The first few hours were a bit disappointing. West Virginia and Pennsylvania offered little in the way of Tesla sightings, as they also offered little in the way of the wealth that produces them. Things were not much better when we reached Ohio, alas, and by the time we pulled into our hotel in Shipshewana, Indiana that night, my daughter had only made a few marks on her notebook page.

Fortunately, when morning dawned we discovered a more rewarding alternative: finding ourselves in the heart of Indiana Amish country, we would now begin counting horse-drawn buggies instead. Before we reached I-90 we had spotted 26 such carriages; the Tesla tally, by contrast, didn’t really start to pick up until we reached the North Chicago suburbs.

It was only a couple of days after our trip that Pope Leo XIV released his new encyclical on the social doctrine of the church and its application to the digital age, Magnifica Humanitas. What, the encyclical asked, should Christians and other people of goodwill do in response to the promise and challenges of this rapidly changing world and its astonishing technologies, especially AI?

Well, what would the Amish do, I wondered? We know what they would do in response to a Tesla, should it ever occur to them to consider allowing their members to own one. They would not respond reflexively; instead, as individual communities, they would discern through prayer, careful consideration, and deliberation whether or not to allow Tesla ownership as part of their particular Ordnung. As part of their approach (here’s a quick run-down), they would ask whether the innovation in question would draw them closer to God and each other or draw them away from Christian principles. And then together they would decide on (and abide by) a rule.

Some of the common Amish decisions against technologies may seem insignificant to us, of course; we would never spend time worrying about whether shirt buttons are morally dangerous. But we have our own tech issues to consider. It does not seem insignificant to worry that smartphones might ruin our enjoyment of face-to-face conversation, for example, or that AI bots might educate our children into inhumane practices or philosophies.

As the new encyclical explains, these technologies pose significant threats to humane society as well as offering opportunities. “AI can be a valuable tool and, at the same time,” Pope Leo writes, “[call] for a measured and vigilant approach” (3.100). We must consider A.I. without fear, the encyclical urges, but still with great attention and careful discernment, for “we cannot consider AI to be morally neutral” (3.104). Leo goes on to suggest that Pope St. John Paul II’s question about whether a particular technology makes life “more human” is a good place to start in our discernment about new technologies (3.129, quoting Redemptor Hominis). The encyclical also discusses the broad application of the Church’s social doctrine to these matters at considerable length, reminding us that the ancient principles of Christianity are relevant even in this far-flung millennium.

I’m glad to see all of this, as calling the myriad actors in a difficult situation to virtuous discernment is one of the most important things that a spiritual leader can do. Yet as Leo notes, even those who are creating these technologies lack full understanding of how they work and seem reluctant to discipline their development wisely. How can ordinary people and communities, not to mention lumbering, inefficient governments and profit-driven corporations, possibly keep up?

It’s hard enough for me to discern how to handle a laptop or a smartphone so that its temptations don’t overwhelm me; I can’t possibly wisely discern about every new form of AI that pops up on my screen or in my life and offers to solve my problems. It’s too many decisions to make, with too little information—and yet in aggregate, these decisions matter greatly not just for my quality of life but for the dignity and wellbeing of my family and community. And since we know that the companies that develop and market these technologies are not animated by wisdom or concern for the well-being of, say, the schoolchildren whom they deliberately distract with YouTube videos—well, I’m not sure I have it in me to be vigilant enough to keep things straight, even in a community setting. I believe in nuance, but that is more than a full-time job, and most people will eventually just give up.

In other words, it may be too late for us to sit down and consider hooks-and-eyes, and then laces, and then buttons, because by the time we’ve spent a single hour on the first of these, the techbros will have invented not just the zipper, but the AI-seamless-fastener-blood-pressure-regulating-girlfriend-suspenders-educate-your-kids-bot. We might need to make some kind of decision about fasteners overall, rather than thinking about them one-by-one.

We might also remember, however, the Amish approach to categorical discernment: when the Amish rejected owning and driving cars categorically long ago, that actually left them with the space they needed to discern when they might ride in one. So if they really were to start to discern about Teslas in particular someday, they wouldn’t be starting from square one: they’d already have an understanding of the nature of cars and how they interact with human beings. Maybe we, too, need stronger principles about categories and applications of technology to begin with and only then will we be able to practically apply nuanced discernment to specific cases.

For example, if we focus in education on catching our schools up with technology and promoting digital literacy, as Magnifica Humanitas implies we ought, we skip the step of asking ourselves what role (if any) generative AI (for example) ought to play in education, and instead just start chasing after it. At the speed of the chase, we can’t discern much at all about individual applications and technologies—we just adopt and adapt. We have ceded control; we are no longer making real choices; we are thinking about tech from within its own framework of instant acceptance and constant motion.

But if we think about the nature of AI when applied to education, and whether or not it’s overall trustworthy and enriching, then we can develop a principle to start from that will allow us to actually discern about particulars. Such a principle would establish whether we allow AI into schooling—with some carefully discerned exceptions—or we do not allow AI to significantly influence the classroom—with some carefully discerned exceptions. To use the car analogy, the Amish need to know first whether cars are generally good to integrate into our community life—and only then can they practically discern about specifics like occasionally riding in them.

I’m grateful to the Pope for his call to principled and humane responses to the digital age. AI is moving very quickly, and we do need to know what our principles should be if we choose to move along with it. But we also need to make that choice to begin with in various categories, and for that we need to understand how human nature and AI interact overall, not just what questions to ask of AI as we adopt it. Practically speaking, to maintain and enrich a humane society, we may need to find ways to respond to technological innovations that are somehow both nuanced and categorically decisive—else I suspect that we, like the passengers in the North Chicago Teslas, may find that we are no longer really driving.

Image Credit: Randy Steele

“Cultivating a Healthy Realism” is a small section toward the end of Magnifica Humanitas. It has only one paragraph, number 218. It begins by saying that “We are in need of a healthy realism that avoids both political idealism and cynicism.”

Whether we turn on the news or not, the world seems to be spinning at an alarming pace. With AI, technology seems to be taking another great leap forward. Will the human cost resemble that exacted by Mao’s great leaps? In the United States, our political realm seems to be sinking ever further into the muck. Young people are showing signs of generational cognitive decline. Many people echo Yeats and suggest that “the center cannot hold.” Others might echo Jacob van Hoddis in “Weltende,” when he writes “The storm is here, a wild ocean has jumped / On land, the swollen dams have burst. / Most everyone has a cold. / Locomotives everywhere drop off bridges.”

As Leo XIV observes, in our troubling times, many of us turn to idealism or cynicism. We ignore signs of trouble or we ignore signs of life. He writes, “There is a kind of idealism that, in order to preserve its own worldview, tends to choose facts selectively, distorting and renaming them. Its proponents eventually inhabit a reality constructed to fit their own convictions. Conversely, there is also a debased form of realism that confuses observation with resignation, arguing that since force prevails, it will always prevail.” We can see both these tendencies at play in many areas of modern life. Sometimes we assume that everything will sort itself out and that surely some of the negative reports we are hearing are exaggerated. Sometimes we fixate on harms and cannot imagine having any hope for the future.

Magnifica Humanitas endorses another kind of realism. Here the pope travels down a somewhat unexpected path. He writes, “Authentic realism does not give up on changing the world; indeed, it starts by clearly identifying interests, fears, constraints and power dynamics, precisely in order to determine what can be achieved, and the measures needed to achieve it.” This realism does not give up on changing the world.

There is an entire discourse built around the idea that we should “stop trying to change the world.” Some people see in the urge to change the world the kind of obsession with ideals or with abstract nouns that has led to extreme political experiments. Others see it as the kind of foolhardy mission that leads to poor mental health outcomes. Even most idealists will admit the impossibility of achieving utopia. And conservatives will know that it certainly isn’t Burkean to try to change the world. For all these reasons, in many circles, it is decidedly unpopular to want to change the world, much less to try to change it. Instead, some kind of endurance of the world is preferred. If it cannot be entirely escaped, the neo-Stoics tell us, it should be ignored as much as possible.

Magnifica Humanitas does caution against some ways we may be tempted to try to change the world. This authentic realism “does not reduce politics to morality; neither does it surrender to violence. Instead, it seeks viable paths for making peace more than a mere word, through credible institutions, verifiable guarantees, patient negotiations, conflict prevention and the protection of civilians.” There is no endorsement of revolutionary violence or anything hurried. A proper method of change will be peaceful and patient, will involve institutions and not just powerful individuals, and will protect civilians.

