Sitting in the Dark

Learning to See into Reality

Air France’s Flight 447 on 31 May 2009 began normally and ended terribly. I’m told it’s not easy to crash an Airbus 330 because of a complicated combination of hardware and software that interfaces pilot-plane interactions. Still, the black box recording of that doomed flight revealed that when all three pilots were faced with a problem not accommodated by the aeroplane’s automation, they had no idea what to do to fix it. The interface denied them the possibility of learning how to adapt to a pressing set of unforeseen circumstances. As a result, that enormous airborne tin can was transformed into a monstrous, plummeting deathtrap. Before the plane crashed and killed all 228 people on board, the last words of Captain Pierre-Céderic Bonin, who took charge of the situation and made it worse, were, “But what’s happening?”

What is happening? We live in an age of metacrisis. This is a term for a trend that has been in the works for some time. It’s not that we’re facing just a few trivial difficulties; rather, we’re looking at a simultaneous combination of gigantic, possibly catastrophic crises. War, rumours of war, emigration, the politics of inundation, the politics of incompetence, liberalism twisting and convulsing in postcovidian death throes, democracy failing, policy confusions, religious conflicts, irreligious conflicts, contests around what we’re doing to the environment, questions around what the environment is doing to us, and so much more. 

Perhaps I’m reading the situation differently than you are. But it seems clear that many of us don’t feel so settled and safe hurtling through the world in this plummeting civilisational flying machine. These crises range from the personal to the massively geopolitical. Our problems are material, environmental, economic, psychological, political, spiritual, and religious. “Can you tell me what’s wrong with me, doctor?” the Zeitgeist might say to the metaphysical diagnosticians of our time, quivering and nervous, unable to decide which symptoms to disclose first.

Perhaps the formal cause of the metacrisis is modernity itself, which is rooted in a certain sort of consciousness—or perhaps unconsciousness—that frames the world in a certain way to prevent real remedies from being known even as real problems escalate. Modernity has been an interface between us and the world, like the automation of that Air France Airbus. Like the interface of that aircraft, it has become a sort of feedback denial system, preventing the world from getting to us. In particular, modernity has tended to de-halo the world. One term for this, although perhaps misleading, is disenchantment. Since the Enlightenment, the divine and spiritual order has been regarded with a skepticism that suggests not quite that there is no supernatural order, but that contact with this order is no longer standard. It has become just one more option on the modern interface.

Unfortunately, since most of us were born into this de-haloing, perception-shaping system, born into a certain pathology of normalcy, it’s been difficult to see that it is not the reality, but the mask that hides reality, or the filter that keeps a certain richer view of reality hidden. Like that aeroplane’s automation, the visible stuff has hidden the invisible stuff from us. And our failure to attend to the invisible stuff has spelt doom.

Airline safety expert Earl Wiener identifies this critical law in the context of aviation safety: “Digital devices tune out small errors while creating opportunities for large errors.” In other words, automation may tidy up ordinary messes, but it’ll do so by ignoring all other escalating muddles. I am more than a little tempted to describe a whole host of ways that modernity functions like digital automation. It would be well worth exploring, for instance, how each of its code words—individualism, experimentation, liberation, liberalism, representation, rights, subjectivity, toleration, the nation-state, and so on—have proven poor guides to finding meaning. Nevertheless, I want to focus here only on one tiny little trend, which is, without a doubt, linked to the artifice of modernity. The trend, evident even in my opening example of aircraft piloting automation, has to do with how we have technologized our lives.

I’m not here to make an irrational blanket judgment on technology. I am well aware of the fact that man is, by nature, driven to develop and work with tools. We are, by divine design, tool-using creatures. There are almost no aspects of our lives that won’t be, in often very positive ways, reliant upon some or other kind of technology. I don’t think we can live without technology. But what is curious to me, and what I want to highlight, is a certain severe disproportion in how we have technologized our lives. We apply technological thinking even where it is not or should not be needed. One obvious example is the building I work in. 

