The Adversary and the Algorithm

How Saint Ignatius of Loyola might see the internet

Saint Ignatius of Loyola among angels

I hear the crisp snap of steel against ice. I sit mesmerized as Steve Yzerman somehow keeps the puck on his hockey stick as he weaves his way through two, three, then four defenders and drops his shoulder. A quick flick of the wrist, and he sends the puck up over the glove of the Philadelphia goaltender. The puck rips into the net just under the crossbar, sending the goalie’s water bottle flying in the air. The crowd roars, and I feel an electric rush surge through me. Do I stand up and yell as I watch this amazing athletic feat? Well, no. Yzerman scored that goal in a stadium in Detroit 35 years earlier, and I’m in our office in an outbuilding in rural Vermont, watching Youtube. As soon as the goal is over, several more previews show up on my screen. One preview jogs my memory, and I recall how Yzerman only survived in the 1980s NHL because he had an ‘enforcer’, a teammate who fought to protect him. I click on another video, and get another rush as I watch two grown men pound each other’s faces bloody as they circle each other on the ice.

Several videos later, I snap out of the haze and I close my computer. It’s almost one AM. ‘What am I doing?’ I yell to myself. Looking around, I instantly realize how tired I am again - an awareness that completely eluded me when I was staring at the glowing screen. Around ten o’clock that night, I was tired and ready to sleep, yet I remembered I had to send a couple of emails that seemingly couldn’t wait. After sending the emails, I saw a Substack post in my inbox and opened it without thinking. I read the post, ironically about how to limit the influence of tech in our lives. I finished and mindlessly opened up another Substack, and then another. Now I’m reading about ‘urgent’ world news, and it’s just too important to stop clicking on the next article. Two and a half hours later, I’ve dissociated enough and I’m not even trying to do ‘productive’ reading. I’m revisiting old hockey videos from my childhood.

In my ordinary, every day rational mind, I would never have made the decision to watch old hockey videos rather than get a decent night’s sleep. I’m not aware of emotionally hiding from anything or wanting to distract myself. I love my life, which is filled with deep relationships, meaningful work, prayer and love of God, and daily connections with a beautiful natural landscape. Now I’m shaking, both over-tired and wired, and dreading my fatigue which will last through the coming day. Odds are pretty good I’ll be a more irritable father and husband all day. Why would I do this to myself, and to my family?

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“What I do, I do not understand. For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate... I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want. Now if [I] do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. So, then, I discover the principle that when I want to do right, evil is at hand. -Romans 7:15, 19-21

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Although the internet is only a few decades old, my weakness and struggle with late-night reading has parallels at least as old as St. Paul’s agonizing struggles with sin and evil in Romans 7, written two thousand years ago. In old Catholic terminology we’d call my weakness concupiscence, one of the fruits of original sin. It’s the tendency for the ‘lower self’ to drive us, somewhat unconsciously, towards lesser goods, in a way that is contrary to the true and rightly ordered good of the soul. My story would be an example of concupiscence of the mind, rather than the drive for food, booze, sex or some other more direct sensory pleasure. Add a little modern neuroscience to the mix, and we could argue that I was getting a dopamine ‘hit’ with each click, similar in type if not intensity to taking a recreational drug. If you’ve analyzed the nature of the internet at all, you’ll know that this dopamine hit and its addictive tendency is a feature, not a bug, in the way much of the internet and especially social media is designed.

St. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) described curiosity (Latin curiositas) as the vain or disordered pursuit of knowledge, disconnected from any ultimate good. For Aquinas, it’s a sin not because of anything inherently wrong with learning, but because learning what is not needed can be used to distract us from the good, or puff us up with pride, or harm our relationships with others (for example, gossip), and generally serves as a distraction from the higher good of life in God. He contrasts curiosity with studiousness, which he defines as the rightly ordered pursuit of knowledge in service of the good.

