The End of Vice

sex dragons and the trouble we're in

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed but women my age are reading romance novels. A lot of them, in fact. These are not your mother’s “closed door” romances with Clark Gable sweeping a virginal woman off her feet. No, in these books the doors are wide open. I’d ignore this fact- good for you but not for me- except a lot of these books are “fantasy romances”. As far as I can tell, this means that they are about sex with fairies (faires?), with dragons around. I could ignore this, too, except that I am wondering what it means that women are fantasizing not about men but about mythical creatures. What does it mean when sex here is not a dangerous/ unexpected/ unpredictable occasion of desire and instead an impossible meeting between a desperate woman and a creature who does not exist?

Even our fantasies bely the fact that the world we live in holds the wrong kind of openness. It’s permeable not to angels and demons, gods and devils, but to forms of life and systems of governance that are drawn from fantasies. Whatever else the Christian faith promises, it should ground its practitioners in what is real- right there, in front of our finger tips. It should never promise something it cannot ground in matter. For the Spirit always alights on matter, not apart from it. She comes as a dove or a wind or as tongues of fire because it is matter that delivers the Spirit to the people of God. She does not come separately from the stuff of the world.

So as our imaginations and our desire for deep Christian goods becomes more and more unmoored from actual bodies and things- like men or women or concrete neighbors and communities- yeah, I’m a little worried about the sex dragons.

The problem with “the technological imaginary”, as I have called it, is that it is total. When one imagines themselves to be a certain kind of creature, the imagination dictates what that creature is, what it can do, and what can be expected of it. You are amphibious or you are not, or you are a mystical dragon, or you aren’t. The world where we transcend the boundaries of our reality is called “fantasy”; whatever else we want to say about it, this means that it is not identical with the world we inhabit. It is helpful to generate stories and realities and ideas that can be mapped on to the world we have, but it is not the same.

The problem of Mary as I’ve named it is that her most miraculous mark- the virgin birth- in our experience is no longer miraculous or impossible. Virginal conceptions are now conceivable- they exist within our thought world. They are like the world that we live in, not fundamentally unlike it. Technology in this case has taken a miracle and made it a procedure. Anyone can have a virgin birth if they can afford it.

This same kind of slippage occurs with our religious imaginaries. Because we are constantly interfacing with forms of reality that are technologically mediated, we imagine that these realities are real. We therefore expect that all realities- human and machine- possess the same capabilities. We think people can be programmed. We think viruses can be patched. We think errors are bugs that can be removed from the operating system. We think knowledge is simply a matter of acquisition, of training yourself on the vast swaths of material that are available “out there”, somewhere. Our sense of place is opaque- our data is “in the cloud”, which means it is nowhere (or in an office park in middle America somewhere). Our physical apparatuses can be “upgraded” by simply purchasing better hardware- a new iphone or a facelift can all be purchased and yield a “newer model” with “better features”.  

The things that are evacuated in this process are the things that make us most human. Time becomes a liar. Sin becomes an option. Justice becomes a program. Wisdom becomes an input. It is not simply the miraculous that is excluded from this version of events, but the ordinary. When aging becomes optional finitude does, too. When sin is thought of as a “bug”, an improper entrant into an otherwise perfect system, we imagine that with the right programs we could exclude it. There is no space for wisdom, for error, or for repentance.

I was made aware of some of these trends about a decade ago when I was teaching college and seminary age students. After a lecture that included reflections on forgiveness, some impassioned students argued that we needed to “shut down” forgiveness, as it had so often been weaponized. They felt that until we could get a better hold on the matter- perhaps more consistent treatments of it theologically or better restrictions on offenders- we should just stop calling for it as a Christian practice. No more forgiveness, until the proper systems are in place.

It happened again, when my students responded to some heartbreaking violence over the last few years. Their instincts were always that we might program something- called social justice- that could inevitably prevent such injustices. First we would develop a bibliography, than we might have a course or training, and then individuals would no longer make these mistakes. In the Christian parlance, with the right training, people would no longer sin.

