Precis of a talk given by Bryan Appleyard
June 21st 2010
Sense and Sensibility in Faith, Science and Media
Bryan Appleyard was our speaker on Wednesday 19 May.
He is the author of several books around this theme, and is a thoughtful contributor to The Sunday Times, with an unusual spiritual sensibility, lightly worn.
His father was a scientist – a physicist - (and an observant Anglican); his mother was Jewish. Bryan became a Catholic convert as a young man. He sketched in his background before he spoke.
He said that in meeting with groups of church people including the Bishops’ Conference, as opposed to many secular groups, he found Christians easy and tolerant. “The Church is the last repository of doubt,” he said, partly in jest – yet to highlight some of the almost fanatical certainties he observes in much of secularist culture.
He referred to the situation of the media today. Newspapers are in crisis – because of the electronic media – and there is thus a rush downmarket. The website version of any of our newspapers is noticeably more downmarket than its printed version. Some papers, such as those of the Murdoch press, are now trying to impose fees on internet access – because they are losing so much money through people reading the papers on the web - but they will face difficulties here: the “gatekeepers” of information, such as Google, may find ways of circumventing the charges.
The electronic media is now the dominant information forum, and it is destroying newspapers. The ideology of the electronic forum is also highly materialistic, technophile and aggressively secularist. Darwin is a huge figure in this ideology and anyone who says anything against Darwin is anathemised. Because of the anonymity of the web, there is a huge amount of free-flowing hatred: Bryan himself has received death threats for questioning some of the materialistic certainties of our time.
Here Bryan mentioned two significant books which illuminate this field: “I Am Not a Gadget” by Jaron Lanier and “What Darwin Got Wrong”, by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli Palmarini. (He also highly recommended Marilynne Robertson’s “Absence of Mind”, a powerful novel about “neuromarketing”.
Derision about religion and faith is the commonplace attitude of the internet communications forum. “Technological triumphalism” is also the order of our time. This is an attempt to change human nature through the relentless marketing culture of the electronic media. Bryan said he regards religion as the great buffer – maybe the only buffer – against these forces. Secularisation is trying to take away all that religion represents.
This secularisation is the “nothing-buttist” cast of mind: we are “nothing but” the biological/material essence of ourselves.
He also spoke of the intrusiveness and surveillance of contemporary technology. Every time we Google a subject, Google is tracking us and our patterns of information-seeking. Google has also picked up millions of private e-mail data through its Wi-Fi roaming technology. We are, said Bryan, all “dripping algorhythms all the time” (that is, data that can be read by computers). Even as things are, if they have your date of birth, your sex, and your postcode, the world of technology knows everything about you.
But he said, “I have faith in faith”.
There was some very interesting discussion afterwards and David Twiston-Davies gave an engaging vote of thanks, joking that he just about knew what a “gatekeeper” was, but “algorhythms” bewildered him. Altogether, though, we felt very informed by the evening. ENDS RESUMEE.