The Digital Memory

Recently I was spending some free time in creative research, and I came upon the 1918 Cambridge Edition of the Greek Anthology, translated by the once-famous W.R. Paton, whose Hellenophilia extended even beyond scholarly interest in his marriage to Irene Olympitis, from the Greek Island of Kalymnos. Scholars nearly everywhere rejoice in the power and versatility of Word Processing; gone are the laborious days on the typewriter, churning out documents at a glacial pace. Scholars in ancient Alexandria and Babylon would marvel of the ease with which we can put thought to writing, and communicate that thought in mere nanoseconds to every corner of the earth. Our needs for physical media are likewise reduced. When the Vatican Archive decided to utilize NASA’s now open-source Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) in order to scan the most delicate papyri and codices both to preserve and to share precious documents, it meant that a scholar did not need a plane ticket to Rome to read a text in situ; he merely had to see a digital image.

Returning to W.R. Paton, I have found particular enjoyment in his collection of Christian Epigrams, including incredibly ancient prayers and expressions of adoration, such as the following: “On the threshold of my soul is the saving blood of the Lamb. Away, Destroyer, come not near.” (Ψυχης εν φλιησιν εμης σωτηριον αιμα αμνου. Ολοθρευων, φευγε, μη εγγυς ιθι. [I.57]) Incredibly brilliant and diligent men and women went through the trouble to preserve these little gems of pious diction that would doubtless have been lost to time. Their accessibility is a source of great convenience, edification, and enjoyment.

Consistant with the Benedictine Maxim habere, haberi, there is a darkside to the universalization and democratization of scholarly knowledge. For every Anthology I can find online, I can find something evil, or stupid. When one has something, the maxim says, one ‘is had’ by it. To put it in more modern terms, our thoughts and behavior are to some extent conditioned by the artifacts which we produce. Best case in point: the smartphone. How many people reach levels of near apoplexy if they lose their phone! Part of this is understandable: quite a few people have their finances, personal photos, and much besides on their phones. Yet another part is the behavior of someone who clearly has developed a relationship of co-dependancy with their device. I cannot deny that I would act the same – at the very least – because the things are so expensive!

This brings us to the heart of the topic of today’s essay: how should a committed Christian behave in these days where we have knowledge of a million little things at our fingertips, but we find that we can’t remember where we left our car keys, or how to make change on a whim? A constant spiritual danger, known by the Apostles themselves, is that of neophilia, the love of all things new/novel. Most consumers today are, by definition, neophiliacs. Corporations and marketers encourage this trend, as they impel us, if not compel us, to update to the newest-and-latest. But for anyone who has owned anything in the past fifty years can attest, “they don’t make things like they used to.” We have the phenomenon of ‘planned obsolesence’, where a product is designed to deteriorate so as to force the consumer to purchase another. Then we have the explosion of cheap, disposible materials, mostly plastics, which now fill our oceans, as well as our bodies. Neophilia has always been considered a spiritual evil, because it binds the spiritual man to the merely phyiscal and temporal. Said more simply, a person obsessed with the newest thing is rarely dedicated to what endures. What endures above all, by definition, is what is eternal. These things, as Saint Paul reminds us, belong to the realm of the unseen. Those things which cannot be bought or sold are the most precious of all.

Many conservative writers were rightly alarmed when the World Economic Forum (WEF) released in 2016 their vision for humanity in the near future, with slogans such as “You will own nothing, and be happy.” It may seem strange that I should bring up this phrase and the controversy it caused, when I just got done praising unseen things. But that is because I also think one of the best ways to appreciate unseen things is to treat with special care those people and things which we do see. Saint John in his First Epistle alludes to this, saying, “he who does not love the brother whom he has seen, cannot love the God whom he has not seen.” (1 John 4:20) As creatures with a body and a rational soul, we cannot not approach immaterial things through the medium of the material. This is the phenomenological foundation of God’s Sacramental Economy. When the WEF laid out a quasi-millenarian vision for utopian ‘sustainable’ abundance, it makes a certain sense that they would undermine the whole concept of private property and ownership. Owning something, having to take care of it, is the fastest route to actually affectively learning to care at all. Perhaps this is one reason why so many adolescents and young adults today manifest an alarming degree of apathy: so many have never worked, never had to own something for which they made sacrifices, and so they disdain the exigencies of the real world. The WEF knows what it is doing: when people truly own nothing, when the money they earn does not translate into tangible goods, it is all the easier to have a populace without roots. The family of course is the principal ‘grounding’ influence in the life of individuals and society, but it is hard to separate family from incarnate space. How many times are families, and their success, interwoven with a stable physical space, where children and adults alike can feel sheltered and safe? The very idea of the ‘homestead’ or the ‘family hearth’ has waned as much as the integrity of the family has, and this is not an accidental occurrence.

