Of Icons and Idols

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Steve Jobs, commencement address, Stanford University, June 12, 2005

I have been crucified with Christ; yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me; insofar as I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who has loved me and given himself up for me.

Galatians 2:19-20

Are these two truth claims compatible? Mutually inclusive? Complementary? Irreconcilable?

Two months before Steve Jobs died, around the time the announcement of his retirement from Apple made front-page news worldwide, Commonweal published this article by Andrew Bacevich, professor of history and international relations at Boston University. It is the most troubling essay I have read this year. Here is an excerpt:

As successor to the Machine Age, the so-called Information Age promises to empower humanity as never before and therefore to complete our liberation. Taking the form of a wireless handheld device, the dynamo of our time has truly become, as [Henry] Adams wrote, “a symbol of infinity.” Rather than spewing masses of stone and steam, it offers instant access to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

The Information Age does something else as well, however: it displays in stark terms our propensity to bow down before freedom’s reputed source. Anyone who today works with or near young people cannot fail to see this: for members of the present generation, the smartphone has become an amulet. It is a sacred object to be held and caressed and constantly attended to. Previous generations fell in love with their cars or became addicted to TV, but this one elevates devotion to material objects to an altogether different level. In the guise of exercising freedom, its members engage in a form of idolatry. Small wonder that aficionados of Apple’s iPhone call it the Jesus Phone.

Bacevich is not registering merely a Luddite reaction against technological innovation. In his survey of modern civilization, particularly the rise of consumption-driven plutocracy, he laments the eclipse of Christianity, at least in the West, as "a formula for ordering human affairs," and its near-extinction as "a personal ethic or as a medium through which to seek individual salvation." Borrowing from Henry Adams, he says the dynamo (in all its iterations from the steam engine to the smartphone) is our surrogate for God. The devastation this loss of faith has caused, in gross physical trauma of our environment; through conquest, war, and genocide; through mindless consumerism and indifference to crippling poverty, leading to spiritual death; this devastation speaks for itself. Bacevich sounds haunting notes, but his pessimism is not defeatism. Indeed, he is driven by the unshakable conviction that all our signs point the wrong way, and our icons are actually more clever idols than any Abraham and Moses had to break. But the signs can be turned back, and the idols can be broken. His challenge to the Church is great. His challenge to each of us who profess to be religious is stark. Will we refuse to be enchanted?

Another quotation from Jobs' Stanford address:

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

There may be truth in this, but to my ears it rings of desperation. If you believe there is nothing to lose in dying because your desire is ultimately fulfilled or transcended, then great. But if you believe there is nothing to gain, either, and you go naked into nothingness -- that is to say, unrequited -- then I have to wonder how you intend to live.

I trust in following the heart when the reason is right. If for this world only we choose to follow our heart, then terrible consequences can and often do follow. Faith in the world we cannot see yet -- call it the kingdom of heaven, the city of God, the beloved community -- trains our heart better to live for others and not merely to "make" ourselves. There is definitely something of the Promethean in what Jobs is saying. But I worry that there is also something selfish in his words, and, when considered in light of Bacevich's argument, possibly self-destructive.

 

In religious life, human development is to be measured by the standard of conversion, not by change. Change alone, no matter how dramatic outwardly, is not sufficient. To work doggedly to change one's own life, and even the lives of persons too many to count, is not necessarily the same as bettering oneself, or the world. Still less does great change mean good change.

 

Yes, each of us must live our own life. Each of us must become our own person. The question is, what kind of person do we become when we believe that we and we alone must make ourselves? A corollary question -- and an important one because, as Jobs himself acknowledges, we do have to live with "the results of other people's thinking" -- is this: what kind of a world do we inhabit when we live as if it were really true that we and we alone must create ourselves? What kind of a world will we inherit if we believe that the future is only what we, and not God, make of it?