Tech exit, pro and con

I have a running friendly debate with Samuel James about Clare Morell’s recent book The Tech Exit. I gave it a glowing review back in June. In October James wrote about his concerns on his Substack. This semester I assigned forty-seven students across two sections to read both Tech Exit and Samuel’s Digital Liturgies, as well as Andy Crouch’s Tech-Wise Family, Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism, and Tish Harrison Warren’s Liturgy of the Ordinary.

More another day about their reactions to the other books. As for Morell, they mostly shared Samuel’s reaction. (I know him and not her, so I’m alternating between last and first names here.) One student described it as “aggressive”: both in style and in advice. They just weren’t persuaded by her maximalism: no television, no video games, no tablets, smartphones, or social media. They were persuaded, by all the books and by the course in general, that social media is a major issue and that smartphone addiction is all too real—and that they (like everyone else) need help. But they felt like Morell threw out the baby with the bathwater.

That’s not to say they didn’t appreciate the book. It opened their eyes to both systemic issues (schools, laws) and children (fentanyl, not sugar). Most students finished the semester convinced that they got personal digital devices at a younger age than they should have, and therefore most of them are not planing to replicate that early-adoption for their own potential future children.

The funny thing is, I’m not myself much of a Tech Exiteer. My household would maybe count as a two-third Tech Exit family at most. We have wireless, two televisions, and two laptops (mine and my wife’s). We even have video games. No child pre–middle school had or has a tablet, and when we first bought a Nintendo Switch our rule was that it wasn’t for handheld use; only for shared play in the living room, on the TV.

Nevertheless, that’s already a lot of Tech Exit rules broken. We do screen time, which is Morell’s number-one enemy. As a general rule we practice screen-free Sunday (or Crouch’s digital sabbath) and up to one hour of daily screen time otherwise, albeit with more leeway on Friday after school and Saturday morning. Some weekdays we’re so busy with piano and dance and tennis and church that the TV never gets turned on; on Saturday mornings we’re not setting timers to make sure they’re off before they hit sixty-one minutes.

We’re a pretty typical family, in other words, with perhaps stricter limits on time and content than the average household. So why, if my house looks more like Samuel’s than Morell’s, did I like her book so much? Let me count the reasons.

First, because I think her diagnosis is correct. I don’t know anyone (literally, not a soul) who takes the problems or challenges of digital devices too seriously. Almost everyone I know underrates the threat they pose to prayer, attention, literacy, free play, and healthy childhood development and socialization. So “directionally” she’s got the better side of the argument.

Second, because most Christian books on technology pull their punches, leaving people the same as when they started. Whatever else her book does, it doesn’t do that.

Third, because nothing would be lost and much would be gained if families took her up on her proposals. This is key. A house without screens is a gift to children—even if it’s not the choice my wife and I made. A house without wireless would be glorious! Why not say that out loud, even if most of us are unlikely to match that ideal?

Fourth, because she’s dead to rights on smartphones and social media. This is where we have drawn the line. My seventh grader doesn’t have a smartphone, and I don’t plan to buy him one anytime soon. And even if (whenever) he does end up getting one, social media will be a hard No.

Fifth, there’s a sense in which a book like The Tech Exit extends the Overton Window for Christian families in such a way that a TV-less, device-less household becomes an imaginable possibility in a way that it might not have been before. So that, even if a family doesn’t go all the way, if they still go forty or sixty or eighty percent of the way, they will have made harder (but better) decisions about technology than they would have otherwise. Put differently, the gravity that a book like Morell’s exerts pulls us all in the right direction, even if there’s still a belle curve of digital practices with a swollen, mushy middle.

Sixth and finally, because although the first half of the book, supported by the rhetoric throughout, suggests an implacable standard, as a matter of fact Morell offers examples throughout her chapters of actual families making local, personal decisions that do not amount to cookie-cutter Tech Exit implementation. These examples reveal that the buck stops with parents, who must work together to put beliefs into practice. It turns out that parents themselves don’t always agree about these things! My wife and I are different people. We’re not both Luddites. Some of our decisions have been compromises. That’s called marriage.

For this reason, among others, Morell rightly refuses to make the perfect the enemy of the good—yet without lowering expectations. That last point makes all the difference. In my experience, the fact that most Christians basically end up looking just like their neighbors in terms of digital habits functions as a prevenient deflator in conversations and thereby a defeater in arguments. Since we’ll all just fail anyway, maybe we shouldn’t set the bar too high, or even talk about it at all? Well, I may be mistaken, but I could have sworn Paul comes to a different conclusion in Romans 6:1.

In short, Morell allows Christians to argue from the shared premise that digital technology is a problem—for all of us, but especially for our children—rather than to argue (once more, ever more, ad infinitum) toward it as a contestable conclusion. Moreover, her vision is resolutely not pie in the sky. I know a father of young children who, based on Morell’s advice, just this summer took the household television off the wall. He and his wife bring it out from the closet for family movie night, but otherwise it’s no longer a digital babysitting option. I assume there are hundreds of anecdotes just like that from Morell’s readers (and others influenced by her ideas). Surely such responses and changes are all to the good?

And if there are other readers who find her suggestions too aggressive, no harm done. At best, it’ll prick their conscience about this or that, leaving them to ruminate about how they might make small changes. At worst, they’ll get annoyed or outraged, then immediately forget about it the moment their unlock their phone.

My latest: on weddings, in CT

My latest Christianity Today column is up this morning, and it’s called “Two Cheers for the Wedding Industrial Complex.” I may or may not defend ring by spring and other such sordid ideas. Enjoy!

