Whether we notice it or not, we are part of a culture in which information overload leads to the cultivation of ignorance. It sounds a bit odd put like that, but the fact is that any system dealing with huge amounts of input has to select, and thus to ignore a proportion of what’s flooding in. There’s a good case for thinking that the ‘modern’ human being has lost various sensory skills that would have been active a few thousand years ago. Even today, we can still just about see in some human populations like the San in Southern Africa evidence of kinds of attunement to environmental stimuli that we just don’t have any longer.
The dangerous and disturbing thing about our present situation, though, is that we end up not simply failing to notice things about our overall physical environment (bad enough, in all conscience) but failing to see the distinctiveness and mysteriousness of human agents. When we speak about seeing the ‘image of God’ in human beings, we don’t (or we shouldn’t!) mean that in certain respects like freedom and intelligence human beings are ‘quite like’ God. It’s more that when I really look at another human being I’m faced with something so different from me and so unfathomable that it’s like looking into the unfathomable and endless mystery of God. I can’t own it, I can’t predict its future, I can’t reproduce its inner workings.
It’s the very opposite of ‘algorithm’ thinking. It’s tied up with the revolutionary biblical idea that everyone has an unrepeatable gift to give to the community of God’s children; and with the rather stunning biblical image of a God who ‘calls the stars by name’ – a God who is completely committed to a unique relationship with every being that has been created. This is the God who is a loving and patient witness to the whole of the history of each one of us – who, in St Augustine’s phrase, is always at home in us, even when we are far away from ourselves and from reality.
A really human and humane education – let alone a Christian education – should be turning our minds and imaginations back to this dimension of wonder at the unfathomable differences of which the world is composed. It’s all the more shabby and scandalous that anyone should think we can deal with educational discernment by means of statistical calculation; and all the more necessary for communities of faith to hold on stubbornly to that conviction about the divine image – what a modern Russian saint called the ‘terror’ of the mystery in the face of the neighbour, which is also the doorway into the terrible and glorious mystery of God.