Malcolm Guite:

So I went back to my college early before term started. And eventually, in desperation, went to see the college chaplain, who was, it happens, an American Episcopalian priest. So I told him this had happened to me and I didn’t know what to do with it.

He said, “Well, of course this happened to you; you’re in trouble. You recited these Psalms as though they were a background. But God is the prime mover and the ground of all being and the Word in whom and through whom all things are spoken and sustained into being. It’s not up to you to call him background. And you named his name in the poetry he himself has given us — you could hardly be surprised that he came.”

[…]

So I carried on like this and then later on a Roman Catholic friend of mine actually took me to hear a Franciscan friar preaching in Cambridge. … He was preaching, it was absolutely brilliant. He began talking about how a babe in the womb is entirely dependent upon its parent and hangs from the thread, as it were, of the umbilical cord and can do nothing. And even if the baby is born, it doesn’t actually physically have the strength even to turn itself over. All it can do is cry and hope to be heard and to be nurtured and nourished and fed. It’s utterly, utterly helpless.

And I thought, God, that’s exactly the way I am with this holy presence, you know, I’m hanging on a thread. Then he said, “You think I’m going to tell you that that’s how we all are with God, the transcendent creator. And in one way, it would be true if we regard him simply as the transcendent creator; we are utterly dependent. However, I’m here to tell you the exact opposite. I’m here to tell you that the utter helplessness of the babe, who can only cry and hope to be picked up and heard, is how God comes to us.”

… And he says, “This is what God does … and if you think he’s helpless, was helpless in The Womb of Mary and even more helpless, subjected to the dangers of the stable, lying in the straw, defenseless, certainly not going to strike us — think how completely vulnerable he is in this wafer. You know, there’s no arms or legs. You could take the wafer, the consecrated wafer, the presence of himself to you, and you could put it to the floor, you could spit on it and grind it under your foot. That’s the risk he takes to come to you.

Somehow in the midst of all of that, the penny dropped and I didn’t cease to think of God as completely holy, but I also thought of God as completely human. And … I realized for the first time in my life, I think, certainly my adult life, I felt it was okay to be a human being. Because in the days of my atheism, I was completely cowed by the scale of the universe. And there’s a lot of brutal atheist preaching which is using the cosmos as a big stick to beat you with into submission.

And suddenly, I thought, no, wait a minute, what if the maker of all this is in this and comes to me as a fellow human being? I then later realized, you know, takes the vulnerability to the nth degree and allows himself to be crucified in order to show what that love is, and then offers us resurrection.

He also reads his poem “Jesus falls the third time”:

He weeps with you and with you he will stay
When all your staying power has run out;
You can’t go on, you go on anyway.
He stumbles just beside you when the doubt

That always haunts you cuts you down at last
And takes away the hope that drove you on.
This is the third fall and it hurts the worst,
This long descent through darkness to depression

From which there seems no rising and no will
To rise, or breathe or bear your own heartbeat.
Twice you survived; this third time will surely kill,
And you could almost wish for that defeat

Except that in the cold hell where you freeze
You find your God beside you on his knees.

Very few people alive today, I think, can articulate the Christian faith — as informed by the Bible and by every moment of the life you live — in a more wonderful, beautiful, wholehearted, agedly wise and at the same time thoroughly childlike way than Malcolm Guite.

Also of note, on his writing of new Galahad and the Grail, which I cannot wait to read with the boys when they are old enough:

I was so cowed by the extraordinary achievements of the high modernists, Eliot, Joyce, Beckett, David Jones, where the kind of thing they write is incredibly effective if you know what’s going on, but it’s bristling with footnotes and everything depends on getting an allusion to something that’s an allusion to something else. And I just suddenly got sick of it. I thought I don’t want to write this kind of coterie, university, elitist thing.

So I kind of thought I need to purge myself of that. But I still want all the subtleties and beauties of high English literature. So I began to be really interested in the poets and writers who can do all the brilliant things but don’t alienate their audience and reader in the course of it.

---

Just as we desire peace but not the things that make for peace, so we desire art but not the things that make for art. We put the cart before the horse. Il pittore pinge sé stesso; we have the art that we deserve. If the sight of it puts us to shame, it is with ourselves that the re-formation must begin. A drastic transvaluation of accepted values is required. With the re-formation of man, the arts of peace will take care of themselves.

— Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

---

Alright, let’s get this over with.

Several moons ago, I wrote two brief defenses of Paul Kingsnorth’s book Against the Machine (here and here). And I said I had one more in me, so here it is.

These are not reviews of the book, or even, really, defenses of Kingsnorth so much as reflexes against the critics that I have certainly found wanting. I get that some folks have not particularly liked it, and that is fine; there are certainly good criticisms of the book. But most reviews, and reviewers, that I have read seem plagued by what I can’t help but describe as a pettiness, or perhaps just a wiggliness.*

(I’m weirdly prompted by a nearly 30-year-old book by Stanley Hauerwas — another toddler-prompted read — which I may get back to.)**

This defense may be coming together last, but it was first in my mind and it is one of my bigger, primary complaints not only with critics of the book but with the general subject itself. In fact, some of what I put in the first one after reading Tara Isabell Burton’s review was actually written well before. And it was originally aimed at… Alan Jacobs.

Contra Austin Kleon, I am not with Alan Jacobs when he says about the damage of phones, social media, A.I., etc., “We really don’t need any more stories explaining what people are doing to themselves.” 

Not that I haven’t similarly protested (er, raged), so I want to be careful. I have no problem with a good ol’ vent-post. And I don’t deny that such things need to be redirected to love of neighbor, which is something Jacobs wonderfully and reliably does. In fact, I’m very much onboard with most of Jacobs’ program as far as any of that is concerned. This is not a criticism of Jacobs per se.

Or maybe it is and I’m just hesitating. But I definitely think we need more and more and more stories about the damages of Evil Tech, not fewer. We need more people reading them and hearing about them and sharing them. We need some momentum.

As far as I can tell, Jacobs is confusing stories we need (or don’t need) to hear with stories in The New York Times. And he’s confusing “what everyone knows” with “what lots of people are talking about.” The fact that another new story might accomplish, in Jacobs’ words, “literally nothing” is not surprising if, as seems largely the case, it’s gobbled up by the same tired group of people who read the last story — and maybe even wrote some of the ones before that!

So when someone like Jacobs says, “We have known about this for a long time so we don’t need any more stories about it,” I trust neither his use of “we” nor his use of “know.” What “we” “know” about the subject is that many academics have made it a good hobby of theirs to study and write about it.

Yet this seems to be the way that many like Jacobs have responded to Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine, a not unfair summary of those critiques simply being: “Meh. We don’t need it.” Jacobs goes one smuggy step further, saying “Well, there’s really nothing to see here since I’ve already read his blog posts, but of course I loved his eeearlier work, and do check out my own work on the Standard Critique of Technology (SCT), which Kingsnorth is basically restating.” Which is about as self-involved a response as I can imagine coming from Jacobs.

And it’s ironic, too: If we don’t need Kingnorth’s book, then we definitely don’t need Jacobs’ “SCT.”

As I said, we need some momentum. And from what I can tell, that momentum ain’t coming from Jacobs and company. But it can come from a Kingsnorth.

Or at least I believe it’s more likely to. For every person (or rather, for the exactly zero persons) that I can get to read Lewis Mumford or Ivan Illich — or Alan Jacobs for that matter — I can get 50 to read Paul Kingsnorth. (I’m not up to 50 yet, but it’s been so easy that I don’t think this estimate is exaggerated. I’ve vocally praised Jacobs for years. So much so that when I verbalized some of this critique to a friend over a beer, he was surprised to hear me dissenting. Yet not one person I know has ever sought Jacobs out. With Kingsnorth, however, a name relatively new to me, almost every single person I have recommended the book to has taken it up with gusto.)

Though it will always be the case that this story or that story may be the one to reach someone who needed to hear it, it’s certainly possible that we don’t need any more stories published in the Times. And heaven knows we don’t need more time to study the matter. But please, let’s have more stories, more books, more talk, more momentum in a better direction. 

