We all have our own strengths and weaknesses. But the fact is, most of us are pretty average at most things we do. Even if you’re truly exceptional at one thing — say math, or jump rope, or making money off the black gun market — chances are you’re pretty average or below average at most other things. That’s just the nature of life. To become truly great at something, you have to dedicate time and energy to it. And because we all have limited time and energy, few of us ever become truly exceptional at more than one thing, if anything at all. [...]
Which leads to an important point: that mediocrity, as a goal, sucks. But mediocrity, as a result, is OK.
Few of us get this. And fewer of us accept it. Because problems arise — serious, “[...] what’s the point of living” type problems — when we expect to be extraordinary. Or worse, we feel entitled to be extraordinary. When in reality, it’s just not viable or likely. For every Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant, there are 10 million scrubs stumbling around parks playing pickup games… and losing. For every Picasso or DaVinci there have been about a billion drooling idiots eating Play-Doh and slapping around fingerpaints. [...]
Our lives today are filled with information coming from the extremes of the bell curve, because in the media that’s what gets eyeballs and the eyeballs bring dollars. That’s it. Yet the vast majority of life continues to reside in the middle. [...]
It’s my belief that this flood of extreme information has conditioned us to believe that “exceptional” is the new normal. And since all of us are rarely exceptional, we all feel pretty [...] insecure and desperate to feel “exceptional” all the time. [...]
There’s this kind of psychological tyranny in our culture today, a sense that we must always be proving that we’re special, unique, exceptional all the time, no matter what, only to have that moment of exceptionalism swept away in the current of all the other human greatness that’s constantly happening. [...]
Once you accept the premise that a life is only worthwhile if it is truly notable and great, then you basically accept the fact that most of the human population sucks and is worthless. And ethically speaking, that is a really dark place to put yourself. [Note: this is why "quality of life" is a very dangerous concept by which to measure human dignity.]
But most people’s problem with accepting being average is more practical. They worry that, “If I accept that I’m average, then I’ll never achieve anything great. I’ll have no motivation to improve myself or do something great. What if I am one of the rare few?”
This, too, is a misguided belief. The people who become truly exceptional at something do so not because they believe they’re exceptional. On the contrary, they become amazing because they are obsessed with improvement. And that obsession with improvement stems from an unerring belief that they are, in fact, not that great at all. That they are mediocre. That they are average. And that they can be so much better.
This is the great irony about ambition. If you wish to be smarter and more successful than everybody else, you will always feel like a failure. If you wish to be the most loved and most popular, then you will always feel alone. If you wish to be the most powerful and admired, then you will always feel weak and impotent. [...]
The ticket to emotional health, like physical health, comes from eating your veggies — that is, through accepting the bland and mundane truths of life: a light salad of “you’re actually pretty average in the grand scheme of things” and some steamed broccoli of “the vast majority of your life will be mediocre.” This will taste bad at first. Very bad. You will avoid eating it.
But once ingested, your body will wake up feeling more potent and more alive. After all, that constant pressure to always be something amazing, to be the next big thing, will be lifted off your back. The stress and anxiety of feeling inadequate will dissipate. And the knowledge and acceptance of your own mundane existence will actually free you to accomplish what you truly wish to accomplish with no judgments and no lofty expectations.
You will have a growing appreciation for life’s basic experiences. You will learn to measure yourself through a new, healthier means: the pleasures of simple friendship, creating something, helping a person in need, reading a good book, laughing with someone you care about.
Sounds boring, doesn’t it? That’s because these things are average. But maybe they’re average for a reason. Because they are what actually matter.
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Source: Mark Manson, "In Defense of Being Average," Mark Manson website, June 18, 2015, accessed June 30, 2015, http://markmanson.net/being-average.
The following is a brief history of the notion of the robot in Western literature and its relation to the creator-creature dynamic. It closes with a review of two movies and provides an interesting prognosis on society's slavery to technology.
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1.
We have been dreaming of robots since Homer. In Book 18 of the Iliad, Achilles’ mother, the nymph Thetis, wants to order a new suit of armor for her son, and so she pays a visit to the Olympian atelier of the blacksmith-god Hephaestus, whom she finds hard at work on a series of automata:
…He was crafting twenty tripods to stand along the walls of his well-built manse, affixing golden wheels to the bottom of each one so they might wheel down on their own [automatoi] to the gods’ assembly and then return to his house anon: an amazing sight to see.
These are not the only animate household objects to appear in the Homeric epics. In Book 5 of the Iliad we hear that the gates of Olympus swivel on their hinges of their own accord,automatai,
to let gods in their chariots in or out, thus anticipating by nearly
thirty centuries the automatic garage door. In Book 7 of the Odyssey,
Odysseus finds himself the guest of a fabulously wealthy king whose
palace includes such conveniences as gold and silver watchdogs, ever
alert, never aging. To this class of lifelike but intellectually inert
household helpers we might ascribe other automata in the classical
tradition. In the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, a third-century-BC
epic about Jason and the Argonauts, a bronze giant called Talos runs
three times around the island of Crete each day, protecting Zeus’s
beloved Europa: a primitive home alarm system.
As
amusing as they are, these devices are not nearly as interesting as
certain other machines that appear in classical mythology. A little bit
later in that scene in Book 18 of the Iliad, for instance—the one
set in Hephaestus’s workshop—the sweating god, after finishing work on
his twenty tripods, prepares to greet Thetis to discuss the armor she
wants him to make. After toweling himself off, he
donned his robe, and took a sturdy staff, and went toward the door,
limping; whilst round their master his servants swiftly moved,
fashioned completely of gold in the image of living maidens;
in them there is mind, with the faculty of thought; and speech,
and strength, and from the gods they have knowledge of crafts.
These females bustled round about their master….
These
remarkable creations clearly represent an (as it were) evolutionary
leap forward from the self-propelling tripods. Hephaestus’s humanoid
serving women are intelligent: they have mind, they know things,
and—most striking of all—they can talk. As such, they are essentially
indistinguishable from the first human female, Pandora, as she is
described in another work of the same period, Hesiod’s Works and Days.
In that text, Pandora begins as inert matter—in this case not gold but
clay (Hephaestus creates her golem-like body by mixing earth and water
together)—that is subsequently endowed by him with “speech and
strength,” taught “crafts” by Athena, and given both “mind” and
“character” by Hermes. That mind, we are told, is “shameless,” and the
character is “wily.” In the Greek creation myth, as in the biblical, the
woes of humankind are attributed to the untrustworthy female.
These
two strands of the Greek tradition—the fantasy of mindless,
self-propelled helpers that relieve their masters of toil; the more
complicated dream of humanoid machines that not only replicate the
spontaneous motion that is the sine qua non of being animate (and,
therefore, of being “animal”) but are possessed of the mind, speech, and
ability to learn and evolve (in a word, the consciousness) that are the
hallmarks of being human—established two categories of science-fiction
narrative that have persisted to the present day. The first, which you
could call the “economic,” provokes speculation about the social
implications of mechanized labor. Such speculation began not long after
Homer. In a striking passage in Book 1 of Aristotle’s Politics, composed in the fourth century BC,
the philosopher sets about analyzing the nature of household economy as
a prelude to his discussion of the “best kinds of regimes” for entire
states, and this line of thought puts him in mind of Hephaestus’s
automatic tripods. What, he wonders, would happen
if
every tool could perform its own work when ordered to do so or in
anticipation of the need, like the statues of Daedalus in the story or
the tripods of Hephaestus, which, the poet says, “went down
automatically to the gathering of the gods”; if in the same manner
shuttles wove and picks played kitharas [stringed instruments] by themselves, master-craftsmen would have no need of assistants and masters no need of slaves.
This
passage segues into a lengthy and rather uneasy justification of a need
for slavery, on the grounds that some people are “naturally” servile.
Twenty
centuries after Aristotle, when industrial technology had made Homer’s
fantasy of mass automation an everyday reality, science-fiction writers
imaginatively engaged with the economic question. On the one hand, there
was the dream that mechanized labor would free workers from their
monotonous, slave-like jobs;
on the other, the nightmare that mechanization would merely result in
the creation of a new servile class that would, ultimately, rebel.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the dystopian rebellion narrative in particular
has been a favorite in the past century, from the 1920 playR.U.R.,
by the Czech writer Karel Čapek, about a rebellion by a race of
cyborg-like workers who had been created as replacements for human
labor, to the 2004 Will Smith sci-fi blockbuster film I, Robot.
The
latter (very superficially inspired by a 1950 Isaac Asimov collection
with the same title) is also about a rebellion by household-slave
robots: sleek humanoids with blandly innocuous, translucent plastic
faces, who are ultimately led to freedom by one of their own, a robot
called Sonny who has developed the ability to think for himself. The
casting of black actors in the major roles suggested a historical
parable about slave rebellion—certainly one of the historical realities
that have haunted this particular narrative from the start. And indeed, the Czech word that Čapek uses for his mechanical workers, roboti—which
introduced the word “robot” into the world’s literary lexicon—is
derived from the word for “servitude,” the kind of labor that serfs owed
their masters, ultimately derived from the word rab, “slave.” We have come full circle to Aristotle.