Designed and built with no thought given to natural ventilation and light, it has such appallingly poor airflow, and even when the world outside is bathed in the most glorious summer light, it is very dark inside without the lights on. Of course, the building is good for quite a lot—it shelters us from the blazing sun and torrential rain. But because it was designed as a shield against natural air and light, certain additional technological interventions have been unavoidable, and air conditioning and electrical light have needed to be added. This architectural deficit is even more problematic because I live in a country, South Africa, with one of the most pronounced energy crises in the world.

I think it is a mistake to cut ourselves off from contact with the world with this disproportionate emphasis on technology. And in addition to this world-alienation, I am concerned mainly with the tendency to render ourselves increasingly passive. One day recently, I arrived at work to find that the power was off. Some of my colleagues were sitting around in the foyer of that dark building doing absolutely nothing. They weren’t even talking to each other—they just sat there. One of them smiled at me and shrugged. I wondered if everyone had been unplugged. A question popped into my head: Why would a failure of electrical power throw so many people into a state approximating mental and physical paralysis?

Later, I realized that little moment echoed a certain Kierkegaardian insight. Kierkegaard says that when we suffer a loss, it may seem only at first that the loss causes despair. But this is not necessarily the case. He suggests that often we mask our despair by being overly attached to certain things. When we lose those things, the mask is stripped away to reveal a despair that was always there, albeit in an unrecognized form. What Kierkegaard suggests by this is not that it is bad to own things or to rely on things but that we may very well deceive ourselves by relying too much on what we claim to own. Disproportion is still the issue. What is needed is honesty, stemming from a desire to seek out the truth rather than explain what happens in a way that simply reflects well on us.

It seems to me many of our technologies can function like masks. In the case of finding my colleagues sitting around doing nothing in that dark foyer, the mask was gone. It made me wonder if perhaps I’ve become accustomed to thinking I’m being active when, in fact, I have succumbed to a passivity that has simply been masked by the tools I use. It is not difficult to look busy when sitting behind a computer screen. It is not difficult to feel busy when answering a million emails. But is what we busy ourselves with really reflective of the full potential of our agency in the world? What does any particular technological mask reveal when it has been stripped away? 

I think of Jean-Charles Nault’s diagnosis of our time as possessed by what the desert father Evagrius of Ponticus called the noonday devil: acedia. The common translation of the term is sloth, but it doesn’t get the full import of its meaning quite right. Acedia is an inattention to love, a failure to appreciate life itself, and a resistance to the deeper, truer things. Evagrius describes the monk in the grip of the noonday devil as constantly distracted, unable even to pray because he cannot be fully present. Is this what modernity’s technological frame encourages? Is this what the interface masks? I think the answer is yes even if we would need to take the trouble individually to look at our lives to figure out how this plays out.

I’m noticing that the technological realm, the typical media ecology we inhabit, sides with rendering us more and more passive, more and more oblivious to how we may be distracting ourselves from the deeper things. Of course, there is a passive component to our being. We are dependent beings through and through. We are dependent upon God, others, and the world. But, once again, it is the disproportion that bugs me when I consider our dependency on technologies. It bugs me to think about the tools we tend to use every day and how they side, by my analysis, with taking our ability to act away from us. I don’t mean only that they stop us from doing things ourselves but that they encourage so much distraction, not to mention a fixation on details that may not be so important. We let this happen, too. We submit ourselves to the tools we expect to serve us. They are often our masters when we want them to be our servants. I’m reminded of something Charles Foster writes in his brilliant book Being a Human (2021):

We walk in a year what an Upper Palaeolithic hunter would walk in a day, and wonder why our bodies are like putty. We devote to TV brains designed for constant alertness against wolves, and wonder why there's a nagging sense of dissatisfaction. We agree to be led by self-serving sociopaths who wouldn’t survive a day in the forest, and wonder why our societies are wretched and our self-esteem low. We, who work best in families and communities of up to 150, elect to live in vast conglomerations, and wonder why we feel alienated. We have guts built for organic berries, organic elk and organic mushrooms, and we wonder why those guts rebel at organophosphates and herbicides. We’re homeotherms, and wonder why our whole metabolism goes haywire when we delegate our thermoregulation to buildings. We’re wild creatures, designed for constant ecstatic contact with earth, heaven, trees and gods, and wonder why lives built on the premise that we are mere machines, and spent in centrally heated, electronically lit greenhouses, seem sub-optimal. We have brains shaped and expanded, very expensively, for relationality, and wonder why we’re unhappy in an economic structure built on the assumption that we're walled islands who do not and should not bleed into one another. We are people who need stories as we need air, and whose only available story is the dreary, demeaning dialectic of the free market.

