Roots of Flourishing

This is the final lectures on the challenges of the digital revolution on our humanity where we discuss its impact on the spiritual dimension.

All aspects of the spiritual dimension can be harmed by the digital revolution.  The spiritual dimension includes the Good (the virtues), the True and the Beautiful while culminating in our relationship with God who is ultimately the summation of everything that is Good, True and Beautiful. 

The Good:  as we saw in the prior episode, it promotes vices such as anger and pride while inhibiting the virtues through lack of in person interactions. 

The True: limitless access to knowledge can include false knowledge.  As we saw in our last episode, we all have biases and bias confirmation along with the false consensus effect that is dramatically increased through the echo chambers of the digital world all which can prevent us from seeing both truth in this world and the transcendent Truth of the spiritual dimension.

The Beautiful: the digital world with its focus on the visual sense reinforces a decades long fascination and idolatry of superficial or external beauty or attractiveness.  This prioritizes the external while downplaying the importance of having a beautiful soul.

Harmony with the Divine:  the limitless distractions that pander to our psychologic desires decreases our time both alone and with God.  Blaise Pascal opined that “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”  Our endless “doing” is preventing us from “being” and thus places our humanity in an imbalanced state that prevents us from nurturing our souls, enhancing our brain capabilities, or thinking of others (either other people or God) before our own desires.  By spending so much time in the psychologic dimension, it thus limits our time in the other dimensions providing fewer opportunities for transformational relationships either with others or more importantly with God.

References

 Distraction Sickness by Andrew Sullivan

Digital Media Technology and Your Spiritual Life: An Uneasy Alliance by Laurel Dovich

Technology and the Soul: The Spiritual Lessons of Digital Distraction by Joshua Hochshild

What Jesus Said About the Importance of Solitude by Bob Hostetler

E-mail for comments and questions at: [email protected]

This is the second of two lectures on the social harms by the digital revolution.  

In the pre-digital world, we desired and sought out relations with those that we had common beliefs and interests; however, the degree of homogeneity of those beliefs and interests was limited by the potential number of people we could interact with.  We also had access to limited information which prevented many of our beliefs from going very deep.  The breadth of values that we held to be vital was also limited due to lack of reinforcement and/or exposure by those in the culture.  Finally, we had many more in-person interactions which provided a greater richness to our communication while also promoting empathy thus preventing us from being overly harsh all the while reinforcing the virtues of love and temperance.  

In the digital world, we still desire and seek out people with shared beliefs and interests, but due to the limitless number of people we can easily find greater homogeneity of beliefs and thoughts and thus we now expect and even demand rigid conformity.  Limitless information and the echo chamber effect reinforce our viewpoints through the phenomenon of bias confirmation thus deepening more of our beliefs and thoughts.  The media, politicians, and influencers now use the digital platform as a vehicle for promoting more things as vital to our humanity thus broadening the number of things that people feel to be nonnegotiable in their relationships and at the same time increasingly demonizing those who hold different views.  The limited nature of the digital world decreases our ability to regularly see and hear the critical nonverbal aspect of our communication thus limiting both the message and our empathy.  This sets the stage for more vulnerable narcissists to become cyberbullies while many bystanders join in through the “bandwagon” effect.  Anger and pride are being stoked and reinforced in many people while everyone is experiencing greater anxiety over the threat of being cancelled all leading to increasing polarization and social division.  

References

How Cancel Culture Psychology and Toxic Tribalism Impact Young Adult Mental Health by the Newport Institute

Superbia: The Perils of Pride. The Power of Humility by Dr. Steve Willing 

Social Media Is Killing Your Friendships by Jennifer Chesak

Has Social Media Ruined The Idea Of Friendship? by Ira Bedzow

Media Madness:  The Corruption of Our Political Culture by James Bowman

What Are The Mental Health Effects of Cancel Culture? by Refocus 

E-mail for comments and questions at: [email protected]

 Gazzaley + Rosen The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World

Elayne Allen Let’s Stigmatize Smartphones

Wendy Wang and Michael Toscano More Scrolling, More Marital Problems

Samuel Perry and Cyrus Schleifer Till Porn Do Us Part? A Longitudinal Examination of Pornography Use and Divorce

E-mail for comments and questions at: [email protected]

3rd part on the digital revolution looking at biologic harms. Key brain aspects include networks, the neurotransmitter dopamine, and mirror neurons. 4 networks. 1) executive control network (ECN): decision making and self-regulation. 2) salience network (SN): filters external and internal stimuli. 3) default mode network (DMN): activated when not engaged in a task. Includes ideas of the self and others (aka social cognition or mentalizing). 4) task positive network: active in tasks.

Neurotransmitters help neurons communicate. The neurotransmitter dopamine drives reward centers. Mirror neurons (MN) fire when a person acts or observes someone performing the same act and are important in perceptions of emotions and empathy.  These structures are imbalanced and not harmonious in psychologic disorders and addictions.

