Too Much Screen Time or Coming to Terms with my Idolatry

 “I did not mean to fall in love, but the men with the big machines came up our road to cut the last of the season’s corn.” This line caught the attention of a New York editor with the reputation of buying books from the strength of one line. He looked at the manuscript and commented that I need to format it properly and not use dialogue to convey information. Thank God my work wasn’t ready for him. I was just at the beginning of learning my craft.

I still admire those machines—the tractors that make me feel small as I’d feel gazing up at a city skyscraper, the chisel plows set in the ground, cutting it, but not so much that soil is wasted, the combines that chew up fields, sorting wheat or beans or corn from chaff. I admire how seeds are laid in the ground, how they grow into grain bearing plants, and then harvested. The landscape changes every summer from those long green rows, barely poking above the ground, to matronly corn stalks, or humble bean plants, and slim wheat fields. Paul Ehrlich predicted mass starvation in the sixties and seventies in his book The Population Bomb. Not contributing to the population explosion, was one reason why we didn’t have children, that’s how that story burned into our culture. I’ve been surprised many times in my seventy years by how my sure sense that doom was descending, but instead something defied the doom. Scientists defied Ehrlich’s grim, anti-human predictions by developing pesticides, herbicides and seeds that could feed the whole world were it not for corruption and distribution issues.

Harvest has begun. The soybean fields next to us have been harvested. It’s been so dry, the dust was so bad, the dust billowed across our yard. I ran to close Mrs. Horse in the barn until the combine and grain cart moved to the far end of the field. Trump’s tariffs have enticed China, a major market for our beans, to buy from Brazil and Argentina. I just talked to a neighbor who said there is no other market for their beans but China. “It is what it is,” he said. We have an abundant harvest, a bumper crop, and no one to buy. I think about the story of Eygpt and Pharoah’s dream warned him to store the seven years of plenty against the seven years of famine.

Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine is challenging the way I think about the society I live in, a society that cloaks a person in ways of doing things, that becomes as invisible as water is to fish. Kingsnorth is a former environmental activist and Wiccan turned Orthodox Christian who has been thinking about how Western Civilization has degraded for the last thousand years. His book The Wake was long listed for the Man Booker Prize. He quotes Lewis Mumford, cultural commentator, who identified how our culture is more machine than human in his two volume Myth of the Machine. (I remember reading the second volume, The Pentagon of Power as a junior in high school and thinking yes, yes.)

Kingsnorth comments about how impersonal international corporations control most facets of our lives:

These ‘depersonalized, collective organizations’ are the giant world spanning corporations which now control most of our lives. They produce the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the technology we use, the ‘entertainment’ we consume and the ‘news’ we base our opinions upon all the while employing millions of us as labourers and harvesting us as products ourselves, through the detailed personal information we freely volunteer them daily all over the web. (36)

We think we are free to create our own lives, become whatever we want. But how free are we when we are dependent on multinational corporations to meet our basic needs from food to medicine to entertainment. The Farm Crisis in the 80’s came about partly because the big three food companies controlled how farmers could produce their crops and livestock. Also they took out loans with their land a collateral and the land’s value collapsed. A few paragraphs later, Kingsnorth says:

The rise and triumph of the internet—the neurological network of the Machine—has meant that there are now few places on Earth to which we can escape from the incessant noise of this state-corporate ‘growth ‘ and the incessant urge to contribute to it by clicking, scrolling, buying and competing. (37)

I’ve certainly been caught by this web, with a very real spider, what some people call a demon, in my pocket, calling me: “You’ve got to look. Please look and see what the latest news is” that devours. I wrote this as my latest perspective for our local NPR station:

For the last decade I’ve been captured by screens, mostly the phone but TV too.  While in the car the phone has filled me in on the latest political outrage but left me blinded to the young eagle flying across the front of the car, or the joyous clouds rolling across a clear blue sky. There are rough drafts of novels sitting in notebooks that might have found readers by now. A few extra minutes? I pick up my phone and pack someone else’s thoughts in my brain instead of my own.

