I have no control over the degree to which digital technology rules the world outside my home, but inside my home, all the questions that society has answered, or allowed technology to answer on its behalf, remain open. Digital technology has remade the broader human world according to its powers, but its power to remake your family remains largely within your powers. You still have the power, once an iPad has found its way inside the home you share with your young children, to get rid of it, get the cursed thing out of the house, pass it along to your mother-in-law. It remains within your power to look at the total dominion of digital technology outside your home and determine what its influence will be on the inside. Who else has this power? Who else can create a world in which the extent of technology’s rule has been consciously decided by people with powerful reason to treat it with suspicion? Even for parents it’s difficult, of course. Even parents feel potent incentives to answer the question of technology in technology’s terms, rather than their own.
Also from the Tomb of Nebamun
From the Tomb of Nebamun
While affirming the essential historical veracity of the Gospel accounts and the importance of real history to which they testify, we must not in theory or in practice supplant the text with our reconstruction of the events behind it, nor should we make this reconstruction the end goal of our reading. We have no access to the events behind the text other than the testimony of the Gospels themselves, and to avidly seek such data would be to deny what we do have in the canonical, inspired Gospels: testimony to those events. To seek the behind-the-text realities is to fall back into the errors of modern historicism, which eschews testimony, distrusts witnesses, and desires to reach the supposed, original, objective truth of the matter. But this…is epistemologically and historically naive and impossible! One must finally trust testimony, or not; we can evaluate the trustworthiness of a witness, but we can never objectively get beyond the irreducibility of testimony.
Parents gain early knowledge of what gatekeeping institutions want and then refashion their family’s inner workings to present a convincing semblance of this thing. With time, through successive stages of their children’s lives, parents come to think of their family as a machine for producing this institutionally desirable thing over and over again.
Cityscape #1 (1963) by Richard Diebenkorn:
From Petworth Park (1932) by Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson:
Hampstead Heath (1921) by John Lavery:
