Too Little and Too Much
How the Restored Gospel Invites us to Expand How We Think About Morality in the Twenty-First Century
In a spare apartment on the fifteenth floor of a nondescript building in a large city in the Midwest, a young man who recently returned from his mission sits in front of a computer, contemplating whether to navigate to a website he knows will feature pornography. Meanwhile, just a half mile away, a brother he met that day at church scrolls through his Instagram feed, feeling for the umpteenth time both incredulous and dully jealous at how so many of his contemporaries can seem so happy and look so good, even as he knows there are other, better, things he could do with his time. And, finally, in the next apartment over from him, a woman he knows is posting pictures from a recent trip to a different social media site, careful that her hair, skin, bathing suit, and smile look just right, hoping that these photos will capture the attention of both those she knows and those she never will.
As members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we likely recognize that each of the situations above entails a moral dimension. I wonder, however, if our moral analysis brings too much pressure to those who need less and too little to those who need to feel more. But to arrive at this understanding, we will first need to examine three seemingly disparate threads. Thus, this essay will begin by examining the film The Social Network, then it will turn to an example of prophetic discourse related to pornography, before finally turning to talking about Doctrine and Covenants section 89. Once we have laid down those three threads individually, we will pick them back up and attempt to weave them together into demonstrating this idea: that our view of morality can broaden so that we can more fully understand the ethics of systems and not just individuals and, hopefully, thereby work to make the world a better place.
Thread I: The Social Network
Released in 2010—and routinely hailed as one of the twenty-first century’s greatest films so far—The Social Network dramatizes the rise of Facebook. Through a script written by Aaron Sorkin, the film nominally follows the early career arc of Mark Zuckerberg but more broadly traces the birth of the digital revolution that Zuckerberg and others midwifed into the world. Thus, the story is not so much a biopic as a morality play examining the origins and motivations of the Silicon Valley culture writ large.
The movie succeeds largely because of two of its most prominent features: its screenplay and its star. First, Sorkin is at his very best here. Even his achievements in The West Wing and his adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird pale in comparison to the subtle moral shading and memorable dialogue he penned for this movie. It has been said that an artist sometimes rises to the magnitude of the challenge facing her, and here Sorkin meets the moment beautifully: capturing the essence of an age and a movement in a mere two hours.
The movie's other defining feature is the performance of Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg. What strikes the viewer about Eisenberg’s performance is the degree to which he succeeds in personifying the movie's overarching thesis: that the twenty-first century technology companies care about money, influence, fame, and reputation, but not noticeably about how their wares affect those who use them. In this way, I believe Eisenberg’s performance is best understood as an avatar, representing the cumulative effect of the actions of many technologists and corporate officers in the dawning digital era—the accuracy of the movie in terms of how it depicts Mr. Zuckerberg personally are thus beside the point (and, theologically, any judgment due to him or anyone else is not ours to mete out, anyway).
What makes the movie so compelling is that Eisenberg portrays the twenty-first century’s march of progress as tepidly ambitious but morally vacuous and cluelessly narcissistic. The companies that are here represented by Facebook seem driven by an ambivalent desire to see how big they can become. In effect, the virtually infinite growth of Facebook's user base is a nihilistic attempt to fill the vacuum at the center of an unwinding twenty-first-century universe. That same rapacious lust for growth—as both mantra and motivation—drives an entire economy: it is not limited to a single person or company.
Thread 2: Modern Prophetic Discourse on Pornography
Over the last few decades, the dangers posed by pornography have been a significant theme in Latter-day Saint general conferences. Previous to 1975, discussion of pornography in general conference was relatively rare. In the 1970s, however, the occurrence of the term started to increase, and in 1979 the word showed up fifteen times. The use of the term ebbs and flows to some degree over the next couple of decades but remains a significant and somewhat prominent theme, reaching its peak in the early aughts. For example, in the year 2000 the term was used twenty-five times and in the year 2005 it was used a total of thirty-four. It turns out that, at least for now, that was the peak of the curve and the use of the term has steadily declined since then such that over the past decade it has been referenced relatively rarely.
