Technology Profanes the Sacred
This week I’m on vacation in London, so today’s post is going to be a bit different. Perhaps a bit more philosophical and meandering than usual. But there have been some things floating around my head about the relationship between culture and technology that have clarified a bit for me during this trip, and I want to get them written down even if they’re not yet fully crystalized.
Last month Ted Gioia wrote his annual State of the Culture post. Ted’s the kind of writer where sometimes I agree with him and sometimes I disagree, but I almost always end up thinking deeply after reading his posts. And his State of the Culture post was no different - I’d definitely encourage you to go read it in full.
The post has a few key insights. The first is that in the same way low-brow ‘entertainment’ has crowded out high-brow ‘art’, distraction is now crowding out both entertainment and art in our culture. This is the end result, Gioia says, of the infinite scroll on TikTok, Instagram, or Twitter:
Gioia gives a set of examples of how this influences today’s cultural landscape, which he calls ‘dopamine culture’:
This post got a fair bit of attention online, and inspired the usual takes, reactions, and reactions-to-the-reactions that are typical of a discourse cycle. I knew I wanted to write about it, but I couldn’t quite place my thoughts. Even as someone who writes about online culture every week, I struggled to articulate exactly how I felt about it. Eventually the discourse shifted, we all started talking about something else, and everyone moved on. But I couldn’t get Gioia’s post out of my head.
Perhaps the best reaction to Gioia’s post came from Gioia himself, a week after the initial post. It’s titled 13 Observations on Ritual, and it details how the endless cycle of distraction and engagement robs people of meaning in their lives. Gioia focuses on the idea of rituals - practices embedded in the real world, that gain meaning from repetition and community participation.
To Gioia, ritual can be many things. It can be a grand religious ceremony. It can be the way you always have a cup of tea in your study and journal in an old notebook before opening your laptop for the day. It can be community gatherings like a graduation, a wedding, a high school football game. Gioia theorizes that smartphones, memes and social media are structurally unable to function as rituals, and that when we allow them to dominate our lives we end up with less connection and less meaning.
As I mentioned above, I’ve spent the last week in London. One of my favorite things to do here is to attend morning worship services at Westminster Abbey. I’m not religious, but I find Westminster Abbey to be almost heartbreakingly beautiful. It’s a place packed with more cultural significance than can easily be described. You can’t walk ten feet without stepping over the remains of a dead king, a titan of science, or one of the greatest poets of the last 500 years.
I like to go in the early morning, because while worship services are open to the public, few people take advantage. By 11am, the Abbey is packed with hundreds or thousands of gawking tourists, but at early services I’ve never seen more than 10-15 people. It’s a private, free ritual in one of the most beautiful places in the world. I go every single time I’m in London.
And it was sitting in that sacred place that I realized what I want to say about the relationship between art and meaning and distraction, between culture and technology and ritual. For as long as we’ve been inventing new technology, the function of technology is to profane the sacred.
Profane, in Latin, literally means ‘outside the temple’. To profane something is to desecrate it. Not to destroy it, but to disrespect it with the specific angle of denying or harming its sacred nature. Profanity, in a deeper religious sense, is not just words that shock or offend. They are words that trivialize holy things.
Technology has always been profane in this way. Forget modern technology. Go back to the original communication technology, the printing press. Gutenberg’s invention allowed the Bible to be mass-printed for the first time, and in languages other than Latin. And the church was furious about this. They tried very hard to prevent the Bible from being printed in the lay person’s languages, called ‘vulgar languages’ - where the original meaning of vulgar was just ‘common’.
To the church, printing the Bible in such a way was disrespectful in the extreme. It wasn’t meant to be read in vulgar languages. It wasn’t meant to be read and interpreted individually. It was a perversion of the sacred nature of the Bible. It’s not an accident that the meaning of vulgar is now obscene, distasteful. To treat the Bible this way was profane.
Hell, forget the Bible. Forget all of recorded history and go back to pre-history and what is arguably the first crucial human technology - the invention of fire. This is as early as you can go in the technological stack. While we don’t have any actual history to rely on here, what do our earliest civilizations and their myths tell us? That the development of fire was a theft from the gods.
Prometheus stole fire from the gods, and gave it to humans as a gift. The act of invention here is explicitly framed as the disrespect of divine will. For his actions, Prometheus is chained to a rock and has an eagle devour his liver - after which the liver grows back and the eagle returns to eat it again, endlessly. Prometheus is tortured endlessly for profaning the sacred fire of the gods and giving it to humanity. This isn’t just ancient Greece - the tale of the theft of fire from the gods is a staple of mythology all over the world. These are some of the earliest myths of human culture that exist, and they agree: technology profanes the sacred.
When Gioia talks about rituals, I think he’s also talking about the idea of sacredness. People crave sacredness and ritual. This has often been tied up with religion throughout history, but even atheists have rituals. Even non-believers cling to sacred practices, just ones that don’t involve gods. These practices can be grand in scale, but they can also be very small. Peggy Olson’s ad pitch for Popsicle in Mad Men touches on how meaningful even these small scale rituals can be.
Humans crave this kind of ritual, this kind of sacredness. They find meaning in these social connections and cultural practices. It’s a way to link yourself to something important - whether it be a wider community, a holy text or a God, other people that you love, a beautiful and breathtaking physical space, or a cultural tradition that goes back generations. And social media by its nature degrades that kind of practice.
After all, imagine a sacred ritual you’re undertaking with other people. It could be a wedding, a religious service, etc. What’s the most embarrassing, thoughtless thing you could do during the middle of it? Have your smartphone loudly ring and buzz, repeatedly. Or use your phone in the middle of the ritual, paying little attention to those around you.
We instinctively recognize, even if we don’t always put it into words, that some places are not meant to be profaned with technology. I cannot imagine how mortified I would be if, while sitting in the shrine of St. Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey with other worshippers, my phone rang. Typically, we’re able to shame people into behaving correctly in instances like that. But for the private rituals that can give us meaning - a morning walk in a forest, quiet coffee with a loved one, a night time prayer - it’s all too easy for technology to intrude. And I think Gioia is right that we suffer for it.
As with all things, the dose makes the poison. I write about online culture professionally, but more than it being a job, I genuinely enjoy spending time on social media. It’s energizing and exciting for me, and my life is better for it. But I also think my life benefits from quiet things that have no connection to modern technology. Meals with loved ones without a screen. Visits to beautiful museums and churches. Long walks.
The infinite scroll does have some real positives, but I don’t think that type of ‘distraction content’ can give meaning in the same way slower, more deliberative, and technology free rituals can. I think it’s important for each of us to have something like that, something that we keep separate from technology and social media, that we hold close to ourselves - not because it’s trending or something that might go viral, but simply because it’s meaningful and sacred to us.
I think this is important. My understanding is that research indicates a good life is ultimately about relationships. To the extent that social media/distraction/addiction apps make us depressed, I don’t think it’s ahedonia in the same way opioids work. Apps can’t strip your brain of pleasure receptors. But like television in Bowling Alone, apps make us miserable to the extent they substitute for meaningful relationships. It’s the time.
This is a beautiful piece, Jeremiah.