Part 1 of John Cassian’s Remedies for The Eight Principal Faults
Beginning with the Appetites
Jonathan Haidt’s forthcoming publication on the relationship between smartphones and childhood is near the top of things I’m going to read in April, but not because I am already smartphone-free. I’m not entirely sure that I want to be smartphone free, if only because I like Google Maps, the Pokemon Go that my kids and I play, and a few assorted things. Lord, make me like Wendell Berry, but not yet.
For the most part, I’m persuaded by all the arguments about dopamine (even if dopamine critiques are overstretched), about deficits in attention, about increased loneliness: all of it. You don’t have to sell me on it, and neither does Haidt. Our kids use minimal screens during the week, are super-reader-nerds, and with every fiber of our being, we will resist them having any more screen time than they have to in order to do their math assignments.
I’m interested in reading it in large part because it gets to something very true about the journey of the moral life: we begin with appetite, not intellect. In asking what smartphones have to do with the formation of children, we’re not primarily asking an intellectual question, as if children were simply brains in need of proper cultivation. That smartphones derail the intellectual process of learning to read in children has been already amply documented. But the crisis which the technology evokes runs far deeper than the intellect, to the regulation of desire, the ability to pay attention to the world around us, and (centrally, I think) our capacity to tame our appetites.
This is where John Cassian wants to help us, by recovering a notion that our problems go all the way down to a place beyond our conscious deliberations, down into our desires, and more importantly, to contend with the bottomless pit that is called gluttony.
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