Published March 26, 2025
Here’s a fun fact: In December 1990, the planet had exactly one website, created by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. A year later, total global websites numbered 50. By December 1993, there were 623; by January 1996, 100,000; by April 2008 (around the time The Catholic Thing started), 162 million. Today the number is north of 1.1 billion. About 4 percent of those websites are pornography-related. Predictably, given the potholes in human nature, porn-related web searches are sharply higher. But overall, for better or worse, it’s now almost impossible to imagine (or remember) a world without Google search, Amazon shopping, and unhinged YouTube videos like The Sound of Music: Action Recut.
I mention this because we humans have a genius for wandering into problems we should have seen coming. Here’s an example.
One of the men who helped shape my adult thinking was the media scholar Neil Postman. In 1996, as the Internet exploded, we had the first of several conversations. A neophyte tech addict – I’d taught myself Linux and the joys of the command line interface (CLI) – I bubbled on about the web’s democratizing impact; how it would horizontalize power structures; how everyone could now have a voice in world affairs, national governance, etc.
Postman, the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly, listened patiently. Then he suggested that too much information, too raw, too loose, too loud, from too many sources, might not have happy results. The greater and faster the flow of information, the more opportunities for confusion and conflict. The more confusion and conflict, the more the need for curators.
And curators – elected or expert or not, he said – come in all flavors, including unpleasantly controlling, deceitful ones, as the COVID experience later proved. Postman was far from authoritarian in politics. He was classically secular and liberal. He simply foresaw the potential for anarchy in a culture overwhelmed by new tools and unable to digest the tsunami of new ideas, ambiguities, and appetites they create. He understood that fragmentation inevitably breeds anxiety and the need for centralized power to offset a culture’s turmoil.
Postman died in 2003, before the birth of Facebook (2004), Twitter now X (2006), Substack (2017), and Bluesky (2019). The information torrent that triggered his concern has only increased – exponentially. To be fair, much of it is good. Facebook connects families and friends. Thousands of excellent religious resources are available online (including publications like this one). Substack hosts the work of terrific new and established voices like Matthew Crawford, Iain McGilchrist, N.S. Lyons, Paul Kingsnorth, Nathan Pinkoski, Mary Harrington, and many others; writers who can say what they want, whenever and however they want.
The trouble is that all these information formats also host a generous share of nutcases, liars, and haters. . .who also say and argue whatever they want in the same space. Tracking real reality – the news and views that comprise a truthful understanding of the world – becomes a challenge of catching facts in a hurricane-strength wind tunnel. The result is fatigue, tribalism, and (too often) grievance.
Grievance culture is venomous. It’s also self-sustaining, like a colony of ticks in the secret places of the heart, because there’s always another oppressor to expose and indict. It’s true that anger is not always a bad thing. It’s a natural response to wickedness and corruption. In Luke 19:45, Jesus himself shows a righteous anger toward the Temple’s moneychangers.
But anger is, by nature, corrosive. It feels good in an ugly sort of way because it so often involves a moralizing exercise that subtly reinforces the self: I was mistreated, or I see others mistreated. So I want justice. I demand justice, now. I don’t care about the cost. And I want the transgressors punished. So let me tell you all about it – online.
Resentment is addictive. It presumes the wickedness or ignorance of those who disagree. It precludes reasoned discourse because it’s a waste of precious time listening to others if, by definition, they’re stupid or evil since their views conflict with our own. And that explains why so much of our nation’s current public life is toxic. It’s senseless to blather on about the “common good” when, by our own words and actions, we make a genuine common good impossible.
The more resentment we bring to our public discourse, the more poisonous our shared culture becomes. If so many of us feel that we’re now the targets rather than the active agents of our social and political environment, it’s because that’s what we are. That’s what we’ve become, the world we ourselves have helped create. And it will get worse until we as a people – assuming we can still call ourselves “one people” – remember that even our perceived enemies bear the image of God and thus deserve some compassion and respect.
Yes, I know: None of what I say here is new. In fact, it’s tediously familiar, even to me. So why bother putting it into words? There’s no way to turn back the clock and un-invent the tools that now rewire the world. And yet I can’t get two vivid images out of my head, both from C.S. Lewis.
There’s a moment in The Screwtape Letters when the devil Screwtape speaks rapturously of the sound of Hell: an endless cacophony of noise and disorder. And in The Great Divorce, damned souls, given a bus ride to Heaven and the chance to repent, can barely suffer the pain of treading on Heaven’s grass. Hell is self-absorption, nursed resentments, and the refusal of reality. The blades of Heaven’s grass are too intensely real.
Once upon a time, I was a news junkie. But so often these days I find myself locked in my head, in the Land of the Unreal, battling enemies and ideas that blind me to the beauty of the world and the people I love. Others might know what I’m talking about. It’s why Adoration matters. It’s silence before the Real.
Francis X. Maier is a Senior Fellow in the Catholic Studies Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Mr. Maier’s work focuses on the intersection of Christian faith, culture, and public life, with special attention to lay formation and action.