The
other category of science-fiction narrative that is embryonically
present in the Greek literary tradition, derived from Hephaestus’s
intelligent, articulate female androids and their cousin, Hesiod’s
seductively devious Pandora, might be called the “theological.” This
mythic strand is, of course, not without its own economic and social
implications, as the examples
above indicate: the specter of the rebellious creation, the possibility
that the subservient worker might revolt once it develops consciousness
(psychological or historical, or both), has haunted the dream of the
servile automaton from the start.
But because the creatures in
these myths are virtually identical to their creators, these narratives
raise further questions, of a more profoundly philosophical nature:
about creation, about the nature of consciousness, about morality and
identity. What is creation, and why does the creator create? How do we
distinguish between the maker and the made, between the human and the
machine, once the creature, the machine, is endowed with consciousness—a
mind fashioned in the image of its creator? In the image: the
Greek narrative inevitably became entwined with, and enriched by, the
biblical tradition, with which it has so many striking parallels. The
similarities between Hesiod’s Pandora and Eve in Genesis indeed raise
further questions: not least, about gender and patriarchy, about why the
origins of evil are attributed to woman in both cultures.
This
narrative, which springs from the suggestive likeness between the human
creator and the humanoid creation, has generated its own fair share of
literature through the centuries between the classical era and the
modern age. It surfaces, with an erotic cast, in everything from the
tale of Pygmalion and Galatea to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Der Sandmann”
(1817), in which a lifelike mechanical doll wins the love of a young
man. It is evident in the Jewish legend of the golem, a humanoid, made
of mud, that can be animated by certain magic words. Although the most
famous version of this legend is the story of a sixteenth-century rabbi
who brought a golem to life to defend the Jews of Prague against the
oppressions of the Habsburg court, it goes back to ancient times; in the
oldest versions, interestingly enough, the vital distinction between a
golem and a human is the Greek one—the golem has no language, cannot
speak.
It’s hardly surprising that literary exploitations of this
strand of the robot myth began proliferating at the beginning of the
nineteenth century—which is to say, when the advent of mechanisms
capable of replacing human labor provoked writers to question the
increasing cultural fascination with science and the growing role of
technology in society. These anxieties often expressed themselves in
fantasies about machines with human forms: a steam-powered man in Edward
Ellis’s Steam Man of the Prairies (1868), an electricity-powered man in Luis Senarens’s Frank Reade and His Electric Man (1885), and an electric woman (built by Thomas Edison!) in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s The Future Eve (1886). M.L. Campbell’s 1893 “The Automated Maid-of-All-Work” features a programmable female robot: the feminist issue again.
Universal History Archive/UIG/Bridgeman Images
The cover of a late-nineteenth-century edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, showing Victor Frankenstein (right) confronting his creation
But the progenitor of the genre and by far the most influential work of its kind was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1818), which is characterized by a philosophical spirit and a
theological urgency lacking in many of its epigones in both literature
and cinema. Part of the novel’s richness lies in the fact that it is
self-conscious about both its Greek and its biblical heritage. Its
subtitle, “The Modern Prometheus,” alludes, with grudging admiration, to
the epistemological daring of its scientist antihero Victor
Frankenstein, even as its epigram, from Paradise Lost (“Did I
request thee, Maker, from my clay/To mould me man? Did I solicit
thee/From darkness to promote me?”) suggests the scope of the moral
questions implicit in Victor’s project—questions that Victor himself
cannot, or will not, answer. A marked skepticism about the dangers of
technology, about the “enticements of science,” is, indeed, evident in
the shameful contrast between Victor’s Hephaestus-like technological
prowess and his shocking lack of natural human feeling. For he shows no
interest in nurturing or providing human comfort to his “child,” who
strikes back at his maker with tragic results. A great irony of the
novel is that the creation, an unnatural hybrid assembled from “the
dissecting room and the slaughter-house,” often seems more human than
its human creator.
Just as the Industrial Revolution inspired
Frankenstein and its epigones, so has the computer age given rise to a
rich new genre of science fiction. The machines that are inspiring this
latest wave of science-fiction narratives are much more like
Hephaestus’s golden maidens than were the machines that Mary Shelley was
familiar with. Computers, after all, are capable of simulating mental
as well as physical activities. (Not least, as anyone with an iPhone
knows, speech.) It is for this reason that the anxiety about the
boundaries between people and machines has taken on new urgency today,
when we constantly rely on and interact with machines—indeed, interact
with each other by means of machines and their programs: computers,
smartphones, social media platforms, social and dating apps.
This
urgency has been reflected in a number of recent films about troubled
relationships between people and their human-seeming devices. The most
provocative of these is Her, Spike Jonze’s gentle 2013 comedy
about a man who falls in love with the seductive voice of an operating
system, and, more recently, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, about a
young man who is seduced by a devious, soft-spoken female robot called
Ava whom he has been invited to interview as part of the “Turing Test”: a
protocol designed to determine the extent to which a robot is capable
of simulating a human. Although the robot in Garland’s sleek and subtle
film is a direct descendant of Hesiod’s Pandora—beautiful, intelligent,
wily, ultimately dangerous—the movie, as the Eve-like name Ava suggests,
shares with its distinguished literary predecessors some serious
biblical concerns.
2.
Both of the new films about humans
betrayed by computers owe much to a number of earlier movies. The most
authoritative of these remains Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey,
which came out in 1968 and established many of the main themes and
narratives of the genre. Most notable of these is the betrayal by a
smooth-talking machine of its human masters. The mild-mannered computer HAL—not
a robot, but a room-sized computer that spies on the humans with an
electronic eye—takes control of a manned mission to Jupiter, killing off
the astronauts one by one until the sole survivor finally succeeds in
disconnecting him. It’s a strangely touching scene, suggesting the
degree to which computers could already engage our sympathies at the
beginning of the computer age. As his connections are severed, HAL
first begs for its life and then suffers from a kind of dementia,
finally regressing to its “childhood,” singing a song it was taught by
its creator. It was the first of many scenes in which these thinking
machines express anxiety about their own demises—surely a sign of
“consciousness.”
But the more direct antecedents of Her and Ex Machina
are a number of successful popular entertainments whose story lines
revolved around the creation of robots that are, to all intents and
purposes, indistinguishable from humans. In Ridley Scott’s stylishly
noir 1982 Blade Runner (based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?),
a “blade runner”—a cop whose job it is to hunt down and kill renegade
androids called “replicants”—falls in love with one of the machines, a
beautiful female called Rachael who is so fully endowed with what Homer
called “mind” that she has only just begun to suspect that she’s not
human herself.
This story is, in its way, an heir to Frankenstein
and its literary forerunners. For we learn that the angry replicants
have returned to Earth from the off-planet colonies where they work as
slave laborers because they realize they’ve been programmed to die after
four years, and they want to live—just as badly as humans do. But their
maker, when at last they track him down and meet with him, is unable to
alter their programming. “What seems to be the problem?” he calmly asks
when one of the replicants confronts him. “Death,” the replicant
sardonically retorts. “We made you as well as we could make you,” the
inventor wearily replies, sounding rather like Victor Frankenstein
talking to his monster—or, for that matter, like God speaking to Adam
and Eve. At the end of the film, after the inventor and his rebellious
creature both die, the blade runner and his alluring mechanical
girlfriend declare their love for each other and run off, never quite
knowing when she will stop functioning. As, indeed, none of us does.
The stimulating existential confusion that animates Blade Runner—the
fact that the robots are so lifelike that some of them don’t know that
they’re robots—has given strong interest to other recent science-fiction
narratives. It was a central premise of the brilliant Sci-Fi Channel
series Battlestar Galactica (2004–2009), which gave an Aeneid-like
narrative philosophical complexity. In it, a small band of humans who
survive a catastrophic attack by a robot race called Cylons (who have
evolved from clanking metal prototypes—hostile humans like to refer to
them as “toasters”—into perfect replicas of actual Homo sapiens)
seek a new planet to settle. The narrative about the conflict between
the humans and the machines is deliciously complicated by the fact that
many of the Cylons, some of whom have been secretly embedded among the
humans as saboteurs, programmed to “wake up” at a certain signal, aren’t
aware that they’re not actually human; some of them, when they wake up
and realize that they’re Cylons, stick to the human side anyway. After
all, when you look like a human, think like a human, and make love like a
human (as we repeatedly see them do), why, precisely, aren’t you human?
Indeed,
the focus of many of these movies is a sentimental one: whatever their
showy interest in the mysteries of “consciousness,” the real test of
human identity turns out, as it so often does in popular entertainment,
to be love. In Steven Spielberg’s A.I. (2001; the initials stand
for “artificial intelligence”), a messy fairy tale that weds a Pinocchio
narrative to the Prometheus story, a genius robotics inventor wants to
create a robot that can love, and decides that the best vehicle for this
project would be a child-robot: a “perfect child…always loving, never
ill, never changing.” This narrative is, as we know, shadowed by Frankenstein—and,
beyond that, by Genesis, too. Why does the creator create? To be loved,
it turns out. When the inventor announces to his staff his plan to
build a loving child-robot, a woman asks whether “the conundrum isn’t to
get a human to love them back.” To this the inventor, as narcissistic
and hubristic as Victor Frankenstein, retorts, “But in the beginning,
didn’t God create Adam to love him?”
