Denethor and the Agonist Effect

 “Was and will make me ill,

I take a gram and only am."

In Brave New World, the drug called soma was something like the Matrix's "blue pill".   It takes the edges off reality (which was depicted as intolerable in its exploitative dehumanization of people).

"Swallowing half an hour before closing time, that second dose of soma had raised a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds."

 "I don't understand anything," she said with decision, determined to preserve her incomprehension intact. "Nothing. Least of all," she continued in another tone "why you don't take soma when you have these dreadful ideas of yours. You'd forget all about them. And instead of feeling miserable, you'd be jolly. So jolly,"

In the last week, because of the political (re-election) news and various Catholic-related rumors and events (notably the Vigano excommunication), I've been checking social media more often than usual. ... primarily X, formerly known as Twitter, since I don't have an FB or other presence.    It has occurred to me several times, noting the dependency that seems to grow fast in me, the urge to refresh the screen and see what else shows up, that social media and especially its opinions and commentary has some of the same effects as soma, except in reverse.   

Soma triggers the feelings of well being and happiness that are presumably innate in every human and designed to find their object in things that are truly good.  It affects one's personality, to accept small material consolations and comforts as happiness.    

The social media commentary cycle is almost the opposite, like an amphetamine rather than a sedative drug; in fact, a kind of agonist. The "Palantir effect" of the news cycle in social media is like mainlining a certain aspect of reality, a negative and crisis-oriented one.    And even more, an almost purely verbal and linguistic mode.  The more one is immersed in it, the more one's reality becomes framed in it, if one is not very careful.    It seems to maximize what used to be called the irascible passions, the crisis mode where you see good things being lost and go into attack and defense mode to preserve and regain them.  

And it shows; it has an effect on one's outlook and personality.    I can feel it in myself after less than a week of visiting X/Twitter several times a day rather than basically never.    Having felt the effect in myself, I am more aware of how of it might impact the writing and thinking of others whose job might require them to keep up with the news flow.   These may well be very strong, intelligent, good people in all respects.  But there is at least a chance that the long term effect may have a framing effect on their understanding of the battle they are engaged in.    In fact, sometimes the heroic types are the most susceptible to the agonist effect, whereas people like me go take a nap. 

It may not always be a bad thing.   Soma's evil beyond its distortion of reality was in how it was imposed on the people to make them content with the intolerable.   It isolated and exploited the concupiscible passions so that people could be controlled.    The X cycle is chosen, like I choose to drink coffee in the morning.  Insofar as it doesn't become dependency, there is no compulsion.    I guess as CS Lewis said about rings and their temptations, they may be humanly unavoidable but you can keep a guard on yourself just as with any other temptation.  

 Palantirs could be useful in the right situation -- in fact, that was part of their attraction -- they imparted instant vision across time and space.    Sometimes I think about the invention of the printing press, how it brought knowledge and misinformation at the same time, in the same way, leaving people free, or vulnerable, to the use or misuse of a certain medium of knowledge.

I say "medium" consciously, in the sense that the media, the means by which the knowledge is transmitted,  is at least part of the message, in that it affects how the knowledge is transmitted and received.  

 The quirky agrarian journalist William Cobbett comes to mind in this context, though I can't find the quote I was looking for, where he deplores universal literacy as filtering reality for the common folk who stabilize and continue a society.    

Of course, broad literacy has brought many benefits, as has the broad use of the internet.   William Cobbett was a pamphleteer; Marshall McLuhan used media to critique the media.   There is nothing inconsistent in this, because things that have great goodness also have the greatest possibility for corruption; you can be aware of the possibility of abuse without forgoing or denying the real benefits.   Free will is of course a paradigm case.   If there is any major motif in Genesis, not to mention Tolkien's mythology of Middle Earth, this is a key one (alongside the equally key motif that weakness can be strength in God's economy).  

