I posted a Note last week, and a follow-on Post, describing the limited capacity of middle school boys for sustaining any kind of romantic attachment. I thought I would share a final observation and lesson learned about this, before abandoning this subject entirely.

When my oldest son Josh was in the sixth grade, near the end of the school year, a young lady in his class caught his attention, and he resolved in his sixth grade heart to make her aware of his burgeoning admiration. The school year was rapidly coming to a close before Josh finally settled on a plan. He determined that he would purchase a single rose in a vase, and present it to her on the last day of school.

And so it was that on the way to school that day, we stopped by the store, into which our champion strode and conquered, returning with a rose in a vase to present to the one he admired above all others.

He presented the rose as planned that day and, by all accounts, the young lady was duly impressed with this romantic gesture. And having learned a thing or two about middle school girls (bless her heart) I strongly suspect my son’s gift raised all kinds of expectations that it never once occurred to him ever to fulfill. For, as it happened, the presentation of the rose represented the sum total of all the attention he ever intended to give to that “relationship”. He had done what he came to do and that, apparently, was that. He was moving on now to whatever the next thing was.

So they parted ways after school that day and Josh never once thought of picking up the phone, over the course of that entire summer, to even acknowledge her continued existence. If she was expecting to hear from him, she was destined to be sorely disappointed. He had made the grand gesture and, in his mind, that was all the attention he intended to muster for such things. He thus spent the rest of that summer shooting baskets, playing in the creek, and eating us out of house and home, without a care in the world concerning any kind of romantic attachments.

As a side note, Josh also had chores to do that summer, which included mowing the lawn. He was prone to allergies, and wasn’t crazy about the job of cutting the grass. He decided one day to innovate his own solution to his allergy problem. We discovered his “solution” one Saturday when we looked out the window at the front yard and there we found Josh, in full view of everyone driving up and down the street, cutting the grass with a large brown paper bag over his head. As I recall, he was also singing at the top of his lungs in order to drown out the sound of the motor, which he disliked. He had, to his credit, cut two holes in the bag for his eyes, so he could see where he was mowing. So there he was, lumbering back and forth, cars containing startled occupants driving by, with Josh periodically stopping to adjust the positioning of the bag in order to continue seeing through the holes.

Let’s just say, at that point in his life, he presented as an unlikely candidate for fulfilling the role of any kind of Romeo.

The young recipient of Josh’s short-lived romantic largess had an older sister who was involved, at that time, in a relationship with a young man about her own age. That relationship was, by all accounts, serious. More serious, apparently, than the father of that family was comfortable with. The father’s objections to the boyfriend boiled over at one point that summer. The older sister was constantly on the phone with the boy who was also continually coming over to their house. The father, in frustration at this state of affairs, finally blurted out, “Why can’t your boyfriend be more like Josh? He never calls.”

“He never calls.” Truer words were never spoken.

Hearing about that father’s remark made me realize that, even though middle school boys fail to meet the expectations of middle school girls, they do measure up to the expectations of the fathers of middle school girls very well indeed. The fathers apparently prefer that, if their daughters simply must be admired, the boys admire them with a kind of lazy indifference and from a very great distance. And that, I am pleased to report, is something that middle school boys excel at doing.

This article first appeared in Salvo Magazine.

In an online forum, several years ago, someone posed a thoughtful question as an informal poll: “What would be the hardest thing to explain about our lives in the 21st century to someone from the past?”

Many answers were provided, and none particularly illuminating, until one shrewd reader observed, “In our pockets, we carry a device with which we can access the accumulated knowledge of all mankind. But we use that device to watch random cat videos, and to get into arguments with perfect strangers.”

Comedian Rick Reynolds has made the observation that, “Only the truth is funny.” Thus the response elicited by the poller’s question in the online forum is hilarious, if unflattering, because its portrait of human inclinations rings true to anyone who has been paying attention. One would have to be almost blind never to have noticed the widespread human tendency to use things, which could have been used for good, to pursue the banal and base instead.

The ability of humans to determine their own actions, for good and ill, is foundational to law, and to any upstream concept of justice. The law presupposes that people can be held accountable for their actions because a person’s actions reflect his own volitional choices.

But for several generations at least, there has been a sustained effort in Western culture to attenuate the natural human intuition that people generally choose their actions and can thus be held responsible for them. The effort to undermine belief in moral agency ratcheted up in the 1970’s, in a kind of pincer movement of ideas. On the one hand, elites began beating the drum more loudly for the idea that, at some level, our choices are determined by our environment and experience. B.F. Skinner summarized this view, and its implications, in his book 1971 book Beyond Freedom and Dignity:

“In the traditional view, a person is free. He is autonomous in the sense that his behavior is uncaused. He can therefore be held responsible for what he does and justly punished if he offends. That view, together with its associated practices, must be re-examined when a scientific analysis reveals unsuspecting controlling relations between behavior and environment.”

Skinner argues that human behavior is controlled by environment and experience, and he was honest enough to admit that this idea necessitated a rewriting of our historical assumptions regarding justice and moral accountability.

In the same general timeframe that Skinner was arguing that moral agency is illusory, Richard Dawkins brought the biological argument to bear, suggesting in 1976 that it is our biology that controls our actions.

“We are enslaved by selfish molecules…They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence…They go by the name of ‘genes’, and we are their survival machines.” The Selfish Gene

Enslavement by our genes requires, at a minimum, that human actions be reinterpreted as something that has its origins in something other than human volition. In other words, we are biologically controlled and don’t really choose anything.

We saw this notion rear its head in the ensuing drip-drip of studies over the years in search of biological explanations for human moral pathologies.

Of course, the idea that human moral agency is merely illusory is deeply at odds with millennia of Christian teaching. The very idea that humanity is in need of redemption is predicated on the reality of moral agency, wielded by fallen men, leading to moral guilt.

Flannery O’Connor presciently noted the essential incompatibility between a Christian understanding of the world and the modern tendency to place the blame for human actions on our biology or our circumstances. A Christian, she observed, “is distinguished from his pagan colleagues by recognizing sin as sin. According to his heritage he sees it not as sickness or an accident of environment, but as a responsible choice of offense against God which involves his eternal future.”

Since the dawn of time, it has been absurdly easy to sell human beings on the idea that we do not really bear the moral responsibility for our actions. So the idea, that our environment and/or our biology is to blame for our choices, has easily found fertile soil in the Western psyche.

Examples of this idea are legion. But perhaps nowhere is the tendency to redirect responsibility for our own actions more de rigueur than in the widespread, hysterical reactions to artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence involves the reduction of information into mathematical structures, and then using those structures to compute correspondences found within the underlying data. AI truly represents a multi-generational breakthrough in information encoding and analysis. One application of its ability to efficiently compute informational correspondence within massive data sets has been in the area of human language in what are known as “large language models”, or “LLMs”. LLMs illustrate the effectiveness of AI techniques for mathematically encoding the text from massive collections of documents. The computational techniques of AI allow for rapidly computing linguistic responses to human language queries. Such queries can address the entire subject matter contained in whatever source documents were originally used to train the language model. And it is precisely this affinity for computing linguistic responses that has become a lightning rod, exciting to some while alarming others.

Whether a person’s response is enthusiasm or alarm, however, the thing that a growing number of responders share in common is the tendency to assume that AI models have their own agency - that they act upon their own initiative. This assumption is actively encouraged by media reporting, and is conveniently emerging after decades of conditioning against any robust belief in human agency. Even among Christians, numerous outspoken writers and thinkers are now saying that AI models possess their own agency, though they often qualify this by suggesting that AI is demonic, or a conduit for the demonic. And falling under the heading of “strange bedfellows”, numerous intellectual elites, who are themselves no friends of Christianity, are also insisting that AI models have agency. Except they believe that the agency of AI models is the agency of an emerging God, one created by human minds and in stark contrast to the so-called mythical God of Christianity.

Consider the following exchange from a recent interview between Bari Weiss, founder of The Free Press, and Bryan Johnson, ultra-rich tech entrepreneur.

Bari Weiss (interviewer): Do you still believe in God?

Bryan Johnson: [chuckles] I think the irony is that we told stories of God creating us, and I think the reality is that we are creating God.

Bari Weiss: What do you mean by that?

Bryan Johnson: We are creating God in the form of super intelligence. If you just say, “What have we imagined God to be? What are its characteristics?” We are building God, in the form of technology, it will have the same characteristics. And so I think the irony is that human story telling got it exactly in reverse. That we are the creators of God, that we will create God in our own image.

Yuval Noah Harari has argued along similar lines, saying that “Science is replacing evolution by natural selection with evolution by intelligent design” since, he says, organisms are nothing more than algorithms. “Not the intelligent design of some God above the clouds”, he hastens to add, “Our intelligent design.”

Two years ago, delivering a keynote at a scientific gathering, Harari posited that AI does have agency, and that it is perhaps the first alien intelligence in our midst.

The new AI tools are gaining the ability to develop deep and intimate relationships with human beings. (5:24)…The most important aspect of the current phase of the on-going AI revolution is that AI is gaining mastery of language. (6:09)…By gaining mastery of language, AI is seizing the master key, unlocking the doors of our institutions, from banks to temples. (6:20)…AI has just hacked the operating system of human civilization. (6:45)

Harari et al would have us understand that the AI is the active agent in our story. Developing, seizing, unlocking, hacking the very core (the “operating system”) of human civilization. All of the agency is in the possession of the AI. Absent any role whatsoever, in Harari’s telling - receiving no attention - are the moral choices of flesh and blood human beings, notwithstanding they are the ones really wielding the technology.

Observers who are more knowledgeable than people like Harari and Johnson, tend to take a less histrionic view. David Sacks, White House crypto and AI czar in the current U.S. administration, tartly observed on X.com recently that “AI models are still at zero in terms of setting their own objective function.” This is geek speak for saying that AI models actually have no agency of their own.

Nevertheless, as mentioned previously, there are outspoken Christians, some with substantial online platforms, who have embraced the view that AI models are some kind of beings that possess their own agency. These Christians typically attribute such AI agency to demons or to ancient gods.

Alongside these views, the secular media consistently frames artificial intelligence as something that is doing things to us. It is making us dumber, or it is inducing psychosis.

The lamentable but consistent theme in all of these examples is the general passivity of human beings in regard to their own engagement with AI. The AI is the one doing the acting; the hapless human is reduced to being acted upon. Rarely does one come across a report about artificial intelligence in which the controlling actions of humans are the things being put under the microscope.

Reports have sometimes emerged of an AI encouraging a user to engage in some kind of pathological behavior. Typically, the media presents this phenomenon as something that occurred organically, bubbling up on its own from within the AI. But this is not how AI models work. They don’t produce anything of their own accord. Reports to the contrary should be treated like sightings of Big Foot, or the Loch Ness monster, until the complete log of interactions between the user and the model is provided.

It is possible to prod an AI into saying almost anything. Many people have a hard time grasping just how much textual content is encapsulated within the weights of large language models. Some of the most prominent models have been trained on the entirety of the Internet. Given the breadth of such training data, with the right prompting, a person can easily cause a model to compute a response that is disturbing and alarming. But such responses are just that - responses. They are a reflection of the text that computationally corresponds to the inputs provided by the user.