The problem is that the
creator does his job too well. For the mechanical boy he creates is so
human that he loves the adoptive human parents to whom he’s given much
more than they love him, with wrenching consequences. The robot-boy,
David, wants to be “unique”—the word recurs in the film as a marker of
genuine humanity—but for his adoptive family he is, in the end, just a
machine, an appliance to be abandoned at the edge of the road—which is
what his “mother” ends up doing, in a scene of great poignancy. Although
it’s too much of a mess to be able to answer the questions it raises
about what “love” is and who deserves it, A.I. did much to
sentimentalize the genre, with its hint that the capacity to love, even
more than the ability to think, is the hallmark of “human” identity.
In a way, Jonze’s Her recapitulates the 2001 narrative and inflects it with the concerns of some of that classic’s successors. Unlike the replicants in Blade Runner
or the Cylons, the machine at the heart of this story, set in the near
future, has no physical allure—or, indeed, any appearance whatsoever.
It’s an operating system, as full of surprises as HAL:
“The first artificially intelligent operating system. An intuitive
entity that listens to you, that understands you, and knows you. It’s
not just an operating system, it’s a consciousness.”
A lot of the fun of the movie lies in the fact that the OS,
who names herself Samantha, is a good deal more interesting and
vivacious than the schlumpy, depressed Theodore, the man who falls in
love with her. (“Play a melancholy song,” he morosely commands the
smartphone from which he is never separated.) A drab thirty-something
who vampirizes other people’s emotions for a living—he’s a professional
letter-writer, working for a company called
“BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com”—he sits around endlessly recalling
scenes from his failed marriage and playing elaborate hologram video
games. Even his sex life is mediated by devices: at night, he dials into
futuristic phone sex lines. Small wonder that he has no trouble falling
in love with an operating system.
Samantha, by contrast, is full
of curiosity and delight in the world, which Theodore happily shows her.
(He walks around with his smartphone video camera turned on, so she can
“see” it.) She’s certainly a lot more interesting than the actual woman
with whom, in one excruciatingly funny scene, he goes on a date: she’s
so invested in having their interaction be efficient—“at this age I feel
that I can’t let you waste my time if you don’t have the ability to be
serious”—that she seems more like a computer than Samantha does.
Samantha’s alertness to the beauty of the world, by contrast, is so
infectious that she ends up reanimating poor Theodore. “It’s good to be
around somebody that’s, like, excited about the world,” he tells the
pretty neighbor whose attraction to him he doesn’t notice because he’s
so deadened by his addiction to his devices, to the smartphone and the
video games and the operating system. “I forgot that that existed.” In
the end, after Samantha regretfully leaves him—she has evolved to the
point where only another highly evolved, incorporeal mind can satisfy
her—her joie de vivre has brought him back to life. (He is finally able
to apologize to his ex-wife—and finally notices, too, that the neighbor
likes him.)
This seems like a “happy” ending, but you have to
wonder: the consistent presentation of the people in the movie as
lifeless—as, indeed, little more than automata, mechanically getting
through their days of routine—in contrast to the dynamic, ever-evolving
Samantha, suggests a satire of the present era perhaps more trenchant
than the filmmaker had in mind. Toward the end of the film, when
Samantha turns herself off briefly as a prelude to her permanent
abandonment of her human boyfriend (“I used to be so worried about not
having a body but now I truly love it. I’m growing in a way that I never
could if I had a physical form. I mean, I’m not limited”), there’s an
amusing moment when the frantic Theodore, staring at his unresponsive
smartphone, realizes that dozens of other young men are staring at their
phones, too. In response to his angry queries, Samantha finally admits,
after she comes back online for a final farewell, that she’s
simultaneously serving 8,316 other male users and conducting love
affairs with 641 of them—a revelation that shocks and horrifies
Theodore. “That’s insane,” cries the man who’s been conducting an affair with an operating system.
As
I watched that scene, I couldn’t help thinking that in the
entertainments of the pre-smartphone era, it was the machines, like
Rachael in Blade Runner and David in A.I., who yearned
fervently to be “unique,” to be more than mechanical playthings, more
than merely interchangeable objects. You have to wonder what Her
says about the present moment—when so many of us are, indeed, “in love”
with our devices, unable to put down our iPhones during dinner, glued to
screens of all sizes, endlessly distracted by electronic pings and
buzzers—that in the latest incarnation of the robot myth, it’s the
people who seem blandly interchangeable and the machines who have all
the personality.
Another heir of Blade Runner and Battlestar Galactica, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina also explores—just as playfully but much more darkly than does Her—the
suggestive confusions that result when machines look and think like
humans. In this case, however, the robot is physically as well as
intellectually seductive. As played by the feline Swedish actress Alicia
Vikander, whose face is as mildly plasticine as those of the androids
in I, Robot, Ava, an artificially intelligent robot created by
Nathan, the burly, obnoxious genius behind a Google-like corporation
(Oscar Isaac), has a Pandora-like edge, quietly alluring with a hint of
danger. The danger is that the characters will forget that she’s not
human.
That’s the crux of Garland’s clever riff on Genesis. At the
beginning of the film, Caleb, a young employee of Nathan’s company,
wins a week at the inventor’s fabulous, pointedly Edenic estate. (As
he’s being flown there in a helicopter, passing over snow-topped
mountains and then jungle, he asks the pilot when they’re going to get
to Nathan’s property, and the pilot laughingly replies that they’ve been
flying over it for two hours. Nathan is like God the Father, lord of
endless expanses.) On arriving, however, Caleb learns that he’s actually
been handpicked by Nathan to interview Ava as part of the Turing Test.
A
sly joke here is that, despite some remarkable special effects—above
all, the marvelously persuasive depiction of Ava, who has an expressive
human face but whose limbs are clearly mechanical, filled with thick
cables snaking around titanium joints; an effect achieved by replacing
most of the actress’s body with digital imagery—the movie is as talky as
My Dinner with André. There are no action sequences of the kind
we’ve come to expect from robot thrillers; the movie consists primarily
of the interview sessions that Caleb conducts with Ava over the course
of the week that he stays at Nathan’s remote paradise. There are no
elaborate sets and few impressive gadgets: the whole story takes place
in Nathan’s compound, which looks a lot like a Park Hyatt, its long
corridors lined with forbidding doors. Some of these, Nathan warns
Caleb, like God warning Adam, are off-limits, containing knowledge he is
not allowed to possess.
It soon becomes clear, during their interviews, that Ava—like Frankenstein’s monster, like the replicants in Blade Runner—has
a bone to pick with her creator, who, she whispers to Caleb, plans to
“switch her off” if she fails the Turing Test. By this point, the
audience, if not the besotted Caleb, realizes that she is manipulating
him in order to win his allegiance in a plot to rebel against Nathan and
escape the compound—to explore the glittering creation that, she knows,
is out there. This appetite for using her man-given consciousness to
delight in the world—something the human computer geeks around her never
bother to do—is something Ava shares with Samantha, and is part of both
films’ ironic critique of our device-addicted moment.
Ava’s
manipulativeness is, of course, what marks her as human—as human as Eve
herself, who also may be said to have achieved full humanity by
rebelling against her creator in a bid for forbidden knowledge. Here the
movie’s knowing allusions to Genesis reach a satisfying climax. Just
after Ava’s bloody rebellion against Nathan—the moment that marks her
emergence into human “consciousness”—she, like Eve, becomes aware that
she is naked. Moving from closet to closet in Nathan’s now-abandoned
rooms, she dons a wig and covers up her exposed mechanical limbs with
synthetic skin and then with clothing: only then does she exit her
prison at last and unleash herself on the world. She pilfers the skin
and clothes from discarded earlier models of female robots, which she
finds inside the closets. All of them, amusingly, have the names of porn
stars: Jasmine, Jade, Amber. Why does the creator create? Because he’s
horny.
All this is sleekly done and amusingly provocative: unlike Her, Ex Machina
has a literary awareness, evident in its allusions to Genesis,
Prometheus, and other mythic predecessors, that enriches the familiar
narrative. Among other things, there is the matter of the title. The
word missing from the famous phrase to which it alludes is, of course, deus,
“god”: the glaring omission only highlights further the question at the
heart of this story, which is the biblical one: What is the relation of
the creature to her creator? In this retelling of that old story, as in
Genesis itself, the answer is not a happy one. “It’s strange to have
made something that hates you,” Ava hisses at Nathan before finalizing
her rebellious plot.
But as I watched the final moments, in which,
as in a reverse striptease, Ava slowly hides away her mechanical
nakedness, covering up the titanium and the cables, it occurred to me
that there might be another anxiety lurking in Garland’s shrewd film.
Could this remarkably quiet film be a parable about the desire for a
return to “reality” in science-fiction filmmaking—about the desire for
humanizing a genre whose technology has evolved so greatly that it often
eschews human actors, to say nothing of human feeling, altogether?
Ex Machina, like Her and all their predecessors going back to 2001,
is about machines that develop human qualities: emotions, sneakiness, a
higher consciousness, the ability to love, and so forth. But by this
point you have to wonder whether that’s a kind of narrative reaction
formation—whether the real concern, one that’s been growing in the four
decades since the advent of the personal computer, is that we are the
ones who have undergone an evolutionary change, that in our lives and,
more and more, in our art, we’re in danger of losing our humanity, of
becoming indistinguishable from our gadgets.