Four loves follow-up

Consider the following portrait, all of whose modifiers are meant descriptively rather than critically or even pejoratively:

A man in his 20s or 30s who is godless, friendless, fatherless, childless, sexless, unmarried, and unpartnered, and who has no active relationship with a sibling, cousin, aunt, uncle, or grandparent. We will assume he is not motherless—everyone has (had) a mother—but we might also add that he lacks a healthy relationship with her or that he lives far away from her.

This, in extreme form, is the picture of loveless life I described in the last post, using the fourfold love popularized by C. S. Lewis: kinship, eros, friendship, and agape.

Here’s my question. In human history, apart from extreme crises brought about by natural disaster or famine or war or plague, has there even been a generation as full of such men (or women) as the present generation? The phenomenon is far from limited to “the West.” It includes Russia, Japan, and China, among others. Young people without meaningful relationships of any kind, anywhere on the grid of the four loves. They lack entirely the love of a god, the love of a spouse, the love of a child, the love of a friend, even the love of a parent.

On one hand, it seems I can’t go a day without reading a new story about this phenomenon; it’s on my mind this week because I just finished Joel Kotkin’s The Coming of Neo-Feudalism. Yet, on the other hand, the crisis we are facing seems so massive, so epochal, so devastating, so unprecedented, so complex, that in truth we can’t talk about it enough. We need to be shouting the problem aloud from the rooftops like a crazy end-times street preacher.

But what is to be done? That’s the question that haunts me. Whatever the answers, we should be laboring with all that we have to find them. The stakes are as high as they get.

Four loves loss

More than sixty year ago C. S. Lewis wrote a book called The Four Loves. Ever since, his framework has proven a reliable and popular paradigm for thinking about different aspects or modes of love. The terms he uses are storge, eros, philia, and agape; we might loosely translate these as kinship, romance, friendship, and self-giving to and for the other. They denote the love that obtains between members of a family, between spouses in a marriage, between close friends, and between humans and God. (This last category is my own gloss; agape is, for Lewis and for the Christian tradition, the love God displays in Christ and thus the exemplary cause of both our love for him and our love for others.)

A thought occurred to me about these four loves, and I wonder if anyone else has written about it.

Our society is awash in loneliness, apathy, despair, and even sexlessness. The youngest generations (“Gen Z” and Millennials) are marrying later or not at all, and (thus) having fewer children or none at all. Divorce is rampant. Kin networks are declining in both quantity and quality, and what remains is fraying at the seams. Regular attendance of church (or synagogue, or mosque) reached historically low numbers before Covid; the pandemic has supercharged these trends beyond recognition. Even friendship, the last dependable and universal form of love, has seen drastic reductions, especially for men. I heard one sociologist, a middle-aged woman, remark recently that our young men are beset by “the three P’s: pot, porn, and PlayStation.” You can’t open an internet browser without stumbling upon the latest news report, study finding, or op-ed column on opioids, deaths of despair, hollowed-out factory towns, fatherless children, lethargic boys, screen-addled kids, housebound teens, risk-averse young adults, social awkwardness, and all the other symptoms of a sad, isolated, and unloved generation. They are like a car alarm ringing through the night. Eventually you get used to it and go back to sleep.

I don’t have anything especially insightful to say about any of this. But I found that, as Lewis’s book came to mind in conjunction with these trends, his framework suggested itself as a useful analytical grid. Perhaps one way to judge whether an individual is flourishing today is whether she can point confidently to the presence of all four loves in her life. A dense and supportive familial network of parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles; a spouse and children of her own; concentric circles of friends who know her well, whom she sees regularly in a variety of settings, and on whom she can rely; a church to she belongs and where she consistently worships and enjoys the presence of the God who created her and continues to sustain her, day by day.

In a sense it’s all too obvious: this description simply transposes into the vernacular the native grammar of the sociologist. We’ve been “bowling alone”—not to mention working alone, dating alone, praying alone—for some decades now; this is nothing new.

Granted! At least for me, though, using the four loves is a helpful way to identify the different ways in which certain loves are present or absent in one’s own life or in the lives of others. I can think off hand of any number of folks who can only count one or two or three of the four loves in their lives. Most of the twentysomethings I know who aren’t uber-churchgoers (as some of my students are—glory be) lack agape, storge, and eros; all they have are friends, and even then, those friends are good for little more than happy hour drinks after work or a concert or club on the weekend. In other words, they barely amount to friends at all.

The Lewis framework also helps us to see the feedback loop of love. Kinship, marriage, friendship, and church (again, feel free to substitute some other religious tradition; I admit readily that I am identifying the institution of religious piety with love for God, for it is in institutions that we embody our loves) each and all reinforce the others. And where one love is absent by unchosen fact—as for those who wish they were married, or whose parents are abusive, or who wish they had more or better friends—the other three loves (a) offer support for what is lacking or lost and (b) provide durable structures in which to persevere and, hopefully, to rectify or supplement the absent love in question.

Peter Maurin once remarked that we ought to labor to forge a society “where it is easier to be good.” That is, the laws and norms, institutions and habits of our common life ought to conduce to virtue—honesty, courage, prudence, kindness, justice, piety—rather than vice. We are social creatures, after all. Likewise we ought to make it our collective aim to build a culture where it is easier to discover, to receive, and to share in the four loves. A world in which the four loves “came easier” would be a world worth living in and working for. Unfortunately, we seem to have done the opposite.