Eyes in the Age of Apple Vision

Illich, eye contact as gift, the gaze of Christ

I don’t know if y’all heard, but Apple did a thing last week, announcing its first major product since the Apple Watch in 2015.

It’s called Apple Vision Pro—and you can buy one, if you so please, sometime next year, for $3,499 (and not a dollar more).

The announcement for Apple Vision Pro has me thinking about eyes, for obvious reasons:

• first, because, um, “vision” is in the name.

• second, because the product, um, goes over your eyes.

• third, because much of Apple’s initial advertisement focuses on human eyes.

On his newsletter “Back Again,” Ian Harber captured some screenshots from the ad:

The gift of eye contact

The final photo above—of a father capturing a **3-D memory** (now a thing that exists) of his kids playing on the floor—has been the subject of much consternation. And understandably so.

As New York Times reporter Joe Bernstein tweeted:

This prompted L.M. Sacasas to say: “(this image) suggested the possibility that the worst thing about the age of digital media will turn out to be how hard it became to look one another in the eye.” He turns to Ivan Illich, who bemoaned the loss of eye contact due to new technology as early as the 1990s—long before Apple Vision, or even the **eyePhone** :) :) :)

He writes:

“Today,” Illich explained… “my main concern is in which way […] technology has devastated the road from one to the other, to friendship.”…

Illich riffed on the etymology of the word pupil and how it pointed to the image of oneself we can sometimes catch in the watery blackness at the center of another’s eye.

“It is from your eye that I find myself,” Illich argues. “It is you making me the gift of that which Ivan is for you … I cannot come to be fully human unless I have received myself as a gift and accepted myself as a gift of somebody who has, well today we say distorted me the way you distorted me by loving me.”

Illich feared that the proliferation of screens was occluding the road to friendship that ran from eye to eye.

…Illich argued that the task before us is to resist whatever threatens (or promises) to remove ‘the thou which you are and from whose gaze, whose pupilla in the eye, I receive myself.’”

Illich says eye contact is a gift because it tells me who I am. It gives me an identity. “It is from your eye that I find myself.”

Illich, looking highly professorial

The vulnerability of eye contact

That being said, eye contact is—shall we say—scary. As Walker Percy put it:

“Why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone's finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?”

Good question.

Sacasas calls the gaze of another “a demanding gift” that requires “vulnerability.” Indeed, that is precisely why it is so tempting to veer away, to gaze into screens, and “to take all the exits on the road that leads from eye to eye.”

Thus, to take the road less travelled requires a refusal to turn to the right or to the left (screens), but instead choosing to remain on the narrow path of human eye contact—and therefore human connection.

The argument seems to go:

1. The only way to forge human connection is through the eye.

2. Screens occlude eye contact.

3. Therefore in the digital age, the “weak” will give in to screens; and the “brave” will resist screens and preserve eye contact at all costs.

Those who don’t do eye contact

But what of those who don’t “do” eye contact? What about people like my son?

It’s common knowledge that autistic persons do not seek out or maintain eye contact as much as the typical individual. (As with most “autism traits,” this is not always true, but it is mostly true. And now, we actually think we know why: upon eye contact, certain parts of the autistic brain don’t “light up” in the same way. It’s just not as meaningful or stimulating.)

One of the early signs our son was autistic was this “deficit” of eye contact.

As his father, I confess: not being able to make eye contact with my son was hard for me then, and it is hard for me now. It exacerbates what Marilynne Robinson writes in Gilead: “A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.” Even if Sam were neurotypical, there would be many parts of him I would never know—rooms of his house into which I would never be let in. I grieve the fact that I have never been able to enjoy sustained eye contact with him for longer than four seconds. I grieve the fact that he finds lawnmowers and bubbles more visually stimulating than my eyes.

That being said, he has taught me that I can never insist upon eye contact—whether his or anyone else’s.

As one autism advocate writes: “If the aim is to make the autistic person appear to be a listening non-autistic person, this is best achieved by encouraging them to make eye contact.” (Which is to say, if the goal is to make them like me.) But on the other hand, “If the aim is to communicate successfully, this is best achieved by allowing the autistic person to listen with averted gaze.”

And this gets to my problem with the argument of Sacasas and others (as I read them) as they bemoan the loss of human connection via technology: there is an overinsistence upon eye contact—an insistence upon a particular form of human connection and human knowing. There is a posture of demand that seems to deny or contradict the giftedness of human eye contact—or of human connection in general. It cannot be coaxed or coerced. As Paul writes, “Love does not insist on its own way.”

“Looking at him, loved him”

That is what makes the eyes of Christ so remarkable.

The writings of Erasmo Lleiva-Merikakis have awakened me to the frequency with which Jesus gazes upon another in the Gospels. To list two examples:

• In Luke 19, he encounters the lonely and desperate Zacchaues, who has climbed a tree in order to “see” Jesus; and Luke recounts, “And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up…”.

• In Mark 10, he encounters the confused and duplicitous Rich Young Man; and Mark recounts, “And Jesus, looking at him, loved him…”.

But Jesus does not demand others look back at him. Especially in his encounter with the rich man, I am struck by the freedom Jesus offers him. He looks at him, but does not demand he look back. He tells the man to “sell everything” and follow him—but when the man declines, he doesn’t force him. It is similar to his posture with the Prodigal Son; as many have pointed out, the Father in Jesus’ story lets the son leave.

rich young ruler

Looking for faces

In The Cure of Souls, Dr. Curt Thompson writes, “We all are born into the world looking for someone looking for us, and… we remain in this mode of searching for the rest of our lives.”

Every parent knows this to be true—literally. The eyes of babies scan the room looking for a face looking for them. Even in the first hours of life, newborns spend an hour in what doctors call “quiet alert”—even if they can see no further than a foot, they are looking for faces.¹

For this reason, we should never tire in our quest to establish connection with others—whether our children, our spouses, our aging parents, and even those we would rather not look at—because they need our face.

And because they need our face, we must “clear the path” from eye to eye—not being afraid to opt out (quietly and not culture war-ry) of things like Apple Vision because we don’t believe they offer the life we’re looking for.

But how can we maintain our principles while respecting the freedom of another person? We must long for human connection, and give the gift of it ourselves—but we can never insist upon it or demand it from others.

In the Age of Apple Vision, there will be times when we want to look at our children, and they will want to look at screens, and that will have to be okay. We can continue looking at them and loving them—even if they do not want to look at us.

1. From Andy Crouch, The Life We’re Looking For, page 3.