Rootedness in a Digital Age

Summary

In the digital age, the great temptation is to treat technology as divine. The common experience of rootedness today is shifting from our digital tools being rooted in us, to us being rooted in our digital tools.

How do we resist this trajectory? The answer is to reestablish the conditions in the human heart that are conducive to deep rootedness in everything that makes us most fully human. Key to this is to rediscover the disciplines that have sustained men and women throughout the ages.

We must address the basic questions of identity. What is the human and what defines its uniqueness? What is the digital and how is it unique? And how has the digital risen to such a dominant and definitive position in our inner and outer lives, to the extent that our humanity and human identity are contested and eroded?

Two philosophies compete for control over the development of technologies that reach deep inside the human person to radically transform people, communities, and societies. The first aims at the full escape from misfortune, injustice, and suffering; the second focuses on our full escape from the limitations of our humanity. Both advocate the rapid development of technology, in ways that fundamentally alter our human form and result in the phenomenon of “transhumanism”.

In response, we must understand the multiple dimensions of human flourishing that underpin a stable identity—from the spiritual to the intellectual and physical—and seek to live a different lifestyle and tell a better story.

To restore our human identity in real life, we must recover the meaning of love, by returning to its divine source. This can be done by returning to ancient practices that have created spiritual rootedness through the centuries, that pull us away from the digital universe and back to nature, quietness, and the true meaning of life. These include charitable and voluntary activities to help others, restoring the principle of the Sabbath and rest, enjoying solitude and silence in pursuit of inner peace, fasting from our digital devices, building lasting relationships, learning a new skill, and choosing to resist the ever-accelerating pace of life.

The choice we face is one between rooting ourselves in the practices which nourish us—body and soul—or in our digital tools. If we steward rather than escape our embodied lives, we can turn our digital tools outwards to the world.