Today we are living with instant messaging in which many people document their every thought – almost in real time – on various social media platforms. There is no time to reflect on the impact of their words on the unsuspecting world. When they are feeling angry or hurt, social media is ready 24 hours a day to pass along the pain-filled sentiments to everyone. This is already generating unprecedented levels of depression and self-harming behavior among teenagers – both boys and girls. I have witnessed the potential for serious damage with our own grandchildren.

When I was a child – light years ago – we had a childhood chant: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words shall never hurt me!” It was intended to increase resiliency and avoid physical retaliation, but, sadly, it is simply not true. Hurtful words – uttered in person or via social media – can leave deep wounds long after physical scars might have healed. By way of response to this reality, our son and his wife have not only restricted the hours that social media is available in their home but also denied their 15-year-old son his own mobile phone – over considerable protestations!

I readily admit that the social media explosion has produced remarkable benefits. We are able to communicate with friends and family in ways that we never imagined. Angela serves as our family social media queen and stays in regular contact with our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and our rapidly growing global extended family. She passes along photographs, family news, and prayer needs, and because of her good efforts, we have stayed well connected throughout the pandemic lock down. We have even located high school friends with whom we had lost contact. I am also able to learn a great deal about the various clergy and churches that I now serve as interim bishop, because I can read through their websites and social media posts. But there is a dark side to all of this.

Read it all.

Pittsburgh ad clerum on anti-social mediahttps://t.co/E4i5UnVUZ5 pic.twitter.com/0pHfFOTPF5

— Anglican Ink (@anglicanink) July 21, 2021

“If only you would listen to these laws…” (Deut. 7:12). These words with which our parsha begins contain a verb that is a fundamental motif of the book of Devarim. The verb is sh-m-a. It occurred in last week’s parsha in the most famous line of the whole of Judaism, Shema Yisrael. It occurs later in this week’s parsha in the second paragraph of the Shema, “It shall be if you surely listen [shamoa tishme’u]” (Deut. 11:13). In fact, this verb appears no less than 92 times in Devarim as a whole.

We often miss the significance of this word because of what I call the fallacy of translatability: the assumption that one language is fully translatable into another. We hear a word translated from one language to another and assume that it means the same in both. But often it doesn’t. Languages are only partially translatable into one another.[1] The key terms of one civilisation are often not fully reproducible in another. The Greek word megalopsychos, for example, Aristotle’s “great-souled man” who is great and knows he is, and carries himself with aristocratic pride, is untranslatable into a moral system like Judaism in which humility is a virtue. The English word “tact” has no precise equivalent in Hebrew. And so on.

This is particularly so in the case of the Hebrew verb sh-m-a. Listen, for example, to the various ways the opening words of this week’s parsha have been translated into English:

If you hearken to these precepts…

If you completely obey these laws…

If you pay attention to these laws…

If you heed these ordinances…

Because ye hear these judgments…

There is no single English word that means to hear, to listen, to heed, to pay attention to, and to obey….

Read it all.

Rabbi Sacks transformed the notion of covenant for us. https://t.co/JxUZNWFUzi

— First Things (@firstthingsmag) December 1, 2020

How many people in our country go about their lives burdened with the well-founded suspicion that their human-looking fellow citizens are not true humans at all, but partisan automata? We are a nation of human beings who constantly, conspicuously fail the Turing Test. The possibility conceived in that test — of a world in which human and machine behaviors are effectively indistinguishable — was inherent in the project of creating lifelike machines from the outset. But it goes back further. Thomas Hobbes, who proposed that mechanical automata “have an artificial life,” also treated them as the paradigm for human life. And we’re familiar with the descendants of this anxiety in the work of Philip K. Dick. For the most part, we have imagined that it would be machines whose behavior would become indistinguishable from humans, not the other way around.

Perhaps the first work of art to take the latter tack — unsurprisingly, a product of the MySpace era — was Basshunter’s 2006 Eurodance hit “Boten Anna,” which tells the story of a young woman mistaken for a chatroom bot. Something similar is at work in the popular “pitchbot” Twitter accounts — New York Times Pitchbot, Federalist PitchBot, and so on — which mock those publications for their rote predictability. These are instances of art-imitating-life-imitating-art: people pretending to be bots imitating human writers who write like bots.

More seriously, Will Arbery’s play Heroes of the Fourth Turning, the finest work of art to come out of 2019, offers an explicitly demonological presentation of media-saturation. Each of the play’s young conservatives is possessed: veteran and Catholic convert Justin is possessed by his complicity in violence, Simone Weil–like Emily by the world-embracing sympathy engendered by her own chronic illness, developmentally-arrested Kevin by something like sexual pathology, and far-right media influencer Teresa by her inner pitchbot. While the other forms of possession on display are more spectacular, finding at times somewhat Exorcist-like modes of expression, Teresa’s is perhaps the most profound. Her friends all have inner lives, albeit vexed and fraught. Teresa, by all appearances, has none. She’s been hollowed out. This is horror as harrowing as anything supernatural, courtesy of our decade’s own peculiar demons.

Read it all.

From the new issue:

What happens to public discourse when everyone fails the Turing Test?https://t.co/6ONNQAZ7AZ

— The New Atlantis (@tnajournal) June 9, 2021