

Poulos points out that while ancient and medieval people did not have a strict separation between imagination and memory, by today’s conventional conceptions, they held human memory, not imagination, in awe. He compares Thomas Aquinas, that great master of synthesis, with Einstein as the genius of an age. Even his brainiac friends were dumbstruck by his ability to recall anything he read or experienced and integrate it into his mind.

In his criminally neglected book The Discarded Image, C.S. Lewis writes from the heart of the electric age:

In a savage community, you absorb your culture, in part unconsciously, from participation in the immemorial pattern of behaviour, and in part by word of mouth, from the old men of the tribe. In our own society most knowledge depends, in the last resort, on observation. But the Middle Ages depended predominantly on books. Though literacy was of course far rarer then than now, reading was in one way a more important ingredient of the total culture.

Insert your favorite depressing comment about literacy here. On the Middle Ages he continues:

They are indeed very credulous of books. They find it hard to believe that anything an old auctour has said is simply untrue. And they inherit a very heterogeneous collection of books; Judaic, Pagan, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoical, Primitive Christian, Patristic. Or (by a different classification) chronicles, epic poems, sermons, visions, philosophical treatises, satires. Obviously their auctours will contradict one another. They will seem to do so even more often if you ignore the distinction of kinds and take your science impartially from the poets and philosophers; and this the medievals very often did in fact though they would have been well able to point out, in theory, that poets feigned. If, under these conditions, one has also a great reluctance flatly to disbelieve anything in a book, then here there is obviously both an urgent need and a glorious opportunity for sorting out and tidying up. All the apparent contradictions must be harmonised. A Model must be built which will get everything in without a clash; and it can do this only by becoming intricate, by mediating its unity through a great, and finely ordered, multiplicity. This task, I believe, the Medievals would in any case have undertaken.

Are we not each, to one extent or another, undertaking such a project? Instead of a “very heterogeneous collection of books,” are we not inheritors of a very heterogeneous collection of not just books, but images, videos, podcasts, tweets, apps, scientific & political theories, etc.? The once monolithic Disney is now just another streaming service flowing into the collective imaginarium. A robust and inherently uncontrollable digital pluralism has usurped the uniformity of the electric-age. Naturally, having passed through modernity, we are less credulous of authors and texts (see: content creators and content) but confronted with the dazzling array of raw data from all manner of traditions foreign to our own (if we are so privileged, or burdened, depending on your viewpoint, to have one), we must filter and cohere numerous fields of knowledge somehow.

Well, how do we do this?

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Next we’ll look at the relationship between online personalities and the online institutions that provide them with access to our attention in Pt. II: e-Platforms & Christian Youtubers.