When I think of the people who made a difference in my life as a kid growing up in Puyallup, Washington, there are plenty of paid professionals including teachers, librarians, pastors, and coaches who come to mind. But I think also of the volunteers—PTA parents like my mom, church camp counselors, and Scout leaders. I think of the veterans at the American Legion who made it possible for me to take part in programs like Boys State and the Legion Oratorical Program. And I think of the Kiwanis Club.

I was introduced to the Kiwanis spirit of service by my grandfather, Ed Zeiger, who became a Kiwanian in the 1980s. He took on various leadership roles at the Club and took part in Terrific Kid Assemblies. He also maintained his Club’s sponsorship of the Boy Scout troop he led, which I went through the ranks of as a teenager myself.

So after coming home to Puyallup to get involved in public service in my mid-twenties, I joined the Kiwanis Club of Puyallup. The club included some influential education, nonprofit, and business leaders, whom I thought I should get to know. I was eager to get involved in the club and connect with its members while embarking on my new life in public service. The Club had a long history of local public servants as members, and it was a point of connection to a vibrant ecosystem of community service and civic leadership.

But I had another reason for joining. In a project I had conducted to interview members of the World War II generation from Puyallup, I learned about the role the Kiwanis Club played in the local war effort. I was eager to learn more about how the Club had shaped the community. I immediately volunteered to serve on the Club history committee.

The Club’s 100^th anniversary was a decade away, and I thought I could pace myself by working my way through the archives and conducting oral history interviews with longtime Club members. Over the next decade, I delivered occasional talks to the Club on what I was learning, and I gradually pieced together a history of the Puyallup Kiwanis Club. It would be printed on the occasion of the Club’s 100^th anniversary in 2021.

Among the things that struck me was the way the Club had served as a civic home for people from all kinds of professions.

A number of school administrators had found an outlet for volunteer service beyond their jobs through Kiwanis over the decades. Take Rich Green, for example. After growing up as the son of longtime Kiwanian Harris Green, Puyallup High School’s Vice Principal Rich Green was hesitant to join. “I really didn’t want to,” he told me. “That was something my dad did, and I didn’t want to follow my dad. But I became vice principal at Puyallup High School, and Dale Mitchell was my principal, and Dale said, ‘Yeah, Rich, you’re going to join Kiwanis!’ I said, ‘Well okay.’ So, in December of 1981, I joined Kiwanis.”

According to Rogers High School Principal Stan Cross, belonging to Kiwanis as a school administrator made a lot of sense. He could see the “power that Kiwanis has in the community,” he said. “It was a great organization to be involved in for two reasons. Being a school administrator, I could be down there, so if there were questions or concerns regarding school issues, maybe I could help handle that part. And we needed Kiwanis to help in some of the school-community things too, so we’d pat each other’s backs, but we worked together to get results. We encouraged other administrators to get in over the years too, and, of course, there have been a lot of school administrators before me who were involved too.”

Cross recruited a fellow school administrator, Lloyd Freudenstein, to join, but only after repeated attempts. “I wanted Lloyd to become a member, and at that time he was principal of a junior high down here, and I said, ‘Lloyd, you have to come and be part of this group.’ ‘You get out of here with that dang crap’—he had these one-liners. ‘I’m not that kind of a person to be joining all these clubs.’ But I kept after him. One day…there were three of us who walked into his office, and he said, ‘Okay, where do I sign.’ He has gone through the chairs and been very good.”

However, some school administrators were reluctant to take part in a service club that met in the middle of a workday, so they joined the Daffodil Valley club, which met on Wednesday mornings. “It was really an educators’ club, because Randy Hathaway, Sam Peach, and Russ Hamburg were in it,” said Green. “They had severe conscience. They didn’t want to meet on school time, so they met at 6:30 in the morning…. If you knew Randy and Russ, they were very straight shooters, and I didn’t think they ever wanted to be accused of meeting on school time.”

Other school leaders, like Cross, Freudenstein, and Green, were not only happy to take part in Thursday lunch meetings, but also to take leadership roles in the Puyallup Kiwanis Club.

One of the other things that impressed me about my fellow Kiwanians was how they had taken on unique responsibilities for major cultural events, including Puyallup’s annual Daffodil Festival parade.

Gary Johnson had led parade logistics for the Daffodil Parade in the ‘80s and ‘90s, with help from Larry Bargmeyer. When Johnson took a new job and left the Club, Bargmeyer recalled, “I accidentally asked, ‘Who is going to do the parades now that Gary is gone?’ I should have known better than to ask that question, but somehow I asked that question.” Bargmeyer ended up leading parade logistics for the Puyallup parade route for the next quarter-century.

Bargmeyer described the how Kiwanis involvement shaped the Daffodil Parade over time:

Kiwanis had been doing float logistics for years before I got there, just the float portion. But as the Daffodil Festival started dwindling, the Kiwanis Club took over bigger and bigger portions. Now, if there’s a parade in town, for the high school football team or something, they just call Kiwanis and say we want to have an A, B, or C parade. We have three parade routes all done, because, of course, the city is required to do all kinds of things if you have a detour. So it’s all on computer today—you know where every sign is placed, how they’re placed. So if the school district has a parade, or if there’s a veterans parade like we did, you just pick one of those three routes…. Other towns come to us and asked, “How did you solve this problem?” Basically, you want a parade to go in a circle, so that when the bus drops people off, it’s waiting in the same spot when the parade is over. So you design a parade route where that can happen.

…. I have always been a delegate and get the heck out of the way. There are people who “own” certain duty stations. “I’ll handle this,” and I don’t ever ask how. If they say that’s their corner, it’s their corner.

Bargmeyer recalled one particularly memorable experience that one of his volunteers made possible. A young Boy Scout once showed up at the Santa Parade only to discover his troop hadn’t signed up to join in the lineup. But there he was in his perfect uniform, along with his parents dressed as Christmas presents. “They didn’t have a spot,” said Bargmeyer, “but our volunteer said, ‘oh yes, here’s your spot, right here in the line.’ So this little kid in his brand-new Scout uniform got to walk down the street with his parents dressed as presents. Isn’t that a lifetime memory? A great volunteer will say, ‘Here’s your number right here.’”

We dole out a lot of glory to the nonprofit CEO or the mayor, but often it is the patient, faithful volunteer—the parade route coordinator, the PTA parent, the historical society docent, or the church trustee—who keeps things going for a community. And it is this kind of volunteer who deserves special acknowledgement during Volunteer Week, and throughout the year.

While there is plenty to commend about shorter-term volunteer engagements, there is no substitute for long-term volunteer commitments. It has become trendy for nonprofit experts to say that young people are more inclined to get involved in low-touch or one-off activities than to join something. They commend one-time volunteer projects for corporate teams (which often require intensive planning by nonprofit staff members) or lower expectations for maintaining membership in a group.

Yes, volunteering will need to look different in our generation. We will need new kinds of organizations, higher-tech points of connection, and fewer meetings for the sake of meeting. We need not emulate everything that was done in the past, which had plenty that ought not be emulated.

On the other hand, I’m convinced that people of any age need outlets for service, and they need them as a life feature and a habit, not just an occasional project. Furthermore, I’m not sure we can get by as a civil society without the kind of sustained and intensive commitments previous generations have made to particular institutions and particular places. As Jennifer Breheny Wallace writes in a wonderful new book entitled Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose, “We have more pop-ups and ‘experiences’ but fewer reasons to be regulars somewhere.” Wendell Berry has written of community as a “membership.” However, civic life may take on different forms in different generations, it seems we are born to hold membership.

If there’s some meeting of purposes between the needs of our society and the needs we have as individuals to be fulfilled as members of a community, it ought to push us toward the high task of institution-building and stewardship. It may answer a tremendous civic imperative that also happens to make each volunteer participant a little less lonely.

When people ask me about how they can chart a course to making a difference in their community, I tell them they ought to join something. Get involved with something you are passionate about, where you can build your social network, and where you can make a difference.

The volunteers who make up the Kiwanis Club of Puyallup—and thousands upon thousands of organizations like it all across the country—show how citizenship ought to be done. Voluntarism is a way of life, and we should do all we can to perpetuate it.

Image Credit: George Caleb Bingham, “The Jolly Flatboatmen” (1846) 

“We face paralysis,” concluded Annabelle Edamala in her reflection on Berry’s essay. For her and for everyone in her generation, “there was no ‘before the computer,’” and the choice to replace “old models” of writing with the one that now rules was never a choice she got to make. I suppose if you’re my age and can remember “the before-times,” you did have some kind of choice. But even so, you already made it, and here you are. Here I am. Here we all are.

Of course, it’s still possible to write without going online. Paper and ink exist. What’s not possible is to be a writer. Being a writer isn’t just about writing; it’s about writing for other people. You may have a few readers, or you may have a lot, but you must have some, or you’re not a writer, even if you write. And the readers are all on the Internet. If you’re just starting out and have no readers yet, then you must find some, and they’re all on the Internet, which is where they must find you. Even if you write physical books, you need the Internet to market it and review it and sell it, and you probably need the Internet to do the research for it.

I don’t make my living as a writer, even if I make some money here and there. But I still try to think of myself as a writer. Part of that is that I’d like to make more money someday, and part of it is the usual grubby desire to see my name in lights, even if it’s just the modest light of the front porch. But the better reason is that thinking of myself as a writer—someone who is responsible not for “expressing himself” but for deepening a conversation with others—helps me to write better. Even a casual writer like me needs readers, not just to pay him, but to keep him honest. And that means that even a casual writer today needs the Internet.

Fifteen years ago, Alan Jacobs published a little book called The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. Reading, he argued, has often been ruined by pedants who want us to read “because it’s good for us” and would instruct us in the correct methods for reading the books that we ought to read. The better way is to read for pleasure, widely, and without much thought for self-improvement. If reading is good for us in an “age of distraction,” it is because reading is the sort of pleasure we cannot get from our online distractions. Reading must therefore be defended in those terms, not as some kind of bad-tasting medicine for people with diseased attention spans.