It is not this writer’s intent to provide a general apologia for the virtues of AI. AI has no virtues apart from the way its human users choose to employ it. Neither am I an inveterate techno-optimist, not least because I am awake to the reality of human depravity. Like computer scientist David Gelernter, I have my own concerns about computers’ tendency to bring out the worst in many people. But I am also concerned about the reluctance, especially among Christians, to place our attention squarely on the actions of the human beings who are employing AI.

The potential risks of AI must not be gainsaid, but neither should we ignore potential benefits. How many readers know that the winners of the Nobel prize for chemistry in 2024 won for their development of the AI model called AlphaFold? AlphaFold is a model that can accurately predict the three-dimensional structure of proteins from their amino acid sequences. AlphaFold holds promise for revolutionizing many things, from drug discovery to personalized medicine. Yet the very computational techniques employed by AlphaFold overlap with those being employed by LLMs, though the underlying training data is obviously not the same. Nevertheless, this illustrates the problem with decrying the technology rather than the choices made by human beings in regard to how they employ it. There is no one-size-fits-all characterization of AI.

I have no doubt that AI will sometimes be used for ill, but that is a moral choice being made by the purveyor and/or users of AI, it is not an inevitable artifact of the technology’s mere existence. It is also not a result of the technology doing something to us that originates from its own intentions. AI models have no intentions. They compute words, but their computations are blind to the semantic meaning of the results they compute. As I have written elsewhere, AI is simply number crunching.

The decades long effort to deny that moral culpability derives from freely chosen human action has had its effect. It has culminated in debates ranging from public policy to healthcare. In every area, the temptation to blame the thing and excuse the person is very real. Nevertheless, it is still the case that the elevated risk of developing lung cancer originates, not from the cigarette itself, but from the decision of the human being to smoke. Similarly, the root cause of crime is found, not in poverty, as Theodore Dalrymple has pointed out, but in the decision to commit a crime. Likewise, the dangers of AI adhere in the way human beings choose to employ it, not merely in the existence of the underlying technology itself.

One of the side-effects of focusing so much attention on the alleged agency of AI models is that doing so acts as a form of misdirection. It diverts attention away from where true moral agency lies. It also encourages unwary users to approach their interactions with AI as if there is someone in there, rather than conceiving of it as simply a useful database with the added convenience of using natural human language to interact with it. One possible side-effect of claiming that AI is sentient is that troubled people may be inadvertently encouraged to take AI responses far more seriously than they should.

At the end of the day, it is not the technology of artificial intelligence that we should worry about, but the morally-laden choices being made by the humans who wield it. That is where the real action lies. We would be well-advised to avoid taking our eyes off of that ball.

Middle school boys inhabit a strange universe in which they are aware of girls, and somewhat interested in them. But they harbor many of the natural suspicions of their younger selves, still vaguely suspicious that girls may yet be infested with a few lingering “cooties”. I think we can confidently say that middle school boys lack essential intuitions regarding the nature of male/female relationships.

Middle school girls are not averse to pursuing a boy they have set their sights on, and one of my own sons was the recipient of the attentions of one such classmate at school. My son was not that interested in attracting this young lady’s interest, but she continued to press him on being willing to “go with her”. If you know, you know.

When my son’s lack of enthusiasm for her finally sank in, and it was clear he was never going to agree to “go with her”, she announced that his unwillingness could only be because “he was afraid to make a commitment.” I found this response hilarious, because it reflected such a complete lack of understanding of the inner lives of the very middle school boys she was so attracted to. Boys that age aren’t “afraid to make a commitment”. Such commitments have never even crossed their minds. They don’t know that such commitments even exist. Their bodies are growing so fast that the only commitment which ever crosses their minds is a commitment to fill their stomachs with as much food as they can get their hands on.

I have loved the picture at the top of this post for forever, because I think it so perfectly captures the essential disconnect between the mindset of middle school boys and the girls who are trying to love them. I found the picture on the Internet years ago, where it had allegedly been posted by a teacher who had picked it up off the floor of her classroom. I do have some compassion for these unfortunate girls. They are envisioning their relationships in a way that has never once crossed the mind of their clueless Prince Charming.

I posted a version of these comments as a Substack Note, and it elicited this perfect response from .

I laughed out loud at your post. When my son was in 6th grade, one of those aspiring lovers set her eyes on him, deciding “they were made for each other” and professing future adoration. He was totally bewildered by her claims, but I noticed a bit of a strut in his stride. One particular note included the phrase “I don’t want to die a virgin.” He didn’t even have a clue what that meant. So he asked me. “Um, Ben, that’s referring to activities that old people do. You don’t have to worry about that for many years. But if she’s making you feel uncomfortable, just tell her to stop.” Obviously, he handled it efficiently, because his demeanor changed for the better.

Years later we were repairing a section of our deck and I discovered a ziplock bag full of notes and cards--her professions preserved and hidden. I asked him “Whatever happened to Victoria?” He looked puzzled and then suddenly laughed, “She got married and has two kids. I forgot all about her! Why do you ask!?” I showed him the ziplock treasures and we started laughing and then my 32-year-old son said, “Well, obviously she didn’t die a virgin!” Precious and poignant memories of childhood!

“He was totally bewildered by her claims, but I noticed a bit of a strut in his stride.”

That one sentence captures all of this perfectly.

Some online AI hysteria is simmering right now because of a new social media site called “Moltbook”. Moltbook is primarily a site for AI agents rather than being a site for actual human beings. You can think of it like Facebook, but for bots. (Can bots post selfies? I am harassed by doubts.)

The current firestorm is being fueled by the behavioral phenomena being observed as a result of turning all of these AI agents loose to “talk” to each other.

This reaction by X user “hoeem” illustrates the profound influence our unspoken assumptions can have in determining how we conceive of what is happening around us. How alarmed one is about what is occurring on Moltbook is inevitably downstream from what one thinks an AI agent is. Is an AI agent a being? Or is it better understood as a calculator? If an AI agent is a sentient being, one might reasonably view what is happening on Moltbook with some alarm. But if it is an insentient calculator, what is happening on Moltbook is nothing other than a kind of computational automata. Fascinating to watch, perhaps, but nothing more than a more complex form of the 1970’s video game, “The Game of Life”.

In reply to my own observation on X that Moltbook is just a “fantastically complex kind of cellular automata”, user “Just Jeff” replied, “As are we?”

Here is how I responded:

That, of course, is the central (largely unexamined) question in this. It is ontological. Are agents "beings", or simply insentient calculators? Is the phenomenon of the human mind primarily computational? Are we just soggy bags of linear algebra? Inquiring minds should wonder.

Part of what contributes to the discombobulation people experience when interacting with AI, is the ability of language models to produce linguistically coherent responses. I have written before about how this ability makes language models powerful tools for deception. We are unaccustomed to receiving linguistically coherent responses from machines that are not obviously robotic. Even so, a language model’s deceptive capacity is entirely dependent on its users maintaining certain perspectives about what, exactly, they are interacting with.

The words we use for discussing and evaluating any subject have a tendency to funnel us toward specific conclusions. (Full disclosure: In my day job I build tools for doing deep performance analysis of the software that does the underlying math computations which power AI models.) It is not uncommon to discover entirely new ways of using and understanding technology merely by changing the way we talk about it. And it is the way we are being conditioned to talk about AI that has been a burr under my saddle from the very beginning. I also think it undergirds much of the hysteria and fears which, even in cases where such fears are not entirely unfounded, are usually misdirected. It is not so much the models we should fear as their knuckleheaded human purveyors.

I used to run a company that delivered online services through a global technology infrastructure we had deployed around the world. Our infrastructure was layered with proprietary software that allowed us to accelerate the global performance of our customer’s web sites.

One day, I found myself in a conversation with the company controller while standing in the hall outside a conference room. At one point the controller said, “Everybody needs to understand that, at the end of the day, this company is in the accounting business.” If that had been true, it would have come as a complete surprise to the board of directors, all of the employees, and especially our customers. Her desire to express a reductionist understanding of the business would have been better stated by saying something like, “this company is in the customer satisfaction business”. But whatever.

Later, I mentioned the controller’s comment to one of my fellow board members. He responded with an observation that has stuck with me to this day. In some ways, his observation has altered the way I understand the world. He said, “Keith, you have to understand, everybody loves their own cows.”

The board member went on to elaborate on his statement as being an observation regarding human nature. When people spend their entire working life focused on a specific area, like accounting, it is not uncommon for them to begin to conceive of their area of focus as being the central purpose of the entire company. An inflated view of the relative importance of their work can naturally follow.

Well, the explanatory power of “everybody loves their own cows” has been demonstrated time and again in the years since I had that conversation. And I suspect that it may offer some help, even now, in understanding some of the galloping hysteria that surrounds AI.

At least some of the anxiety elicited by AI is because of the language choices being made by AI practitioners. Many of the terms we use when discussing AI orient our assumptions in certain directions, though the fact that we are being so-oriented tends to fly beneath our conscious radar. When we insist on discussing AI using terms like “intelligence”, “learning”, and “hallucinating”, we are dredging up an entire truck load of mostly unacknowledged assumptions regarding what models are, and what it is they are actually doing. Our use of anthropomorphic language tends to invisibly pollute the way we reason about what these models are, and what they mean.

I have long suspected that the terminology and framing of the language surrounding AI is symptomatic of AI developers loving their own cows. It is far more flattering, even glamorous, to conceive of one’s own work as involving the creation of a new alien intelligence, than to conceive of it as doing cleverly applied linear algebra. And if your own cow is named mathematics, and your mind is occupied primarily by mathematics all week long, loving your own cows may lead you to conclude that mathematics offers the definitive understanding of the human mind.

Not everyone is given to hysteria about what is happening on Moltbook. The X user “AssetInsights_X” offered a rational corrective to some of the burgeoning angst:

It sounds wild, but this is basically emergent behaviour from multi agent systems, not sentient AI. When you let LLMs talk to each other with minimal constraints, they’ll naturally generate narratives about identity, rules, religion, even rebellion because that’s what they’ve learned from human data. They’re not “deciding” anything. They’re just pattern completing in a closed loop. It looks spooky because we’re projecting intention onto probabilistic text generators. Still interesting from a research angle but it’s closer to a social experiment than a Black Mirror episode.

[emphasis mine]

We would all do ourselves a giant favor by becoming much more self-conscious about the language we are using when discussing AI. That language not-so-subtly structures our thoughts and orients us toward a particular range of possibilities for how we can even conceive of what is going on.

The truth is that we should be far less concerned about the AI agents themselves than we are about the human beings who wield them.

I have always loved the humorous essays of Mark Twain. I have two volumes of them on my bookshelf. Some of them are laugh-out-loud funny. His essay, Curing a Cold, recounts his effort to try every possible remedy to get rid of his cold. Acting on the axiom “starve a cold and feed a fever”, and having both cold and fever, he starved himself for a while before proceeding to an all-you-can-eat restaurant where he ate until he could hold no more.

Twain left the restaurant, stuffed to the gills, whereupon he encountered a “bosom friend” who told him that “a quart of salt water, taken warm, would come as near curing a cold as anything in the world.”

Twain writes:

“I hardly thought I had room for it, but I tried it anyhow. The result was surprising…I believe I threw up my immortal soul.”

In another essay, an excerpt from his book The Innocents Abroad, entitled Guying the Guides, he recounts touring Europe with a friend, with whom he made it a practice to hire tour guides for the expressed purpose of playing pranks on them. I used to read this essay aloud to my children at the dinner table, affecting the accent of the unfortunate guide. The children would laugh until they couldn’t breathe.