Foster’s examples here point to decisions made, mostly by other people whom we have never met, about how technology might ‘help’ us. Something similar was noted by G.K. Chesterton years ago—a century ago, in fact—in a series of articles written for Vanity Fair under the title The New Renascence: Thoughts on the Structure of the Future (1920–1921). You can tell we live in an age of decadence when (almost) everything is outsourced. We pay others to fight for us, entertain us, and rule over us. What would it mean to be less passive, to be more conscious, to be more creative, to do more things for ourselves? What would it mean if we were to govern ourselves instead of simply outsourcing our lives to our media? It may be cheap to own a slave but it’s still cheaper to be a slave. It is cheaper and more costly at the same time.

What should we do about all of this? I return to my own life, and especially to thinking about South Africa. Global signs of the metacrisis play out in very noticeable ways here in the form of what people talk about as state failure. We’ve had seriously corrupt politicians run the show for a long time. One of the noticeable consequences of this is that various state-run enterprises, each of which is technological in its own way, have become progressively worse and worse. I’ve noted the power failures that’ll leave people sitting around waiting, doing nothing. But there is, as there always is, another side to this. More and more people in South Africa have been waking up, thanks to so much technological failure, to their capacity to act, to pay attention to what is valuable, to do things for themselves. The number of South Africans moving away from relying on government services in the last few years has been staggering. There’s been a shift from public education, electricity, healthcare, policing, public housing, and several other things. Privatisation is the watchword, but perhaps the word is also a mask that functions, like technology, as yet another idea that blinds us to our real situation. The principle is a fundamentally ethical one, captured in a simple question: What are we responsible for? To begin with, we are responsible for what we attend to and how we attend to it. We can seek humility and stand in awe of the many gifts given to us in the world around us.

I am not suggesting anything like Luddism. I am suggesting, rather, that it is worth taking time to wonder if and how the tools we use may be masking something, and especially whether they may distract us from the deeper things. I’m suggesting that we can become more mindful, more alert, to our own capacity to act. It is quite instructive to notice when we should pick our tools up or put them down, just so that the mere force of technological habit, by sheer automation, does not have the final say over the shape of our lives. It is helpful to notice whether we have allowed ourselves to be conditioned to believe that what our tools demand of us is what matters most just so that we can alter how we operate in the world. The media guru Marshall McLuhan put what I’m trying to say better than I can: “There is no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”

We can change our minds instead of sitting around in the dark. In fact, I’m just here to remind you, and me too, that every time we use a tool, every time we submit ourselves to certain technological mediations, we are making a choice. Maybe we forget that we are making a choice, as we assume too easily that we must merely conform to what is handed to us. But this is not how it is. Evagrius would say that combating the noonday devil means persevering in what is good, including in prayer; taking time to meditate on scripture, as we realign ourselves to what is ultimate; repenting of those mental and physical habits that cast a shadow of unreality over all we think and do; and labouring with greater intentionality. We are not under any obligation to go the way of that doomed Airbus, if a dramatic metaphor may be allowed. This is something Chesterton reminds us of in one of the best critiques of modernity out there, from his book The Outline of Sanity (1928), and it is with this little thought that I want to leave you:

The aim of human polity is human happiness. . . . There is no obligation on us to be richer, or busier, or more efficient, or more productive, or more progressive, or in any way worldlier or wealthier, if it does not make us happier. Mankind has as much right to scrap its machinery and live on the land, if he really likes it better, as any man has to sell his old bicycle and go for a walk, if he likes that better. It is obvious that the walk will be slower; but he has no duty to be fast.

Duncan Reyburn is an Associate Professor in the School of the Arts at the University of Pretoria. He is the author of Seeing Things as They Are: G. K. Chesterton and the Drama of Meaning.

Art by Paul Klee.