Rebuilding Jerusalem in the Dark

What Tolkien’s Elves Can Teach Us About Using Technology Well

Electricity is killing us. It is a startling claim, I grant, but one that must be taken seriously. Studies over the last decade show that most human beings carry one to two percent of Neanderthal DNA, and these good and bad alleles contain two relevant effects: hyper-reactivity with increased risk for depression and frail circadian rhythms. Put simply, Paleolithic man naturally selected genes that helped him survive: hypersensitivity to light and sound. Fifty thousand years later, I am no longer asleep in a dangerous jungle waiting to be eaten. I sit in a comfortable office chair, under fluorescent lighting, and in front of an LED computer screen for eight hours a day. Add the three other hours I spend on my smartphone or tablet while eating, commuting, or lounging, and the explosion of growth in loneliness, depression, and suicide in the modern world starts to make a bit more genetic sense. Many might not see the connection. As the godfather of media theory, Marshall McLuhan, knew well: we are so steeped in our “electric information environment that is quite as imperceptible to us as water is to fish.”^[1] But for those able to reach beyond their own electrical bias, it is clear that something is going deeply wrong in our light-filled world. The natural and social order has been thrown into disarray and we are becoming very aware of the effects: our sickness. But what exactly we should fix remains elusive—or at least heavily debated.

In his recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV references a different kind of light: burning. Citing the Book of Nehemiah, Leo tells us that we are living amidst the razed ruins of Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile. In 586 BC the temple was looted and burned to the ground by Nebuchadnezzar II: “the walls collapsed and the gates burned” (par. 8). All the royal families were rounded up and deported. There were no buildings, no protection, no food left—just the people and God. I fear many readers purposely overlook the catastrophic intensity of this metaphor and relegate the encyclical to good advice. Pope Leo is not telling us to simply make a new friend or sort our recycling better. He is asking us to completely rebuild Jerusalem “piece by piece,” as if we have absolutely nothing physical to stand on, as Nehemiah did. In a world so rich and full of things—especially very bright and loud things—this is a scathing criticism which calls into question all aspects of modern life. If we are truly living after the Babylonian exile, how did the exile occur and are we even aware of what we lost? I will argue that over the course of two thousand years, human beings have virtually eradicated the one surefire antidote to our maladapted inheritance: oral culture, which is the original human form. Beginning with the clock, accelerating through the book, reaching its climax during the Industrial Revolution, and ending with the death knell of our current digital technopoly—our tools have radically changed the way in which we experience reality as embodied creatures. We have subsequently burned away all the social fabric of in-person communication, rituals of embodiment, and physically demanding practices that kept us sane, connected, and enduring for centuries.

Let There Be Light

Today constant exposure to artificial light is ubiquitous across all ages and cultures. Adult life has been radically transformed by it. Sleep expert Charles A. Czeisler of Harvard Medical School noted that “every time we turn on a light, we are inadvertently taking a drug that affects how we will sleep and how we will be awake the next day.” But once upon a time man rose and fell by the cycle of the sun, and our Neanderthal circadian rhythms thanked us for it. Before electricity, our ancestors were able to enjoy their labor and leisure in the context of the natural world around them. Pre-modern people had so much rest, in fact, that we had two sleeps, interrupted by an hour of leisure. Roger Ekirch’s At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past documents how “[f]amilies rose from their beds to urinate, smoke tobacco, and even visit close neighbors. Remaining abed, many persons also made love, prayed, and, most important, reflected on the dreams that typically preceded waking from their ‘first sleep.’” Sure—fire, candles, and gas lamps provided a certain amount of flexibility beyond the narrow parameters of the sun. But, as Lewis Mumford points out in Technics and Civilization, those solutions always carried an ever-present threat that outweighed their ineffectual lighting. One might start a fire or “ignite the ‘mine-damp’ and exterminate [everyone] by a single blast.” The danger imposed by the flame limited its use to the dire and urgent, such as keeping watch, searching for someone lost, or waging war.

The first thing we might do to reorient society to our natural biology is to conscientiously reduce the adult intake of all flickering light and sound. For children, this would mean outright banning most electronic devices.