Jacobs writes a lot and has an active online presence that I have absolutely benefitted from. But last year I stopped following his writing. I am very fond of the memory of discovering his essays, first in the pages of Comment magazine about eight years ago and then in the published form of Wayfaring and Shaming the Devil. I loved them! (Even if he may not like most of his own essays while simultaneously complaining that no one reads them.) This may feel like some obligatory caveat, but it’s really more than that. I have regarded and still regard Jacobs as a lifeline. I love him and I like what he’s doing and I praise what he is about. And, perhaps the most important thing to say, I believe that his role and influence as a teacher will be for him, and for many who have known him, like those great ocean depths that, as Albert Schweitzer said, go unseen under the foam and waves of public information.

On this topic, however, I don’t see Jacobs touching grass. In this way, he resembles (not coincidentally, I think) Brad East. In fact, I’m tempted to rewrite this and aim it all at East, whose writing I have not liked one bit and whose review of Against the Machine was particularly bumptious. I have not known exactly how to describe why I have so disliked East’s writing, but the nearest I can say at this point is that I find a kind of above-it-all condescension*** in every single thing he looks at and writes about — and he looks at and writes about a lot, and therefore ruins much. A point not unrelated to where I am going here.

Yet to call East’s review of Kingsnorth condescending would be insufficient. Though most of it is just East’s summary of Kingsnorth, written in his usual (to my ears, at least) smuggish, I-already-knew-this way, his final remarks are downright belittling. “Swing and a miss,” East essentially tells Kingsnorth. “Can’t hit ‘em all. Better luck next time, li’l buddy.”

Here’s the main point I’m driving towards. For many many many readers of Against the Machine, this is or will be their first introduction not only to Kingsnorth, whose neither fiction nor blogposts they have ever read, but to much of the philosophy and tech-critique that he distills in the book. And even among those more familiar, many may, and many have, found Kingsnorth to be more readable and/or relatable. And this seems to be a point entirely missed by “academics” like Jacobs and East.

“We already know all this and I’ve covered all of it in my work before,” says Jacobs. “Kingsnorth is no Illich or Han or Barba-Kay,” says East. And blah and blah and blibbity blah.

When yet another academic says yet again how thoughtful critics of technology predicted this or that, I’m listening, because I’m into that sort of thing. But, at least for this reader, it often feels very casual and hobby-like. Here’s another great quote about how television was destroying us long before smart phones and — oh, look, another stamp for my collection.

Or, getting back to Jacobs: When someone with a decades-long love affair with Apple products says “please refer to my essay on the standard critique of technology — and look at my nice distraction-free techie setup,” the decidedly non-weightiness should not be very surprising. There’s an army of people out there who, like Jacobs, want to love and quote Wendell Berry but at a very, very safe and MacOS-supported distance.

Getting back to the momentum thing: In the same way that stories about Evil Tech need a new audience, the entire “tech critique,” I think, needs new handlers. And I would happily see that mantle taken up by a Kingsnorth — and taken away from a Jacobs.

Again, I have no desire to thoroughly denounce Jacobs. But on this topic, I say read him for the footnotes, not the advice. And to the degree that he has an influence on whether and how you read Kingsnorth, ignore him entirely.

All of this has been written for the better part of 5 months. I’ve hesitated with it in part because I think there’s an element of unfairness in it that I haven’t known how to disclaim.

(In fact, I think Jacobs knows much of this, or a version of it, perfectly well.)

But even if I admit it might not be entirely fair, it can still be a point worth making. In my own way, I am also pointing rather than detailing. I’m trying to say something and I’m trying not to take it too far.

Surely one reason to hesitate is that I’m easily pointing a finger at myself. As I said above, I too have complained about what we “know” and do nothing about. And I too think Byung-Chul Han is brilliant, and what little I’ve read of him is great because he is essentially right on almost every point. (Which makes it all the more strange to say that Han’s books are the answer to no one’s problems.)

Perhaps another reason why this has taken so long is that it is very much not a final word. Like many, I really don’t know what to do. Like many, I am constantly working on a healthier arrangement with the Internet and technology. (A dumb phone and a stationary computer have probably always been more than enough.)

Answers to this dilemma are not easily laid out.

For example, Kingsnorth didn’t say as much as many would have liked about the “homestead.” But then, Chris Smaje, who has written a lot about the homestead and who I have found to be a far more hopeful writer overall, has spent about as much time as anyone disclaiming the inability to fully prescribe what he is prescribing. That’s because they know there’s only so much that wordy-words can do. Here’s the thing we feel in our bones is bad; we believe there is a better, more human way; go try it for yourself.****

Legitimate criticism notwithstanding, some nail is certainly being hit on the head — a contact with need and with reality that has been sorely missing and that Against the Machine hits with accuracy and force.

