Alongside wrinkles and mottled skin, the primary mark of my aging is an increasing appreciation of venerable American curmudgeon Jonathan Franzen. I recall the day that I discovered that the lauded novelist thought that Twitter was absolute garbage: Sitting seaside on a Santa Cruz pier thumbing a Junot DÃaz novel that I didn't enjoy—but which I had committed to read in an effort to contrive an ill-advised relationship—I unlocked my phone to discover a vitriolic horde of LitTwitterers denouncing the man who had uttered these words:
Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose. It's hard to cite facts or create an argument in 140 characters … It's like if Kafka had decided to make a video semaphoring The Metamorphosis. Or it's like writing a novel without the letter 'P'… It's the ultimate irresponsible medium. People I care about are readers … particularly serious readers and writers, these are my people. And we do not like to yak about ourselves.
Franzen famously hates everything from capitalism to lingerie, though unserious art and unserious artists are particularly abhorrent to him. And he especially laments the "internet junk stream"—a disdain that he shares with his late friend, the prescient David Foster Wallace. While his widespread hatred borders on performative and parodic, Franzen's rebukes all hinge on one totally real and fundamental enemy: atomism.
Our culture has an enormous problem with loneliness—as well as an obsession with self. No one seems quite willing to admit that a relentless focus on ourselves may not be an antidote to isolation. We harbor a collective "main character syndrome," and our postmodern Copernican Revolution has placed our own minds at the center of a universal story that revolves around us. No where is this more literally obvious than in our social networks, where each of us is the hub with spokes of followers.
All of our Zuckerbergian overlords proclaim the utter goodness of the untamed connection afforded by social media, though the accompanying downsides of mindless scrolling, self-loathing, depression, anxiety, and addiction are rarely noted. Tech evangelists view these downsides as obstacles to be overcome rather than logical consequences of social networks that present people as commodities, as algorithmically malleable, as atoms.1 As Chesterton quipped, "The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums"—and we are driving ourselves mad with our hope that further self-discovery and public self-disclosure will set us free from our anguish.
A misguided understanding of science and unwavering materialism are at the center of our culture's solipsism—the frail belief that all one can truly know is one's own mind and thoughts. Those who seek meaning and find that it cannot be touched, cannot be tested retreat into themselves. What remains for these poor atomistic souls is a pile of paradoxes: A distrust of the people they desperately seek; an attempt to connect with others by endlessly cultivating themselves; a dense apartment building where they know no one; a collection of followers and no one to call in the midst of a crisis; a hatred of a God that they are sure does not exist.
After Chesterton decried foolish belief in oneself, his conversation partner replied, "Well, if a man is not to believe in himself, in what is he to believe?" In response, Chesterton wrote Orthodoxy, a defense of faith.
Franzen's latest novel, Crossroads, is far from a theological treatise, but it does take a closer look at solipsism. Each of its main characters struggles with the consequences of all-consuming selfhood. Russ, a middle-age associate pastor, flirts with a younger parishioner in a self-assertive conquest. Marion, a depressed homemaker, justifies her self-sabotage with the failure of her therapist to spur on self-discovery. Clem, a college student, sleeps with a girl he does not love, repeatedly, in hopes of self-exploration. Becky, a high schooler, abandons her virtue to pursue self-revelation. And Perry, a savant, uses everyone in his life in his monomaniacal pursuit of self-fulfillment through drugs. Only Judson, the youngest child who has not yet reached the age of reason, is spared from the negative consequences of radical self-love.
Though Franzen set out to write a novel that only focused on the emotional aspects of religion, he may have unwittingly landed on religious truth.
"Crossroads" refers both to the pivotal events of the novel and a church youth group of the same name, from which Russ is ousted in favor of hotshot young preacher Rick Ambrose. Of course, Ambrose's approach is to bring kids in at all costs, and the price he settles on is abandoning religion. That is, he believes that the best way to save souls is to remove all stains of religion to make the whole experience more palatable—an approach that many churches have settled on today. In the end, though, many people find TED talks a poor substitute for homilies, concerts a weak stand-in for liturgies, hobbies a lame replacement for worship, and therapy an insufficient surrogate for confession.
Remembering a traumatic past, Marion reflects:
She might have imagined her story emerging with much guilty gasping, much reaching for Kleenexes, but confessing her worst sins to a psychiatrist was nothing like her Catholic confessions. There was no terror of God’s judgment on her puny self, no pity for her sweet Lord’s suffering on the cross for what she’d done. With Sophie, a female layperson, a maternal Greek American, she felt more like very naughty... People who weren’t seriously Catholic didn’t understand that Satan wasn’t a charmingly literate tempter, or a funny red-faced devil with a pitchfork. Satan was pain without limit, annihilation of the mind.
If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. We all fail repeatedly to be good, yet our solipsistic culture tells us that redemption is just a bit further down the corridors of our own minds. C.S. Lewis notes the absurdity of this suggestion in his excellent Screwtape Letters, written from the perspective of a soul-seeking demon to his apprentice: "It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out."
Goodness is found in community, and real community is found in the physical world. Human beings are sensual creatures, which is why the spiritual truths of the faith are conveyed in physical manifestations: icons, statues, relics, candles, incense, water, oil, bread, wine, body, blood—and the cross. The same loss the faith incurred with online masses during the pandemic is the loss our culture has inflicted on itself with misguided attempts at connection and foolish hopes of salvation through self-realization. Truth, love, and beauty are found in people, in imago Dei. Go be with them.
In the worst case, tech evangelists like Daring Fireball's John Gruber are so hamstrung by addiction that they begin to celebrate it: "And do iPhone / Android / BlackBerry addicts really see this as a problem that needs to be solved? I feel like I spend so much time on my iPhone ... because it’s so good. I’m never more than a few seconds away from something at least somewhat engaging. I think it’s because we want to be on them. These devices are where our minds are drawn — like moths to a flame, perhaps — whenever we’re otherwise unoccupied."