Wayne Allensworth has a frighteningly interesting commentary on virtual reality, an addictive abuse of technology which might generate still more problems than what we’re seeing from our better established abuses of technology (`ordinary’ video games, cellphones for 4 to 104, etc), Disconnected: Our Virtual Unreality, where he writes near the end:
Alistair Charlton of the International Business Times recently quoted a subject who had tested VR sex. VR pornography, he said, will “probably spell the end of civilization. I just know some people will never, ever take that thing off.”
My take on these matters is simple: charitable concern and actions for others can do only so much and, if we do other than cut off those who sink into such a hell, then we’re merely wasting resources better used for the healthy among our children. So far as I can tell, we who are concerned about saving a civilization and its healthier children have to let Darwinian natural selection and other related forms of selection take over. In other words, if human beings insist on letting themselves be passive victims of exploitive technologies, let them perhaps live and die in modern-day equivalents of opium-dens.
When it comes to saving civilization and those, currently dwindling, healthier children, we can choose from two basic responses:
- Bring a better moral order to society by way of central powers. This would necessitate some sort of criminal prosecution against many in the entertainment industry (including mainstream news organizations) and would leave someone or some small group of someones in charge of Western culture.
- Restore healthy processes in smaller communities by way of which economic and cultural `systems’ will organize themselves in accordance with some plausible and intelligent moral order—that is, allow the Invisible Hand to work while recognizing it isn’t a magic force and that Adam Smith was observing an economy organizing itself in the context of a society populated by those who didn’t necessarily believe in the Christian creeds but did act according to some version of Christian moral order.
I’m putting my money, of which I have none left, but also my life on that second possibility: the rebuilding of Christian Civilization by way of individual and small-community effort. My regular readers may remember that I consider Christian Civilization to be the totality of the Body of Christ of which the Church Herself is but an organ, albeit the central organ and organizing organ of that Body. I’m one of those pessimists who think we’ve destroyed too much of the foundation of Western Civilization—an early version of a true Christian civilization, not by failing to keep up our infrastructure or by putting up Modernist buildings. No, we’ve destroyed too much of the foundation by corrupting our own selves and our children. Most of the capital of a civilization is found in the minds and moral characters of its members.
As it is, few Christians of higher intellectual competence bother to read the Bible—as did the great physicist James Clerk Maxwell and other serious scientists from prior centuries; few Christians or non-Christians in the West of any level of intellectual competence bother to read demanding works of the West other than work-related manuals or papers; few even read demanding works of a secularist sort or demanding works of anti-Christians. Modern anti-Christians or—still worse—those indifferent to the issues of serious theological belief, live in what a Supreme Court Genius might label as the penumbra of the teachings of Rousseau or even of serious writers of a Unitarian mindset such as Locke or Dickens. There is no Christ in A Christmas Carol, but only feelings of good-will connected to roasted turkeys and eggnog and medical care for all; it be a very bad sign indeed that so many alleged Christians wish to beat up on store-clerks who say, “Happy Holidays!” and then go home to watch A Christmas Carol with their children. This shows a serious lack of intellectual development or of any sort of spiritual insight.
Let me tie together the pieces of this essay: those younger human beings (and a few older ones) addicted to video games or cellphones or the still worse life of virtual reality are true children of the West, for the modern West is a virtual reality which, so long as it had Grandma’s bank accounts to run off, could shelter us from past or present realities. Unsheltered by that inherited wealth and by the inherited moral order we seem by our acts and words to greatly despise, then—as individuals and as communities, we might well prove ourselves to be Darwinian failures. God’s story will go on and I believe more strongly with each day that Christian Civilization will move East, to be centered perhaps in Russia and perhaps somewhere in the Pacific Rim. (The West coast regions of a fragmented United States are one specific possible location—or perhaps South America for those who believe in Nostradamus and who believe he really predicted the Pope would move to that continent at about this time.)