And it does not seem a coincidence to me that Wendell Berry’s daughter can praise the book Kingsnorth wrote as the right book for our time, while the self-congratulatory echo chamber of scholars and self-appointed heirs claiming to bring you the wisdom of The Tech Critique cannot.

“Come with me into a field of sunflowers is a better line than anything you will find here,” wrote Mary Oliver, “and the sunflowers themselves far more wonderful than any words about them.”

To quote Jacobs, everyone knows this — to one extent or another. The question is, Who is more likely to compel you, to drive you with a loving human madness, away from the screens and machines and into that field?

To the degree that Kingsnorth can, however imperfectly, help to fill the void where that drive has been missing, questions about his worthiness to take up the mantle are irrelevant; he is simply doing a better job than his critics.

—

*One thing I have found particularly among heavier readers who were disappointed with Kingsnorth: they are usually reading him in addition to much attention given to the material at hand. This is mostly from (in as healthy a way as possible) the online crowd. They have read, and even write, much tech critique. Ivan Illich is not a new name to them, and L.M. Sacasas’ newsletter probably shows up in their inbox. Against the background of their library, I certainly can see that Kingsnorth appears… gruff, to say the least. Not that this covers all their criticisms, but it has mileage. However, though there may be some overlap, these folks are not the reviewers I have in mind in this post.

**Being so many months out, I cannot be sure what this reference to Hauerwas was. My best guess is that I saw something in his introduction to his 1998 book Sanctify Them in the Truth. In that introduction, Hauerwas writes,

The power of the view of Christian belief I am trying to counter is apparent just to the extent that we continue to speak of “Christian beliefs or belief.” Of course Christians believe such things as God created the world, that God called Abraham, worked through the prophets, chose Mary, and raised Jesus from the dead. Indeed, it would be quite strange to say that one “believes,” for instance, in the resurrection and yet assume that some further decision or attitude needs to be taken in relation to such a belief. Even stranger would be the notion that believing any of these things as true could be abstracted from the kind of life commensurate with holding such beliefs. For example, what could it possibly mean to “believe” that Jesus has been raised from the dead if a people do not exist who continue to “eat and drink” with their Lord?

The emphasis there is my own. He goes on to express the dangers he sees in turning “convictions“ and “beliefs” into “thoughts.” Worse, the language of those beliefs is taken off the ground, out of the common world.

I fear that too often contemporary theology is produced in such a way that it can be read only by other theologians. This may be quite fortunate, given the kind of work that currently passes for theology today. Yet if theology is a servant ministry in and for the church, I do not think the alienation of theology from the church’s common life, which is so prevalent today, can be a matter of indifference.

It may seem strange that any of this would motivate me to post the argument above. And strange it may very well be. But I hope it’s possible to see the connection between Hauerwas’s theologians and the “theologians” of tech-criticism who have, it seems to me, been mostly interested in displaying their own knowledge to each other.

***Call East’s the anti-essay approach.

****I spoke above of “momentum.” And I believe that momentum absolutely can be driven in very large part by a no. Kingsnorth may be, to borrow from a podcast title, more doomer than optimist. But one of the schticks that I’m increasingly schticky about is the credit that a morally sound no actually deserves. Credit to the no and credit to the goodness that thrives off a good no! What we’re discovering, and what I think it takes a Kingsnorth to say plainly, is that you really do need a hard no somewhere. Dabbling in theory and ever-new “distraction free” tech setups will simply not do.

Zayd Ayers Dohrn:

This was a dark time—a time when the hope and promise of the civil rights movement seemed to have been overly optimistic, even naïve. A bit like our own political moment, when each new headline seems to bring with it a new outrage, a new sense of injustice—an era when the bad guys often seem to be winning. “Of course, you could see it coming,” she says now. “But still, the way it happened. It didn’t really matter who killed him [MLK Jr.]—the CIA and all the conspiracy stuff around it. He knew he was gonna be killed. And he was killed. And it radicalized people.”