If fifteen years later we are not just distracted but “post-literate,” then Jacobs’s argument is all the more persuasive. But fewer people will be persuaded by it, simply because fewer people will have read any books at all, and so they will be unable to know what Jacobs is talking about. If you grow up being forced to eat your vegetables, you still have some experience of vegetables, and when someone comes along and says that vegetables can be experienced differently, you have some purchase on what they are saying. But if you have never tasted a vegetable, the promise that vegetables can taste different means nothing to you. You are a very different sort of “reader” than the one Jacobs has in mind. For, of course, you do read all the time. You read texts and posts and comments on posts. You read inspirational quotations on inspirational photos. You read summaries of summaries of things that are tl;dr. You read subtitles for movies (if you even watch movies – TikTok videos are so much easier) in your native language, because you find it too taxing to follow the dialogue with your ear. You read texts and posts and comments on posts while you are reading those subtitles. And, of course, you now read many things that were not even written by a writer. According to one six-month-old headline (which is naturally all I bothered to read) “over 50% of the Internet is now AI slop.”

The point is that writers are more reliant than ever on the Internet for readers, and that the Internet is better than ever at forming people into “readers” who cannot read, let alone enjoy what they read. The writer who wants readers who will keep him honest as a writer, not as a painfully inefficient generator of text, will have to look for people who have not been lobotomized by the Internet. But he will have to look for them on the Internet. Where else? Should he staple some posters to a light pole and hope people call his landline seeking copies of his debut novella, Another Tilt at the Windmill?

But I’m overselling it a bit (the apocalypse is always good for clicks). I like to think Front Porch Republic is proof that if the Internet addles brains, it also keeps the less-addled in touch, and so helps them stay sane. And there are plenty such sites. In spite of the medium there are still readers, and so there are still writers. At any rate, no writer should spend too much time complaining about the quality of the audience. Also, a good writer raises his audience’s quality—not because he’s so great, but because he rises to the occasion when it counts. My real fear is not so much that the Internet makes us bad readers, but that it makes us bad writers.

Of course, the first way it makes us bad writers is that it makes us bad readers. Just as you can’t make good food without eating and appreciating good food, you can’t write anything worth reading if all you read is crap. Since you’re reading this, I’ll indulge myself in the presumption that you have good taste. But that’s no sure protection. The Internet is brimful of great writing; the problem for people who know what to read is knowing not to read it while scrolling ahead for the next hit of great writing. The best defense is to do your reading offline: to read printed books (especially old ones) and printed magazines, and to print at least some of what you find online so you can peruse it properly, at your leisure. Fortunately this isn’t hard. It’s perfectly possible to avoid becoming a bad reader, and to the extent that being a good reader makes you a good writer, it’s therefore possible to be a good writer even now.

Nor is it too difficult to avoid the more obvious ways in which the Internet makes us bad writers, or tries to. Trying to think and write (same difference) when I’m online often makes me feel like George in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron”: “[W]hile his intelligence was way above normal, [he] had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.” I don’t know if my intelligence is above normal, but it’s probably less than what it would be if I’d been born a hundred years earlier. But I can recreate that lost paradise to some extent, just by shutting off the various bells and whistles that screech at me, and there’s no law that says I can’t (not yet!). I can even pony up for a fancy no-frills writing machine with mechanical keys guaranteed to make me feel like Hemingway (hangovers not included).

No, the trickier problem with being a writer in the Internet age is the special way the Internet can distract us from our reasons for writing. The usual distractions—fame and fortune—are still present, magnified perhaps by the sense (if not the delusion) that they are easier to achieve, but balanced by the knowledge that even if fame and fortune come they are likely to be more ephemeral than ever. But the usual distractions are not really distractions from writing. They are part of being a writer. Fortune is unlikely, but no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. The “except” is a piece of hyperbole—who doubts that Samuel Johnson mainly wrote because he liked it?—but it is no more degrading to think of writers as craftsmen who ought to get paid for their work than it is to think that way about carpenters. Fame is an idol, but every writer worth reading is one who feels about certain famous writers not as fans feel about celebrities, but as children feel about parents, or friends about friends. That feeling is gratitude, not obsession, and fame doesn’t render it false. As for ephemerality, it was always very unlikely that anyone will be reading this in 200 years; the Internet merely makes that obvious to all but the most self-important.

What is newer is the way that the Internet distracts us from the only really good reason anybody ever wrote anything for anybody else to read. Writers ought to get paid if they can, and they ought to be recognized when they deserve it, but there are better ways to get money and reputation. The only really good reason to be a writer is that you like the work. It may be true that a writer is “someone for whom writing is the hardest thing in the world,” but a good writer is someone who does not resent the difficulty. But on the Internet, it’s increasingly possible to be a writer without doing much writing. Even before the advent of AI, the Internet encouraged a kind of cut-and-paste, disconnected way of thinking that must at least partly explain the declining quality of contemporary fiction. Now you can literally just push buttons. As “writer” gets further separated from “writing,” the idea of “being a writer” turns into a powerful distraction from the actual work of writing. You sit down to write, and find yourself “being a writer.”

At FPR, we want to keep “writer” connected with “writing.” That’s why we’ve made clear that we won’t publish AI-generated text. We’ve even joined Paul Kingsnorth’s “Writers Against AI” campaign, despite our Berryan distrust of movements. To be a writer against AI is to make three commitments:

1. I will not use AI in my work as a writer.
2. I will not support writers who use AI in their work.
3. I will support writers, illustrators, editors and others in related fields whose work is entirely human-made.

Alan Jacobs posted a thoughtful response to Kingsnorth’s campaign. After detailing the various ways he uses Claude “in his work as a writer” (none of which involve using it to actually write), Jacobs suggests that “while I think I . . . comply with the spirit of Writers Against AI, I am not meeting the criteria demanded by the letter.” This distinction between the spirit and the letter of the no-AI-for-writers law is worth thinking about. I think Kingsnorth’s three commitments can themselves be fairly read as expressions of the spirit of the law rather than as attempts to impose the letter of the law, which is how Jacobs seems to interpret them. I don’t think Jacobs is violating the spirit of the law with the way he uses Claude (in fact, I was intrigued by how he uses it and thought about trying it out). I don’t know if Kingsnorth would say he is—given that Kingsnorth sometimes talks about AI as the Antichrist, I suspect he might.

But Kingsnorth’s own distinction between “raw” and “cooked” barbarians might be useful here. “Raw” barbarians shun the Machine entirely, while “cooked” barbarians resist the system by inhabiting it thoughtfully rather than mindlessly. Jacobs might be more “cooked” than Kingsnorth, but Kingsnorth allows for that: it’s not a betrayal to be “cooked,” and most of us have to be. Kingsnorth’s principles don’t speak to the problems with AI (like the environmental costs) that might lead someone to endorse a complete ban on using it even if it has its legitimate uses in a writer’s work (hence the value of a religious exemption, the freedom to not be forced to use a technology you find morally hazardous). So as long as we’re talking about AI and writers in particular, and as long as we’re emphasizing the spirit rather than the letter, I don’t think that aligning ourselves with Kingsnorth’s principles implies that we’d be obliged to reject anything that we knew was written by a writer who uses AI in the way Jacobs describes.

The risk of emphasizing the spirit over the letter is always that people will take advantage of it. The fear that that will happen is one of the things that leads people to emphasize the letter over the spirit. But I think it’s better to take that risk. We should be able to state principles clearly and trust that people will interpret them in good faith, even if that leads to different interpretations. Taking a clear stand doesn’t mean being legalistic, and FPR in particular should avoid being legalistic. After all, our patron saint is the man who wrote “Why I Am Not Going to Buy A Computer.” But we’re a website, and I’m sure every single person who writes for us uses a computer to do the writing.

The letter kills, but the spirit gives life. When half the Internet is AI slop, there is no shortage of the letter. For that reason there is no shortage of “writers.” The real peril of writing in an age of distraction is that, on your way to becoming one of them, you’ll lose your soul, or never develop it. You’ll forget that writing is a pleasure. And a little more spirit will go out of the world.

Image Credit: Jean-Jacques Henner, The Little Writer (1869)

It’s not a surprise to encounter the rhythms of AI-generated prose in a social media post “written” by a tech CEO. It’s a bit more jarring to find them in a Washington Post op-ed about “guardrails” for AI or a book extolling AI education by Sal Khan (a book that also includes fake quotations attributed to Mother Teresa and Pablo Picasso, among others). It’s particularly jarring to see them in more niche publications I respect—and have myself published in—or in essays submitted to Front Porch Republic. (Why would you submit an essay generated by AI, which makes an argument critical of AI, to a website that doesn’t remunerate authors? No idea, but it happens consistently now.)

I rarely know for sure whether a suspicious-feeling essay is in fact AI generated. My AI radar is flawed, as are the various AI-powered detectors (what strange tail-chasing-dog situations we find ourselves in these days). Many of these essays are likely written through some sort of human-AI collaboration by people who think they are centaurs but who are more likely becoming reverse centaurs. And many may simply be written by humans who have read so much machine-generated prose that they themselves now write and think in machine rhythms. Nic Rowan calls this strange phenomenon the AI “mind meld.” We learn how to think and speak from interacting with our communities, and if we inhabit intellectual ecosystems blasted by industrial-scale token generators, our ability to think well will suffer.

OpenAI’s recent decision to sunset Sora, its AI-powered video producer, is likely motivated by economics rather than any twinge of Sam Altman’s vestigial conscience. And on its own this decision will do little to slow the torrent of manufactured images, videos, and words that have little to no connection with any reality outside the algorithmic functions that whir in data centers across the world. We now dwell among simulacra, and vertigo is endemic. Its most common manifestation is a kind of ennui. The world is a fascinating place, but when we marinate our minds in robotic tokens, boredom ensues.

