A Modest Interior

Feminism, AI, and the Danger of a Superficial Life 

By Chava Green, PhD

[The following is my first messy tangle of thoughts about a topic I have been thinking a lot about: modesty as a path to interiority and an antidote to the digital age. Please send me your thoughts as I begin to develop these ideas! my email is chava@thehasidicfeminist.com]

The Crisis of the Interior

Recent popular books have made the claim that our primary agency comes from our ability to control our attention. Distraction becomes the linchpin of the loss of self, of identity, and of individuality. Without focus, we are swept along in the viral trend of the moment without an anchor in reality as it truly is. This narrative is dangerous because it is still shallow. Focus is neutral. Slowing down, unplugging, going off-grid– all of these solutions to the danger of distraction are ultimately hollow because they do not replace social media, the internet or AI with something of substance. Without that alternative, they fail for most people because the allure of the technology is too great for anything less than drastically changing your lifestyle to combat. 

In fact, my ultimate argument will not be to unplug or get off social media. There is no doubt that having very strong safeguards around it, and severely limiting your use, are going to be beneficial for the system of values I will suggest you replace it with; however, technology within the context of interiority can ultimately be used as a tool. It must be seen for what it is– a technology– which at its root comes from the Greek term for a craft, an art, a useful process that culminates in the creation of something that requires skill. There are plenty of uses of technology that have benefited society. These are skills I am glad to be relieved of performing for myself. I am not opposed to progress. The question is whether we remain the ones directing and using the technology or if it begins to use us. I am not talking philosophically here. There may be a tech elite that will be directing the technology, but my question is whether the vast majority of people will simply fall within its prey as something to be bought and mobilized. 

If distraction is not the root evil of social media, then what is? The argument I will make in this book is that the root evil of social media and AI is superficiality.  This does not originate with this particular technology but rather it is a manifestation of a broader set of ills that have been plaguing society since the loss of an interior life. Perhaps we can say that it is both a manifestation of this loss and a means of accelerating this loss. The process I am talking about has been referred to by many names and sourced in many large-scale events: the Enlightenment, the disenchantment of society, the Industrial Revolution, the rise of capitalism, the sexual revolution, the digital age, etc. Each of these events or processes have played a role in distancing us as humans from a core experience of the world as magical. We all know that we are alienated from the land, the people, the place, the soil, the hope, and the good that is or was once possible to know. Now it can feel like a rebellion against the world to “reconnect” to the earth. But even this has been captured by the language of a trend. Real authenticity is practically impossible. Ben Stiller said once in a podcast that he remembers the 90s as a time when everyone was talking about whether or not to “sell out.” Nowadays, that’s the goal– to monetize your “art,” your music, and ultimately yourself. There is no shame in this, this is the whole point. 

The problem is that we have arrived at superficiality as a worldview. The superficial is all there is. “What you see is what you get.” Some of the content on social media plays on this very idea, like the cakes that look like regular objects. The whole joke of the skit is that someone thinks it is a phone and then they put it to their ear or face and then they get smeared with icing. The point is that we take things at face value. We don’t expect the inside to be anything other than what it seems. In fact, we rarely know what the “inside” even is. The irony is that nothing is at all as it seems anymore. We know this so deeply that we shy away from trying to deal with it. We “know” that the influencer on social media is fake– made up, edited, distorted by a filter, only showing us one glamorous aspect of their lives– but we eat it up. We even think that the real moments, the authentic moments, the times they “let down their guard” are more special because of this. But even then, we know it is bullshit. 

The problem is we have no language to talk about why this is a problem. So, it sort of doesn’t feel like a problem. In fact, the problem is that we do not have an embodied practice of interiority. We have nothing in our lives that draws us back to our body and off the screen, we have no safe haven within to return to.  The relativism promoted by modernity, in which all truths are valid, where “sex work is work” or “men who feel like women are women,” has burned the bridge to reach the essence of reality. The essence of reality is true on every plane and at every time and in every place. Does that sound like an impossible thing to believe? That is because the posture of modernity is doubt. Paul Kingsnorth calls modernity a way of seeing. I think it is a way of doubting. 

Without the belief that there is an inner truth of reality, the inner core of the self is also impossible to access. If the world is chance and randomness and accident of some atoms bumping into each other, then what makes up your core? How can you posit a wellspring of inherent value within yourself if there is no such aspect to the world? The recent talk about a religious revival or a return to the Christian basis of the West is a distraction again from the main point: the world has a source in meaning and purpose. In English, we call this idea G-d, but it has many names in various languages and traditions. The point is that there is a beginning, middle and end. The point is that there is direction and telos. The point is that you matter because you are part of a meaningful world. 

Modesty is the embodied practice that makes these ideas real. Modesty takes these concepts and makes them a daily meditation. Modesty changes your relationship to your body and to the body of the world– the part you see and interact with. Modesty is a technology, a craft, a training, in developing an interiority. Modesty changes the superficial layer of self to be a portal to what is inside. Modesty reminds us over and over and over that the external is only the peel of the orange, the inedible, the thing that will ultimately be discarded. Modesty is a reminder that sexuality is connected to self, to essence, to creation, to a baby, to pleasure as a relationship to other, not as an end in and of itself. Modesty manipulates the surface to become porous rather than ensnaring.

