Article

Community

Creed

Loneliness

12 May 2023

6 min read

Of singular value

A new report on relationships caught the media headlines. Lauren WIndle is inspired by its take on being single.

Lauren Windle

Lauren Windle is an author, journalist, presenter and public speaker.

A man walks along a street past a orange wall with a huge 'Good' written in cursive script on it.

Photo by Volkan Olmez on Unsplash.

A friend of mine used to work at Lambeth Palace. She had a sister and brother-in-law who were based abroad and one of their visits happily coincided with fireworks night. As a treat, she decided to take her relatives to Lambeth Palace’s display – apparently the gardens are beautiful, and the glistening bursts of colourful light only served to illuminate and enhance its horticultural charm. The evening was perfect, aside from one snag; her brother-in-law, from Uganda, was struggling to cope with the bitter cold of a crisp November evening in the UK. But he needn’t have worried for long. Noticing his distress, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, nipped upstairs to his living quarters and descended with a woolly hat to keep the chill away from the shivering visitor.

This is when I moved from the casual indifference, that I have towards all public figures that I don’t know personally, to really liking Justin Welby. The story endured so much in fact, that even when he politely declined to endorse my book – citing time constraints, it didn’t shake my resolve that he was a man with a good heart, albeit a busy schedule.

I was left with the overwhelming feeling that Justin Welby was telling me to love and care for my fellow man. To hand out woolly hats, if you will.

He has once more come up trumps in my eyes with last week’s publication of Love Matters, a 236-page report on examining relationships and families. It is the third of a trilogy of commissions from the archbishops of Canterbury and York, with the first two focusing on housing and social care.

The report is broadly aimed at informing the actions of the government and Church of England but offers a message to us all. The five key messages are; we need to put more value on families – whatever set-up they have, we need to support relationships and manage conflict well, we need to honour single people and not place such emphasis on romantic love, we need to invest in our children and young people and we all need to work towards a kinder, fairer and more forgiving society.

These, we can all agree, are noble aims. As I read through the detailed communiqué, I was left with the overwhelming feeling that Justin Welby was telling me to love and care for my fellow man. To hand out woolly hats, if you will.

The mainstream media also made noises of approval as the passages on the value of single people gained a huge amount of traction in the press – including a front-page article in The Times.

As the author of a book that directly challenges the Church’s response and treatment of single people, I felt a warm glow. I felt hopeful for change and that a glaring problem had been given the recognition it deserved. The mainstream media also made noises of approval as the passages on the value of single people gained a huge amount of traction in the press – including a front-page article in The Times. The publicity was so far reaching that I even got a message from a friend and features editor at The Sun saying she thought it was a “very Windle sounding message from the Church”. But not everyone in the Christian community shared my (and her) enthusiasm.

This isn’t due to the content of the report, but rather its omissions. The grumbles I’ve heard have accused it of being “weak” and “waffling” in its message and people have been disappointed that it isn’t more forthright in its promotion of marriage. But I would argue that, in church circles, marriage gets enough airtime.

There’s no question in the Church that marriage is important. There is implicit beauty in committing to combine your life with another person – prioritizing someone over everyone else (including yourself), loving, caring for, supporting and encouraging that person. Through the Bible God says it is not good for anyone to be alone. God blesses marriage. God encourages people to go forth and multiply). But somewhere in the mix, Christians stopped celebrating marriage and started idolising it.

I’ve heard of... people being relegated to “all-singles groups” (the equivalent of the kids’ table at Christmas).

Researcher David Voas conducted a quantitative analysis of Church life with a survey and found the majority of English church attendees are married. He said:

“It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that in England individuals don’t go to church, couples do.”

People who run churches are usually married men and their partners take up a first-lady position in doting support. Single Friendly Church’s survey (2012) found 43 per cent of single people felt their church didn’t know what to do with them.

Ministry for single people, if it exists, is often an afterthought and not engineered in a way that makes it appealing to potential attendees. Two thirds of people in the single friendly church’s survey said they felt being married is the expected and accepted lifestyle in the Church. So much so that the Church is based around the school calendar with everything effectively shutting down over August.

