What We Lost When We Abandoned the Hearth

Above certain latitudes, every home should probably have a hearth. In an age of central heating, it may seem redundant or even wasteful, particularly when the same age has dispensed with sensible architecture and banished aesthetics to the realm of childish curiosity. Half the time, fireplaces seem to exist purely for decoration: artificial flames or video screens sitting emptily in hovels that don’t even connect to chimneys. It’s a sad state, but it’s pretty common.

Halfway through the last century, an invader to the home snatched up the space once reserved for incineration. The little box of moving images did not at first seem like an invader at all; it was welcomed in with open wallets and open minds, and left on for a few decades to raise a couple generations of kids with centralized media. And now, gradually, it’s being replaced with even more immediate, neurotic forms of media delivery systems that have no geographical or architectural correspondence to a family gathering place.

We can’t blame the television for everything, of course, but to simply dismiss the role it played in fracturing family unity, and moreover, personal interior awareness should not be forgotten. But in order to approach this, we have to best understand what it replaced: fire.

Fire

One could almost say that there are only two things which define a society: language and fire. Fire, how to make it, and access to it defines the boundary between man and animal. It forms the foundation of man’s transformative power on Earth. And it insulates him from the cold, dark nights with its warmth light. But it is fundamentally destructive, too, costly and consumptive to maintain, at times even fickle to look after, if we can speak in metaphor.

Speaking reductively, the advance of civilization correlated to the increasing complexity with which technology could manipulate, package, or otherwise make use of fire. Fire correlated to energy. Energy meant greater efficiency. Efficiency meant more complicated machines with which to better use fire. Every form of energy generation is related to some form of how to either generate more fire or to harness a fire that already burns.

But this is to merely consider fire in its utilitarian sense. Fire also images a certain element of natural beauty. It is for this reason that we should instead consider the campfire, the fireplace, the candle lit at dinnertime. We should consider exactly what draws our attention to the red-orange flickers that float above the glow of hot embers.

Fire has to be tended to. The logs will burn unevenly, have to be consolidated, turned. When it dies down, it needs more fuel added to it. Embers periodically need a fresh blast of air to get new wood to catch. Keeping a fire alive isn’t a passive exercise, but it isn’t an altogether conscious one, either. A man’s absorption into a live hearth prompts introspection and reflection, and, like the fire, is itself kept active by the small, short, subtle reflections on the state of the flame.

The connection here shouldn’t be too quickly overlooked. The development of one’s interior life depends on a certain level of conscious introspection, or inner sight. Prayerful meditation serves as a means of developing this skill, but there are certain natural practices in what used to be considered every day life which contribute to it as well. Basic labor, repetitive physical tasks, walking, generic cooking, and of course, tending a fire—each has some element that contributes to the purification of one’s inner sight.

Like tending a fire, it’s about the subtler motions that engages part of the mind, yet not with such intensity as to disturb one’s broader frame of thought. In the case of tending a fire specifically, the combination of the light and the heat, and the shape the flames make as they erupt in pops and bend around charring logs openly invites this introspection. It is impossible to observe a fire and not be drawn into one’s own thoughts.

An invitation to inner sight is only an invitation, however. Some may be drawn into idle fantasy, or into the self-referencing circles of doubt or stress that tend to accompany the tedium of modern life. Merely dwelling on these doesn’t constitute the development of an interior life. Such idle entertainment indicates a will chained to and wholly subservient to the flesh, the world, or to the enemy. An attempt must be made to organize the interior life, to first shun what is evil and eventually what is even merely idle, and to simultaneously focus on what is good, Who is good, and to maintain one’s focus on prayer in the reminder of the theological virtues.

This strays a little from our general thrust, but it’s important to remember that merely entering into some sort of interior life is not enough to consider oneself as having a good one. Imagination is good, but it needs to be directed toward good things in order for it to not become cancerous. Self-reflection is good, but it too needs direction so that it does not conspire into idleness, wrath, or despair. And while attempts to organize these things by purely meditative means, divorced from prayer, may seem like worthwhile endeavors, the weight of the Fall makes progress by such means effectively impossible. Where we do not turn toward Him, He lets us sink further into the mired swamp of our pride.