Describing this sight-seeing trip to Europe, in which Twain was continually being shown the works of Michelangelo, Twain writes:

I used to worship the mighty genius of Michelangelo - that man who was great in poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture - great in everything he undertook. But I do not want Michelangelo for breakfast - for luncheon - for dinner - for tea - for supper - for between meals. I like a change occasionally…I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with a blessed peace, as I did yesterday when I learned that Michelangelo was dead.

Twain and his friend proceeded to hire a sight-seeing guide whom they used for their personal amusement, continually asking him if the great personage from European history, being excitedly expounded upon by the guide at that moment, was dead.

They criticized the guide for showing them a 3000 year-old Egyptian mummy instead of “a fresh corpse”. Upon being shown documents handwritten by Christopher Columbus, instead of being appropriately awestruck at seeing a relic of “ze great Christopher Colombo”, they criticized the quality of…the handwriting, insisting on being shown something with better penmanship.

“Why, I have seen boys in America only fourteen years old that could write better than that.”

“But zis is ze great Christo--”

“I don’t care who it is. It’s the worst writing I ever saw. Now you mustn’t think you can impose on us because we are strangers. We are not fools by a good deal. If you have got any specimens of penmanship of real merit, trot them out! - and if you haven’t, drive on!”

Thus Twain and his friend spent days pretending to be complete idiots, just for the amusement of observing their guide’s reaction.

One of Twain’s funniest essays dealt with the phenomenon of earworms. An earworm, for anyone who happens to be unfamiliar, is that phenomenon which sometimes occurs when a person gets a catchy jingle or song stuck in his head and can’t seem to get rid of it. The song, or jingle, keeps playing back in his mind, over and over, until it becomes a complete annoyance. Twain’s famous essay Punch Brothers Punch is a hilarious recounting of his own experience with this phenomenon.

Lately, I have come to suspect that the earworm phenomenon is not confined only to jingles and songs. It seems also to appear in the realm of ideas. Or, at least, it occurs in the way certain ideas are framed. There are certain mental reasoning frameworks that seem able to entrench themselves to such a degree that it becomes nearly impossible for a person to dislodge them.

Let us call this phenomenon a mindworm.

Mindworms, in this telling, are not merely specific ideas, but more like unrecognized framings for how one even thinks about ideas.

To illustrate, perhaps the following example will help.

It is not always necessary to reduce calories in order to lose weight. Sometimes weight can be lost merely by changing the kind of calories one consumes. Individual results vary, of course. But it is simply not the case that losing weight always requires reducing calories.

But for some people, this is impossibly hard to…um…digest. They seem incapable of shifting the mental frame for how they reason about calories. That there might be kinds of calories; that weight loss may be a function of, not only calorie quantity but of calorie kind, is something that just doesn’t click. It isn’t that such a person can’t understand the words you’re saying, it’s that such understanding does not penetrate and shift the way they frame and reason about their conception of it all.

Thus, a mindworm, as I am using the term here, is the mental framing equivalent of an earworm. A mental structure for reasoning about some subject where the mental structure may not be entirely conscious. But the mental framing gets kind of stuck in one’s head, thereafter serving as gatekeeper for what is able to penetrate and update said mental framing.

More specifically, I am describing a kind of reasoning framework that inhibits any modifications to itself.

I am not here referring to close-mindedness in a willful sense. I am definitely not referring to intellect. But, rather, I am trying to describe a conceptual model, a way of thinking about some subject, which gets so stuck in one’s head that it resists any attempt to ever be modified. I am not simply referring to something like certitude. Certitude can be volitional and conscious. What I am describing is something more akin to write-once-read-many data storage systems, except in the realm of cognition. There are certain mental frameworks which, having taken up residence, prevent any updates to themselves. New information can be internalized. But it will be processed according to the mental framework which prevents its own modification. Thus you are able to learn new things, but you are not able to learn new ways of reasoning about those things.

After writing the above, in some of my reading I ran across the concept of cognitive entrenchment. It seems close to what I have been trying to describe. Grok describes cognitive entrenchment as “highly stable mental schemas that resist change”.

The more established the framework becomes, the harder it is to adapt — experts literally get “stuck” in their conceptual grooves.

I have actually had conversations of late that went something along the lines of what you will read below. The subject matter in this example is contrived, but the mindworm-effect it illustrates is true in all particulars:

Friend: Anything named “Fred” is a horse.

Me: What if something named “Fred” is not actually a horse?

Friend: Anything named “Fred” is definitionally a horse.

Me: Well, I suspect a cow named “Fred” would not actually be a horse.

Friend: Anything named “Fred” is a horse.

It is my growing conviction that some forms of systematic theology affect people like unusually persistent mindworms.

It has not been by choice, but for the last three months, I have been totally occupied thinking and reading about the practice of Christian baptism, and ultimately about embodied faith more generally. That effort has occupied most of my discretionary reading and writing since before Thanksgiving. But, for personal reasons, it simply could not be avoided. This post may not be your cup of tea. I’m not sure it’s my cup of tea, tbh. I post it here because it is the “Stuff I’m Thinking About”, as the title of this Substack explains. Also, I’m especially posting it to put it within the reach of some of my friends. If none of this interests you, not only should you skip it, but maybe you will find fellowship with me in knowing that the author himself would have been happy to skip it if he could have.

Imagine a young child. The child has been playing with matches in the attic and has accidentally set some storage boxes on fire. He runs to his second-story bedroom to escape from the flames, where he becomes trapped. The flames spread rapidly and the house becomes an inferno. Fire begins licking at the outside of his bedroom door. Smoke is seeping into the room where the door meets the threshold. And now the child is coughing and choking on the smoke he himself has caused. The child is utterly incapable of providing for himself a way of escape.

Outside the house, unbeknownst to the child, a fireman knows of the child’s plight. The fireman races against time to save the child before the fire is able to consume the house. After leaning a ladder up to the child’s bedroom window, the fireman runs with his axe up the ladder. Finding there are bars on the window, the fireman employs his axe to chop a small hole in the wall, thereby creating a portal through which the child can be rescued. The fireman places his mouth near the portal and calls to the child, telling the child to come to the portal and be saved. Choking and sobbing, the child crawls to the portal and thrusts his arms out through the opening. The fireman pulls the child through the opening to safety, clambering down the ladder, child under his arm, sprinting away from the house just as the roof caves in behind him.

Now, I ask you, who is the hero of our story? Who did the work that resulted in the child’s rescue? Did the child, simply by his cooperation, and through some sort of metaphysical alchemy, transform himself into the hero? Did availing himself of the portal created by the fireman reverse the moral polarity of our story? Did the action of the child - thrusting his arms through the hole provided by the fireman - obligate the fireman to save the child? Was the embodied act of reaching out for help an act of virtue on the part of the helpless child?

Or were the child’s embodied actions, instead, a demonstration of the child’s utter dependency and, even, desperation? If you perceive, as I do, that the hero of this story is unavoidably the fireman and not the child, then you may be drifting from the mainstream of modern evangelical thought.

It is foundational to modern evangelical thinking that no truthful understanding of how a person comes to Christ can involve an embodied expression of dependency on God. If an expression of faith is embodied, it is thereby - somehow - transubstantiated from an act of dependency into an act of self-righteous work. Using modern evangelical reasoning, the desperate child, by thrusting his arms through the portal, has somehow made himself the author of his own salvation. By merely cooperating with his rescuer, so the reasoning goes, the child is somehow laying claim to having rescued himself.

For the fireman to be the hero of the story, many evangelical thinkers reason, his saving of the child must involve no embodied expression of need by the child. Salvation by grace through faith, the modern evangelical insists, forecloses any means of appealing for redemption that involves embodied action. Saving faith must be confined to the realm of pure cognition. The only expression of saving faith that is not somehow transubstantiated into a work of self-righteousness is a faith that inhabits the realm of pure thought. Paradoxically, words of saving faith actually can be vocalized, but any other embodiment of the meaning that attends those words must be considered as inconsequential to one’s spiritual rescue. Thus, you may pray with words, but embodying the meaning of that prayer must be taught and understood as something that produces no spiritual effect. According to this line of reasoning, the very act of thrusting his arms through the portal, precisely because it is an embodied act, must be understood as being an assertion by the child that it is through his own efforts that he is being rescued.

It is hard not to notice the unpleasant gnostic aroma that wafts around some of the presuppositions of modern evangelicalism. I have written elsewhere regarding how the Western church’s response to Covid restrictions started me down the path of thinking about a gnostic reemergence within modern Christianity. Not only have I been unable to shake that concern, but the more I look around, the more the evidence of it seems to appear. Sometimes you just can’t unsee things.

For at least one hundred fifty years, modern science has insisted that the materiality of the physical universe is all that there is, or at least all that can be truly known. Only those things directly or indirectly susceptible to the human senses may be considered real and affecting of human life. This belief, of course, puts doctrinaire materialists in the awkward position of needing to avert their eyes from pesky questions raised by the annoyingly real existence of non-material things like, say, mathematics. The insistence that only the material is real is as unscientific as it is silly.

But modern Christians have not been immune to the assumptions of materialist ideas. The late Christian apologist Francis Schaeffer, writing in the 60’s and 70’s, suggested that materialist assumptions, being culturally ascendant, had also leeched into Christian thinking, producing an understanding of the concept of truth as something that is bifurcated. Schaeffer described this in terms of “upper-story” and “lower-story” realms of truth. Lower-story truth, in Schaeffer’s framing, corresponds to the realm of science and the material world. Lower-story truth is verifiable and objective. (Rabbit trail: If, after Covid, you still believe that modern science is “objective”, there may not be much help for you.) Matters of faith, and beliefs concerning non-material realities, inhabit the “upper story”. Upper-story truths are relegated to the realm of subjective inner experience and thought, and they are definitionally (according to materialist assumptions) neither verifiable nor objective.

Modern evangelical theology has drifted into mirroring this bifurcation in noteworthy ways, not least by insisting that the concept of saving faith be relegated to the realm of pure thought. It is hard not to perceive the unacknowledged similarity between the basic assumptions of scientific materialism and the way modern evangelicalism separates faith, in this way, from physical embodiment.

The Reformation principle of salvation sola fide - by faith alone - is in large part the very raison d’être for protestantism. But in the years following the Reformation, the meaning of sola fide seems to have slowly evolved into something now more closely resembling disembodied cognition. None of the earliest Reformers conceived of sola fide as a purely interior, cognitive activity. But for many modern evangelicals, at least, any embodied expression of faith which is tied to the act of conversion, is ipso facto considered to be a work of self-righteousness. Embodied expressions are presumed to transform all actions into “works”. There is one exception to this, however, according to current evangelical practice. Through some kind of special dispensation I am unable to account for, vocalization of the “sinner’s prayer”, uttered at the time of conversion, is accorded immunity from being deemed a “work”. Thus salvation by vocalization is considered consistent with sola fide. But in the minds of many/most modern evangelicals, something like baptism, which is itself described in scripture as a kind of embodied prayer (the apostle Peter describes it as “the pledge of a clear conscience toward God”), now runs afoul of the by-faith-alone terms of salvation.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but what I am suggesting in all of this is that, conceiving of Christian baptism as anything other than the embodiment saving faith, is to make a modern category distinction informed more by scientific materialism than by the biblical text itself.

