COMMENTARY Avoiding human bug zappers

“Bugs are so dumb.”

That was my immediate takeaway from a video that showed up on my Twitter feed, advertising a new kind of light-based bug zapper. Apparently, the device uses light to draw even the most pesky of pests — mosquitoes — to their electrified death.

Mosquitoes generally avoid most bug zappers, because they’re not attracted to UV light. But because of the particular frequency of the light used by this device, it seems that the mosquitoes don’t really have much of a choice in the matter: they see the light, it causes a response in their nervous system, and they promptly fly straight toward the worst possible outcome for them, “like a moth to a flame,” as it were.

Again, bugs are dumb.

Of course, it dawned on me almost immediately after having this thought that I had watched the bug zapper video amid yet another 30-minute Twitter “death scroll,” a sort of mindless perusal of the social media app, spurred on by the promise of dopamine hits in the form of “likes” and an ever-renewable stream of content. It’s the kind of thing that I don’t want to do, that I know isn’t a good use of my time moral theology at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., so he could become a seminary professor in the subject in St. Paul. Father Ryan happily did as he was told and audited economics and sociology lectures on the side. After his first degree was completed, Archbishop Ireland forgot to reassign Father Ryan, so Father Ryan took the initiative to start an additional theology degree, staying on at Catholic University for another two years. In 1902, Father Ryan returned to St. Paul to teach moral theology and became well-known for suggesting practical applications. but find myself repeatedly doing anyway.

In other words, I’d run straight into my own human version of the bug zapper.

Of course, the human being’s cerebral cortex is a bit more complicated than a mosquito’s; and we also have this thing called “free will.” But make no mistake about it: TikTok, Instagram and the like are designed to hack our minds, recaching lower and lower on our brain stems to remove discretion and decision-making from the equation as much as possible.

Social media may be especially pernicious, but it’s only one form of the many “human bug zappers” all around us today. An oversaturation of addictive elements, from sex to sugar, screens to shopping, and marketing and technological reinforcement has left many of us at the mercy of stimuli around us. As Thomas Merton once opined, our society’s “whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible.”

I don’t think we like to admit that there are things in our lives that have this kind of effect on us, easily overriding our willpower, preying upon our impulses, and prompting us to do things that we’d rather not. Poor impulse control seems like an affront to our idea that we’re in charge or at least that, with God’s grace, our moral defects and any difficulties in living the good life are supposed to disappear overnight.

However, denying our weaknesses and our susceptibility to certain temptations and triggers isn’t virtuous or holy. In fact, it’s the opposite.

Our Catholic faith teaches that though God forgives our sins, the effects of original sin and concupiscence can still linger. This is why we’re warned about “near occasions of sin” and resolve during our act of contrition to “avoid whatever leads me to sin.” And of course, Christ tells us that “if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away,” because “it is better for you to enter into life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into fiery Gehenna” (Mt 18:19).

The result of his second degree was a well-respected book, “A Living Wage.” In the book, and for the rest of his life, Father Ryan argued that both the dignity of families and the economy necessitated a “living wage” that would enable a working man to make enough money to comfortably support his family.

In 1910, he calculated a living wage to be $700 for someone living in a rural area. (That would be like suggesting $100,000 today.) Father Ryan believed that this would drive the economy, shifting money from the pockets of the wealthy, who couldn’t possibly spend all of it, to those who would spend it immediately on things they needed, increasing employment. Higher wages would also help families avoid the sinful use of birth control, another of Father Ryan’s regular topics of conversation.

Father Ryan was a committed capitalist (contrary to the insinuations of conservative opponents) who believed that business owners had a duty to pay their employees a living wage before distributing profits to shareholders. Father Ryan’s work was vindicated twice by Pope Pius XI: once when his encyclical “Quadragesimo Anno” was published in 1931 arguing many of the same points, and once in 1933, when the pope elevated Father Ryan to domestic prelate with the title of Right Reverend Monsignor.

By then, Msgr. Ryan was a nationally known figure and a resident of Washington, D.C., where he lived from 1915 until 1945 and worked as a professor and public theologian. Msgr. Ryan’s death was front page news in Minneapolis and Washington in September 1945. After a funeral by Archbishop John Murray in St. Paul, Msgr. Ryan was buried with his family in Calvary Cemetery, also in St. Paul. His legacy lives on in the name of the John A. Ryan Institute for Catholic Social Thought at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, which seeks to apply Catholic thought to social concerns.

Luiken is a Catholic and a historian with a doctorate from the University of Minnesota. She loves exploring and sharing the hidden histories that touch our lives every day.

Of course, if you can avoid the sin by removing something a bit less important to your life and wellbeing than your eyes, you should. In our society of human bug zappers, so often the challenge is to give ourselves the space needed to grow in virtue and freedom. It’s about working smarter, not harder, because the moment of free choice often isn’t when we’ve already locked our eyes on the alluring lights of our own personal bug zapper, but rather when we’re deciding whether to put ourselves in its vicinity in the first place.

For me and my Twitter death scrolls, this means deleting the platform from my phone, and sometimes even using an app to set restrictions on how often I can use the platform on my laptop. It might be an inconvenience, especially because I use Twitter for my work as a journalist, but it’s a step I’ve taken to help me live more freely.

We all have our own personal bug zappers in our lives, and thus need our own plan of attack to avoid them. It may involve a bit of intentionality, and maybe even some sacrifice, but ultimately, it’s worth it. I’m sure if a mosquito had a similar option to limit his exposure to the death-dealing bug zapper, he’d take it, too.