After 28 years, the last four spent in Missouri, I finally relinquished my right to the name ‘New Yorker’ and bought a car. Like any male, I have my fascination with motors hidden mysteriously under opaque surfaces, and the dull locomotive considerations behind my purchase were spiced up a bit by the prospect of fiddling with a manual transmission. Deep within many of us the soul remains sprawled on a floor blurting, “Vroom-vroom!”
Other consequences of the purchase didn’t sit so well, including the knowledge that my spatial experience of St. Louis would change considerably. I spent four years getting to know the city from the inside—walking, biking, busing—generally avoiding highways and the odious Star-Trek effect of feeling beamed from neighborhood to neighborhood. This newfound capacity of getting anywhere quickly—and its flip side, the security of easy escape from wherever I am—was an alarming concession to a thematic temptation of contemporary life. We are everywhere surrounded with means of getting away quickly from what’s in front of us; of living in a kind of exile from where we are.
Ours is an age of chronic disorientation, when much of the technological euphoria of the early internet days has given way to weariness, anxiety, and cynicism. There is much talk of slowing down and living off the grid and of a technological detox. The phenomenon evokes many words: displacement, disengagement, alienation. I call it ‘self-exile.’ I like the imagery of exile because it captures the literal physicality of the experience and also because it helps us to appreciate the alternative, which I designate as ‘environment.’ My argument is that Catholics can best avoid and undermine this self-exile if we understand our own counterculture in terms of reestablishing true environments. Moreover, a proper understanding of what an environment is, and why it has spiritual worth, will help us differentiate ourselves from some of the other, secular critics of self-exile.
Catholics must be wary of reducing spiritual health to some natural simplicity, which is nothing but Rousseauian romanticism. Urban cafes are haunted by the shaggy-and-gray-haired hippie who, all in the same breath, bemoans hookup culture, consumerism, technology, and institutional religion for collectively spoiling human nature. His human nature, though, is only romanticized appetite, a wish that sin were uncomplicated and lust simpler to satisfy. No Catholic, seeing the necessity of grace to perfect nature, can accept this position. Another advocate of ‘slowing things down’ is the dilettante, the lover of moods and whispered words in candle-lit rooms. His slow-paced hedonism of varied, subtle, and delayed gratification is hedonism nonetheless. Ironically, the ideological snob and the ideological redneck have essential similarities. Both associate spiritual fulfillment with a particular order of pleasures—either refined or primitive—and both hate suburban consumerism. Rousseau and Montaigne would be pleased.
Can Catholics yearn for a simpler pace of life without falling into these traps? Are we reasoning in the wrong direction, from the outside in, when we ascribe spiritual significance to the fast pace of modern life? I argue no, and my reason is the peculiar character of our relation to space and time in our age.
Let’s focus on three familiar experiences that I assume are ubiquitous: obsessive correspondence (email, texting, social media), local driving (versus a road trip), and peripheral entertainment. I choose these experiences because they are familiar and straddle our work and leisure. Often, they blur the distinction between work and leisure. Each one reinforces a life of exile, mental and physical banishment from our natural spatiotemporal environments. This exile breeds anxiety and guilt in those rare moments when we do exist here and now. This exile is not only detrimental to spiritual health; it precludes the very possibility of spiritual life. Catholics may agree with the Rousseauism on one point, that spatiotemporal presence—living here and now—is a necessary precondition of having any spiritual life at all.
Instincts are fascinating. What we do routinely, automatically, without reflection, can tell us more about ourselves than our best articulated testimonies, and there is no doubt that digital correspondence has become a collective instinct. More than eating, drinking, smoking, or taking in spectacles, carrying on delayed communication with absent people has become the filler act of preference. I use the word ‘correspondence’ for communication that is not guaranteed to be instantaneous (so I exclude audio and video calling). We bring our phones to the bathroom. We text during social events. We even look forward to social events as fodder for virtual commentary. We report to remote friends and family about what we are saying, doing, or viewing with the people around us. I sit down to grade papers or learn lines for a play, and, within minutes, I am feverishly checking my email. We are incapable of working within our immediate sphere whenever there is the possibility of responding to somebody in a distant sphere.