There is a certain kind of hope in believing it is possible to change the world. And, in this case, hope opposed to a certain kind of hype. One of the main “arguments” we are facing with AI, and with many other things, is inevitability. Every day someone says the equivalent of “I don’t like it either, but what can you do?” We are told that, though we don’t have to like AI or the state of politics or the educational system or anything else, we will still need to accept them as they are. It’s inevitable.

Many people are simply fatalists about many things. And with regard to AI, especially, many of us have already surrendered. How often do we sound like Hemingway in Farewell to Arms? “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

To suggest that we should not give up on changing the world is to defy the inevitability of AI. We do not have to be fatalists about everything. Indeed, we ought not be.

Some readers have been disappointed that Magnifica Humanitas does not condemn AI or call for action against it. Yet this point on authentic realism makes it clear that the encyclical dismisses inaction and passivity. Christians, and all men and women of goodwill, can and should do more than try to survive these trying times. We can and should do more than shrug our shoulders.

Several times the encyclical reminds us of our various responsibilities and encourages action at different levels for the common good. Is this naïve optimism? While historians may be skeptical about changes in human nature, human history has been full of changes, many brought about by human activity, intentional or not. As the body of Christ, Christians have significantly contributed to such changes, often overturning longstanding traditions. In the Roman world, Christians redefined acceptable treatment of children. As Tom Holland’s book Dominion shows, Christianity transformed the Western world and gave birth to the dominant ethics that now span the globe. Christians led the abolitionist movement. It is a very good thing that many of the people involved in those historical moments did not give up on changing the world.

Magnifica Humanitas references Hannah Arendt several times, and Arendt’s concept of miracles is very relevant here. In “What is Freedom?” she describes miracles, performed by God or by humans, as “interruptions of some natural series of events, of some automatic process, in whose context they constitute the wholly unexpected.” These miracles are possible because of human freedom. It is always possible for someone to step out of line or interrupt some seemingly automatic process. The Christmas truce of 1914 was a miracle in this way. In 1962, Vasily Arkhipov performed this kind of miracle on a Russian submarine when he prevented the launch of nuclear weapons against the United States. Arendt believed “it is not in the least superstitious, it is even in the counsel of realism, to look for the unforeseeable and unpredictable, to be prepared for and expect ‘miracles’ in the political realm.” These things are seen as miracles, because “the more heavily the scales are weighted in favor of disaster, the more miraculous will the deed done in freedom appear; for it is disaster, not salvation, which always happens automatically and therefore always must appear to be irresistible.”

Magnifica Humanitas encourages us to not give up on changing the world, reminding us that disaster is not irresistible and an AI-dominated future is not inevitable. Certainly not in a world in which the Lord is at work. The encyclical’s authentic realism offers us a vision of reality that has space for Arendt’s miracles and God’s miracles, alongside a fair assessment of the world’s troubles. Leo XIV writes that authentic realism “starts by clearly identifying interests, fears, constraints and power dynamics, precisely in order to determine what can be achieved, and the measures needed to achieve it.” We can see in Magnifica Humanitas and its authentic realism a call to attention, a call to action, and an affirmation of hope.

Image Credit: Andrew Wyeth, “Christina’s World” (1948)

“This Is Why Your Groceries Are So Expensive.” Sandeep Vaheesan and Claire Kelloway detail how consolidation has hurt both eaters and growers of food and consider what could be done to improve the situation: “The entire U.S. food system is remarkably consolidated, exploitative and fragile. Two companies sold half of all fresh bread in 2020; two others controlled an estimated two-thirds of all baby formula in 2022; and two companies produced about 60 percent of all carrots in 2023. Result? Food prices remain elevated after rising about 30 percent between 2019 and 2025, as corporations took advantage of pandemic supply chain disruptions to raise prices and, critically, profits.”

“Can Utah Save the Great Salt Lake?” Shawn Regan describes the manifold benefits the Great Salt Lake provides and the cross-partisan effort to replenish it: “The Great Salt Lake is rapidly drying up. As the lake recedes, it exposes a vast lake bed laced with arsenic and other toxic metals both naturally accumulated and elevated by decades of industrial activity. When the wind picks up, it lifts these fine sediments and carries them toward the region’s booming cities. Researchers have found that the smallest particles, light enough to stay airborne for weeks, can penetrate deep into the lungs and are associated with higher rates of respiratory disease. On some days, this part of Utah records the worst air quality in the country.”

“The Future Belongs to Those Who Resist It.” Clare Coffey names the insidious kind of danger that smartphones and AI pose today and points to communities as the appropriate scale of resistance: “What is difficult, what is confounding, about our current moment is that, since the advent of the smartphone, we have been subject to powerful technologies of default, technologies of ubiquity. The crucial decision is not whether to amass and deploy, as in the nuclear era. Nor is it how to apportion the infrastructure that will determine the possibility horizon for future generations, as with the rise of the automobile. Most of the chronic civilizational damage that every day becomes harder to deny takes place in billions of diffuse moments without momentous stakes. The phone is everywhere; the phone is woven into the fabric of your social networks; the phone is useful for a hundred little tasks of everyday life. And there is nothing actually morally wrong or damaging, in any isolated moment, with taking the phone out of the pocket to while away five minutes.”

“What Bowling Green Does Not Forget.” The Dispatch has a wonderful series of essays titled “Where I’m From.” You might start with Amelia Christmas Gramling’s essay about Bowling Green, KY: “Rocky’s was two blocks away from the Salvation Army, four blocks from Western Kentucky University, five blocks from the county jail, and another 10 from the Barren River (and the homeless encampment under the Old Louisville Road bridge). Rocky’s was where I could and would run into Spoons, local panhandler, and Patti Minter, former state representative, in a single night (both, incidentally, fundraising for their cause).”

“Galahad and the Grail.” Boze Herrington celebrates Guite’s new book of Arthurian poetry: “Malcolm Guite maintains a healthy sense of the numinous – of what a character late in his new book, Galahad and the Grail, calls ‘the world’s bright edge,’ those sacred mysteries that defy tongue and pen. In Galahad, the first in a projected four-book series retelling the story of Logres in verse, he attempts to revive the Grail legend for a jaded and skeptical age. Unlike many contemporary authors, he has not sought to desacralize or deconstruct the old tales but to restore their ancient symbolic and religious edifice, like a contractor refurbishing a venerable and beloved house.”

“No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious.” If you think about it, it’s rather remarkable that a company valued at one trillion dollars operates on an obviously flawed view of their central product. Yet just because Anthropic has become very valuable (though not, yet, profitable) by pretending Claude is conscious doesn’t mean you have to humor their fantasy. Ted Chiang explains: “Being open to the possibility that LLMs are conscious is the same as being open to the possibility that Microsoft Word is conscious, or, more precisely, that multiple distinct consciousnesses are dormant in every Word document containing a conversational transcript, and that they are awakened every time the document is loaded. Should you consider the possibility that every time you open a Word document, you are bringing multiple conscious interlocutors into existence, and every time you close one, you snuff their existence out? No. Contemplating that scenario is not a good use of your time. Even if the Microsoft Office team employed a philosopher who said you shouldn’t be so certain, because consciousness is not well understood, that would not be sufficient reason for you to take this idea seriously. We don’t need to fully understand the nature of consciousness to definitively say that certain things are not conscious, and conversational transcripts fall in that category.”

“There Is Already a Word for the Deep Moral Failures of AI.” Tyler Austin Harper wonders if Christian categories are necessary to rightly condemn AI. I think he’s right, as my forthcoming book will make clear: “Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, then, that the critics, living and dead, who capture my unease about the AI revolution—who discuss it with appropriate moral gravity—are or were Christians. They are or were people comfortable using words like sin. They include Catholic writers such as the social critic Ivan Illich and the philosophers Charles Taylor and Jennifer Frey, as well as the Orthodox Substacker Paul Kingsnorth, the Presbyterian theologian Carl Trueman, and Pope Leo, with his new AI-focused encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas.”

“News from The Berry Center.” There’s a lot of good work going on in Henry County, KY thanks to the good folks at the Berry Center. They detail a bit of it in their spring newsletter.

In 1891, in response to the Industrial Revolution, Pope Leo XIII released an encyclical called Rerum Novarum, translated “New Things.” Industrialism brought profound social changes: work changed from subsistent farming to factories. Families moved from the countryside into packed cities. Trade between nations increased. The resultant shifts affected the human person, family, work, economic policies, and politics. Responding to these “New Things,” the Pope drew on principles from Christianity: fraternity between employees and employers, a just wage to buy private property, the state’s protection of those being abused.