Like people sitting together at restaurants heads down, engrossed in their phones, I’ve sat with my quiet husband, texting on Messenger with someone who wants my help. Now.

 “Internet friends are not friends,” says a wise friend. She’s right. Online relationships are disembodied and ghostlike. I’ve lost time on people who move on when their drama passes, while Mrs. Horse waits in the barnyard.

Without the benefit of a person’s physical presence, we miss out on how it can heal or energize or even discourage us. Maybe instead of building online friendships, we need to put down our screens and meet in person. Maybe instead of reading our phones during breakfast, lunch and dinner we need to taste and savor our food. Maybe if a post stings us to outrage, it’s not worth disturbing our peace. Maybe instead of filling every last minute with something our phone says, we need to be bored. Maybe I should apply all these maybe’s to myself.

I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective.

Here’s where you can find the original post.

Kingsnorth drew a parallel to ancient Egypt, a civilization that treated people like “a machine made of human parts” (38). People were enslaved and monuments were built. Kingsnorth says most of us are as clueless as fish who aren’t aware they are swimming in water:

Across the spectrum, from conservatives to liberals, Marxists to fascists, believers to atheists, very little serious criticism of the entwined myths of progress, growth and materialism will ever be heard in the public sphere. Ultimately most of us accede to our sovereign, happily or otherwise. (40)

But there’s hope in this very analogy, because God called his people out of that slavery, out of the machine that was Egypt. Their years in the wilderness, their stop/start relationship with God and the freedom he offers, perhaps offers us hope and ways to resist, that are rooted in our relationship with the living God. Lest I forget, God fed them with heavenly food and watered the with the rock that was Jesus following. Every time we take the Eucharist we are fed with the very body of Christ. When I think about how Bruce and I have no one to watch over us in our frailty, I come back to the story of God’s care for his people in the wilderness, how his name is Jehovah Jireh-God will provide. Kingsnorth says:

To liberate ourselves, steadily, one human soul at a time we simply have to walk away from the Machine in our hearts and minds, as the Israelites of the Exodus walked away from its original master Pharaoh. Or, as Mumford has it in the conclusion of the second volume of his masterwork: ‘For those of us who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the next move is ours: for the gates of the technocratic prison will open automatically, despite their rusty ancient hinges as soon as we choose to walk out’. (42). 

But for me that choosing to walk out is easier said than done because there are real people on the other side of Facebook or Substack. The Machine (Substack/Wordpress/Facebook) has given me a way to find you, my readers. Old friends, good friends, have found me through Facebook. Just the other day, the woman who walked with me through my parents’ deaths, who knew how to listen and point me toward hope looked me up after nearly forty years of being out of touch. I’ve found out important local news through neighborhood Facebook groups. And have found people with similar political beliefs in the National Review Plus Facebook group, a group with diverse thinking, that has eased my anxiety because I see I’m not the only one.

And then there’s television with story lines that make a person forget that as Christians we are called to chastity, as we watch scenes that might have been called porn fifty years ago. The habit to switch it on and relax while someone else’s story plays out on a screen goes back my whole life because it is a sort of fire, the family gathered around. But I have so many books I want to read that I set down to watch the not so big screen TV. The hooks have been set.

Early in Against the Machine, Kingsnorth paints a bleak picture about western civilization. Over a thousand years it has lost its story and rootedness in that story and common cultural traditions. During graduate school, fifty years ago, my poet teachers wondered what would happen because the Christian story we had in common, was just about spent. Kingsnorth cites The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler:

By the twentieth century, the direction was clear and for Spengler the Great War only confirmed it. Only disintegration, followed by Caesarism, and a ‘return to thorough formlessnes’ awaited us now…The only realistic response was to adopt some version of Stoicism, and hope for the coming of the cultured and suitably strong Caesar to steady the ship as she sank. (27)

As far as Caesars, Germany got Hitler. Russia got Stalin, China got Mao, and the US is experiencing authoritarian creep. Kingsnorth claims Western Civilization is dead and offers a proper response to the culture wars that have erupted across the United States and Europe. He says it’s past time to fight them.

