The continued development and use of technological devices is often justified by arguing that in doing work for us, they allow us to rest. And yet, our common experience suggests the opposite. If using a computer cuts the time I need to do my job in half, that does not lead to my employer allowing me to go home after half a day’s work. He will instead demand that I do twice as much in the same amount of time (and for the same pay). The more work we offload onto the machines, the more work is expected from us. This is the contradiction at the heart of the obsession with automation: that we want a greater amount of work done without doing it ourselves. We demand that our devices run constantly while we remain sedentary. We want to reconcile an endless frenzy of activity with idleness. This effort might strike us as irrational, and it is. All vice is. There is something in the mindset that desires to make and use machines as we do that is vicious. The technocratic mind suffers from a primary vice: sloth.
St. Thomas Aquinas, writing eight centuries ago, very accurately described life in the age of social media. Aquinas did not know what our machines would be capable of, nor their impact on our lives, and as far as we can tell, he did not even imagine anything like them could exist, but in describing the vice of acedia (or sloth), he managed to capture modern life with uncanny accuracy. Acedia is a “sorrow for spiritual good,” a sorrow that comes from either not thinking of spiritual goods as good and thus sorrowing because they are perceived as evil, or from being discouraged by the difficulty of attaining them and refusing to do the work needed to acquire them. Acedia is one of the seven capital vices. These are called capital because they spawn a host of others. In the case of sloth, Aquinas calls the offshoots six daughters: “malice, spite, faint-heartedness, despair, sluggishness in regard to the commandments, wandering of the mind after unlawful things.” This last one has daughters of its own:
This tendency to wander, if it reside in the mind itself that is desirous of rushing after various things without rhyme or reason, is called “uneasiness of the mind,” but if it pertains to the imaginative power, it is called “curiosity”; if it affect the speech it is called “loquacity”; and in so far as it affects a body that changes place, it is called “restlessness of the body,” when, to wit, a man shows the unsteadiness of his mind, by the inordinate movements of members of his body; while if it causes the body to move from one place to another, it is called “instability”; or “instability” may denote changeableness of purpose.
Are these not traits of life in a technological society?
Our minds are forever wandering, jumping from distraction to distraction, scrolling endlessly through online content. Even our work is constantly interrupted by a never-ending stream of notifications, emails, phone calls, instant messages. Have we not all experienced “uneasiness of mind,” a lack of focus from switching from one screen to another, jumping from phone to computer to television to smart watch, from clicking on an infinite chain of hyperlinks? Do not news feeds, and click-bait articles, and advertisements prey on our curiosity? Is not the nonstop succession of tweets and posts a high-tech form of loquacity? Are not comment sections dens of spite and malice? All this technology serves a variety of purposes which only distract us from the one and only purpose that matters. Like Martha, we are so anxious and burdened with the many things our devices are constantly nagging us about that we neglect the one thing that is needed. We are thus robbed of the better part, which leads us promptly to despair. We might not recognize these daughters by the terms Aquinas used to name them, but today we would refer to them as anxiety and depression.
We are so anxious and burdened with the many things our devices are constantly nagging us about that we neglect the one thing that is needed.
Among sloth’s varied offspring, we find some that imply sluggishness and others that denote activity. Here the root of the contradiction mentioned above is unveiled: Sloth pulls us away from the spiritual good that we no longer perceive as such, and it pushes us to pursue that which we now mistakenly take for the greater good. We are idle with respect to what is genuinely good and frantic about what is not. When we strive for goods that are not the highest goods, we will never be satisfied: A man pursuing them will be forever restless. Man was made, as St. Augustine famously said, to rest in God. Anything less than God will never suffice; his absence can never be filled by any amount of finite goods. This is also why sloth begets despair.