From those industrial days, modern Catholic Social Teaching (CST) emerged. The world has gone through several iterations of “new things.” The world wars. The sexual revolution. The internet revolution. What CST attempts to do is to apply changeless Christian principles to these “new things” that we encounter. It’s not a list of rules or a mere list of principles but an effort to foster a distinct Christian life that brings good news in light of contemporary issues. Anna Rowlands calls CST a “profound social midwifery” giving birth to new ways of living considering the love found in the gospel. The church doesn’t have answers to all the social issues but, as Pius XII said, she should “point quietly to the values she has forged and which she places at the disposal of all for the solution of social problems.”

The day after Pentecost, a new Leo issued an encyclical called Magnifica Humanitas, magnificent humanity, to address the new AI revolution. Leo XIV takes technology and innovation back to the beginning at the Tower of Babel—an interesting image especially as Pentecost is often referred to as a reverse Babel. Leo, however, contrasts Babel with the image of Nehemiah rebuilding the Jerusalem wall by fostering a language of communion rather than uniformity—a language that perhaps prefigures the Pentecostal tongues of fire: distinct and particular yet universal. He warns of the “Babel syndrome,” “namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance” (para. 10). This syndrome isn’t necessarily new but is being applied in a new technology.

Christians must have different values than the reigning paradigm of any given moment. Leo references his predecessor, Pope Francis, on the technocratic paradigm where “the tendency to let the logic of efficiency, control and profit alone shape personal, social and economic decisions. This makes it clear that technology is not simply a tool. When it becomes the standard by which everything is judged, it begins to dictate what matters and what can be discarded, reducing creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency” (para. 92). We simply will not lead healthy or whole lives under a technocratic imagination.

Here, in addressing the imagination, is where Catholic Social Teaching does its best work. It’s not a matter of mere pragmatism or application. This element of CST can be frustrating for those who want to be told what to do. But encyclicals have different purposes. They are to help guide Christians in clear, gospel imaginations. There are (at least) two imaginations with which we build—two imaginations of how to be a human, raise a family, spend money, participate in statecraft, etc. The aim is to expose the ways a modern imagination has disordered our world and to paint an alternative path. It’s not just the ends that need to change because with a disordered imagination, a good end could be pursued with the wrong means. CST aims to lay out a gospel-oriented imaginative vision and then invite the lay apostolate to apply the principles.

To develop a different imagination, CST employs one foundation and several principles (sometimes called themes). The first half of Magnifica Humanitas reviews these central ideas.

At the heart of CST is the title of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical: magnificent humanity. Human dignity stems from being created in the image of God, and thus, we are bestowed with profound equality and resultant duties and rights—regardless of class, skin color, income, or ability. A right view of the human person—and protections around the person—founds a proper imagination. All of society—family, work, politics, economy, immigration, globalization—should be structured around and support the human, revealed fully in the person of Jesus. One of the interesting moves Leo makes in this most recent encyclical is tying limitations to magnificent humans. “Everything that appears as a ‘limit’ — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. And yet we must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them” (para 118).

To recognize the profound dignity of every human leads to the first principle: solidarity. If I recognize the human in myself, then I’m led to see it in all others. The way Pope Loe XIV talks about this in his recent encyclical is that a recognition of our limits leads to solidarity in compassion: “Indeed, precisely because we experience limits — vulnerability, suffering and failure — we can recognize the inviolable dignity of every person, both our own and that of others” (para 122).

The second principle is subsidiarity. If society is to be structured around the human, then decisions should be made closest to the humans they affect. Too often, policies are made from the top down in a one-size-fits-all approach. It’s not that decisions should never be made at a national level, but without mediating institutions, tyranny often results. This right level of decision-making leads to participation and communion.

The context of solidarity and subsidiarity leads to the common good, a term hotly debated within CST circles. Gaudium et Spees defines the common good as the “sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach fulfillment more fully and easily.” The common good is about sharing what we hold in common. If human being is about being with and being towards, then the common good guards and guides toward the goal of sociality. If I have a private good—say, some donuts—then once I pass out all my donuts, then there’s none left. A common good is different—like justice or love. These common goods don’t run out and, in fact, can only be enjoyed with others, so we should support policies and ways of life that encourage the exponential sharing of such common goods.

The last principle is social justice. Under this principle are sub-principles like the universal destination of goods and the preferential option for the poor. In essence, we can’t say a society or state or family or economy is good unless the poor are taken care of. We ought to be concerned with the poor because Jesus says this where he resides (Matt 25). God gifts the world enough to go around, and whatever we own privately is for the sake of others. As Pope Leo XIII affirmed in Rerum Novarum, private property is a good, but it’s a good that’s for sharing generously with others.

Motivated by these principles, we ought to imagine a different world. It’s not seeking to establish some utopia but to move our world in a more healthy and whole direction.

Encyclicals like Magnifica Humanitas aren’t for hot takes. I’m Protestant. I don’t think these documents are infallible. There are aspects to question and critique. But I can recognize that they are written from a wise and careful tradition of Christians reflecting on the truth of Scripture and striving to apply it to contemporary challenges. As such, we should sit with these words, because perhaps there is something to teach us.

Catholic Social Teaching has been called the best kept secret of the Catholic church. It seems like the secret is getting out, and for that, I’m glad.

Glossary

Common Good: Those goods which lead to human development, care, and respect.

Encyclical: A formal letter from the Pope to bishops and sometimes to the whole church or world. These form the foundation of Catholic Social Teaching but there are also apostolic exhortations (more practical and pastoral) and conciliar documents (a more collaborative document like those released around Vatican II) and homilies and speeches that are important for reflecting on biblical teachings that flesh out CST.

Human Dignity: The foundation of CST. Each person has unique and equal worth and value.

Lay Apostolate: Think something like “priesthood of all believers.” The lay people are tasked with infusing their lives with the gospel.

Solidarity: The social reality resulting from seeing human dignity. Solidarity connects us to one another, seeing each other as dignified and worthy of respect and love.

Social Justice: How the poor are treated should always be considered and respected.

Subsidiarity: One-size-fits-all approaches seldom work. A family or community has the right to make decisions that affect them. Decisions shouldn’t be made at the highest level but at the smallest. As such, we need mediating institutions so seldom found in modern life.

Universal Destination of Goods: God makes it rain on the just and the unjust. Goods should be given to the community in a way that everyone has enough to live a dignified life.

Image Credit: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, “The Tower of Babel” (1563)

Outrage has spread about stories of the technological onslaught: a proposed “hyperscale” data center in Utah that would consume vast amounts of energy and water and emit incredible amounts of heat; 49,000 people in the Lake Tahoe area losing their access to energy as their utility prepares to divert electricity to data centers; homeowners in Coweta County, Georgia fighting the threatened use of eminent domain to seize their properties for a new data center.

“The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam,” read a recent headline in the corporate-friendly, AI-adoring Wall Street Journal. The backlash is not confined to any one political party. A piece in the left-wing publication, Jacobin, argues that “the grassroots resistance to artificial intelligence data centers that is springing up in communities across the country outlines the kind of working-class coalition many of us on the Left have always dreamed of — a diverse, nonpartisan, top-bottom movement against Big Tech billionaires that has the potential to reshape American politics in incredibly positive ways.” (Interestingly, Jacobin also published an essay arguing against slowing down data center construction due to supposedly “serious equity concerns.”) The populist wing of the Republican Party is just as vociferously opposed to these massive, water-guzzling, energy-devouring machines being placed in their backyards, with the cause taken up by right-populist luminaries like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson.

Data centers touch a nerve on the right and left because they bring to a head pernicious trends that have been intensifying for decades: pollution and the overstretching of natural resources; the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of billionaires; the rising cost of energy and the hypocrisy of elites who have talked for years about climate change but now want to dramatically increase energy production for AI; mass surveillance and the erosion of human rights and civil liberties; the replacement of human labor and human creative activity by machines; the mismatch between the growth of GDP and corporate profits and the grinding down of the middle class, accompanied by the decline of overall human well-being; and the glaring absence of real democracy, as nobody ever voted for AI to take over our lives.

“People just feel as if they’re under siege,” said Republican Senator Josh Hawley, who has proposed some mild restrictions on data centers. It’s not just a feeling, though. AI data centers are, in fact, accelerating the dangerous trends listed above. What we feel is this sense of acceleration, even if we can’t exactly explain it.

AI advocates openly acknowledge, both bragging and warning (like a shot across the bow), that their technology is accelerating the transformation of modern life like never before. The ex-CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, gave a commencement address at the University of Arizona where he told students the “technological transformation” brought about by artificial intelligence will be “larger, faster and more consequential than what came before.” The crowd of students, worried about their own futures, responded with rounds of aggressive jeers and boos.

