The Term “Backwards” Means Nothing
“But that’s so backwards, right?” There is a widespread assumption in modern society that stepping away from so-called “progress” means becoming “backwards.” This attitude is utterly illogically. The very descriptions are subjective and arbitrary. They imply that fads are positive in nature, and tradition negative. It is as ridiculous as claiming “everything new is good!” Imagine one lemming saying to another, “Run forward! Forward is good!” In a spirit of progressivism, the two lemmings run forward zealously, right off of the face of a cliff. There was nothing positive about their forwardness.
The term “progress” has simply been used to describe a current direction in society. It does not imply nor deny improvement in any way, whether for society, individuals, or wellbeing of any kind. We need to be especially deliberate and theological when evaluating any technological or social movement. Something is not “good” simply because it produces comfort, efficiency, longevity of life, or even personal happiness. Something is “good” because it nurtures holiness (Comfort and efficiency, by the way, often detract from holiness). Holiness is the purpose of the human person. Anything that leads towards holiness is good. Anything that points away from holiness is bad, end of story.
Turn Back the Clock
“Shall we turn back the clock?” John Senior asks. He answers this question more boldly than most.“Shall we turn back the clock? Perhaps I shall simply excite unreflecting contempt by saying clearly, emphatically, and without irony, regret or Romantic cant, ‘Of course!’ We can and must turn back the clock — to the right time. The only way out of the current crisis in inflation, energy and all the rest is…to simplify” (Senior, Restoration of Christian Culture 42).
By turning back the clock, John Senior is not implying that we should attempt to live the way our ancestors did in a given specific time period. He means we should be the ones turning the clock. We, Christian people, need our hands on the steering wheel. We should be creating our culture, our values, schedules, and priorities, and not the world around us. Neither the government, nor media, nor the industry gurus should determine the way we live. We alone are accountable for how we live, and eternity depends on it.
Let Our Values Determine Our Lives
However, we are not living intentionally. In his book, Living into Focus, Arthur Boers observes the way most of us do, in fact, live: “I meet a lot of folks who are unhappy, stressed, depressed, eating poorly, and not getting enough exercise…People regularly make choices that are counterproductive to the happiness they want…I keep running into people who sense something awry with life. Yet we rush on, as if sleepwalkers on automatic pilot, not knowing the right questions.”
Can it Be Done?
Can we turn back? Can we set the clock to our own time?
“Of course we can turn back the clock, by which I mean that technology must be re-geared to the proper dimensions of the human good — and not the other way around where people, we are told, ‘will adjust,’ which means be engineered to fit whatever schemes technologists devise, where education is changed to suit the convenience of the Registrar, industries are organized for the efficiency of their administration and not the product or the job to be done, where we are served tasteless meals under conditions beneath the level of the feeding-trough in fast-food shops because they can get us in and out faster with a greater cash return and fewer dirty dishes — in a word, where human values are subservient to systems” (Senior, RCC 42).
Technology can be a very good thing. In order to do so, it must be “re-geared” towards human flourishing. For instance, innumerable studies have shown that the “time-saving devices” of the twentieth century have not saved time. On the contrary, they have increasingly depleted our leisurely time. The invention of washing machines, dishwashers,
microwaves, email and the like, all correspond to higher expectations for work and fewer hours of downtime.
We Should Not Be Seeking Free-time
The problem is that our culture has made the pursuit of “free-time” a chief priority. We should be pursuing meaningful time. Our goal is not to “get it done” but to enjoy the process and find meaning and contemplation in the process. The activity conducive to leisure and prayer is always superior. All actions have one aim: cultivating the interior life.
Time to Go Back
“It is time to go back to those conditions in which human beings can grow again… Simplify, as Thoreau said, not by changing governments — a change of collars on a dirty neck; not by denouncing IBM, Communism, the Catholic hierarchy, the Rosicrucians and Jews; but in a single, honest, unremembered act, as Wordsworth said, of kindness and of love. As the first significant act in the change of heart, really — not symbolically — smash the television set, then sit down by the fire with the family and perhaps some friends and just converse; talk alone, even one night a week, will cut your use of energy, and love will grow. Don’t force its growth. The hearth, like good soil, does its work invisibly, in secret, and slowly. After a long time beneath the hearth of a quiet family life, green shoots of vigorous poverty appear; you have become, in a small way, poor. If several families, sharing this humble secret, buy old houses on the same slum block and fix them up, they will have restored a kind of Auburn right in the midst of their ruined city and begun the restoration of that ordinary, healthy, human thing, the neighborhood” (Senior, RCC 49).