Nonetheless, fire opens for us the invitation to our own interior lives. One could argue, that we are always invited to introspection at any time of any day, and he’d be correct insofar as our interior lives are granted to us with the most immediate sense of stewardship before all other outward exterior objects can even be named. We bring it with us everywhere we go; it goes into every conflict, every problem, every situation, and every joy and triumph as well. The meeting of the will and the intellect is a world unto itself, made by God for our use, but also made for Him to dwell in as well.

That civilization of the past, which in America underwent so many changes in a single generation as to render itself unrecognizable, was one in which there was a hearth in almost every home. Consider the affect that an open invitation to introspection had on such a population. It was not considered a novelty, either, but a fundamental element of home life. That it was a necessary means of heating the home or cooking meals seems irrelevant for our purposes here, but this eventually turned out to be the way in which the hearth was eventually bricked up and stowed away.

Technology supplanted the hearth in a variety of fields: the gas and electric stoves and ovens for cooking, and later the microwave; central heating for temperature control. The invention of the television was the last point on the curve that eliminated hearth ubiquity. But technology didn’t have to do this. In this case, technology, in the form of the television, merely provided a temptation. When the television entered the home, it quietly shut the door that invited a restful introspection, and by doing so, opened the door that invited passive indulgence in the excesses of entertainment.

Television

To state the obvious, television presents flickering light and pretty colors every bit as much as a fireplace does. It presents more of them, actually, with greater variation in color and frequency than a few logs in a fire. And, more relevantly, it presents these in the form of distinct images intended to convey some sort of narrative, from which its audiences derive some form of meaning.

As mentioned above, there is meaning to be found in the apparently gazes at a live hearth, but this meaning isn’t something projected outward by the fire itself so much as engaged with interiorly. The fire prompts a sort of interior motion. The fire, then, could be understood as a tool to assist invoking a form of silence: one fit for interior recollection. The fruits of this could then be considered the meaning derived from an active fireplace—but, importantly, it is something of a secondary or tertiary sense of meaning. It’s an interior coordination, a sense of mental and spiritual course correction or affirmation. In a word: context.

Where the hearth was replaced with the television, it became used for that context instead. But television provides a different context altogether. When one stares into the magic box of moving images, too often does it result in complete pacification. Interior recollection, if it occurs at all, is narrowly focused into the confines of whatever alternate reality the television channel is tuned to. If you’re watching Columbo, you’re thinking about Lieutenant Columbo’s current adventure. If you’re tuned into the news, you’re thinking about whatever this or that media station is presenting to you. It takes a certain mental fortitude, working at odds with the machine, to reflect inwardly and dwell on one’s interior disposition.

The fireplace provided nothing more than an invitation to the interior life. The television, by its very nature, retracts that invitation. The pretty colors and flickering lights create for you a narrative or world into which to insert yourself as a captive audience. This takes almost no cognitive effort. If it did, television shows in general wouldn’t be nearly as popular. Television, in other words, takes from you the work you do gazing at a fire, and then invites you to hand over your interior life to those who write and direct the programming that you watch. It is as if to say, reflection is difficult and sometimes unpleasant, so just tune out and let us, the people in Hollywood, handle it for you.

Keep in mind here the loss of a meditative society isn’t the point here. There has never been a society actively engaged in prayerful meditation in any meaningful sense of the term, outside of the very limited borders of cloistered monks. Rather, what has been lost is a society grounded in its people’s daily, raw reality, where its people’s interior lives were at least generally active and only tangentially influenced by centralized media narratives. To speak with more highfalutin language, we could call this shift the encroachment of modernity, or the rise of the postmodern condition, or somesuch other European-styled esoterica.

This could be related to, but isn’t directly reliant upon, the shift in labor value. Put more simply: the loss of a society that predominately works with its hands. That shift occurred at the same time and for largely the same reason: technological innovation spurred material changes in labor efficiency, and this coincided with the reorganization of the economy around larger corporations, investment banking, and service industries. The phenomenon that placed a television in every home by the end of the seventies was part of this society-ranging revolution mid century.

What we can notice, however, is this: media came to dominate the conscious minds of more people in the country than at any other time in history, and this is even taking into account how media-savvy Americans have traditionally been. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of our obsession with tabloid political theater back in the 1830s, noting the ubiquity of pamphlets and papers across the then-burgeoning young country. An obsession with politics might be argued as ingrained in the American spirit. But reading a paper isn’t the same as passively absorbing the flickering lights of a machine that tells you stories.