I need to acknowledge that machine-generated words and images are not the first threat to our ability to seek truth together. Plato complained about the sophists quite some time ago. George Orwell and Thomas Merton warn about the political and moral dangers of doublespeak. Business leaders have long been double-clicking on problems and leveraging best practices to implement impactful solutions. Academese, or what Hannah Coulter calls “the Unknown Tongue,” excels at using many words to say very little. Mass media has eroded local accents and regional vocabulary, imposing a homogenized, bland, and formulaic discourse that is, if we’re honest, little better than its machine imitations, which only further this convergence on a generic mean. As anyone who has been paying attention can attest, the internet was not exactly a thriving verbal ecosystem pre-AI.

We like language that enables us to evade the rigors of thought and its often uncomfortable consequences. In one of his many marvelous asides in Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton observes that “most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought. Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable. Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves.” If this was true in 1908, we shouldn’t be too quick to blame AI for our own moral and intellectual vices.

That said, people immersed in AI-generated text will lack opportunities to develop a sense for sense, a taste for meaning. Good speech or writing makes sense palpable. I have in mind Wendell Berry’s meditation, in “Standing by Words,” on the etymology of “sentence”:

When we reflect that “sentence” means, literally, “a way of thinking” (Latin: sententia) and that it comes from the Latin sentire, to feel, we realize that the concepts of sentence and sentence structure are not merely grammatical or merely academic—not negligible in any sense. A sentence is both the opportunity and the limit of thought—what we have to think with, and what we have to think in. It is, moreover, feelable thought, a thought that impresses its sense not just on our understanding, but on our hearing, our sense of rhythm and proportion. It is a pattern of felt sense.

If we hope to think well, we’ll need to exercise our minds and experience these patterns of felt sense. That’s the only way to develop a taste for truth. Machines—it should go without saying—cannot feel sense, no matter how well they may be able to imitate the verbal behavior of humans who can. Thus, if good writing makes sense palpable, machine text induces a kind of neuropathy, disrupting our ability to intuit truth. Given this danger, we desperately need conversation partners who will shake us out of our mental ruts and provoke—rather than save—intellectual labor.

In an earlier essay, “In Defense of Literacy,” Berry directly addresses the danger that “prepared, public language,” language intended to make us “buy or believe somebody else’s line of goods,” poses to people who have not learned to work carefully with words. As he poses the question, “What is our defense against this sort of language—this language-as-weapon?” His answer is simple yet demanding:

We must speak, and teach our children to speak, a language precise and articulate and lively enough to tell the truth about the world as we know it. And to do this we must know something of the roots and resources of our language; we must know its literature. The only defense against the worst is a knowledge of the best.

There are no shortcuts. We have to consistently exercise our minds by savoring and producing verbal efforts to make sense feelable. The only defense against AI slop is to give more time and effort to carefully crafted language. (For a wonderful book with practical advice on how we might care for language, see Marilyn McEntyre’s Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies.)

One way to do this, of course, is to read books written before November 2022. I certainly want to be formed by Shakespeare, Milton, Thoreau, and Dickinson. I’ll never exhaust the riches of English-language writing (much less good writing in other languages!) pre-generative AI—I could spend the rest of my days savoring Annie Dillard, David James Duncan, G.K. Chesterton, Flannery O’Conner, Robert Farrar Capon, and many, many more. But I also want my word-hoard enriched by people responding with care and wisdom to the events of today. I need poets like Seth Wieck, essayists like Teddy Macker, and story-tellers like Kazuo Ishiguro.

What will it take to sustain the remnants of a contemporary republic of letters on the margins of a public square blasted by machine-speak? I don’t know. And I don’t think anyone does. I am heartened, though, to know of many people who want to think and learn with other humans who are striving to muster a language precise and articulate and lively enough to tell the truth about the world as we know it. In responding to this desire, many readers and writers are looking for ways to signal their commitment to human words. Paul Kingsnorth started an effort called Writers Against AI, and Justin Clark created a set of logos that participating writers and readers can display. (FPR has one of these on our submissions page.) The UK’s Society of Authors has launched a Human Authored program where authors can register their books and get authorization to use their trademarked seal. This program has now expanded to the US Authors Guild as well. Oddly, to my mind, a work can be certified as Human Authored even if authors use AI for “research, brainstorming, or outlining.” Created by Humans allows authors to register their books, attest human authorship, and then license these to companies looking to train AI models. (Though if you value human verbal exchanges, I’m not sure why you’d want to help train machine word generators.) These all rely on “self-certification”; as an author, you give your word that you wrote the words that appear under your name. This approach is prone to abuse.

Other approaches aim to increase reliability. Books by People certifies publishers and vets their editorial processes. Human Creative has taken another route to establish trust; it monitors a writer’s process. This is much more invasive than AI detectors that scan the finished product, and it’s also much more reliable. I’m drafting this essay in Human Creative’s web application, and when I’ve finished revising and am ready to publish it, I’ll receive a shareable certificate (viewable here) that gives readers a relatively high level of confidence that they’re reading something a person composed.

There are real drawbacks to this approach: First, even these guardrails are not insurmountable. I imagine I could generate an essay in some AI platform, print it out, and then type it up in Human Creative (though the application does have some capacity to catch AI-sounding prose). And, of course, if I’ve read so much robot prose that I think and write in machine cadences, typing out such pablum won’t make it worth reading. Second, I’m used to drafting essays in Scrivener, and the various AI deterrents that Human Creative relies on introduce friction into the writing process. Given the widespread distrust generated by machine text, though, process verification will prove essential in many academic, business, and literary contexts. As an editor, I’d welcome essay submissions accompanied by a Certified Human Content seal, particularly from authors I haven’t worked with before. (Human Creative is offering a free trail to anyone who signs up right now; if you give it a try, I’d be interested in hearing what you think.) If the tide of AI slop rises much further, FPR may have to require this seal from new authors. Already, nonexistent citations litter peer-reviewed articles, and some who manage code repositories have had to close pull requests to avoid being inundated with buggy code.

It may not seem fair that the hubris of AI developers inflicts costs on those who want to know whether they are listening to a person or a machine. Polluters always harm not only themselves but many others, and these harms can ripple outward for generations. It’s always easier to damage an ecosystem than to restore it to health.

Unlike the tech-bro CEOs who promise that their products will usher in a utopia where we won’t need to work or think but can merely enjoy the fabulous fruits of machine work and thought, I have no technological panacea to sell. There are no machines that can magically give us the intellectual and moral virtues required to think well and experience truth—or, in Stanley Hauerwas’s resonant phrase, enjoy “the relation of an adequated mind to its object.” These pleasures are the hard-won fruits of caring for our places and for the words we need to know and treat them justly. Those of us who value verbal virtues must commit to preserving spheres where they and their joys are practiced and shared—in our homes, our churches, our schools, and also, if at all possible, on the margins of a digital and print ecosystem being destroyed by machine-generated simulacra of sense.

Image credit: Albrecht Dürer, Of the Just Shaping of Letters

Wherever a Christian’s meditations may have led him, he is always brought back, as by a natural bias, to the contemplation of the cross. The whole mystery of Christ is a mystery of resurrection, but it is also a mystery of death.

It may not be a surprise, then, that such contemplations form the “natural bias” of The Body of this Death: Letters from the Last Archbishop of Lancaster. Published in 2025 by Word on Fire Academic, this book is perhaps closest in genre to an epistolary novel but defies easy categorization. Its author, Ross McCullough, is an Associate Professor of Theology at George Fox University. Whatever form best describes the fictional elements of this book, it is first and foremost a work of Catholic theology written in defiance of a dystopian near-future closely resembling our present.

That hypothetical (or, perhaps, imminent and assured) near-future is what makes this book so stomach-churning and so vital. I have not experienced such a sustained feeling of dread since Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation. These are vastly different books, but they are eerily joined in one respect: confronting the prospect of an inevitable alteration to human being. VanderMeer’s Area X perpetuates irrevocable ontological change in those who enter it. McCullough’s sparsely described and diabolically named “transfiguration,” now the beneficent tool of a “liberal” state, hints at a benign immortality at much the same cost. Naturally, it is reserved for the most recidivistic criminals.

More terrifying still and more prescient is IR (Immersive Reality). The Archbishop describes it as follows:

Most people, most of the time, will choose immersive reality instead. It will be like the transhumanists: having to go through the trouble of the whole thing, with all the uncontrolled side effects and the impossibility of reversing the procedure…We would rather simulate enhancements at our leisure and maintain the option of returning to the familiar world than have to live with them and their consequences.

Hence perpetual digital surveillance, the “resurrection” of the dead, and endless distraction: “Oh brave new world that has such people in it.”

Nevertheless, The Body of this Death is not only concerned with the loss of our humanity to digital simulacra or surgical implant or extraction. The range of its 168 pages is immense and its application wide-ranging. The letters themselves are addressed to a Muslim woman, two close friends, a priest in the diocese, and a kind of agnostic or atheist. For all their brevity, they present a trove of aphorisms encompassing icons and parenthood, Islam and Kierkegaard. A few selections will indicate the quality of the whole:

At times, perhaps, the music can only be heard in moments of intense suffering, as the anesthetized nerve only fires when the stimulus is extreme, but still it is heard, and it sounds of something beyond suffering and anesthetic both. All of our inoculation against the real cannot protect us from it. “Whereas it is in the nature of meaning that not everything has it” –– there is Baudrillard’s basic error. To have meaning is the definition of thingness. Omnis natura rationem parit, Hugh of St. Victor says; all nature is pregnant with meaning, and nothing in the universe is without issue.”

To appreciate Christianity for its contribution to Western civilization is like reading Dostoevsky to increase one’s vocabulary.