I’ve seen many such attempts be made. Organizations are now involved in numerous trainings and initiatives, and are expected to make public statements on nearly anything that is considered a social ill. The idea, I think, is that with more information and more knowledge, people will be better. But do you see how this is treating people like machines, and information as the answer to sin? For social ills both public and private can be named as sin, and so when we talk about them we should remember this. When we attempt to resolve them, we should ask what kind of human person we have in view. Is the offender a man or a machine? Can he be forgiven, or is he too broken and must be discarded? Can he be rehabilitated or must he be destroyed? The questions are indeed this stark.

When we imagine men to be machines, we not only saddle them with impossible expectations regarding their productivity and power. We also saddle them with the devastating responsibility of deciding which among us can be used, and which must be destroyed. For in the technological mind there are only these two options. There are none who can be tolerated, restored, humored, pandered to, endured. They are useful or they are not, fixable or not.

It is the human element of the Christian faith that is becoming the most difficult to explain. And this means, too, that the deep symbols of the faith themselves are becoming incoherent. Have you noticed how prevalent autocorrect is in the machines that we are accustomed to? As if the thoughts we are formulating have already been completed and exist somewhere else? Have you seen the way that “social justice” is treated as if it were a universal program, part of some cosmic bureaucracy can be put in place by those in power to predict the behavior of those beneath? Have you noticed the way that bureaucracies demand obedience- submit or be destroyed? Have you noticed that the medical world treats illness as something that can be fixed or corrected, with prevention given nary a mention?

In my time teaching young adults, I’ve noticed another thing. Of the old-fashioned concerns of religious adults- that young people smoke too much and drink and behave like horny animals- I share none. The concerns I have are of another kind entirely. For me, it is not that the young have no virtue. It’s that they have no vices. This is what keeps me up at night.

This is not to say that young people aren’t doing bad things. If they are, they are mostly doing them alone, behind closed doors, in front of a screen or behind one. They are spending less time together in person doing the dumb and foolish and natural things that young adults have always done. They are having less sex. They are not learning to drive. They are getting their hearts broken not by each other but by the crushing machine that generates the Algorithm that tells them their lives hold no meaning. How much more tender to receive rejection from a girl, than from an algorithm. Its brutal finality certainly contributes the rates of mental health distress we are seeing.

The thing about vice is that it is what renders God coherent. When you have tased forbidden things and thrown yourself on the hard rocks of this world’s pleasures, you get a sense of what is possible and what’s not. When you wake up hungover, you’re still you. When you break a woman’s heart, it’s you that delivers the wound. Without such vices, you might imagine that it was possible to live without reaching the end of yourself. Vice approximates for us a story of what it means to be human that is inclusive of finitude. It delivers up sorrow and temporary joy- but mostly sorrow, eventually. It delivers, too, a bit of grace. To faith, it opens the door. The broken woman, the scarred man must simply crack it open.

When we know vice, we know what grace portends. We understand that grace is concrete, that it delivers something real. When we’ve wounded someone, it offers repair. When we have been harmed, it can cauterize the wound. When trust has been broken, grace can start to rebuild. It speaks another word from another world- a word that grants a bit extra, enough for today, a silencing that says “enough” or a roar that says “you too” or a relief from the sorrow that another day may hold. Grace is as concrete as joy, as robust as laughter. It is real, in the world, alighting with the Spirit on matter.

Without vice, I’m seeing hollow eyed people who have no idea about the limits of a man. They think themselves endless and grieve only their lack of self-actualization. They can’t hack with the latest update, they have failed even though the program was installed. It’s a hollow wound but a gutting one.

The Christian imaginary is constituted by many things. Core for me are sin and finitude, and wonder and delight. Without these Christianity cannot be Christian. It will fail. It is failing- by “failing” I mean it is struggling to take root in the hearts of men. This is because we are catechizing people as if they are machines, giving them a gospel based on false assumptions about human outcomes, capacities, and limitations.

But it could be otherwise. The Christian imagination holds everything that is needed to push back against the machine of unnatural man. But it’s going to have to push hard.