In a recent conversation about the world’s most beloved fairy tales, Jonathan Pageau commented on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the mystical object that captures the attention of the queen: a magic mirror. “Mirror, mirror on the wall,” says the queen, expecting always to hear she’s the fairest in the land, only one day to discover there’s someone who threatens her supremacy. Jealousy then drives her hunt for Snow White.
For thousands of years, humans have imagined the power of being drawn to an object that props up one’s pride. In the story of Snow White, the looking glass serves two purposes: (1) to flatter the queen by affirming her beauty and (2) to help her keep an eye on the activity of others, so she can maintain control over her kingdom. Flattery and surveillance.
The 1937 Disney classic shows the mirror mounted on a wall. But other versions of the story show the queen looking into a handheld mirror.
Today, imagination is reality. I have a magic mirror in my pocket. And so do you.
Tell Me I’m Beautiful
Your phone is designed every day, every hour, to tell you that you’re the center of the universe. If your phone is your world, and if the settings and apps are tailored to you and your interests, then with you at all times is a world that revolves around you. No wonder we find it hard to set the phone aside. Nothing else has the same effect of putting us at the center. Nothing else makes us feel more in control, more Godlike, more knowledgeable, more connected.
The phone is like the vanity mirror, a temptation to pride. Its power is like that of the pool that captured Narcissus, who pined after the reflection of his face until it led to his destruction.
“The deeper danger of our screens,” Andy Crouch says, “is flattery. Our screens, increasingly, pay a great deal of attention to us. They assure us that someone, or at least something, cares.”
The curse of this flattery is self-imprisonment, the locking up of one’s self in the smallest chamber of the mind. Like the queen, constantly looking in the mirror and hoping to see her beauty, we lose the ability to lose ourselves in pleasures that don’t require constant self-awareness. We never find ourselves because we can’t lose ourselves.
We can’t enjoy the beauty of nature except as a backdrop for a selfie. We can’t retreat into a thought-provoking book because the phone is always there, beckoning us with distraction and flattery. We can’t piece together thoughts and express our feelings in writing or conversation because our hearts have shriveled and our minds flit from one topic to another before being drawn back to the magic mirror, like a mosquito to a lamppost.
Show Me My World
The phone doesn’t only flatter us as we construct a sense of online identity; it also, like the magic mirror in Snow White, helps us maintain constant surveillance of our social circles, our little kingdoms in which we all seek to maintain supremacy. Whether it’s the number of likes and comments on Instagram, the virality of an entertaining video on TikTok, the fist-bump of “ratio-ing” someone on Twitter, or the amassing of followers and “engagement” on Facebook—we’re all participants in a massive social experiment that casts us all as the stars of our own shows, a veritable Truman Show except that we’re in on the gag and enjoy the attention.
When your sense of flattered identity gets too tied to this kind of vigilant surveillance of your social hierarchy, you cannot help but become discouraged or depressed when someone else vies for supremacy. The vanity of the queen in the story of Snow White doesn’t stop with self-absorption; it descends into jealousy and rage. Because, after all, the magic mirror does more than tell you how fair and lovely you are—it informs you of people fairer and lovelier still.
When you scroll through posts of friends and family who always seem to be living their best lives; when you see peers whose careers have taken off in ways yours hasn’t; when you notice how colleagues seem wealthier, stronger, livelier, happier; you become aware that you’re not the greatest. The magic mirror flatters you, then flattens you.
And, just like the queen, we’re primed for a soul-destroying jealousy, a seething sense of envy in response to our feelings of deflation and discouragement—sometimes dipping into depression, often erupting into vitriol. The queen cannot celebrate the beauty of another; she must take it down.
Perhaps this is why the online world of social media is a cauldron of vices masquerading as virtues, with inordinate energy spent tearing down others. We grow increasingly incapable of celebrating the good we see in others because beauty has been reduced to a tool of competition, a zero-sum game that leaves no room for generosity of spirit. Having spent so much time gazing into our magic mirrors—having grown accustomed to constant flattery and vigilant surveillance—the deadly sin of vanity impoverishes our spirits and shrivels our souls.
Look out the Window
A growing number of sociologists, psychologists, pastors, and theologians recognize the dangers of social media and the effects of the phone, particularly for adolescents. But we’d do well to expand our concerns beyond the mental health challenges of teenagers to see how almost everyone today, no matter their age, is too tightly connected to their magic mirror. We’re more chained than we realize.
The magic mirror tells us a false story and slowly transforms us into shells of the humans God has called us to be. We like to think we’re Snow White. It’s more likely we’re the evil queen.
What’s the solution? A world of windows, not mirrors. Habits of mind and heart that lead us to look through windows to the glories of something other than ourselves and to see through the temptations and tendencies of the mirrors all around us.
Spiritual vitality involves turning away from self and toward God, the daily exercise of remembering that we were made to know and love God, that we were made to be known and loved by God, and that God (not us) is at the center of all things. We look through the windows of God’s world and God’s Word until we see the beauty of his creation and redemption. Only there will we find lasting contentment. Only there will we see how our own story finds a place in the epic he’s crafting.
There’s more magic in the world than in your mirror. The world outside our window is enchanted, if only we have eyes to see.
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