the facts answer

Benedict XVI’s Bunker?
Take a look on the “net”
On the Internet, the culture of positivism reaches its apotheosis, changing the way we read and think.

by JOHN WATERS

I remember, many years ago, being puzzled by an observation of the writer John McGahern, widely regarded as perhaps the finest Irish novelist of the second half of the 20th century. McGahern had in later life become an atheist, but had resolutely refused to engage in the fashionable denigration of the Catholic Church, which has become culturally obligatory for writers and intellectuals in recent years.
On the contrary, he appeared to retain a deep affection for Catholicism. Once I came across an interview in which he spoke of the importance of the Church in the development of his intellectual life. “The Church,” he said, “was my first book.”
At the time, I thought it a strange thing to say. For me, perhaps with an overly literal mind, a book was something with pages and a cover, whereas the Church was an institution founded by Christ to continue His work on earth. But McGahern’s image came back to me recently, reading a book called The Shallows, by the American writer Nicholas Carr. Carr’s thesis is that the Internet is changing how we read, and therefore how we think, feel, and remember. It is a deep and complex book, which delves first into the workings of the human brain and then departs on a history of the written word in human culture. Carr outlines how the distraction-ethos of the web may be rendering impossible the process of “deep reading” by which the deeper sensibility of man has been nurtured since the invention of the printing press. And this in turn is short-circuiting the process whereby deep reading had functioned to fill our memory banks with profound understandings and complex connections which enabled us to empathize with our fellows. Instead, we are being taught to memorize and think mechanistically, to shift rapidly from one thing to another, to regard the Internet as an external memory bank. This, says Carr, is reducing us to “pancake people,” flattened out versions of our ancestors.
Reading The Shallows, I found myself thinking not just of McGahern’s image, but of Pope Benedict’s “bunker” speech last year at the Bundestag. For what Carr is saying, in effect, is that the culture of positivism, of which the Holy Father warned us so graphically, has reached a kind of apotheosis in the Internet, which has finally provided mankind with a form of communication that directs us into reduced ways of seeing and thinking while suggesting itself as a radical advancement of what came before.
Once again, man has created a system and immediately begun to imagine himself reflecting it. But this time it has the power to change his mind to exclude all possibilities which do not correspond to this understanding.
Carr insists that the Internet is neither “the work of the Devil” nor, as Google might try to convince us, a godlike creation which transforms mankind’s situation unambiguously for the better. His book is not “religious” in the most obvious, immediate ways. And yet its ominous message directs us back to the word as written in the oldest books we have: to the longings that once caused men to scratch the shapes of their deepest questions onto clay slabs.