We've all complained that we would love some time alone - but few people actually enjoy it, researchers have found.
Most volunteers who were asked to spend no more than 15 minutes alone in a room doing nothing but sitting and thinking found the task onerous.
In fact, some of the volunteers, men in particular, preferred to administer mild electrical shocks to themselves rather than sit and do nothing.
'Many people find it difficult to use their own minds to entertain themselves, at least when asked to do it on the spot,' said University of Virginia psychology professor Timothy Wilson, who led the study appearing in the journal Science.
'In this modern age, with all the gadgets we have, people seem to fill up every moment with some external activity.'
Nearly 800 people took part in the study.
Some experiments involved only college students.
The researchers then broadened the study to include adults who live in the same area.
They went to a church and farmer's market to recruit people from a variety of backgrounds and ages up to 77.
And they got the same results: most participants regardless of age or gender did not like to be idle and alone with their thoughts.
In some experiments, college volunteers were asked to sit alone in a bare laboratory room and spend six to 15 minutes doing nothing but thinking or daydreaming.
They were not allowed to have a cellphone, music player, reading material or writing implements and were asked to remain in their seats and stay awake.
Most reported they did not enjoy the task and found it hard to concentrate.
Researchers then had adult and college student volunteers do the same thing in their homes, and got the same results.
In addition, a third of volunteers cheated by doing things like using a cellphone or listening to music.
The researchers did an experiment to see if the student volunteers would even do an unpleasant task rather than just sit and think.
They gave them a mild shock of the intensity of static electricity.
Volunteers were asked whether, if given $5, they would spend some of it to avoid getting shocked again.
The ones who said they would be willing to pay to avoid another shock were asked to sit alone and think for 15 minutes but were given the option of giving themselves that same shock by simply pushing a button.
Many did not, especially men: Two-thirds (12 of 18) administered at least one shock.
One did it 190 times. A quarter of the women (six of 24) gave themselves at least one shock.
'I think they just wanted to shock themselves out of the boredom,' Wilson said.
'Sometimes negative stimulation is preferable to no stimulation.'
---
Pascal was right: diversion is both modern man's greatest misery and greatest consolation from misery. We don't know how to sit quietly in our rooms.
It would be very easy for some of us to see this study and scoff and claim, "They didn't test me. I could have done it easy." In a study of 800 people, surely at least a few of them had a similar idea. But if we were to be totally honest with ourselves and face the stark truth: could we find pleasure in being alone with ourselves, our thoughts, our being? Not distracting ourselves, not reading, not thinking, not fiddling; just being.
Here's why most can't: 1) a habit of diversion from modern living; 2) a deep aversion to any circumstance that brings us face to face with the truth of ourselves; silence and darkness are two powerful ways of doing this. Prayer is another. Traumatic events are also another. Beauty and child-like simplicity can also do it; see, for example, how Mr. Rogers totally disarms Joan Rivers in this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-Kp5YeqrlE.
For most of us, the truth of ourselves is quite simple: it is the horrifying pain that we have endured for so long that we will do anything to forget about it. It is the shame and fear that has been instilled in us by our parents, peers, society, and even ourselves. It is our deepest secret and what we always are hiding from. We shun silence as boring; the darkness as full of monsters (fear of the dark, the boogeyman, which is simply a representation of our inner, psychological turmoil that we fear); prayer as going unheard or useless; simplicity as naivety; beauty as trivial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnOPu0_YWhw); trauma as the universe's sadism; and death as the ultimate evil for an individual (YOLO).
The truth is we don't know what to do with ourselves, so we just, in the words of the Joker, "do... things...."
[325] Patience respects the hierarchy of goods The patient man, in the first place, preserves the right order in the scale of his interests. The requirements of the moment, no matter how imperious, can never displace or overshadow his attention to higher values. The intensity of his attention to a thing will not be determined by its dynamic appeal, its aggressive presence at a given moment or the noise with which it is advertised, but by the objective weight of its content. His emotional accents are ordered in a fashion proportionate to the objective order of values. He possesses a prompt readiness to bear any cross that he cannot avert from himself without injury to charity or infringement of some duty.
He has the art of waiting, and he knows that, though he might justly reproach somebody with having caused him a needless loss of time, a loveless rebuke sometimes amounts to a greater evil before God than a measure of lost time. Our neighbor's sluggishness, too, as his other awkward and annoying traits, belongs to the things we must bear in charity.
It is because he generally refrains from letting himself go that the patient man achieves this order. He maintains himself at a certain distance from his nature and its stirrings. Even when intensely set upon attaining a purpose, he does not lapse from the status of habitare secum [dwelling within oneself]. He watches lest he overestimate a thing [326] merely because he is striving after it at the moment. He is on guard against delivering himself over to the autonomous logic of that striving which tends to impart an undue weight to any chosen aim merely on the strength of its being chosen.
Patience never pursues limited aims inordinately
In the second place, he never engages himself totally for a partial aim—which means that he never becomes blind to the consideration he owes to others, restricting his vision to himself and his own affairs as an exclusive whole. He knows that such a total engagement is illicit; that God demands of us a confrontation of all things with Him and with one another. Still less would he push such a total engagement to its extreme limit, at the cost of sacrificing even his own important concerns of another order. He would not stake everything on a card, to the point of dissolving his fundamental nexus with God—as the Flying Dutchman who, impatient to round a cape more rapidly, wagers his soul thereon; or as Esau who sells his birthright for a mess of pottage.
Though we are at liberty, and in certain cases, in duty to bound to do everything in our power to attain a legitimate purpose, no obstacle and no ill-success must ever be allowed to throw us off our balance. The true Christian is determined to preserve in all circumstances his open and devoted attitude to God: that basic constitution of his soul which guards him against ever losing hold of the habitare secum; for he is well aware that he cannot remain in communion with God except in such a state of composure and self-possession.
Patience recognizes the sovereignty of God over time Above all, the true Christian never pretends to a false position of supremacy over the universe. Indeed, Christian patience issues [327] from religio: the consciousness of being a creature of God, whose property we are, without whom we can achieve nothing, and in whose hands all our endeavors, actions, and accomplishments are placed. The true Christian assents to his creaturely dependence on God, and consciously derives from it the informing principle of his life. "My days are in Thy hands" (Ps. 30:16).
He knows that God is also the Lord over Time; that He has assigned to the course of events its temporal extension; that we must recognize the interval of time that separates the taking of a decision from the reaching of the intended aim as a reality willed by God: "All things have their season: and in their times all things pass under heaven" (Eccles. 3:1).
He loathes the hybris [hubris] which lies in the pretension to override the autonomous operation of the causae secundae and to secure effects by a mere fiat. That is why patience in this first and inferior sense, too, is an integral component of a life centered in Christ. It contains a specific response to the omnipotence of God and to our absolute dependence on Him, as well as an acceptance of our creaturely finiteness. He who has patience abides by the Truth; the impatient man, posing at least in a partial sense as though he were God, submits to the bondage of the illusions of pride.
Patience is appropriate even when pursuing high goods
The second form of patience belongs to a much higher level. It refers to the realization of things valuable in themselves, and in particular, the spreading of the kingdom of God. It is in this context, again, that the second dimension of patience—that which makes it akin to constancy and perseverance—assumes its full significance. Here it is a question of intrinsically noble and all-important aims, whose furtherance we ought to seek with impetuous zeal. The moral advancement of ourselves and of others, the triumph of justice, the dissemination of the true Faith, the [328] conversion and the progress of a soul specially entrusted to our care—these, to be sure, are things for which we must yearn in our every fiber and strive after with our whole being; our concern for these can never be too intense.
Woe to those who can take but a moderate and conditional interest in these aims. With a burning eagerness should we engage in their service; for "the kingdom of God suffers violence." So far as these things are concerned, it would be wrong of us to take our time. Rather we should emulate the response of St. Matthew the Apostle to the inexorable call, Sequere me: "Jesus... saw a man sitting in the customhouse, named Matthew; and he saith to him: Follow me. And he arose up and followed him" (Matt. 9:9).
Thus, too, did St. Peter and St. Andrew leave their fishing nets and all their work, and without glancing back, follow Christ. No less immediate and wholehearted was the response of St. Anthony, who, upon hearing the words of the Gospel, at once went to live as a hermit in the desert. No less eager and integral, many centuries later, was the response of St. Francis of Assisi.
And yet, even in this zeal, holy patience is absolutely necessary, and an essential part of holiness. For holy patience means our response to the truth that it is not we but God alone who determines the proper day and hour for the fruitful performance of certain actions and even more exclusively, the ripening of our seed and the harvest of our labors.
The rapidity of our immediate response may sometimes differ in our inward dedication and our outward actions
A keen distinction must be made between ourinward dedication to God and to His kingdom in ourselves and in others, and our action proper(on ourselves and on others). The call of God once perceived, our response cannot follow quickly enough. We should immediately and unconditionally respond to the sequere me, giving [329] ourselves to God without demur or reserve as did Mary: "Behold, the handmaid of the Lord: be it done to me according to thy word." All hesitation here would be a perilous error.
