What Is Eroding Our Humanity? Four Forces We Can't Ignore
We're doing something a little bit different today. I want to talk with you about a book I read this past fall. It's called Against the Machine: The Hidden Luddite Tradition in Literature, Art, and Individual Lives by a man named Paul Kingsnorth. You can find it here. The book is a lot to think about.
Kingsnorth is an interesting guy. For much of his life he was an atheist, or an agnostic at best. He had, however, a very deep concern for nature and for society's impact on nature. One of the parts of the book I really enjoyed was when he talks about how — very much to his surprise — he had converted to Christianity, specifically a version of Christianity found in the Orthodox Church. That realization of his conversion really led him to question some of the conclusions he had come to about the problems we're facing in this world. He began to see that it's not just politics we're dealing with, nor is it just ecology. It's not just economics either.
All of these things, he realized, are symptoms of something else. The root cause behind all of them is spiritual.
Back to the Beginning
This all goes back to the Garden of Eden, where humanity was in a proper relationship with nature. We are creatures — alongside the trees, the birds, and everything else out there. We're fellow creatures, made by the same Creator. On our part, we're specifically made in the image of God, but fellow creatures nonetheless.
The fall into sin wasn't just merely a loss of innocence. It was a denigration of humanity. It shifted our role and our relationship with the rest of creation. We're no longer who we were created to be. And the systems of this world continue to degrade our humanity. They are actively at work to make us less human than God intends us to be. The mechanisms of this world erode our humanity because they deny our nature as creatures and our relationship with our Creator.
Kingsnorth argues that there are four things — they all begin with the letter S — that corrode our relationship with God and our fellow creatures. The four S's are science, self, sex, and screens. Let's take those one at a time.
Science
Science in its proper sense is just knowledge. It's learning and understanding how things work, what reality is. Knowledge is not the same thing, however, as authority. And more and more in our culture, science has been assigned a place of authority in terms of how we ought to live our lives.
You might remember the phrase that came up frequently during the pandemic in 2020: "the science is settled." Except as things went on, we found out that the science really wasn't settled. There were all kinds of things that turned out to be different than we thought. And frankly, science is very rarely settled — there are always more questions to ask. As time goes by, things change. The science was "settled" during the time of Galileo too — that the earth was flat and we were the center of the universe. I remember back in the 70s and 80s, the science was settled that eggs were bad for you. Now they're good for you again.
When people say "the science is settled," it's actually an appeal to authority — a way to control people and say, "This is how you ought to live your life." And I want to be really clear: science itself does not do this. It's when people take science and move it into a faith system. We might call that faith system scientism. The idea is that science has all the answers we need for our lives — including the existential questions about why we're here, what life is for, and all of that. And the reality is, when we elevate it that way, it becomes an idol that breaks our relationship with God.
Self
The second S is self, and this one is maybe more self-evident. Since the fall of humanity, people are inherently self-motivated — we look out for number one. There are times that people overcome that part of our nature, and it's generally for the sake of people who are near and dear to us. Parents for children. Sacrifice for the family, for the tribe, for the community, even for the nation. There's usually some kind of bond — a relationship of love — that causes people to be self-sacrificial.
But for a lot of life, people tend to be really focused on self. And when we focus on ourselves and the things that we want and desire, our focus is no longer on God and it's not on our neighbor. When we don't live in a right relationship with God and don't have a right relationship with our neighbors, we are less connected with how God intends us to be. That loss of connection is a loss of something essentially human in us. We weren't made to stand alone. As the old saying goes, no man is an island. We're not intended to be entirely within ourselves. Going back to Genesis — it is not good for the man to be alone. We're made to live in community with other people, but also with creation at large. That's an important part of who we are as human beings. As we lose that, we lose a bit of our humanity.
Sex
The third S is sex. In our culture right now, sex is seen as the highest good and the most important right that a person has. It's almost as though there can be no wrong expression of one's libido. But sex is a good gift that God gave to humanity — and to the animals as well. It's intended, first and foremost, for procreation. But for us it also does something really important: sex is intended to bind husband and wife. It's to bring life into the world.
As we've twisted sex to make it something other than that, we lose our humanity. What we've done is turned sex into a form of entertainment for self-gratification. And notice — this overlaps with the previous S. When sex becomes about the individual and not about the couple, about the marriage, we lose something very, very important.
One of the ways our culture does this is through pornography, which is essentially the commodification of a person's body. There's a transaction happening — they're selling themselves, and if you're viewing it, you are, in a sense, buying it. As we dehumanize others to use them for our own pleasure, that leads to a degradation of our own humanity — not to mention the fact that much of what you find in pornography is actually a form of human trafficking and sex slavery. It dumps evil into our hearts, degrades our humanity, and erodes our love for our neighbor.
Screens
The fourth S is screens. You know — that shiny black thing that's probably in your pocket right now. Or maybe you're actually watching this on that shiny little black reflective altar. Our screens are a big issue for us.
Social media is a major part of people's lives. And it's interesting — we think social media is free. You don't pay any money to get on it, right? But the reality is, it's not free. What you're selling is yourself. You're selling yourself to an algorithm so that the algorithm can then sell to you. It watches every click, every view. It keeps a tally of all of these things so that it can commodify you — in order to sell to you, to influence you, and, I know this sounds a little paranoid, but even to control you.
If you want another interesting read on this topic, there's a fiction book called Feed by M.T. Anderson — you can find it here. It's a really uncomfortable look at a future where everybody is constantly connected to a form of the internet and social media, where their lives are either improved or diminished by their connection to "the feed." Good book. I'll just leave it there.
What This Means for Us
When we look at our relationship with God, it's really essential to recognize that our God is a God who relates to us. The heart of the gospel starts with the fact that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. In John chapter 1 it says that the Word became flesh in order to dwell among us. God speaks to us. He actually embodies that Word in the person of Jesus Christ, in order that He might be among us and be with us.
And He continues to do this work — to redeem and restore people's lives through relationships. He calls us into a relationship with Him through our Baptism, where He connects us to Jesus, to His death, and also to His resurrection. He connects us to Jesus in the Lord's Supper, that we might receive His life within us as we eat His body and blood for the forgiveness of our sins. And Scripture talks about it this way: if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. That new relationship we have with God — in this redemption of Jesus Christ — restores the humanity that God intended us to have.
So here's where we are. We have these four forces — science, self, sex, and screens — that are actively at work degrading our humanity. They do so by pulling us away from God and away from one another. They encourage us to look inward, to be isolated, to be commodified, to be controlled. And as people who are connected to Jesus and have new life in Him, we have to ask: how do we protect that humanity? How do we push back?
- Science — Knowledge is a gift. Scientism is an idol. Don't let anyone tell you that human wisdom has replaced the need for God.
- Self — We were made for community — with God, with each other, and with creation. Isolation is not our nature. We are not islands.
- Sex — God's good gift of sex was designed to bind, to create life, and to serve the other — not to entertain and consume.
- Screens — That little black rectangle is not neutral. It is watching you, learning you, and shaping you. Handle it with intention.
That's going to be our starting point for what comes next. In the next video, we'll talk about some of the ways we can protect and restore our humanity — what Kingsnorth and Scripture both point us toward as an answer to these forces. I hope you'll come back and check that out.
You can find Against the Machine by Kingsnorth here
You can find Feed by MT Anderson here
— Pastor Eric Tritten, Gloria Dei Lutheran Church, Hudson, Ohio
Comments