February 2000 Print

Lt. Cmdr. Matthew Childs

 

I'm faced with a bitter irony. I intend to write about what is wrong with computers and the Internet. When I'm done with my first draft I will e-mail it to a colleague for his review. The irony is the one that has always been with the Church. We must live in the world but not be of it. We must love and serve God with our whole heart, strength, mind, and yet live in a world that does not acknowledge God on His own terms. We must live toward the perfection of defined principles while living in the imperfection of real life which is contrary to those principles. The Internet age is a new phase of the process of trying to live life as a fallen creature in a fallen world, in which we are necessarily subject to its allurements both by our concupiscence and for our strengthening unto salvation. The Internet must be seen for what the fascinations of the world, the flesh, and the devil have always been: temptations toward distraction from God. In humility, we resign ourselves to the temptations God allows, but we must never yield to them. This is an attempt to locate the phenomena of the Internet, of hyperspace, and of virtual reality within established principles and the larger phenomenon of our cultural regression. How must a Catholic approach the Internet, a thing designed to remove things from their natural habitat. This is an attack upon the computer phenomenon but is not a full rejection of computers, much like we can rightly attack modern medicine without giving up aspirin. Yes, God draws good out of every evil, but there is a tremendous amount of evil here. The argument is that the evil of Internet mania grossly outweighs any good and we'd better know that our salvation is at grave risk before we flip the switch, log on, and download.

This is not an exhaustive study nor is it primarily concerned with technical specifics of the Internet, but rather a look at the larger principles applied to it. I wish to present some facts to the laity and also to the clergy entrusted with the obligation to lead us.

Postmodernism

It is the Catholic thing to first define the error and then apply correction through the Faith. St. Pius X followed this organizational principle in his attack upon modernism, Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907). I will do the same in attacking postmodernism, though by a much more modest effort. It is clear that from Catholic moral and theological standpoints, St. Pius X's attack on modernism unmasks postmodernism as well. There is nothing particularly new in postmodernism. It is not a step beyond modernism so much as it is a completion of modernism.

St. Pius X shows quite clearly that modernism comes from the false philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) which separated the mind from external reality. This fundamental error is at the heart of postmodernism, too, but with a profound difference. Postmodernism re-admits the mind to a sort of "external reality," but that "reality" is now virtual and is not distinguished from the objectively un-real. In other words, once the mind was separated by modernism from "real" reality and convinced of the primacy of subjective reality, "reality" could be re-­admitted by postmodernism, but in a totally different sense, i.e., in a subjective, imaginative, sentimental sense.

[W]ithin our lifetime, computers will actually start designing themselves, and actually start thinking, at which point humans...will become completely irrelevant. Some people might think this scary, but I find it a consummation devoutly to be wished for. Think about it: If humans are vain enough to want to continue living, we can figure out how to upload our personalities into a computer. Get rid of the organic hull! At that point, there won't be an overpopulation problem, because you won't be taking up space. We won't be polluting earth. We won't even need Earth... —Michael Cudahy

The best example of this transition from modernism to postmodernism is seen in the Catholic Church during the 1900's. The modernist victory in Vatican II was the end of modernism per se. Ecumenism, otherwise known as the "annihilation of all religions" (Pope Pius X), was the beginning of postmodernism. The postmodernist "culture" that now prevails began in 1962-65. Ecumenism is the false "virtual reality" of the postmodern NewChurch which has unhinged herself from real tradition, real definitions, and real dogmas. Now that "ecumenism" has become the primary tenet of the NewChurch, however, the "Faith" can now reach out to the world again (à la Jubilee 2000) but in an entirely different sense. Since conversion denotes difference, it doesn't look to convert from error to truth but to call all together in a "unity of diversity"—a virtual reality, an absurdity that denies the very definition of the terms "unity" and "diversity." Postmodernism in the Church is a denial of objective, unchanging truth and tradition as well as deliberate obfuscation of words. Modernism knew what it was rejecting. In Pascendi, Pope Pius X condemns modernists for deliberately moving away from established doctrines. The recognition of "newness" requires the recognition of the old. The differences between tradition and modernism were clear and were recognized by both sides of the "dialectic." This is not the case with postmodernism. The victory of modernism is now so complete that the postmodern world is not concerned with external reality at all. For the postmodern mind the only reality is always changing, always subjective, always imaginative, and always sentimental. Frederic Jameson, a leading commentator on postmodernism, says, "Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good."¹