In the past few years, several friends in academia have forsaken their Universities and purchased land to start farms. They have become electricians, engineers, and diesel mechanics. They have opened gyms, and learned to bake and sew. This, I think, is not only a reaction to the suffocating leftist tyranny presently reigning over our Institutions of Higher Learning; it is also a genuine manifestation of a desire to return to the physical trades, to engage more with the material realm and its workings, and away from the realm of mere ideas. Of course, they also make far more money, with less DEI intrusions: do you really care if a ‘cis-gender white male’ picks up the phone when your bathroom pipes burst? No. We all know that anyone will do who can fix the problem at hand.

There is another thing which I think is gradually shifting which will address this problem of “Digital Memory” as a culture. The crushing debt of exorbitant and usurious student loans, along with the relative wage stagnation in traditional ‘white-collar’ work, is driving not just former academics, but young people, back to trades. This I think is good for our society in the aggregate, because young people will be less likely to be exposed to the indoctrination centers/brothels which are most colleges today. Although one may argue that having a less educated younger generation will hurt us, I have to ask why it has become the case that young adults in university have to spend money to learn what they should have learned in High School, or even Middle School. To add to this, I think the near-universality of the ‘college degree’ has led to a simple supply and demand problem. When everyone has a bachelors degree, they aren’t worth as much. Now the new bar is having a master’s degree. This means more debt, more years in a university while they throttle access to an education. No wonder why so many savants and creatives drop out of High School and College. Society may be able to re-evaluate the meaning of a university education when it is clear that not everyone can, or should, pursue a college education.

In the first days of the internet, there was some hope that easy access to information, much like the service of a Public Library, would lead to advancements for ambitious and curious people. Yet just like the ubiquity of a college degree has led to its depreciation, the ubiquity of information has likewise led to its depreciation. For anyone who is teaching young children today, what seems so striking to me is the utter lack of curiosity, which is the prerequisite to true learning, let alone to wisdom. Children, in tandem with emergent AI, are more ‘answer machines’ than thinkers. Like the machines they emulate, they often fail to understand the inner logic of things, and so often make embarrassing, even catastrophic, errors. For this reason, I think it may also come to pass in our lifetimes that students and their teachers will return to the time-honored oral exam as the primary means of evaluating students. The means by which a student can fake and plagiarize their tests and projects is alarming, and beyond our capability to stop completely. However, reintroducing oral exams where appropriate, when a student has to present and demonstrate true understanding of a topic, rather than just regurgitated, mechanical knowledge, could stimulate young minds. On the other hand, I can foresee a lot of gnashing of teeth because this could cause too much ‘anxiety’ in students. I have come to dislike the word anxiety, because I think for too many it is actually the emotion of fear or worry. It is important to teach young people to overcome their fears. Anxiety, in my estimation, is stale, stagnant worry, like a pestiferous swamp in the mind.

Knowledge and learning, as well as the organic acquisition of it, is not treated with the value it deserves. Over and above anti-intellectual trends which come or go, I think it is important to recognize that trades, too, are knowledge. That is especially so in a technologically advanced society.

So while it may seem that a response to Digital Memory is to return to good old ‘Analog’ Memory where possible. That is true. That is because, once again, we are not machines, nor are we merely bags of meat. In that vein I would throw in a few other ideas, such as taking time to memorize interesting and shareable facts and quotes. Even memorizing jokes is a great stimulus to the memory. I remember being dumbfounded when I first learned that the works of Homer were first declaimed by memory orally before they were written down. Yet it shows the extraordinary human capacity for memorization, and especially so when that involves rhyme, rhythm, and narrative. It truly is amazing what the human mind is capable of doing.

Also, pace Marie Kondo, I think families should hold, and celebrate, the possession of physical vessels of knowledge, such as libraries. I will never forget the precious days my Father held me in his lap and read the Bible to me. I remember once going through his own private library, and finding Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. My Father had a mild learning disability and was the son of functionally illiterate parents. Yet that little paperback copy was full of pencilled notes, underlined words to learn, and other indications of how he wrestled with the text. We always kept books in public places, and were proud of our collection. Although I confess my physical library is much reduced (it is far too laborious to move, as a Priest often has to do), I always have kept my own. We know now via neurological studies that children and adults process information differently when read electronically versus in print. There is a virtue in taking time away from the tyranny of the screen.

Finally, as this is a Sunday, I think, much like I said in one of my recent essays, taking time recreationally to acquire skills and hobbies is both one of the joys of life and a protective agent from mental, spiritual and physical stagnation. Our Lord knows that we need to take time not to work constantly, not to have our attention always fixed on the bare necessities of living. To do so, we need to seize the time intentionally. It is no accident that the Lord’s Day is the day we, in the Sacred Liturgy, rehearse, by divine precept, our corporate anamnesis (memorial institution). We rest, we remember, and we are recreated…as Our Lord intended. For remembering, too, can be made a liturgical, and sacred act.