For many people, the Covid pandemic lockdown meant “the triumph of fear and the paradoxical enjoyment of a fettered life.” That’s what Pascal Bruckner contends in The Triumph of the Slippers: On the Withdrawal from the World, which I read in manuscript and am happy to mention here. It’s a short book, just over one hundred pages long, by one of France’s most discerning social thinkers. Covid, to him, aligns with 9/11, climate alarm, and the Ukraine conflict as events encouraging retreat from the public square and (non-digital) social life, the “closing of minds and spaces.” We don’t seek and aspire, imagine and invent—we survive. Living behind closed doors was once understood as an impoverishment of life. Now, it delivers safety and leisure, particularly when screens divert us any time we want.
We have entered a sterile era, Bruckner concludes, a time of weakened eros and banal experience. As I read his observations, I couldn’t stop muttering in agreement. He even has a passage on one of the great American short stories, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” by Herman Melville. Bartleby sinks into a passive, stubborn resistance that ends in his death.
If we don’t have a widespread recovery of active public involvement, despair and dissipation will only continue. The forces of defeat are strong, as are the temptations of the screen. Bruckner’s advice: Accept risk, avoid dependency, be with others (friends and strangers). In short, get out of your slippers.
“Wouldn’t you like to have a taste of this intensity?” asks Simon Critchley in his study entitled, simply, Mysticism. It includes discussions of Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich, Annie Dillard, and T. S. Eliot, along with a careful examination of what mysticism is, what the concept signifies. Mysticism is an itinerary or journey, Critchley says, which seeks the presence of God (not necessarily union with God, as is often asserted). He praises William James, who granted to mystical experience the possibility of higher truths that ordinary observation can’t reach. He quotes the mystic Dionysius: “Abandon everything . . . God despises ideas.” He ponders, too, the fate of mysticism in a modern world that has so marginalized the most fertile soil for mystical journeying: monasteries. (Critchley notes—unenthusiastically—one common alternative, namely the cultivation of aesthetic experience and a “fashioned” self.)
There is also an important historical thesis in the book, one related precisely to this advance of modernity. Citing Michel de Certeau, Critchley states that mysticism wasn’t recognized as a discrete form of experience until the seventeenth century. The conception of it as such “marks a basic shift in Western attitudes towards the sacred.” When theologians and thinkers laid out this devotional intensity as a special condition, the sense of mystery proper to all modes of worship was diminished and lost. We begin to look back to the mystics of the past, the Desert Fathers, Franciscans, and so forth, as qualitatively different from the rest of the faithful, instead of Christians of greater discipline and intensity. Critchley himself had a mystical experience at age twenty-four in Canterbury Cathedral, but afterward judged it an aesthetic rapture, not an epiphany. He proceeded to follow Nietzsche and the death of God. That he returns to mysticism in this weighty volume and regards godlessness as a terrible disappointment (“I was never a triumphant atheist”) shows that the question isn’t closed, at least not for him. It adds a personal angle to the study, a search for understanding in an age sliding ever further into nihilism.
One day a notification popped up on Carlos Whittaker’s cell phone telling him that, on average, he logged seven hours and twenty-three minutes of screen time per day. It shocked him and led to the experiment recounted in Reconnected: How 7 Screen-Free Weeks with Monks and Amish Farmers Helped Me Recover the Lost Art of Being Human. First, he would spend two weeks with twenty Benedictine monks in the high desert of Southern California, then two more weeks working with Amish farmers in Mt. Hope, Ohio, then three weeks back home with family, the entire time screen-free. No cell phone, no laptop, no email, no alerts.
At the first retreat, he prays and prays on schedule, wishes for some air conditioning, and quivers in fear at night—fear, that is, of his own thoughts, which, at the start, won’t slow down. He takes solitary walks, during which he learns the discipline of “beholding.” At the end, he finds that “the monks’ practices had centered me in ways I’d never experienced before.”