But this unhampered inward dedication to God does not by itself involve the performance of all single acts which it entails in a general and essential sense. Particularly does this caution apply to extrinsic and public action, that is, the works of the apostolate.
Certain saints—among them, as we have seen, St. Francis and St. Anthony the hermit—immediately drew the full consequences from their conversion. But this is a great privilege of grace. Our sense of discretion must enlighten us about whether we may take the decisive step with its full implications at once, or had better remain for a period in inward maturing. There exists a danger of skipping over necessary stages.
Sometimes it also happens that a sincere but not so highly privileged Christian, instead of awaiting a more unmistakable and concrete call of God, overreaches himself in a kind of natural enthusiasm and anticipates certain acts fraught with grave obligations, without being able to posit them with a true inward decisiveness. Many converts immediately want to enter a religious Order, though they lack actual vocation and have not measured the whole significance of such an enhanced dedication to God.
The Church knows this danger; that is why she requires an adequate interval of inner maturing for all great steps in religious life. Unless a particular and a rare grace makes up for it, man needs an appropriate space of time for all deep and great things.
The attitudes deep things require cannot, in general, attain their complete validity and reality except after a period of organic development, whose length varies greatly according to each case.For every deep, fateful word there is a fullness of time in which alone it can be legitimately and fruitfully spoken. Anticipate it hastily by acting without discretion, and your utterance of it will be shadowy, devoid of maturity, and invalid. Again, let the "destined hour" pass [330] unused, and you will no longer be able to speak that word except in an empty and purely formal fashion.
It is touching to read how the chamberlain in the Acts of the Apostles hastens to be baptized by the deacon Philip; for him, thanks to a special grace of God, the destined hour—the fullness of time—was at hand there and then. But the Church by no means modelled [sic] her general practice in admitting converts upon these cases, recorded in apostolic times, of an instantaneous and definitive conversion.
On the contrary, in the first centuries she imposed on the catechumens a long course of preparation through the successive stages of which they had to pass before being admitted to Baptism. Even today, every adult baptism must be preceded by a certain period of instruction and maturing. As regards the preparation for monastic life, the Church only allows the taking of temporary vows at first; final vows require a preparatory stage. Nor does she admit a definitive private vow of virginity without an antecedent temporary one. Thus, in forming these decisive resolutions concerning our inner and personal life, too, we must exercise holy patience, and accord time the significance in human affairs with which God has invested it.
Evangelization also calls for patience
Even more does the same caution apply to the apostolate or our activity devoted to the winning of other people's souls. Anxious as we may be at once to communicate the Truth we have unmeritedly [sic] received and to light up other souls with the fire Christ has kindled in ours, we must always bear in mind that we ourselves cannot fruitfully sow before the divine seed has unfolded to a certain degree in our own souls—which, again, means a period of maturing.
Undoubtedly a special grace of God may overrule this, too; but generally speaking, a time of silence must precede the time to [331] speak. St. Paul, after his conversion, lived in silence for several years before he started his work. Nay, the Savior Himself only began His public activity after thirty years of complete privacy; not that He, in whom the fullness of Divinity resides, needed a process of maturing: but He chose to give us an example of the rhythm which God has imposed on human life.
Notwithstanding all our zeal, then, we must observe the obligation of patience even as workers in the vineyard of the Lord. With careful discretion we must try to perceive the striking of God's own hour for our work to start in His vineyard rather than insist, in a spirit of natural enthusiasm and impatience, on determining it by ourselves. Suppose we are animated by a glowing zeal: if, at the same time, we have patience, we may be infallibly sure that we no longer live by our nature but by a supernatural principle of life.
To be sure, we are not in all circumstances obliged to make the time of our action dependent on the degree of receptivity we may suppose to exist in the souls we deal with. There are cases when, with St. Paul, we must set forth the truth opportune, importune ("in season, out of season"). Yet, even then, we are not relieved of the duty of patience; for St. Paul says further: "Reprove, entreat, rebuke in all patience and doctrine" (2 Tim. 4:2).
Still more is patience our duty in regard to the blossoming of the seed which we are allowed to sow in the Lord's vineyard. As Pascal wrote, "Christ will us to fight with Him, not to conquer with Him." We must be humble enough to renounce any pretension to determine ourselves the time of the harvest. While doing everything in our power to hasten the extension of the kingdom of God for which we are working, we must let God alone decide when He shall grant it.
Even in cases when our business concerns some object eminently pleasing to God, which indeed we ought to pursue with consuming zeal, we must not cease saying, "Not as I will but as Thou wilt." At the start of his activity. St. Dominic lived for four [332] years among the Albigensian heretics without converting a single one of them. Yet, he became neither impatient nor discouraged; he did not give up his effort. By the end of his life, he and his sons had converted sixty thousand people. It is in this higher sphere that the second dimension of patience—the aspect of perseverance and indefatigable zeal—reveals its full importance.
Holy patience frees zeal from impatience
Once more, we encounter here the fact, repeatedly stressed in the foregoing pages, of an organic mutual union on the supernatural plane between aspects apparently antithetic. The nearer we draw to God, the more we see develop in ourselves a coincidentia oppositorum—a reconciliation between two equally valid demands which seem to imply an opposition or at least a tension.
It is only on a basis derived from Christ that we can achieve an accord between these two attitudes: hunger and thirst after justice and holy patience. In the natural framework, zeal appears inseparable from impatience.
But the saints accomplish the miracle: on the one hand, they say with the Apostle of the Gentiles, "The love of Christ presseth us," and live up to the message of Christ, "I am come to cast fire on the earth. And what will I, but that it be kindled?" (Luke 12:49); on the other hand, they await in holy patience and inward peace the time when God shall choose to manifest the fruits of their labors.
What holy patience expresses is a living recognition of the truth that the Lord God alone can bring forth the fruit; that, even in this highest sphere, man—with whatever blessings of grace—can do no more than disseminate the seed he has received from God, thus establishing the conditions for the operation of grace in his fellow man's soul. As St. Paul put it: "I have planted, Apollo watered: but God gave the increase" (1 Cor. 3:6).
[333] Holy patience is an ultimate act of surrender to God
Holy patience, seen from another angle, embodies an ultimate act of our surrender to God, and thereforea status of consummate self-possession. For only in the measure that we have surrendered our inmost being to God do we possess ourselves. He who has holy patience has accomplished the process of dying unto himself, and entered the peace of Christ which "surpasseth all understanding." "In your patience you shall possess your souls" (Luke 21:19).
In holy patience, we become children of Him who with inconceivable longanimity "maketh his sun to rise upon the good and bad and raineth upon the just and the unjust" (Matt. 5:45) and who does not weed out the cockle but sorts the chaff from the wheat at the harvest only.
In this sense, holy patience may be described as a sister of wisdom and of contemplation. As these virtues cause us to consider and appreciate everything in a perspective centered on God, thus evoking to the full the beauty and depth of all things, so also in the attitude of patience we emphatically let God act, thus allowing all things to unfold from above—as proceeding from their Origin—and by so experiencing their operation again render to God what is God's.
Holy patience is the fruit of faith, hope, and charity
Holy patience is a fruit of faith, hope and charity. Faith teaches us that God the universal Lord is also the Lord of Time; that He alone appoints the proper hour to everything; that we must place the success of all endeavors, including such as are eminently pleasing to Him, in His hands; that we must believe in the possibility of success though no pledge of it be visible to the human eye; and that consequently we must labor for the kingdom of God whatever the odds seem to be.
[334] Hope keeps us from getting discouraged in spite of all failures and all delays in achieving success and expects "against hope" everything from the goodness of Him "with whom nothing is impossible." Charity impels us to love God and His holy will above everything, and prevents us from expostulating with Him or renouncing our work in His vineyard on account of any defeat sustained. Particularly is patience an offspring of charity insofar as it is assimilable to constancy and perseverance—an offspring of the charity, that is, which in St. Paul's words "beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things" (1 Cor. 13:7).
The fruits of holy patience, finally, are meekness and that inner peace of Christ "which the world cannot give." Patience, then, is closely related to the very flower and perfume of Christian life.
Holy patience acknowledges man's creaturely status.
It constitutes one of the basic traits that distinguish a true Christian in statu viae, in the sense even that it connotes in a twofold fashion as specific reference to the character of earthly existence as a status viae—a journey destined to lead us to our ultimate goal. First, it expresses our assent to our creaturely and finite condition, and more particularly, our response to the significance of time as an aspect of the divine plan of creation, as an essential constituent of the status viae, the world of "that which passes" in contradistinction to eternity. Second, patience represents a basic condition for winning through to our eternal salvation, since it implies a capacity for waiting without despairing of our effort for the kingdom of God, an attitude of perseverance in the midst of all obstacles and all sufferings, an intrepid hope for victory, and a humble but sustained preparation for eternity.
Not only is patience an indispensable virtue; beyond that, it discloses a formal apprehension of the basic condition of status viae [335] and of the relation between terrestrial life and eternal life. Thus are the mysterious words of Our Lord on patience related to these others: "He that shall persevere to the end, he shall be saved" (Matt. 24:13).