Current Google CEO Sundar Pichai has also warned society to “brace for impact” of AI acceleration. Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, has said, “AI progress is accelerating … it could overwhelm our ability to adapt.” He predicted “a radical acceleration that surprises everyone.”

But what does it mean for the “technological transformation” of society to accelerate? Regardless of what AI oligarchs would have us believe, the data center controversy illustrates the answer to that question for a simple reason: because we can actually map out the devastating effects—physical, biological, ecological—that the accelerating buildout of data centers has on us and our environment.

The key to understanding these effects is a concept the Big Tech barons like to throw around. As Amodei has said, “these systems are improving on an exponential curve.” Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, has likewise said, “AI is advancing at an exponential rate.” “The amount of computation we can do,” according to Huang, “is increasing exponentially.”

To understand what’s coming, then, we need to understand what these guys mean when they say AI is developing on an exponential curve. The late physics professor, Albert Bartlett, said in a popular lecture that “the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” He was perhaps being a bit hyperbolic, but what he meant is that, in general, we simply do not appreciate the consequences of steady growth. The concept itself, however, is not that hard to grasp.

Anything that experiences a steady rate of growth over time is growing at an exponential rate. Exponential growth results in an upward-curving “J-shaped” graph, the kind of curve that economists and businessmen sometimes loosely invoke when discussing long-term GDP growth or the growth of new technologies. The curve starts slowly, then steepens dramatically because growth compounds on top of prior growth.

The classic J-shaped curve

Take the example of an economy that grows steadily at 3% per year. With exponential growth, the absolute increase gets larger each cycle even if the percentage stays constant. At 3% annual growth the economy doubles roughly every 23 years, then doubles again 23 years later; then again. The curve stays deceptively gentle for a long time, then steepens dramatically because growth compounds on top of prior growth.

The “J Curve” is crucial for us to understand because economic growth is tied to the physical world—also known as the real world, which we all rely on, enjoy, and are embedded in. As the global economy grows exponentially, anything tightly coupled to economic activity also grows in a J-shaped fashion: energy use, material extraction, pollution, freshwater withdrawals, waste generation, carbon emissions. Even large amounts of available resources and environmental waste-absorption capacities can be overwhelmed surprisingly quickly under such compounding growth.

The shocking effects of exponential growth can be illustrated with an old story. Once upon a time, a king was so impressed by one of his subjects that he offered the man a reward. Instead of asking for a large sum, the man slyly asked for grains of rice placed on a chessboard like this: 1 grain on the first square, 2 on the second, 4 on the third, 8 on the fourth, and continuing to double on each of the 64 squares. The king agreed. At first the numbers looked tiny, but due to the dramatic effects of exponential growth, by the final square, the total grains of rice across all 64 squares was mind-bogglingly huge: 18.4 quintillion grains of rice. Stacking that many grains would reach about 81 trillion miles or 14 light-years from the surface of the Earth — far more than the kingdom could supply. This story shows how exponential growth stays deceptively small for a long time, then suddenly becomes enormous. (In the story, notably, the king ultimately puts the man to death.)

As many environmental thinkers have theorized over the years, the mismatch between exponential economic growth and our finite ecological systems is at the core of environmental problems. Exponential growth unleashed by the Industrial Revolution produced well-known J Curves, particularly those of the post-World War Two era: global plastic production, atmospheric CO₂ concentration, global fertilizer consumption, aviation traffic, motor vehicles, dam construction, telecommunications, global material extraction, and many more. Some environmental scientists call these the “Great Acceleration” curves.

Which brings us back to AI. Data centers are a clear example of an emerging J Curve. AI may be perceived as an “immaterial” technology, but it totally depends on data centers that have intense physical demands for electricity, cooling, water, concrete, steel, semiconductors, transmission lines, backup generators, mining, land, and fiber networks.

The exponential growth of AI data centers is following a J Curve, not only as a single burst of technological development, but as part of a long-running historical pattern. The AI/data-center buildout represents an acceleration phase—the dramatic steepening of the curve—in the larger J-shaped path of industrial civilization itself as technological capabilities and ecological impacts intensify simultaneously.

This is why the numbers that we are seeing about AI data centers, in terms of their size, their needs for energy and water, and their other physical and biological impacts, are mind-bogglingly gargantuan.

Robert Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University, has crunched some numbers for the proposed “hyperscale” data center in Box Elder County, Utah called the Stratos Project. “What I’ve found,” Davies has said, “is so much worse than I thought it would be.” He estimates the physical footprint of the Stratos Project to be the equivalent of about 2,000 Walmart Supercenters, and the energy footprint to be equal to about 40,000 Walmart Supercenters. The project’s backers admit it will need about 9 gigawatts of energy—more than double the electricity used by the entire state of Utah. Nine gigawatts “is a number that’s really hard to get your brain around,” Davies has said, but once an additional 7 gigawatts of waste heat are factored in, according to him, the project carries a total thermal load of 16 gigawatts—heat that goes into the local environment—“the equivalent of about 23 atom bombs worth of energy dumped into this local environment every single day.” Putting this much energy into the local environment will raise day-time temperatures by five degrees Fahrenheit, Davies estimates, and up to 28 degrees at night.

It is difficult to fathom numbers this large, or wrap our heads around the catastrophic damage to our Earth that a single “hyperscale” data center can exact. That’s because we are in the steepening part of the exponential J Curve. In other words, many of our ecological problems, which were already dire, are now going vertical.

We can detect this verticality in statements and projections made by AI companies and their leaders. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said recently, “The amount of energy that we need for computing is 1,000x more than we currently have.” Huang’s comments express the logic of a self-reinforcing technological expansion process that will lead to an exponential J Curve.

In an internal memo, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that his company’s “audacious long-term goal is to build 250 gigawatts of capacity by 2033.” If that happens, OpenAI’s electricity use by 2033 will be comparable to that of India’s 1.5 billion people.

Similar trajectories are projected for freshwater consumption by AI data centers, including in regions that are already suffering from drought and freshwater shortages (global freshwater supplies are already in steep decline). The state of Texas recently announced it would have to spend nearly $200 billion dollars to avoid a water crisis in the coming decades, but the state has approximately 400 water-guzzling data centers already in development (in addition to thousands of data centers in development nationwide and the 4,000 to 5,000 that are already operational), with reports suggesting that Texas data centers could consume between 29 billion and 161 billion gallons of freshwater per year by 2030.

The water that is used by data centers for cooling is emitted from the facilities back into the environment at very high temperatures, and is contaminated with PFAS “forever chemicals.” The United States and the world are already choking on PFAS pollution that is accumulating practically everywhere—in our water, air, soil, food, and consumer products. Now imagine the exponential effect of building thousands of these forever-chemical-spewing data centers.

To make matters even worse (if that’s possible), as AI capacity is built out, the machines themselves generate more demand for computing power. “AI is the first technology that can accelerate its own progress,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has claimed. This makes for a situation in which computation scaling is at least partly machine-driven rather than purely human-driven. That has the potential to steepen the J Curve even more.

If you are a technophile or an AI true-believer, you may be asking yourself why should I listen to lowly homo sapiens critics of AI or trust their fallible reasoning abilities. Okay then, what if we go to the super-intelligent machines themselves and ask them directly what will happen if AI data centers continue to be built in an exponential J Curve? I did that. And ChatGPT was quite willing to tell me, in great detail, why “my assessment is that indefinite exponential growth in the physical footprint of computation is unlikely to remain compatible with finite planetary systems.”

Here is how ChatGPT summarized our exchange and its “assessment,” quoted directly above:

The reason for my assessment is that computation is not an abstract activity; it is a physical process requiring electricity, cooling, water, land, transmission infrastructure, semiconductors, concrete, steel, copper, and rare-earth minerals. If AI data centers continue expanding at high exponential rates for decades, they are likely to compete increasingly with cities, agriculture, transportation, and industry for scarce resources, particularly power and freshwater. Regions already experiencing drought, groundwater depletion, grid congestion, and ecosystem stress may face difficult allocation decisions as AI infrastructure demands accelerate. Additional pressures could include expanded mining, land conversion, waste heat, transmission corridors, industrial noise, and chemical pollution associated with semiconductor manufacturing and cooling systems. While technological improvements can reduce resource use per unit of computation, history shows that efficiency gains often stimulate greater total consumption rather than reducing overall demand. The broader concern is that ecological systems—rivers, aquifers, forests, biodiversity, and the climate system—do not expand exponentially in response to industrial demand. They possess finite capacities, regeneration rates, and ecological thresholds. For this reason, I believe industrial civilization as a whole may itself follow a large-scale J-curve, with the AI/data-center buildout representing a late-stage acceleration phase in which technological capability and ecological throughput intensify simultaneously. In that interpretation, AI is not an exception to the historical pattern of industrial growth, but one of its most advanced expressions.