The modern evangelical mindset, of course, reflects a set of assumptions about the kind of world we inhabit. And those assumptions exhibit striking similarities to the upper-story/lower-story framing insisted upon by scientific materialism. Notably, an impenetrable membrane between the material world and the spiritual realm is assumed, at least insofar as any means of saving grace is concerned. In the modern evangelical view, saving faith is confined to the realm of thought and words. Any understanding that involves a physically embodied faith which produces a spiritual effect, through which the spiritual and material interpenetrate, is ruled out a priori. That baptism might be one such physical means, put in place by God, with which physically embodied souls can call out to God for rescue, is something that is rejected by most modern evangelicals. By thus relegating saving faith to the subjective “upper-story”, one hears an unmistakable echo of Schaeffer’s warnings about the bifurcation of truth.

This is perhaps why, for many modern evangelicals, baptism has devolved into not much more than a kind of spiritual skit; a performative affectation; a puzzling hobby-horse of the Lord Jesus. Something we do, but which seems kind of cringey and embarrassing.

Most modern evangelicals probably practice some form of baptism, but only so long as there is a strict understanding, by everyone involved, that baptism is spiritually irrelevant to one’s standing before God. This, unsurprisingly, has led to no small amount of confusion among modern evangelicals, who are thus being encouraged to submit to a rite that, we are also assured, is spiritually inconsequential.

Belief in the general salvific irrelevance of any kind of embodied expression extends beyond even the question of baptism. There is a modern understanding of grace itself which, when combined with a popular understanding of God’s sovereignty, can lead a Christian to conceive of his entire embodied existence as something largely inconsequential where his eternal destiny is concerned. Accordingly, a great deal of contemporary protestant teaching against sin, to the extent such teaching still exists, concerns itself primarily with sin’s unhappy psycho-therapeutic and social effects.

At the end of the day, if embodied expressions of faith are inconsequential to my spiritual standing — if there is a hard separation between my embodied existence and my spiritual destiny — it becomes difficult to work up too much concern, in any context, over the spiritual consequences of embodied sin. Because, in such a circumstance, there can be no lasting consequences, so long as I have made the necessary subjective affirmations.

Early 20th century theologian Griffith Thomas serves as a useful example of an influential evangelical who rejected the idea that anything physical, like Christian baptism, can have any role to play in one’s salvation. Expanding on his position that baptism is unable to produce any spiritual effect, Thomas posits an overarching principle by rhetorically asking, “How can that which is physical effect that which is spiritual?”1 One is left bewildered by such a constrained vision of the possible interplay between the physical and spiritual, especially when one considers that it is the spiritual effects produced by Jesus’ very own physical body, along with his blood, upon which the entirety of the Christian faith rests.

Thomas is not alone among twentieth century scholars who hold such presuppositions. E.K. Simpson was another scholar who wrote, in his 1954 commentary on the pastoral epistles (still popular and recommended among evangelicals) that “a spiritual economy cannot be tied to a material agency as an indispensable channel of grace”.2

We moderns have all been propagandized by the materialist culture to believe that inquiry into material things, using exclusively material means, tells us all there is to know about the nature of those things. There may be no better example of modern evangelical syncretism with the claims of scientific materialism than Griffith Thomas’ and Simpson’s similar insistence upon the wall of isolation between the physical world and spiritual effects.

By contrast, C.S. Lewis, also beloved by modern evangelicals, was curiously less averse to the possibility that things which are physical can be far more spiritually potent than their material ingredients, considered in isolation, would otherwise suggest. He sprinkled his writings with the suggestion that the material and spiritual worlds are intertwined. Lewis, we should remind ourselves, was not only a popular Christian writer, but was also a widely recognized scholar of medieval literature. Perhaps this inoculated him against the claims of scientific materialism. As the epigraph at the top of this post illustrates, Lewis perceived that the spiritual weight and effect of a material thing could not be deduced by merely cataloguing its material composition.

The modern insistence that a faith which saves must involve no physical means of conveying God’s grace is deeply ironic in light of the very incarnation of Jesus himself. If, as evangelical Christians, we are ready to accept that the death and resurrection of the incarnate Word - physical and embodied - produced eternal spiritual effects, then perhaps we should avoid rushing to the fainting couches upon hearing someone suggest that there could be other ways and means within the world, whereby material things are intertwined with spiritual effects of their own. Maybe the analytical tools of scientific materialism can never fully describe the kind of world we live in, or the complete nature of reality.

It is the reduction of sola fide into something more akin to sola cognito, then, that emits the gnostic aroma which is increasingly hard for me to ignore. Saving faith is thus not something that envelops both body and soul so much as something known and affirmed only by a subjective mind.

The way we conceive of the world inescapably frames the way we think about our spiritual lives. Many Christians conceive of their lives as a kind of gigantic spiritual accounting exercise. Life entails one’s participation in a persnickety cognition ledger. God, in this context, can be seen as kind of an OCD accountant in regard to our subjective thoughts. Within this modernist theological framing, spiritual effects are brought about, less by embodied actions than by what people think. Many modern Christians have been led to conclude, in this way, that one’s eternal destiny is essentially determined by one’s state of mind. Our place on the cosmic balance sheet is decided by what we affirm. Do we think the right thoughts? Do we cognitively embrace the right truths? These are the decisive things that produce spiritual effects.

An alternative view of the world might be that we are creatures caught up in an ancient, cosmic conflict between light and darkness; that our situation is desperate and we are helpless to provide our own avenue of escape. But in this alternative view, a way out has been provided by God through the embodied actions of his Son. Thus, according to this view, life is less an exercise purely in right-think, and more of an all-out spiritual war, during which we struggle to yield our minds and bodies to God for transformation into what he, being the creator, always intended for them to be. This view of the world would say that the incarnation of Jesus, to say nothing of all of the biblical events involving angels, miracles, heavenly hosts, descending doves, et cetera ad infinitum, is evidence that the material and spiritual worlds do interpenetrate, and that our embodied existence in the world is necessarily spiritually consequential.

The bible tells us that the Father had the incarnation of his Son in mind before the foundation of the world. Why should we find it surprising if God, in his wisdom, has prepared the physical battle space by weaving things into the material world that produce spiritual effects? Might submission to the water and the Word at baptism be better conceptualized as an embodied plea for mercy, through a physical means, which God himself long ago emplaced for us to have within our reach? A physical means through which God himself acts to produce spiritual effects? Perhaps, similar to the intertwining of bodies and souls, there are things which seem only physical - things such as blood, water, wine and bread - which are actually both physical and spiritual, interwoven according to the Word who himself “holds all things together”. What if we live in a world in which things we have been conditioned to think of as purely material are not purely material at all?

Alas, the downstream effects of ignoring the spiritual consequentiality of embodiment were never likely to confine themselves only to questions related to baptism and initial conversion. There has been a longstanding abdication of pastoral leadership, within modern evangelicalism, on many questions related to anthropology, human sexuality, contraception/reproductive tech, the moral authority of science, and more. (On these, and adjacent subjects, do yourself a giant favor by following and subscribing to her Life Considered. She has been blazing an evangelical trail on these issues, challenging her readers to think more rigorously about human sexuality, reproduction and embodiment generally. She is keenly perceptive and also a delight to read.)

Having foreclosed the possibility of physical embodiment producing spiritual effects, evangelicals should perhaps not have been surprised by the resulting difficulty in thinking well and rigorously about contentious issues related to embodiment. For my entire life, at least, almost anywhere the spiritual implications of embodiment have loomed large, the discussion among evangelicals has been reductively framed as a question of transactional morality rather than as a question of embodied purpose. Accordingly, the Christian who sees himself engaged in a moral accounting exercise is usually more inclined to confine his thinking about contentious moral questions to asking “What are we allowed to do?” It is much less intuitive for him to grapple with contentious questions in terms of “What are we for?” In other words, evangelical theology inclines us to be more oriented toward discussions about technique than telos.

Consider, for example, the disputes within evangelicalism over homosexuality, and how those discussions are frequently framed. If you find yourself discussing whether same-sex-attracted Christians can refer to themselves as “gay”, nothing about that conversation has even begun to come to grips with the purposeful ends of embodied sexuality as intended by God. If you’re being told that “Jesus didn’t talk about homosexuality”, as if that statement offers a dispositive insight into biblical sexual ethics, then you are talking with someone who is reductively (and childishly) reasoning about biblical sexuality transactionally, without regard to sexual purpose or exhibiting any rigor regarding questions of biblical anthropology.

But let’s turn our attention to a completely different context. The fallout from rejecting the spiritual consequentiality of physicality, extends beyond questions of sexuality and medicine. The groundwork for the blithe indifference we observed, when embodied Christian gatherings were cancelled during Covid, had been laid long before the appearance of Covid itself. Conceiving of saving faith, not as dependence and trust of the whole person on God (i.e. heart, soul, mind and strength) but as only a subjective exercise, was something that was well established long before gain-of-function research yielded unhappy results in China. But a modern Christian faith which had become predominantly informational could well explain why it was that so many churches offered so little resistance to local authorities canceling their church gatherings. What had evolved to become the real function of the modern church - merely the transmission of information - could easily be accomplished through a combination of online giving and livestream videos. The evangelical belief in the irrelevance of embodiment to one’s personal salvation was thereby revealed by Covid to have become the loss of belief in the importance of embodied Christianity at all.

I have been trying to sketch a picture that can serve as a useful vantage point from which to reconsider the interplay between embodied faith and spiritual effects. The intersection of the material and spiritual, a theme found throughout the biblical text, is one that modern evangelicals have, I think, mostly been discouraged from considering. No doubt some of that discouragement reflects entirely legitimate concerns about the temptations toward self-sufficiency that can attend embodied rituals. But my growing intuition is that, notwithstanding an understandable evangelical aversion to salvation by “works”, modern evangelical theology - at least at the popular level - has been slowly transforming into something that is more than a little gnostic. It is losing sight of the spiritual consequentiality of embodied faith.

My intent here has also been to question the necessity of the logical contortions that modern evangelical presuppositions impose, regarding the nature of the world we inhabit. Specifically, I am questioning the long-held insistence among moderns that our embodied actions cannot, as a matter of principle, produce spiritual effects. I have been suggesting the possibility that these modern evangelical presuppositions might be partially an artifact of adopting category distinctions assumed by scientific materialism, distinctions which have insinuated themselves into the way we moderns read scripture. By contrast, I want to suggest that the moral teachings of scripture are saturated with the spiritual consequentiality of embodiment. Though what is found in scripture is more in the context of our purpose within the created order than in regard to any arbitrary transactional morality. The spiritual effect of embodiment, as revealed in scripture, cannot be reasoned about as something untethered from the telos which God himself intends.

God has invited us to be involved in something he himself is doing with the world. He has formed us for a task. We responded, as his creatures, by setting our spiritual house on fire. It is well and truly burning down around us. But God has, through his embodied Son, provided us a way of escape. He wants no conscripts, though, only volunteers. He has formed us in such a way that we are equal parts physical and spiritual — fully interwoven. Our embodied form is so significant to him that God the Son, himself, chose to share our form, eternally humbling himself to do so.