That anyone could think this seems impossible! How can anyone think that "nature is gone for good?" In Pascendi Gregis, Pope Pius X gave the answer: once supernature is rejected the logical end is a world of pure atheistic materialism. "...Modernism leads to atheism and to the annihilation of all religion. The error of Protestantism made the first step on this path; that of Modernism makes the second; atheism makes the next."²

Words are the only thing still worthy of fighting for, and it is indeed necessary to fight for the true sense of the words to save the reality they signify. —De Corte

 

When this is the case, there can be no distinction among things except in the arrangement of the matter they all share. In insisting that there is only the natural and no such thing as the supernatural, the modernists of Pope Pius X's time made the definition of the natural impossible. Without the external reality of supernature—something which can define nature because it is separated from and greater than it—nature really doesn't have any meaning, though it may retain the sense of existence. Modernism convinced mankind that there was nothing but trees, and no such thing as the forest. When you deny yourself an external perspective, you deny yourself full vision. Try taking a picture of the exterior of your house from your living room. The only way you could do it would be with the aid of some kind of technology that could give you a view you cannot naturally obtain. This, of course, addresses the deceit of the Internet which provides this same sense of being able to "see" things and to "visit" places that we cannot naturally "see" or "visit"; and after a while we get used to this new perspective and forget it's not real. What we see in the movement from modernism to postmodernism is "the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense, perhaps the supreme formal feature of all the postmodernisms...."³

To describe the differences between modernism and postmodernism, Ihab Hassan, a noted postmodern scholar, makes a comparison of the attributes of the two "-isms." A partial rendering of that list will give the sense of the transition we have made in the second half of the 1900's:

MODERNISM	POSTMODERNISM
Purpose	Play
Design	Chance
Hierarchy	Anarchy
Finished Work	Process/Performance/Happening
Creation	Decreation/Deconstruction
Determinate	Indeterminate
Transcendence	Immanence4

The trend is clear. Overall, Jameson's general characterization that postmodernism is "anti-­foundational" is supported by Hassan's list. To them and most of the world, including most contemporary Catholics, the trend is not such a bad thing—but rather just a thing. After all, how can there be good or bad if there is no standard, no God. That there can be order and truth and virtue without God is the lie of the devil. The point is that any subjective notion of truth can be deconstructed, in fact, even must be changed in form in time and with each person's own notion of "truth." Only the Unconstructed, the Untreated, can defy such change which is why the modernists had to get rid of God first. Modernism set up a "dialectic" posing the nature of God and His Church against such events as the Prayer Meeting at Assisi (1988) and the Catholic-­Lutheran Accord (1999) to impose tacit acceptance of false gods and rejection of the One Triune God of the Catholic Church. Postmodernism simply ignores God and His Church. Once all gods are acceptable and it is conceded that all religions are paths to salvation any self-respecting postmodernist must ask, "Why bother with God and His Church at all?" The seemingly complex systems of thought that are postmodernism are reduced simply to one word: atheism. Postmodernism is pure atheism and a desperate culture because it is a world that will never even think of looking for God.

Where there is no longer a submission to supernatural reality, there can no longer be distinction and hierarchy in the natural realm. God is real and presents Himself in very real ways: a real burning bush, a real infant in a cave, a real body nailed to a Cross, a Real Presence transubstantiated from bread and wine. God is undeconstructable because He is not a construct. God is Reality and is found in the real, in nature, His thumbprint. God is the antithesis of postmodernism, that completion of modernism when "nature is gone for good." Where is God to be found in a world disconnected from nature? St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that God is not evident to us as Himself, but must be known through His creation. Take nature away, remove the real, and our way to God is gone.

