There is a serious downside to use of computers and mobile devices, according to recent medical and social science reports. Several essays and books likewise point to the danger. Nonetheless concerned parents or stressed-out workers still reach superficial or incorrect conclusions about the internet and tech devices. For example, some well-meaning people say internet problems are due strictly to content. Don’t view porn and other trash, they continue, and you will be OK.
To better understand the influence of technology, learn something about the founders of some important companies—their philosophy, the culture of their businesses and more.
It feels odd to distinguish between the old internet and the new internet. The old internet was a tool for the military and for research facilities. As it grew, the internet had a populist aura. The feeling was that the internet is a friendly companion, a community, an extended family of pioneers. That language is still around but it does not apply to the new internet. By about 1995 the internet had become fully commercial. Yes, the content of the internet ranges over every taste, perspective and interest. But it is largely controlled by a small number of companies. The big players in today’s internet business oppose ideas of democracy and communal decentralization, writes Jonathan Taplin in Move Fast and Break Things (Little Brown, 2017). “The dominant philosophy of Silicon Valley [is] based far more heavily on radical libertarian ideology.”
Modernity (which dates from 1500, let’s say) remarkably elevates the dignity of each individual. This is a singular achievement. No longer can someone’s career or lifestyle be determined by the caste of one’s parents. No longer can someone be denied opportunity because of one’s ethnic group or gender. Of course, modernity does not always deliver on its promise. But compared to pre-1500 days, modern individuals enjoy immense freedom.
Libertarians take the otherwise good notion of a liberated individual to its extreme. They believe that, writes Taplin, attaining one’s individual happiness is the only moral purpose of life. That doesn’t mean that a libertarian walks down the block and knocks over older people in the way. A libertarian might sponsor a youth outing or visit the elderly. Simply that the criteria for any behavior is its potential to reward the individual actor—be it financially, psychologically or even spiritually, when defined in an individualistic way.
The big players of the new internet are moral arbiters each onto him alone (and it is a white male culture). They oppose any universal governance of the internet. They succeed—by their definition of success—because they are free to break the bonds, to go beyond, to be above, to push anything aside in the name of liberty. Taplin says their credo is: “Who will stop me.” The men who created the new internet “believed that they had both the brilliance and the moral fortitude to operate outside the normal strictures of law and taxes” and other restraints. They “truly believe that technology can deliver happiness” by its very nature. Thus critical to the success of the big tech companies “is the ability to maintain the illusion that they are working for the greater good even while pursuing policies that serve only their own needs.” Some tech giants give away money and sponsor anti-poverty programs. It is possible that in doing so some of the tech giants are totally sincere. In fact, for some the illusion is their reality.
We take the internet for granted; likewise cyberspace, the dish and cable box, mobile devices, apps and programs of all kinds. This technology is our default position. We don’t concern ourselves with the philosophy of the internet’s big owners. We assume the best whenever our mobile device helps us hail a ride or when our computer allows us to post a blog. We take it as obviously correct when Mark Zuckerberg says, “To improve the lives of millions of people [connect them] to the internet.” We hardly consider the downside of Zuckerberg and others promoting a world of isolated individuals who fend for themselves with a lifeline called the internet. We are content enough with the assumption that the way to better health care is through more and faster connections to web-doctors, cyber-insurance plans and computer-linked pharmacies with a drive-up window staffed by a robot. Better education? On-line courses. Better work experience? Robot colleagues. Better sports fandom? Watch the game on one’s own device…at the stadium, no less.
Is tech really an improvement? Or at a minimum a neutral force? A subsequent column will consider tech presumptions in light of Catholic philosophy.

Droel edits INITIATIVES (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629), a print newsletter on faith and work.

The Working Catholic: Theology of Work
by Bill Droel

It was in post-World War II Poland that a positive turn occurred in the theology of work.
For centuries Catholicism, with some important exceptions, gave pride of place to worldly abandonment, including a degree of disdain for normal work. In the prevailing Catholic understanding a saint-worthy spirituality meant intense contemplation which required a retreat from ordinary workaday obligations. This attitude was derived in part from Hellenistic and Gnostic influences. It was also partially a byproduct of too close an association between the church’s princes and royalty.