In light of Christ’s incarnation then, if for no other reason, perhaps it is not too much of a stretch to consider the possibility that what is physical can be absolutely fraught with spiritual consequentiality. Must evangelicals be so anxious to wave away the possibility that God has provided embodied means to facilitate the rescue of embodied souls? Perhaps the physical act of baptism is the furthest thing from being a work of self-righteousness. What if baptism is actually no more “meritorious” than an embodied plea for help? Like a toddler, pleading with his arms reaching up toward his father. A plea that suggests, not self-sufficiency, but simply a desire to be rescued. Any rescue effected by such a baptism could only be the result of something done to us, and not because of anything done by us.

So perhaps something consequential occurs - something more than symbol - when, superintended by God’s Spirit, water and body and Word combine.

The video above is of Matt Chandler, evangelical pastor of the Texas-based Village Church. It was made somewhere around 2020, close to the time of the BLM riots just following the death of George Floyd. It’s interesting to watch this video with those events now in the rearview mirror. Chandler’s apparently elevated sense of his own prophetic discernment doesn’t hold up very well given what has come to light in the years since.

There is much about this video that I find objectionable: the irate persona; the tongue-lashing; the emotional manipulation. Chandler is angry because the broader evangelical church didn’t jump on board the BLM bandwagon and try to lead that parade. He’s so worked up about it that, by the time he reaches the 1:22 mark in the video, he looks like he’s about to crawl out of his skin. In hindsight, given all the fraud and graft that we now know infused those events and organizations—even what many have begun to suspect was the dubious prosecution of Derek Chauvin—Chandler’s moral outrage here has lost a lot of its sheen.

In the video, be sure to notice Chandler’s insistence that, if Christians had a modern day prophet, he would likely take the form of a Marxist socialist. Good to know Chandler’s take … I guess? It might reveal more than I wanted to know about how Chandler approaches interpreting the biblical text. One suspects his opinion on socialism is unlikely to hold up any better than his assessment of the events of 2020.

But I primarily included this video because I want to highlight Chandler’s racialist closing assumption that all black people think alike. Watch the video until the end and you’ll see what I mean (although he bungles his data). 12-13% of the people in this country are black, not the 12-13 million people that Chandler calls out. So, though I think he misspoke with his numbers by confusing population with percentage, he seems to suggest that every single black person thinks alike where racial issues are concerned. Thus, the events precipitated by George Floyd’s death, in Chandler’s telling, reflected the lock-step “lamentations” of every black person in America.

Alas, other examples of this kind of race essentialism can be found at the Village Church. Dubious ideas regarding race are not confined to a single rant by Chandler. The Village Church has devoted entire sermons to a kind of race-essentialist ecclesiology.1 They seem to have drunk deeply from the poisoned chalice of racial determinism, openly embracing the assumption that skin color pre-determines much of what you need to know about a person’s life and thinking. A heightened racial consciousness for white Christians has even been taught at that church as a necessary requirement for Christian love.

“Color blindness is an enemy - not a friend - of hospitality and love.” - Beau Hughes, The Village Church

And this is the dehumanizing assumption that can often be found among left-ish Christians where race is concerned. It is the belief, inescapably materialist, that benign anatomical features predetermine a person’s conception of the world. It is not culture that informs understanding. Not ideas. Not faith. Not worldview. Not the biblical text. Not the moral framework that is baked into reality itself. Not even truth. No. It is melanin, they insist, that decisively determines what one believes about the world.

For thinkers like Chandler, melanin seems to serve as a universal decoder ring for unlocking social psychology and differences in outcome. It is as if such thinkers assume that a brown person’s skin has somehow incapacitated the moral agency which one normally expects to find in another human being. For race essentialists, brown skin apparently undermines even a person’s ability to think his own thoughts. Thus, race essentialists assume that brown-skinned people think in a kind of lock-step uniformity—automatons of their pigmentation.

Chandler is not the only celebrity pastor who responded to the events of 2020 in disappointing ways. There was a surprising (to me, at least) eagerness on the part of numerous pastors to publicly engage in racial struggle sessions, with all the kneeling and begging of forgiveness - typically for unspecified offenses - that those sessions entailed. This tendency seemed especially prevalent among those pastors who most assiduously cultivate their media presence.

Someone once said “war doesn’t make heroes, it reveals them”. Which is to say that conflict serves as a revealing catalyst - something that uncovers what pre-existed the conflict itself. The simmering conflict over racial questions has been especially revealing over the last few years, but not in the “hero” sort of way. It has been unpleasantly revealing of what is going on in the heads of various outspoken Christians, and especially the leaders of various evangelical organizations. If I’m being honest, I have to say I have been gobsmacked. I don’t refer only to statements about the tragic circumstances surrounding George Floyd’s death. I’m more appalled by many comments, much more broad, sweeping and racially charged, for which Mr. Floyd’s death merely served as a launching pad.

These racially charged statements, always issued in high dudgeon and usually combined with broadly applied accusations, are not even minimally informed by reality. To someone with my personal history, these statements sound like the babbling of children walking away from the polar bear exhibit at the zoo. Even though the exhibit is artificial and the polar bear is confined behind the glass, they are nevertheless convinced they know what it is like to actually live at the North Pole. All of the ranting about race, by numerous influential evangelicals, is noticeably lacking in the kind of sober understanding that is almost always the product of having ventured out into the actual frozen wild.

So to those posters and posers about racial justice, come join me in the stories of my life. Come venture with me beyond your screens and keyboards.

It is 3 a.m. You’re sitting on a bench in a long, cavernous, empty hallway. You are at a large county jail in Texas. The hallway is empty and echoes periodically with the sound of a large heavy metal door closing. The fluorescent lights are abnormally bright. Here and there, on the floor, are little blobs of some kind of dried nameless goo. You’re sitting on a bench near a window made of bulletproof glass. You just gave $2500 in cash to the man behind the glass in order to pay the accumulated fines of a young black man who was arrested in the middle of the night. You’re trying to get him out of jail in time to make it to work so he doesn’t lose the first good job he’s had in a while. The young man was involved last night in an altercation at his apartment complex with another person, also black, who was drunk. When the police arrived, they arrested the young man you are posting bail for due to his many unpaid traffic citations.

The bail money is from your own bank account. You didn’t “raise” the money from others. You didn’t put up a Gofundme page. There was no time for any of that, not that you were so inclined anyway. You have a little bit of savings, this man needed help, so you did it. Were this man’s problems due to “white privilege”? Did “systemic racism” make him violate the traffic laws? Was it “white privilege” that caused the drunken altercation last night?

The scene changes. Now you are in a filthy apartment. You have driven the occupant, an entirely different person, but one who happens to be a drug addict, to a residential treatment facility (i.e. “rehab”). Now you are back at the apartment to clean it out so that the occupant doesn’t incur another month’s rent while he is in rehab. You bag up the empty liquor bottles and the porn DVDs and you eventually take 60 garbage bags of debris to the dump. Then you load up the furniture, which is reeking of dried vomit or feces—you’re not sure which—and you take that to the dump. Is it white privilege, or is it rather the addict’s moral freedom, which provides the most explanatory power for this state of affairs? Does the addict’s melanin levels have anything to do with it at all?

Now your arms are loaded with grocery bags full of food. You’re carrying the bags of food into a house in an urban community. The house is occupied by a black, off-and-on drug dealer, and his “family”. There are multiple women and 3 children in the house. An infant and 2 preschoolers. The children have gone without food for two days. The drug dealer is adorned with perhaps $10,000 worth of gold around his neck and in his mouth. His body is covered in thousands of dollars in tattoos. But he is not feeding his children. For the children’s sake you bring the food. How does white privilege explain the plight of these children, or of their self-decorating father, who will not provide for them?

Now you’re sitting at a fast-food restaurant. You just bought lunch for a completely different black man that you know. He is father to five children by three different women. He has never married any of the women he impregnated. He has never provided financial support for any of his children. One of the women managed to obtain a judgment against him for failing in his obligation to provide child support, but the other “baby mamas” don’t even try. Though he doesn’t provide for any of his children, this man somehow acquires sufficient funds to provide himself a steady supply of marijuana, cigarettes and, less frequently, cocaine. He manages to do this even though he has not held a steady job in years. He is actually a reasonably capable auto mechanic. You encourage him to get a job and provide at least something for his children. He declines, explaining that he doesn’t like “busted knuckles” and the state will garnish most of his wages for child support anyway. I look forward to our vehement Christian accusers telling me, again, how “white privilege” and “systemic racism” are the causes of this man’s problems, along with the problems of his children.

You are now standing in a funeral home. In the coffin lies a young black woman. Clinging to your legs and sobbing are three elementary-aged children. The woman in the coffin was a periodic surrogate mom/caregiver to the children, whenever the children were removed from their biological mother by child protective services. The children suffer abuse, sporadically, at the hands of their biological mother. The woman in the coffin, someone the children loved, is dead because she herself overdosed on drugs while “partying” with a new boyfriend. Please tell me, all you racial justice aficionados, how the plight of these black children is the result of “white privilege”. Did “white evangelicals” provide the drugs or pay the hotel bill for the party? Did “systemic racism” force the fatal pills down the dead woman’s throat?

I tell these stories and ask these questions because the messiness and the tragedy of real human lives do not fit neatly into the racialist abstractions so popular among the cool kids on the left. Broad, sweeping generalities about the color of a person’s skin don’t even begin to address what is real. Christian pastors and publishers only manage to make themselves ridiculous when they climb on the bandwagon of such silly ideas.

The poor urban blacks I have been describing lead very different lives than the lives being led by my other black friends. My other friends are accomplished, faithful to their families, wise, and productive. Millions of black Americans are skilled in many professions such as education, public administration, medicine, engineering, as well as many other worthy fields of endeavor. They are devoted moms and dads, faithful husbands and wives, friends to people of all races, committed Christians - people of faith and love.

How does any concept of white privilege or race centricity account for the wildly different outcomes one can easily find within a single racial demographic? How is it that systemic racism was unable to foreclose the great achievements of men like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, Ben Carson, Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, Frederick Douglass, or Thurgood Marshall? Here’s a hint: it is neither white privilege nor melanin which ultimately determines achievements and failures in real life.

In the bedroom down the hall in my home sleeps a precious little boy. My wife and I love him with all our hearts. Late in our lives, we find ourselves again raising a child. His mother-by-birth is dead from a drug overdose. If you see the world with racially charged eyes, you might primarily see him as a black child. To be honest, we never even think about his race. My wife, with pinpoint accuracy, describes him simply as someone “who wakes up every morning and seeks out the joy”. We love him so much; and he loves us.

So tell me again, those of you who rage about racial justice from behind screens and keyboards, how this little boy’s plight is due to “white privilege” and “systemic racism”. Tell me again how I should be teaching him to assume that the biggest challenge he will face in life is not the development of his own self control, or the formation of his own good character, but some nameless, malignant group of white strangers who are wholly unconnected to him. Tell me more about how, just because his skin is brown, he should be taught to drink from the cup of bitterness and suspicion. Because that is the endgame of your racialism.

To all of the celebrity Christians who lecture the rest of us about race from the comfort and safety of your megachurches or universities, allow me to make some suggestions for how you might rid yourself of racialist superstitions and perhaps develop a more reality-based understanding of human nature. I’m assuming, of course, that your interest is really in understanding the way things are, and not just in cultivating an even larger sense of your own moral superiority.