Where do you want to go today?®

 

The Language Issue, Postmodernism, and the Internet

Inextricably tied to postmodernism is the literary and linguistic theory that has developed along with it and which provides its intellectual foundation. A few words need to be said about words, about language, both divine and human, because the widespread use of the Internet has begun to destroy words and language. The Internet has moved us away from the idea that language is attached to something real. The Internet removes us from the idea that the "sign" can signify. The process of "surfing the Web," of designing your own "text" as you go, of catch-phrases like Microsoft's, "Where do you want to go today?" are things we don't think much about, but they are evidence of what socalled structuralism and poststructuralism literary theories call for in reading text. They are fundamentally postmodern.

In response to the question "What is today's most unreported story?" more than 60 leading scientists and science writers replied with answers including the failure of the population timebomb to explode and the coming ability of scientists to remodel the human body. One of those who responded was Keith Devlin of Stanford University, CA, who warns of the impending death of the paragraph. The increasing use of computer-generated illustrations and diagrams will gradually do away with the need for writing, he says, resulting in the majority of humans being unable to handle anything more demanding than a sentence. —Roger Highfield, The Daily Telegraph

 

So what are structuralism and poststructuralism? Broadly, they are theories dealing with signs, words, and modes of expression. These theories have paved the way for the philosophical viability of postmodernism. Words are vitally important because they are the way we attach concepts to reality. Words are what make our ideas see the "light of day." Consequently, to control words and ideas about words, is to control concepts of reality. The nature of advertising, which is meant to convince us of our need to buy something we really don't need, is evidence of this. When God utters the Word, He conceptualizes Himself so completely that He generates His Son, Who is the Word of God. This utterance is the perfection and the source of all language. Language is, and is meant to be understood as, the process by which ideas and reality are attached. The Word for God is God Himself; the word for us who are made in the image

Israel's leading orthodox rabbis have issued a ruling banning the Internet from Jewish homes, arguing that it is "1,000 times more dangerous than television" and threatens the survival of the country. The ruling, issued by the Council of Torah Sages, is an attempt by the rabbis to halt the infiltration of "sin and abomination" from the Internet into the homes of the ultra-orthodox, whose children have hitherto been shielded from the temptations of the modern world. The rabbis recalled that they had banned television 30 years ago, and said that the dangers from the Internet were even greater....The newspaper of Degel Hatorah, one of the strictest of the religious parties in Israel, said the Internet was "the world's leading cause of temptation, it incites and encourages sin and abomination of the worst kind:" - Alan Philps, Electronic Telegraph (Issue 1688, Jan. 8, 2000)

 

 of God is meant to function in an analogous but fallen way. In God there is no separation between concept and utterance. This is because in His Divine intellect His understanding of the idea expressed is perfect. For us, however, there is separation between the word and the concept. T. S. Eliot says: "Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow."⁵ This separation, resulting from our existence within time and exaggerated by our fall, is what postmodernism rejects. We begin to see the satanic nature of postmodernism—it would become as God! It claims for itself a sense of the non-separation between concept and utterance that is reserved for God alone. It is only a sense, however, in the same way that cyberspace, while claiming reality, is only virtual reality. As with all things satanic it is merely a mockery because human language can only become flat and depthless when it loses its attachment with objective meaning. As with the postmodern cultural phenomenon which achieves human connectivity at the expense of humanity and virtual reality at the expense of reality, structuralism and poststructuralism achieve non-ambiguity in language at the expense of disconnecting language from meaning. The disconnection between language and reality is the combined project of structuralism and poststructuralism. Structuralism is to modernism as poststructuralism is to postmodernism. Terry Eagleton, a contemporary literary theorist sums it up:

