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.
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