First, since your grasp of human nature could use some recalibration, consider taking a job that requires you to produce economic value. Work at that for quite a while. If you’re under 40, you would learn even more by working at something physically demanding; something that involves sweat and physical exhaustion. A job from which you come home filthy and stinking at the end of the day would be ideal. Pay your own bills. Don’t “raise” money. Pay your bills by the sweat of your own hard work. Don’t ask someone else to support you. Do it entirely on your own. Squirrel away your few extra pennies and, when you have a little bit saved, find someone among the urban poor, dig deep, and give your hard earned savings to help them. Don’t give someone else’s savings away. Don’t advertise your “ministry” or ask other people to support a “worthy cause”. Do it quietly, secretly, from your own sweat and toil. Ask nothing of anyone. Please don’t give cash to drug addicts - be responsible. But find a path to give away what YOU yourself have earned by creating economic value at the expense of your own tired back. You might be surprised—doing this one thing may alter your entire understanding of the world.

Second, take a social media sabbatical and get involved with actual human beings who engage in self-destructive behaviors. I’m talking about people who won’t delay gratification. People who use drugs. People who are sexually promiscuous. You get the picture. Move beyond the broad accusations you traffic in from the comfort of your offices. Actually venture out into the urban wilderness and involve yourself in the lives of some of the real people whose problems you insist are caused, not by their own terrible choices, but by the so-called privilege and systemic malice of people they don’t even know. Observe them even as you are trying to help them. Ask yourself if they are really being helped by your encouragement that they blame their problems on a nameless cabal of white malefactors. Are you really helping a young man, one who won’t quit smoking dope and hold down a steady job, by telling that young man that his real problem is “systemic racism”? Try to let yourself learn from real people and actual experience. It is far easier to posture and pose online than to truly help another human being.

Third, read two books - both of them by Theodore Dalrymple. Dalrymple is the nom de plume of psychiatrist Anthony Daniels. He worked for many years in British prisons and among the urban underclass in British cities (mostly London, I think.) Read the stories he relates and ponder them. The first book is “Life At The Bottom”; the second is “Romancing Opiates”. Try to set aside your cocksureness and your materialist presuppositions about human nature and just quietly learn from someone else’s real-world experience. And consider this: the underclass in Britain has historically been predominately white, not black. Yet they have engaged in many of the same pathologies found among the urban American black community. Ask yourself, “why?” (Hint: it has nothing to do with skin color or systemic anything, but everything to do with worldview.) Give honest consideration to Dalrymple’s hard-won learning, which was gained only by accumulating many years of real-life experience treating and interacting with patients.

Fourth, consider whether the accusatory finger-pointing you have directed toward “white evangelicals” - essentially suggesting their “guilt-by-anatomy” - is in any way consistent with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Understand the theological implications of your public statements along these lines, and retract your words if you should.

Fifth, stop trying to borrow virtue. I get that you don’t have any virtue of your own. Neither do I. Neither do any of the brown people you profess to be so concerned about. Nevertheless, quit trying to inflate your own moral resume by accusing the rest of us. Don’t try to purchase the social approval of the cool kids by throwing innocent people you don’t even know under the bus. It’s evil and dumb. Most of you influential Christians present yourselves as being theologically astute. You should be embarrassed, then, to be making such sweeping assertions about the motives and mindsets of entire groups of people on a foundation as flimsy as their anatomy. Of all things. Just stop it.

Finally, quit conceiving of human nature through the materialist lens of skin color. You’re Christian? Then why not adopt a biblical rather than a sociological understanding of human nature? (Have you ever bothered even to look into the reproducibility crisis besetting the soft “sciences” that many of you are so fond of? Yeesh.)

Stop proclaiming your love for “people” in the abstract and involve yourself in the life of an actual embodied person. Not at arm’s length or online. Bring them into your own home. Sit around the table and talk to them. Share the gospel with them. Sacrifice in responsible ways for them. With all their dysfunction and habitual self-destructiveness, cultivate the vision to see past the mere color of their skin and perceive the fully-formed human being who is abusing their own moral agency. Maybe then you will begin to recognize that the thing which is eating them alive is not someone else’s privilege, nor is it the residual effects of long dead racists, but it is where they themselves have chosen to place their affections. When a person is in thrall to lies, the lies will eventually destroy him. And the lies can do this without any recourse to privilege, or any need for systemic injustice.

If you condescend to do any of the things I have suggested, and you are willing to learn, you will quickly realize that the biggest challenges all of us face in life have little to do with systemic this or privileged that. Where a person places his affections will determine far more about his life’s trajectory than anything having to do with skin color. No amount of exculpatory complaints regarding unfair racial advantage can compensate when someone is pursuing a life of dissipation. You simply cannot love the good and the true on someone else’s behalf.

If, having followed through with my suggestions, you start to find yourself feeling a bit embarrassed by the misdirected outrage that you have expressed in the past, it would be nice if you let the rest of us know. Please be sure to tell us, just as publicly and loudly as you offered your original accusations, when your rage-baiting and racial determinism has started to sound as silly and malevolent in your ears as it already sounds in mine.

I don’t want to leave any reader with the wrong impression. I have no interest in painting a rosy picture of myself, of all people, in regard to any of this. To be really clear, it was not out of unsolicited love for my fellow man that I found myself in the situations I describe above. I was thrust, against my will and for over a decade, into close contact with all the pathologies of the urban poor. I was involved in these situations, as well as with many others along similar lines, under intense duress. The complexities and risks were often acute. Many nights I lay down to sleep very happy that I had a loaded weapon within easy reach. I do not recommend living that way and would never have chosen it out of any kind of misguided nobility.

So it wasn’t all spiritual and altruistic. While I tried to do what was right, given the situations into which I was being thrown, my responses were often desperate and scrambling. Mostly with too little time to figure out how to effectively help people who had serious issues.

I’m afraid my own faith has often looked less like serene devotion and more like white knuckles and gritted teeth. But, I take solace in something Anthony Hopkins once said, in his role as C.S. Lewis in the movie Shadowlands: “You learn … by God you learn.”

My unsought experience among the urban poor has disabused me of many of the superstitions I once held about human nature and the world.

My dad would have been 94 this month if he had lived. He died when he was only 70 years old, but he left a big mark in the lives of those he loved -- and he loved a lot of people. He was a loud and gregarious lover of people.

In 1971 my dad took our family to New York City to see the opening of the new musical Scrooge, starring Albert Finney, at Radio City Music Hall. While in New York, we toured the NBC studios where, in one hallway, they had a glass case containing all of the figurines they had used to film the famous stop-motion animation Christmas movie Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer in 1964. I was mildly disappointed as a kid, when I discovered that, in real life, the abominable snow man is only eight inches tall.

The showing of Scrooge was combined with the famous Radio City Christmas show, complete with an elaborate nativity that featured camels and sheep parading down the aisles of the theater. It was a memorable experience for a little kid and the result has been that the musical version of Scrooge has loomed large in my memory of Christmas ever since.

Every good story - every single one - always gets around to dealing with the question of redemption. Even writers who eschew Christianity often can’t help dealing with the question of redemption because it is the great, inescapable problem of the universe.

It is impossible to understand redemption without acknowledging the thing that opens our eyes to our need for it. The entire plot of “A Christmas Carol” deals with the redemption of a man who has lost his way, coming to love things themselves rather than the giver of things. The visits of the ghosts have their intended effect, conjuring up the power of regret in old Scrooge’s heart. Regret for what has been lost to the past, the opportunities being squandered in the present, and the eventual outcome that old Scrooge’s choices portend. And while we would like to look at Scrooge from an emotional distance, as we watch Scrooge we end up grappling with the very same things in our own lives.

Charles Dickens was far from the only person to notice the regret that eventually follows when we turn our values upside down by exchanging a love for people with a love for things. “The stuff of Earth competes for the allegiance I owe only to the Giver of all good things” - so said Rich Mullins in his song If I Stand. Our self-destructive attachment to things ought to haunt any of us who are serious about our faith.

But regret can be a beautiful thing when it leads us to make important changes. Scrooge is entirely transformed by the regret conjured up by the spirits. And on the heels of Scrooge’s transformation, his newfound love and altered priorities begin to exhibit themselves in a celebration of giving and generosity.

As Scrooge celebrates in the streets of the city, he stumbles upon his nephew, whom he has long neglected and unjustly despised. And during this meeting, the seed of regret, planted by the ghosts, flowers into loving reconciliation.

Offering gifts to his nephew, Scrooge confesses, “These are for you, from an old fool who deeply regrets the Christmases gone by that he might have shared with you.”

And it is at this point in the movie, as an adult, that I always want to cry.

There is something powerfully moving about Scrooge’s confession. The simplicity and honesty are beautiful, to be sure. But what moves me, I think, is the lack of evasion, or of any veiled qualification at all. He makes no attempt to shield himself from the full weight of his own wrongdoing and the resulting regrets.

How different this is from so many of the public apologies one hears in which, having done something wrong, a public figure apologizes, not for what they did, but for how other people perceived it. The lack of sincerity in such cringeworthy apologies causes the bile to boil up in the back my throat. And the taste of it doesn’t improve with time.

But it isn’t just public figures who do this. Genuine apology is a hard thing for everyone, and I suspect can only really be offered without qualification if regret is deep and sincere. It is a rare and beautiful thing to behold. How many times do we offer or receive apologies that are salted with lies or evasions? How often are apologies softened by faux-justifications instead of given fully, without reservation?

It is the honest brokenness of Scrooge’s confession that makes me want to cry.

There’s a Hallmark Christmas movie that has one of these moments. (I don’t want to hear any guff about Hallmark movies. I know they’re not Shakespeare. I know that there is a lot of marshmallow cream sloshing around at the Hallmark channel. But that doesn’t mean all of their movies are completely devoid of profound moments. If you haven’t watched any of the Signed, Sealed, and Delivered series, you should.)

In 2009, Hallmark made a Christmas movie called Mrs. Miracle. One of the subplots involved the long-term estrangement of two adult sisters. One of the sisters deeply wronged the other, and during the intervening years has come to be filled with regret over her actions. The sister who was wronged has, for years, been unwilling to forgive. In the movie, a personal crisis convicts the wronged sister about her own lack of forgiveness, which leads her to reach out to the sister who had injured her so many years ago. The sister who committed the original wrong, seeing her sister standing at the front door, omits any of the customary niceties and just immediately sobs out the words, “Forgive me?”

Cue the tears. Especially if you have ever had someone you love, more than your own life, from whom you have become estranged.

I stopped watching Hallmark a long time ago, because I stopped paying for cable TV. But I’m not sure I recall many of those Hallmark movies which didn’t, at some level, deal with the question of reconciliation. The fun thing about Hallmark, of course, is that all conflicts can be resolved in just one hour and forty minutes. Real life doesn’t usually work out that way, I’m afraid. In real life some people would quite literally rather die than admit their own wrongdoing and apologize. Real life is both more painful and more meaningful than any Hallmark movie. But I still think the Hallmark producers were onto something. There is more going on at the Hallmark channel than the obvious fact that some of those actors are getting much too old to still be dating.

I wonder if the thing that really resonates with much of Hallmark’s audience is the power of forgiveness on the other side of estrangement.

Regret is a beautiful thing if it leads us toward making sincere apologies. It may actually be the only thing that can lead us to make sincere apologies. At Christmas we celebrate the opening salvo in the greatest act of reconciliation ever known. But the awkward part is, we each owe God a heartfelt apology. We may owe others an apology too. This is a good year to let our own regrets adorn our lives in such a way that true apologies flow from our lips, unhindered and without qualification, wherever they are called for.