Poland was in ruins following World War II—industries destroyed, cities demolished. During six years of war, over six million people died. Poland, with a long history of aristocracy, was now receptive to a Marxist ideology of work. In this context Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski (1901-1981) wrote a remarkable retreat manual, Duch Pracy Ludzkiej (The Spirit of People’s Work). This relatively unknown book was translated into English in 1960 and published in Dublin, simply titled Work. In 1995 a New Hampshire publisher released it as All You Who Labor and also as Working Your Way into Heaven. This year it appears again in the United States by way of EWTN Publishing in Alabama, titled Sanctify Your Daily Life.
In recent months several U.S. Catholic bishops have launched a program or campaign to revitalize the church in their area. These efforts focus on under-utilized buildings, a relative shortage of clergy, low participation of young adults in liturgy and insufficient funds to maintain important ministries, especially Catholic grammar schools. Wyszynski approaches the revitalization project differently. Instead of starting with the church’s own internal difficulties, he mulls over rebuilding society by way of a Christian vision of work. (As an aside: The U.S. publishers of Wyszynski’s book reflect our country’s individualistic self-help culture with titles and subtitles like Your Way and Your Life. The book’s original thrust is more about improving society or perhaps the synergy between social renewal and virtuous Christians.)
To develop his theme Wyszynski must first heave aside a common but mistaken reading of Genesis that says work is a punishment for original sin. “Even before the fall,” he writes, “people had to work, for they had to dress paradise. Work is therefore the duty of people from the first day of life. It is not the result of original sin; it is not a punishment for disobedience.”
Work is participation in God’s ongoing creation. God’s command in Genesis to “fill the earth and subdue it,” is a call to mobilization, Wyszynski writes. “When God announced the summons He saw the earth as it would become through work. God saw [all of us] who would go through the world in submissive service to Him, adding ever more perfection wrought by His power in work, to what God had made.”
And then Wyszynski gives brilliant insight into a new theology of work. The perfection of things through work perfects the person doing the work, he details. Embedded in the very process of work itself is a prior plan. Workers can find a set of virtues in the work process, varying with the type of work. Thus good work requires that we follow and respect work’s own strict and binding rules. It takes the practice of various virtues to “bring our will into conformity with the laws and techniques of work,” Wyszynski concludes. All work has an interior spiritual aspect.
Wyszynski’s book includes meditations on several work virtues. Work well-done perfects society and each worker. Good intentions or exquisite management theories do not somehow spiritualize shoddy work, much less excuse exploitation.
In summary: Work serves as a mirror to our true self and to the real character of society. “Without external work, we could not know ourselves fully,” says Wyszynski. In our work “we discover the good and evil in ourselves” and in itself work is a spirituality.

U.S. Catholicism has challenges. Absent a thorough theology of work that relates to real jobs, to actual family life and to neighborhood sidewalks, however, there will be insufficient attraction between Catholicism and young adults. Repositioning parishes and adopting better pastoral language is not enough. But, a spirituality of work that is accompanied by methods for social improvement has a chance of displacing our culture’s vacuous sloganeering, its impersonal work environments and its mistreatment of so-called economic losers. Is anyone thinking about a U.S. Catholic theology for work? Does anyone have a pastoral program for young workers?

Droel is the editor of Pope John Paul II’s Gospel of Work (National Center for the Laity, PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629; $5). It continues this consideration of Poland’s contribution to work theology.

The Working Catholic: Public Friendship
by Bill Droel

Let’s say there is a society in which everyone honors contracts—formal ones and implied promises. Managers and their employees abide by their collective bargaining agreement. Car dealers transparently present their vehicles; customers pay their loans. Real estate agents advertise “open housing” and then do not discriminate. Tax returns contain accurate figures. Civil courts are the rarity. Yet, says Pope Pius XI (1857-1939), such a utopia may disguise alienation. All the rules can be followed, but that society can lack friendship or alternately what Catholic social thought calls public charity, neighborly love or solidarity. “Justice alone,” Pius XI writes, “cannot bring about a union of hearts and minds.”

