The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.
The fact that we need to pose the question “why is it wrong to marry a chatbot?” tells us our culture does not possess the kind of robust anthropology needed to withstand the coming AI deluge into our lives. If we don’t know what a human is, or what a human is for, we won’t see any problem with giving in to the Machine. In order to ensure that we do not become something less (or greater, apparently) than human, we must first understand what it is we are fighting for. That territory has always been the church’s domain to cover: celebrating the imago dei present in every human life, endowed with purpose by their Creator and created to worship Him with all they have.
If the church has any hope to remain faithful and relevant in the modern world, she will have to reckon with the crisis of meaning many are experiencing as a side effect of allowing the Machine to exercise total control over their lives. In a world that increasingly believes in hyper-efficiency at all costs, a world that will continue to develop at breakneck speed in the coming years, we cannot resort to being a Jesus-flavored version of the Machine and expect our friends to find that notion intriguing. You cannot win the world by mimicking the world. We need something more radical to counter what the Machine offers: a vision of life that is grounded in reality, saturated with hope, and fiercely tethered to the world God made.
During World War II, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre observed that German-occupied France was never more free, because “every accurate thought” was a conquest over German propaganda. Here’s what Sartre said in 1944:
We were never more free than during the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to talk. Every day we were insulted to our faces and had to take it in silence. Under one pretext or another, as workers, Jews, or political prisoners, we were deported en masse. Everywhere, on billboards, in the newspapers, on the screen, we encountered the revolting and insipid picture of ourselves that our oppressors wanted us to accept. And, because of all this, we were free. Because the Nazi venom seeped even into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest.
That last phrase will always be true. Every accurate thought is a conquest.
And yet today, in the Machine age, what threatens our ability to think accurately is often different from the threat in Sartre’s time. Our devices are certainly capable of spewing venom; but they also spew a type of vanity. […]
The limitation of the digital world is that it isn’t directly connected to the real one. There’s no earth and soil behind our screens, no raindrops falling, no tree roots sucking up moisture, no muddy footsteps made by human feet. It is a digital representation, a shadow mimicking reality.
This separation from the real gives the online world a certain latitude, a certain stretchiness. […]
[O]nline experiences can coddle our view of the world, even if it is fantasy. This happens not just because people are trying to spread “fake news”. It happens because we have an urge to make sense of the world we live in. But digital content, being so easy to manipulate, can turn the search for real understanding into a search for whatever satisfies us.
So we can end up with blancmange understanding, like a blancmange pastry: a high-sugar trans-fat blob of tasty ideas, without much basis in fact, and with no great nutritional value.
Such distorted ideas become possible because they remain separated from the corrective friction of reality. It will always be easier to stay in the virtual world and keep our distortions…
Naturally, this comes at the cost of the world and of truth.
And what is truth?
What is truth? is also the question that Pontius Pilate asks shortly before sending Jesus to be crucified. It’s a very modern question, but it’s fitting that it was asked by a Roman, because it shows it’s also an eternal question. What is truth? How do we know that we aren’t all living in a dream right now?
Before the crucifixion, Jesus is scourged, leaving him wounded and bloody before the final execution. Jesus is supposed to be God, this infinite power “out there”, but at that moment in the story, he is embodied in physical reality. Even if you are not a religious person, there’s something here that speaks to a question we face in our age.
You see it in the Book of Genesis too. Let there be light. Let there be land. Let there be creatures. God speaks, and words become physical reality. According to this worldview, reality is not a dream, not a virtual simulation. Our consciousness is connected to a body and a physical world where there are aches, sufferings, and even death, but also the beauty of summer skies, raindrops, and the feeling of mud under our feet.
If, as Sartre suggests, every accurate thought is a conquest, then every embodied experience can support that conquest through the corrective friction of life itself.
“We’ll never be able to build an accurate and lifegiving worldview out of stretchy digital goop,” says Peco. “But we don’t have to play the puzzling game, not if we’re determined to seek out the corrective friction of the real world—through our embodiment, agency, connection, and the other spheres shown in the Visual Human Creed.”