With a little St. Paul, a little neuroscience, and a little St. Thomas Aquinas, I’m starting to get a handle on what I was caught up in that night. But why? How did I come to do what I did not want to do? Why was I, who have committed my adult like to living in deep, embodied relationship with God and with the land, staring blankly into a small glowing box at 1:00 AM watching a recording of Dave ‘Cementhead’ Semenko smash his fist into Chris ‘Knuckles’ Nilan’s face forty years earlier?¹

For that answer, let’s turn to another great saint, Ignatius of Loyola (d. 1556)

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Ignatius on the strategies of the Adversary

Saint Ignatius of Loyola was a spiritual genius, and one of his great gifts was his method for the discernment of spirits. Drawing upon many centuries of Christian teaching, Ignatius recognized that our thoughts and inclinations may come from three sources - 1.) Our selves, meaning our ordinary, natural psychological processes, 2.) from God and God’s good angels, and 3.) from ‘the enemy of mankind’, or the devil and his demons (also known as evil angels). Proper discernment, Ignatius teaches, requires being able to recognize the source of a given thought, and to respond appropriately to nourish the good thoughts and starve the evil thoughts, in order fulfill our life’s calling ‘to praise, reverence and serve God²’. Ignatius recognized that this could be a subtle process, one which required patience, prayerful awareness, and ideally the support of a competent spiritual director. To assist in this discernment Ignatius left directors a set of rules to understand the tactics of the Adversary.

Might these rules have something to say about how I approach the internet?

“It is characteristic of the evil angel, who takes on the appearance of an angel of light, to enter by going along the same way as the devout soul and then to exit by his own way with success for himself. That is, he brings good and holy thoughts attractive to such an upright soul and then strives little by little to get his own way, by enticing the soul over to his own hidden deceits and evil intentions. (Week II, the fourth rule)³

“We should pay close attention to the whole train of our thoughts. If the beginning, middle, and end are all good and tend toward what is wholly good, it is a sign of the good angel. But if the train of the thoughts which a spirit causes ends up in something evil or diverting, or in something less good than what the soul was originally proposing to do; or further, if it weakens, disquiets, or disturbs the soul, by robbing it of the peace, tranquility, and quiet which it enjoyed earlier, all this is a clear sign that this is coming from the evil spirit, the enemy of our progress and eternal salvation. (Week II, the fifth rule - boldface mine)”

Ignatius is describing my experience. I never sit down intending to waste time online. There’s always a necessary reason first - sending an email, or having a meeting. Then, I make a quick decision to do something slightly less necessary - opening a group message or a Substack article I’m subscribed to. Often it’s a writing about prayer, or nature awareness, or a community gathering - something good, and often holy. Then, I open a link described in this, which is related but a little farther away - perhaps a related news piece from another state. It’s something a little ‘less good than what I was originally proposing to do’, as Ignatius describes. That click leads to another, and then another, and then another. By the end of the sequence, I’m caught somewhere I never intended to be, ‘robbed of the peace, quiet and tranquility that (I) enjoyed earlier’. I have the exact same pattern play out in my relationship with the internet that Ignatius observed in his spiritual directees 500 years ago. Soberingly, he describes this as the strategy of the evil spirt/evil angel (a demon). When we’re drawn to the good, the life-draining thought form isn’t attractive to us directly, so it ‘walks with us’ in a good way at first, and little by little seeks to draw us from what gives life to what will be to our detriment.

While I’ve been spared a life-destroying internet addiction, I’ve heard and read the stories of others who have gotten caught up into truly dark material - addiction to pornography, addiction to performative social media, recruitment into cults, or even being groomed for terrorism. The stories follow a similar pattern, though moving far deeper into compulsion and self-destruction. They begin with an innocent exploration, perhaps through a person trying to deal with loneliness through connecting with an online chat group. Then slowly, imperceptibly, they move to a new forum or website, and then to another, and then to another - over days, weeks or months. They continue in deeper and deeper immersion until the person is stuck, unaware of how they got there. A twelve year old boy feels a curious and normal attraction when he sees an ad for a model wearing a bikini - one click leads to another, and soon he’s watching hardcore porn in his room at night, deeply damaging his first understanding of human sexuality. A teenage girl feels a rush when she receives ‘likes’ on Instagram after posting a simple photo, and begins to obsess over how she’ll look on screen as she post more and more. A year later, she’s an ‘influencer’ whose identity is wrapped up in a curated persona, and she feels deeply isolated and lonely. A restless young man meets other guys in a chat room who write about a life of sacrifice and purpose. He feels more and more inspired by their stories, and his boring daily life becomes less and less interesting. They name an enemy for him, which feels immensely clarifying. Six months later he’s trying to score tickets to fly to Syria with dreams of fighting for the new caliphate. In all of these examples, there’s a seemingly innocent start. Then, the online engagement builds an increasingly intense sense of compulsion. The person starts to feel they can’t live without the online stimulus or (pseudo) connections, and becomes enslaved. The same pattern Ignatius described as the strategy of the evil spirit seems to be at work in this progression of deeply destructive engagement with the online world.