The collapse of great societies is about the decay of relationships, writes Robert Hall in This Land of Strangers (Greenleaf Books, 2012). All of our major issues, he details, are really about weak relationships—homelessness, struggling families, addiction treatment, misuse of the internet and even economic downturns. Even our daily commerce suffers under a paucity of open relationships.
The big concept in business today is “marketing the brand.” A company may have several flavors or models or instruments or services. According to the brand theory, customers, employees and stockholders will stay connected to a successfully marketed brand, no matter the specific product or service. Yet, what is actually happening? There is high employee turnover and “an ocean of employee distrust” in many sectors, Hall writes. Managers too distrust the corporate executives while those executives lose touch with the original aspirations of the company. Stockholders are fixated on quarterly returns, not on a company’s future. Customers are loyal until a competitor runs a commercial that promises the next flavor, model, service or instrument. And all the while Wells Fargo spends lots of money on their “Rebuilding Your Trust” campaign.
Society goes along treating “relationships as if they were optional,” Hall continues, even though plenty of research documents the benefits of relationships. Those with many friends and colleagues are “prospering emotionally, socially, academically and economically.” Those who have few friends and colleagues are also those who lack confidence and resiliency, who fall behind in school, and whose finances are sliding backward. What holds for individuals and families also holds for companies and non-profits. Those with only tentative ties to a small number of stakeholders have or soon will have a grim financial picture.

Has alienation run its course? Will relationships be a priority in the days ahead? According to Hall, “the small group is the unit for transformation.” Neighbors or like-minded people unite around a local concern. They get to trust one another and, over time, expand their social capital to include other concerns and other small groups. Lots of encouraging energy comes about as people connect with other members of society in new and exciting ways.
There’s the Me Too movement and the Black Lives Matter movement. There’s fresh energy in the movement for responsible gun ownership. Fresh relationships are building around local electoral campaigns. The durability and effectiveness of these movements and of other civic endeavors, however, depends on what is occurs between people, one-to-another. Does it begin and end on the internet or is there genuine face-to-face exchange? Hash tag groups and flash mob events do not in themselves contribute to a relational society. In fact if cyber-connections are overdone, there is risk of greater isolation.

Strong cultural forces make genuine relationships seem superfluous. Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017) calls those forces liquid modernity. It favors episodic and temporary attachment and fluid identity. The culture suggests that strong attachments are potential hindrances. The fickleness goes further. Views of reason and good sense change with conditions, Bauman writes. There is little assurance that what an individual holds to be true at sunset will be what that individual prefers tomorrow. Modern culture puts too much emphasis on the individual, who is quickly overwhelmed with choices in the “realm of self-fulfillment and calculation of risks,” Bauman continues. In a liquid culture, strangers and weak ties are the substitutes for “the feared fluidity of the world.”

Movements, churches, unions, civic entities and more continue to use too many shortcuts. They resort to the strategy of “better presence on the web” and spend far too much time and energy on impersonal marketing, on the color of the brochures, the advisability of TV or radio promotions and the like. They attempt to catch people on the fly–people who might attend a grand opening or a rally, people who are fond of clicking like or don’t friend.
Effective solidarity or neighborliness requires the opposite. Public friendship is grounded in virtues, beginning with amicability. It treasures finesse, attention, subtlety, forbearance and perseverance. A person’s practice of civic friendship proceeds with calculated vulnerability in a humble and sincere manner. Public virtues are nourished in small groups, but not those given to mixing-up, shifting, exiting and entering, randomly meeting, starting late, jumping around, endlessly in crisis over collective identity and disbanding over and over.
Please send along your experience with small groups to the address below. Droel’s booklet, Public Friendship, is distributed by National Center for the Laity (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629; $5)

The Working Catholic: Vocation of Politics
by Bill Droel

Can electoral politics be a vocation; a person’s response to God’s call? By one opinion, the answer is decidedly no. Political office, this opinion points out, is a place for illicit sex, ostentation, financial corruption, self-serving ideology and general boorishness. As for those politicians who invoke God’s name, their policy positions hypocritically oppose God’s revealed positions: care for the poor, proper labor relations, compassion for widows and orphans, respect for each life and more.