Often, the language that we use as members of the Church to explain and discuss the problems with pornography frames the issue largely as one of personal, individualized morality. We might think, for example, of the young man I reference at the beginning of the essay. We might frame the decision that confronts this young man as amounting to a great moment of moral truth. And I believe there is merit to that framing as far as it goes. However, I believe that such a framing does not fully do justice to the nuances of prophetic discourse on the subject. Consider, for example, this quote from then-Elder Gordon B. Hinckley, spoken in general conference in 1975: “The flood of pornographic filth, the inordinate emphasis on sex and violence are not peculiar to this land. The situation is as bad in Europe and in many other areas. . . . The whole dismal picture indicates a weakening rot seeping into the very fiber of society.”
Nothing here directly questions the moral importance of a person deciding for himself to leave pornography alone. That said, however, this quote makes it clear something much broader—even endemic—is going on here. Returning to the theme we examined when discussing The Social Network, the inescapable implication I take away from this quote from Elder Hinckley is that the systems within which we live our lives also have their own embedded morality
After all, while a rising flood might emphasize the importance of great swimming skills, it would be odd indeed to insist to those who are at risk of drowning that the rising water levels are their fault. Again, that's not to say that individuals should not avail themselves of every means of survival during a natural disaster—certainly they should—but we must also recognize that the flood itself is certainly no fault of those who are in danger. After all: pornography constitutes an enormous industry—virtually its own economy (100 billion dollars per year).
But the real rub comes here: the profit goes not to the consumers (of course), nor, mostly, even to those depicted. Rather, the bulk of the profits go to those who produce and distribute it. What is most morally vexing is that, in many (though certainly not all) cases, the pornography industry acts as a siphon and a funnel, extracting profits from the impoverished that flow largely to those who have the power and means to control the production and distribution. For example, multiple investigations by outlets as disparate as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal over recent years have demonstrated that “respectable” companies such as Meta (via Facebook, and Instagram) have profited handsomely by keeping users hooked on their platforms in part by including pornographic or just-barely-not-quite materials on their sites, including material that exploits children.
Thread 3: The Word of Wisdom
Even those who know almost nothing about the Church likely know that its members neither drink, nor smoke, nor even sip coffee and tea. Those who are Church members know these prohibitions stem from what we colloquially call the Word of Wisdom (formally known as the 89th section of the Doctrine and Covenants). For today's purposes, however, I want to focus not so much on the revelation’s dietary stipulations, but instead on the striking preface that the Lord provides to explain why the saints need to hear what He has to say:
[This revelation is] given for a principle with promise adapted to the capacity of the weak and the weakest of all saints, who are or can be called saints. Behold, verily, thus saith the Lord unto you: in consequence of evils and designs which do and will exist in the hearts of conspiring men in the last days, I have warned you, and forewarn you, by giving unto you this word of wisdom by revelation.
I am not aware of other verses anywhere else in scripture that read quite like these. The Lord contextualizes this revelation by offering a specific justification for the text’s existence. These verses suggest something like this: “The problem is not so much, for example, with wine itself but, rather, with drinking wine within a society where large corporations (that is “conspiring men”) stand to profit handsomely by selling you a lot of alcohol.” In other words, it may be the case that conditions could exist in an alternative iteration of our world where drinking wine might be just fine (anyway, Jesus drank wine without any apparent concern). Indeed, perhaps drinking alcohol, in other eras—ones that had neither Safeway grocery store chains nor the Anheuser-Busch corporation—might have been morally neutral but, in an era and society where amoral corporations stand to profit off of everything from binge drinking to alcoholism, drinking becomes a much deeper problem. My point is not that we ought to take the prohibition against alcohol lightly—modern medicine increasingly demonstrates that alcohol does us no favors, and I’ve seen alcohol ruin enough lives to never want a drop of it myself, member of the Church or not—but simply to suggest that the Lord seems to be at pains here to remind us that the issue is not just the alcohol itself, but also the societal, cultural, and economic milieux within which the alcohol is to be consumed.
Part 4: Weaving the Threads Together
We now live in a world where it is no longer helpful or realistic to think solely or even primarily about morality as an individual choice. The ideas we have considered here suggest that the theology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is capacious enough to allow us, within the housing it provides, to think of the ways in which complicated interdependent systems shape the moral frameworks within which we, as individuals, make our decisions. In other words, our theology requires that we consider the morality that is built into the systems we construct, whether governmental, corporate, or societal.