Peco refers to these eight spheres as “battlegrounds,” but “not because we are urging you to some kind of militancy. Rather, it’s to point out that there is no neutral ground.” And he adds that you don’t need to take on all eight of them; it can be enough to focus, really focus, on one. “Defend even one sphere thoroughly, and you will save many of the others.”
In the link above, Ruth Gaskovski follows this up with “the 3Rs of Unmachining”: “Recognize the damaging impact of technology wherever it happens, Remove it, and Return to the real world.”
And adds, sharply: “We can read as much Mumford, Kingsnorth, Crawford, Berry, Newport, Carr, Haidt, or any number other tech-critical writers as we will, but if all these insights do not actually translate into our lives, we are only moving mind furniture.”
And, hope-filled-ly: “What we need to focus on is how to live a fully human life. The individuals and families who commit themselves fully to remaining grounded in reality, and on being fully human, have already won the war.”
What we are seeing now on the political right in America is a bizarre but not unsurprising spasm. On the one hand, there is a portion of the right—more libertarian in its economic sensibilities and hawkish in its foreign policy—that regards its positions as the best way to resist totalitarianism and antisemitism. Many holding to this package of beliefs are old enough to remember the Soviet Union and to have known people who served in World War II, so it is no surprise that they would be particularly alert to those evils. Elsewhere I have referred to this school as “right-wing conservatives.”
On the other hand, there is a rising generation of right-wingers, often called the new right or perhaps the dissident right, who are not particularly concerned with either of those things. Rather, they feel a deep sense of hopelessness about their lives—they doubt they will ever be able to own a home, escape economic precarity, or start a family. …
Since their adolescent years, many have felt attacked over things largely outside their control—to take one example, often relatively banal expressions of maleness were attacked as “toxic masculinity.” Meanwhile, following the social script handed to them by their elders—whatever you do, go to college!—has mostly just saddled them with enormous amounts of debt as they enter adulthood and find a precarious and uncertain job market. These factors generate a great deal of anger, anger which is often quite understandable. In some cases, this can take a still darker turn, leading to a search for someone to blame.
As a result of all this, they understand their political project as an attempt to use the power of the state to fix the problems that animate them and, often, to punish the people they blame for those problems. … I have referred to this bloc as “right-wing progressives” …
There may be some age and experience that separates these two groups — in fact, I’m certain there is. But what Meador misses, and what I have been soapboxing for nearly a decade, is the fact that these two groups have wide, immense overlap. Maybe even more overlap than non-overlap.
Meador says of the latter group, “This is also the same basic media ecosystem that includes figures like the Tocquevillian Catholic Patrick Deneen, the white nationalist Stephen Wolfe, and right-wing tech leaders like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. All of these distinct figures and the movements they are trying to lead, some far more alarming than others, are trying to either direct these alienated individuals or capitalize on their rage.” The former group may not necessarily “follow” the media ecosystem the way the latter, younger group does, but their anger and alienation has most certainly been capitalized on, in the same way, by the same ecosystem.
I’m not sure it’s possible to make sense of the rest of Meador’s piece with this in mind. In fact, it all sounds very 2015 to me.
I don’t know what exactly is going on on the right. Not so long ago, David Frum, speaking of Trump and the American right, said, “When this is all over, no one will admit to having supported it.” I think the best we can hope for is that some are finding the will to step out and say, “I was never a part of that.”
I don’t think I can get my hopes even that high. But I will say that Meador’s call to reflect on the relationship between Pope John Paul and Ronald Reagan is at least partially encouraging. In that spirit or a similar one — preferably one of common love rather than common hate — I will say that if you know or meet anyone coming out of the “postliberal” fog, embrace them.
With the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century, [Hannah Arendt’s student Michael Denneny] observed, reality was coming to be divided between, on the one hand, a domain of objective facts explicable in terms of universally valid laws expressible in mathematical terms, and, on the other hand, domains of contingency or unknowability about which nothing rational can be said.
The faculty of taste, and the range of phenomena in which it can be found to operate, Denneny argued, revealed to early-modern thinkers a “fundamentally different kind of reality” from the reality sundered into rational science and subjective nonsense. This different reality is the one in which we still spend much of our lives, whenever we have to invoke what we sometimes call common sense to make decisions that we feel we can get right or wrong, without having rules in reference to which rightness and wrongness are defined.
