Choosing Vinyl in a Digital Age

There’s a term that has gained wide traction over the last number of years to describe our unique cultural moment. Disenchantment. It’s a term used mainly by philosophers and historians and theologians to describe the fact that faith feels different in the twenty first century west than at most other parts of Christian history and even human history, more generally.

Faith no longer feels as obvious as it once did. God was once more of a given, a fact of life. There was more social support for belief because everyone had it and everyone supported the institutions that formed and reinforced it. It would have been hard to find someone in medieval Europe, for example, who didn’t believe in God. The idea would have been almost literally unthinkable. Very simply put: It’s easier to believe when everyone else does.

It is likely not news to you that we no longer live in a world where belief in a transcendent God is obvious or assumed.

The Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, Globalization, the Age of the Internet… Over the last few centuries, as human knowledge and technological capacities have expanded, as cultures and religions have come into much closer contact with one another, the world has grown ever less mysterious, ever less “enchanted.” Belief in God, where it remains, is much more individualistic, more selective, more of a “do it yourself” assemblage of whatever beliefs “work for me.” It is no longer a given. No longer just a fact of life. It’s an optional extra, for many people. Something that might be useful in helping with mental health or dealing with stress. Or not.

This is the disenchanted world that we live in in the twenty-first century. And yet all is not well in these disenchanted times.

Sometimes the story of our cultural trajectory in the west is told as a story of liberation from the shackles of superstitions and oppressions of religion. It is told as the story of emancipation, of freedom. There may be a sliver of truth to this. Certain forms of religion were oppressive and we do well to move beyond them.

But if religion and Christianity were just bad news, full stop—something that human beings believed when they didn’t know better and would inevitably grow out of—we might expect to see certain things in a world where its influence is fading. We might expect to see a flowering of culture, of wellness and health and vitality and equality and tolerance and community and flourishing once the shackles of religion were shed.

It is likely also not news to you that while there are glimpses of this goodness here and there, overall, this is not, in fact, what we see in the post-Christian west.

What we in fact see are…

… skyrocketing rates of depression and anxiety and addictions of all kinds.

… an ever-widening gap between rich and poor.

… weakening commitments to institutions of all kinds.

… an explosion of shallow and vulgar forms of entertainment.

… divisive and polarizing public discourse.

… an unhealthy dependence upon technology.

… and people hiving off into endless categories of identity and fighting for territory.

We also see despair. We see people adrift, struggling with meaninglessness and isolation and loneliness. We see people lacking a coherent vision of either the past or the future within which to anchor their lives, lacking a compelling a hope to guide their action in the present.

This is particularly true among the young. Last week, Ross Douthat wrote an article for The New York Times about the phenomenon of young people saying that they don’t want to have children because they fear raising them in the world they are inheriting. The specific reason for this addressed in his article was the threat posed by climate change, but in my conversations with young adults it could also be racial injustice or the economy or a lack of good employment options or the ugliness of the world of social media or a difficulty in forming meaningful stable relationships with people that have shared values. It’s not uncommon to hear people south of thirty complain that the world is too messed up to bring children into.

This, despite the fact that in many ways there has never been a time in history where more people enjoyed more rights, where the standard of living in places like Canada is higher than ever, where until very recently life expectancy was longer than it had ever been (it’s gone down in places like Canada mainly due to things like suicide and drug-related deaths), where technology has brought pretty much anything the human mind could dream up to our doorsteps and screen pretty much on demand.

Something else is going on in our despairing moment. Douthat argues that while there are many reasons for the phenomenon of young people not wanting to have children, one that doesn’t receive nearly enough attention is religious in nature.

Explanations for the recent surge in teenage misery that focus on the effects of social media, the impact of the pandemic, overprotective parenting and other factors all make a lot of sense.

But religious shifts belong in that conversation, too, especially since depression and anxiety appear sharpest among the most liberal younger Americans. If some of the passions of progressivism have their origins in spiritual impulses and aspirations, the absence of ultimate religious hope may darken the shadows of despair over young-progressive souls.

This is our cultural moment. Our defaults have changed. Our horizons have shrunk. Our cultural despair is profoundly religious in nature, whether we recognize it or not.

I recently read an article about Jack White, “one of the few undisputed rock gods of the twenty-first century.” His band, the White Stripes, are famous for their raw, stripped down approach to music. White has a strong preference for vinyl over digital when it comes to recording. He founded his own studio (Third Man Records) and has even employed an audio engineer in a white lab coat (who awesomely calls himself “Dr. Groove”). White is seen as something of an antique, a “nostalgist” in the music world.

I’m not qualified to weigh in on the vinyl vs digital debate when it comes to sound quality. I know that many people like vinyl just because they like being the sorts of people who like vinyl. But as I read the article, it occurred to me that perhaps there’s a metaphor to be mined here. Those who choose vinyl in 2022 do so in a digital world. They do so knowing full well that they could easily open an app on their phones instead of dropping the needle into the record. They’re choosing a different way of engaging, of listening, of experiencing music. But there’s no going back to a world where vinyl was the only option.

In the same way, those of us who still believe, at least in some form, in an enchanted world where God is alive and active do so in a world of science and factories and vaccines and driverless cars and Facebook and Amazon and global travel and easy information and a plurality of beliefs. We’re consciously choosing a different way of engaging, of listening, of experiencing reality. But there’s no going back to a world where belief was the only option.

It’s a limited metaphor, as all metaphors are. But finding a way back to vinyl in a digital world might be the path to salvation in our culture of despair.

Feature image source.