How long, one wonders, will Big Tech oligarchs allow AI to tell truths like those above about the disastrous path their technology has put us on? How long will they let their very own machines admit where they are taking us?

And let’s not forget how these machines reach the kinds of conclusions expressed in the “conversation” above. They do it by searching and summarizing the sum total of digitizable human knowledge. In that sense, ChatGPT’s words above represent a kind of warning from humanity’s own wealth of knowledge that we are indeed courting self-destruction.

For decades now many ecologists and environmental thinkers, including some in the agrarian tradition, have pointed out the profound flaws in our society’s orientation around the permanent exponential growth of technology, industry, and GDP, as well as the conflict between exponential growth and the Earth’s limits. Those prescient thinkers have been dismissed, insulted, and generally ignored. Meanwhile, the industrial-technological Machine with a capital “M” (in the sense of the word used by writer Paul Kingsnorth) has continued its metastatic growth. Now AI and its data centers are taking us into a steeper phase of technological civilization’s J Curve.

Perhaps in earlier decades, at shallower parts of the J Curve, it was easier to ignore the ill effects of technological growth. But now that the Machine is expanding more rapidly, up the steepening line of the J, AI data centers—the physical manifestation of a technology that many of us previously thought was somehow immaterial—are imposing themselves into our neighborhoods, sucking away our water, diverting energy from us to them, and surrounding us with gigantic, offensively ugly facilities that emit heat, noise, and pollution at a scale that until now was inconceivable. We are unwittingly enclosing ourselves, it seems, in a toxic technological prison.

It’s safe to say also that AI data centers’ exponentially growing physical and ecological effects are mirrored in the exponential growth of the technology’s intrusion into our lives at other levels. We are experiencing a J Curve in AI’s effects on us in the social, political, economic, philosophical, psychological, and even spiritual realms. That’s what AI’s biggest boosters would have us believe, and there’s no reason to doubt them. Some tech gurus admit, or even openly long for, exponentially self-replicating superintelligent technologies to replace humanity. Already we are bombarded with threats of mass unemployment, autonomous drones, robot dogs, AI lovers, AI-generated music, books, and films in place of works by human musicians, writers, and filmmakers, and the list goes on. The accelerating character of this phenomenon explains perfectly the sense of bewilderment, unease, fear, and loathing that so many people now feel toward AI and data centers in particular.

Of course, then, the reasonable response would be for a mass movement of Americans and peoples around the world to break from their decades-long (or centuries-long) slide into technological and industrial overdevelopment, or dystopia to use a stronger word, and to stop AI data centers in their tracks. The broad, emerging “Not in My Neighborhood” movement against data centers does indeed have the potential to starve AI of the massive and continually expanding quantities of energy it needs to keep growing itself exponentially, or to at least slow down the rate of growth. The Pope’s latest encyclical warning of the threat to “human dignity” posed by AI suggests that the broad-based anti-AI movement could indeed become a potent force.

If history is any guide, however, governments, billionaires, and corporations will use every tool in the toolbox to break down popular resistance to data centers, particularly because our entire growth-based economy is now essentially dependent on the projections of AI’s rapid expansion coming to fruition. “Most U.S. Growth Rides on AI,” say some reports.

The Trump administration, for its part, has made it abundantly clear that “winning the race,” mainly against China, for supposed “unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance” is a top priority. Trump issued an Executive Order in July 2025 called “Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure,” which various federal agencies are busy carrying out.

AI CEOs, even as they predict that their machines will replace human laborers and deliver society-wide unemployment, have tried to hold out carrots to the public, promising vaguely that AI will eventually deliver some kind of workerless utopia. AI will usher in an “age of abundance” and make work “optional,” says the erratic tech billionaire Elon Musk (he’s also warned that AI is “a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization”). Anyone who is tempted to believe promises of techno-utopia need only pick up a history book. “It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being,” wrote John Stuart Mill in 1848. “They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make large fortunes.”

Recent news reports indicate, however, that AI’s backers are shifting from carrots to sticks. As AI hatred spreads among the population, U.S. law enforcement agencies are gearing up to quash “anti-tech extremism,” and these tech-enabled agencies are reportedly not shy about targeting peaceful groups and protestors for surveillance. As many AI critics and proponents have noted, the computing power of AI will enable mass surveillance of the population to a degree never before possible, a power that is already being directed at opponents of data centers.

So then, where does that leave us? Will the American people and the rest of humanity passively and unquestioningly accept the continued exponential growth of technology and industry, and allow themselves to be swept along the J Curve from Hell by the doomsday machines known euphemistically as “data centers”? Or will the life-threatening scale of these “dark Satanic mills,” to quote Blake, finally provoke a showdown, forcing us to confront the accelerating technological self-destruction we have been courting?

The battle lines are being drawn. How will the struggle play out?

Many believe the rise of AI is inevitable. Before we succumb to the convenience and dazzle of these new technologies and let the machines take us where they will, however, perhaps enough of us can inform ourselves about what is at stake and remind ourselves what makes life worth living, and then summon the spirit of defiance that still abides somewhere deep down in our human bones.

Image Credit: WPR

His is a useless localism, to be sure. But surely his question isn’t useless. What does localism mean if it doesn’t literally mean “not traveling”? Can localists also be travelers, or is the localist sensibility necessarily prejudiced against what quite a few books praise as the noble “art of travel”?

When I was a college sophomore I spent a semester abroad in the Middle East. It was quite a leap. I grew up on a family farm in Indiana. Now I was living in a Cairo apartment, hitchhiking to desert monasteries, talking politics with Palestinians and Israelis. It was the proverbial life-changing experience, and after graduating I wanted more. I went backpacking in Europe, then I spent a couple of years in Toronto. After that, nearly four years in South Korea (with lots of trips to other countries in the region), followed by a random move to Portland (Oregon), where I lived for two years before finally “settling down” to a PhD (in Boston). And I call myself a “localist.”

The intern for that study abroad program was a graduate student named Joel Carillet. After our semester ended, we all went home; but Joel kept traveling, and in twenty-three years he hasn’t stopped. I’ve traveled; Joel is a traveler. While he has a kind of “home base” in Tennessee, he doesn’t have a permanent home. He lives everywhere, making his modest living as a photographer. And yet—strange to say—I can think of few people with a more localist sensibility.

I’ve stayed in touch with Joel over the years. A few years ago he came to Dubuque to give a lecture for our honors program. We exhibited some of his photographs, a collection he titled “And Who Is My Neighbor?” The pictures come from all over the world, from danger spots and beauty spots, famous and not-famous, near and far, the Appalachian Trail and the Syrian refugee camps. Last year he came back, this time with photos from Ukraine. When he left, he was planning a second trip into the heart of that darkness.

On this last visit I put my question to him, the question about localism and travel, about home and “roots.” He was kind enough to write down some of his answers. He also selected a few of his photographs to accompany his words. They are scattered throughout the text below. He suggests that simply “to be in the presence of the world’s beauty and pain,” as he was when he took these pictures, is itself “to feel a sense of connection and rootedness.” Our exchange has been lightly edited for clarity.

Adam Smith: Can you tell readers a bit about your background? Where is home for you? How did you become a traveler—and what does “traveling” mean to you?

Joel Carillet: I was born in Austria to missionary parents and returned to the States when I was almost three. At age twelve, we moved overseas again, to Papua New Guinea. I returned “home” when I was seventeen.

Home has always been a complicated theme. I’m very drawn to the romantic notion of being at home in one place and community, but in reality, for me, this would require severing myself from the larger sense of home I developed at an early age.

My formative years were in more than one culture and community. I felt rooted in each place that I was, even if I did not feel that I belonged entirely to any one location or community. At age fourteen, I could feel at home barefoot in the jungle of Papua New Guinea accompanying friends from the village of Likan on a pig hunt, speaking their language, while simultaneously missing my best friend Ray in suburban Atlanta, reliving in my mind some of our memories together and looking forward to one day seeing him again.

After college (sociology/political science) and graduate school (church history) in Tennessee, I worked in Egypt for a year, then various jobs in DC for parts of two years, and then in late 2003 began a 14-month journey across Asia to write a book. I don’t think I expected to still be on the road so much nearly twenty years later, but that’s what happened. I began the transition from primarily writing to photography in 2006.