What might be particular about modernity is not so much that these sorts of decisions are more salient to us than they were to our premodern ancestors but that we have a diminished capacity and altered vocabulary for describing the specific areas of reality in which such choices are made.
“Silence,” Picard observed, “is nothing merely negative; it is not the mere absence of speech. It is the phenomenon of the whole man.” He distinguished between original silence, the primal quietude woven into creation itself, and the provisional silences we stumble into in modernity, the pauses between bombardments of sound. One, creative and life-giving; the other, destructive, masking emptiness. Picard contrasted the unbroken quiet of mountain valleys with the incessant buzz of modern cities, where engines and horns fill every crevice of time. He feared that when language is no longer sheltered by silence, it loses its savour, collapsing into chatter. Without that holy hush, words become mere signals. Relationships, too, suffer, for without shared repose there can be no true listening.
The age of the telegraph and the wireless already threatened to banish this original silence. What would he say now, when we carry the factory whistle in our pockets, when algorithms call out to us day and night, when even dreams are colonized by notifications? His intuition remains bracing: without a surrounding quiet, language grows thin, judgment hardens into argument, and intimacy withers. The word that has not been sheltered by calm arrives brittle, even when it means well. It shatters at first use. […]
The mystics had already lived this lesson. Pseudo-Dionysius taught that God is beyond every name, beyond even being, so language must proceed by negation until quietude itself becomes praise. Meister Eckhart spoke of Gelassenheit, a letting-be in which the soul consents to emptiness, entering the “desert of the Godhead” where no word can follow. Nicholas of Cusa described a learned ignorance, docta ignorantia, that bows before mystery rather than presuming to master it.
Angelus Silesius, the German mystic and poet, sang the same wordless hymn in his seventeenth-century verses. For him, prayer was a return to the root of being: “True prayer requires no word, no chant. . . . It is communion, calm and still with our own godly Ground.” His brief, crystalline aphorisms teach that silence is the condition in which Love can be born anew. “If in your heart you make a manger for Love’s birth, then God will once again become a child on earth.” In this sense, silence is less a void than a cradle, an emptied chamber of the self where divinity may alight, tender and unannounced. […]
Our century multiplies Picard’s concern exponentially. Social media rewards speed, assertion, and outrage. Scholars describe “continuous partial attention,” a state where nothing receives depth. Linda Stone coined the phrase to describe the condition of perpetual distraction that fragments consciousness itself. Studies of noise pollution reveal its measurable toll: elevated blood pressure, disturbed sleep, impaired learning in children. We flee into digital detox retreats, or into apps that sell quietude back to us as a subscription service. Noise is the religion of our age, demanding constant sacrifice of our attention.
Yet silence is a human inheritance. It is the ground where thought clarifies, where prayer ripens, where friendship deepens. Even politics needs stillness: Václav Havel described the power of the powerless as a refusal to participate in lies, a silence that carried more truth than many speeches. That refusal was costly; the person had to live by the truth without requiring a hearing. The moral strength of such a stance comes from the same source as contemplative practice.
One of the things that I’ve always detested about a certain segment of the left is what I often call “bravery on the cheap.” We saw a lot of it during the George W. Bush years. Some critics of the administration would assert that Bush was Hitler reincarnated and then pretend they were Martin Niemöller heroically speaking truth to power by opposing him. Hollywood was full of this sentiment. Actors would win an Oscar® and use their acceptance speech to vow they won’t be silenced or some such.
It was all B.S.
For starters, telling an auditorium full of Hollywood liberals exactly what they wanted to hear didn’t take a lot of courage. The last time I saw real courage at an awards ceremony, it was when Ricky Gervais told the assembled bigwigs that no one cares about their political opinions.
The much more important point is this: If Bush was Hitler—or even Hitlerish—very few of these people would say boo about him, because they’d be terrified. It was precisely because Bush was not anything like Hitler that people could criticize him without paying any price at all. Martin Niemöller was sent to a concentration camp. Naomi Wolf got a book contract, Michael Moore got another movie deal, etc.
A lot of protest-addicted people are like the dogs who act ferocious when they’re on a leash or behind a door. But when the leash comes off, they smell the other dog’s butt and say, “It’s all good.”