The television’s design and function mimic the fireplace in its most basic senses. But because it is able to add a narrative to the flicker of lights, it removes the inward-peering mirror of the flame and replaces it with stories and drama that blur our immediate senses of reality and fiction. Sometimes this blurring is intentional, as is the case with media outlets who contort the truth to push agendas. Sometimes, however, it’s unintentional, as in the case of how the writers of prime time television shows were able to shape conceptions about reality for their viewers that turned out to be totally, wildly incorrect.

And this isn’t to say that once one becomes aware of the machine’s ability to brainwash, distract, or condition him, he stops being susceptible to its conditioning. Like any form of social conditioning, the opposite is the case. For so long as one uses it, he remains a victim of its control. The only real option is to unplug, or to otherwise use it against its intended purpose. Owning a television to watch films, albeit infrequently, is not the same as having a television hooked into a cable service that you engage with every night. Whether it’s even worth it for that, however, is a topic for another discussion.

The Internet

We live today about ten years removed from when television was the dominant media apparatus in the typical American household. Now it’s probably a handheld device: a phone, perhaps a tablet of some sort, both not-so-distant progeny of the personal computer. Television as a media format has eked out a section of bandwidth in the form of streaming platforms, but those who use the physical box of flashing images every night are participating in a dying ritual.

When we consider how we engage with media, it would seem that what these new devices offer is preferable to the magic box that they replaced. The internet carries more possibility for content, both educational and entertaining, with greater degrees of versatility and interactivity. A man spotted in public using his phone could be doing anything from reading an article to chatting with strangers to playing a game.

While it can’t be admitted that the internet or these devices will help anyone grow in his spiritual life, it would at least seem that something which engages our mental faculties is better than the passive media bombardment that the television supplies.

But, of course, this isn’t quite right. Consider how the internet is most often used. Consider how the ease of its use has consolidated around only a handful of platforms, all of which are run by the same handful of tech oligarchs. But more than that, consider also how the internet is engaged with, both individually and socially. Does the screen of a phone invite an awareness of one’s interior disposition? Are phones being used the same today as televisions were a quarter-century ago?

Phone-browsing, more than the internet itself, is one of the greater errors of our technological society. Smartphones and their tablet cousins are both ordered around ease of use and catered to a lowest common denominator. App programming, especially with their front end design taken into account, all push users toward visiting the same handful of networked sites and never, so to speak, leaving the reservation.

And when they’re using these social network sites, are they engaging with actual information, or are they consuming trivialized packages of manufactured emotions? That might sound hyperbolic, but Twitter last year instituted a “do you want to read the article before retweeting this?” warning, ostensibly to stave off impulsive reactions to headlines designed to elicit impulsive reactions. But then, if one actually reads the article, one finds journalism, scholarship, or writing integrity no better than what used to pass for a checkout counter tabloid a mere decade ago.

By doing this, Twitter has set up a false front: if one reads the article before commenting on it, one assumes himself superior, more level-headed, less impulsive than those who didn’t. And yet whatever article the warning is attached to is almost without exception a complete waste of time. Most of these articles exist purely for the headlines, just as the tabloids existed purely for their front pages. What’s changed is that there was no consumptive digital platform that kept millions of eyes trapped in the grocery store checkout line, glued to the tabloid rack. Now, effectively, there is.

More blatantly, social media’s affect on public consciousness has been of overt narrative manipulation under the guise of like-farming. Interaction, too often, is ordered around the endorphin rush of notifications or comments. Narratives, in the form of articles, get recycled with attached puerile commentaries by so many peanut galleries who seek agreement among their own particular in-groups. This sort of thing happens in real life, too, but not at such great a scale or with such high turnover rates as online.

You could consider it a gluttony for engagement, but if we were to reduce all sins down to the categorical seven, then this is a sort of gluttony of attention linked very closely with pride. Gluttony is something of an inversion of or over-indulgence in hunger, and those caught in its throes tend to have characterized their gluttony as hunger in an effort to rationalize away the great evil they commit. But gluttony feeds off of and destroys the flesh very directly: obesity, liver failure, the numerous destructive affects of hard drugs, et cetera. The gluttony attached to social engagement is a little different. It doesn’t result in clogged arteries or varicose veins; it results in a mind closed off from its own awareness.