Then too God’s word is confusing for not being deformed enough. Perhaps much of the Bible’s literary meaning comes as a report from the unfallen world, and where it fails to correspond to our events, that is less because Scripture is false than because history is. The unfallen world is what our world at bottom is, without the deprivations of sin, and perhaps what Scripture gives us, in places, is a history too true for us to recognize––not because of our blindness, in the first place, but because events themselves are not fully realized. Only in the second place does this present as a kind of blindness in us, as when someone affirms that we are married and we correct him to say that we are divorced, or speaks as if our daughter were alive and we respond that she is dead.

The problem with Catholics is that they are bad Catholics; the problem with Protestants is that they are also bad Catholics.

Every attempt at iconoclasm is only partial–or it is nihilism. For there is no other way to represent God than by things. You can prefer the idea to the image, but where did you get the idea? You can prefer the spirit to the flesh, but both are creatures. You can prefer the word of God to the body of God, his teaching to his touch; you can circumscribe the uncircumscribable within mere prophecy rather than within the full ambit of a human life–still it is a circumscription, and rather more a circumscription than allowing him all those unspoken ways in which one man is present to another and the God-man present to us all. All revelation is a temptation to idolatry, as the iconoclasts knew–and the iconodule knew better. The question is which icons teach us to see them, and so see all else, as icons, and which obscure their own iconicity.

Such range is achievable because the incarnation is the theological center of The Body of this Death. I am reminded of one of the great moments in St. John Henry Newman’s An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine:

I should myself call the Incarnation the central aspect of Christianity, out of which the three main aspects of its teaching take their rise, the sacramental, the hierarchical, and the ascetic… Christianity is dogmatical, devotional, practical all at once; it is esoteric; it is indulgent and strict; it is light and dark; it is love, and it is fear.

This book may stray too far into the esoteric, dark, and fearful corners of what the Archbishop calls “metamodernity.” Part of me embraces this because things like IR and, God forbid, “transfiguration” seem to be where our civilization is heading. Yet hope remains, and it is the hope of the incarnation, which the Archbishop describes as the “technology of Catholicism.” It is a hope ultimately bound up in the statement “Christ happens to things” rather than the other way round. In a dire moment, he reflects:

Christ is not nailed to the cross; the cross is nailed to Christ. It is not the savior that flees the world but the world that flees its salvation. You think you are here to discipline me, but perhaps the nails run the other way.

Because Christ “happens to things,” the Christian life is one immersed in materiality:

The givenness of the material thing, the fact that we constantly stub our toe against it: we cannot un- or re-purpose it at will. For the great danger of the immersive [the IR mentioned above], which after all is still half-bodied, is how little stubborn in this sense it is.

Just so.

I used “sparsely” a moment ago, and this adverb describes a strength and a weakness. The letters themselves, their arrangement, and sometimes their content remain perhaps too mysterious. In an “Introduction” evocative of Umberto Eco, an editor tells us that the manuscript before us is a kind of critical edition (complete with footnotes, but not, thankfully, an apparatus). This edition is the product of a handwritten copy in English from the diocesan archives of Buenos Aires and a Spanish translation sold in Copenhagen by a bankrupt Spanish bookseller. The editor describes the letters as a labyrinth. The Archbishop himself will use that word with specific reference to Borges. Borges would appreciate the form, and, perhaps, the mystery.

Intriguingly, the latter third of the collection is marked “posthumous letters,” and one can only speculate about why. Our fictional editor offers prosaic reasons, but the dust jacket hints at a hologram, and the title is taken from a translation of Romans 7:24 with an appropriate emphasis given to the near demonstrative pronoun (τοῦ σώματος τοῦ θανάτου τούτου – the body of death, this one).

Well. Which body? Which death? McCullough’s title invites Pauline answers. To the question in Romans 7, the answer is Christ and all that he entails: incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Thus also in 1 Corinthians 15, but there the response to “what kind of body?” is met with: “Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be, but a bare seed…But God gives it a body as he has chosen.” In 2 Corinthians 3, we learn more: “And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same images from one degree of glory to another.” It is telling that we learn very little about the procedure of “transfiguration” beyond the detail that one’s eyes must be removed.

Nevertheless, The Body of This Death might have been still more profound and illuminating had McCullough chosen to give us further plot. Still, he never does us the disservice of watering anything down. I suspect readers in the market for this book will appreciate that.

I finished this book on Easter Sunday after reading it over the course of Holy Week. As de Lubac foretells, I found myself immersed in the mysteries of death and resurrection, in the incarnation and in the sacramental nature of a created existence: this body, this life, but also this body and this life joined to Christ’s (baptized into his death, co-buried, and co-raised as Paul says in Romans 6). By chance, I happened to finish Michael Tobin’s translation of Bernanos’s The Diary of a Country Priest earlier that day. I was left with Bernanos’s “all is grace” in conversation with McCullough’s “Why seek so nearly imitated a presence when you can pass over to the original? Why, unless at bottom you do not want the original?” I cannot get it out of my mind.

Go and do likewise. Be haunted. Buy this book and read it. It makes a kind of devotional companion to Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine and Barba-Kay’s A Web of Our Own Making. For its theological mastery and its aphoristic craft, it also belongs with Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Augustine. The comparisons with Screwtape are apt, but McCullough has given us something more Catholic, less accessible, and more timely. If each of those qualities is simultaneously strength and weakness, so be it.

This essay is crossposted to The Enthusiast.

Image Credit: Caravaggio, “The Incredulity of Saint Thomas” (1602)

They have multiplied across my nightstand, and the stack is growing. Sticky notes, a pencil, junkmail postcards, and a receipt work as placeholders.

I actively read three to four books. I read a few pages from each book every night or switch from book to book. I have plenty of other reading friends who keep disciplined systems like these, sometimes with up to ten books.

Unfortunately, I started four books in December and have not returned to them since. Can I blame my attention in a distracted age? Certainly. Did I spend a lot of late night hours visiting instead of reading? You bet, but a few months have now passed. Is a book or two ready for the fatal Did-Not-Finish pile? Also a possibility. But I wonder if it’s something else that leads me to lay aside certain books.

Here are two examples. For a decade, I have wanted to read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, from 1920, This Side of Paradise. I’ve taught many of Fitzgerald’s short stories and The Great Gatsby countless times. I might never find a character to truly cheer for in his work, but that is my opinion of course and also not the point of fiction. My margin notes and lines and boxes of every color reveal how I’ve learned and reflected on Fitzgerald’s works over the years as I taught them. I relish so much of his style and phrasing while I can also appreciate his critical eye of American society. Yet I stopped halfway through his instant bestseller. I don’t like Amory. I have left him at age twenty in the middle of Princeton in chapter 3 , and I’m not sure I care enough to read more. I feel a certain stubbornness or maybe ambivalence.

I also tried half of a nonfiction book by David Robson, The Laws of Connection. Once again, I began it months ago. I chose it because I had hoped to learn some new ways of conversing with others and our adult children at Christmas gatherings. After all, I heard a wonderful BBC interview with Robson about intentionally asking deeper questions to develop greater intimacy with friends and family. Studies and science and proof and data abound! How fascinating. How handy. But I didn’t finish.

Huge sticky notes jut out of the pages. I can see scribbled ends of words. I thought I needed this book. I didn’t go to great expense but had found a retired copy from an Ohio library. It had lasted in circulation for one whole year from 2024 to 2025. That may have been a clue. Or it didn’t find appeal in one small town in Ohio.

So was it too much mental work to read? No. It had a reasonable academic tone and practical tips for things to try in conversation. This book could help my communication skills. I would not have picked it up if I didn’t think that I had a need to grow. But I grew tired of notetaking, I think. I’m not sure I will even collate the notes I did take. I quit.

Maybe my reading taste buds are dull. Maybe I’m in a lazy slump. Do I need more books? More appealing choices? Am I even asking the right question?

Like me, C.S. Lewis asks dozens of book questions in his essay, “High and Low Brows.” In 1939, he addressed his thoughts about kinds of books to the English Society of Oxford. Yet my summary is inaccurate already. Lewis said that it was unfair to rank “degrees and kinds of merit.” It’s lazy to place things in categories without thinking through the distinctions. But he does believe there are contrasts between books. The main issue is to figure out how to talk about the differences.

As he examines this set of ideas, Lewis concludes at one point that books can be bad because of poverty of style and because a protagonist is shallow or foolish. That gave me pause. Perhaps that was one reason I disliked This Side of Paradise. Lewis thinks of all the common things we think of too: Do we rank books based on popularity or seriousness? Ease or difficulty? Vulgarity or virtue? The lists go on, but Lewis assures us we have failed if we continue to think this way. There is an answer, and it’s not a few simple categories. We need to expand how we see all books, to imagine “a whole series of vertical lines representing different kinds of work, and an almost infinite series of horizontal lines crossing these to represent the different degrees of goodness in each kind.” It would be an enormous chart.

I realized as I read Lewis’s analysis that I am guilty of one of the very dangers he warns against: oversimplification. I was looking for a single reason for why I quit reading one pile of books. In doing so, I wasn’t looking at each book for its individual merits. Lewis says any lowbrow book can have good and bad, and we can see the “same kinds of goodness and badness in books that are not lowbrow.” Even as I look back at the psychology of communication in The Laws of Connection, I can see both. I think I may return to it.

I find Lewis’s everyday wisdom helpful. It’s not that the books I have chosen are good or bad. The answer lies in my perspective, my state of mind. In the greatest of ironies or the greatest of book tests, my husband and I went book shopping on the weekend. I didn’t worry about whether my choices were lowbrow or highbrow. A huge bookstore in a neighboring town discounted all of its stock before it moved locations. What did I find appealing? Two John Grishams and one collection of poetry and prose from 1964, A Book of Comfort by Elizabeth Goudge.