Days after a recent primary election in Illinois, Lumen Christi Institute (www.lumenchristi.org) hosted a forum in Chicago’s Loop on “The Dignity of Politics.” In its promotional material Lumen Christi, a Catholic group, said that “politics is held in low repute today” and that political activity breeds contempt for the law and public policy.
James Stoner of Louisiana State University, at Lumen Christi’s invitation, shared his own list of negatives with the forum’s participants. Among his obvious examples: the corruption of some office holders deters citizens from electoral politics, including from voting; plus the prevalence of rigid ideology within the major political parties discourages those who might consider political involvement as a vehicle for change.
The Lumen Christi forum—like the daily activity of governance—was conducted in secular language. Perhaps a subsequent forum could ask a panel of elected officials to share how their Catholicism informs their daily work; how within their given environments they incrementally advance justice and peace; how and where they find support when they feel their profession is drifting from the common good.
A panel of Illinois officials at the forum tried to balance Stoner’s negative list. Mary Jane Theis, an Illinois Supreme Court Justice, reminded the participants that politics is a limited activity. While governance must be conducted honorably, its normal business is not a take-no-prisoners moral crusade. Justice is always approximate. The improvements of today must be improved upon tomorrow.
Dan Cronin, a county board chairperson, agreed. Constructive political service doesn’t have the time for moral grandstanding, he said. “Compromise is the way to accomplish good things; it is a virtue.” A conscientious official, said Cronin, must go to work each day with the humble attitude that yesterday was “not quite good enough.” For example, he said, politicians must do more tomorrow to alleviate today’s poverty in Illinois.
Larry Sufferdin, a county board member and a panelist at the Lumen Christi event, spoke of the positives. The corrupt officials dominate the news, but overall “the integrity of politics is good today,” he said.

Some Christian denominations stress people’s sinfulness. Christian sectarians go even further and judge an entire culture to be evil. Withdraw from the world, they preach. Catholicism, by contrast, is world-affirming and therefore accents the goodness of people and their institutions. Catholicism acknowledges that people are flawed by sin and that their institutions can drift away from original aspirations and from the plan of God. But normally the Catholic strategy—grounded in the dogma of Incarnation–is to start with positives and then coax people and institutions toward improvement.
If our world resembles the plan of God, it is because Christians and others respond to the call that is issued to each of us. Politicians need places and occasions in which to reflect on their vocation. Politicians need the solidarity of colleagues—from whatever political party, whatever religious background, or whatever humanistic impulse.
Politicians and other workers who want to live their calling might here-and-there find weekend worship to be a useful resource. They might get some spiritual cues from official Church sources. Unfortunately, the credibility of Catholic bishops and their staff is at low tide these days. More likely, modern workers would find critique and support in independent lay-centered groups, including Lumen Christi. Best yet are those support groups that politicians and other workers form among themselves. For example, a small support group of lawyers that meets regularly or a business executives group that discusses mutual concerns and perhaps adopts a project for the common good.
Most of the time, most workers and most parents and most students go about their daily routine individually without the benefit of a support group. In the modern age, everyone it seems is a solo-practitioner. A true vocation, however, has two parts: A person’s unique gifts plus the objective needs of a community. Without the challenges and support that come from one’s circle of friends and colleagues, a full vocation is unlikely.

Droel edits a free newsletter on faith and work for National Center for Laity (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629)