For this reason it’s best understood as a sort of pride that functions like gluttony. Where one’s attention might look inward in order to engage with the spiritual life, instead it is repulsed, avoidant, turning away to exterior things for comfort. But exterior things are not enough. This one seeks recognition, approval, to be called out and numbered among friends. He seeks engagement with other wills. Social media offers a thin veneer of this, packaged up in the form of tabulated, accounted, artificial response buttons. That will trigger the endorphins, but it won’t result in a bond—neither with his fellow man, nor with the one from Whom he truly seeks recognition and friendship.

The endorphin rush is the gluttonous indulgence. It’s a gluttony without a material, yet it is designed to result in the same sort of psychological addiction. And this phenomenon probably wouldn’t be so egregious were it not so ubiquitous. Social media did not become a monolithic sculptor of public consciousness until the release and proliferation of smart phone technology, which happened around 2008. MySpace, Twitter, and YouTube all predated that revolution, and while the state and organization of Silicon Valley was radically different then than it is today, the success of handheld technology, and how it facilitated the explosion of social media, cannot be denied.

This brings us to the self-isolative aspect of the handheld technology. Although not directly related to the internet, the internet plays the foremost role in how the smart phone fragmented social interaction, down to its most basic components. The handheld offers an escape route from real life, not from any pressing danger or even fear of it, but from the tedium of boredom. A culture unconditioned to silence seeks desperately to fill any sense of stillness wherever it can—nature abhors a vacuum, so it says. Whether it succeeds in this task with genuine work, busy work, leisure, or facile distractions is irrelevant to the greater interest: never let yourself be in a situation where you might risk the slightest amount of introspection.

Since that’s the default position of the culture at large, it’s no surprise that the tech it has developed is used for this purpose. Television’s part in this arc functioned to pull private consciousness away from interior awareness, regardless of whether that was a stated goal of its development. After a few generations of this had passed and television had become normalized, handheld technology served first to more fully drag private consciousness into the void, and then to burn the bridge behind it. Real life became populated with strangers staring at screens.

Television, for the most part, wasn’t capable of severing family cohesion by the mere function of its existence. The media it televised did, but replacing a fire with a magic box only shifted the attention of those gathered around the hearth. The internet revolution, on the other hand, did exactly the opposite. Although by means of chat clients and social media it may seem as though the internet connects people and brings them together, it does so by isolating them in real space. Before, you needed a television in every room in order to get the family to vacate its living space. Now, they vacate it freely without even having to leave each other’s physical proximity.

Conclusion

When we gave up the hearth, we gave up a regular invitation to grow our spiritual lives. We gave up a source of our family cohesion. We gave up a practicality that reminded us of our labor in creation. In its place, television brought foreign signals into the home which brainwashed the country, and sixty years after that, social media broke apart whatever cohesion was left.

The reactionary mindset is not one that glamorizes the past so as to seek to return to it. The clock only marches forward. It is one that glamorizes the past, sometimes to the point of romance, so as to draw the best parts of it back into public consciousness. It’s not common to encounter someone who genuinely wants to live in the 1950s, or the 1830s, or the 1510s. But every reactionary would want the good elements of those times to have survived: social cohesion, greater awareness of chastity, public order predicated upon private responsibility, et cetera.

The notion that these things all had to be bartered in order to bring into the world the great progressive experiment is in some sense self-evidently true. But the popular way of framing this exchange—that technology is what ruined this—is not. The technology of the television itself is not necessarily what turned American minds into neurotic colonies for global interests. That there was not resistance to this in the first place, that Americans, by and large, did not view this newcomer to the home with skepticism, is equally to blame. By the time the televisions were flying off shelves in the early seventies, the social conditioning program to re-engineer the entirety of American life had already been under way for two full decades. Americans wanted to give up on introspection. Television gave them the opportunity, and the hearth, and all it stood for, happened to be in the way.

Today, as the enemy colludes with nearly every prince in the world, it is prudent and necessary to reclaim old habits. If you have a hearth, using it is one of them.

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