There appears to be a general law in force, that response is easier than initiation. For instance, how many visits to YouTube or TikTok begin with the deliberate search for one specific video? I guess that most viewers actually want to be the butt of suggestions. Reacting to suggestions is easier than generating ideas. We spout facile one-liners and thumbs up. However, digital correspondence appeals for still another reason. In a funny subplot of Michael Frayn’s novel The Tin Men, Hugh Rowe is an amateur novelist who procrastinates by writing enthusiastic blurbs for his non-existent novel. Like Walter Mitty, Rowe lives in his imagination, but he lives specifically in the future. It isn’t a mere daydream of the impossible but a precipitous habitation of a possible future, a jumping the gun. Obviously, Rowe is vain. He seeks congratulations for something he hasn’t achieved. However, one may imagine a subtler motivation, namely, approval of the activity’s worth. He wishes to protect himself from both practical and existential failure—from failure to attain his goal and from failure to form worthy goals.
There are many reasons, perhaps, why we interrupt our work and our leisure to communicate with absent people, but chief among them I think is fear; fear that we aren’t using our time well. The approval of others is a resource at our fingertips, as tempting as online encyclopedias to a researcher and online conjugators to a translator. When we know the value of our projects, or the correct historical date, or the right conjugation, we double check, we second guess, only because the resources are right there. Unable to tolerate a moment’s uncertainty when the oracle is a click away, we place ourselves in a different tense from that of our proper activity. We place ourselves in the future, like Hugh Rowe, seeking verification or validation for something we haven’t finished. The result is perpetual temporal exile from when we physically are and from when, mentally, we ought to be.
Rowe’s need for approval is a very human temptation spurred by perennial fear and uncertainty, but I think our age has introduced a novel spur, which is the uncertainty caused by social alienation. The less we have to go by, culturally, the more we look over our shoulders, wondering what other individuals make of this living business. What would other people think about the way I spend my time? This anxiety surfaces most in our leisure, which is why there’s such a market for white noise. It may not be terribly interesting, but at least it’s what everyone else is doing.
A good friend called me the other day with a new terminology she’d heard in a podcast—the words ‘road,’ ‘street,’ and ‘stroad.’ The podcast, 99% Invisible, interviewed Charles Marohn, an erstwhile traffic engineer who coined the “stroad.” From the horse’s mouth, a ‘stroad’ tries to do two things at once, and it fails at both. It tries to be both street and road.” Of course, this depends on distinguishing ‘street’ and ‘road.’ “A road,” he says, “is about moving things over distance at speed,” or, as one of the hosts puts it, “all about getting people quickly from point A to point B.” A street, meanwhile, “is a place—like where people go to shop and hang out.” Marohn compares a ‘stroad’ to a futon. This, I think, is unfair to futons, but his point is that both violate the principle of division of labor.
I found myself ill at ease with this taxonomy, and I wasn’t sure why until my friend exclaimed, “Well, it sounds like you just don’t think roads should exist!” She was right. I wasn’t contesting the disease of stroads, but I believed Marohn hadn’t drilled deep enough. The problem is the prevalence of roadways in the first place. Of course (as she observed), the ancient Romans had roads, in the sense of connective arteries, paths between towns and cities, space for long marches and merchant caravans. Nevertheless, these were nowhere near as normative as highways and thoroughfares are in the post-industrial West (especially the U.S.). A journey is one thing. Daily life is another, and daily life shouldn’t involve journeying.
As social, physical creatures, human beings depend upon physical environment for their spiritual health. It’s why we create specialized rooms for work and recreation, worship and study. Our imaginations and other moral faculties are fragile, highly dependent upon what we are physically sensing here and now (which is one crucial function of liturgy). The natural environment of ordinary life is the town, a space where fundamental activities—labor, worship, commerce, study, and recreation—are interwoven politically and culturally. Our actions as individuals require both political and cultural unification, because we are social creatures and because we are fallen creatures. Individually, in isolation from the literal communion of saints, we cannot structure and sanctify our lives.