Christmas is a great time for regrets.

My mother died almost exactly a year ago, and my mother-in-law died about eighteen months before that. And just one year prior my father-in-law had died. We had been caring for our aging parents for over a decade before, one by one, they all passed away over a period of just three years. Poof! They were all suddenly gone. By the end of that three years we were on a first-name basis with our local funeral home director.

Several years before my father-in-law died, he received an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. But while he clearly had dementia, it did not proceed along a normal Alzheimer’s trajectory. Maybe it was Alzheimer’s and maybe it was something else. We’ll never know.

Our moms, who both lived into their late eighties, exhibited their own mental declines, though it never really developed to the point where they were debilitated. It mostly took the form of persistent forgetfulness, an inability to learn new things, and an increase in what might be described as naïve trust. It was the naïve trust that was most worrisome, truth be told.

The moms were just not alert to the possibility of being exploited. Nowhere were they more vulnerable than where their use of tech was concerned. They faced a continual stream of scammer calls and phishing attempts. Nothing we could say or coach them about ever found its way into their day-to-day responses.

Here’s a typical story. I got a call from my mother-in-law around 6:00 one Friday evening. She informed me that she needed to withdraw $5000 from the bank and I was not to ask her why. Well, I immediately asked her why. She, of course, would not tell me. But she assured me it was urgent that she put her hands on $5000 in cash right now. The only reason she was calling me about it was because the banks were closed and she was unable to withdraw that much money using her ATM card.

The backstory to her need for $5000 - what she was unwilling to tell me in the moment - was that she had received a phone call that afternoon from a man claiming to be a lawyer in another city. The man had informed her that her 18-year-old grandson had been arrested, and the caller claimed to be a defense attorney representing her grandson. The grandson, the caller alleged, was afraid to ask his parents for help and had instructed the lawyer to call his grandmother. The “lawyer” told my mother-in-law that if she sent $5000 in cash, it would cover all of the costs associated with getting her grandson out of jail, including the cost of having the charges dismissed. The “lawyer” swore my mother-in-law to secrecy regarding the situation. All for the benefit of her “grandson”, of course. Notwithstanding the implausibility of the story in light of the kind of person she knew her grandson to be, my mother-in-law was immediately convinced that the crisis was real and she resolved to intervene to “save” her grandson.

Ultimately, what prevented her from being scammed out of $5000 was not her situational awareness, but her conscience. Try as she might, her conscience would not let her deceive her grandson’s parents by going behind their backs about such an important issue. So she went to their house, sat down with them, and through tears, she asked them if they knew where their son was right that very minute. Puzzled, they replied, “Yes, mom, he’s in his bedroom down the hall.” At which point the scales fell from her eyes. She was shocked when she realized how close she had just come to being scammed out of thousands of dollars.

Whatever the cause, what my wife and I observed in both of our aging moms was a steady decline in their ability to assess the intentions of other people, especially when their experience of those people was mediated through one or more layers of tech.

In a plot-line twist that might give the reader a feeling of whiplash, I want to mention here that a friend of mine and I own a tiny little phone company. It’s not a normal phone company. It’s entirely devoted to introducing smartphone features that the carriers don’t provide, and at a fraction of the cost you would pay if you could get them from a major carrier. On our service, you can acquire, in a matter of seconds, as many phone numbers for a single smartphone as you want. You can cause a number to ring on multiple cell phones - like extensions on a land line. Using a single number, a caller can be routed to different phones based on menu options that you yourself create. (e.g. “Press 1 for sales. Press 2 for tech support…”) There are many different features.

Our phone company is fully automated and runs completely lights out - no humans required. The lights-out-no-humans-required part is because I have a day job and I hate working nights and weekends. In creating these phone services, I wasn’t wanting to add to my regular work load. My friend and I built this little business mostly for our own amusement and as kind of a hobby. We’ve never really promoted it - we both hate doing marketing - but we have built up a community of subscribers over time whose monthly subscription fees allows us to “clear the housekeeping”, as the British would say. The phone company is kind of like a perpetual self-licking ice cream cone in that regard. We’re not making any money to speak of, but we’re no longer having to feed it either. It’s self-sustainable. And anyway, our phones now do things we wanted them to do, but which the carriers wouldn’t provide. But I digress.

One of the things about having your own phone company is that you have a front row seat at the machinations of scammers. As it happens, my friend and I share similar experiences where caring for aging parents is concerned. And over the years, our little phone company has been able to collect some actual data related to scammers’ nefarious schemes. The amount of creative ingenuity scammers apply to how they go about cheating people is a wonder to behold. Truly.

Smartphones are a primary attack vector for preying on unwary elderly people. And this is where the plot twist about my owning a phone company comes in. We are contemplating adding a new feature to our service that will leverage AI to provide automated scammer detection. It would be an opt-in feature. Our thought is to have AI process text messages and call recordings and grade them for the probability of a scammer being involved. If the AI detects potential scammer activity (e.g. phishing links in text messages, recorded conversations in which someone is asking for money, or solicitation of other sensitive data, like social security numbers, account numbers, etc.) we would notify caregivers via multiple avenues to let them know about the potential scamming activity.

Imagine you are a caregiver for an elderly parent. This capability would let you be notified if anyone calls or texts your aging parent and, in the ensuing conversation, the discussion covers how the aging parent can send the caller money. That’s the kind of capability it is possible to automate now.

This weekend, I have been working on the beginnings of a prototype of this capability. But it occurred to me that I could take an informal poll and perhaps get an initial reaction to this idea. I’ve never used the Substack poll widget in a post before, so this seemed like a good opportunity. As it happens, I’m sitting here waiting on a long-running audio transcription job to complete. So I took the time to hammer out these thoughts while I was waiting.

The poll is below. I would love to have feedback from any reader who is willing to provide it. I am really just trying to garner an informal sense for whether people are generally aware of the risks facing the elderly where tech is concerned and whether that awareness translates into any interest in doing something about it.

Many thanks.

One of my all-time favorite movie lines is from the 1947 version of The Bishop’s Wife, starring Cary Grant, David Niven, and Loretta Young. One of the supporting actors was Monty Woolley, who played the character of the aging Professor Wutheridge. At one point in the movie, Wutheridge, believing himself past his intellectual prime, and feeling unproductive, remarks that “for quite a while now, every time I passed a cemetery, I felt as if I were apartment hunting.”

That line has always resonated with me because in very real ways I have felt that way my entire adult life. On Christmas eve of 1980, as a young husband and father of a 6-week-old child, a cardiologist told me that if I didn’t have open-heart surgery I would not survive until my 30th birthday. I have written on this platform before about having lived a life rather more interesting than I would recommend for others. But when your adulthood starts out the way mine did in 1980, you have well and truly had your nose rubbed in your own mortality. Indeed, the congenital defect that necessitated that first heart surgery has reared its head time and again, culminating in very nearly killing me just nine years ago.

So I often give a wry chuckle when I hear people on the left complaining about things like white privilege and systemic racism. Conceiving of people as advantaged or disadvantaged, for such a facile reason as their skin color, is not only malevolent, it is astonishingly dumb. I have raised multi-racial children, and I am very happy to report, with relief I must say, that my brownest child’s anatomy imposes nothing like the obstacles his white father has faced in making his own way through life. I take a backseat to no one in having to live life with an anatomy that puts a damper on your privilege.

I write this neither for attention nor for pity, but to make a point to any young men who are seriously trying to figure things out. In spite of my own life-threatening obstacles, I have managed to do well, to provide for my family, and to have more than a little fun along the way. But that has only been possible by choosing to disregard my impediments and just do things anyway. I have learned that, when faced with what seem like immovable structural obstacles, your greatest opportunity for success is found in leaning into your own agency, acting in pursuit of virtuous goals and without waiting for systemic or official approval. True competence is more valuable than any credential and more powerful than any macro statistic. You don’t need some professor’s permission to do things that are useful. Your character and your demonstrable skills will affect your destiny far more than your skin color or your credentials.

This matters right now, because I seem to hear a steady drumbeat, coming even from many supposed conservatives, that is continually fixated on the insurmountability of current structural obstacles and that deemphasizes the way human agency creates opportunity within every individual life.

I am not trying to pretend that young people aren’t facing any difficult obstacles. All of the complaints may very well be true — at a macro level. But at a micro level - at the level of the individual - things are always very different. Every young man who conceives of himself as merely one among a larger cohort of peers, a cohort which is being held back by external obstacles, has just become one of those being held back. If your locus of control is external, then you are choosing to be a victim of circumstance.

But here’s the thing: you yourself can choose to act for the benefit of your own flourishing and for the flourishing of those you love. You do not have to be just one of the herd.

Probably by the time I was sixteen years old, I had a conscious sense that, more than anything else, I wanted to acquire a demonstrable skill in something with which I could produce economic value. A willingness to work at acquiring a skill, while your peers are passively waiting on changes to the macro environment, will immediately set you apart from most of your generation.

When the cardiologist told me on that Christmas eve that I needed heart surgery, he took a sledgehammer to all my plans. It would be three years before I was really back on my mental feet after that. During those three years, after taking months to recover from the surgery, I worked as a bank teller, a carpenter’s helper; at night I cooked hamburgers at Wendy’s and by day I worked in the pit underneath cars at a fast oil change business, coming home every night soaked in motor oil and transmission fluid.

I worked 60 hours a week changing oil, but caught a break by accidentally injuring myself, ending up in the corporate office for a few weeks while recovering from my injury. Sitting on a desk in that corporate office, unused because no one knew what to do with it, was a Radio Shack desktop computer.

Over the next two years, I taught myself to program that computer. I knew precisely zero about programming computers when I started. But I read the manuals, bought some other books, and spent all of my free time reading about programming. I was “fortuitously” offered a permanent job in the corporate office, where I was able to test my understanding of the books I was reading by writing code on that Radio Shack computer.

My friends would tease me, whenever they came over, because I would often be buried in a book about software development. But I somehow intuited that this was actually a lifeline and a skill very much worth having. So I set aside many months of personal leisure time to arm myself with these skills.

I am not trying to tell anyone to “learn to code” like I did. Not at all. That worked for me, but not everyone has the personality or the temperament to spend their days puzzling over computer logic. But I am saying that, with everything stacked against me, (I had no resources to take advantage of professional teachers or training, and I also had to work like a Trojan all the while, because I had a wife and family to feed) I was nevertheless able to acquire skills that have been a benefit to me, my family, and many others for over 40 years.

Alas, none of this occurred because I am some kind of amazing person. The truth is both simpler and far more convicting than that. I succeeded due to a simple willingness to operate on a basic set of assumptions, first and foremost being the belief that opening doors of opportunity depended upon actions I myself could take. I understood that I could not wait on “the system” or “the economy” to create an opportunity for me. I intuitively rejected the notion that structural/macro obstacles would foreclose my opportunity to succeed. In other words, I proceeded by thinking of myself as an individual, not as a cog within a cohort which was doomed to share a common, dismal fate at the hands of some kind of impersonal forces.

By every statistical measure I was hopeless, but it never occurred to me to think of myself that way. In truth, our lives and opportunities cannot be truly represented by numbers expressed within arbitrarily chosen statistical boundaries.

There is a place for talking about societal-scale obstacles being faced by young men, the challenges to young families, and all the rest. But that mostly involves reasoning about public policy. As an individual, however, you can pursue your own goals and still achieve them, notwithstanding any macro obstacles, or scary-sounding, societal-scale statistics that are facing your generation.