[…]

The whole nation seemed to be disintegrating, coming apart under the centrifugal forces of war and racism, like a jet engine cracking up and spinning out of control. And all you could do was either brace for impact or try to grab the controls.

Two months after King’s death, SDS held a meeting to elect new leadership. And even though she had been a member of the group for less than a year, Bernardine [Rae Dohrn] was put forward as a candidate—part of the Revolutionary Youth Movement slate, promising to take SDS in a more militant, radical direction. …

“You have to take action,” she remembers telling herself. “You have to do something.”

On June 14, 1968, SDS met in plenary session to ask questions of the new candidates. Bernardine, the only woman on stage, faced vocal skepticism about her radical bona fides. “Do you consider yourself a socialist?” a man in the audience called out, drawing jeers and mocking laughter from the crowd.

Bernardine stared him down for a long moment of silence. “I consider myself,” she said finally, “a revolutionary Communist.”

She was elected in a landslide. Suddenly, at twenty-six, Bernardine was one of three co-equal national leaders of SDS, and one of the most prominent women in the New Left.

That same year, membership in the organization surged above 100,000, with 350 chapters nationwide. SDS was fast becoming the biggest, most visible, and most active student group in the country. And while some members still wanted to focus on building a big-tent mass movement, Bernardine and her Revolutionary Youth Movement comrades were determined to up the level of protest—to turn their peaceful student debate club into a militant fighting force.

“There’s no way to be committed to nonviolence,” Bernardine told a crowd of SDS members that month, “in the middle of the most violent society history has ever created!”

Nick Catoggio:

“Trump had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to delegitimize the opposition after 2024 through effective conservative governance and honorable comportment,” he wrote [Peter Laffin]. “But he couldn’t escape his impulsiveness, and he could very well go down as the figure who ushered in socialism in the U.S.”

Is that the answer?

As I noted last week, the president’s right-wing apologists love to credit his continued political viability to a popular backlash to progressivism. “This is how you got Trump,” they’ll snort, alluding to how the elite left’s condescension and cultural excesses alienate the working class. But that logic works, or should work, both ways: If socialists sweep into federal office this fall, presumably that too would be driven by some sort of backlash among the hoi polloi—to the right this time, not the left.

What will the nature of the backlash be, according to Republicans? When they ask themselves “What did we do wrong to make a creep like Graham Platner electable?” what conclusion will they reach?

We can start with a conclusion they won’t reach. They won’t embrace Laffin’s theory.

Admitting that Trump cocked things up so badly as to make socialism attractive by comparison would require right-wingers to admit they erred catastrophically in reelecting him. They’ll never do it. They spent 10 years being warned by “elites” that the president is an embarrassing civic blight on America who’s as incompetent as he is crooked. They’d sooner pay $12 per gallon for gas before they acknowledge that those elites were correct.

[…]

Republican voters will find it hard to concede that Trump’s failure on affordability is how we got Graham Platner. For one thing, they won’t want to admit that the president’s blue-collar credentials are almost entirely cultural, not economic. But I think the right is also instinctively allergic to interpreting politics through the lens of class and redistribution. They associate such things with the Marxist left, and I think on some level they resist the idea that control of the government should depend on which side is delivering tangible improvements for voters.

To the modern right-wing tribalist, politics isn’t a contest to see who can deliver more. (Except with respect to deportations.) It’s an existential struggle to keep the left out of power so that they don’t destroy the country. Concede that socialists are benefiting from Trump’s failure to bring down the cost of living and you’re conceding that, in some circumstances, the public might reasonably prefer socialist leaders. Unthinkable.

[…]

…if you grew up, as I did, with “American exceptionalism” as the engine of your patriotic pride, the last 10 years have been a sustained exercise in having your face ground in a pile of s–t. (If you grew up during the Trump era, you never had that engine to begin with.) Americans might once have been an exception to the grubby manner in which most other populations on Earth governed their countries, but no more. If we’re exceptional now, it’s only insofar as we gave a second chance at leadership to a man any respectable people would have thrown in prison or exiled after his first term ended the way it did.

Patriotism will recover somewhat once Trump is gone, but I’ll be surprised if it ever rebounds completely. Having seen what other Americans are willing to elect and indulge, the disillusionment about exceptionalism can never be undone.