Again, Ignatius observes:

“To use still another comparison, the enemy acts like a military commander who is attempting to conquer and plunder his objective. The captain and leader of an army on campaign sets up his camp, studies the strength and structure of a fortress, and the attacks at its weakest point.

In the same way, the enemy of human nature prowls around and from every side probes all our theological, cardinal, and moral virtues. Then, at the point where he finds us weakest and most in need in regard to our eternal salvation, there he attacks and tries to take us. (Week I, the fourteenth rule).

Ignatius, using a military image, suggests the enemy of our soul looks and searches for the place where we’re weakest and most susceptible to influence. I’ve again found this to be very true in my relationship with the internet. It’s precisely the area where I have some fear or clouded judgement where I’ll be sucked into compulsive reading, whether it’s social commentary, reports of wars or natural disasters, or even news on religion and spirituality. I don’t have any social media accounts other than Substack⁴. Even on Substack, I see that the algorithm is designed to find my ‘weak point’ and feed me constant suggestions of what it thinks I’ll most want to read, just as Amazon will always suggest another two related products for any one I try to purchase. It sends me emails encouraging me to sign up to use new features (notes, videos, AI assistants) to produce more as a Substack writer, and thus spend more time here. The algorithm isn’t thinking. It’s not conscious - but it’s expertly designed to probe and eventually find where I’m most attracted and to feed me more and more invitations. The Substack algorithm is designed to have me subscribe to more ‘stacks, to read more, and above all to spend more time on the platform. The Amazon algorithm is simpler, but still designed to make me buy more. I’m ignorant of the details of how Facebook, Instagram and TikTok work, but it sounds like it’s the same dynamic, except more intense. Like the demons described by ancient spiritual writers, the algorithms want our energy, our attention, and our life-force. Like the demons, they’re designed to custom tailor their appeal to each individual in order to draw us ever more deeply into their world. Every time we give the platform our time and attention we ‘feed’ this mechanism, and it can grow stronger in its influence over our psyche.

It’s the same strategy that Saint Ignatius describes the devil as using to harm souls. Now, I’m not saying that the internet and its algorithms are created by the devil, or are run by demons. But I am saying that the internet, the popular sites, and the demons use the same strategies.

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Is the Internet Demonic?

Would Ignatius recognize the internet and social media as demonic? I think both yes and no. No, in that in his sophistication he would recognize that this is, after all, only a complex ‘machine.’ It lacks consciousness and it lacks a will. It runs on a series of programs, and can only operate as I’ve described based on human design and human input. In that sense, Ignatius might see the internet and social media as neutral - tools that could be picked up and put down as necessary in a spirit of freedom or ‘indifference’ to all created things, and in service to our higher goal of living for God.

