We Should Be Ashamed of Ourselves

“I like it better when your phone is on airplane mode.” The comment came from my dear wife as I was responding to a text while we were walking into a restaurant for lunch. We had just crossed the border back into Canada after spending a weekend in western Montana to celebrate our anniversary. My phone had been on airplane mode while out of the country to avoid data roaming charges. Apparently, I am more attentive, more present, and just generally more enjoyable to be around when my phone isn’t constantly buzzing and when I am not leaping to its every (real or imagined) demand. I mumbled some half-hearted, woefully inadequate excuse before sheepishly shoving my phone back in my pocket.

She’s right, of course. We’re all more enjoyable people when our attention spans aren’t being colonized by our devices. And yet, we stupidly persist. I’m not even on social media and I can find ways to be completely absent from those in my physical company and present to whatever’s happening on my phone. I shudder to think how bad it might be if I had a half-dozen or more social media platforms to monitor and respond to and feed data throughout the day. Which is, of course, the norm for a great many people, particularly younger generations who increasingly live almost entirely online, and whose mental health is being destroyed in the process (Jon Haidt’s research makes this abundantly clear).

As I’ve mentioned before, I think Freya India is one of the most interesting Gen Z voices out there at the moment. She’s remarkably insightful and articulate for someone so young (only 24 years old!), particularly when it comes to social media and how it is changing our experience of what it means to be human. She recently interviewed Paul Kingsnorth on her Substack, and made the case that constantly sharing, editing, curating, modifying our bodies, our identities, our very selves online is a kind of desecration of something sacred. And she makes a strong case for bringing back something like—gasp!—shame:

So maybe we do need a little more shame, some stronger cultural norms around these things—where sharing private moments seems strange, where it would be unthinkable for a 12 year-old to have an Instagram account, or shameful to take selfies in sacred places… The other day I watched a group of young women take selfies together in a restaurant the entire evening, barely exchanging a word with one another. While eating, they started editing their photos in silence—one hand editing, the other holding their cutlery. They looked possessed. This is the same generation who say they feel painfully alone. What are we doing?

She followed this observation up with a question for Kingsnorth:

I wonder what you make of this feeling—that social media doesn’t just harm our mental health but degrades us spiritually.

I think she is asking exactly the right question. Transferring these questions into the domain of sacred/profane rather than healthy/unhealthy gets at the idea that there is something far more significant going on in our online addictions. It’s not just that we’re failing to optimize our mental or emotional health. It’s that we’re reducing something sacred—a human being—to commodified data, to a product to be uploaded and evaluated and edited online. We are not treating one another or ourselves with a level of attention, care, even reverence commensurate to what and who we are.

Kingsnorth’s response also contained much worth dwelling deeply on:

I think that this sense of degradation, or profanity, is at the heart of my objection to social media and to the Machine in general. There are a lot of studies I could quote or arguments I could make, and many people have made them much better than I could… But at the root of it for me it is just some deep sense of wrongness. Of sacrilege.

I doubt he’s alone in feeling this way. I certainly do! The question, as always, is, “What to do?”

Kingsnorth goes on to talk about how the “culture of liberation” that began in the 1960s has failed to deliver on its promises, and about how recovering (or repurposing) shame could be precisely what we need:

We all pretended to believe, then as now, that ‘shaming’ people in order to keep society within those limits was bad, and that we should not judge or condemn any behaviour at all, however socially damaging. But no culture in history has ever believed that. And in fact, in the age of ‘cancel culture’ we don’t believe that either. We still shame people for all sorts of things—racism, sexism, homophobia and a host of ‘isms’ real or imagined. What we don’t shame is personal vanity, sexual licence, anti-social behaviour or any expression of sexuality, no matter how niche or damaging. What we have done is to promote personal ‘liberation’ to the exclusion of all other values—and that particular value just happens to be the one which is most easily monetised. The result is a culture in which the pressure to Instagram yourself is both psychologically damaging and highly profitable. The culture is profane and commercial at the same time. They feed off each other.

We can all feel in some way that this is wrong: that we have let something vital go. The key thing is that, as you say, at some level we seem to feel ashamed of ourselves for the way we are living—and we are deeply unhappy, especially the young. Recently I gave a talk in which I pointed out that the Christian list of the ‘seven deadly sins’ which we used to be told to avoid in order to live a Godly life—lust, gluttony, greed, envy, pride, wrath, sloth—are now the basis of our economy and culture. We don’t avoid them—we actively promote them. This ought to tell us how off track we are.

I felt a twinge of shame after my wife’s comment yesterday afternoon. And that’s probably good and appropriate. Sometimes, we should feel ashamed of ourselves. It’s a sign that on some level, however small, we know that we were made for something better, something more, something healthier than our habits and assumptions and “new normal” are steering us toward. Something sacred.