And that partly explains how you get Graham Platner. When you lose respect for your country, electing unfit, unrespectable people to office can only feel less objectionable. That’s basically what populists say when asked why they excuse Trump’s poor character, no? I came to hate the system, so I was willing to overlook a dishonorable candidate’s flaws to shake it up.

Well, a lot of people hate “the system” that Trump and MAGA have created. If there’s a guy out there willing to tear it down, who cares if he once had a Nazi tattoo? The branch of government he’s running for functionally doesn’t even exist anymore! Political squalor is like any other good: If you make it profitable, as the right did by twice electing the president, you’ll get more of it.

Needless to say, I don’t expect any soul-searching on this point from Republicans in November if Platner and the other socialists win. The market among the grassroots right for less squalor and more dignity is, shall we say, not robust.

If anything, I imagine many will seize on a swell of support for “godless communism” as an excuse to become more radically squalid in their politics. That’s another impediment to Trump’s “Stop the Steal” plans, in fact: Postliberals will want mainstream Republicans to believe that the socialist threat is real and rising, not an artifact of election chicanery. It can’t be defeated by banning mail-in ballots or tightening voting procedures. It can only be defeated by—you guessed it—the GOP becoming even more fascist.

Byung-Chul Han (2021):

George Orwell’s novel 1984 has recently become a worldwide bestseller. People sense that something is wrong in our digital comfort zone. But our society is more like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In 1984, people are controlled by the threat of harm. In Brave New World, they are controlled by administering pleasure. The state distributes a drug called “soma” to make everyone feel happy. That is our future.

Neil Postman (1985):

Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting [a hardly less humiliating] pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

This book [Amusing Ourselves to Death] is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

Aldous Huxley, in a letter to George Orwell (October 1949):

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience.

From Huxley’s Brave New World (1932):

Outside, in the garden, it was playtime. Naked in the warm June sunshine, six or seven hundred little boys and girls were running with shrill yells over the lawns, or playing ball games, or squatting silently in twos and threes among the flowering shrubs. The roses were in bloom, two nightingales soliloquized in the boskage, a cuckoo was just going out of tune among the lime trees. The air was drowsy with the murmur of bees and helicopters.

The Director and his students stood for a short time watching a game of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy. Twenty children were grouped in a circle round a chrome steel tower. A ball thrown up so as to land on the platform at the top of the tower rolled down into the interior, fell on a rapidly revolving disk, was hurled through one or other of the numerous apertures pierced in the cylindrical casing, and had to be caught.

“Strange,” mused the Director, as they turned away, “strange to think that even in Our Ford’s day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting. Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It’s madness.

Augustine, sermon on 1 John 4:

Once for all, then, a short precept is given you: Love, and do what you will: whether you hold your peace, through love hold your peace; whether you cry out, through love cry out; whether you correct, through love correct; whether you spare, through love do you spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good.

Steve Robinson (revisiting a theme):

In my 74 years this hand has learned to print and write cursive, bathe a dead man, build an iconostasis, a mansion and a bird house, wipe a tear and create one, change the diapers of a child and a parent, pour a beer (both into a glass and down the drain), dig a ditch and a grave, craft a casket, color inside and outside the lines, knead a loaf of bread dough, pound a pulpit and overturn tables, write a computer program, a Master’s thesis, a love letter, a book, and an insult, sign a marriage and a death certificate, put a Band-aid on a boo-boo and duct tape on a bleeding gash, cook for dozens and for one, turn the page of a book and a life decision, pull the trigger on a gun and an idea, pull a tooth and stop a nosebleed, bait a hook, gut a deer and a friendship, clean an altar and a toilet, hitch-hike and drive a stick shift, pet a mean dog, sew a button, take a blessing and give freely, mic a crankshaft, point in the wrong direction, draw a portrait and a cartoon, give a thumbs up and a middle finger, demolish a house and a marriage, shake hands and hug desperately, break boards and promises, beat an adversary and caress a lover, change an ostomy bag, dress a bishop, anoint the dead, wave hello and goodbye, build a motorcycle and twist its throttle, make a bar-chord and play the blues, throw a pot in anger and on a wheel, torque a bolt, develop a photograph, cleanse a chalice and a mess-kit, handle a snake, cradle a dying dog…, 

hang on too long, 

…and let go too soon.

