In “Among the Disrupted,” the cover essay for the New York Times Book Review (January 18, 2015) Leon Wieseltier laments how devices are often valued over books, technology seems ascendant over the humanities, hunger for instant information has replaced the long search for wisdom, and the meaning of humanity has been reduced to the mechanistic. All worthy concerns, I would say, even if you or I would parse things differently in places from Mr. Wieseltier.

You can read his essay here.

And to get you started pondering the ideas Wieseltier raises, here are few quotes from “Among the Disrupted”:

            “Journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability. As the frequency of expression grows, the force of expression diminishes: Digital expectations of alacrity and terseness confer the highest prestige upon the twittering cacophony of one-liners and promotional announcements. It was always the case that all thing must pass, but this is ridiculous.”

            “The distinction between knowledge and information is a thing of the past, and there is no greater disgrace than to be a thing of the past.”

            “Aside from issues of life and death, there is no more urgent task for American intellectuals and writers than to think critically about the salience, even the tyranny, of technology in individual and collective life.”

            “The processing of information is not the highest aim to which the human spirit can aspire, and neither is competitiveness in a global economy. The character of our society cannot be determined by engineers.”

            “Every technology is used before it is completely understood. There is always a lag between an innovation and the apprehension of its consequences. We are living in that lag, and it is a right time to keep our heads and reflect. We have much to gain and much to lose. In the media, for example, the general inebriation about the multiplicity of platforms has distracted many people from the scruple that questions of quality on the new platforms should be no different from questions of quality on the old platforms. Otherwise a quantitative expansion will result in a qualitative contraction. The new devices do not in themselves authorize a revision of the standards of evidence and argument and style that we championed in the old devices.”

I received an email from Marsh Moyle, a friend who has long been carried by a vision to bring a vision of culture and life shaped by the gospel (www.citygate.org) to the nations that formerly languished under the yoke of Soviet communist rule. “This came today from friends in Ukraine who are quite reliable,” he wrote. “The news is very disturbing. They would appreciate your prayers.” What follows is the content of the email:

---------- Forwarded message ----------

Dear friends,

            Many of you have asked us, what is going in Ukraine and how it affects our ministry. On the second issue I can say that it doesn’t really affects for now and there are no real fights in Kryvyi Rih. But many of our volunteers were in Kiev and many of our friends—both believers and unbelievers participate actively, so we worry about them and try to support as much as possible. Also we try to show our position—based on Gospel, filled with love, justice and hope when the situation looks like hopeless. Many people are absolutely zombified by Russian propaganda and they are really blind and aggressive. Another try «to bury their heads in the sand» and they hope that it never touches them. And the biggest group of people is absolutely lost and disappointed. For us it’s a great chance to show them that “cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the LORD.”

            Concerning the whole situation, I’ve found a letter from famous Ukrainian writer Yuri Andrukhovych. This is probably the best short description in English. I can subscribe to his appeals in the last paragraph, but for sure the main request is to pray—because only God can provide the way out from this extremely difficult situation.

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Dear friends,

            These days I receive from you lots of inquiries requesting to describe the current situation in Kyiv and overall in Ukraine, express my opinion on what is happening, and formulate my vision of at least the nearest future. Since I am simply physically unable to respond separately to each of your publications with an extended analytical essay, I have decided to prepare this brief statement which each of you can use in accordance with your needs. The most important things I must tell you are as follows.

           During the less than four years of its rule, Mr. Yanukovych’s regime has brought the country and the society to the utter limit of tensions. Even worse, it has boxed itself into a no-exit situation where it must hold on to power forever—by any means necessary. Otherwise it would have to face criminal justice in its full severity. The scale of what has been stolen and usurped exceeds all imagination of what human avarice is capable.

            The only answer this regime has been proposing in the face of peaceful protests, now in their third month, is violence, violence that escalates and is “hybrid” in its nature: special forces’ attacks at the Maidan are combined with individual harassment and persecution of opposition activists and ordinary participants in protest actions (surveillance, beatings, torching of cars and houses, storming of residences, searches, arrests, rubber-stamp court proceedings). The keyword here is intimidation. And since it is ineffective, and people are protesting on an increasingly massive scale, the powers-that-be make these repressive actions even harsher.

            The “legal base” for them was created on January 16, when the Members of Parliament fully dependent on the President, in a crude violation of all rules of procedure and voting, indeed of the Constitution itself, in the course of just a couple of minutes (!) with a simple show of hands (!) voted in a whole series of legal changes which effectively introduce dictatorial rule and a state of emergency in the country without formally declaring them. For instance, by writing and disseminating this, I am subject to several new criminal code articles for “defamation,” “inflaming tensions,” etc.