Image Credit: Erik Desmazières, “The Library of Babel”

“Creating Membership.” Jake Meador responds to the novel by reflecting on the conditions needed to form community: “The Burley tobacco program so beloved by Berry and central to the story of Marce Catlett is best understood, then, as a model of Christian political wisdom. It was a synthetic project designed and sustained by human endeavor that ensured that all parties in a given relationship benefitted from the work produced by that relationship. In other words, it demonstrates that social cohesion is not exclusively a product of material precarity that forces people together. Social cohesion can also be created when people determine to pursue each other’s good in common and structure their relationships in ways that are mutually uplifting.”

“Chesterton’s Radical Sanity.” I have a very different response to Chesterton’s distributism than does Rachel Lu, but her appreciation of his wit and wisdom is quite good: “In an era teeming with ‘influencers’ of the most noxious variety, it is deeply moving to read an author who is so adept with words, and yet so totally suffused with gratitude, humility, and purpose. But instead of waxing nostalgic, modern readers should take note. His age had its own noxious influencers. Ours has access to all the same sources of wisdom and insight that Chesterton once ‘discovered.’ It’s never too late to see the dazzling wonder of one’s own backyard.”

“Lord of the Gadflies.” John Rodden takes stock of the life and writings and significance of the uncategorizable John Lukacs: “Although he occasionally taught briefly at prestigious institutions elsewhere (Princeton, Johns Hopkins, the Fletcher School of Diplomacy at Tufts, the University of Pennsylvania), he remained at Chestnut Hill College until he retired in 1994. Lukacs was a scholar with impassioned convictions, high standards, and genuine integrity—a nearly impossible trio of commitments to maintain throughout seven decades of prolific writing.”

“What Happened After a Teacher Ditched Screens.” Jenny Anderson profiles a teacher who found Chromebooks were getting in the way of education: “Over and over again, though, Kane discovered that all of the dashboards and data analytics of ed tech did not make the individual needs of students clearer, nor did they much help those who were struggling. Instead, the screens offered students cover, a way to appear engaged without any actual sustained effort. Only when he got rid of all the laptops and tablets did the needs of his students become plain.”

“Inside Charleston’s Craft Renaissance.” Farahn Morgan describes how the American College of the Building Arts is giving a liberal arts education and an apprenticeship in craft: “In recent years, as the rapid development of artificial intelligence has given rise to anxieties about the future of work, the college has emerged as an early model for a more human-centered craft education. It offers a holistic alternative to the traditional university-to-white-collar route, one that focuses on training both the body and the mind. The idea is to prepare students for the coming era of technological disruption by helping them develop a deeper understanding of those qualities that have traditionally shaped the built environment: empathy, patience, humor, and an appreciation of beauty. These are not easily replaced by machines, precisely because they’re rooted in humanity.” (Recommended by Adam Smith.)

“To Write Well Is Human.” Nadya Williams begins her essay about the dangers of passing off the work of writing to a machine by praising the good desire that leads people to want to write: “Whether they hope to produce novels, poetry, or essays, many people who write using AI want what writers have always wanted: to take perfectly ordinary words and turn them into something extraordinary. There’s something transcendent and soul-moving to beautiful writing, no matter the genre or shape of the piece, because writing—as other creative endeavors—reflects our basic nature as image bearers of God. Just as our God is a creator, we have a desire to create things of beauty, including with our words.”

“Joe the Hero.” Mark Oppenheimer tells about a schoolmate of his who lacked legs but not courage: “Joe came up only to Tom’s waist. But Joe had authority. He was a handsome, square-jawed boy—man, really, 19 years old—dapper in the togs of our school’s jacket-and-tie dress code: He favored white shirts and red ties, and his blue blazer dragged on the ground as he walked. But also, Joe was the most badass, fearless, uncowed cripple any of us had ever met, with a massive muscularity in his chest, and arms pumped up by years of doing double duty as legs.”

“Anthropic Debuts Preview of Powerful New AI Model Mythos in New Cybersecurity Initiative.” It’s hard to know how to take Anthropic’s breathless claims about it’s new model’s abilities, but it would be quite the plot twist if AI breaks the feasibility of secure networked computers. Lucas Ropek summarizes the situation: “Anthropic claims that, over the past few weeks, Mythos identified ‘thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities, many of them critical.’ Many of the vulnerabilities are one to two decades old, the company added.”

“Nick Offerman to Host “A Wonder is What it Is.’” For National Poetry Month, Nick Offerman is doing four radio episodes where he reads a poem by Wendell Berry and then reflects on it. The first episode can be found here. (Recommended by Dominic Garzonio.)

How do we reimagine and remake the human presence on earth in ways that work over the long haul?

David W. Orr

The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.

David W. Orr

As we lurch, at the order of our president, grotesquely into another war in the Middle East, a war snuffing out the lives of humans and various nonhuman creatures, a war that is opposed by most Americans, a war that’s playing fast and loose with the security of much of the world; as we suffer, yet again, the helpless awareness that our government, whose power is purportedly derived from “the consent of the governed,” is not in our hands; as we, like a herd of animals sensing an oncoming storm, intuit that the system—the incomprehensibly complex, elaborately technological, fragilely interrelated, global industrial system of which we and our government are part and which is bent on a “greed for gain which knows no limit and tends to infinity”—is perhaps beginning to collapse; as we collectively protect ourselves from knowledge of our own implicatedness in this system by armoring ourselves with speed and distraction and political hate; and as we witness our holy Earth—our town, the lake of our childhood, the faraway land visited while traveling—become more and more maimed by human influence, we seem to be (borrowing language from the Lakota) “crying for a vision.”

On our quest for a vision we could do worse than consider the work of David W. Orr, carefully consider his many essays and books published over the last few decades. Despite his eloquent words of prophetic challenge and prophetic possibility, Orr remains too little known in America.

And what is Orr’s vision?

In light of the variety of topics he’s written about (love, gratitude, water, oil, speed, scale, diversity, language, education, climate change, technology, science, scientism, spirituality, politics, leadership, citizenship, agriculture, conservation, localism, architecture, ecological design, the industrial economy, and others) and in light of the richness of his expression, attempting a summary of his vision seems a fool’s errand. But let me run that fool’s errand roundaboutly (and uncomprehensively) by sharing a list from his book Hope Is an Imperative, a list of things Orr believes every healthy community needs, a plainly worded but provocative list that I’ve been sharing with friends and students for years:

• front porches
• public parks
• local businesses
• windmills and solar collectors
• local farms and better food
• better woodlots and forests
• local employment
• more bike trails
• summer baseball leagues
• community theaters
• better poetry
• neighborhood book clubs
• bowling leagues
• better schools
• vibrant and robust downtowns with sidewalk cafes
• great pubs serving microbrews
• more kids playing outdoors
• fewer freeways, shopping malls, sprawl, television
• no more wars for oil or anything else

A healing vision for America, Orr suggests in his writings (and in the list above), is one faithful to the great nearby, to the gospel of the local, to the wisdom that sits in places, to what Benedictines call stabilitas loci. It is a vision wed to slowness, proportionality, beauty, art, to “peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind.” It is committed to remaining human against all odds, to face-to-face encounter, technological prudence, hard work, self-reliance (“homespun resourcefulness,” Orr calls it), the decentralization of whatever can be decentralized, and integral livelihoods. A healing vision, Orr says (again and again and again), is one scrupulously mindful of future generations. (“We do not have to rob the world and steal from our children to live well.”) It is a vision that honors “tradition, obligations, physical reality, and our long-term prospects”; and one that is in harmony, as much as possible, with the laws—and other beings and forces—of the Earth. It is a vision based on “the art of applied wholeness,” on imaginative responsibility, and on acting out that responsibility by way of minute particulars. In an essay on his friend Wendell Berry, Orr revealingly invokes English historian and archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes: “Jacquetta Hawkes … once described rural England of the eighteenth century as characterized by a ‘creative, patient, and increasingly skillful love-making that persuaded the land to flourish.’” David W. Orr’s vision, too, privileges such love.

And while Orr’s vision is radical (no incrementalist, Orr repeatedly says he doesn’t care to “tinker at the edge of the status quo”), it actually seems plausible. It seems to be a vision we could live up to and sustain because it’s predicated (unlike the sanguine chimeras of today’s tech boosters) on abiding by the facts of life instead of trying to rearrange them. Orr, again and again, reminds us that we are currently living beyond our means, that we are running afoul of the bounds of the natural world, of the ordinances set by God for existence. Instead, says Orr, we should build our economies—and communities—“on ecological realities,” on a design revolution that meshes how we provide food, shelter, energy, materials, livelihoods, and waste-management with the “larger patterns and flows” of the Earth. If we want an enduring America, Orr reasonably tells us, we need to ensure the integrity of natural systems. And these are not partisan notions, says Orr, not Left nor Right. They are common sense. “The alternative to chaos,” writes William Catton, author of Overshoot, “is to abandon the illusion that all things are possible.” At this moment in human history, at a time still (despite decades of warnings) delusionally and harmfully addicted to what Ivan Illich called “development euphoria,” those words—quoted by Orr—might surprise us with a cutaneous shiver.

“The fact is,” Orr writes in his wise, testy, lapidary book The Last Refuge, “that the industrial, extractive economy and its politics cannot be sustained.” Loudly and at times snarlingly suspicious of the fast, blind, abstracting, technocratic juggernaut that is modernity (“incoherence, disorder, and violence are the hallmarks of the modern world”), Orr calls us to redefine the good and proposes a thriftier, earthier, more reverent understanding of prosperity, a prosperity inseparable from the “art of inhabitation,” an art that involves what George Sturt, one of the last wheelwrights in England, described (in The Wheelwright Shop) as the “age-long effort … to fit close and ever closer” to one’s particular place. Relatedly, Orr invites us to see that “humans are embedded in a network of obligations and are kin to all life.” Apart from participation in this wider creaturely kinship, humans do not exist. “Our starting point,” Brother David Steindl-Rast wrote (using words Orr likely would admire), “must be the perspective of togetherness.”