In “Making It Home,” the story of a soldier returning from World War II, Wendell Berry writes: “Once it had seemed to him that he walked only on the place where he was. But now, having gone and returned from so far, he knew that he was walking on the whole round world. He felt the great, empty distance that the world was turning in, far away from the sun and the moon and the stars.” Travel for me is a way to participate in life, not to escape it, and not merely to consume things/experiences. It is a way to explore the breadth of my neighborhood—the world—which seems especially important given how interconnected we are at this point in history.

AS: How can a life of wandering other people’s lands, of observing them from behind a camera lens, of doing without a permanent home, meet our permanent “need for roots”?

JC: Simone Weil speaks of the need for roots. I agree, and I feel it. But what does it require to be rooted in a place? Language, time, relationships, an inward sense of love? If I see Michy in Munich every five years, am I less rooted there than I am in a place I see every five hours or days or weeks or months? It would seem that I must be less rooted, and yet there is a power in that root that I find hard to explain. An imperfect metaphor: a root of a tree in a tropical rainforest receives rain many days of the year; a root of a desert shrub maybe only once in a blue moon. But both roots are vital and make life possible.

In 2019, I returned to the village of Likan in Papua New Guinea for the first time in 27 years. That’s a long time! But upon arrival my sister, father, and I were embraced. Elementary-age children took my hand and called me by my name and told stories they knew of me as a teenager. How can kids so young know so much about someone who left the area long before they were born? Because their parents and grandparents shared stories—Papua New Guinea is a storytelling culture. The effect on me: I was not a stranger here; I had roots. My life here was not merely past; it was ongoing through memories shared through stories, and through children I had never met reaching up to hold my hand and walk me through the village. I’m not sure I have ever felt at “home” in the same way when I returned to Tennessee.

In asking how a traveler maintains roots, one could turn the question around and ask a person focused on the local how he or she maintains a sense of place that is adequate for the twenty-first century, marked as it is by global interconnection.

AS: So how do you do that, then—how do you maintain those roots? What practices have you found necessary? What role does memory and narrative play?

JC: Memory, which is important to both Berry and me, is harder to maintain when one is global and often on the road. The stories are more scattered, as is the telling of them. It’s the opposite of weekly communion and remembrance. I wrote in my journal many years ago that sometimes my life feels like a series of events that never really happened. So how is narrative and memory maintained for the traveler? Three things come to mind:

1. Writing is imperative. I am floored by some of what I have forgotten and only remembered later because I had written it down. In one week in Ethiopia in 2010, for example, my bus hit a horse, I saw a church security guard beating a 13-year-old girl (and I intervened), a man ten feet from me was hit by a car, which broke his leg, and a bridge I needed to cross was destroyed by a flood shortly before I got there. A decade later, I had forgotten all but the bridge, perhaps because that is the only event I had a picture of. The memories of the others came back only after I read my journal.

2. Having home-away-from-homes that one returns to every few years. Practically speaking, in addition to Tennessee being a home base where I have roots (though lately they are withering), there are a handful of places around the globe that I return to from time to time and feel a sense of home. For example: Munich, Germany; Ko Phangan, Thailand; Jerusalem. There are friends in these places, and landscapes which by walking again I feel a sense of return, of touching a base, of finding a momentary center before I go out again. And I often feel that my friends in these places “get me” even more than many of my friends in Tennessee might; our time together, our reunions, nourishes my soul.

3. I don’t do this as often as I should, but sometimes I’ll sit still for, say, an hour, and imagine all the people around the world who have embraced me, shook my hand, kissed my cheek, etc. It is a way to recall, to be more centered, to feel a kind of rootedness and ongoing presence of people. Something like the Eucharist, but different.

AS: Berry often says that the relentless exploitation and expropriation we see both at home and abroad stems from an outlook that is too “global”—an inability to imagine or care about the real consequences of decisions. How is your kind of “global outlook” different?

JC: It sounds like Berry is referring to a kind of “global” that is prone to abstraction, which makes sense if you don’t know people beyond one’s borders. But this is foreign to me. My outlook, my mental map, is filled with names and faces and relationships, which nurtures an understanding of, and care for, the planet as a whole.

I can think of a couple of books that really capture this difference. Rory Stewart’s The Places In Between recounts his walk across Afghanistan in the winter soon after 9/11. He takes his time to see a place, with courage, and introduces us to society and culture through intimate encounters with ordinary people. His analysis of Afghanistan, including what Western intervention could and couldn’t achieve, was generally much better than those back in Washington or London who wouldn’t dream of traveling as he did.

Chris Cleave’s Little Bee: A Novel is a beautifully written book about personal relationships and global interconnectedness. It tells the story of the intersection of two lives, one Nigerian and the other English. If you’ve ever wanted to understand better how an immigrant or refugee might see the world, or if you’ve ever met someone in your travels and keenly felt the inherent awkwardness in how only one of you is privileged and safe, or if you’ve ever asked the question “Who is my neighbor?” you will likely love this book.

AS: What does the future look like? Will you ever “settle down”?

I anticipate still being on the road much of the next five years, continuing to document people and places and issues. During this time I also hope to begin turning my years of images and reflections into book form. But generally speaking, the future is a mystery to me, and I know the unexpected, whether it be a beautiful surprise or a tragedy, could be around any bend.

Postscript

Since the interview, I’ve had two more distinct experiences of home:

One was on a remote jungle hillside in Papua New Guinea, at the end of an arduous hike to a Dauntless dive bomber that had crashed in 1944 and had been discovered by locals five months earlier. To reach a crash site in a sweaty state of exhaustion, and then be the first American in eighty years to touch the aircraft, where the remains of the young American pilot were still in the soil beneath the upside down cockpit, is an experience hard to put into words. I have a more tenuous relationship to patriotism than many other Americans, but I have a deep sense of the sacred and history, and I felt it profoundly here. It was a feeling of home.

The other experience was in a cozy living room in Lviv, Ukraine. Five weeks earlier, on Easter Sunday, I had photographed dozens of strangers around the city, including a young woman named Anna sitting in a cafe reading a book. We spoke for maybe five minutes and then said goodbye. She followed me on Instagram and in the weeks that followed took note of my busy travel schedule around the country. She also knew that I was dealing with lower back pain. After about a month she messaged to say she would travel soon to Poland for a few days, and that she would like to offer her apartment to me for rest. A few days later I showed up at her door. I was met with an embrace, with caring words, with a cake and good coffee, and a quick tour of the apartment. We had only 15 minutes together before she needed to leave to catch her train, but when she closed the door behind her, I sat alone on her couch for quite some time, feeling a profound sense of awe and love and hope. This too was a feeling of home.

Image Credits: Joel Carillet

Campbell thought of myths as metaphors that help us make sense of the world. He saw the hero’s journey as one of Jung’s archetypes: It was an underlying aspect of how humans interpret everything. Once you see the pattern of the hero’s journey, you see it everywhere. It’s there in The Hobbit, Star Wars, and The Lion King. We can also find it much further back in time, even as far back as The Epic of Gilgamesh. If you need more examples, you can find plenty of Campbell talks on YouTube. Academics typically look askance at Campbell, and not all non-academics subscribe to his views, either. Yet the idea of the hero’s journey has held on. It seems relevant to the stories that shape our notion of reality, because there are always stories about heroes.

Campbell also feared that the old stories just didn’t stand up very well to life in the late twentieth century. He thought the myths were essentially broken. In the absence of a compelling mythos, he counseled people to “follow your bliss.” Arguably, following your bliss has also not stood up very well as a substitute, but Campbell seems to be right that the old stories have fallen on hard times. It seems almost impossible to have a classic hero’s journey in this day and age.

That may be because today we are up against a hydra with a thousand faces. The forces we are up against are impersonal and often leave us exhausted and discouraged. We are not up against nature or the gods like Odysseus and our other forebears. We are not quite up against society, like those in earlier centuries. But we are not only up against ourselves, either. The hydra we face is not only hard to defeat; it’s hard to define.

One face of the hydra would be the multiplication of tasks that has divided our time into unrecognizable segments. For example, it’s not a simple thing to check your work email. You have to do two-factor authentication and then wade through listserv emails and phishing messages sent by your own institution to test you. Many things are this way. Simplicity is often unavailable. You have to choose multiple settings to start the dishwasher or any household appliance designed for convenience. You want to watch a show, but first you must log in and perhaps authenticate yourself again and then choose a profile and once you settle in with your show, it will be broken up by ads probably four times. You want to pay your bills using the app your bank insists on, but it needs to be updated first. All of life begins to feel like pauses of calm between interruptions. No wonder whole books can be written and sold on the argument that you should do things for sustained amounts of time with directly applied attention.