If structuralism divided the sign [word] from the referent [the reality described by the word], this kind of thinking—often known as "post-structuralism"—goes a step further: it divides the signifier [the sound/image of the word] from the signified [the concept of the word].⁶

That is to say, structuralism took away the word "cat" from any reference to an objective idea/image of a "cat." Poststructuralism allows "c-a-t" to refer to anything anyone wants it to mean, if they want it to mean anything to them. The two-stage project of the dissolution from modernism into postmodernism of the NewChurch is achieved again, this time in language. First remove "real" reality, then readmit a virtual reality of non-absolutes, in which reality is actually created by us as we proceed, and which can be different for each individual since no concept has any necessary relation even with its own sound. This is the opposite of language's true ideal and real figuration in God as discussed above.

This process of readerly constructedness is precisely what surfing the Web trains us to do. Consider the effect on a child being raised on the Web toward language, the way it is constructed, and its meaning. This goes for any interactive learning program. He is being trained to develop a certain attitude. He will find it perfectly normal that no text should follow any pattern other than the one developed by him or the computer as he goes along clicking the button that most appeals to him that day. He will simply come to accept that there is no set text and no author except, perhaps, himself or the computer as it executes automatic updates and links, etc. In case it seems I'm twisting these theories to my own advantage, let me quote Eagleton again in his treatment of structuralism/poststructuralism:

The structuralist emphasis on the "constructedness" of human meaning represented a major advance. Meaning was neither a private experience nor a divinely ordained occurrence: it was the product of certain shared systems of signification....Reality was not reflected by language but produced by it.⁷

If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger. —Frank Lloyd Wright, American Architect (1867-1959)

This production or construction of reality by language is what literary theorists call constructedness, because it is the process of removing the primary importance of the creator, also known as the author, and replacing him with the primacy of the reader and finally with the text itself. [Note that "author" and "authority" are the same word. —Ed.] More significantly, this importance is no longer a question of meaning. For structuralists and poststructuralists language no longer refers to anything. Language is not considered to attach concepts to reality through the medium of words; structuralists care only about the medium, i.e., the words (or signs), which become for the structuralists merely "black marks on blank page." As Eagleton explains in discussing Ferdinand de Saussure's achievement in structuralism: "Saussure's stress on the arbitrary relation between sign and referent, word and thing, helped to detach the text from its surroundings and make of it an autonomous object."⁸

That detachment, instead of refocusing the search for truth onto God, its source, and away from mere words, led the poststructuralists further away from meaning and toward mere words: "The movement from structuralism to poststructuralism is in part...a shift from seeing the poem or novel as a closed entity, equipped with definite meanings which it is the critic's task to decipher, to seeing it as irreducibly plural, an endless play of signifiers which can never be finally nailed down to a single center, essence, or meaning."⁹

In other words, language itself is a kind of web. Hence the reader's job is not to find meaning in words but to study the interaction with each other, their "play" or arrangement. But this is a misunderstanding of what we should expect non-divine text to do in the first place. Non divinely-inspired text should never be held to contain meaning so much as to strive toward figuring the meaning given by God alone. In setting up the false possibility that it could do more, the postmodernists have devised a sort of straw man that they could then easily overthrow by claiming "the death of the author" and, finally, the impossibility of finding meaning, resulting in the decision no longer to look for it—a decision called "deconstruction."

The infatuation with text as the "play" of signs alone as opposed to the presentation of signs toward signification, is precisely a rejection of the eternal within time because it rejects the possibility of meaning in utterance, in God and among ourselves. On one hand, we must admit that our language is never fully successful in reaching perfect meaning. If our words were capable of holding meaning in themselves and not dependent upon some higher source of meaning then our language would be divine and so would we; and such is clearly not the case. On the other hand, it is another thing to reject any and all meaning because of this imperfection. It is like a painter scribbling lines that look interesting relative to one another who refuses the existences of a tree because he couldn't paint it perfectly.

