Cultural Physics and The Great Diversion

A Clarion Call to The Light Brigade

“… It is the particular that must be treated.”

—Aristotle, Metaphysics, I.1.9

Marginalia

Last week, I returned to this platform with a barrage of bullets outlining my current thoughts and ideas on where our culture is and isn’t regarding beauty, machines, and how I believe we are being voided as human beings. Now comes the fun part: unpacking it.

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I don’t intend to do this in one post. I see the 108 bullets as our conversation guide. I mentioned that this line of cultural exploration will either be my next book or live here in a collection of posts. I even easter-egged the title in the post, but no one’s found it … yet. I know you will soon enough.

When I say “conversation guide,” that’s exactly what I mean. I want to explore with you. Not everyone is comfortable sharing in the comments, but your questions, comments, and resource recommendations are a gift to me. So, if you feel comfortable, please jump into the conversation in the comments. 

This weekend, my wife and I were blessed to speak at the Encountering Beauty conference at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. My talk was an extension of the 108. I’m doing my best to hone these ideas, clarify them, and present them to you in a way that inspires, challenges, and incites change.

Cultural critique can sometimes feel empty, especially when there seems to be no way forward. That’s one of the reasons why my wife and I created the MARVELING course. You can get this inspirational course for only $37 (a $90 value) for a limited time.

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Prelude

As we venture into the 108, a few points of clarity will help us frame our exploration:

1. I am tugging on three fields of thought that possess a fascinating interplay:

   1. Science - the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained.

      1. You don’t have to be a scientist to “open your eyes and look to the heavens.” In The Beauty Chasers, I discuss the importance of seeing, observing, and marveling. This is an artist’s attempt to disguise “science” in fun words so we stay connected to the natural world, awash in its wonder. {Smile emoji}

   2. Metaphysics - the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space.

      1. As Christians, we should be students of first principles because it is in their exploration that we ignite our wonder, and wonder lights the pathway of Wisdom.

   3. Theology - the study of the nature of God and religious belief.¹

      1. As Christians, our daily lives reflect our theology—or lack of it. What we do, how we live and think, begins with a proper understanding of the nature of God. It isn’t navel-gazing. It is contemplating God and walking in the light of his Wisdom.

2. This interplay gives us profound insights into the parallels between the physical and metaphysical characteristics of the universe and the purpose of human existence.

3. Who cares? Why is this important?

   1. Understanding these parallels helps us appreciate the importance of daily life's symmetry and alerts us to forces trying to misshape it.

   2. Unity: The oneness of the universe and human existence tells us of the intent and love behind the Creator—it teaches us the nature of God.

   3. It reminds us that we are children of the Light, not darkness. We possess a beautiful weight—a density—of being and existence. We are the light brigade,² and our mission is to dispel despair and live in the brilliance of hope.

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Cultural Physics and The Great Diversion

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Current culture’s primary adversaries are not secular humanism, relativism, or moral therapeutic deism. Christians love to point to these philosophical conditions, brought on by liberal cultural movements in the second half of the twentieth century, as the primary culprits in society’s lack of spiritual awareness.

But these conditions are now secondary abstractions to the physical conditions and habits of the advanced world.

Though a formidable foe, the philosophical thought propagated at state and private universities does not act as our primary adversary. We are willful participants, whether Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, or pagan, in something far more pervasive. We are not victims of radical liberal thought. We live in a physical world of machines that has waged war on the metaphysical world of meaning. And we fight with and for this adversary.

We throw the word distraction around like it’s a mental health problem—a disease that has suddenly come upon us. But our label is wrong. We do not live in a world of distractions.

We’ve been diverted.

A distraction is passive, while a diversion is intentional. A river is not distracted; it is diverted. Its flow can be physically altered to irrigate a different part of the land. It can also be diverted for insidious reasons. We can steal river flow to starve the land and its inhabitants. We’re dying of thirst even as we help the adversary in daming the river.

And yet we do suffer.

We live our days in a “dry and weary land” (Isa. 63:1) of our own making. We suffer from a poverty of emotion and despair that is not immediately noticeable because it is brought on by a machine: the smartphone and the media itself—though the media is now secondary to the medium.

Marshal McCluhan prophesied, “The medium is the message." Did he realize that the medium would one day consume all messages, making our interaction with mediums our active participation in the enslavement of our imaginations?

McCluhan believed that it wasn’t just the written, oral, or visual content that came through different mediums, such as television, radio, and now the World Wide Web, that influenced human imagination but that the mediums themselves shaped our consciousness.