Urban atomization reflects and reinforces spiritual atomization. A society ruled by roads, even honest roads, is one where spaces and resources are radically focused on the individual. So long as I can get to my resources, why should it matter whether I see other people doing diverse things? Why should it matter whether I pass a church on the way to the grocery store, or a butcher’s on the way to the library? Why should it matter that I pass beautiful houses on my way to the restaurant—so long as I haven’t chosen to embark on a scenic drive? If I want to see something beautiful, I can drive to the museum or the park or some wealthy neighborhood. But it does matter. It matters because an environment is not something to which I treat myself. It is something to which I surrender. A life comprised of selected, self-oriented environments becomes selfish, fragmented, myopic. It cultivates the illusion that I am fundamentally capable of holding, within myself, the model of a spiritually ordered life; a model that will dictate my environmental choices. The view is recognizably protestant—that my own spiritual center, my conscience, presides over and above any institutional or cultural affiliation. It is also recognizably capitalist. I am a shopper, not a pupil, of my environment, which comforts (or supports) but does not educate me.
Whenever I enter a highway within the city, I experience something akin to leaving a project for an email, a feeling of displacement. However, on the road, the displacement is spatial. I have not simply changed environments. I am in a limbo between environments. Of course, I am physically in an environment (a long gray stretch of bordered concrete populated by anonymous motorists), but my mind is elsewhere. One can rarely be on a highway the way one is on a street. It is like trying to find ambiance on an elevator.
The human need for sensory input is itself strong evidence of our dependence upon environment. People do, of course, stimulate themselves in order to keep away from the unwanted underbelly of silence—restlessness, doubt, fear of the mysterious—but the desire for an edifying sensory field is natural and good. Even productive silence requires a more or less structured environment. When people don’t place themselves in a natural environment of well-ordered sights and sounds, they compensate with quantity. Rampant screens, headphones, earbuds, etc. all express the false identification of environment with noise. Unfortunately, most of what is seen and heard is not able (or designed) to claim full attention. The music is too boring, the videos too short, or else the public venue itself feels like a distraction from the private entertainment (I’m trying to listen to Taylor Swift, but there’s a cafe in the background).
Varied, unrelenting noise habituates us to the fragmentation of our attention, presenting yet another case of self-exile. Imagine I’m reading in a cafe, music is playing on the radio, and a man over at the other table is wearing air pods and playing chess on his smartphone … Where exactly am I relative to him? In what sense is there? Do we actually share an environment? Here the exile isn’t strictly mental. Exclusive sensory fields create exclusive physical environments, even within a shared geographic space.
Maybe all this is problematic, but is it really a new problem? “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n,” declaims Milton’s Satan. For every texting, highway-driving, and air-podded individual, torn in a million directions by competing stimulations, isn’t there another, sober and watchful, able to focus on the here and now?
Saint John Damascene, in De fide orthodoxa, argues that fear has “six varieties,” which are “shrinking [laziness], shame, disgrace, consternation, panic” and “anxiety.” This subdivision arises when we define fear as a kind of blasphemy, the expectation that we, like God, foresee the future. Each variety of fear expresses some pain associated with our failure to foresee the unforeseeable. Laziness shrinks from the possibility of overwhelming labor, while consternation and panic arise when imagination essays to anticipate the future by painting possibilities (especially worst-case scenarios). “Consternation,” for example, “is fear originating in some huge product of the imagination.” Fear is the desire for control. It is no coincidence, then, that our age of anxiety is an age of technology, an age of attempts to control. Hatred of weakness and uncertainty can only exist where there is the expectation of control and certainty. Nihilism is a descendent of rationalism, because only the man who expects to know everything will throw up his hands in despair that he knows nothing.
Our technological exile from the here-and-now produces two kinds of people who are superficially very different: the pushover and the egoist. The pushover is easily torn in multiple directions and, if he has any time at all to think, may exhibit Damascene’s symptoms of fear, especially anxiety. He is fragmented like his sensory field. The egoist, on the other hand, treats everything around him as technology. He constructs for himself a psychological environment based on the exclusive categorization of everything around him as either useful or un-useful. He may be open-minded, of course, recognizing that what is useless to him may be useful to another, but he personally will have no truck with the un-useful. His own projects and concerns are the massive center of his personal universe, and whatever cannot be sucked into orbit has no relevance.
The pushover lacks attention. Like the spirited warrior class of Plato’s Republic, he will follow whatever is the dominant energy around him. Such a man has no time for streets, solitude, uncertainty, or silence, so long as louder, swifter things compete for his attention. The egoist, meanwhile, will select his environment based on a self-oriented criterion of relevance. Things do not claim his attention; he claims theirs. He, too, has no time for streets, solitude, silence, or any place and time requiring his passivity. The pushover is incapable of intelligent work, the egoist of intelligent leisure. Spiritually, the pushover has no individuality, while the egoist has only individuality. That is, the pushover lacks any core strength to retain what is good, while the egoist lacks any vision of what is good beyond his nose. Technology promises to satisfy the peculiar needs of each—the pushover’s need for stimulation, the egoist’s for control.