I’ve heard of people trying to set up initiatives for single people but being told by church leaders that, as they themselves were single, they probably weren’t best placed. I’ve heard of “pairs and spares” dinners and people being relegated to “all-singles groups” (the equivalent of the kids’ table at Christmas).

It’s high time we recognised that being single isn’t a state to progress out of, or level up from. It is not a waiting room for the as yet unchosen.

To add insult to injury, there are churches that won’t allow unmarried people into positions of leadership. One study found that half the American churches quizzed wouldn’t allow a single person to run a house group. To be clear, this means that Jesus would not be qualified. This hypocrisy received acknowledgement in the Love Matters report. It said:

“The Commission believes strongly that single people must be valued at the heart of our society. Jesus’ own singleness should ensure that the C of E celebrates singleness and does not regard it as lesser than living in a couple relationship. Loving relationships and being able to give and receive love matter to everyone.”

Given this climate in the Church and the fact that outside of it, more and more people are remaining single, the report’s emphasis on the equality of singleness isn’t “weak” but vital. It’s high time we recognised that being single isn’t a state to progress out of, or level up from. It is not a waiting room for the as yet unchosen. It is a valid and valuable life stage that is equal but different to marriage.

For too long Christians have tried to “solve” singleness with marriage. Rather than solving the problems associated with singleness, i.e. loneliness, absence of deep and intimate love, with community and family (in whatever form it takes). I don’t believe that by platforming the value of singleness, that we detract from the value of marriage. It’s not a seesaw whereby one must fall for the other to rise.

Another blow that hits me hard, is that this report is highlighting what the world outside the Church has been aware of for years. Books like The Unexpected Joy of Being Single and What a Time To Be Alone confirm the inherent value of both single people and the time a person spends single (whether for now or for life). This is recognised by the Bible, particularly by Paul in his letters, but rarely highlighted in the Church. It seems like a shame that Carrie Bradshaw and the Sex And The City ladies did more for affirming singleness than our spiritual leaders.

But not anymore. Justin Welby has thrown his woolly hat in the ring. He’s standing up for the value of each person, married or single, each relationship, romantic or platonic, and each family, genetic or otherwise. And you won’t catch any grumbling from me.

Explainer

Culture

Digital

16 July 2024

6 min read

Tech has changed: it’s no longer natural or neutral

The first in a three-part series exploring the implications of technology.

James Lawrence

James is Canon Missioner at Blackburn Cathedral. He researches technology and theology at Oxford University.

A caveman holding a hammer looks at a bench on which are a broken bicycle and a laptop.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

My son was born in February last year and it seems that every day he is developing new skills or facial expressions and adorable quirks. Just the other day he was playing with some wooden blocks and when they inevitably fell over, he let out the most adorable giggle. As you can guess I immediately reached for my phone so that I could capture the moment. Moments like this happen all the time in the life of a modern parent- we want to share with our spouse, family, and friends or just capture the moment for ourselves because it’s something we treasure. And yet, in this series of articles I would like to consider this moment, and the thousands like it that take place in a technological society, and ask: is everything as benign as it seems?

There are two ideas that often come up whenever people talk about technology. The first is that technology is basically ‘neutral’, that technology only becomes good or bad depending on what you are doing with it. “Look at a hammer,” someone might say, “there is nothing intrinsically good or bad about this hammer, only the end result is good or bad depending on whether I’m using it to hit nails or people!” On this reading of technology, the only important questions relate to the consequences of use.

If technology is neutral, then the primary concern for users, legislators and technologists is the consequences of technology, and not the technology itself. The only way to ensure that the technology is used for good is to ensure, somehow, that more good people will use the technology for good things than bad people using it for bad things. Often this idea will present itself as a conversation about competing freedoms: very few people (with some important exceptions, see this article from Ezra Klein) are debating whether there is something intrinsically problematic about the app formerly known as Twitter, most discussion revolves around how to maintain the freedom of good users while curtailing the freedom of bad users.