The Working Catholic
by Bill Droel

St. Frances Cabrini, MSC (1850-1917), the first U.S. citizen to be canonized, is the patron of immigrants. William Green (1873-1952) was for 28 years president of American Federation of Labor (before the merger with CIO). A notorious public housing project in Chicago was named for these two.
Ben Austen takes us inside that housing project in High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing (Harper Collins, 2018). The project started in 1943 with several row houses in an area once called Lower North Side, and previously called Little Italy. In 1958 the high-rises appeared; first 15, then eight more, then others—three were 19 stories, and then others up to 23 stories. Eventually the project came down; demolition completed in 2011.
Originally, Cabrini-Green, like other public housing, was meant to temporarily assist working families; to provide a way station between unemployment and upward mobility. It was also an effort to address slum conditions in the area and to create jobs in construction and administration. Cabrini-Green, a case study in unintended consequences of social policy, failed all three of its original goals.
Austen intersperses the chronology with the stories of select residents. He follows Dolores Wilson, a longtime resident who remains attached to her family and neighbors. There is Kelvin Cannon who, despite potential, soon affiliates with a gang and is convicted of crime. Willie J.R. Fleming likewise shows potential; moves away from Cabrini-Green; yet returns to its danger. He eventually displays organizing creativity, but neither he nor his followers have enough sustaining discipline and power. Annie Ricks comes to Cabrini-Green following a fire in her home. She makes a stand there for the sake of her eight children.
Austen refrains from moralizing. He is also light on analysis; certainly implying the wrongness of some decisions, but not targeting villains. Austen thus challenges readers to draw their own conclusions. His policy narrative is complex enough and his characters are complicated enough that fair-minded readers must put stereotypes aside. Yet, from the time of Martin Luther King’s assassination in April 1968 followed by riots in Chicago and elsewhere, it is obvious that Austen’s book and Cabrini-Green itself will not have a “happily ever after” conclusion.
Are there any heroes in Austen’s book? No super-heroes. But some Cabrini-Green residents manage as best they can, by participating in improvement efforts and especially by keeping their children in school and in some cases finding better opportunity for their families. High-Risers also mentions “friends of Cabrini-Green,” who exhibit constancy in assisting families and young adults there. For example, Brother Bill Tomes (and his handful of disciples) provide a small measure of good example to young people. Marion Stamps, who once lived in Cabrini-Green, is a savvy advocate. She is such a fixture that she can with credibility call-out gang members and politicians alike. The leaders at Holy Family Lutheran Church and at other churches never tire of providing services to residents and eventually, with LaSalle St. Church and others, develop alternative housing. Austen names two police officers who excel in dealing with young people at Cabrini-Green. Jesse White, who is still Illinois Secretary of State, assists many Cabrini-Green residents over the years. His Tumblers group, designed for Cabrini-Green youngsters, still performs at many parades and other events.
Austen includes Ed Marciniak (1918-2004) in his bibliography. Marciniak was involved in race relations and with public housing for decades. As early as 1951 he warned the housing authority not to build high-rises in the Lower North Side/Cabrini-Green area. Over the years Marciniak started a tutoring program for Cabrini-Green students, raised money for scholarships there and served on numerous committees and a few federal judicial panels dealing with Cabrini-Green.

For the last 20 years of Marciniak’s life, I was honored to be his assistant. We spent many hours walking the rim of Chicago’s Loop, often including the area in and around Cabrini-Green. We talked with lots of people—sometimes by appointment, sometimes informally. Here, out of a list of about 20 conclusions, are three in abbreviated form.

1.) The government does a reasonably good job delivering assistance that is not means-tested, specifically Social Security and Medicare. In all other programs the delivery of social services needs to be mediated by smaller, closer institutions. Housing assistance requires partnerships of non-profit entities like churches and community development corporations along with government, plus community-minded, for-profit entrepreneurs, construction companies and management teams. A sufficient number of local institutions need to relate to those in assisted housing—good schools, stores, social service, youth agencies and more.

2.) There has to be a certain quantity of well-managed assisted housing in a target area so that families are not dumped into an otherwise downward scene. At the same time there has to be a limit on assisted housing units in a target area so that the new residents do not inundate the area with poverty. Again, the target area has to have as many local institutions as possible.

3.) Poverty, we also concluded, is not simply about income. An older type of poverty assumed upwardly mobility was possible because a sufficient number of factory jobs in assembly or manufacturing were available. That is no longer the case, as Austen repeatedly mentions. The new poverty includes lack of useful social connections, a lack of proficiency in the requirements of the knowledge-sectors, a loss of marriage and family life as a buffer in one’s daily struggle and more. To impose the expectations of the old immigrant story onto the new urban (and more recently suburban) poverty only leads to blaming people when supposed remedies fail. On the other hand, urban pessimists are wrong to presume that the new poverty is an unbeatable inter-generational sentence and that therefore “those people” deserve to fend for themselves without any assistance.

Marciniak’s book on Cabrini-Green is Reclaiming the Inner City (National Center for the Laity, PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629; $5.50). Droel edits NCL’s print newsletter on faith and work.