The Prayer When You're About to Log On

Overcoming the use case that hates us.

St. Ephraim. He has a signature prayer, pictured in the icon above. A prayer used especially at Lent — and, as far as I know, one never singled out as especially well suited for those of us about to log on each day. But consider:

O Lord and Master of my life

Take from me the spirit of laziness,

Despondency, lust of power and idle talk.

But give rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience,

And love to thy servant…

These words apply still more than they appear to on the page. A translation that’s even more on point would have Take from me the spirit of sloth, meddling, vain curiosity, lust of power, and idle talk, as Father Josiah Trenham observed in his Forgiveness Sunday homily last month (starting at 13:28). We don’t often associate despondency with the meddlesome curiosity of vanity. Why not?

FAKE SELVES, FAKE WORLDS

Because we think of despondency as exhaustion, as listlessness, as inertia. Of course, there’s something to that. But it’s hardly the whole story. Fr. Trenham quotes St. Sophrony’s definition:

Despondency is the lack of care for our salvation, which comes when we allow our life to be entirely absorbed by daily cares and routine chores.

What we are confronting is not just the routinization of vanity but the meddlesome curiosity it fosters.

Again — we typically think of vanity as self-enclosure, an excessive inwardness of self-regard, self obsession, selfishness in all its forms. But it is more. Vanity points us outward, too, thrusting us into “the world” as we encounter it in all our partiality but also as we imagine it, predict it, desire it, fantasize about it. Vanity takes the self-image we self-obsessively summon up and hurls it into battle with our image of the world.

And the way we attack that image, trying to pillage what we desire and wield what we will, is meddlesome curiosity, powered by our relentlessly calculating and imagining mind. This drama — sometimes brooding in isolation, sometimes rampantly social — plays out beneath the banal veneer of our going through the motions of life and its tasks. The one reinforces the other. The disenchantments of bare quotidian life tempt us to fill our impoverished selves and world with a pandemonium of petty plots and grand schemes. And that bizarro world, in its inward and outward expression, drains us and alienates us from our real lives, leaving behind an empty shell of rote operations. Inside the fabricated labyrinthine realm we confuse with reality, we become so lost we forget the very possibility of our salvation.

In short, what immiserates us in the maze of our own senses, desires, and feelings is our temptation toward, and ingenuity at, automated simulation.

That’s right — no technology needed. Our given selves in the given world have all the equipment we need to automate the production and operation of simulated selves in simulated worlds. The roteness, the addiction, that drives these fake, fragmented selves and worlds manufactured by our calculating, imagining minds — it happens without mechanical aid, without tools crafted by the latest techniques. Even without technology that can accelerate and scale our mass production of fake selves and worlds, our own human equipment easily churns out automated simulations that are as physically and spiritually destructive as they are all-consuming.

So you can see now how the internet has become so optimized for doing just that — achieving a veritable singularity of automated simulations, each and all consuming and producing the spirit of sloth, meddling, vain curiosity, lust of power, and idle talk. This is the lifeblood of the “collective consciousness” or cyborg “superorganism” we sometimes hear people talking about. Only, instead of bringing life, it steals life, bringing us a spiritual and physical sickness unto death.

If, of course, we use it that way. And considering that so-called “artificial intelligence” is really just automated simulation…