Despite their blindness and rejection of original sin, all these language theorists are confirming the primacy of the Word by demonstrating the inadequacy of the word. All the while they claim to be showing more and more convincingly that there is no meaning per se in anything, they prove that all meaning comes from God. They are like the Pharisees who, assured that Our Lord was a false prophet and worthy of death, proved His divinity by having Him killed. These theorists, in focusing so narrowly on the words themselves and ignoring meaning "strain at a gnat and swallow a camel." Post-structuralism refuses any possible value in or meaning to words by never moving beyond them. They are eternally present, and only as themselves, as "black marks on blank page."

So what does any of this have to do with the Internet? The Internet is nothing more than a sign of our postmodern, poststructuralist times. If we have defined those times at all effectively, I hope you can see how the whole manipulation of "reality" by the cyber phenomenon is a part of a much larger movement to abolish our connection with the real so as to remove us further from God. The Internet breaks down all barriers. It flattens. It has incredible width and very little depth. A commercial I heard the other day for an on-line shopping service speaks volumes. A voice imitating some sort of bellhop welcomes us to the store and says "Going...sideways." A somewhat perplexed customer asks, "What kind of elevator is this?" to which the bellhop responds, "The cyber kind." The commercial concisely reflects the loss of depth in the postmodern world. The Internet's progressive screens and arrows allowing up to go forward or backward at whim teach us—even force us—to accept text as a "readerly" construct, one that deteriorates the distinction between writer and reader. It is an almost perfect postmodern, poststructuralist victory, perhaps most of all because no one really takes the time to think about it. The Internet removes us from reality by changing the way we look at reality. As the poststructuralists claim we construct all truth, the Internet encourages us to construct reality. It changes living rooms into chat rooms and communities into virtual villages. More and more, people turn to the Internet as a first step in looking for anything: plane tickets, room reservations, dinner reservations, stock quotes, information for research papers, even (and most importantly) "friends" with whom to meet and discuss like problems and situations. The human need to interact is here, but in placing the Web between that need and its fulfillment, we can expect nothing but partial satisfaction which means only greater desire and, finally, a perversion of our very nature as it conforms to its new boundaries. We will begin to want the Web to be real.

The last time I used a hammer, my hand slipped and I hit my thumb. And for a split second, I unconsciously reached for the Undo key, Control-Z. I just thought, Oh, I gotta undo this. —Sky Dayton

 

Another commercial I heard within five minutes of the above, made use of a construction we probably don't even think about any more. The end of the ad invited the listener "to call us, or visit us at www.anything.com." Note the implication. The telephone has its bad points, but at least it denotes difference and separation. The best you can do on the phone is talk with someone. A Web site claims truly to take us there. The principles underneath the ubiquitous phrase "visit us on the Web" are the principles of postmodernism and poststructuralism. The ideas that underlie it are huge and we are being encouraged by such little steps to accept a false, a mock, a virtual reality.

Consider how directly opposed this all is to the ways of God and His Church. The Church's teaching remains ever the same even as the world persists in its perpetual processes. God is real, and He always chooses to present Himself in very real terms: a burning bush, an infant born in a cave, a body nailed to a tree, a Real Presence transubstantiated from bread and wine. God is undeconstructible because He is not a construct; He Is. God is real. God is reality. He is always found in the real, in nature, His thumbprint. How far from God is postmodernism, that completion of modernism when "nature is finally gone for good." Where is God to be found in such a world disconnected from nature? He cannot be. St. Thomas Aquinas teaches us that God is not self-evident to us but must rather be known through His creation. We cannot know God directly because it takes a divine intellect to do so. Take nature away, remove the real, and our way to God is lost. Consider, further, our Lord's use of language during His time on earth. We are told He spoke in parables "and without parables He did not speak...that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet saying: I will open my mouth in parables I will utter things hidden from the foundation of the world" (Mt. 13:34-35). And what sort of stories does God Himself tell? He tells stories of allegory drawing almost exclusively upon nature: a fig tree, a storm, a mustard seed, a head of wheat. Our Lord used language that refers to specific things in an attempt to reveal things unseen. His entire purpose was to help us reach to meaning beyond the words themselves. This is most certainly language that refers, and it is specifically not language that is concerned with itself as language alone. Are we to say that our Lord was only using language that fit His earthly time, as if God somehow is limited by time, as if the validity or applicability of our Lord's teaching is dependent upon one of His own creations, that of time? This is the sort of blasphemy that leads heretics to separate the historical Christ from the religious Christ; the sort of blasphemy that says the dogmas of the past are no longer relevant in our time. This is the sort of blasphemy condemned by Pope St. Pius X and the sort of blasphemy that drives the postmodern Church. The allure of virtual reality is more than just a cool new trend or a game we play with technology; it is an attack upon the eternal soul because it trains that soul not to rely upon the real as its primary datum, which is to say it pulls the soul away from the place it will find God.