In his famous commencement speech, “This is Water,” David Foster Wallace told the audience that “There happen to be whole parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.” These are some of the most familiar faces of the hydra: boredom, routine, and petty frustration. They surely existed in other centuries, but they have gained new strength in ours. We encounter petty frustration when we want to order food at a restaurant, only to be directed by a waiter to a QR code. If you are too impatient to sit down, you still need to be prepared for petty frustration—fortunately there is an app to tell you which McDonald’s ice cream machines are working. Foster Wallace describes the experience at the end of the workday. You want to go home and eat, but you remember there’s no food and now you’re off to a miserable grocery store, through bad traffic. And “the store is hideously lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can’t just get in and quickly out.” After escaping the line with crying children and yelling parents, “you take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn’t fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera, et cetera.”

In the hero’s journey, the hero often faces something that wants to kill him. Our environment lacks this personal antagonism. The marvels of engineering and technology have vanquished many of the more obvious dangers. Our astronauts conquer space, yet even they are bedeviled by Outlook. We can orbit the moon, but we cannot avoid the inconveniences that accompany the modern tools allegedly designed to help us.

Plastics and other environmental toxins could be another head of the hydra. A study warns us about how each serving of soda or red meat or bread or eggs or milk or soy takes minutes off your life. How many cups of coffee or glasses of wine should be avoided, or accepted, to extend life five extra years? Climate change and environmental destruction operate in the long durée, but are never inactive. Could these slow killers ever be defeated by a hero? The answer is certainly not in attempting to become immortal through obsessive bodily programming, which is its own rejection of life.

You can add Paul Kingsnorth’s “Machine” as a third head. We all exist under the gaze of big tech. AI extends its fingers into our homes and hobbies after grabbing up workplaces. AI is now allegedly powering youth baseball bats. LLMs steal human writing from the past, and then we pay them to replace human writing in the present.

Another hydra would be the constant threat of obsolescence. You need to quit your job to learn to code. Then AI takes over coding and you need to try something else. You should skip college, but then manufacturing dries up. You should pick your college major based on a career, but the job market shifts. Obsolescence may have always stalked the old, but now it even lunges at the young. Will there be a workforce for the young to enter? Even if you are gainfully employed, with long-term prospects, people seem to delight in predicting the end of your industry, whatever it is, regularly and publicly. And if it’s not your job, it’s your town or your alma mater that may fade to black. What sword can we use against obsolescence?

Such nebulous enemies challenge the basic elements of the hero’s journey. With our ability to be contacted at any given hour, almost anywhere on the planet, how can we achieve separation or departure? Sometimes we bring the challenges home with us, as we keep checking work emails. Sometimes we use technology to bring everyone with us, narrating our alleged adventure without achieving separation.

Maybe seventh sons never really fought dragons and married princesses, but it seemed like a good story. It was a welcome narrative. It’s hard to even imagine a hero triumphing against the hydra with a thousand faces. Could you tell a good story about a hero facing this hydra? Does the hero make it to work without traffic, get to inbox zero by lunch, avoid an unproductive meeting, manage to exercise and eat in the same day, remember every password perfectly, always get the insurance company to come through, and never run late taking kids to soccer practice? Even if victory is won for a day, could a hero triumph over the hydra without permanently abandoning modern life? Initiation was always a challenge, otherwise we never would have taken notice of Beowulf, but it seems difficult in new ways.

The hydra with a thousand faces laughs with all of them. Our world is one of unnecessary complication and unclear opposition. Even much of our manmade environment is slyly hostile to humans, from the benches designed to annoy the homeless to the highways Robert Moses cut through New York to the chairs that may be slowly killing us with sitting. Our own tools are against us. We have created the handheld devices that give us depression. Screens did not force themselves on our children.

No doubt the actual people of the past often felt the enemy seemed impossible to kill or permanently defeat. Even if a farmer had an unprecedentedly good harvest, he could not defeat the weather. Every year he would face the same opponent. Rome and Carthage fought more than one round against each other. Gilgamesh lost the magic flower to a snake. However, victory was imaginable.

Arguably, the hydra of modern life has infiltrated our imagination. Can we imagine something like a hero of our time? Lately, many of our fictional heroes are not quite human; they are more Marvel than man. Our politicians and celebrities and tech CEOs seem not quite human sometimes, too. The hydra with a thousand faces curls itself up atop our captured imaginations.

David Foster Wallace suggested that if we learn how to see and interpret our circumstances differently, “it will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars—compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things.” This will involve decentering ourselves from our mental conception of the universe. And it will be characterized by “attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.” This doesn’t look like what we typically celebrate as heroism. It doesn’t even seem to resemble much of a main character.

Perhaps this, then, is where fighting back begins: with imagination. Narratives are powerful. Even in ancient Greece, Odysseus could make his way back to Ithaka to slaughter the suitors, despite angering Poseidon. Odysseus could only escape the hydra, but Hercules could kill it. The gods were not conquerable in those days and fate could still overwhelm anyone, but victory was imaginable. Poets may not quite be the “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” as Percy Bysshe Shelley suggested, but storytellers may help us face this hydra of a thousand faces and provide an image of a hero of our time—one who does more than escape modernity. Perhaps some models are already emerging of characters who are not overwhelmed by the hydra but model the compassion and love that Foster Wallace commends. I have in mind the quotidian fidelity of John Ames in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead or Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter. If we attend to such exemplars, we may be better able to imagine the kind of heroism to which we are called today.

Image Credit: AOL

God sets the lonely in families, he leads out the prisoners with singing; but the rebellious live in a sun-scorched land.

Psalm 68:6 (NIV)

I. The Graveyard and the Field

My uncle’s former farm sits on a kind of borderland, though I never had words for that as a child. To the south and west, the fields run out in long rows. It’s the kind of midwestern acreage that teaches you to measure time in corn height and rainfall. But to the north, pressed up against the fence line, sits St. Thomas Cemetery, a small field of stone where the dead rest inside the same horizon as the living.

When I was a boy, I used to slip away after chores and sit beneath the oak tree guarding that fencerow. The dog would follow, flop down beside me, and keep the kind of watch only a dog can keep: half loyal, half asleep. That’s where I first read Where the Red Fern Grows, a book about a boy, two dogs, and the kind of love that teaches you through loss. It was the right book for that soil. The land was already translating things for me long before the language arrived.

I went back recently for no grand reason, just a turn of the handlebars and a pull in the chest. The property is no longer a dairy, or worked by my family’s hands. My uncle long ago left the life of a tenant farmer, trading the land for other vocations before retiring. But the fence is still there. The cemetery is still quiet. The oak still leans in the same direction, as if listening. I sat again in the same patch of grass on a cool and damp spring afternoon, a good book in hand. Time folded instead of passing.

The graveyard is an in-between place where love and labor coexist and a boy can sit between the living and the dead to learn the truth of both without anyone explaining it out loud. There were moments while reading as an adult when I looked up and saw the farm less active than I remember. There from my childhood past sat a solitary fence post now weathered beside the machine shed. It almost whispered from its lonely place out of earshot from the house.

II. The Caterpillars and the Quiet

My uncle never talked much about faith, but he had a way of reading the world that felt older than religion. He listened to forecasts, experts, and seed catalogs like other farmers. Yet without formally teaching natural truths, he trusted what the land was already saying. For him, the first sermon of the year was preached by caterpillars. He watched when they appeared, how fast they moved, and how early they crossed the road. 

If the woolly bears came out thin and quick, he said it meant the season would burn fast. If they were late and heavy, the ground was holding something cold and wet underneath. It sounded like folklore as a child, but I know now it was a kind of literacy—an informal education in paying attention to things most people dismiss as background. It was a language woven into the way he assessed planting, a quiet counterweight to the burdens he carried through humor and toil.

As I sat beneath the oak, I thought of Billy Colman, the boy in Where the Red Fern Grows who learns endurance, grief, and responsibility beside his father in hard weather. Billy and his father endured sub-zero cold. My uncle and I drove fence posts into Illinois ground already hardening in a spring without rain. The Psalmist says the rebellious dwell in a sun-scorched land. I only know how truth arrives quickly in harder seasons.

In the spring of 1988, while the other farmers planted long-season hybrids that needed time and rain the year would never give, my uncle put in 90-day corn: a short-season gamble based on bug tracks and instinct. The same instinct surfaced in other kinds of weather. Some men checked the news to gauge the world; my uncle checked the township. While gathering feed in Seward, IL, my uncle would ask about the ball diamond, the church and the school district.

