One of the most delightful things about John Keats’s early sonnet, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” is that Keats uses images from the age of global exploration and modern science to describe the feeling of first experiencing what the Homeric poems really are. The classics of the deep past become a vast, unexplored expanse, a richly promising future, like the heavens where a new planet has just been discovered or the Pacific Ocean when the Spanish explorers first crossed the Isthmus of Panama. Why do we not feel the same thing about the digital future?
Last month, an article in a British online journal addressed a problem increasingly felt as an urgent need: “Breaking the smart phone spell.” The author pointed out that 79% of parents felt their children spent too much time on their smart phones and 60% thought that the usage was “sometimes or always detrimental.” On average, they gave their children smart phones at age 10, and one of the reasons was that the children’s schools required them—a complaint I have heard from our students at Wyoming Catholic College about the high schools they attended. One British parent wrote about her son, “He is now totally addicted to his phone and can’t concentrate enough to read a book or even a page. He is told by his school that it’s okay as that is what the future will be like. I am gutted as he used to be an avid reader.” (That’s a distinctly British use of the word “gutted,” by the way, but it makes the point feel even stronger.)
The distress of British parents could lead to bans on mobile phones for children in schools in the U.K. similar to the ones that that took effect in France four years ago and in China (which is a little startling) in February of 2021. The lords of Big Tech acknowledge the danger of social media and excessive screen time (at least for their own kids). What the same things might do to young adults is the heart of our concern at Wyoming Catholic College, where our famous ban on cell phones began in 2007. Our founders saw that the trend was going nowhere fruitful, but it took some serious backbone to ban the devices altogether. We have been debating the question of whether to go even further without becoming mere Luddites.
One of the benefits of our policy is that students in class are actually present to the discussion, give or take the usual human frailties. It’s not hard to see how mobile phones affect us. If I have my cell phone at hand in a meeting, for example, messages and emails pop up and divert my attention. Not only is this susceptibility to interruption rude in the most basic human ways, but it exposes the prejudice encouraged by the culture of connectivity—the sense that these communications in their space-neutral and time-sensitive buzz are the real “present” that encompasses you, the reality more important than the people around you.
Not so in the class I’m now teaching the freshman. Thinking into Homer’s extraordinary similes in the Iliad brings them into a conversation they would never have on their devices and even into a kind of wonder at the continuity of their experience with the everyday life of the deep past 3000 years ago. For example, in Book XV Apollo is helping Hector attack the wall that the Achaians have built around their ships. He wrecks the bastions “easily, as when a little boy piles sand by the seashore/when in his innocent play, he makes sand towers to amuse him/and then, still playing, with hands and feet ruins them and wrecks them.” The little boy startles us, somehow, as though we thought building sandcastles had started with us or our parents. In Book XVII, the hero Menelaus—never one of the strongest warriors—keeps charging into the ranks of the Trojans. We are told that Athena “puts strength into the man’s shoulders and knees, inspiring/in his breast. The persistent daring of that mosquito/who, though it is driven hard away from a man’s skin, even/so, for the taste of human blood, persists in biting him.” I almost laugh aloud when I read it, not only because I slapped a few mosquitoes on my skin this summer, but also because the simile carries such a snapshot of this husband of Helen, the man whose dishonor is the pretext for the Trojan War. I hesitate to ask: are there people in your experience who remind you of mosquitoes?
These ancient images establish a deeply pleasant bond of recognition. We share with the ancient poet an experience that makes them vividly real, though the culture that gave rise to the epic itself has changed almost entirely. Such experiences of the deep sources of wisdom and faith make possible the kinds of renewal that Dr. James Tonkowich will be exploring in this semester’s series, Points of Light, which shows how such figures as St. John Vianney, St. John Henry Newman, Archbishop “Dagger” John Hughes, Pope Leo XIII, and St. Therese Lisieux arise so splendidly despite the darkness of the times. In fact, his title reminds me of still another simile from the Iliad:
As when in the sky the stars about the moon’s shining
are seen in all their glory, when the air has fallen to stillness,
and all the high places of the hills are clear, and the shoulders out-jutting,
and the deep ravines, as endless bright air spills from the heavens
and all the stars are seen, to make glad the heart of the shepherd;
such in their numbers blazed the watchfires the Trojans were burning…
We might substitute the saints of the 19th century for the watchfires of the Trojans. Remarkably, at least in this virtual age, our students experience the same vision of the heavens when they spend their nights outdoors on their trips in the Mountain West.
Contrasted with this communion with the deep past is what we might call the “hive mind” of the culture that the British parents lament, one in which an illusory self is addictively fed an illusion of endlessly critical but unreflective presence. What this culture bodes, we all fear, but here at Wyoming Catholic College we are doing our best to think out the nature of the threat. The response needs to be as fresh as Keats’s discovery of “deep-browed Homer”—a matter not of restrictions simply but of new possibilities for continuity and community.
Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College’s weekly newsletter.
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