Digital technology unnaturally brings a large quantity and high frequency of novel information or stimuli to reward centers. This overload can lead to addiction manifested by anxiety and obsessive technology checking behaviors. 

In addiction, the DMN thinks too much about “me” and not enough on others. Addiction decreases the DMN’s connections to the ECN leading to impulsive behavior and poor long-term goal prioritization. The SN wrongly prioritizes external and/or internal addictive cues. Dopamine receptors are down regulated resulting in need for more stimulation. MN's connectivity likely decreased with less social recognition and empathy.

References
Anna Lembke Dopamine nation +  interview

Zhang + Volkow Brain default mode network dysfunction in addiction-what addiction does to our brains

Gazzaley + Rosen The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World

Review Mirror neurons 30 years later

Dopamine, Smartphones & You-how our brains are manipulated

Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics articles: Associations Between Infant Screen Use, Electroencephalography Markers, and Cognitive Outcomes + Association of Habitual Checking Behaviors on Social Media With Longitudinal Functional Brain Development

Kurt Thompson Anatomy of the Soul

Ronald Siegel The Science of Mindfulness

Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review

E-mail for comments and questions at: [email protected]

3rd part on the digital revolution looking at biologic harms. Key brain aspects include networks, the neurotransmitter dopamine, and mirror neurons. 4 networks. 1) executive control network (ECN): decision making and self-regulation. 2) salience network (SN): filters external and internal stimuli. 3) default mode network (DMN): activated when not engaged in a task. Includes ideas of the self and others (aka social cognition or mentalizing). 4) task positive network: active in tasks.

Neurotransmitters help neurons communicate. The neurotransmitter dopamine drives reward centers. Mirror neurons (MN) fire when a person acts or observes someone performing the same act and are important in perceptions of emotions and empathy.  These structures are imbalanced and not harmonious in psychologic disorders and addictions.

Digital technology unnaturally brings a large quantity and high frequency of novel information or stimuli to reward centers. This overload can lead to addiction manifested by anxiety and obsessive technology checking behaviors. 

In addiction, the DMN thinks too much about “me” and not enough on others. Addiction decreases the DMN’s connections to the ECN leading to impulsive behavior and poor long-term goal prioritization. The SN wrongly prioritizes external and/or internal addictive cues. Dopamine receptors are down regulated resulting in need for more stimulation. MN's connectivity likely decreased with less social recognition and empathy.

References
Anna Lembke Dopamine nation +  interview

Zhang + Volkow Brain default mode network dysfunction in addiction-what addiction does to our brains

Gazzaley + Rosen The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World

Review Mirror neurons 30 years later

Dopamine, Smartphones & You-how our brains are manipulated

Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics articles: Associations Between Infant Screen Use, Electroencephalography Markers, and Cognitive Outcomes + Association of Habitual Checking Behaviors on Social Media With Longitudinal Functional Brain Development

Kurt Thompson Anatomy of the Soul

Ronald Siegel The Science of Mindfulness

Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review

E-mail for comments and questions at: [email protected]

2nd of 5-part series on the digital revolution. Today we look at the psychologic harms.

Expressive individualism sets the background that already drives us more into the psychologic.  This overemphasis on our thoughts, emotions, and desires leads to narcissism.  This preoccupation with self-referential thinking or thinking about “me” leads to unhappiness.

Silicon Valley exploits this turn to the psychologic by exploiting our mechanisms for producing positive emotions.  Their techniques take advantage of an unnatural environment overwhelming our neurobiology resulting in boredom and anxiety over “fear of missing out” on the next positive emotion served up by digital technology.  Although positive emotions are beneficial, we need all of PERMA (P: positive emotions, E: engagement, R: relationships, M: meaning, and A: accomplishment) to flourish. Digital technology increasingly provides positive emotions unhinged from these other essentials. 

The psychologic is now in overdrive. We are increasingly out of balance, not working in harmony, and neglecting/harming the basic goods.  This is a root cause of our mental health issues.

Social media, video games, and pornography are great threats.  Social media is harmful especially to children and adolescents.  Videogames drive us deeper into the psychologic isolating us from our other dimensions and can lead to addiction.  Finally, pornography panders to psychologic desires dissociated from social, biologic, or spiritual goods.  Internet pornography has led to alarming rates of sexual dysfunction through distorted expectations and addiction.  

 We must moderate our time and engagement with these technologies.  We must strive for balance and harmony and promote the basic goods.  Self-transcending our psychologic and fully engaging our other 3 dimensions is essential to restoring balance that the digital technology continually threatens.