The alluring nature of the smartphone and the ubiquity of the television provide the Content Producers a way to manipulate our realities with their messages of fear, anxiety, and greed.

McCluhan’s prophecy, “The medium is the message,” powerfully connects with C.S. Lewis’s story, The Last Battle, the final installment of the Narniad. In it, the ape Shift dresses Puzzle the donkey in a lion’s skin to manipulate the animals of Narnia. 

Puzzle is the medium. Shift is a false prophet who uses language to manipulate the truth (reality) about Aslan to gain control of Narnia. The Narnians succumb to the deception to the point where they no longer question the veracity of Shift’s claims.

Sidenote: Whenever you see a great mass of people believing what they’re told by “authorities” without questioning, while those who resist the propaganda are demonized and called law breakers, you know something’s amiss.

The Narnians fell in line with Shift’s distortion of truth. Remember, Shift didn’t set out to rebel against Aslan. He distorted reality (Remember: Truth is correspondence to reality), subverting truth by using the image of Aslan—Narnia’s good king—and the power he represents for evil purposes.

Our “Puzzle in a Lion’s Skin” is the smartphone. We’re constantly told that it is now essential for life on earth and critical to the productivity and connectivity of our civilization—all good things, right?

Have we asked ourselves who’s in control of the machines?

Who’s pumping the content through the machine’s applications?

What is their intent?

Why do they want our daughters and sons addicted to social media?

How have they subverted truth/reality?

Do we even question? Or have we just blindly accepted, succumbing to the lies of modern technology?

The Voiding of Human Density

The human race is being voided. The phone machine is reformating the disc of our imagination. Its physical omnipresence molds our dependence and reliance on its instant connection to unlimited information.

Think of it’s hold on you and me:

Turn phone over = Dopamine#

Check phone / side-scroll = Dopamine²

Our addiction to machines and their inane messages of death, disguised so elegantly in the pomp and lure of community, social connection, and productivity language, contributes to the systematic removal of the density of life.

What is the density of life?

In his timeless book Confessions, St. Augustine said, “My weight is my love.” He wrote this in the final chapters as he unraveled his thoughts on time, creation, and the significance of light. I want to draw a parallel between Augustine’s idea of “weight” and the scientific explanation of density.

Here’s how I am envisioning the parallel:

Weight = Density

Weight / Density = Human Desire²

Time = Existence

Time is relative to my weight.

Here’s my explanation of the above:

Summary: My existence—how I act and move in reality—is altered by what I desire. Our desires—our weight—alter reality in the same way that gravity alters reality. We pursue and make decisions based on our desires. Each decision changes the course of our lives, our reality.

Time = Existence + The passions that alter the reality of our daily living

Weight / Density = Human Desire^{2. {Emotions, sensibilities, sincerity, passions, et al.}}

Sum: The weight (or density) of daily living is relative to what I desire most.

If we use the physical phenomenon of the Black Hole as our metaphor, we can better understand how our weight is being voided.

We view black holes as these objects of haunting mystery and uncertainty. But the little we do know of black holes paints a different picture.

1. The immense density of a black hole bends spacetime and light because its gravitational force is so strong it changes reality.

   1. We know that black holes are formed by massive, dense celestial objects whose density curves spacetime so drastically that if we could view an object at the event horizon of the black hole—the very edge of spacetime curvature before it descends into the singularity—it would appear motionless and timeless.

   2. That is because the geometric force created by the density of the black hole—what we call “gravity”—pulls the light into the black hole, so the last image we can see would be the last of the object’s light.

   3. Nothing can escape the strong force of the black hole.

2. Black holes are profound examples of density that surpass what the laws of physics can explain.

   1. Their singularity, impossible to observe or reach because it lies beyond the event horizon, connects our physical and metaphysical paradigms.

   2. A black hole is a natural phenomenon existing in our physical universe. Yet, it possesses characteristics closer to the infinite (metaphysical) than the finite.

   3. Remember: Metaphysics is theoretical knowledge that searches for the why and first causes of existence and reality.

   4. Aristotle stated that the pursuit of first causes and universal principles equates to the pursuit of wisdom.

   5. Wisdom is the pursuit of the Good.

   6. The black hole serves as our metaphor, suggesting that there is more to life than just data and the physical material world we observe and record with our machines.