            Briefly put, if these “laws” are recognized, one should conclude: in Ukraine, everything that is not expressly permitted by the powers-that-be is forbidden. And the only thing permitted by those in power is to yield to them.

            Not agreeing to these “laws,” on January 19 the Ukrainian society rose up, yet again, to defend its future.

            Today in television newsreels coming from Kyiv you can see protesters in various kinds of helmets and masks on their faces, sometimes with wooden sticks in their hands. Do not believe that these are “extremists,” “provocateurs,” or “right-wing radicals.” My friends and I also now go out protesting dressed this way. In this sense my wife, my daughter, our friends, and I are also “extremists.” We have no other option: we have to protect our life and health, as well as the life and health of those near and dear to us. Special forces units shoot at us, their snipers kill our friends. The number of protesters killed just on one block in the city’s government quarter is, according to different reports, either 5 or 7. Additionally, dozens of people in Kyiv are missing.

            We cannot halt the protests, for this would mean that we agree to live in a country that has been turned into a lifelong prison. The younger generation of Ukrainians, which grew up and matured in the post-Soviet years, organically rejects all forms of dictatorship. If dictatorship wins, Europe must take into account the prospect of a North Korea at its eastern border and, according to various estimates, between 5 and 10 million refugees. I do not want to frighten you.

            We now have a revolution of the young. Those in power wage their war first and foremost against them. When darkness falls on Kyiv, unidentified groups of “people in civilian clothes” roam the city, hunting for the young people, especially those who wear the symbols of the Maidan or the European Union. They kidnap them, take them out into forests, where they are stripped and tortured in fiercely cold weather. For some strange reason the victims of such actions are overwhelmingly young artists—actors, painters, poets. One feels that some strange “death squadrons” have been released in the country with an assignment to wipe out all that is best in it.

            One more characteristic detail: in Kyiv hospitals the police force entraps the wounded protesters; they are kidnapped and (I repeat, we are talking about wounded persons) taken out for interrogation at undisclosed locations. It has become dangerous to turn to a hospital even for random passersby who were grazed by a shard of a police plastic grenade. The medics only gesture helplessly and release the patients to the so-called “law enforcement.”

            To conclude: in Ukraine full-scale crimes against humanity are now being committed, and it is the present government that is responsible for them. If there are any extremists present in this situation, it is the country’s highest leadership that deserves to be labeled as such.

            And now turning to your two questions which are traditionally the most difficult for me to answer: I don’t know what will happen next, just as I don’t know what you could now do for us. However, you can disseminate, to the extent your contacts and possibilities allow, this appeal. Also, empathize with us. Think about us. We shall overcome all the same, no matter how hard they rage. The Ukrainian people, without exaggeration, now defend the European values of a free and just society with their own blood. I very much hope that you will appreciate this.

Image 1: Map.

Image 2: Yuri Andrukhovych.

Image 3: Protest in Maidan Nezalezhnosti or Independence Square (http://rt.com/news/ukraine-protests-court-ban-538/).

In the April 2011 issue of The Atlantic, James Fallows wrote a fascinating piece, “Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media” exploring the digital media revolution that is occurring in the world of news. It’s worth reading and discussing, because the changing media landscape is a reality that helps shape our thinking, beliefs, and lives.

One paragraph gives both the flavor of the essay and raises a question that is worth careful reflection:

“If we accept that the media will probably become more and more market-minded, and that an imposed conscience in the form of legal requirements or traditional publishing norms will probably have less and less effect, what are the results we most fear? I think there are four:

            • that this will become an age of lies, idiocy, and a complete Babel of ‘truthiness,’ in which no trusted arbiter can establish reality or facts;

            • that the media will fail to cover too much of what really matters, as they are drawn toward the sparkle of entertainment and away from the depressing realities of the statehouse, the African capital, the urban school system, the corporate office when corners are being cut;

            • that the forces already pulverizing American society into component granules will grow all the stronger, as people withdraw into their own separate information spheres;

            • and that our very ability to think, concentrate, and decide will deteriorate, as a media system optimized for attracting quick hits turns into a continual-distraction machine for society as a whole, making every individual and collective problem harder to assess and respond to.”

It seems to me that there are several reasons why Christians should have an advantage in this area, so that as the digital revolution unfolds, the church can increasingly become a bulwark of careful thinking and disciplined reading. We are people of the Word and so have all the more reason to take words—and truth—with utmost seriousness. We are already organized and used to discussion so that learning from one another to choose and read media sources with discernment should be possible. And we have a final authority in the Scriptures so that we are not dependent on media pundits to spell out the opinions we should hold.

The question, of course, at this point is simple. Will Christians take advantage of these things or will we merely flow along with the rest of our world, seduced by the most clever rhetoric, drawn into the ideologies of the Left and the Right, open to adopting whatever myths are spawned in a cynical world, and overwhelmed by the profusion of media options?