If there were no tractor accidents or barn fires, if there were no news of divorces or ambulances in the night, he’d say, referencing his farm, “The neighbors are quiet.” He found a way of naming a real peace, neither bothered nor loud. The kind of peace earned by seasons where nothing broke. He never explicitly explained any of this. He lived it, which is worse and better than teaching. If you wanted to understand, you had to watch him the way he watched the land. You had to learn that the world is always speaking but rarely in words.

III. The Steer and the Ledger

The year the corn survived, I did too. During the summer of the drought, my uncle and aunt encouraged me to raise a heifer for the county fair. They never framed it as a life lesson, just the kind of opportunity farm kids were given to test their grit and endurance. When the heifer did well, my grandfather bought me a steer calf, and that meant I’d stepped into something bigger than a project, making me part of the work. I fed the steer with the grain that grew from the drought—the same 90-day corn the caterpillars had predicted. Looking back, it feels like a parable: scarcity turned into muscle, and hunger turned into growth. The steer was my first real responsibility and my first real grief.

Every day, we tied the steer to the fencepost near the machine shed, and I learned to walk beside an animal over twice my size. At times, the animal displayed a nervousness resulting in broken fences, busted knuckles and gravel ground beneath my adolescent skin. The muscle from the steer’s hindquarters started showing up in my own arms, hips, and chest. When I walked it to the trailer to transport it to the Winnebago County Fair, a rabbit, of all things, startled it, and I was yanked through a cattle pen like a rag.

I remember standing up, furious, and calmly talking the animal into the trailer. At the fair, I would rest on straw bales and a sleeping bag. Some childhood friends and I would play cards into the night by lantern and flashlight. In the morning, I would wash the animal, and its startle reflex would send me chasing the steer through the fairgrounds, walking him back to the beef barn to wash him all over again. Each time, I learned something new about the surroundings, and about how patience develops. 

When the fair season ended and the steer sold, part of the money belonged to someone else. I remember handing out a portion to the landowner with whom my uncle farmed on shares. The word economics was foreign to me then, but I understood what it meant to owe something for work I thought was mine alone. There was no room for a teenager’s indignation; the moment required an adult’s accounting. To some extent, even gratitude kept a ledger.

I sat in a dusty kitchen, counting bills into the landowner’s waiting hands, while my uncle swatted flies. Sure, I raised the steer. I fed it, brushed it, walked it, and hauled it where it needed to go. Yet even as a boy, I could see that none of that labor occurred in isolation. The plowed field, the maintained barn and the dried feed all arrived through someone else’s hands. That afternoon, I learned a form of justice that keeps the world upright long enough to plant again.

I cried when the steer left, and the adults decided those tears belonged to my attachment to the animal. Despite my protests, then and now, they were not entirely wrong. But even as a boy, some deeper part of me recognized I was grieving something larger than livestock. The world had just revealed one of its harder laws: if you love something long enough to raise it, you do not necessarily get to keep it. You only get the chance to tend it faithfully enough to know you did not waste the gift.

IV. See the Water

The early 1990s arrived wet and refused to let up. Fields once starved under the 1988 sun now drowned before seed could take hold. Topsoil turned to soup beneath our boots, the creek spilled its banks, and land that had once begged for rain pushed it away in excess. I remember riding in the truck with my uncle one spring, asking why planting stalled. I still carried the logic of the drought in my young mind. If attention had saved us once, surely it could save us again.

My uncle said nothing at first. Then he pulled the truck to the shoulder, pointed through the windshield at the flooded fields, and shouted, “See the water, Colin! It is water!” His aggravation was directed at the land itself, at the absurdity of watching the same ground swing from thirst to drowning in the span of a few seasons. In 1988, listening offered a fighting chance. Floodwater offered no conversation. It swallowed timing, judgment, and intention alike. 

That was the year I began to understand something I would not have language for until much later. Sometimes, God does not simply give or withhold. Sometimes He rearranges who belongs where. He leads out the prisoners with singing, though not always the ones we expect, not always gently, and not always forever. No one placed me with my aunt and uncle because they possessed some special gift for raising a displaced boy. Circumstances placed me there because someone had to keep me. 

Something in my uncle eventually gave way beneath the strain of too many uncertain seasons, and a few years later he left farming altogether, took to the highway, and hauled freight across distances. As a boy, I thought he abandoned land he understood. As a man, I see something else. The flood taught him even the sharpest listener can only carry so many unanswered seasons.

V. Inheritance

I was living in a house never meant to be mine. My parents could not hold their own ground, and someone had to hold me. No ceremony or paperwork marked the arrangement with my uncle and aunt. I simply arrived to find a bed, chores, and a place at the table. Sitting in the cemetery this spring, with the same fence posts standing where the field meets stone, I found myself praying in a way that felt less like speaking and more like remembering. At fifty, I could see the boy as clearly as if he still sat beneath the oak with a book in his lap and a dog at his feet. For a moment, childhood and adulthood, before and after, no longer felt like separate countries but neighboring fields divided by a fence I had crossed without noticing.

“God sets the lonely in families.”

That verse sounds gentle until you live it. It doesn’t say he asks the family first. It doesn’t say the family is ready. It doesn’t say the family knows what to do with the one set there. My aunt and uncle did not sign up to raise me, and I did not know how to belong to people who were already tired. They loved me in a way made of labor and expectation, not softness. Rather than adoption or foster care, it was something older and harder: an inheritance of responsibility, paid in sweat. Half of what they gave me came from duty before that word became something we speak of with suspicion, as though obligation were somehow less noble than affection. My aunt and uncle belonged to harder grammar.

The other half came from defiance, the stubborn refusal to let a child disappear simply because the adults who made him ran out of courage. The words for this arrived much later; they were completely absent when I was a child. I just knew the love I received always had a bruise in it. Years later, I would hear family members speak of me as if I had almost been theirs, as though my failure to stay revealed some flaw in my own nature rather than a break in the foundation beneath us. But nothing about me at that time was permanent. I was someone’s responsibility, not someone’s son.

And yet I would not trade that season. Because that house, with its strained marriage, its unspoken frustrations, and its fragile welcome taught me cleanly: You can be loved and misplaced at the same time. You can be wanted and resented. You can be set in a family and still feel the echo of the place you were meant to belong. Most people learn those truths in adulthood. I learned them while hauling buckets, feeding a steer, and sleeping under a roof built for someone else’s life.

I never became a farmer, but the land still got into me the way a scar becomes part of the body’s map. I garden, I tend soil, I read weather the way some people read moods, and I don’t know how not to, even in exhaustion, or when there’s no harvest worth the labor. A friend once told me he was amazed at what I can do with the ground. I just felt tired. It’s my inheritance: the instinct to watch the sky, to smell the dirt, to worry the way other people pray. 

My own garden tells the truth my uncle already knew: the soil can bless you, but it will not spare you. It will give you tomatoes and wasp nests, clover and septic failures, beauty and rot in the same square foot. It does not care how poetic your intentions are. Some days I want to quit too—the tending, the noticing, the weight of caring what grows and what withers. I inherited work, but I also inherited watchfulness. And maybe that’s its own kind of blessing; the sort you feel only in hindsight, like rain after dust.

VI. The Red Fern and the Stone

I began this story in a cemetery because that’s where I first learned that endings are not the end of anything. The oak still stands there, guarding the line between rows of corn and rows of names. The stones are no newer, the fields no less patient. Now, I am sitting here, in the same patch of grass where I once read Where the Red Fern Grows, reading psalms and listening to the wet spring breeze. I didn’t bring a dog this time, but I still feel the shape of one at my side. As a boy, that book was a story about loss. Now I see it was about what grows after the loss.

The red fern only grows where something has been buried with love. Something in me was buried on this farm in a way before the words. It was a boy’s grief and a man’s vocation. There was a hunger to notice as wounds became a compass. And like the fern, it came back in other forms: in the quiet spaces where I sit with other people’s grief, in my own garden, and in a stubborn tenderness I still don’t fully know how to explain.

My uncle will probably never say what those years meant to him, and I’ll probably never say it the way he’d understand. And yet, even at this moment, I know he was the one who taught me attention is a form of love, work is a form of prayer, and quiet, when it is real, is its own kind of peace. I was placed in his home the way a seed is placed in soil: without full permission, without certainty, and without a promise of outcome. And yet, 

God sets the lonely in families, he leads out the prisoners with singing; but the rebellious live in a sun-scorched land. 

Sometimes the family is a flooded field. Sometimes the prisoner is a man who sings only in weather and silence. Sometimes the dry land is a cemetery that teaches you how to live. Not all roots stay where they’re planted. But the ones that do remember. And between them, a boy learned that eternity is not somewhere else. It is here—in the seam where what grows and what remains share the same ground.

Image Credit: Eugene Smith, “The Walk to Paradise Garden” (1946)