The verbal/linguistic mode is a key part of our rationality.  It is a participation in the Logos.  But the Logos was made flesh, and this is important; we process things in time, space, sensorially, not just through our brains.  The internet, as many thinkers have warned, is a sensory deprivation tank where audiovisual perceptions are isolated and magnified, to the detriment of stability, of proprioreceptive function. 

This post has been more about alluding to things that I've been thinking about because of this last media-driven week, not so much about truly digging into them.   Now I want to go on to something that seems related.    

Sebastian Morello, a British philosopher and lecturer whose articles in the European Conservative I have been reading this past week, writes that "Catholicism has largely become an internet genre." 

Indeed, a strange characteristic of the post-authority epoch is that the parish and the diocese isn’t really where Catholicism happens. Catholicism has largely become an internet genre. And whilst the Church’s government is doing all it can, from the very top, to destroy the trad movement, it certainly remains alive and well online. It is mainly by this virtual world that young people come to Catholicism in their attempt to escape the Manichaeism and nihilism of late modernity (which mainstream Catholicism only appears to offer in ceremonial form).   Can Hermetic Magic Rescue the Church?

To say that Catholicism has become an internet genre is to make a sociological statement, not a theological one, for of course the object of Faith is above all a Reality, in which everything else is to some extent participating.    But in the social context, this concept has a lot of resonance, and relates to what I am trying to say here.  

His thesis is that the institutional Church is currently bogged down in the dichotomies of late-stage modernism or rationalism.   A lot of the doctrinal back and forths we have all experienced since Vatican II are kind of like death-twitches of this essentially temporal, but once-powerful system of thinking.    

As Morello writes:

The reason for which the Church exists is union of its members with the Triune God. And when the hierarchy’s members forget this in their pursuit of worldly ambitions, God’s people must consider what lies within their own spiritual repertoire and mine those resources to cultivate as far as possible the richest interpersonal relationship with Jesus Christ that they can; or better, that He can cultivate in them.

It seems to me that the paradigm of rationalism—with all its chaotic relationships, ugly architecture, shallow sentimentalism, fetishization of abstractions, legal positivism, and blindness to persons—to which the institutional Church has conceded so much moral territory, must be overcome if we are to recover the primacy of the mystical in the life of the Church.

The progressive agenda, in this model, is trying to move towards a future that can never exist, because it's the hopelessly dated utopia of a former generation.    The wise and powerful mages of the 60's and 70's, the Sarumans of many colors, have become the Sharkys of this generation, manipulating and contriving and making deals with whatever special interest group will pretend to have some respect for their wisdom.   

Some of the reactions to progressivism, which are on display in sometimes naive and surly forms on social media, look like a simple reaction to this agenda. They essentially accept the overarching premises of progressivism but hate and fear it.   They look too deeply into the Palantir, and then start making pyres and shouting about death and despair, like Denethor did, and annhilating their own stake in the future, as Denethor did directly or indirectly with his two sons.   This is my nutshell take on the Vigano trajectory currently in the news.   But I am sorry for him, and am praying that the excommunication does what it was traditionally supposed to do and shocks him back into reality mode.   

Back to Morello -- his solutions for the crisis, he says, are for a future article.  But he indicates that he thinks they will involve a rebirth or restoration of Christian mysticism, meaning I think a true realism, which would complement rationality as Reason but transcend the more stale, mechanistic debris of end-stage de facto materialism. 

For the real battle as always will be in the real future, the one God holds in the palm of His hand.   As Chesterton says in the Everlasting Man: 

“Christianity has died many times and risen again, for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave....

They are always telling us that priests and ceremonies are not religion and that religious organization can be a hollow sham; but they hardly realise how true it is. It is so true that three or four times at least in the history of Christendom the whole soul seemed to have gone out of Christianity; and almost every man in his heart expected its end…. When Christianity rose again suddenly and threw them, it was almost as unexpected as Christ rising from the dead.…

…This is the final fact, and it is the most extraordinary of all. The faith has not only often died but it has often died of old age….it has survived not only war but peace. It has not only died often but degenerated often and decayed often; it has survived its own weakness and even its own surrender… It ended and it began again.