There is much to reflect on, coming back from my 10-day trip. Everyone can’t stop talking about the Touchstone conference, which seemed to bring to the forefront a question that numerous public intellectuals have been dancing around but is now out in the open: is Christendom good or bad? Is the civilization of the west worth saving, or should Christian “culture warriors” shift to a “yo-ho-western-civ-has-got-to-go” posture?
On the anti-Christendom side of the debate is Paul Kingsnorth, an Orthodox Christian living in Ireland who has been calling for the West to die (“though this place is my home and the home of my ancestors…I want to uproot it….Let it die so that we can live.”) Kingsnorth launched an international debate eleven months ago with his much-discussed Erasmus lecture, “Against Christian Civilization.”
At the Touchstone Conference, Rod Dreher offered what seemed to be a direct response to Kingsnorth, in his lecture “Pilgrims, not Tourists: a (Sort of) Argument for Christendom.” In the week and a half since the Touchstone conference, I have encountered much opposition to Dreher’s perspective from those more sympathetic with Kingsnorth. Dreher’s opponents have seen in his Touchstone presentation everything from Christian Nationalism to warmongering. It’s an interesting debate, not without its false dilemmas and need for nuance and careful definitions. In time, I hope to use my Substack to weigh in on this discussion, since my priest, Fr. Patrick Cardine, has been doing some very dynamic work on how a Eucharistic model of cultural engagement might reframe some key assumptions in this debate. (Spoiler: we think Christendom is a good thing.)
Also at Touchstone, we heard a fantastic talk from Jonathan Pageau (actually, my favorite lecture of the entire program), an excellent presentation from Seraphim Richard Rohlin, some deep metaphysical reflections from Hans Boersma, and warnings about the dangers of AI from our own Paul Kingsnorth, plus a number of other speakers.
Basilian Media & Publishing came to the Touchstone conference as a vendor to help promote, among other things, their best-selling book this year, Are We All Cyborgs Now?: Reclaiming Our Humanity From the Machine.
After the Touchstone conference, I grabbed a few days in northern Idaho before heading back to Chicago for the annual OCAMPR conference. OCAMPR stands for “Orthodox Christian Association of Medicine, Psychology and Religion” and is a truly interdisciplinary gathering of everyone from chaplains to doctors to psychologists to counselors to life coaches to clergy. I attended the conference a decade ago, where I gave a presentation on gratitude, and I have always wanted to return.
Leading up to the OCAMPR conference, I had been working with Dr. Mena Mesiha, Mary Mesiha, and Mina Botros to understand the neuro-mechanisms of digital addiction and the different treatment modalities for addressing this growing pathology. It was such a joy to be on a panel with them, especially as they made me an honorary Coptic, though I haven’t an ounce of Egyptian blood in me.
During my part of the panel presentation, I gave an abbreviated version of the research published in my recent Substack article, “The Slot Machine in Your Pocket.” I argue that the mere presence of a phone keeps a person in a state of interruption-readiness. Knowing that at any moment your attention might be pulled away from an activity—whether homework, a conversation, a project at work, or restorative activities like reading or walking—seems to stop one from being able to fully engage in the task at hand. Moreover, interruption-readiness follows the same variable reinforcement schedule as slot machines: even if only one in every twenty interruptions offers the type of social nourishment we crave, the mere availability to be interrupted becomes linked to the potential for dopamine. The occasional rewarding moments of digital interruptions, mixed with unrewarding or irritating ones, compel us to keep returning, although in this case “returning” may simply be our willingness to remain available to audible or visual interruptions, even at times when such availability is clearly antithetical to wellbeing (for example, while driving, sleeping, conversing, or even immediately following sexual intimacy).
Again, you can read an expanded version of my presentation at my Substack.
The panel was chaired by Dr. Mena Mesiha, MD, MTS, Orthopedic Surgeon at PrimaCare Medical Center, who helped keep us organized, both in the months leading up to the panel and during the presentation itself.
Also on the panel was Dr. Mina Botros, MD, who brought to the discussion his expertise as a Neuropsychiatry Resident at UMass Chan Medical School and UMass Memorial Hospital. Using the criteria in the DSM-5, he shared criteria for identifying addiction, and compared tech addiction to substance disorder. From there he went to explain about the different anatomical centers involved when phone dependence spills into an addictive or pre-addictive behavior. Tech addiction, and particularly problematic social media use, he suggested
might be characterized by (1) reduced volume of the ventral striatum, amygdala, subgenual anterior cingulate cortex, orbitofrontal cortex and posterior insula; (2) increased ventral striatum and precuneus activity in response to SNS cues; (3) abnormal functional connectivity involving the dorsal attention network; (4) inter-hemispheric communication deficits.