In the Midwest, the Amish put him to work immediately. He learns to herd sheep, cut and “tedder” hay, and sit down to meals with patience and gratitude. (The average American family meal lasts twelve minutes, Whittaker notes, the Amish meal ninety minutes.) The full meaning of “community” becomes clear and reveals the idea of “virtual community” to be a fraud. Back home, Whittaker remains unplugged for three weeks, which now feels normal to him. The family travels to Yellowstone, and his conversations with his kids are more meaningful. “I was a different man,” he says. “All because I didn’t have a phone.” When the experiment ends, he doesn’t want to get back to the device. He’s free and untroubled. Nice.
I covered another book on a similar premise of digital damage on the podcast a few months back: Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World. The book has drawn widespread attention, and rightly so. It covers social scientific studies of how cell phones affect people’s behavior in crowded spaces, the decline of patience in waiting rooms and in lines such as those at Disneyland, “sensor-based” tools that monitor employees at their desks and consumers as they stroll down aisles packed with goods, and many more contemporary phenomena.
When Aldous Huxley toured the Escorial near Madrid and stood before El Greco’s Dream of Philip II, he envisioned an era when human beings were deeply embodied, “firmly rooted in the realities of physical pleasure and pain,” Rosen writes. The spreading “virtuality” of the twenty-first century carries us ever farther from that immediacy—porn replaces sex, cooking shows are better than actual cooking, and so forth. As a spunky eight-year-old, Rosen began to play the bassoon, an unwieldy tube with two reeds and fourteen keys from which she drew sounds “like the cries of a tortured duck.” She stuck with it through adolescence and college, though: “Playing that instrument was and still is a full-body experience.” It’s the kind of practice that is disappearing from the lives of the young.
Meanwhile, we have titans such as Max Levchin, a cofounder of PayPal, declaring: “The world of real things is very inefficient.” Technology, such visionaries proclaim, will tidy things up, organizing individuals into a better society—and of course, Rosen observes, make a hefty profit for Silicon Valley. The book is a stern warning told in fluent prose and brisk vignettes. Much recommended.
Two hundred years from now, will people look back at the twentieth century as an anomaly in the history of faith? Will the aggressive secularism of the post-1950s in the Western world appear a deviation, as well as a misfortune for three generations of people unlucky enough to have lived through it? “There was no God in my own home, no prayer,” writes Sally Read (a statement that may have troubled most readers in 1950, but in 2024 sounds wholly commonplace). In her grandmother’s house, however, was a painting, an imitation of Raphael’s Madonna del Granduca, that captivated her as a child despite her father’s “mighty determination” to maintain a godless household. In another room was a smaller image of Mary, which Read asked for upon her grandmother’s death. The artworks turned out to be instrumental to Read’s journey from atheism to the Catholic Church at age thirty-nine. Her new book, The Mary Pages: An Atheist’s Journey to the Mother of God, tells the story of her conversion as a memoir framed by four more Marian artworks: Fra Filippo Lippi’s Madonna and Child with Two Angels; Our Lady of Guadalupe (an acheiropoieton from 1531); Michelangelo’s Pietá; and the Statue of Our Lady of Walsingham (anonymous).
Read is as honest as a confessional poet (being a poet herself). The uneven trajectory of her life includes lots of men and erratic behavior. She recounts posing naked for an artist, hoping it would be an act of feminist liberation that would break the old rules of beauty (“my body broke every expectation in the ugliest way”). She admits to being excited about the London showing of the infamous portrait of Mary partly composed of elephant dung. She believes at one point that the conception of the Messiah was, in truth, a case of rape.
Read’s parents and friends, her academic exposure to feminist deconstruction, and her cosmopolitan habits would surely insulate her from the lure of Catholicism, one might think. But she converts nevertheless, and Mary is the instrument: “We long for the consolation of God’s lips on ours—his cry met by ours. And while the churched can meet God in church,” Read says, “the vast unchurched, the seekers, the discouraged, the far-away will often look for Mary without knowing it. Mary: searcher, lady of the lost, God’s outlier.”
Mark Bauerlein is a contributing editor at First Things.
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Image in the public domain.