For those immune to technology’s more lucid charms—us so-called night-owls—we can call the sun’s bluff but are still sore to admit that our ancestors were also much more physically active than we are today. Skyrocketing obesity, cardiovascular disintegration, and inflammation rates in evidence in the West were simply not possible two thousand years ago. Oral societies not only relied on hunting, gathering, and farming to survive, but—without books—singing, dancing, and storytelling were cultural necessities to hand down generational knowledge. This form of orality was intrinsically attached to physicality on even a personal level. McLuhan explains in Understanding Media that when “the heavy visual stress of literacy is lacking in a culture, there occurs another form of sensuous involvement.” He quotes a Greek guide: “Do not be surprised at the frequency with which you are patted, petted and prodded in Greece.... It’s as though your hosts are trying to find out what you are made of.” The ferocity and passion of the oral tradition has movement and touching at its roots. From the perspective of our animal genetics, it is impossible to overstate how much of a boon physical activity and embodied touch is for the human body and mind, especially given that half of our brain relies on spatial engagement. As Iain McGilchrist writes in The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning, “Meaning emerges from engagement with the world, not from abstract contemplation of it.” Between the sun’s light and all of these physical activities, the human body was in constant motion. These activities were also not constrained by time, which would soon bring humanity into a new dimension.

A Moment in Time

Something momentous occurred in 996 AD that would inadvertently drive man away from presence and embodiment and, ultimately, to isolation: a Benedictine monk created the first modern mechanical clock. “The monasteries,” observes Mumford, “helped give human enterprise the regular collective beat and rhythm of the machine; for the clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but of synchronizing the actions of men.” The effect that this one small invention had on both the future of machines and man was transformative. The act of “time-keeping passed into time-serving and time-accounting and time-rationing.” As this took place, “Eternity ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human actions,” and “one slept, not when one was tired, but when the clock sanctioned it.” Mumford makes clear how electricity and reading proceed directly from the clock: “When one thinks of the day as an abstract span of time, one does not go to bed with the chickens on a winter’s night: one invents wicks, chimneys, lamps, gaslights, electric lamps, so as to use all the hours belonging to the day.” By inventing the tool of the clock, “[a]bstract time became the new medium of existence” and revolutionized the way we viewed the world. “The clock, not the steam-engine,” insists Mumford, “is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.”

While the clock may have kicked off the formal change, the transition from oral “story-telling” cultures to reading and writing ones is essential to understanding how we have arrived at the sedentary, digital lifestyles we inhabit today. The book, as we understand it now, did not become widespread until the 15th century with the invention of Gutenberg’s press. The aristocracy in the Middle Ages, explains Neil Postman in Technopoly, “integrated [tools] into the culture in ways that [did] not pose significant contradictions” to its history and culture. The machined book was born into an oral tradition that had God at its core, and it would take many centuries for reading to transform oral society into the logical, utilitarian technocracy we have today. It is difficult to imagine a time when nobody read books, but it was precisely the rush towards knowledge and literacy that entailed the weakening of man’s grasp of the physical world. “By removing words from the world of sound,” says Walter Ong in Orality and Literacy, “...print encouraged human beings to think of their own interior conscious and unconscious resources as more and more thing-like, impersonal and religiously neutral.” The primacy and privacy of the print book—while genuine in its drive to educate and illuminate—began a slow divorce in our commonality, separating the bonds that held us together.

Marshall McLuhan, in The Gutenberg Galaxy tells us, “It was not until the experience of mass production of exactly uniform and repeatable type, that the fission of the senses occurred, and the visual dimension broke away from the other senses.” Where the clock allowed us to view time and space as a prized commodity, the printing press emphasized our visual capacity above all the other senses: “The increasing separation of the visual faculty from the interplay with the other senses leads to the rejection from consciousness of most of our experience, and the consequent hypertrophy of the unconscious.” Simplifying McLuhan’s esoteric language here: a society that focuses on sitting around, reading books, and dwelling in one’s own mind must not be surprised when it no longer dances, speaks, or shares things in common. Echoing this despair three decades earlier, Mumford writes, “With the starvation of the senses went a general starvation of the mind: mere literacy, the ability to read signs, shop notices, newspapers, took the place of that general sensory and motor training that went with the handicraft and the agricultural industries.” In a very peculiar—but unsurprising—way, the book took man’s focus away from his present, embodied world, weakened his gross motor skills, and spurred his desire for technocracy, machining, and industry.

The Revolution

Technocracy describes a time when tools and scientific measurement began to push aside traditional values and religious beliefs. God was slowly being replaced by science. However, man still held his ground against the ever-growing dominance of tools. The sun still regulated the workday, and communal traditions still existed through most of the 17th and 18th centuries. However, something big was about to disrupt that history: the Industrial Revolution. Frederick Winslow Taylor and Richard Arkwright, two of the many pioneers of factory automation (and blatant slavery), were the precursors to this revolution. The supplanting of God by science allowed them to rearrange the work of man—using the clock no less—into logical steps devoid of creativity or dignity. Taylor, bringing the stopwatch onto the machine shop floor, measured and sliced the embodiment of work into individual pieces. He was hated for it by every factory and worker he visited (and automated) and would only become a hero to future CEOs after publishing his seminal work, The Principles of Scientific Management. Arkwright employed young children in his factories for their small hands and frames. They were disposable. These new strategies of technique, once rearranged to perfect efficiency, required complete and “total work,” a phrase coined by German philosopher Joseph Pieper. In this environment of total work, electricity, machining, and automation combined to unhinge man from his physical experience. He could work long, brutish hours, regardless of the time of day. He did not need to be strong or shrewd—just obedient and consistent. For every atrocity that occurred, both against life and dignity, he would need to look the other way to survive.