Now, one might argue that the tendency in modern devices to habituate us to a slothful existence is only incidental—that it ultimately depends on how we use them. There is some truth to this. We could without a doubt use them differently and yet we do not. Is it merely because we are weak-willed? Is it only because we use them poorly? Or is it because the technologies themselves are designed and built to instill in us bad habits? I would argue that this tendency is not incidental but springs from an essential connection between sloth and modern technology. Martin Heidegger held that the essence of technology is that it is a mode of revelation in which all things are revealed as standing reserve—as there for the sole purpose of serving our needs. This is why Pope Francis calls it a “technocratic paradigm”: an all-encompassing way of thinking according to which all of creation is there just so we can use it. The goodness of things is limited to their utility so that our relationship with the world is reduced to our acting upon it. Aquinas had a different view. He held that God created the world out of sheer goodness. Creation exists to make that goodness visible. Aquinas points out that what distinguishes acedia is that it is a sorrow in the divine good. This is why it is opposed to charity: It is contrary to the joy that flows from love of God. The slothful person cannot rejoice in God’s goodness. In our modern context, we cannot rejoice in it because we no longer perceive it. Our technological mindset blinds us to the divine goodness in creation: We can only see it as good in relation to ourselves. Josef Pieper writes that this distortion of our understanding of creation leads to the perpetual activity characteristic of sloth:
It should scarcely surprise us that that weakening of that tie (by virtue of which the world is viewed as a Creation and not as material for man to act upon) should keep pace with the breakdown of the theoretical character of philosophy, with its loss of prestige vis-à-vis mere functioning, and with the decay of philosophy itself. There is a direct road from “Knowledge is power”—and Bacon’s other statement that the purpose of knowledge is to furnish man with new inventions and gadgets—to Descartes’ more explicitly polemical statement in the Discourse that he intended to replace the old “theoretical” philosophy by a practical kind, so that we men might make ourselves the “masters and owners of nature”. That road leads on to Marx’s well-known declaration: Hitherto philosophy has been concerned with interpreting the world, but what matters is to change it.
With every increase in knowledge we are compelled to create newer inventions which augment our mastery over nature: We run after them so that we might gain greater power over the world. Very soon we find ourselves immersed in the master-slave dynamic by which the master becomes so dependent on his slaves that he becomes enslaved: The gadgets become our masters.
Sloth pulls us away from the spiritual good that we no longer perceive as such, and it pushes us to pursue that which we now mistakenly take for the greater good.
This is also why Pieper can contrast sloth to leisure, to genuine rest. Leisure is, in Pieper’s view, an affirmation of the goodness of things, an acquiescence to their being what they are in the way in which they are. To be leisurely is to be receptive to the goodness of things independently of how they may benefit us. One can then rest since one is not seeking constantly to exploit, manipulate, and dominate. And it is only in being receptive to the goodness of things that we can come to appreciate and use them properly; only then can we realize that their usefulness is an overabundance of goodness, a surplus that is given to us, a gift. Only thus can we develop a technology that will in fact bring us rest.
This can help make sense of Aquinas’ seemingly strange remark that sloth is opposed to the precept about hallowing the Sabbath day. If Pieper is right, then to be leisurely is to imitate God’s rest on the seventh day, a rest grounded in his seeing that his creation was “very good” (Gen. 1:31). The command to rest is not restricted to people, extending to beasts of burden (Exod. 20:8–11) and even to the land: “The LORD said to Moses on Mount Sinai, ‘Speak to the Israelites and tell them: When you enter the land that I am giving you, let the land, too, keep a sabbath for the LORD. . . . But during the seventh year the land shall have a complete rest, a sabbath for the LORD, when you may neither sow your field nor prune your vineyard’” (Lev. 25:1–4). Today the Lord’s command would perhaps require us to allow our devices to rest. But why should the command extend to animals and inanimate things? The point is that there are limits to our dominion over creation. We cannot dispose of it at will because we are not its absolute rulers but its stewards. We can only be faithful stewards by acknowledging that creation does not exist solely to serve us.
Pope Benedict XVI wrote that “part of the Christian path is the conviction that the only way for us to be truly creative—that is, capable of creating—is by doing so in harmony with the Creator, with the One who made the universe. We can only really serve the earth if we receive it in accordance with God’s Word, but in doing so we will truly be able to advance and perfect both ourselves and the world.” Our technology will genuinely benefit us (both materially and spiritually) when what we make reveals creation to be what it is in reality: an expression of God’s goodness, a reason for us to worship him. “Creation is wholly fulfilled, serves its purpose, when it is a house of worship. . . . Creation exists for the sake of the Sabbath, it exists for the sake of the covenant, and it exists for the sake of worship.”
By recognizing God’s goodness in his creation, our technology will be transfigured, and it too will exist for the sake of the Sabbath rest. Or we can continue on our current path. The Old Testament prophets proclaimed that Israel’s failure to keep the Sabbath led to the Babylonian exile: “He took into exile in Babylon those who had escaped from the sword, and they became servants to him and to his sons until the establishment of the kingdom of Persia, to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had made up for its sabbaths. All the days that it lay desolate it kept sabbath, to fulfill seventy years’” (2 Chron. 36:20–21). The punishment for not keeping the Sabbath is endless toil.