Isolating with our devices is the new baseball and apple pie. Whenever I look around, I see someone staring into his or her phone, still as a statue, and I think of the myth of Narcissus and how he stared into the pool at his reflection, and falling in love with what he saw, he lost himself. Then I think to myself, wow, that must be exactly what I look like when I’m staring into my phone. From Ovid’s Metamorphoses, chapter 3 there is something strangely relevant for today’s world. Ovid was a Roman poet who lived at the same time of Jesus and during the reign of Caesar Augustus. He recorded many of the Greek and Roman myths, and when I was a attempting to be an author of fiction (which I’ll save for another episode), I read Ovid’s Metamorphosis quite a bit for a couple of reasons: first, they are ancient stories with deep insights, second, I enjoy reading mythology, and third, I could steal plots from these ancient tales and plug in my own characters.

There are only so many plots, and once you exhaust your Netflix, Hulu, Prime, and HBO Plus shows, you will know what I mean by that. There is not an unlimited well of plot lines for writers to draw from. But for my purposes here, I only mean to talk about one of Ovid’s recorded myths, and it’s a pretty well known one, about Narcissus. See if you can spot the similarities between your usage of the smart phone and this silly old myth. Narcissus comes to the side of a pool of water and looks down, very drawn into what he sees there.

…There as he stoopedto quench his thirst another thirst increased.While he is drinking he beholds himselfreflected in the mirrored pool—and loves;loves an imagined body which containsno substance, for he deems the mirrored shadea thing of life to love. He cannot move,for so he marvels at himself, and lieswith countenance unchanged, as if indeeda statue…

All that is lovely in himself he loves,and in his witless way he wants himself:—he who approves is equally approved…

The cheat that you are seeking has no place.Avert your gaze and you will lose your love,for this that holds your eyes is nothing savethe image of yourself reflected back to you.It comes and waits with you; it has no life;it will depart if you will only go.

Good luck finding a more apt description of what the smart phone does to us. The phone is the image of our thoughts reflected back to us, allowing us to love what we are thinking. And we cannot move. We become stone. Like statues, like Narcissus.

Somehow the ancient writers, prophets, and thinkers can reduce our modern “advanced society” to a yawning “been there, done that” kind of mockery. The thoughts and epiphanies in our heads today lack originality if you go back to the classics. What’s clear to me is that the ancients were not simpletons, or fools, or gullible - they were wise from living, and suffering. Storytelling from all cultures has a wisdom that we tend to ignore in our age of instant gratification and tech efficiency.

Even as we unlock more doors to physics and biology, the greatest questions have not changed and will never change. I recently read that scientists have developed a laser to see around corners. Won’t that be nice. Will it make the world a “better place”? No. In fact, many of our “better place” stories about technology end up blowing up in our face, sometimes literally, since military applications are the first takers. A show called Silicon Valley produced a great joke on the software and tech industry’s self-congratulation for fixing the world’s problems. Every app and product claims to be “making the world a better place” but for the most part that is just a marketing ploy and self-delivered backrubs for techies to encourage themselves in their endeavors. There are many things that start out to “make the world a better place” and end up doing the opposite, the two most famous ones that I can thing of being: splitting the atom and a thing called Facebook.

I do not mean to attack science, since I love it. The findings are amazing. I nodded along with these “fixers,” with a faith in scientism, believing that tech and science would undo every knot - if not today, eventually. We, as individuals and collectively, are gazing at ourselves with amazement, marveling, in self-worship of humankind and things of this world, and forgetting about God. I did for many years.

I am an internet Luddite. It’s true. I admit it. I see no conflict between science and religion, or science and spirituality, since science is concerned with things of this world and faith is concerned with things beyond this world. But I do see a conflict between big tech and reality. Along with the Narcissus myth that is so obvious in the phone addiction, there is another primeval event that I recall whenever I turn over my phone and see the back.

The irony of the company Apple having a logo of an apple with a bite taken out printed on the back of every phone is too rich and obvious to ignore. While I appreciate the Catechism of the church’s reference to figurative language regarding Genesis 1 and the Fall of Man, I also love the story of how Genesis uses the apple to describe the flaw that is written on our hearts. The Catholic church’s allegorical reading of Genesis is one of the main reasons I am a returned Catholic, as I felt much like St. Augustine when he said: “I was being killed by the Old Testament passages when I took them literally.” (Confessions p109, p414) But when the story for original sin uses an apple as the central temptation of turning the first people away from God and toward worldly pleasures, and the largest corporation in the world, Apple, is turning people away from God and toward worldly pleasures…and the logo is a bitten apple…again you can’t help but nod toward the ancient writers. Apparently, there is something about apples that we really, really like. I think the only name that could have been more perfect for Apple, the company, might have been Golden Calf, but I have a feeling that wouldn’t sell as many phones.

The funny thing to me is that the pre-Christian Greeks had a saying of “Know thyself,” which said that man must be subordinate to the Gods, and Prometheus was punished for getting out of order. The Hebrews first three commandments are about respecting and surrendering to God. The Christian addition was to love God first and then one another. The Islamic profession of faith, first thing, is that there is no God but God. Myths from nearly all cultures have humans in tales that makes them subordinate to God, because mankind is underneath God. The order of things must be God before humans, otherwise bad things will happen. I have a deep feeling that this correct. The ordering set forth by old knowledge was learned by experience.

Today, however, the sprawling message, mainly broadcasting from America, is the opposite focus of the old wisdom. “Know thyself” is now a self-oriented interpretation of life, like the kind Narcissus found. We stare into the phone, at the reflection of our thoughts, looking at a watery, amorphous truth in the mirror, wrapped in a fog of a false “connectedness.” But really we are alone, separated, fooled, like the boy and his reflection, staring at himself in the mirrored shade.

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