Yet, I think Ignatius would also recognize the devil’s strategies at work in the internet, and see that even if it is not demonic, its use could easily accomplish the work of the demons. The demons, Ignatius knew well, hate human beings and want us to be miserable. They rarely assault humans directly, but instead rely on deception to draw us away from the highest good (God), and trick us into wasting our lives in the pursuit of ‘lesser loves’ that can’t possibly lead to long-term happiness. The demons’ ordinary victory is not found in Satan worship, but in lives of distraction and dissipation, where people are enslaved to their ‘passions’ and are unable to hear and respond to the presence of God in their lives. The Internet offers a myriad of avenues for a life of distraction and dissipation. In addition to unedifying content, the very act of engaging with the screen involves a degree of disengagement with the wonders of Creation. I find that I almost always have a decrease in awareness of my body (disembodiment) when I sit in front of a screen. Even more obvious, staring at a screen means that I’m not out on the land, where I’m constantly engaged with the Creator through the wonders of the natural world. The statistics are staggering - the average American spends seven hours per day looking at screens, and less than one hour outside. Screens keep us participating in a world of abstraction, guided by our impulses, rather than a world of reality, where God is constantly revealed to those who have eyes that see. I’m quite sure Ignatius would recognize screens as a useful tool for the demons, in how they make it easier to turn from reality and towards unreality, and particularly unrealities curated to our own ‘weak points’ and patterns of compulsion.

Of course, the internet is not made by demons - at least not directly. It’s made by human beings. Specifically, it’s made by human beings with a certain worldview and model of reality. It’s the epitome of the project of the Western ‘Enlightenment’ kicked off in the 17th and 18th centuries. It is a world of pure abstraction, of human rational thought organized in a vast web of interconnectedness. It can allow an ordinary person to access most of the recorded knowledge of the world (digital, audio, and video) in an instant from a tiny box held in one’s hand. This is an astounding triumph of the late-Western technocratic mind, giving us a power that would be unthinkable to our ancestors of only one hundred years ago.

The very fact that we, with all the world’s knowledge in the palms of our hands, are generally no happier than our ancestors - and mental health statistics suggest we’re a good deal worse - highlights that the ‘Enlightenment’ worldview is deeply flawed. It promised a rational utopia, and what got was isolation, an epidemic of depression, and rapid destruction of the natural world. We might better call the ‘Enlightenment’ era of European history the ‘Great Narrowing of the Aperture’ It’s the era when European intellectual culture progressively discounted the soul and spiritual realities from their focus and inquiry, leading to a ‘scientific’ worldview studying only on the material and rational planes. Thus began the project to view nature as a complex machine, entirely understandable at its core through the cause and effect activity of unthinking particles obeying the laws of Newtonian physics. Phenomena that couldn’t fit the mechanical worldview were conveniently left out of the new, emerging consensus ‘reality’. For example, Saint Joseph of Cupertino, who levitated seventy times in his lifetime, walked (and hovered!) over the earth at the same as Isaac Newton began formulating his law of gravity. This awkward fact is simply ignored in the forward surge of the rational Western mind.

Psychologist Iain McGilchrist understands the rise of recent Western, rationalistic civilization as the result of the elevation of the activity of the left hemisphere of the brain (rational, linear, logical, detail-oriented) over the right hemisphere (intuitive, holistic, comprehensive). In McGilchrist’s perspective, our culture is sick in that we have a profound imbalance between the two hemispheres of the brain, whereas a healthy culture would maintain a balance between the functions of the two halves. McGilchrist suggests that the healthy ordering of the two halves is that the holistic right hemisphere governs the human person as ‘master’, and the pragmatic left hemisphere operates in service to the right as ‘emmisary’. Hence, the title of his seminal work, ‘The Master and His Emmisary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World’. The internet was developed from the powers and processes of the Western, divided mind, unshackled from its previous intimate relationship with the intuitive and spiritual faculties of the human person.

A great irony of the internet is that engaging with this vast storehouse of human knowledge often ends with us swamped with the most base impulses. Every one of the seven deadly sins (Gluttony, Lust, Greed, Anger, Sloth, Envy, and Pride) can be enflamed by spending time in particular corners of the internet. The problem is not only that use of the internet leads to excessive identification with the left hemisphere of the brain. For many (most?) of us, it also often leads us into a swamp of unconscious thoughts and actions originating in the brain’s limbic system. I was in college in the late 1990s when tech optimists envisioned the internet as the dawn of a bright new future of enlightened rationality. Instead, we have epidemics of porn addiction, gaming addiction, social media posturing, political and cultural fragmentation, and rage against our ideological opponents. We were promised a Star Trek future, but instead we’re fast moving towards a hybrid of Brave New World and Idiocracy. The demons, I recon, are delighted.