Cheat Sheet

I’ve given you perhaps too much information about black holes. I can’t help myself. That’s because their existence fascinates me. The physical world contains objects that break physical laws down and present more questions than answers. They are bridges between the physical world and a world awash with wonder and the infinite. Black holes and Light are two such objects. By looking hard at them, it is my hope that they look hard back at us.

For now, let’s just keep this in our pockets about black holes:

Their incredible density creates intense gravitational force, which not even light can escape. I want us to think about this density and gravitational force that alters the reality of spacetime and, in a metaphorical way, observe how our lives also possess a density—or should.

I suggest that our density as humans is being voided by phones, other mediums, and content intended to subvert our view of truth and reality.

Now, think of the weight Augustine talked about.

“My weight is my love.”

Augustine’s “weight” shows the correlation between the physical and metaphysical laws governing our reality.

Weight changes reality—gravity in the physical world and desires in the metaphysical world.

Like a black hole, we, too, possess a density of spirit.

But just as vast spaces between the density of celestial objects are void of weight, the human spirit can be voided of its weight. Our daily life experiences are relative to our weight.

If we live with passion, vigor, and emotional richness, joy adds to our weight, our density.

But think about this. If reality can somehow be made to feel meaningless, our weight is voided. We become weightless. If, unlike a black hole, we lack the density of passions and exist as empty entities, we find ourselves returning to primeval chaos, an uninhabitable realm of mayhem, rebellion, and lawlessness.

Mind you, not in the physical world, but in the orbit of our spiritual selves. In ancient texts, the Leviathan symbolizes chaos. In Scripture, chaos was a void. The world was void and uninhabitable before God spoke light into existence.

Young people are dying—physically and spiritually—due to a lack of fullness, density, and strong force in their lives. The machine world has done this. And we’ve helped.

C.S. Lewis also prophesied and wrote two books about our current affairs. The first was a lecture series at the University of Durham titled The Abolition of Man. The second was a science fiction novel that fictionalized the concepts in his lecture, That Hideous Strength. In Abolition, he said our job as educators is not to cut down jungles (emotion, sentiment, passions) but to irrigate desserts.

The Christian intelligentsia likes to throw moralism at problems. We look at the passions in the world and, like old grumpy goats belt, “That’s ba-ha-ah-ad.” But Lewis said in his experience as a college professor, for every one student who needed his jungle of emotions cut back, ten students were living in the arid deserts of cold rationalism. They were being voided.

Remember the diverted river. We helped divert it. And now we need irrigation.

But all is not lost.

Even in typing that last sentence, I am participating in the binary nature of reality: lost/found, fast/slow, dark/light.

Our post-world culture, however, does not embrace the natural way of reality. Instead, we cling to life’s fragmentary nature, holding to the torn-to-pieces-hood that defines modern life. The poet Rilke embodied this very idea when he wrote:

You, darkness that I come from

I love you more than all the fires.

But this is a choice. In rejecting reality, we rebuke truth, happy with our indifference to what is and isn’t. We are the Mosaic generation of ambiguity living in a grey world of eternal twilight.

Nothing sticks.

No vividness.

The notion that darkness is our home is a false reality, for we were born of light.

Weren’t we?

Why else do we reach for it in the cold hours of sickness, confusion, disappointment, loss, and despair? We believe we are reaching for what is supposed to be … and, so often, isn’t.

The light/dark dichotomy gives us crisp, well-defined edges of reality to work with. We need this true reality right now. For too long, we’ve languished in the overwhelming, middling sense of grey—no definition, no edges.

Light is the bedrock of existence. And light will give us the meaning that machines only mimic.

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Your Homework

Journal your answers to the following questions. If you want to know more about how my wife and I value the rhythm of journaling, check out our Marveling course. Click here.

1. Honestly assess your phone use. Can you go a whole day without it? Do you feel incomplete if you’ve left it behind accidentally?

2. How much time do you spend on your phone compared to how much time you sleep, eat, go outside, or spend time with friends?

3. Where do you get the bulk of your information for daily living from: the World Wide Web, social media applications, print resources, books, etc.? How do you process this information and what questions are you asking of the sources disseminating it?

4. How much time do you spend observing the natural world and contemplating it versus the time you spend receiving information and entertainment from digital sources? Why is isolation from the natural world a cause of concern for the Christian?

5. Do you feel like you are losing density? If so, why?

*If you would like to answer these questions in the comments, feel free. But only if you’re comfortable sharing.

Notes

1. I used the basic definitions of these three words found on the Dictionary application on my laptop.

2. “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” The Poetry Foundation, October 31, 2017, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45319/the-charge-of-the-light-brigade.