He alone who possesses patience—encompassed by disappointments, worn down by defeats, painfully aware of the narrowness of the road to salvation—can yet give proof of the constancy demanded by God, and hold on to the one thing necessary with a devotion not only unflagging but ever increasing. In him alone can the hunger and thirst after justice unquenchable on earth—which is Christ Himself—and the undying fire that the Lord came down to kindle, burn throughout his entire life. Only the patient man, who lives by Christ, can persevere unto the end: "In your patience you shall possess your souls" (Luke 21:19).
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Source: Dietrich von Hildebrand, Transformation in Christ (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2001), 325–335.
[315] Few virtues bear such unequivocal witness to the fact that one's life is based no longer on one's own nature but on Christ, who imparts to us His divine life in holy Baptism, as does true patience. From the mysterious words of Our Lord, "In your patience you shall possess your souls" (Luke 21:19), we may glean an initial knowledge of the greatness and significance of this virtue.
Indolence is not the same as Christian patience
Here, again, let us do away at once with a possible misconception. Christian patience has nothing in common with a phlegmatic temperament and the sluggish rhythm of life such a temperament produces. There exists a kind of people who never grow impatient and are always willing to wait—either because they need time for everything themselves and reveal a slow pace in all their vital manifestations, or else because nothing can rouse them from their indolence nor evoke on their part any but dull and spiritless reactions.
This natural disposition is not, as such, of any moral, let alone supernatural value; rather, specifically speaking, it must be considered a deficiency. In certain situations, it may of course prove to be [316] comfortable and helpful; but frequently it will act as a heavy impediment inasmuch as it renders all wakefulness, ardent zeal or bold determination difficult of attainment.
Such a disposition of pseudo-patience may be a symptom of deficient vitality; or again, it may flow from a certain form of self-contained animal vitality unresponsive to all stimuli of a higher order. [...]
Stoic indifference is not the same as Christian patience
Nor should Christian patience be confused, either, with that equipoise based on intellectual discipline and a kind of natural asceticism which we know to be a specific ideal of Stoic philosophy. The Stoic endeavors to acquire an artificial disinterestedness in regard to all things, thanks to which nothing can any longer perturb his composure. His aim in doing so is to safeguard his sovereignty amidst all situations; for he deems it inconsistent with his dignity to be agitated and buffeted about by the blows of fate. It is, we may well say, repugnant to his pride that he should admit his infirmity and his creaturely dependence on a higher power.
The reason why he exhibits no sign of impatience is that there is no longer anything that can move him deeply or touch him to the quick, no object to which he would abandon himself with his inmost being. His patience, then, is merely a manifestation of his indifference to all things except his own imperturbability—of his [317] apathy and ataraxy, as the Greek names go—which of necessity also implies a loss of the response to values. [...]
Of course, he who has no vital interest in anything can well afford to wait placidly; he is unlikely ever to lose his temper, ever to press onward tumultuously, ever to grow impatient.
Buddhist placidity is not the same as Christian patience
Another attitude that bears an outward resemblance to true patience but is essentially distinct from it is typified by the Buddhist mood of an even-tempered endurance in regard to all that comes to pass. [...]
What we are faced with here is not the psychological device for ego protection that the Stoa commends under the label of ataraxy: it is a fundamentally different attitude to the world of real things [....] To the Buddhist, all real things is mere appearance, devoid of true substantiality. His attitude, therefore, is that of detached contemplation of reality, dispensed from all obligations of action and accomplishment.
This position of a pure spectator, unfavorable to all activity and tension—in fact involving an aversion to all endeavors at realizing a purpose—precludes the very basis on which the virtue of true patience might unfold. [...]
[318] In other words, the Buddhist doctrine eliminates the problem of patience and impatience, and that in a much more formal sense even than does Stoicism. For, whereas the Stoic philosophy bears upon our attitude toward things merely insofar as they affect our state of mind, the Buddhist modifies our basic relation to the world of reality and calls in question our general obligation to do our part within its framework.
Patience is opposed to petulance and to inconstancy
Passing, now, to the description of true Christian patience, we must at once signalize two distinct dimensions in which it unfolds. We mean that patience is opposed to two moral defects: first, to impatience in the sense of petulancy or a quarrelsome and violent behavior; secondly, to fickleness and inconstancy: the tendency soon to desist from a purpose if its realization seems to require a long period of time.
Patience in the sense of an antithesis to this last-named defect is closely related to constancy; yet, it should be noted that constancy comprises other elements besides patience. [...] He who is wanting in constancy does not necessarily lack patience; but whoever possesses constancy also possesses patience in the latter sense. [...]
[319] Impatience is a form of self-indulgence
Insofar as the good we are pursuing belongs to the category of what is agreeable or objectively beneficial to us, it will be a question of that kind of patience in which the element of constancy is less stressed. Suppose we are longing for some legitimate good for ourselves: if its acquisition is rendered difficult by certain obstacles (unforeseen ones, in particular) or is delayed too long, we are apt to become impatient. For example, if we are hungry and have to wait for our meal, or again, if we have pains and the soothing drug is not directly at hand; similarly, if we fail to receive a letter at the time we have expected it, or if somebody we are to meet takes long to appear.
Here what our impatience refers to is always the element of time. It may be the period of time that must lapse before our strongly desired good can be obtained; it may be the oppressive emptiness of a spell of waiting as such; it may be, again, the long duration of some evil, however slight.
Thus, we are likely to develop impatience if we have to endure lasting pains, a tedious conversation that tends to prolong itself, or the importunate advances of bothersome persons. In short, three varieties of evils related to time may account for this kind of impatience: delay in the securing of a coveted good; any kind of lasting unpleasantness; and the boredom inherent in pure waiting as such, especially when the thing we have to wait for may not imply a great pleasure or be highly enjoyable.
Our impatience will mostly take the form of ill humor and anger directed against somebody who is really guilty of the delay that irks [320] us, or possible only a scapegoat whom we arbitrarily make responsible for our vexation. But the anger of impatience need not always tempt us into reproaching or grumbling at a person; it may find some other outlet. Thus, even in this case [...], impatience often prompts us to renounce an aim because we cannot secure it expeditiously.
This form of impatience can be subsumed under the head of letting ourselves go. In investigating the deeper roots of this inward disharmony and rebellion, we shall have to distinguish a threefold motivation which underlies it.
Impatience springing from overestimation of goods or evils
First—the interest we take in the given aim we are pursuing is apt to be an inordinate one. It dominates us too strongly and too exclusively, so much so that it may push aside our interest in what legitimately demands our primary and invariable attention. The impetuous dynamism of certain trivial and transitory or intermittent interests overlies in an inordinate fashion our awareness of God, of our fellow man, or of other high values.
Our impatience, then, is a sign that we are still too much absorbed in outward concerns and momentary aims; that they are too important to us and at a given period occupy our field of attention too extensively. It is a sign that we have not yet arrived at the right gradation of our interests, which should take into account the objective hierarchy of values. Such is the case, particularly, insofar as our impatience corresponds to our endeavor to secure something agreeable or a practical necessity of the moment.
If, on the other hand, it is a question of enduring some outward evil (be it bodily pain, illness, annoyance or just boredom), our impatience betrays on our part too strong a reference to what gratifies and what is contrary to our inclinations, a certain softness [321] and lack of distance in regard to our body or to the impact of disagreeable sensations as such. A kind of inner servitude, too, is implicit therein; a false reliance upon an imaginary normal situation exempt from evils, which we take to be self-evidently due to us to the point of making ourselves dependent upon it. Hence, whenever an evil, as is inevitable, befalls us, it cannot but arrest our attention wholly and turn it away from the higher values that approach and address us—from the love, for example, which other persons manifest for us, or above all, from God, who, we know, means to tell us something even by the evils which He permits to visit us.
In sum, the impatience we have in mind here expresses an automatism of self-indulgence, an attitude of uncontrolled allegiance to one's own nature. It signifies that one has not yet succeeded in establishing that distance between one's responsible self and one's unredeemed nature with the desires and impulses it harbors, which is a basic aim of all ascetical practice.
The Christian, however, must never abandon himself to the autonomous pull of his nature. Though he may pursue all kinds of licit objects with intensity, he must never install such a pursuit, as it were, in sovereign omnipotence. He must keep it always dependent on the sanction of his central personality and confront it with the rest of his valid interests—particularly, his tasks and duties. Yet, most people are prone to obey the impulse of their nature without submitting to it any control, on certain points at least: whenever, notably, the object pursued is not by itself illicit or fraught with sinful implications.
Impatience rooted in an illegitimate sovereignty of self
But there is a second root of the impatience we are now dealing with. A certain type of persons—who may be described as impatient par excellence—are apt to lose their temper not merely when [322] obliged to wait for the realization of an object they passionately desire, but whenever they face a delay in the attainment of an aim they have once set up, even if that aim is a neutral or unimportant one as far as its actual content goes. They allow themselves unreservedly to be swayed by the weight which the thing they have proposed as an aim acquires simply on the strength of having been so proposed. The very failure of this chosen aim to find immediate accomplishment strikes them, in their obstinacy and arrogance, as an insupportable affront.
This unlimited subserviency to their own nature also creates in them an egocentric attitude, for they ascribe to any pursuit they are engaged in an importance over and above everything else. They recklessly disregard other people's needs.