What would Saint Ignatius think of all this? We can’t know for sure, but I do think he would recognize the bitter fruits of our unhappy culture as the work of the evil one. He might not recognize the internet as the direct product of demons, but rather as the product of human beings who had become focused on self-will and rising up to strive for godlike control and power, without the supreme good of surrendering their efforts to the divine will. Thus, Ignatius might see the internet as most directly a symbol not of the devil, but of the Tower of Babel. It’s an edifice built to elevate the capacities of the divided brain - and thus it offers us both the best (knowledge and power) and the worst (dissociation and addiction) of the flawed anthropology of the late Western worldview. The story of Babel ends with God destroying the tower, for the good of the human beings who are nearing their goal of becoming ‘godlike’ while separate from God. (In God’s mercy, might our internet meet a similar fate?).

To walk forward in freedom

Does Ignatius offer us a way forward? He begins the Spiritual Exercises with his Principle and Foundation, which teaches that human beings are created for life in God, and all our decisions must flow from this:

From this it follows that we ought to use (all) things to the extent that they help us toward our end, and free ourselves from them to the extent that they hinder us from it.

To attain this it is necessary to make ourselves indifferent to all created things….

Rather, we ought to desire and choose only that which is more conductive to the end for which we are created (God).

Saint Ignatius suggests an attitude of complete interior freedom (‘indifference’) in how we relate to all things. He applies this principle to the most fundamental goods of existence - health, wealth, honor, and even life itself. How much more does this same principle apply to our devices which are, when all is said and done, merely tools? They are to be picked up, used to the extent that they can help us in living in freedom and loving relationship with God and neighbor, and set down the moment they become obstacles in any way. I can easily imagine Saint Ignatius, if he lived in the 21st century, training his Jesuit missionaries in how to develop the requisite interior freedom and ‘indifference’ needed to then use the internet as a tool for reaching and evangelizing those bound up in the online world.

For me, this can be an ongoing struggle. I still believe, in theory at least, that this tool can offer more good and value to our work than it takes away. Yet the temptation always remains to make engagement with (and through) the internet a distraction from God rather than a tool for God’s service. How can I keep the tool in its proper place? If I can’t, do I have the courage to walk away for good? When do I make that decision?

I find myself in the midst of a challenging discernment here. My state in life appears to call for some engagement with the internet and the online world. Yet I can increasingly see that it is, overall, a net negative for human flourishing given the state of our human hearts as they are. It’s an incredible resource. In a theoretical purely rational world free from human distortion, it could be an unmitigated good. Yet, that’s not the world we live in. So, how do I prayerfully and soberly use the tool, and keep from being drawn away from the infinitely greater good of life in God?

How can I engage with the internet so that I spend my nights praising the Holy One, rather than watching Knuckles and Cementhead trade punches on the ice?

Or, if I continue to be unable to rightly order this relationship, do I have the courage and humility to walk away from the online world entirely, for the sake of my soul? Jesus teaches that ‘If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life maimed than with two hands to go into Gehenna, into the unquenchable fire.⁵’ If my internet connection causes me to sin, does Christ ask me to cut the ethernet cable and be done with it? What life would I be able to enter (more fully) into without this distraction?

How about you? What ways have you found to use this frighteningly powerful tool as servant, and keep it in its proper place in a life lived in and for God? Have you ever pondered walking away from the internet, for good?

1. While this whole story is a bit embarrassing, I confess that I unapologetically love the nicknames of ‘80s hockey goons.

2. From ‘The Principle and Foundation’ of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.

3. The ‘Week’ refers to the weeks of his four-week retreat in which these rules are designed to be utilized by spiritual directors.

4. Yes, this is social media - long-form, thought-provoking social media, but it operates with the same background programming.

5. Mark 9:43. Note that, in this severe teaching, Jesus doesn’t make a distinction between serious/deadly (mortal) and less serious (venial) sins.