Virtue
or virtual?
Technology used recklessly
obscures human life, dignity
Imagine you are driving at high speed on a highway. On the way to your
destination, a constant storm of information surrounds your car, aimed
at informing you, marketing products to you and enticing you to engage
in conversation. Among all this stands an occasional road sign warning:
Caution Ahead. It is easy for you to miss the signs with everything and
everyone clamoring for your attention.
Two road signs along this metaphor for the Information Age in which we
live popped up last week.
On May 8, newspapers reported that a new video game tallied more than
$500 million in worldwide sales in its first week. The game costs $60,
so some quick math indicates that more than 800,000 people stood in line
to buy one.
The game’s lead character, controlled by the game player, murders,
steals, patronizes prostitutes and recruits henchmen to do the same. Reviewers
of the game say it is possible to play it in 25 to 40 hours, but a fuller
experience of the lush graphics and, unfortunately, the brutally realistic
violence may take 70 to 80 hours. This is not the passive experience of
a two-hour violent movie. It is days or weeks worth of active participation
in virtual violence, mayhem and, let’s be frank, sin.
Its makers would call it “just” a game but clearly it represents
more than entertainment. How can the realistic depiction of murder, assault
and other crimes not affect the player? For what is now nearly a million
players, the line between realistic images and real people may become
tragically blurred. Caution Ahead, indeed.
Another cultural road sign also appeared on May 8 in this newspaper. Cardinal
Justin Rigali called for Congress to pass legislation banning human-animal
hybrids known as chimeras.
Animals can now be genetically engineered with human characteristics,
then destroyed to harvest the material. For instance, a mouse could be
created with human brain cells, then killed to obtain the cells for human
therapies. But is the organism human, animal, both or neither?
First we blur the line between real violence and virtual. Next we make
human beings and animals indistinguishable. Both warning signs become
almost unnoticed in an age of vast information conveyed at rapid speed.
We may not be geneticists or video game developers, but we each have the
responsibility to do our part in reining in abuses of the technological
power humanity possesses.
We must refuse to buy products that poison our minds by desensitizing
us to real or virtual assaults on human dignity, regardless of whether
it is packaged as entertainment. We must urge civic officials to protect
life and respect human dignity in the development of the life sciences.
We must courageously and clearly speak the truth of our human nature —body
and soul, created and redeemed by God — even amidst the information
blizzard of our age.