By the late nineteenth century, Mumford observes that the “eye, the ear, the touch, starved and battered by the external environment, took refuge in the filtered medium of print; and the sad constraint of the blind applied to all avenues of experience.” The irony of Mumford’s second thought would be echoed by McLuhan who understood that all technologies are “amputations and extensions” of our senses. The sensory onslaught and slavery of “total work” pushed man deep into the printed page. All other experiences dwindled. For all its graces, electricity prolonged the workday, “improved” working conditions, and made it possible for man to endure the worst humiliations imaginable. Henry Ford, for example, is thought by many Americans to be a scion of generosity for doubling his workers’ wages. However, he had no choice but to increase pay. For every thousand workers he hired on the assembly line, nine hundred quit. The dangerous, repetitive work, the fumes, the exploitation—all of the conditions engendered by the Industrial Revolution—disrupted the humanity of work and drove man further inwards in search of ever more technical solutions to his ailments.

Mordor in Our Midst

J.R.R. Tolkien, a veteran of the trenches, knew mechanized warfare well and absolutely hated machines. In a 1952 letter to his publisher, Raynor Unwin, Tolkien wrote about his need to move out of industrialized Britain: “This charming house has become uninhabitable–unsleepable-in, rocked, racked with noise, and drenched with fumes. Such is modern life. Mordor in our midst.”^[2] If you have read The Lord of the Rings, you know that this is an especially charming insult. You would also know that Tolkien spends most of his epic tale showcasing his special affinity for nature. From the gleaming ripples of the Anduin River to the pungent stagnation of Gogoroth, Tolkien uses both environments and their peoples to reveal the interplay between good and evil. Of all the peoples and cultures he created, the Elves, the firstborn of Arda, remained Tolkien’s particular love and the singular reason he wrote the book in the first place.

Tolkien was a philologist and created the Elves because he wanted to create a language. In building that language, he accidentally manifested an entire culture and, I would argue, a logos. This logos, or framework, gave birth to the purest fictional example we have of demigods besides Greek mythology. Elves are immortal and, because of this, Tolkien took great pains to show how respectfully their technology was woven into the physical world. Upon entering Cerin Amroth, the Elvish central core of Lothlórien, Frodo could see “a vanished world. A light was upon it for which his language had no name” and the inhabitants appeared “ancient as if they had endured for ever.”^[3] Tolkien continues: “In winter here no heart could mourn for summer or for spring. No blemish or sickness or deformity could be seen in anything that grew upon the earth. On the land of Lórien there was no stain.”

The Elves abuse no tree, manipulate no creature, and build technologies only to glorify the Valar (the gods of Tolkien’s universe). The Elves have no interest in “making the will more quickly effective,”^[4] says Tolkien in his letter to Milton Waldman. Their technologies are formed without “the corrupted motive of dominating: bulldozing the real world, or coercing other wills.” Whereas Mordor and Isengard fell trees and stoke flames to fuel the machine, Elves live in a state of constant joy, song, and humility. Despite their lack of domination, though, their weapons, armor, and agility are superior: “Only Legolas still stepped as lightly as ever, his feet hardly seeming to press the grass, leaving no footprints as he passed.”^[5] All their tools are of the highest quality, built in correspondence with the living world. Sam jokes while in the elvish paradise, “Whether they’ve made the land, or the land’s made them, it’s hard to say,”^[6] revealing that none can tell which came first. It is also worth noting that Elves, who have lived forever (as far as we understand “forever”), also have perfected their circadian rhythm and use of light and darkness: “With that he fell asleep. Legolas already lay motionless, his fair hands folded upon his breast, his eyes unclosed, blending living night and deep dream, as is the way with Elves.”

I use the Elves here to answer a question posed by Jacques Ellul in his essay on Technique and the Opening Chapters of Genesis: did technique exist in the Garden of Eden before the Fall? We mostly consider technology in the context of our current situation: pain, toil, and scarcity. But for Christians, the answer to Ellul’s question is critical because of the dictate in the Lord’s prayer, “on earth as it is in heaven.” Tolkien’s Elves paint the clearest picture of what the Garden of Eden may have looked like had we never been kicked out of it: cities of unending harvest, constant song and dance, resources mined and used perfectly, tools built for the purest appreciation of Ilúvatar. All of this while keeping in mind that Adam and Eve, unlike the Elves, were in direct communication with God and without error or sin. By comparison, the fictional narrative painted by Tolkien is a lower bar and likely more accessible for our minds that have been so deeply deluged by digital technologies.