 References
Expressive individualism references in episode 3

Gazzaley and Rosen’s The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World highlights our neurobiology and psychology

Clare Morell’s How Digital Media Helped Shape the “Modern Self” reviews expressive individualism and digital technology

Joshua Pauling’s Modern Man Is Psychologized, Sexualized, Politicized—and Digitized explains how the digitized man is not whole

Ronald Siegel’s The Science of Mindfulness: A Research-Based Path to Well-Being reviews data supporting mindfulness 

Marty Seligman’s Flourish explains PERMA

Trevor Haynes’ Dopamine, Smartphones & You: A battle for your time shows how our brains are manipulated

Surgeon General’s Advisory Social Media and Youth Mental Health  is a wakeup call

Elayne Allen’s Let’s Stigmatize Smart Phones advocates for public change of our behavior

Internet pornography harms in Dr. Brian Park's Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports

E-mail for comments and questions at: [email protected]

This is the first part of a five-episode series on the challenges that the digital revolution pose for our humanity.  This episode will provide a general framework to analyze the effects of tools and specifically the digital revolution regarding our human flourishing.

The analysis begins with assessing the depth and breadth of a tool’s impact on us.  The digital revolution is widespread globally while at the same time we now spend a substantial portion of our lives interacting with it.  Additionally, the technology now vies for our attention through a myriad of alerts and other mechanisms to capture our attention.  This signals a substantial increase in the ability of the tool (digital technology) to impact our lives.

Our framework for critically analyzing whether any tool to include the digital ones is helping or harming our human flourishing is by looking at it through the lens of whether it is leading to better balance and harmony with promotion of the basic goods.  The symptoms of our skyrocketing mental health issues provide solid evidence that something is amiss, and the evidence is mounting that the digital revolution is accelerating these problems by driving us to be more out of balance by causing us to focus more and more on our psychologic dimension to the neglect of the other three (biologic, social, and spiritual) while also harming the basic goods.

References

E-mail for comments and questions at: [email protected]

Join me in the last of a two-part conversation with college student Micah Allen.  This episode continues our discussion of human flourishing from both philosophical and theological perspectives.  We introduce three philosophers and theologians Soren Kierkegaard, Marcus Aurelius, and R.C. Sproul in addition to referencing previously mentioned authors Viktor Frankl and Albert Wolters.  The conversation focuses on redeeming a proper understanding of the individual and also of an ascetic life.   We also discuss the role of suffering in our lives and how that can lead to post-traumatic growth and a furtherance of our virtues and character.

E-mail for comments and questions at: [email protected]

Join me in the first of a two-part conversation with college student Micah Allen as we discuss human flourishing in the college experience and beyond.  This wide ranging discussion covers issues within college from Micah's perspective as a resident assistance to general  thinking of human flourishing from both theological and philosophical perspectives.  

E-mail for comments and questions at: [email protected]

The last of a four-episode series on redeeming work that discusses how ideological intrusion into our work can degrade, dilute, and even distort the good of our work.  Finally, we discuss the one area of positive enhancement (promoting engagement or flow) that the institution contributes to our work. 

Ideology can be defined as a set of political beliefs or a set of ideas that characterize a particular culture. Although ideology can degrade and dilute the good of work, its greatest threat is in distorting it by turning the specific work into something else to pursue another goal.  Historically, the ideology of communism adversely affected the good of work by distorting all work to conform to various ideological claims.  This led to fatal results due to unprepared armies, poor quality products, and food shortages.  Today, the sexual revolution, political agendas, consumerism, and wokeism all have adversely impacted the good of work in many fields.  Examples of journalism, education, and medicine demonstrate distortion by one or more of these ideologies by forcing them to pursue other goals.  These other goals now harm the internal good or excellence of each profession while simultaneously increasing interpersonal tension amongst workers, and harming society coinciding with decreasing trust within society towards each profession.  

The institution should strive to adequately match the talents of the workers with the tasks at hand knowing that the talents and tasks can change over time.  The institution should neither want a bored worker nor a stressed-out worker.  Increasing workers’ abilities through additional training and then giving them commensurate levels of greater responsibility and/or more challenging tasks is essential for growth and fulfillment in our work leading ideally to greater time spent in “engagement” or “flow.”  Ideas such as giving employees side project or innovation time off time to work on projects that they find interesting while on company time has shown to decrease burnout and increase job satisfaction.

References

A Time to Build by Yuval Levin is a key read for understanding the healthy role that our institutions should play while he convincingly argues that our current institutions are not healthy which is adversely affecting our society.  An NPR interview hits the high points of his book. 

Website on Communism and Computer Ethics by four Stanford graduates discussing Work Ethic and Motivation

Wikipedia has a nice discussion on Lysenkoism

Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcy’s book How Now Shall We Live is a classic book that responds to different worldviews contrasting them with a Christian worldview.  An entire chapter is dedicated to the outsized effects that the sexual revolution has on our worldview.  A 41-minute video reviews the book.

Carl Trueman’s book Strange New World is an excellent introduction to expressive individualism while his book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is a deeper exploration.  There are multiple interviews and lectures with Carl Tru

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