David W. Orr’s vision calls us to see this togetherness by thinking systemically, by noting patterns of cause and effect, “the patterns that connect us across the divisions of culture, religion, geography, and time.” In an era that rewards a clever sort of intelligence, an intelligence tantamount to a cunning amoral gaming-of-the-system, tantamount to a headist, whole-blind knack for self-interested expediency, Orr’s intelligence (like Ellen Davis’s, Joanna Macy’s, Gary Snyder’s, Wendell Berry’s, and David Steindl-Rast’s) is about seeing, for the sake of the commonweal, the interrelatedness of things, the exquisite and infinite mutuality. You can call such seeing imaginative responsibility, the ecological imagination, or the piety of the open eye. Call it what you will, it is a deeper kind of intelligence than what’s privileged today, and it’s an intelligence we can’t do without. It broadens one’s sense of identity and enlarges one’s field of care. It sponsors the “elaborate courtesy” (Wendell Berry’s words) proper to stewardship and love. Intelligence attuned to the whole is intelligence in service of health, of the holy. And such intelligence is often inconvenient. In an incisive essay on 9/11 from his book The Last Refuge, Orr writes two sentences that speak, discomfortingly, to modern America regardless of the party in power:

In an ecological perspective … there are few accidents or anomalies, only outcomes based on system structure and dynamics. Climate change and glittering malls, Calcuttan poverty and sybaritic wealth, biotic impoverishment and economic growth, militarism and terrorism, global domination and utter vulnerability are not different things but manifestations of a single system.

To provide a better sense of Orr’s gift to us, let me get out of the way entirely and quote him at length:

I once asked a class to explain the dead zone, which is roughly the size of New Jersey, in the Gulf of Mexico, the fact that one-third of U.S. teenagers are overweight or obese, and the possible relationships between the two. After an hour, they had filled the blackboard with boxes and arrows that included federal farm subsidies, U.S. tax law, chemical dependency, feedlots and megafarms, the rise of the fast-food industry, declining farm communities, corporate centralization, advertising, cheap food policy, research agendas at land-grant institutions, urban sprawl, the failure of political institutions, cheap fossil fuel energy, and so forth. Most of the things described by those boxes, however, resulted from decisions that were once thought to be economically rational or at least within the legitimate self-interest of the parties involved. But collectively they are an unfolding continental-scale disaster affecting the health of people and land alike.

(From the essay “Leverage” in Hope Is an Imperative)

Ugliness is, I think, the surest sign of disease, or what is now being called “unsustainability.” Show me … neon ticky-tacky strips leading toward every city in America, and the shopping malls, and I’ll show you devastated rain forests, a decaying countryside … and toxic waste dumps. It is all of a fabric. And this is the heart of the matter. To see things in their wholeness is politically threatening. To understand that our manner of living, so comfortable for some, is linked to cancer rates in migrant laborers in California, the disappearance of tropical rain forests, 50,000 toxic dumps across the U.S.A. … is to see the need for a change in our way of life. To see things whole is to see both the wounds we have inflicted on the natural world in the name of mastery and those we have inflicted on ourselves and on our children for no good reason, whatever our stated intentions. Real ecological literacy is radicalizing in that it forces us to reckon with the roots of our ailments, not just with their symptoms. For this reason, it can revitalize and broaden the concept of citizenship to include membership in a planet–wide community of humans and living things.

(From the essay “Ecological Literacy” in Hope Is an Imperative)

The increasing velocity of knowledge is widely accepted as sure evidence of human mastery and progress. But many, if not most, of the ecological, economic, social, and psychological ailments that beset contemporary society can be attributed directly or indirectly to knowledge acquired and applied before we had time to think it through carefully. We rushed into the fossil fuel age only to discover the giant problem of climate destabilization. We rushed to develop nuclear energy without the faintest idea of what to do with the radioactive wastes. Nuclear weapons were created before we had time to ponder their full implications. Knowledge of how to kill more efficiently is rushed from research to application without much question about its effects on the perceptions and behavior of others, about its effects on our own behavior, or about better and cheaper ways to achieve real security. CFCs and a host of carcinogenic, mutagenic, and hormone-disrupting chemicals, too, are products of fast knowledge. High-input, energy-intensive agriculture is also a product of knowledge applied before much consideration has been given to its full ecological and social costs. Economic growth, in large measure, is driven by fast knowledge, with results everywhere evident in mounting environmental problems, social disintegration, unnecessary costs, and injustice.

(From the essay “Slow Knowledge” in Hope Is an Imperative)

Looking back, the last few decades should teach us that democracy is vulnerable to those, whether terrorists or ideologues of any sort, who flagrantly defy the rules of civility, tolerance, and public order. The history of Greek democracy … stands both as a beacon to the possibilities of self-governance and a warning about its fragility. Looking to the future, ours will one day appear as an oddly disoriented time. Many of the issues that fueled the passions of our day will appear to them as merely vaporous diversions from much larger issues. In particular, our obsession with consumption and individual rights to the neglect of collective rights will appear derelict, perhaps criminally.

(From the essay “Late-Night Thoughts About Democracy” in Down to the Wire)

Education is not widely regarded as a problem, although the lack of it is. The conventional wisdom holds that all education is good, and the more of it one has, the better. The truth is that without significant precautions, education can equip people merely to be more effective vandals of the earth…. We have fragmented the world into bits and pieces called disciplines. As a result after 12 or 16 or 20 years of education, most students graduate without any broad, integrated sense of the unity of things…. We routinely produce economists who lack the most rudimentary understanding of ecology or thermodynamics. This explains why our national accounting systems do not subtract the costs of biotic impoverishment, soil erosion, poisons in our air and water, and resource depletion from gross national product. We add the price of the sale of a bushel of wheat to the gross national product while forgetting to subtract the three bushels of topsoil lost to grow it. As a result of incomplete education, we have fooled ourselves into thinking that we are much richer than we are.

(From the essay “What is Education For?” in Earth in Mind)

Imagine a world in which those who purport to lead us first make a pilgrimage to ground zero at Hiroshima and publicly pledge “never again.” Imagine a world in which those who purport to lead us go to Auschwitz and the Killing Fields and pledge publicly “never again.” Imagine a world in which leaders go to Bhopal and say to the victims, “We are truly sorry. This will never happen again, anywhere.” Imagine those pilgrim leaders going to sites where love, kindness, forgiveness, sacrifice, compassion, wisdom, ingenuity, and foresight have been evident: Assisi, the home of Saint Francis; Le Chambon, where French villagers acted to save Jews during the Nazi occupation; a shelter for the homeless in New York City…. Imagine a world in which those who intend to lead help lift our sights above the daily crisis to the far horizon of what could be…. Imagine a world in which we expect leaders to be knowledgeable people who meet each year not to talk about economic growth, but about ecological and human health—a more complicated and pressing subject. Imagine a world in which those who purport to lead had actually read widely and thought deeply about the directions of technology, suffering, nature, agriculture, ethics, political philosophy, and the human future…. Imagine a time in which those who purport to lead us would have to understand the fundamentals such as how the Earth works as a physical system, the state of the planet … policies necessary for sustainability, economics suited for a small planet, ecological design, and techniques of conflict resolution.

(From the essay “Imagine a World: The Education of Our Leaders” in The Last Refuge)

History is a record of many things, most of which were not planned or foreseen. And after Auschwitz, Hiroshima, the H-bomb, gulags, and killing fields we know that at best it is only partially a record of progress. It is easy at this point to throw up one’s hands and conclude with the Kentucky farmer who informed the lost traveler that “you can’t get there from here.” That conclusion, however, breeds self-fulfilling prophecies, fatalism, and resignation—perhaps in the face of opportunities, but certainly in the face of an overwhelming need to act. We also have the historical examples of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Albert Schweitzer that suggest a different social dynamic, one that places less emphasis on confrontation, revolution, and slogans and more on patience, courage, moral energy, humility, and nonpolarizing means of struggle. And we have the wisdom of E.F. Schumacher’s admonition to avoid asking whether we will succeed or not and instead “leave these perplexities behind us and get down to work.”

(From the essay “The Problem of Sustainability” in Hope Is an Imperative)

The great poet and social critic Denise Levertov described “prophetic utterance” as speech that can “transform experience and move the receiver to new attitudes.” By my lights, David W. Orr’s many writings fit that description.

The darkness around us is deep. But “in a dark time,” says the poet, “the eye begins to see.” Vaclav Havel spoke penetratingly of the “self-momentum” of a power or system. This self-momentum, Havel said, is the unconscious, irresponsible, uncontrollable, and unchecked momentum that is no longer the work of people, but which drags people along with it and therefore manipulates them. And this momentum, Havel noted, is accompanied by a demoralization, a widespread inertia. Writer, scholar, and psychologist Randolph Severson writes, in an unrelated context, of demoralization as “a state of helplessness, hopelessness, purposelessness, and eroded sense of mastery, in which life’s narrative feels incoherent and the future empty … the heart’s energy dispersed among trivialities, base desires, or spiritual fatigue.” Severson adds that during demoralization “high aims lose motivational force; one knows the good yet fails to strive.” It further entails the “erosion of confidence that striving matters.” Echoing Severson, Havel says demoralization signifies the “willingness to surrender higher values when faced with the trivializing temptations of modern civilization.” Havel elaborates:

“A person who has been seduced by the consumer value system, whose identity is dissolved in an amalgam of the accoutrements of mass civilization, and who has no roots in the order of being, no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his own personal survival, is a demoralized person. The system depends on this demoralization, deepens it, is in fact a projection of it into society.”