Although my personal definition of modesty comes out of my Jewish faith and practice, I am not referring in this book to the legal codes of modesty within Orthodox Judaism. I am not suggesting that every woman start wearing a long skirt, highneck shirt and covering her hair after she gets married. This book is about modesty as a social norm and set of values. It is about what happens when we talk about the body in new ways, when we begin to understand the components of a soul, when we actually want a more truthful life, when we put boundaries around sexuality in order to save it from destruction and save ourselves from it destroying us. This is not modesty for women in some form of purity discourse or to protect them from men. Those are still surface layer visions of modesty as clothing or as directly linked to sexuality. Modesty is a posture that pushes back against doubt as a foundation for a life. It takes life seriously and accepts that things mean something. 

I am in an academic group working on issues in the social world of Orthodox Jews. One week the talk was about modesty. I noticed that the secular Jews, and the ones who had left the religious world in particular, talked about modesty as a form of men’s social control over women. Obviously, this emerges from the feminist literature along these lines. I believe there is a big difference between saying that modesty itself is a form of men’s social control over women and saying that modesty has been, or is currently, used by men to control women. Certainly there is the danger of the latter and there are no dearth of historical and contemporary examples of this. Unfortunately, this has deeply tainted modesty as a practice and makes any attempt to speak of it in a new light look like a “reclamation,” an “apologetics,” a “rebranding,” or, even more insidious, a “false narrative of empowerment.” I reject these parameters around what modesty can mean for both men and women, as well as the feminist premise that men and women are eternally attempting to wrest control for themselves. There are a lot of bad people in this world, but to move past limiting stereotypes we need to start talking more about the badness and less about the people. 

I also want to acknowledge at the outset that the actual practice of modesty is very complex when looked at in the context of children’s moral education. The terms of enforcing, teaching, and internalizing discourses of modesty have not been done very well in many religious communities and this has led to harm, violence and pain. I hope this rethinking of modesty will eventually trickle down into the broader ways that conservative communities think about mundane things like dress codes in a world that is much, much more complex than skirt length or “protecting men from their sexual urges.” The argument in this book is that modesty must be the result of a rich inner world and that the embodiment of values is part of what makes up the values themselves; however, this argument also implies that modesty without an inner value system is more than useless, it brings us right back to a superficial worldview. 

This is all exceptionally vital at this moment in our collective human history. With the advent of AI entering our daily lives, we are in serious danger of losing the inner world. When young people (or old people for that matter) start to think that skills or creations or work is pointless because AI can do it better, faster and easier, then we are pulling the silky curtain of humanity farther and farther away from the individual. The luscious voice within you that says, ‘I can create something’ or ‘I have something to give that cannot be replaced’ rings hollow. This is the danger we face. The antidote to this is building an inner life.  An inner life is a place of maturing, of growth, of development and learning, of self and selflessness, of long-term progress and joy, of rebirth, of freedom. An inner life is the ultimate response to the superficial. 

The book is also about feminism because there was a time when feminism was concerned with the objectification of women. There was a time when feminism was thinking critically and productively about sex, sexuality, and safety. There was a time when feminism was thinking expansively about freedom beyond an act of resistance. Much of the focus on these issues has fallen away from the core work of feminism as it has lost purchase in the grounds of embodiment, gender as a “real thing,” and sex as anything other than permission to have pleasure. I tried to write a paper once in graduate school about maternity in feminist thought and my sources ended in the 90s. The pregnant female body is too essentialist (and far away from gender studies graduate programs) to become the fount of feminist theory it once tried to be. I make the argument here that when we begin to string together the concepts of interiority, embodiment, modesty, truth, spirituality, the higher echelons of the soul and a life lived in relation to others, sexuality reconnects to reproduction in ways that are powerful and productive. This also links the contemporary “free for all” feminist frameworks around sex to their direct result in the sexual exploitation of minors, of the disenfranchised, and of the insecure. Modesty brings responsibility and maturity back to the table when we talk about sex. 

This book begins with a brief history of how we arrived at this moment of upheaval in how we understand what it means to be human by following the histories of two actors in this process: the birth of the personal computer and the rise of anti-essentialism in feminist thought. There are probably endless combinations of factors that could be plowed to bring clarity to our present situation, but these are the two that I find most apparent and, regarding feminism, one I know quite well. I explore how these two major technological and social evolutions result in a superficial relationship with our material world. Then I look at modesty as an antidote to this perilous situation. Within this discussion is a look at what freedom has meant philosophically and theoretically, and how this sifts down into everyday assumptions about what it means to “do what you want.” I draw on my expertise in Jewish mysticism, which I argue has important elements that can be read as a psychological source text, in order to give a radically different approach to freedom. This is a freedom rooted in a dual human nature that contains a base, animalistic element and a higher, moral element. I take a detour to unpack what it means to give the reigns of society and oneself to the animal within and how capitalism and social media feed off of the instincts and desires of the animal aspect of being human. This is where some important repercussions about sexuality are explored 

Modesty, with this groundwork, becomes an embodied practice away from the animal within and the superficial without. It is a connection to interiority with major social ramifications. I end by returning to AI to think about the no-man’s land between the animal body and the moral soul that is the realm of pure intellect. What happens when we externalize human intelligence divorced both from the experience of embodiment and from the connection to morality and interiority? This is not a world we want to see materialize. This is the moment to recenter on the interior, on the soul and ultimately on our mission here as humans– to make a coarse world something divine.