 

When you begin to send email, you are deciding to be tied to your computer for the rest of your life, except for carefully arranged and preannounced vacations. The tie's strength comes from polite regard for the feelings of others; except "polite regard" doesn't quite do justice to the anxiety caused by a screen full of unread emails. They are like a string of bad debts, and while some people have a marvelous ability to breeze through bankruptcies unscathed, most of us don't. When my computer broke down recently, my first feeling was relief: Nyah, nyah, nyah, they can't find me now... I suspect that the minute daily obligations of email, which will grow ever more frequent as computers shrink and become part of our clothes and our bodies, offer a preview of the real-time social surveillance that will one day be not only normal, but necessary to sanity. Turn off the flow and people will go mad. —Gary Wolf, Wired Contributing Editor

 

We will worship something. Satan doesn't just want us not to serve God, he wants us to serve him and he is the prince of this world. He wants us to be strictly of the world, so his "miracles" cannot ever truly be miracles but rather the heretofore unseen manipulation of the material realm. Hence the false "miracles" of technology and most of all the great promise of the Internet. Here, finally, we can truly achieve connectivity of all men. But it is a lie. There is no love on the Net or from the Net. This tool of connectivity that can bring the whole world together is only the latest temptation—now more effective precisely because of its global permeation—to distract us from the One True source of human connectivity and love. The brotherhood of man through Marxism was the great lie that ushered in the 1900's and the same great lie about the communion of man through material in the form of cyberspace ushered it out. We would do well to recall Fyodor Dostoevsky's prophetic insights:

We are assured the world is becoming more and more united, is being formed into brotherly communion, by the shortening of distances, by the transmitting of thoughts through the air. Alas, do not believe in such a union of people. Taking freedom to mean the increase and prompt satisfaction of needs, they distort their own nature, for they generate many meaningless and foolish desires, habits, and the most absurd fancies in themselves.¹⁰

To say hello to a digital effect is $35,000. The littlest thing—removing an unsightly pimple from an actor's face in a close-up? $35,000. You want to change the color of the leaves on a tree? $35,000. You want to change the color of the sky? $35,000. —Nora Ephron

Let's extend this Luciferian connection a little further. Consider the nature of the communication, the interaction you have with the Web and that which is offered to us with God. God's love for us is perfectly selfless and real. God's love takes nothing from us except a portion of that which has already been freely given. He presents Himself to us in real flesh and blood. The devil, on the other hand, offers a false brotherhood of man through atheistic materialism of which the latest, greatest tool is the Internet. The devil is always a liar, because in fully rejecting God he has fully rejected truth; but he always tries to mimic God to ensnare souls. The devil's "love" is the opposite of God's. It is self-centered and demands servitude. The devil makes no sacrifices for his servants but rather continuously takes from them. Of course, he's clever enough to make his program look good, especially to those who set their sights on the material horizon. The Internet "cookie" is indicative of the kind of "love" we can expect from the brotherhood of man created by the Internet. A "cookie" tags data from your computer usage which is retrievable by outside entities without your knowledge. This means that information about you is being collected and sold to merchants interested in marketing to specific consumer profiles though one need not be paranoid to consider other possible solicitors of this information. The truth about the Internet is that this "superhighway" goes in both directions to lots of places. There's stuff coming in and going out and not necessarily with our express consent. When we open our computers up to the Web we seem to be in charge of what we do and where we "go," but while that line of communication is open, the places we "visit" can also learn a lot about us. It is only necessary that you go looking with no real goal; that you are "completely open," words the devil loves to hear. Does it seem an exaggeration to relate surfing the Web with satanic possession? I am not talking about direct and limited access to potentially helpful sites—though I would maintain that a trip to the library is preferable—I am talking about surfing, because surfing is a submission to the medium, a submission to "process" over "object," which makes it postmodern and Godless.