We assume that these tools of social interaction like Facebook and Instagram are, in and of themselves, perfectly benign. We are encouraged to think this by massive corporations who have a vested interest in maintaining our use of their platforms, and at first glance, they seem completely harmless: what could possibly be the problem with a website in which grandma can share photos of her cat? And while the dark underbelly of these platforms has violent real-world consequences – like the rise of antisemitism and anti-Muslim hatred – the solution is primarily imagined as a matter of dealing with ‘bad actors’ rather than anything intrinsically problematic with the platforms themselves.

Jobs here draws a straight-line comparison between the bicycle and the PC. As far as Jobs is concerned, there is no quantitative difference in kind between the two tools.

The second idea is related but somewhat different: Advocates of modern technology will suggest that humanity has been using technology ever since there were humans and therefore all this modern technology is not really anything to worry about. “Yes, modern technology looks scary,” someone might say, “but it’s really nothing to worry about, humans have been using tools since the Stone Age don’t you know!” This view proposes that because hammers are technology, and all technology is the same, there is, therefore, no difference between a hammer and the internet, or between the internet and a cyborg.

This second idea tends to be accompanied by an emphasis on the slow and steady evolution of technology and by highlighting the fact that at every major technological advancement there have been naysayers decrying the latest innovation. (Even Plato was suspicious of writing when that was invented). Taken as part of a very long view of human history, the technological innovations of the last 100 years seem to be a normal and natural part of the evolution of our species which has always set itself apart from the rest of the animal kingdom in its use of technology.

Steve Jobs gives a good example of this in an interview he gave about the development PC:

“I think one of the things that really separates us from the high primates is that we’re tool builders. I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condors used the least energy to move a kilometer. And humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list… not too proud of a showing for the crown of creation… But then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And a human on a bicycle blew the condor away – completely off the top of the charts.

And that’s what a computer is to me… It’s the most remarkable tool we’ve ever come up with… It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds”

Notice that Jobs here draws a straight-line comparison between the bicycle and the PC. As far as Jobs is concerned, there is no quantitative difference in kind between the two tools: one is more complex than the other but otherwise, they are just technologies that expand human capacity. “A Bicycle for our minds” is a fascinating way to describe a computer because it implies that nothing about our minds will be changed, they’ll just be a little bit faster.

And yet, despite the attempts of thought leaders like Jobs to convince us that modern technology is entirely benign, many of us are left with a natural suspicion that there is more going on. As a priest in the Church of England, I often have conversations with parishioners and members of the public who are looking for language or a framework which describes the instinctive recognition that something has changed at some point (fairly recently) about the nature of the technology that we use, or the way that it influences our lives. That modern technology is not simply the natural extension of the sorts of tools that humans have been using since the Stone Age and that modern technology is not neutral but in significant ways has already had an effect regardless of how we might use it. How do we respond to such articulate and thoughtful people such as Steve Jobs who make a compelling case that modern technology is neutral and natural?

I often have conversations with parishioners who are looking for language or a framework which describes the instinctive recognition that something has changed about the nature of the technology that we use, or the way that it influences our lives.

Thinking back to that moment with my son when he giggles and I take a photo of him, at first glance it seems completely innocuous. But what resources are available if I did want to think more carefully about that moment (and the many like it) which suffuse my daily life? Thankfully there is a growing body of literature from philosophers and theologians who are thinking about the impact of modern technology on the human condition. In the next two articles I would like to introduce the work of Martin Heidegger, outline his criticism of modern technology, showing how he challenges the idea that technology is simply a natural extension of human capacity or a neutral tool.

Heidegger is a complex character in philosophy and in Western history. There is no getting around the fact that he was a supporter of the Nazi Party during the second world war. His politics have been widely condemned and rightly so, nevertheless, his insights on the nature of modern technology continue to this day to provide insights that are useful. His claim is that modern technology essentially and inevitably changes our relationship with the world in which we live and even with ourselves. It is this claim, and Heidegger’s suggested solution, that I will unpack in the next two articles.