Pushover and egoist are really no more than faces of the romantic and the rationalist, Werther and Gradgrind, whose respective faults are spinelessness and myopia. The one has no will, the other a shriveled will. A true solution to the problem of self-exile must avoid both extremes.
Here in St. Louis, the Traditionalist Catholic community boasts a majority of cultural and intellectual converts, young men and women who have discovered (or rediscovered) Catholicism in the course of their attempts to solve other cultural, historical, moral, and artistic puzzles. Despite a great diversity of backgrounds and preoccupations, they share a distinguishing thirst for environment. This thirst shows itself in the desire for structured activity, in the desire for form, in the tendency to objectify our actions by asking, “How do I express myself well?” Not, “How do I express myself?” These young Catholics seek excellence (e.g., how to speak well) over acceptance (how to find people who accept the way that they speak). They evince an attention to detail, in dress and dining, that is structured and structuring, conformative and creative. This two-way relationship to our physical surroundings is key to what I mean by ‘environment.’
Environments are created; they are deliberate, principled sculptures of our physical circumstances. When I paint my house, or set my table, I am doing something artistic with the raw materials of survival. Having created the environment, however, I enter it. I accept its terms of influence and exclusivity. I have chosen that this environment, and no other, will frame my actions. This spirit of patient commitment to a particular physical framework is directly opposed to the spirit of self-exile, which can handle neither the exclusivity nor the passivity of existing only here and now. The passivity in question is formal; it’s not the passivity of inaction but of receptivity to a concrete context. There is no time for productive creativity when one hops from context to context, like a man crossing a stream, fearful that no single stone can bear his weight. When we sit still and entrust ourselves to one exclusive place and time, we make an act of faith (however intelligent) that this environment is adequate to our project. If our project is life itself—raising a family, studying, cultivating a career—we can appreciate the weight of the trust. But there is no alternative. Short of trusting an environment, we are back in the predicaments of the pushover and the egoist, either too distracted or too self-serving to give ourselves patiently to our surroundings.
These days, a good portion of the leisured population sees the theoretical value of shutting our laptops or programming our phones to inform us—like prudent lovers—when we’re relying too heavily on them. In order to progress from resolution to habit, however, we can’t be naïve about the difficulties that face us. We’re not only up against fun and dopamine; we’re also up against the terror of risk, of claiming one little perch in this vast, pluralistic chaos of competing opinions, and staying put. Nothing runs more against the grain of a crusader spirit. We would like to be able to dash in all directions, converting barbarians and slaying dragons. We are soldiers in the army of Christ, but we are foot soldiers, not fighter pilots. Foot soldiers stand their ground.
Staying put means avoiding the rationalist temptation of reducing Catholicism to a list of doctrines, an intellectual position easily bitten off and digested by the individual for his own private sustenance. Being Catholic means living in a Catholic environment, where those doctrines, like seeds, have room and time to grow. This environment cannot be the unqualified ‘world,’ because the world, crippled by original sin, is hostile to the truth. “In the world you shall have distress” (Jn 16:33). A Catholic environment is a deliberately constructed place where sacred and profane beauty, liturgy and art, work, leisure, study, and communal fellowship are all modeled after the Heavenly Jerusalem. This should not be an act of vanity, a pharisaical wish to pray loudly. It should arise, first, from the desire to glorify God, and, second, from the sense of our own need to be influenced, of our abiding dependence upon form and structure, of ourselves as cultural animals. We cannot respect this dependence while flitting from place to place.
Let us put down our phones to pick up something of value, maybe an instrument for playing music worth hearing. If we feel the fear that projects may fail and hours be wasted, let’s resist the urge to seek validation and, instead, learn to laugh a bit at ourselves. If we do fail, from one moment to the next, at least we will fail somewhere, like a traveler who remembers where and when he lost his way and can retrace his steps. In self-exile, we are permanently lost, because we are permanently at odds with our environment, strangers to the here-and-now. The age of self-exile is unacceptable for sons of a God Who chose, out of all time and space, to be born one particular night in a stable in Bethlehem.