It is necessary to be aware of the more insidious snares the Internet provides the Enemy so that our use of that technology does not compromise our eternal salvation or our opportunity to earn the highest place in heaven possible.

Finally, consider how the incredible postmodern, poststructuralist, constructed connectivity of the Internet is achieved: bandwidth, almost infinite bandwidth, providing the means to transfer mind-boggling amounts of data at the speed of

 

Here in Coffeyville, KS [one of Amazon.com's six US distribution centers totalling 3 million square feet—Ed.], the high walls are painted white, and the endless rows of stock shelves shine in fluorescent yellow—the better to see the billboard-size banners that festoon the aisles and walls. "Our vision," reads one, "is the world's most customer-centric company. The place where people come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online:" Another banner floats above one of the aisles and lists the company's Six Core Values ("customer obsession, ownership, bias for action, frugality, high hiring bar, and innovation"). It's like the Cultural Revolution meets Sam Walton. It's dotcommunism!—"An Eye on the Future: Jeff Bezos Merely Wants Amazon.com to Be Earth's Biggest Seller of Everything," Time, Dec. 27, 1999

 

light via computer chips and fiber optics made of silicon and glass. What are silicon and glass?—Sand. This international web of connectivity, this vast empire of information and services; the entire virtual world is an empire built, literally, upon sand. It is a postmodern empire that removes us further and further from the one source of true reality, of true signification. When the Word is lost and the word becomes a construct merely to be deconstructed, we are left as the foolish man who can maybe hear the sounds that come from our Lord's mouth, but cannot attach any meaning to them. And if we do not attach real significance to our Lord's words, then we will never translate them into the real actions that must accompany Faith precisely to make it real:

...Every one that heareth these my words, and doth them not, shall be like a foolish man that built his house upon the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and they beat upon that house, and it fell, and great was the fall thereof (Mt. 7:26-27).

We are dust and unto dust we shall return, along with all our vain efforts to become like God. The Web is sand, and unto sand it will return. In the meantime, we must strive to live in accordance with what we do know because God Himself told us: to love God with our whole heart and soul and our neighbor as ourselves. Love God as manifested by His real Self and maintained by the inviolate and changeless teachings of His real Church, fueled by His real Presence, effected by the real Mass, on real altars; to love our real neighbor in his real home, in our real communities and chapels, in the real world.

Lt. Cmdr. Matthew Childs taught English at the US Naval Academy (1994-­97) and has since been working on a Ph.D. in English while working in the Navy. Under the influence of Dr. David Allen White, he and his wife Kelly both converted and were baptized into the Catholic Church on the same day (October 21, 1995). His family has since assisted at only the Latin Mass, most recently at St. Aloysius Gonzaga Retreat Center, Los Gatos, CA. He and Kelly and their three children, Eliot Matthew, Austin, and Isabella Marie, live nearby in Monterey, CA.

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1. Jameson, Frederic, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke U. Press, 1991), p. 9.

2. Pope St. Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, §39.

3. Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 9.

4. Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture (Ohio State University Press, 1987), pp.91-2.

5. T. S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men," The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1950).

6. Terry, Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 128.

7. Ibid., pp. 107-08.

8. Ibid., p. 99.

9. Ibid., p. 138.

10. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 314.