I mean, look at how Hollywood and academia have kowtowed to China over the last decade. They can’t even be counted upon to oppose a foreignauthoritarian regime when doing so comes at a price. The anti-Bush vitriol was all performative bravery on the cheap precisely because there was no price to pay and, often, there was ample upside.
George Orwell made a related point as only Orwell could. People revered Gandhi for his courage in speaking truth to power against the British, without ever acknowledging that it was precisely because the British were British—i.e., a liberal people—that his nonviolent tactics could work.
Gandhi, Orwell wrote, “believed in ‘arousing the world’, which is only possible if the world gets a chance to hear what you are doing. It is difficult to see how Gandhi’s methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again.” There are any number of legitimate criticisms of British rule in India, but if the British were Hitlerite or Stalinist, no one would know who Gandhi was.
Also, a standalone line from this piece worth placing in a thousand other contexts: “One doesn’t necessarily have to agree completely with this observation to concede that it is not just plausible, but actually quite defensible.” How much trouble could we avoid if we somehow found a way to that sentiment more often? Instead, as Goldberg puts it, we get cheap “bravery” and “soul-sickening cowardice.”
On that note, and since I’m quoting Jonah Goldberg, there’s something else I want to put a pin in, from his recent podcast interview with Yuval Levin. Goldberg notes the asymmetry between the antisemitism on the left and on the right, its different “nature, motivations, and function,” and he concedes that antisemitism is more marginal, even much more marginal, on the right. But the left’s antisemitism is for the most part “couched in euphemism”; to most on the left, it’s not about being antisemitic, or even anti-Israel, it’s about (they say) being pro Palestinian, pro peace. (Arguable, and not, here, by me, argued in either direction; see above paragraph.) The right’s antisemitism, however, partly due to its opposition to political correctness, skips the euphemisms. And since “cynicism is hard to maintain,” provocative trolling and just-asking-questions speak becomes serious ideology.
“The fact that there is tolerance for that kind of non-euphemistic antisemitism on the right, however, marginal [it is],” says Goldberg, “feels to me a more open negotiation with evil than what’s going on on the left.”
But I just sat through 45 minutes of the worst, most antisemitic, misogynist, misanthropic “greatest hits” of Fuentes’s podcasting career, and after listening to it I draw two conclusions: (1) Nick Fuentes is a cynically depraved monster, sincere in his moral corruption; (2) his psychological appeal to lost and disaffected kids is easy enough to recognize. Between the rants about Jews and women I heard a comprehensively corrosive skepticism of all things and institutions, emblems of a failed world that people like him and his audience were born into, one that gave them the short end of the stick. […]
These people are not conservative in the proper sense of the term, and they likely never will be. They have nothing to conserve, no investment in “the system” or the establishment, which has let them down. The idea of respectability itself is a mug’s game to them, one that people are dealt in or out of on the basis of arbitrary political factors — and they are its losers. Fuentes speaks directly to them, and he offers Jews and feminists as an explanation for their helplessness. That is why he is a force for evil. But it would be desperately foolish to ignore why he has drawn his audience: He is tapping into a dark corner of the same “burn it all down” sentiment that is widespread among youth of all political sides. He is drawing on the same slipstream as Zohran Mamdani is — a man who, not at all coincidentally, also smirkingly offers Jews as a convenient scapegoat for the world’s problems.
My complaint with Carlson et al. is, at root, a religious one. It could not be a political one: Tucker Carlson’s politics in these waning days of Anno Domini 2025 are not worth disagreeing with, and neither are Kevin Roberts’. Like every other self-abasing servant of the digital mob, their politics are insipid, superficial, and subject to instantaneous revision as soon as necessity requires it. One might as well argue with a puddle of piss on a hot summer sidewalk—whatever there is to it won’t last as long as the argument, and all that will remain will be a stain, if that, and the knowledge that you have wasted your time. Tucker Carlson may think that he can put on Christ with no more consequence than putting on those flannel shirts he affects these days (somewhere in Maine, there is a thrift shop with a lot of Brooks Bros. bow ties for sale), but it does matter—a great deal—that men such as he purport to speak from, and for, a Christian point of view.