We can return, in this light, to the three examples we considered briefly at the beginning of this essay: a man considering viewing pornography, a man scrolling longingly through Instagram, and a woman posting—hopefully—her photos to social media. At first glance, we intuit that the primary moral valence in each of these examples resides with the decision each of these individuals will make while at their respective screens. But when we “pan the camera out” and consider a broader moral ecology, we come to see that, while individual morality certainly still matters, it is in fact only the very gleaming tip of the spear, with newly-drawn blood still dripping there—and that that broader moral ecology matters deeply.
In fact, the great lie—if only an implicit one—conveyed to each of the estimated 4.7 billion people in the world who have a smartphone is this: “You are an individual, and what you do on this phone is personal and private.” When nothing could be further from true. What is instead the case is this: the advent of the smartphone has allowed the unfurling of a new and increasingly invidious economy wherein we—our hearts, our minds, our decisions, our preferences, our experiences, and all the things that are meant to make us human—are being bartered for in a public square heretofore unimaginable. Those who run, invest in, and profit from the digital economy have monetized jealousy, lust, polarization, the need for love and acceptance, violence, thoughtlessness, and virtually every other part of the human experience. We have—largely unawares—allowed ourselves and the things that make us us to become the commodities that are traded on this massive global market. We cease to matter as individuals and come to exist, instead, as nodes in a nearly infinite network, infinitesimally small bits of attention that are meant to be captured and exploited.
In the era of ubiquitous smartphones, and with the advent of endless scrolling, there is no end to the potentially totalizing influence that these merchants of attention can exert over our hearts and minds. Those who control both the production of digital media content, and, even more powerfully, the algorithms that seek to shepherd our attention from one thing to the next have access to the collective human psyche in a way that ancient despots and monarchs could only have dreamed of. Indeed, Orwell's Big Brother—with his puny and nearly laughable “telescreens”—fades into anachronistic insignificance compared to the endless allure that beckons from the latest iPhone.
In view of these trends and this ascendant technology, we come back to the work of Dr. Anna Lembke, a psychiatrist at Stanford University and one of the world's foremost experts on the science and psychology of addiction. She has argued that the problem with our shared cultural understanding of pornography is not that such media is not addicting but, rather, that it is only one example of the myriad substances and online offerings to which we are now invited to addict ourselves.
In effect, she is arguing for the existence of an unfathomably dangerous axis that looks something like this: Corporate interests, in a desire to accrue and concentrate capital, are exploiting easy access to individuals through the ubiquitous presence of smartphones and other digital media (as well as the widespread availability of substances like junk food, alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs)—together with our desire to be constantly experiencing pleasure—to create a political and corporate economy within which all of us are addicted to many things all the time.
Corporations profit most handsomely when we become addicted to whatever it is they are offering. Thus, the digital advances of the early twenty-first century are weaponized to make a world where we have been given something very like the soma dispensers from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. We are enslaving ourselves because we are unwittingly becoming captive to the designs of the “conspiring men” the Lord warned us about.
If we understand the circumstances of this new corporate and societal economy, then two inevitable consequences follow. The first is that we can respond with greater compassion to those who are, to use then-Elder Hinckley's metaphor, up to their eyeballs in floodwaters. Given the overwhelming scope and sophisticated digital and algorithmic precision of the forces that are arrayed against the well-being of twenty-first-century individuals, it is understandable that many of us have fallen victim to everything from access to pornography to increased political polarization. Without abandoning continued calls to close our ears to these siren songs, we can nonetheless offer grace and space to ourselves and each other as we navigate these turbulent twenty-first-century digital waters.
Just as importantly, however, this understanding calls us to wake up to the ways in which the axis of corporate-sponsored addiction could ruin us. In the early twenty-first century, our theology, our scripture, and modern prophetic discourse call us to recognize that the unfettered accumulation of capital, the societal allowance of corporations to exploit both individual producers and consumers, and the latitude we have given to corporations to operate without regard for the public good in pursuit of unlimited profits simply cannot any longer be seen as morally neutral. Corporations will too often seek profit at the expense of the well-being of those upon whose backs they build their organizations. In the rapidly accelerating, and in some ways genuinely frightening, early twenty-first century, we as Latter-day Saints must recognize the danger inherent in the way that these forces are arraying themselves, and stand up to be counted among those who will insist that this state of affairs no longer be allowed to stand.
To receive each new Tyler Johnson column by email, first subscribe to Wayfare and then click here to manage your subscription and select "On the Road to Jericho."
Art by Louis Marcoussis.