It seems much of America is facing such a self-momentum and demoralization now. The system appears to be in the saddle, riding us. And there is a feeling of futility in the air, a loss of faith in the future, a shrug-the-shoulders resignation to our lot. Not sure how to respond to the dizziness of this moment (to the edgeless dream of our economy; to the various wars; to the mounting social and environmental disintegration; to our screen-addiction and the blitzkrieg of A.I.; to our bipartisan politics of reduction and abuse; to the cruel and unhinged behavior of the current administration), many of us retreat into a myopic dailiness, into the “frenetic-anesthetic,” into the gaudy but gray accoutrements of mass civilization, all the while losing interest in the prospect of active outward engagement with the commonweal, of extending care beyond our own noses, beyond our own doorstep. I am generalizing here and therefore writing reductively. Many, of course, do care and reliably act open-handedly (and perhaps you are one of them!). And many in recent days have taken to the streets to protest the current administration. Even so, I don’t ever recall such an energetic slough in my lifetime. I see it in young people and among peers: an atomized anomie, a shutting-down and closing-in. There are many reasons for this anomie, I know, and I don’t presume to know them all. But I suspect we are in part stunned—and this is something Orr posits, too—by the cussed firehose of information. Put differently (and changing metaphors), one of the symptoms of information sickness seems to be paralysis.

I would also contend that we find ourselves in this slough because—whether we admit it or not—we are fed up with the totalizing partisanship of today’s politics. I suspect that we all know, somewhere deep down, that what’s happening today, what’s besetting us, is not because of one group. It’s not those evil Republicans or those ridiculous Democrats. Today’s politicians are, in part, “blind executors of the system’s own internal laws” (to use more of Havel’s words). And yet our status quo thrives on polarizing partisanship, which leads us away from the necessary work of unhorsing the system. Put differently, today’s political discourse, by invariably engaging in shallow partisan blaming, doesn’t excite us with truth but attempts to lull us with lies—and we are, even if obscurely and unconsciously, repulsed, vitiated, and shriveled by those lies, by the endless parade of vaporous reductionist diversions.

But as Havel showed through his humane, brave, artful citizenship and leadership, such seemingly intractable momentums and demoralizations can be disrupted. They can transmute. Breakdown can lead to breakthrough, and nonviolently. With the help of many and working over many years, Havel succeeded in replacing a dictatorship with democracy and doing so without a bloody war. Randolph Severson asserts that healing means “the deepened capacity for courageous, responsible existence,” for “the restoration and elevation of human aspiration,” for “the heart’s energized orientation toward transcendent good, sustained by disciplined practice.” Havel arguably helped bring about such a healing in Czechoslovakia. He helped reteach Czechs (and many around the world) their own worth, their own relevance, and their own power, the power to act in service to one’s neighbor, to one’s community, to those who will come after us, and to this mysterious beautiful world. Vaclav Havel was a muse of agency. Responsibility, he often said, is destiny.

What are we Americans being asked to learn now? What might healing look like for us? What agency should we wake up to? What “transcendent good” might we pursue? David W. Orr, in a voice both visionary and practical, suggests it is to craft a “prosperous way down” in order to eventually make for a lasting, more beneficent settlement of this land now called America. A “prosperous way down” is not typical language in a country dominated by a daylight consciousness enthralled by triumphant everlasting ascent, and it certainly is not the language of American politicians who promise us more, more, more and up, up, up. But it is the language, I would submit, of an adult, of someone facing the facts. And going “down” needn’t have a negative connotation—that, I think, is a telling cultural misconception. “Heaven is under our feet,” said Thoreau, “as well as over our heads.” “The holy land,” added poet Kathleen Raine, “should be the place we live on.” So perhaps going “down” is not only about scaling back and doing without but returning—returning and knowing this Great Mystery as if for the first time. Perhaps we are ready to graduate from being a culture alienated from the very ground of its own being. Words from Harold Robbins, a leader in the Catholic Land Movement, a movement which sponsored a similar “prosperous way down,” speak to our condition. “The Land Movement,” Robbins powerfully wrote, “is realist. It rejects fashion; it rejects that denial of free will which is involved in the dogma of inevitable progress.” To reject the denial of free will which is involved in the dogma of inevitable progress: that is the clarity and gumption we need now. We are not powerless.

And it should be stressed that the prophetic possibilities Orr—and Gandhi and King and Schumacher and Havel and Harold Robbins—share with us are not achievable in the face of the society-sponsored prejudice that is today’s partisan hate. This is another momentum that needs to be disrupted. There is an attraction to collective hatred, no doubt. It brings a species of meaning to our lives; it gives one ground to stand on; it counters loneliness and a sense of powerlessness; it makes one feel tidy, psychologically organized. It can be clarifying. But it is an ill clarity. “Hidden within a group,” writes Vaclav Havel, “a pack, or a mob, every potentially violent person can dare to do more; each one eggs the other on, and all of them—precisely because there are more of them—justify one another.” These are troubling words, I’d say, words that look deeply into all of our eyes. Collective hatred, in other words, invites others within one’s collective to up the ante of malevolence. Such hatred also co-creates more of that which is hated. “When we act from a perception of another’s malevolence,” writer and psychologist Radhule Weininger reminds us, “we elicit that reactivity in them. When we act from a perception of their goodness, we reinforce that potential.”

And collective hatred, as I have suggested above, also shields us from the difficult work of reckoning with the roots of our ailments, of addressing the underlying rottenness of our system. It spares us the burden of acknowledging our own implicatedness and of having to change our way of life. In the confusion of political hate with constructive citizenship, we buffer ourselves from seeing soberly, broadly, deeply, and holistically, from connecting causes and effects. In fact, we need to foster the opposite of collective hatred. “We must interact with one another,” Sulak Sivaraksa reminds us, “if we are to find and address the root causes of suffering.” “Affection,” says Walt Whitman, “shall solve every one of the problems of freedom.” Before we dismiss such statements as irritatingly quaint, we should remember that they come from tested and seasoned souls of extraordinary mettle and that they echo the words of the wisest who have walked among us. As my sixteen-year-old daughter hauntingly said to me recently, we need to try to extend to each other “radical grace.” Such an extension is not the same as passivity, as standing idly by while our government acts destructively. We must not let our country continue to play the role of “rogue nation given to state terrorism,” “secretly arranged preemptive wars,” and a “cynical manipulation of patriotism” (Orr’s words). We cannot watch from the sidelines as our democracy dissolves, as people are violently disappeared into hidden-away detention centers and foreign mega-prisons, and as the Earth is poisoned and plundered. That said, we cannot mistake political engagement for, as Henry Adams once put it, “the systematic organization of hatreds,” for shunning and polarizing taunts and speaking with cocky morality to the convinced.

Rather, we somehow need to extend a forgiving humanity to each other, trusting that such extending will help us respond more effectively to our ills. The heart that has its reasons that reason does not know is perhaps our greatest strength now—it is perhaps the only way through this impasse, awesomely formidable as it is. To put it all another way, we not only need to immediately, intentionally, and vigorously address our errant government, we need to begin transitioning the destructive system that we all abet to something life-sustaining, and we need to do this, each of us, with a love that covers all offenses. A tall task! But as the wise tell us, we are not obliged to complete the task but neither are we free to abandon it. “If there is to be any chance at all of success,” Vaclav Havel adds, “there is only one way to strive for decency, reason, responsibility, sincerity, civility, and tolerance, and that is decently, reasonably, responsibly, sincerely, civilly, and tolerantly.”

When young Prince Siddhartha (the Buddha-to-be) left the family palace compound after many years of living a sheltered life of privilege, luxury, and ease, he saw a sick man, an old man, and a dead man. Until then Siddhartha had never experienced life’s grisly, tragic side. And the sights of the sick man, old man, and dead man disturbed him, causing in him a breakdown: a breakdown into bewilderment, fear, sadness, and despair. And this breakdown inspired his legendary renunciative journey, his long wayfaring that culminated in his awakening. Looking back on these disturbing encounters, the Buddha is said to have called them “heavenly messengers” for they set him on the path to healing.

Looking at our time and country in the manner of the Buddha, it appears that we are surrounded by heavenly messengers now. And they are trying to tell us something. May we be granted the gift of listening, inwardness, discernment, courage, and an undefended heart. And if you’re bewildered and despairing and can’t quite decipher the heavenly messages, perhaps David W. Orr (or Vaclav Havel or Sulak Sivaraksa or Walt Whitman) is someone to turn to.

Image Credit: Georgia O’Keeffe, “A Sunflower from Maggie” (1937)

“I don’t know anything about truth,

but I know falsehood when I see it,

and it looks like this whole world you’ve made…

…This mock trial can no more determine my lot,

than can driftwood determine the ocean’s waves,…”

– Elephant in the Dock, Aaron Weiss

These days, I spend a lot of time trying to stem the fracturing of my mind and spirit into splinters of anger, division, and sanctimony, those shards of self our world is hellbent on shattering us all into. The fracturing process is only practical, perhaps. For while fragmented humans might be sharp to the touch and dangerous to draw near to, those isolated pieces are more easily swept along in whichever direction it is deemed most profitable to sweep them.

Conflict is to be expected under these pressures. The urge to “fight back” wells up. But this is also a conditioned response. For the root of this impulse is fear, and fear is maybe the most profitable resource ever extracted from a man’s heart. Fear numbs us to those within our reach: those who hunger, thirst, are estranged and naked, sick and imprisoned, those walking, living, and working beside us. Those we can reach. Fear draws our attention to a world full of troubles far beyond our reach and then sells us distractions from the subsequent distress they elicit.

I do not need to outline what a half-starved, crazed, hollowing manner of living this is. You are swimming in the same ecosystem I am. “This is water”, as David Foster Wallace pointed out years ago. Most everyone agrees they are sick of the water, and yet, right on cue, the next siren call of the news cycle is sounded, and we are exposed as powerless to resist it, sick or not. Broken lives, pain, destruction, and death is produced en masse by our culture yet we view it all as some sort of amoral byproduct, as dispassionately as we view the pollution in our rivers and streams. What can be done? What could we do?