Don’t be scared away by all those big words: in layman’s terms, this means that technology overuse has an impact on the regions involved in emotional processing and regulation, decision making, and impulse control. Mina went onto discuss treatment modalities from CBT to medication, but his main emphasis was on meditation and prayer which
has demonstrated changes in the prefrontal cortex, cingulate cortex, insula, and hippocampus. Higher gray matter volume seen in reward processing centers such as the right superior frontal gyrus, left inferior orbitofrontal cortex, and bilateral precuneus. When specifically looking at internet gaming, meditation not only increased the volume of these areas, but also improved their functional connectivity, thereby enhancing executive control / decision-making, emotional regulation, and mood.
These neuroanatomical changes suggest that MM [mindfulness meditation] was able to enhance top-down executive control, modulate the default mode network, and regulate reward-related brain regions, which may underlie its effectiveness in reducing gaming craving and addiction severity in patients with IGD [internet gaming disorder].
One take-away from Mina’s talk which I found helpful is that “when a person is addicted to technology, these activities are done to avoid or alleviate feelings of anxiety or irritability, rather than for fun and recreation.” This theme was picked up on by Mary Mesiha, the final panelist, who is a licensed clinical social worker with years of experience offering therapy. She spoke about the solutions to digital addiction, and her insights were so helpful that I want to share them in some detail here.
In a recapitulation of many of the other talks at the conference, Mary explained that all addiction is, at root, an attempt to fill the Jesus-shaped hole in our hearts with things that cannot satisfy. The tech companies pour millions of dollars of research into finding ways to make our phones as addictive as possible, and in the process these devices offer the illusion that they can satiate the soul. It’s not just the bright colors and stimulating beeps and notifications, though that is a huge part of it. More fundamentally, however, it’s that these devices offer a temporary relief from disconnection, even though ultimately they carry the risk of merely burrowing us deeper into isolation. As Mary put it in her paper:
One might feel that they hyperconnected in the digital world, but really and truly they increasingly disconnect [us from] the relational world. …We know that addiction thrives in loneliness, isolation and a lack of belonging. So the more a person falls into the technology addiction, the more isolated they become: so it becomes a vicious cycle
The solution to tech addiction, like any addiction, is genuine connection – ultimately connection with God, but also connection with the Lord through the communities by which Divine love is mediated to us.
In exploring the healing role of community, Mary referenced the oft-cited Rat Park Study. The study from the late 70’s began by putting rats alone in a series of separate cages. Each rat was given access to two beverages: regular water, and water laced with cocaine/heroin. The rats became addicts, and 90% died from their addiction. In the second phase of the experiment, rats were given the same choice, but this time they were not alone but put in a rat community where they could engage in activities appropriate for rat flourishing: socializing, exploring, working, raising families, playing, etc. During this phase of the experiment, only 5% chose the drug water.
Mary cited the British novelist, John Hari: “the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it is connection.” She added,
Addiction is not about the pleasurable effects of substances, it’s about the user’s inability to connect in healthy ways with other human beings. In other words, addiction is not a substance disorder, it’s a social disorder, the substance is not the issue, it is what is underneath.
Understanding addiction as rooted in disconnection offers strategies for addressing it. Yes, we need to address issues of access and boundaries. But more importantly, we need to be proactive in fostering healthy connection. That is what Alcoholics Anonymous does, but it’s also the purpose of the church.
As an aside of my own here, don’t let anyone tell you the church isn’t a social club. The church is more than merely a social club, but not less. If we aren’t participating with God to allow the healing work of the sacraments to flow out into community life (and, I would argue, the culture around us, which gets to part of the Dreher/Kingsnorth debate), then we likely have a mechanistic and even superstitious approach to the Eucharist, approaching Communion like a Starbucks drive-through.
Back to Mary’s paper:
We as human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. It’s how we get our satisfaction. If we can’t connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find.
Being spiritually connected, being in communion with one another and with God is a critical park of Orthodoxy, of Christianity. We all need a connection/relationship with God, and with each other.
Given that connection with God and each other offers a protective layer against addiction, we need to preserve these connections by protecting our attention. Thus, I concluded my paper with the following charge:
Attention is not just how we weed out what’s negative: through the gift of our attention, we preserve the things we love. If there is something you care deeply about—whether a hobby, a type of music, or a spouse—you will need attention to protect it. But if we allow offline activities that are meaningful to us to be punctuated by digital distractions (including even interruption potential), we risk diluting the quality of our experiences by habituating ourselves to a condition of continuous partial attention, never fully engaged and never fully present.