Addicted to Novelty

The Vice of Curiosity in a Digital Age

This week, I am tremendously blessed to report, my family and I at last ended our months of nomadism and moved into a beautiful new home in Round Hill, VA. And right now, I am on a train to Raleigh, NC to teach my mini-course, “Faithful Citizenship in a Fractured Age.” So in lieu of original content, I’ll be digging into the archives, as it were, and bringing you an excerpt from an article I published in the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics back in 2017, “Addicted to Novelty: The Vice of Curiosity in a Digital Age.” A few weeks ago at church, a visiting young man came up and introduced himself to me. He said the article had “changed his life” and that he kept a stash of hard copies in a drawer at his office to hand out to other young men who came through. I was taken aback, supposing the article had long since been memory-holed in the way of most academic journal articles, but grateful that the Lord had found such use for it.

Much of what I argue in it, I think, is now much more commonly-recognized now than seven years ago, with civil society at large waking up to the fact that all is not well in our relationship to our devices. But I think that the analytic lens I propose in the article—the Augustinian and medieval idea of the vice of curiositas—remains a singularly helpful and little-used framework for making sense of these problems. For one thing, as I argue in the excerpt below, I believe we can make much more sense of pornography addiction as primarily driven by curiositas than lust, strictly speaking—although the two are certainly related. I hope this insight may prove helpful for Christians struggling with such addictions and pastors seeking to counsel them.

You can download the full article here.

The Lust of the Eyes

The possessiveness and self-indulgence of our digitized intellectual appetites run considerably deeper, as I hope to show in this closing section by returning to a consideration of Augustine’s keen distinction between the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes in relation to the rising problem of internet pornography. The pathology at work here in this extreme form is mirrored at a lower level in compulsive internet use more generally.

Pornography

Pornography is certainly nothing new, as any good student of medieval or classical art and literature knows well. But there is good case to be made that pornography addiction, at least on any kind of wide scale, is something new. The statistics on pornography use in Western societies (and increasingly in developing societies too) are staggering, although only a minority of users fit the profile of full-blown addictions at this point. For those who are addicted to pornography, the effects are often devastating—not just the obvious break- downs of marriages and relationships but inability to form loving relation- ships, depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, sexual dysfunction, ADHD, poor academic and work performance, and—the hallmark of any addiction—the inability to quit. Nor does it take long to develop such addiction—just a few months in many cases.

When pornography is discussed among pastors or Christian writers, it is generally assumed to be a pretty straightforward form of the vice of lust, one of the seven deadly sins, the same sort of uncontrolled sexuality that leads to fornication and adultery. Until recently, most psychiatrists, although rejecting the language of sin and vice, treated pornography use similarly, either as evidence of a healthily robust sexual desire or, in extreme cases, as a manifestation of a hyperactive sexuality that might require pharmaceutical treatment. The opposite seems to be the case; many porn addicts seem to remain virgins far longer than their peers, struggling to form meaningful relationships with sexual partners or develop much enthusiasm for sexual activity.

Here the precision of the earlier Christian moral tradition can come to our aid. In Aquinas’s treatments of lust, in both the Summa and the De Malo, it is striking to note the almost complete absence of any discussion of the lustful gaze. For Aquinas, lust, properly speaking, does not have to do with pleasure in looking, since lust is the vice that concerns “desires for things pleasurable to touch regarding sex.” Accordingly, his discussion is occupied almost entirely with discussion of unlawful sexual acts and the desire to indulge in them. If one sinned by looking at a woman lustfully, it was almost certainly because one was, at least subconsciously, entertaining a desire to “use [her] for sexual intercourse.” From one perspective, the impotent pornographic gaze is a lesser evil than the adulterous gaze that chiefly concerns Aquinas. From another perspective, however, it is far more disordered, since the naturally good end of intercourse is no longer in view, nor even, increasingly, the natural good of the woman’s beauty.