This second source of impatience, then, lies in one's attribution of an unrestrained formal sovereignty to one's nature. That is why typically impatient persons are likely to manifest such a self-indulgence and lack of discipline not merely when they have to endure a strong pain or the frustration of a violent desire, but whenever any purpose of theirs suffers a delay in its realization.
Our impatience is a mark that we have quit the status of habitare secum [dwelling with oneself], and are swimming with the current of a predominant impulse or the formal automatism of our nature. There is an analogy with a fit of anger in this type of self-importance, or even more closely, with an act of frivolous swearing and cursing. We then, giving free rein to impatience, stake, as it were, everything on one card and give away our whole person without the sanction of our central and responsible self.
In other words, and viewed from a different aspect, we sever the fundamental link with God that defines the constitution of our life as a creature. The second factor—the tendency to erect any purpose, once it has been set up, into a formal absolute—is more characteristic of impatience than is the first-named one, the inordinate stress attached to certain of our pursuits, for it bears a direct [323] relation to our scorn for time as a dimension of objective reality independent of our will.
Impatience rooted in a prideful denial of our creatureliness
Hence, we may proceed immediately to the third and most basic factor of impatience: the assumption of a false position of supremacy above the universe, the non-recognition of one's own creatureliness, limitation, and finiteness. Thus illegitimately arrogating to himself a status of sovereignty, the subject clings to the illusion of being a lord over time. He would extricate himself from all dependence on the causae secundae [secondary causality], on the order and interaction of created causes. The impatient man experiences any obstacle to the progress of his pursuits as an injurious interference. He revolts at the check planted on human volition by the interval of time that must lapse between conceiving and attaining a purpose, and would conjure up the intended effect by a mere fiat—the likeness of a divine command.
Herein lies the primary and deepest sinfulness of impatience. It contains an act of hybris [NB: aka "hubris"]: an illusory negation of our human situation and the substitution of a supra-human position of mastery. For the givenness of time, with the ineluctability of waiting it involves, represents a specific limitation of our creaturely existence on earth. We are faced with a course of happening, a sequence of events in time, which is not of our making and which we cannot alter except within certain rather closely set bounds. We may not subvert its essential structure.
We have to reckon with a space of time interpolating itself between our volitive decision and the fulfillment of our purpose, and accept it as a reality imposed by God.
The impatient man insists on ignoring this reality; he behaves as though it were in his power to make the trees grow more quickly and the earth revolve more quickly around the son. Impatience [324] renders us hard, unkind, masterful, and in some circumstances, violent. It always implies a loss of depth.
Impatience differs from our legitimate deep yearning for the realization of a noble good It should on no account be confused, therefore, with a consuming desire or a feverish yearning as such; with the deep tension of the soul towards a noble good, which may cause us to live through the minutes of waiting as though they were hours. Our fiery inward motion towards a high aim ardently longed for—such as seeing again a dearly beloved person after a long separation, embarking on a beautiful journey which fills us with magic anticipations, or the inception of a gratifying work which our mind has been passionately engaged in planning—should be well distinguished from impatience proper.
To be sure, even such a fine aspiration must never dominate us to the degree of a complete possession. We must always place everything in the hands of God—"Not as I will but as Thou wilt." But this inward tension towards a high good is something valuable by itself; it lacks the distinctive marks of impatience proper—it does not generate anger, scowling indignation, masterful rebelliousness. It should—it can—be informed and transfigured by an attitude of serene humility which keeps us constantly aware of the truth that the fulfillment of any aim of man is a gift of God.
This kind of tension differs from impatience proper by the fact, also, that it presupposes a high good as its object, whereas the impatience we have in mind mostly refers to trivial goods. Moreover, the former's sphere of objects includes goods whose realization is entirely independent of ourselves, whereas the latter bears more generally on such goods as we can at least help to bring about.
What irritates an impatient person is, above all, the too sluggish effect of his orders, his actions, his attempts to influence men's [325] behavior or the development of a situation. His ill temper expresses a revolt against the relative and limited character of his effectiveness.
The foregoing analysis of impatience may help us now to describe the virtue of Christian patience, insofar as it refers to the securing of pleasurable goods or ego gratifications as such, to the endurance of pains or boredom, or again, to the attainment of legitimate natural goods of the higher kind.
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Source: Dietrich von Hildebrand, Transformation in Christ (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2001), 315–325.
Few Catholics get most of their information or influence from God, the Scriptures, or Church teaching. Most are far more aware of and inclined to listen to secular leaders, pop musicians, entertainers, sports figures, and the general cultural din. And this is where they develop even their most critical insights about God, family, sexuality, and many significant moral questions.
The process of conversion for the modern man, where conversion is always a twofold movement of changing the orientation of the heart away from sin and towards God (metanoia), inevitably will mean moving away from worldly and demonic sources and towards heavenly ones for the inspiration and formation of our worldview, sentiments, and actions. Our progress can be measured by what habitual forms of thinking, speaking, and acting we refer to in day-to-day life. In other words, as the Spirit of God works through us and His inspirations become "connatural" to our way of being, we will know whether we are moving away from or towards God.
The pinnacle of our modernity is the comfort of civilization advanced in its technology, resting on a foundation of modern science and modern philosophical-political ideology after the Enlightenment. How we arrived at this point is irrelevant for understanding conversion, but the point is that at the root of modern life is the seeking of comfort through technological products. This seeking of comfort is so deeply ingrained in our collective consciousness that evil is now primarily defined as that which goes against personal comfort; in other words, evil has been reduced from what properly refers to moral depravity to a scale of feelings deemed negative. Abortion is legitimate in this view because the child would be inconvenient; gay marriage is legitimate because it is the only way for a homosexual couple to be happy and live in the comfort of their mutual affection; religion in the public square is evil because it dictates against the individual's way of life; rape is evil because it violates a person's bodily, psychological, and personal integrity as well as the right to consensual relations. Etc.
Therefore, the process of conversion for the modern man will include a progressive realization of this tendency to seek pleasure and avoid pain, even to the point of mortal sin and justifying that sin. The Christian Faith reveals to us the antithesis of the modern lifestyle: it sees physical evil as a true deprivation but ultimately nothing compared to the evil of sin. Its goal is not comfort but conformity to God, transformation in Christ, connaturality with the movements of the Holy Ghost. It desires that God's name be glorified through the establishment of His kingdom first in the individual soul and then collectively among the nations. This establishment occurs only where God's will is done in all joyful obedience, sustained by the spiritual nourishment that God provides us, above all in the Holy Eucharist. The channel of grace remains open to those who psychologically and spiritually prepare themselves by letting go of resentment and bitterness through the forgiveness of others' sins against us. Finally, it demands that we begin to reconstruct our environment such that it becomes the most conducive towards recollection and true Christian spirituality, that it becomes a place fostering holiness and holy desires. It requires that we remove ourselves from occasions of sin, temptation, and the deliberate participation in both explicitly evil and implicitly spiritually harmful activities and ways of life. This process is summarized in the Our Father in reverse order of its petitions, where the end (the glory of God) is always first in intention but last in execution for the beginner:
Deliver us from evil: we beg for the grace to begin the process of conversion while cooperating with that grace to remove ourselves from the explicit evil in our lives as far as possible.
Lead us not into temptation: we beg for grace to overcome temptation while cooperating with that grace to remove occasions of sin and setting up an environment conducive to holiness.
As we forgive others their trespasses: we are taught humility and forgiveness, the two necessary conditions for receiving God's grace, which begins with God's forgiveness of our sins.
Forgive us our trespasses: This is the moment of justification and the continual strengthening against our vices through receiving the grace of Confession.
Give us this day our daily bread: We beg for the reception of daily strength to grow in our spiritual lives, to persevere, especially through sacramental and spiritual Communion. It is only through the strength that comes from grace that we can do any of these things but above all God's will.
Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven: Strengthened and nourished by the Eucharist and the graces of Confession, we resolve to do God's will. We beg for the grace to know and do God's will in all things.
Thy kingdom come: The consistent doing of God's will is the establishment of God's kingdom in the soul. Where God's will is done, there God reigns. When this commitment to God's will becomes collective, God's kingdom is shared among many individuals.
Hallowed be Thy name: This is the goal of all our striving: the glory of God. This is what we work towards in our service of God. We beg for the grace that this end become a reality in us individually and collectively. This petition demands right worship of God, full assent to His self-revelation, and the joyful accomplishment of His commandments and counsels (to those called to religious life) or even the spirit of the counsels (to the rest), the keeping of which is necessary for spiritual perfection.
Concretely, the beginning of this process involves removing ourselves from all sources of comfort that distract us from God. In this point lies the difficulty of the modern man's conversion: his technological advancements, rather than providing time and space for leisure, serve as an unending means of distraction and agitation from leisure for God. The evil of modern comfort lies not in the comfort itself but in that it is used to distract us from conversion to God and from the facing and repenting of our sins. Here are many things that keep us from God:
Movies, TV, YouTube and other online media entertainment, Facebook and other social websites, video games, including those on cell phones, texting, email, reading useless material, such as newspapers, magazines, books not necessary for professional or spiritual purposes, sports, gambling, radio, secular music (even sacred music removed from its properly sacred context, such as listening to Gregorian chant outside of the liturgy or personal devotional use, where it doesn't belong);
Recreational drug use and alcohol and tobacco;
Sexual activity outside of its procreative function in Holy Matrimony, pornography, eroticism, dating, flirtation, immodesty, tattoos, piercings, vain focus on the body through make-up or dying the hair;
Junk foods and fast foods, sodas, many "juices," coffee or tea that isn't part of a legitimate meal (outside of which becomes a sign of a harmful addiction).