It is true: political speech, even hateful speech, is not the same as political violence.
However, we stop far too short when we condemn political violence while excusing and contributing to a culture of political hatred.
The reason some people were prepared, quite literally, to justify or even celebrate the assassination of Charlie Kirk the man is that they had grown so accustomed to hating the idea of him. When his image would appear as they scrolled through social media, they might mutter under their breath, “F— that guy.”
One of the lies we tell ourselves is that we can cultivate hatred of someone like Charlie Kirk (or slain Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman or former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) as “political figures,” and that this hatred will remain quarantined to the abstractions of politics. We have bought into the fiction that hatred mediated and directed by what we consider to be our “good” or “correct” political views somehow makes our hatred righteous. We sanctify our hatreds and even tell ourselves that our loves require hate. We say, “I don’t hate Charlie Kirk, I love my immigrant neighbors,” or “I don’t hate Democrats, I love the truth.” These evasions, this slipperiness, are how we assimilate ourselves to the idea of wishing others ill. It is then only out of the overflow of our hearts that we celebrate when they are harmed.
Luke 6:35-49 (Eugene Peterson translation):
35-36 “I tell you, love your enemies. Help and give without expecting a return. You’ll never—I promise—regret it. Live out this God-created identity the way our Father lives toward us, generously and graciously, even when we’re at our worst. Our Father is kind; you be kind.
37-38 “Don’t pick on people, jump on their failures, criticize their faults—unless, of course, you want the same treatment. Don’t condemn those who are down; that hardness can boomerang. Be easy on people; you’ll find life a lot easier. Give away your life; you’ll find life given back, but not merely given back—given back with bonus and blessing. Giving, not getting, is the way. Generosity begets generosity.”
39-40 He quoted a proverb: “‘Can a blind man guide a blind man?’ Wouldn’t they both end up in the ditch? An apprentice doesn’t lecture the master. The point is to be careful who you follow as your teacher.
41-42 “It’s easy to see a smudge on your neighbor’s face and be oblivious to the ugly sneer on your own. Do you have the nerve to say, ‘Let me wash your face for you,’ when your own face is distorted by contempt? It’s this I-know-better-than-you mentality again, playing a holier-than-thou part instead of just living your own part. Wipe that ugly sneer off your own face and you might be fit to offer a washcloth to your neighbor.
43-45 “You don’t get wormy apples off a healthy tree, nor good apples off a diseased tree. The health of the apple tells the health of the tree. You must begin with your own life-giving lives. It’s who you are, not what you say and do, that counts. Your true being brims over into true words and deeds.
46-47 “Why are you so polite with me, always saying ‘Yes, sir,’ and ‘That’s right, sir,’ but never doing a thing I tell you? These words I speak to you are not mere additions to your life, homeowner improvements to your standard of living. They are foundation words, words to build a life on.
48-49 “If you work the words into your life, you are like a smart carpenter who dug deep and laid the foundation of his house on bedrock. When the river burst its banks and crashed against the house, nothing could shake it; it was built to last. But if you just use my words in Bible studies and don’t work them into your life, you are like a dumb carpenter who built a house but skipped the foundation. When the swollen river came crashing in, it collapsed like a house of cards. It was a total loss.”
Luke 6:35-49 (RSVCE):
But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish. 36 Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.
37 “Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven; 38 give, and it will be given to you; good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”
39 He also told them a parable: “Can a blind man lead a blind man? Will they not both fall into a pit? 40 A disciple is not above his teacher, but every one when he is fully taught will be like his teacher. 41 Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? 42 Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take out the speck that is in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother’s eye.
43 “For no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit; 44 for each tree is known by its own fruit. For figs are not gathered from thorns, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. 45 The good man out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil man out of his evil treasure produces evil; for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.
46 “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do what I tell you? 47 Every one who comes to me and hears my words and does them, I will show you what he is like: 48 he is like a man building a house, who dug deep, and laid the foundation upon rock; and when a flood arose, the stream broke against that house, and could not shake it, because it had been well built. 49 But he who hears and does not do them is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation; against which the stream broke, and immediately it fell, and the ruin of that house was great.”