As a young man I saw the parochial consequences of the work of my hands and judged my life by my constricted view. As I’ve aged I’ve seen beyond my own house, to a new generation, to my children’s children and to generations of people I have never met incarnationally. I’ve come to realize that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are correct: our life and the history of the world is in our hands. Today. In this present moment.

[…]

Go. Do things. Be humble. Be bold. 

Your hands will do bad things.

Repent when they do. But know this: You will be repenting your whole life. When you look back on your life the goal is not “no regrets” but “no anxiety”. Because whatever your hands have done that has humbled you will be made beautiful in the fulfillment of the mystery of God’s merciful providence in Christ.

Catherine Woodiwiss:

I think this is the first time I’ve seen the World Cup become the Unified Social Media Hivemind Games. Let me take a guess, dear reader: You, too, are obsessed with Erling Haaland? You, too, think Jude Bellingham is a smokeshow? You also were all in for Cabo Verde? You also think FIFA is rigging the Cup for Argentina?

It’s not weird that anyone might feel this way — it’s weird that everybody does. In my conversations with strangers at Whole Foods, a first-time-soccer-fan at the bar, my Instagram friends’ stories, my work colleagues, every single one has repeated this pattern. In each case, we collectively responded as a global algorithmic unit, forming these opinions suddenly, loudly, and increasingly obsessively, sometimes in the span of hours. Most of these examples are fun and lighthearted (I get it, I love my Viking weirdo).

The positive experience of a hivemind feels like collective effervescence — the phrase coined by sociologist Émile Durkheim to describe the electric feeling of energy, harmony, and connection that occurs when people gather with a shared purpose.

But the level of it still feels a little off, like someone reached into each one of our unique diverse perspectives around the world and activated “target + sentiment = GO” on all of us at once.

And the ugly side of this gets ugly fast.

If we want to talk about patterns, here’s one I’ve seen about Team Argentina: Isolated incidents in play (often clipped to be directly misleading, or look worse than they were) → essentialism (it’s not just one game, it’s every game for this team) → shame (it’s not just on the field, it’s everything about who this team is) → expansion (it’s not just the team, it’s the fans and the country’s history and honestly, kind of just the whole country itself). I’ve seen individuals go from “hey, Messi kicked his shin too hard” to “Argentina is the ethnonationalist state of Nazi-Netanyahu dreams” in, like, days.

This uncritical, highly-suggestible hivemind effect isn’t just happening with the World Cup, obviously. It’s been happening in fandoms of all kinds and political conspiracies of all stripes for years. But it feels like it’s hyper-accelerating — the velocity, intensity, and reach of this kind of narrative is a new thing, and it feels dangerous.

It also feels, hate to say it, pretty stupid.

[…]

I suspect some of us, maybe many of us, are genuinely addicted to the idea of a villain and the thrill of conspiracy. I’m a little worried that our spirits have become insistent on always finding evil lurking just beyond the fringes of our awareness.

Another French philosopher Simone Weil writes that psychological gravity — just like physical gravity — naturally tends downwards, pulling our attention toward base behaviors. Attention is a form of prayer, she says, and where we choose to put our attention reveals our values. We can decide to seek true community and harmony and joy. But we have to choose to pay attention to it.

At first, we were mostly paying attention to each other, and the surprising pride we felt to belong to a country with ranch dressing and free refills. We were paying attention to “Rock Chalk Algeria” and South Korea fans in sombreros and German coaches in cowboy hats, and the renewed capacity for imagination and trust we all felt as a result. But pretty soon, we let the algorithm direct our attention elsewhere — to a villain and to conspiracy — because that’s what we like to do.

The knee-jerk reaction to find a villain undermines our capacity to participate in this collective effervescence. And the disinclination to ask questions in the face of mistrust and anger intrudes on our ability to celebrate each other.

I can’t exactly confirm this — I don’t even know who any of the players mentioned are — but it fits pretty well with much that I’ve seen.

Nicholas Carr:

In the second half of the twentieth century, technocrats gained a powerful new weapon to deploy on the information battlefield: the digital computer. In automating the core bureaucratic function of data processing, computers vastly expanded the information that authorities could collect, store, and analyze. A new philosophy of social engineering emerged, reflecting a belief that even the most complex problems can best be solved by getting the right data into the hands of the right experts equipped with the right computers. Information makes everything transparent — and tractable.