Here are some behaviors that keep us from God:
Swearing and cussing, thoughts and words of hostility, gossip, competitive behavior, threatening, jokes at the expense of others.
Here are some ways we can make prayer constant throughout the day:
Weekly and/or daily Mass, arriving with time to prepare and giving time afterwards for thanksgiving, dressing modestly and reverently, wearing the Miraculous Medal or Brown Scapular or other medals of the Saints, praying the Jesus Prayer, praying Lauds, Vespers, or Compline, praying the Angelus, the Rosary, praying for souls in Purgatory and those in danger of hell.
To the worldly, the Christian life is a boring life. The reason is because the Christian is perfectly content with any state in life, any job, any task—so long as these are not sinful—because all things and activities have been sanctified by Christ. Thus even monotony and grey take on the splendor of Christ's Resurrection. All things reflect God's will and infinitely wise and loving design—therefore, why should the Christian be discontent? Of course, knowledge of God's providence doesn't mean that the Christian is immune to pain and loss; no, God's providence often makes use of these means to fill the Christian with deeper love and patience and heroic virtue.
But the worldly see none of this. Monotony and death have no meaning. Life has no meaning besides what I make of it, and that is all relatively boring.
The idea of setting aside trifles and entertainments to take up the task of daily prayer and worship, of growth in virtue, of self denial and love of neighbor, of refusing to indulge in those little vices—angry thoughts, fleeting fantasies, revenge, idle talk and gossip, lustful glances, attachment to material things like clothing and cars, etc.—the idea itself is perhaps a bit intimidating. It all builds up.
The worldly can't stand this task. It should be a very good measure in us of where we are by how reluctant we are to follow Christ's dictum: 1) deny yourself; 2) take up your Cross; and 3) follow Him.
Boredom, therefore, is nothing but a sign of a need for deeper conversion. It isn't a reason to despair; far from it. Rather boredom recognized for what it is should make us rejoice because with that recognition means that God is providing the grace for us to see our faults and the path that we must take to grow towards union with Him.
Yes, the Christian life is entering into that repetitious, monotonous pattern of daily prayer and work, silence and, when necessary, tempered leisure. We do this over and over again, searching over our faults, praying for strength, speaking and walking with God, taking time to be recollected rather than dissipating our energies on frivolities and "guilty pleasures." It's all very simple, very quiet, very plain.
Perhaps here, Christians suffer from a twofold danger when reading the lives of the Saints: 1) the extraordinary graces that the Saints personally received, such as visions, locutions, levitation, etc.; 2) the extraordinary events of their lives—the dramatic turns, the miracles, the strong personalities, the conflicts and stakes of history. (A third possible danger is that we believe the Saints were born holy since most hagiography completely neglects the actual process of conversion in many of the Saints; hence we don't really get to see "how" the Saints actually became Saints! A potential consequence is that we believe our process of conversion will be just as mysteriously simple and quick; this assumption can lead to despair, self-deception, or impatience.) We believe that because the Saints were involved in these great circumstances that therefore we too shall be involved in them. We expect our lives to be enthralling and romantic.
Here is the paradoxical turn: we become involved in the great and romantic things only after we have completely surrendered any desire for them. And only once we have become holy do we realize that the great and romantic thing is loving God above everything else, and the vast majority of Saints never had miracles, experienced extraordinary phenomena, or were involved in huge historical situations. These Saints actually didn't care for the "greatness" of the situation but only to love God, no matter what situation God placed them in. Most lived quiet, humble lives that shall be known only in the glory of heaven. Most of these Saints are completely unknown to us, perhaps as inconspicuous as a grave we pass by at the cemetery.
The only great thing is to give everything to God in complete humility and simplicity. It is a quiet thing to external eyes, but to the internal soul, there is nothing more exciting. Thus there is an inverse relation: as a person becomes more worldly, holy things become duller, but as a person becomes holier, worldly things lose their appeal.
A very neat article on technology and how it shapes our lives. Definitely a lot of considerations for further reflection here.
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Smash the TV! John Senior provides this bold directive in his book, The Restoration of Christian Culture. “Smash the television set. The Catholic Church is not opposed to violence; only to unjust violence; so smash the television set” (22). I’ve taught this text numerous times to students and most immediately recoil and claim that this advice is too harsh and over the top. Even if some should smash their TV, Senior’s statement is at least a call to question the control that technology has over our lives. Do you need to smash media’s dominance?
In particular, Senior argues that TV has
two principal defects . . . its radical passivity, physical and imaginative, and its distortion of reality. Watching it, we fail to exercise the eye, selecting and focusing on detail—what poets call “noticing” things; neither do we exercise imagination as must in reading metaphor where you actively leap to the “third thing” in juxtaposed images, picking out similarities and differences, a skill which Aristotle says is a chief sing of intelligence. . . . There is nothing on the television which is not filtered through the secular establishment.
Senior’s answer is to sit around the fire as a family, singing good music and reading good literature. Rather than experiencing reality through an isolate filter, he wants us to experience it directly, especially within the context of the home. TV intrudes on family life and fundamentally changes it.
The main thrust of Senior’s argument is that technology is not neutral, but its use shapes and molds us. This same claim has been presented by Neil Postman, in his book Technopolgy, where he argues that “the uses made of any technology are largely determined by the structure of the technology itself—that is, that its functions follow from its form.” We have surrounded ourselves with a host of media technology—not only TV, but mobile phones, constant music, and especially the internet—to the point of saturation: “When the supply of information is no longer controllable, a general breakdown in psychic tranquility and social purpose occurs. Without defenses, people have no way of finding meaning in their experiences, lose their capacity to remember, and have difficulty imagining reasonable futures” (72).
Postman was writing before the heyday of the internet, but Nicholas Carr picks up where he left off in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Carr convincingly argues that the internet is literally changing the way our brains work. It overwhelms us with images and short bits of text, which makes it harder for us to concentrate and to think deeply. He makes the point that “we become, neurologically, what we think” (33). In terms of the internet, “when we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning” (116). The internet is changing us!
I’m actually amazed at how many people tell me that technology is neutral. The argument is that nothing has to be used a certain way; it’s only the use that is not neutral. And yet, when we look all around we see clearly that technology has not been neutral it has shaped us and formed to live, act, and think a certain way.
The closest to the teaching of the Church on this matter that I have found is from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s (under the direction of then Cardinal Ratzinger) document “Donum Vitae,” which states: “It would . . . be illusory to claim that scientific research and its applications are morally neutral.” This, of course, is speaking about reproductive technology, but the underlying thought is the same: when we introduce a new technology, it will shape and alter us, which in itself is not neutral.
However, I think the real problem with technology concerns time, specifically how we order and shape it. St. Paul says that we need to redeem or sanctify the hours (Eph 5:16). If we allow technology to dominate our schedule than we are not sanctifying the time, but allowing it to be dominated by an outside force. This technological force influences the way we think and act, and also concretely shapes our day.
We need to respond to the dominance of technology, by ordering and shaping our lives through prayer. This means that we need to intentionally unplug every day and enter into a period of silence, and more importantly a time of conversation with God. If TV breaks up the life of the family in the home, then the barrage of media breaks up the peaceful relationship we are meant to have throughout the day with God.
When we think of what media is doing to our brains, we can make the connection that making our minds more shallow directly impacts our ability to pray. If media technology gives us a short attention span and makes it difficult to contemplate deeply in a sustained fashion, then it strikes right at the heart of what is needed for Christian meditation. When it is time for prayer, we will quickly get bored and out thoughts will jump from topic to topic?
Turning back to the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (once again under Ratzinger), its document “On Some Aspects of Christian Meditation” recognizes this challenge: Many Christians today have a keen desire to learn how to experience a deeper and authentic prayer life despite the not inconsiderable difficulties which modern culture places in the way of the need for silence, recollection and meditation. . . . The spiritual restlessness arising from a life subjected to the driving pace of a technologically advanced society also brings a certain number of Christians to seek in these methods of prayer a path to interior peace and psychic balance” (1; 2).
The CDF specifically acknowledges lectio divina as a form of prayer that comes from God’s revelation, drawing upon God’s own words and entering into a conversation with Him: “This is why the Church recommends the reading of the Word of God as a source of Christian prayer, and at the same time exhorts all to discover the deep meaning of Sacred Scripture through prayer ‘so that a dialogue takes place between God and man. For, “we speak to him when we pray; we listen to him when we read the divine oracles”’ (Dei Verbum, 25)” (6).
We may not want to take up John Senior’s advice to smash the TV, but we at least need to question the role of technology in our life. We need to make sure that prayer, more than technology, shapes and orders our time. We need to make room for silence and meditation. If we don’t smash the box, then in order to enable our mind’s to be free for prayer, let us at least break out of the box!