This in practical terms is the slow necessary, sometimes boring work to which I suspect people in our place and time are being called: to build new things out on the margins. Not to exhaust our souls engaging in a daily war for or against the ‘West’ that is already gone, but to prepare the seedbed for what might, one day long after us, become the basis of a new culture. To go looking for truth. To light particular little fires—fires fueled by eternal things, the great and unchanging truths—and tend their sparks as best we can. To prepare the ground with love for the resurrection of the small, the real, and the true.

But first, we are going to have to be crucified. (30)

He’s calling us to the hard work of making our own lives, loving our neighbor as best as we can, and denying our wants.

Finally, at least as far as I’ve read, Kingsnorth talks about how science and magic are intertwined because both endeavors are about taking control of the world—spiritual or physical. He says:

Our world is still run by magicians, working from the ‘sacred temples of their laboratories to discover how humanity my reshape the world in accordance with its will. (76)

For awhile I’ve wondered about idolatry that is so often talked about in the Hebrew scriptures. Kingsnorth pinpoints what it is, and the way to resist. He says, “Magic addles the mind.” Addled mind. That was me. My diagnosed mild cognitive impairment came from too much screen time, the constant change of the newsfeed, each post jerking my emotions one way and then the next. The neuropsyche test that showed major slippage came just as Covid was hitting. But when I started walking and beholding the world, as Maggie Ross urges us to do, offering thanks when my mind wanders, coming back to the center-what I write about here—my mind cleared and my IQ test improved. The neurologist kicked me out of his office, saying people whose minds are failing don’t improve. Kingsnorth affirms the efficacy of practicing this stillness for us all:

Somehow, though, the work must be to still the mind instead. To let go of the natural attachment to our cunning, serpentine will. We know where the path leads if we don’t: we see daily the path that magic and science will take us down. Do what thou wilt is the motto of our world: the motto of the Machine. Thy will be done is its older brother, and its challenger. We all want to live by the first of them, but we know that the work is to walk away from it a thousand times each day: to let the will go and to listen instead for the old song which, however much we might think otherwise, has never stopped being sung in the woods and the waters and around the edges of the human heart. (78).

As I mentioned before, the house blessing, simple words from scripture, and a straightforward pastor has cleared the house, cleared something in me. Bringing the pup Aiden into our home has helped me stay out of the phone first thing in the morning. I’ve deleted the Facebook app but sneaky Meta has hooked an icon to Messenger, so it’s easy to look up the latest news. I see my Diet Coke/Pepsi addiction has made me beholden to the Machine. It’s a small vice, but maybe in light of this, it’s not. (A neurologist warned me off this years ago.) At least tea is natural and a better high, though I’ve heard there’s poison in that drink too.

As far as my own need for control, I have finally realized I have to trust the Lord will give me something to write each week, as the terror of my blank mind has been real. Laying off the digital content as loosened my thoughts and creativity. There are too many voices, too much good content. I’ve come to respect my own attention and have chafed at people sending me stuff, basically asking me to think their thoughts. What if I have my own to think? What if my 70-year-old brain has to make space, a clearing for my work, not theirs? Print books are different. Even Substack essays aren’t as devastating as FB or reels. (I have pretty much trained Facebook by saying I’m not interested in posts that spark outrage and fear.)

It seems to me Kingsnorth is calling out our sins in the way the old Biblical prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah called out God’s people, who immersed themselves in “Do what thou wilt.” We too have immersed ourselves in “Do your own thing” or “You deserve a break today” and many other sayings we live by.

Let me leave you with one creature we can’t control and the honor she gave us by crawling onto my shoulder and then sleeping between Bruce and I all one night. The frightening dog is loose but she doesn’t seem to be afraid to come in the bedroom, where she is sleeping. And then there’s Smudgie who sat at the foot of the bed for several nights after my extreme nightmare. It’s always an honor when a cat comes to you.

The pups have pushed me out of bed just as the sun breaks the horizon. I have felt its warmth on my cheek, a gentle hand, a steady hand. Yesterday I watched a hawk drop out of a black walnut and soar low over the fields—flapping up and then gliding down, until he dropped behind a hill onto the waterway.