This is not a new question. I am not seeking “the answer”, but rather a different path. I was once wisely told that “what you push back against is what defines you.” Here is a beginning. Maybe we ought to use our being and thinking not to decide what our lives should be “for” or “against,” but rather what we would like our lives to define. And then, where do we have to move, act, and labor in order to live out that definition? What loose shapes are we already drawing in our breathing, singing, toiling, speaking, playing, worshipping, traveling, and socializing? Maybe we have been going about this the wrong way.

Whether we realize it or not, the two most essential elements by which our lives are daily defined is by our presence and attention. Or, to put it another way, through our incarnation and embodiment. Look and see, as Wendell would say. What are the effects of an industry’s, an institution’s, an ideology’s, a group’s, or an action’s presence? Are they good or bad? More to the point, who are they good or bad for? What is the result in my spirit, and thus in my living, and thus in my local community? Here is where presence and attention start.

I’ll give an example from my life. I am “absent” from Amazon, meaning I do not buy from that company. This is not due to my being morally or intellectually superior to anyone. I merely had a choice to make: to be present or to be absent from this endless marketplace of cheap goods. Such a marketplace is bad for my local economy, bad for my soul’s addiction to comfort and ease, and bad for its founder, who hoards so much money and power over society. So I stopped giving my money to them. This is not a binary, unbending rule, however. If I am buying a gift and the desired gift can be found nowhere else but Amazon, I will buy it. My aim is not conspicuous adherence. My aim is to live a life that will not be defined by the lies, waste, and bottomless appetites that Amazon sells. I hope my absence will help to form the outlines of a heart that has refrained from surrendering to every desire to always possess more (though it still feels those urges). As I buy less, I find I want less.

Another example: I have begun to walk weekly the trails of my local land trust, Stringer’s Ridge. The place is not social media-worthy. But it contains my local trees and wildlife, on my local hills, saved by my community’s local efforts and funds, in my local city. I have learned to be grateful for these efforts when I stumble upon them, to see them as the gifts they are, the fruits of a generous spirit now grown rare. Here, I choose to give both my presence and attention. I take my dog and try to slow down. I pray.

The trees there abide, barely growing to the naked eye. They wrap their years around them like thin shawls, only perceptible in their rings. Within these circles there is a chronicle which remembers drought and plenty, heat and cold, sun and cloud. The lengths of the fallen trunks are patterned in sequences of mushrooms decomposing them so other lives may spring from the darkness of this death. These trees’ crowns sway in the breeze but refuse to bend to the headlines’ tyranny. They lend shade in the summer, gold in the autumn, admonishment in the winter, and resurrection in the spring. My hope is that the shade of these faithful witnesses may fall regularly in my presence as well.

Once this line of thinking is pursued it branches out and leads, like a spider’s web, to every corner of my life. And so the threads lead inevitably to hidden areas of hypocrisy and failure. This tempts me to rejoin the collective obfuscation, rationalization, and comparison which is the vernacular of our time. To ignore the personal flaws within my control and focus instead on “their” flaws. But this leaves me back at the start, half-alive and half-mad.

In truth, I control only one hypocrite on this earth: myself. And here, I am returned to sobriety. Despite my best efforts and intentions, my own way of life is plagued by imperfection, ignorance, and foolishness. Presence and attention are not enough. The human condition remains. Grace is required. Grace allows me to accept my limits and weaknesses as a human and carry on growing. Because I cannot live perfectly, I am free to live well. But then, grace insists that I must extend its mercy to everyone else I see. To resist this call is to risk rejecting grace itself. How can I claim it has visited me if I withhold it from my neighbor?

Some will quickly demand to know where grace’s limits lie then. Who is outside of it? I think it is doubtful you have tasted much of the grace I am attempting to describe if your first thought is about where that grace must not go once it has reached you. Not that no such limits exist. Rather, I am deeply suspicious when that is the initial impulse of a soul in debt to unmerited favor.

Wendell talks about this in a letter to his lifelong friend, Gary Snyder, in the wonderful book Distant Neighbors:

“If you don’t see how much badness comes from stupidity, ignorance, and confusion, etc. – if you don’t see how much badness is done by good, likable people; if you don’t love, or don’t know you love, people whose actions you deplore – then I guess you go too far into outrage, acquire diseased motives, quit having any fun, and get bad yourself.”

As I reflect on that warning, I know I am not generous enough. My good faith and good humor are rarely put to use. I find I’m more likely to speak my mind than be silent and listen. Years of this kind of solipsistic excess has made our culture sick, like too much alcohol or food makes a stomach sick. The evidence is found every day in our newspapers, our churches, our internet, and our creeks. We are vomiting it all up, and it is a foul harvest whose taste I recognize in my own heart.

My heart is diseased, but what is diseased may heal. Do we see that need to heal? Our attention is a commodity, and fear always baits it away from such modest visions. I can only speak from the background of my own faith, which is Christian. I have seen that tradition embrace a certainty that can only be accomplished by whittling God down into a manageable deity corralled and tamed by a maze of theological fences. This makes it easier to wield him as a weapon at our ideological enemies. There is far less effort given to wrestling out our relationship with his grace, which is why maybe so little of it seems to reveal itself in our presence and to our attention. Gratitude cannot survive long in such conditions. It is impossible to be grateful to that to which nothing is owed, and we cannot owe anything to what we believe we control. And once gratitude dies in a man, whatever virtues still endure in him will soon wither, leaving only a sapless husk behind.

Ultimately the yearning to capture some small measure of what makes life beautiful, of grace’s miracle, exists in us all. Many of us have just forgotten how. Presence and attention may humbly lead us back to ask what our fallible lives already define, and what they may define instead. Maybe our worst impulses, actions, and mistakes aren’t what define us in grace’s eyes. Maybe in understanding our common state we may be reminded to deal gently with the confusion and stupidity we all harbor and act upon. My wish is to offer my life increasingly to what grace whispers the world one day will be. May my years lend a syllable or two to such rumors.

Image Credit: Edward Henry Holder, “Coastal Scene” (1879)

Interestingly, AI is presented by both Rodriguez and Altman as a guide for parents with their many questions. This ever-present deity-like assistant never slumbers and can not only pull data down through the ages from all the experts but can also offer those tender words of comfort that parents need in difficult moments. Altman, in his interview with Fallon, described AI as a “general purpose sort of life adviser.” Here, the first threat is already establishing an afront upon the authority of the parent. While it is described merely as an adviser and assistant, it is no mere assistant and certainly not worthy of the title, adviser. Altman, while acknowledging that people can and have parented before AI, stated that he cannot imagine parenting without it. His world, including his very child, is only accessible through the power of a screen. Even though his child is only 8 months old, there is coming a day when the child will be able to process and understand not only his father but his father’s “adviser,” and the dividing line may not be so clear as Altman would believe.

Altman admits that he feels bad for using ChatGPT in his parenting, but this guilt seemed more due to his own questions than the fact that he was using it in the first place. His panic regarding whether his son was on track developmentally sent him not to a fellow human being, family or friend, but to his trusted adviser, ChatGPT. It is rather telling that Altman describes the answer that he got back as “great,” though it’s not clear what basis he had for this judgment. It’s doubtful he asked his own parents or a mentor about the merits of the machine answers.

Parents turning more to AI and less to family and friends are getting a poor substitute to fill our natural need for human connections. A child raised by ChatGPT-asking parents may well seek fewer human interactions than their parents, as they watched their parents building relationships with a machine instead of people. Altman is playing with the same fire as the parents in Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt.” In Bradbury’s short story the parents experience a loss of connection with their children and lose any authority over them. Slowly, the children are consumed by the virtual reality like machine in their nursery, and in the end the parents are consumed by the machine at the wishes of the children. Technology dependence is not simply a worry for children but for adults as well. A parent’s overuse of technology, especially in parenting, threatens to blur the lines in our most natural relationships. What will happen as the child learns to ask ChatGPT instead of parents?

For Altman, AI might be an “adviser” or a personal assistant, but Altman’s child will perhaps see through the veil and find AI as the source of authority. Just as the parents allow more room for the computer program in “The Veldt,” so does AI continue to encroach upon human relationships and trust. Even in his own examples on the Late Show, Altman evaluates ChatGPT’s answers based on his life experiences and relationships that are not bound to a screen display. While he can apply such wisdom and questioning, it is not clear how future generations that grow up relying on AI for guidance will develop the broader awareness needed to test machine knowledge.

Here lies the danger for the generation raised by parents assisted by AI: where does it end? If the iPad generation has taught us anything it is that technology pushes into areas once reserved for parents and human relationships. Playtime is now for the computer rather than for the parent and child. Learning is now tapping a button rather than searching and wondering alongside other people. Humanity was created for dependence upon each other, but our greatest achievements currently replace opportunities to form relationships. If parenting relies on AI, then parents should not be shocked as their children go to AI rather than to their parents for meaningful answers to their questions.

After all, Altman’s child will eventually learn that his father finds him a very inefficient form of intelligence. As Altman explained to another interviewer who asked about AI’s energy usage, “it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart.” Altman’s child might have reason to doubt that someone who thinks like this would love him or care much about helping him develop as a person.

As the Tonight Show interview drew to a close, Fallon turned to any cons or worries that Altman had regarding AI, and his answer was the rate of change. Not change in general, only the current rates of change for AI. He is half right; the rate is worrisome, but the nature of change is just as worrisome. The nature of AI is to replace reality with its measurements and functions, and this is a poor trade. Altman and others have fooled themselves into believing that they have left the cave, but instead they have willingly chained themselves to the wall and gladly swapped the substance for the shadow.

Image Credit: Rembrandt, “The Flight into Egypt” (1627)