This becomes clear when we consider testimony from porn users themselves. Gary Wilson, in Your Brain on Porn, compiled and synthesized thousands of testimonials from recovering porn addicts, and notes that “it’s clear from countless reports that it’s not uncommon for porn users to move from genre to genre, often arriving at places they find personally disturbing and confusing.” This sounds less like Augustine’s lust of the flesh, in which we use our senses in order to take inordinate pleasure in some object, and much more like his lust of the eyes, in which we curiously take pleasure in the mere act of our perceiving even something that gives us no pleasure, like a lacerated corpse. One user quoted by Wilson exclaims, “I’m tired of hearing, ‘You like what you like’ from people. A lot of the things I look at I don’t like”; the user goes on to enumerate scenes as brutal and degrading in their own way as the gladiatorial games that Augustine’s friend Alypius could not look away from. Such porn users also report deliberately delaying climax for hours to scan through as many videos as possible, and restlessly moving on from one to the next without even properly watching any one scene.

Wilson argues that these pathological behaviors represent a new development in the aftermath of the arrival in the mid-2000s of high-speed internet and porn “tube” sites modeled after YouTube. Before that, porn use was more directly ordered toward lust—the enjoyment of the visual object as such. Now, however, it is driven primarily by that trademark of curiosity, the thirst for novelty in which the gaze objectifies and devours its object almost immediately and must move restlessly on to the next, never satisfied. Internet pornography use is thus perhaps evidence that the demons have been hard at work lately in applying Screwtape’s advice: “As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations.  All the healthy and out-going activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return.”

Dopamine and the Ecosystem of Curiosity

There is a chemical explanation for this behavior. The brains of compulsive porn users, like victims of other addictions—both substance and behavioral— have rewired their reward circuits, the part of the brain that motivates us to pursue new things and “rewards” us with the satisfaction of accomplishment when we have laid hold of them. This part of the brain is powered by dopamine, a potent neurotransmitter that is powered by novelty or the anticipation of novelty and that flags in the face of repetition—the so-called Coolidge effect. Shock and surprise particularly stimulate dopamine, explaining why shocking and disgusting images may nonetheless compel our attention. However, the brain becomes rapidly desensitized in the face of such stimulus and requires ever-more intense experiences to keep the dopamine flowing; this is the basic structure of all addictions.

Although dopamine is frequently associated with pleasure, recent research has distinguished between the role of opioids, which actually give us pleasure from the experience of a pleasurable object, and dopamine, which fuels the wanting of it, thus confirming Augustine’s long-ago distinction between the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes. Susan Weinschenk explains:

It’s all about seeking.  Instead of dopamine causing us to experience pleasure, the latest research shows that dopamine causes seeking behavior. . . . Dopamine causes us to want, desire, seek out, and search. It’s not just about physical needs such as food, or sex, but also about abstract concepts. Dopamine makes us curious about ideas and fuels our searching for information.  The latest research shows that the dopamine system is stronger than the opioid system. We seek more than we are satisfied.

This restless seeking is not unique to pornography but is, as we have already seen, an increasingly pervasive feature of our increasingly digital lives. Hence the compulsive urges—to open emails or web pages for no particular reason, to pursue long periods of mindless browsing, particularly of images, following link after link of “clickbait,” as we now call it, even when we neither really expect nor really experience pleasure in the process. Drawing parallels with Addiction by Design, the groundbreaking recent research of Natasha Dow Schüll into the digitally driven explosion of gambling addiction in recent decades, Alexis Madrigal writes in the Atlantic of Facebook as offering a version of “The Machine Zone,” “a rhythm . . . a fine-tuned feedback loop . . . a powerful space-time distortion” in which the hope of real-world rewards becomes meaningless, replaced by “the pleasure of the repeat, the security of the loop.” The internet and our digital devices offer us a perfect storm of dopamine stimulation: a perpetual stream of visually enticing new content accessible instantaneously through a medium that makes us feel that we are in control even as we are becoming increasingly passive and that rewards us with visual and auditory cues that make us feel at each moment that we have just accomplished or discovered something. The result is a feedback loop of perpetual seeking and self-satisfaction in the privatized possession of novelty that fits uncannily with both Augustine’s and Griffiths’s diagnoses of disordered intellectual appetite.