The Ever-Present But Anti-Transcendent Screen

'[I]f the transcendent does not find a place in social media, where do God or any of the “existential questions” fit in? Do they even become questions? Do they even get considered?'

From Crisis

By John M. Grondelski, PhD

Our screen-based culture is flat and temporal, very immanent, very now, in some sense very ephemeral. None of those characteristics is conducive to openness to transcendence.

First Things editor Mark Bauerlein spoke September 12 at Belmont House, in Washington, D.C., about his latest book, The Dumbest Generation Grows Up, the sequel to his 2008 Dumbest Generation. Both books are about the consequences of letting a generation come of age on screens. The earlier book warned against potential effects; the latest examines what happens when that generation crosses the line into what should be chronological adulthood.

Readers can delve into Bauerlein’s books to digest the full range of problems the screened generation faces. I’ll limit myself to three.

First, screen dependency decimated reading and, consequently, knowledge skills. Screen-based learning was originally touted as a way to tailor education to an individual child’s interests and levels, but—especially after the Covid lockdown—it has become apparent that putting the libraries of the world at the click of a button has not elevated the literacy or cultural levels of young people. 

When Pope Francis recently spoke of getting people (especially seminarians) to read literature, in part to get them off screens, I argued that the papal proposal failed to account for how screens change the way people approach reading. They’re not just “different delivery modes.” They fundamentally differ in how each approaches a fixed text as well as how they condition the writing of that text. Let’s just say, James Fenimore Cooper would not have had a career as a Tweet writer.

Second, building on the previous argument, Bauerlein criticizes screens for caging young people in youth culture. Books at least occasionally force young people to engage in what once used to be called “higher culture,” that is, something beyond the interest level of the contemporary teen or young adult. In many ways, it is an “anti-intellectual” culture. Social media reinforces these youth-centric foci by its “friending” mechanisms, which reinforce the predominantly youth world and ethos for its users. Instead of cross-generational fertilization, the youth orientation of social media, argues Bauerlein, boxes young people into a youth ghetto, with all the callowness such confinement would likely entail. Far from being “diverse” or “inclusive,” it frames a world that is generationally (and culturally) monochromatic and exclusive of worldviews other than its own.

Third—and to me the most important of Bauerlein’s arguments—is the immanentizing effect of screens. Bauerlein touched on this argument briefly at the conclusion of his remarks, but it perhaps is the most important of them: the here-and-now, youth-centric, temporal focus of screens leaves no room for the transcendent. How does Transcendence break into social media?  

And, if the transcendent does not find a place in social media, where do God or any of the “existential questions” fit in? Do they even become questions? Do they even get considered? Bauerlein does not think it coincidental (neither do I) that, as social media came to dominate generations, those generations also produced the phenomenon of religiously disaffiliated people we call “nones.”  

The culture and ethos of the screen is flat and temporal, very immanent, very now, in some sense very ephemeral. None of those characteristics is conducive to openness to transcendence. They in fact foster an indifference to, if not alienation from, more transcendent realities. 

The outcome is not, however, merely religious disaffiliation. It arguably also goes hand in hand with other phenomena, such as the greater indices of depression and mental illness among youth, social dysfunctionality, and even suicide. This is especially rampant in the teen years and especially among teenage girls who, struggling to establish their own sense of identity, suffer from being immersed into a peer culture that is often negative, unconfident, and even guilt-ridden. Such are the wages of immanence.

Many years ago, Jacques Maritain in another context criticized the contemporary immersion into the here and now to the exclusion of transcendence. He called it the “minotaur of the immanent.” In many ways, he was prescient about our current dilemmas.

The Minotaur was a hybrid, a “non-conforming” half-human, half-animal beast born of bestiality. He was imprisoned in the labyrinth on Crete into which fourteen Athenian youth—seven men and seven maidens—were regularly sent for the Minotaur to devour. It was only Theseus who eventually slew him (and managed to retrace his way, thanks to a string, out of the labyrinth).

Today’s Minotaur of the Immanent may not be half-bull, half-man, but it continues to devour young people otherwise in the bloom of youth. It devours them not by eating them alive but by eating away their natural openness to something (and Someone) bigger and beyond themselves. It contents them with the flatness of this world by blinding them to the adventures of setting out into the deep of life with God as one’s pilot.  

Bauerlein struck on something sapping our evangelical and “youth ministry” efforts, a major reason why we have a growing number of “nones.”  

Where is today’s Theseus?