The philosophy was given its first test on an actual battlefield: Vietnam. Early in the conflict, Robert McNamara, President Kennedy’s Harvard-educated defense secretary, recruited a team of “whiz kids” from universities and think tanks to plot war strategy. Working in Washington and in “combat development and test centers” in Southeast Asia, the team conducted extensive behavioral research aimed at developing communication programs to gain the support of local villagers. At the same time, it worked on incorporating computer technologies into weaponry. American planes were soon dropping thousands of motion, sound, and chemical sensors into enemy territory to create an “electronic fence” to track troop movements and guide bombing raids. “I see battlefields that are under 24-hour real- or near-real-time surveillance,” said Army Chief of Staff William Westmoreland in 1969. “I see battlefields on which we can destroy anything we can locate through instant communications.”

But even as he spoke those words, the United States was in retreat, defeated by guerilla fighters armed with little more than guns and walkie-talkies. The Pentagon’s high-tech strategy failed spectacularly. It neither changed the minds of the Vietnamese population nor provided a military advantage. But rather than triggering an honest assessment of the flaws of large-scale data mining, the fiasco had the opposite effect. The problem wasn’t that computer-based decisionmaking had limits, the technocrats concluded. The problem was that the computers weren’t supplied with enough data.

This conclusion would, as Siegel shows with example after example, turn into a perverse tenet of the information age: Every failure of automated data processing becomes an excuse to collect even more data.

It’s worth remembering here something that that same Robert McNamara said in a memo to LBJ on May 19th, 1967: “There may be a limit beyond which many Americans and much of the world will not permit the United States to go. The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 non-combatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny, backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.” 

Carr continues:

After the 9/11 attacks, the perversity came into high relief. America’s spy agencies, having failed to anticipate and prevent a terrorist plot on U.S. soil, were rewarded with vast new powers to gather information indiscriminately, on American citizens as well as foreign actors.

In addition to the sweeping Patriot Act, passed by a panicked Congress a month after the attacks, the administration of George W. Bush launched a raft of clandestine surveillance and propaganda programs, with names like Total Information Awareness and The Office of Strategic Influence. Flouting the Privacy Act of 1974, which had imposed tight controls on the federal government’s ability to collect personal data on citizens, intelligence agents began downloading Americans’ phone records, text messages, credit card transactions, library records, medical charts, and, as Siegel puts it, “anything else that could be fed into the maw of the super-surveillance machine.”

He closes the review of Siegel’s book with this:

Originally promoted as a medium of reason and objectivity, the Internet has revealed itself in the social media era to operate under a definition of truth so flexible it would make a postmodernist blush. The huckster, not the technocrat, is its true master.

Lawrence Lazarus:

In the coming ears, artificial intelligence will not simply change how we work It will likely erode work itself as the central organizing principle of modern society.

This is not a claim about mass unemployment or human obsolescence. It is about what happens when work gradually ceases to perform the quiet functions it has long served: occupying large populations, structuring daily life, anchoring identity, and stabilizing social and political institutions. As those functions weaken, the consequences go beyond the labor market. They spread outward, into family formation, social cohesion, political legitimacy, and how people experience purpose itself. The earliest signs of this shift are already visible.

… Different industries, regions, and roles will experience the phases of this shift at different speeds and in different sequences. Some may skip phases entirely; others may linger in one phase for years. The purpose here is not to map the future with precision but to render visible a pattern of erosion that has already begun, and to follow its logic toward a question we will eventually all have to answer.

[…]

At scale, this raises a question that economic policy alone cannot answer. When work no longer organizes daily life — when it no longer anchors identity or social contribution — what replaces it? This is the question toward which the coming years are moving — not suddenly, not uniformly, but persistently.

Who will answer it? Not economists: their tools measure output, not meaning. Not technologists: they built the displacement, not the replacement. Not politicians: they are still debating whether the disruption is real.

The question will fall to all of us: to families deciding how to raise children in a world without clear career paths, to communities trying to hold together without the rhythms of work, to individuals staring at open hours and wondering what they are for.

We will not answer it quickly. We may not answer it well. But we will have to live with the uncertainty while the old structures fade and the new ones have yet to take shape.

That is what it will mean to live through the drift.