Rebuilding Jerusalem

The actions that are necessary to recover culture and rebuild the world are probably too impossible for most to imagine or take seriously. Frankly, Pope Leo XIV’s view of our world as the burnt city of Jerusalem is jarring even to my sensibilities. So the challenge as I see it is not to propose practical solutions, but impractical—borderline absurd—solutions. If the Elves and Eden are who we ought to look to for answers, then even the most radical answers we can conjure will probably be mediocre by God’s standards.

Radically reducing our reliance on the screen is a good place to start. In 1977, our friend Marshall McLuhan met with the Governor of California Jerry Brown and insisted upon the “rationing of television for the population in general.” He was laughed out of the room and told how “unrealistic” that plan was. Fifty years later, the reduction of video time for children and babies receives the same chuckles by the grandchildren of Gov. Brown’s generation who are now serious doctors and academics. While granting that the culture has moved dramatically towards self-amusement, the first thing we might do to reorient society to our natural biology is to conscientiously reduce the adult intake of all flickering light and sound. For children, this would mean outright banning most electronic devices until the brain finishes cognitive development.

The electrical changes made inside the home, at work, and within general life would need to be dramatic—probably socially and economically catastrophic. A return to a sensible circadian rhythm would destroy the world. We would need a call for fewer work hours and more rest, simply because of the removal of artificial light from the home and office. A return to physicality and orality would demand in-person work: more conversations and fewer emails, more walking and fewer phone calls. In order to rebuild the strength and fortitude to stave off cancer, cardiovascular troubles, and obesity, we would need to reintroduce physical labor into all aspects of life. And not just the “insufficiently life-arousing” spectacles (as Mumford treated sports), of treadmills and weight-sets, but labor that derives meaning through creation. The tending of homes, gardens, and community areas that are no longer outsourced to landscaping companies, slave labor, and machines.

We would also need a return to the land. We would need to dissolve free trade agreements, boldly foster domestic agriculture and grow real food again. Supply-chain logistics and the illusion of scarcity have broken the tried-and-true safety-net that once was. Man no longer identifies with—in fact he repels from—the smells of his own food, the harvesting of his own grain, and the creation of his own things. Albert Borgmann summons a “deeper world” via the English historian Dorothy Hartley in his book Power Failure: “A modern woman sees a piece of linen, but the mediaeval woman saw through it to the flax fields, she smelt the reek of the retting ponds, she felt the hard rasp of the hackling, and she saw the soft sheen of the glossy flax. Man did not see ‘just leather,’ he saw the beast—perhaps one of his own—and knew the effort of slaughtering, liming and curing.” In order to achieve “Made in America” or “America First” policies, it would require a complete retraining (or reculturing) of man.

Reculturing or reconnection is typically perceived as a hobby or a bourgeois choice in a cosmopolitan society such as ours. However, I believe this question of light is a life or death decision for the social order of Western civilization. Wendell Berry famously declared in The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture:

The modern urban-industrial society is based on a series of radical disconnections between body and soul, husband and wife, marriage and community, community and the earth. At each of these points of disconnection the collaboration of corporation, government, and expert sets up a profit-making enterprise that results in the further dismemberment and impoverishment of the Creation. Together, these disconnections add up to a condition of critical ill health, which we suffer in common—not just with each other, but with all other creatures. Our economy is based upon this disease. Its aim is to separate us as far as possible from the sources of life (material, social, and spiritual), to put these sources under the control of corporations and specialized professionals, and to sell them to us at the highest profit.[7]

Whether we choose to tackle the challenge or not, we will be delivered to the same end in slightly different ways. The fall of literacy and the disappearance of culture foreshadows a coming dark age. These omens have historically preceded the fall of empires and we are no different. Our bodies and souls cannot handle this affliction. We require an awakening or we will collapse. But the question in front of us is whether the lights (the modern urban-industrial complex) will be extinguished by some grave calamity brought about by our folly or whether we will collectively and preemptively dim the lights that we possess to return to a semi-technological sanity of sobriety. To return to Tolkien: will we persist like Gondor, stripped of the honor of Númenor, making “tombs more splendid than houses of the living, and count[ing] old names in the rolls of their descent dearer than the names of sons;”^[8] all while waiting for Mordor to consume us. Or will we be more like Tolkien’s Elves, ready to live in communion with the earth and humbly “diminish”^[9] in our power to draw ourselves closer to the fullness of God’s everlasting love and order.