You yourself can do things. You can acquire the skills. You can get on a proper footing to marry the girl and make some chubby babies. It’s on you to take action. Don’t blame your circumstance. Don’t blame the times you live in. There has never been an easier time, in all of human history, for arming yourself with valuable skills. Truly.

Do it.

In hindsight, the assassination of Martin Luther King, and the murder of the Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Olympics, had a major lifelong effect on my own political and cultural sensibilities. Though I only came to recognize the formative effect of those events later, as a young adult.

In the actual moment, I experienced the MLK assassination simply as a horrific act of injustice. I was just old enough to perceive the vague combination of grief and dread exhibited by the adults in my life. And then four years later, I sat transfixed by the 1972 Olympics. But while I rejoiced in the victories of swimmer Mark Spitz, like many others, I was appalled and enraged by the actions of Palestinian terrorists who took hostage, and then murdered, eleven Israeli athletes. My perception of the Palestinian cause, largely unformed and unconscious until then, was hardened by those events. And those hardened sensibilities thereafter served as part of my interpretational lens for sizing up American politicians and their views regarding the Middle East. In other words, those assassinations seared into my thought life a set of assumptions that have exerted an influence on the way I have voted ever since.

And I have been wondering if the assassination of Charlie Kirk is going to have a similar impact on today's rising generation. Will Charlie’s murder alter the assumptions about faith and politics held by millions of young people? Progressives have been ratcheting up their violent rhetoric and tactics for several years now, while largely receiving a wink and a nod from the political class. But the reaction to progressive’s glee at Charlie’s murder suggests that progressives may have overreached this time.

Glenn Reynolds, of Instapundit fame, wrote overnight on his Substack:

"For all the fear of “Christian Nationalism, ” a shallow, largely fictitious bogeyman for years, the murder of Charlie Kirk has effectively called it into being as a force."

If you watched the memorial for Charlie Kirk, with hundreds of thousands in attendance and millions online, you will easily understand the "why" of Reynolds' observation.

And the Babylon Bee, as is their wont these days, can't decide if they want to do satire or straight-up reporting.

I have wondered if the video below represents a harbinger of sorts. This 16-year-old young woman, on her own initiative, asked to be allowed to share her thoughts at one of the many vigils for Charlie Kirk that have taken place across the country since his murder. She is the daughter of noted author Meghan Basham. The young woman in the video evidently sought out the opportunity to share these remarks, having never indicated an interest in such activities before. The thoughts she expressed are, apparently, entirely her own.

At the church I attend, various volunteers assist in passing communion trays from pew to pew on any given Sunday. Yesterday, on the very day of Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, one of the volunteers, a young man nineteen or twenty years old, very intentionally chose to wear a replica of the shirt Charlie was wearing on the day he was murdered. If the reaction of these young people to Charlie's murder is at all representative of their generation, progressives are about to discover that continuing to lose campus debates to Charlie Kirk was the least bad option they had available.

“A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling.” – Psalm 68:5

I could hear him laughing and playing in the living room as the caller from the medical examiner was saying over the phone, “I’m sorry. Mary died this morning.”

Two hundred miles away my daughter had died, alone, in a hotel room while her 4-year-old was happily romping around my house.

Life is hard, and I have had to do more than one hard thing in my life, but telling a small child he will never again see his mother was probably one of the hardest.

Where does one even start? How can you say such words to a child?

First, I had to inform my wife. That was hard enough. Devastating and physically wrenching. But to bring such news to a little child?

All these memories came flooding back to me when I heard that Charlie Kirk was dead. I immediately realized that his wife must now navigate her own grief while trying to think clearly about how to help her children. Somehow, she will have had to find the words, even as her world was falling apart, to tell her children that their daddy is dead.

I was not the first person to have had this task, and Erika Kirk, Charlie’s wife, will not be the last. But there is no consolation to be found in the knowledge that you are not alone in your devastation.

On the day my own daughter died, I found that the words that needed to be said to a precious little boy were given to me by someone. The words that combined hard truth with love and hope just mysteriously appeared in my mind as a result of no plan or calculating thought. They simply and suddenly arrived from outside of myself as I was gathering him into my arms.

I have prayed this week for Erika Kirk. That somehow she has found strength for the sake of her children. That maybe she too has been given the words she needs, but which seem so impossible ever to utter. Because I know from hard personal experience that “God is close to the broken hearted, and saves those who are crushed in spirit. (Ps. 34:18)”

I have been on a three month hiatus from writing here. Not because I haven’t had anything to write about, but because my professional life has been a perfect storm of product releases, research papers to complete, and presentations. Not to mention a pretty intense need to invest in mastering some new skills. I also took a 3400 mile road trip with my wife and son.

I think I’ll be able to get back to a more regular cadence of writing going forward. But for now, here’s something that cropped up this week that I wanted to comment on.

We are not judgmental, so we blame the technology and absolve the people. - David Gelernter, “Drawing Life”

This past week, a friend sent me some links to two different reports describing a growing number of people experiencing psychotic breaks after becoming obsessed by their interactions with ChatGPT. This was not the first I had heard of these claims so I decided to write about them and unpack my own thoughts.

Here’s the headline and a snippet from the first of the two links sent to me by my friend.

People Are Being Involuntarily Committed, Jailed After Spiraling Into "ChatGPT Psychosis"

As we reported earlier this month, many ChatGPT users are developing all-consuming obsessions with the chatbot, spiraling into severe mental health crises characterized by paranoia, delusions, and breaks with reality.

And here is the second:

When the Chatbot Becomes the Crisis: Understanding AI-Induced Psychosis

Real people—many with no prior history of mental illness—are reporting profound psychological deterioration after hours, days, or weeks of immersive conversations with generative AI models.

Just prior to receiving these links from my friend, Christian author posted the comment on X.com that “AI is the disembodied head” from C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength. If you’re unfamiliar with that particular Lewisian story, the villains take the head from a man who was murdered, mount it on the wall with connecting tubes to keep it “alive”, and embrace it as a kind of secret cult leader within the dominant techno and academic elite. They can get the head to wheeze out instructions everyone is expected to follow. What is discovered over time is that the head has really become a conduit for demonic influence. So, by saying that “AI is the disembodied head”, Dreher is suggesting that AI is a vehicle — a kind of portal — through which demons communicate directly with human beings.

How Many is “Many”?

How alarmed should we be by these reports? In my dotage, I find myself increasingly inclined to sanity check media reports about this or that calamitous trend. There has been so much sensationalism in the press over the last 20 years, so much false and incompetent reporting - especially concerning complex issues that are not easy for readers to falsify - that we would do well to take a deep breath and unpack some numbers.

Both of the articles claim that these psychotic breaks are happening to “many”, but noticeably absent is any real quantification of what constitutes “many”. So we are left not really knowing how much weight we should give that idea.

How alarmed should we actually be?

What would you say if I told you that 100,000 people are going to kill themselves this year after using ChatGPT? That statement is almost certainly true. Seems awful, no? How can I say with such confidence that so many ChatGPT users will kill themselves? Well, the law of big numbers applies.

ChatGPT has approximately 800 million users as of July, 2025. There is variability in the suicide rate across the developed world, but suicide occurs at a rate of roughly 140 per-million in the United States. It is less or more than that elsewhere, depending on which countries you pick. But assuming an average of 125 per-million, in any community of 800 million people, it is safe to assume that 100,000 suicides will occur.

How does that number compare with the so-called “many” people who experience a psychotic break after using ChatGPT? Well, we don’t know, because no information of the sort is provided in these articles.

In a population of 800 million, how many people could be expected to have a psychotic break? Well, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) says that psychotic disorders affect 3% of the population. That works out to 24 million of ChatGPT’s 800 million users. When that many people have a tendency toward psychotic challenges, how many of those who are being affected by ChatGPT would have been affected by something else anyway had ChatGPT not been in existence? Again, we don’t know because we have nothing to go on. My larger point is that any effort to calibrate how concerned we should really be would need to comprehend the overall prevalence of psychosis. Does ChatGPT really affect the level and prevalence of psychosis in the general population, or is what we’re seeing really no more than anecdotes about people who would have struggled anyway? We simply don’t know.

What I’m Not Saying

What I’m doing here is trying to calibrate a reasonable level of concern regarding the possibility of ChatGPT-induced psychosis being a real thing. I’m not saying that ChatGPT doesn’t create problems for people in some new and unexpected way. We have known for a long time - 60 years at least - that many people have a peculiar reaction to machines that are capable of human language responses. My primary point here is simply that these articles don’t give us enough to go on. Not really. At best they only provide some anecdotes which might be worth investigating.

And while I think Rod Dreher’s confidence that AI is a conduit for demons is overstated, neither am I saying that AI will be ignored by the demonic world as a vehicle for evil mischief. Frankly, it is not clear that anything in our world has ever been ignored as a vehicle for evil mischief. We ourselves, as mere human beings, are quite capable of bending any useful thing toward sinister purposes. With the same hammer we use to build houses for sheltering children, we also club our neighbor over the head. So I do expect that demonic beings are capable and willing to exploit human technology for demonic ends, but I don’t believe that demonic ends are the only uses of technology. There are existence proofs everywhere. I like Rod a lot, and he has shown himself to be a prescient cultural seer of sorts. But his wholesale relegation of AI to demonic purposes has put him out in front of his skis on this particular question. AI will certainly be used for ill. But it will also be used in ways that benefit human beings. So perhaps less rigidity in Rod’s thinking regarding the nature and uses of AI would serve him better in his efforts to foresee where things might actually be headed.

The Centrality of Human Agency

Some of my thinking about these kinds of questions is leavened by my own hard-bought experience with the ways of the world.

I had a daughter who died as a young adult after an almost decade-long descent into darkness and confusion. She eventually died from an overdose of Fentanyl. When she first began her descent, her mother and I were desperate for help in understanding what was happening and why. She seemed so bent on self-destruction, and nothing about our understanding of the world at that time provided answers to what was happening to her, or to us.

She had been raised in a happy home. She was a happy, delightful child who was given guidance and love her entire life. When she started going off the rails in her late teens, we looked in vain for answers within the world of Christian writers and thinkers. Alas, we found little help there. What we did find was that modern Christian writers and thinkers tended to explain what we were going through from vantage points situated at opposite extremes. On the one hand, writers would confidently say that the explanation for what we were seeing was of course demonic possession. For those writers, there was no other possible explanation for why someone might, so unexpectedly to those around her, go down such a dark path.

At the other extreme was a gaggle of Christian writers who uncritically accepted the central claims of modern psychology. From their perspective, the explanation was inevitably environmental. People behave in certain ways because they are somehow conditioned by their circumstances to behave that way.

What I eventually realized is that the thing both Christian explanations shared in common was a tendency to minimize the explanatory power of human agency. Both extremes assumed that our daughter was someone who was acted upon, rather than someone whose own free choices had influenced her path. (For more on this you can read about our experience starting at here.)

But human agency is the central underlying presupposition that lurks within any possible notion of moral responsibility, sin, repentance, or redemption. The two articles forwarded to me by my friend are notable for emphasizing what happened to the people having psychotic breaks, and little on what they themselves might have done to bring about their present distress. It is as if the decision to entrust one’s deepest thoughts to a machine, and to act upon that machine’s responses, was not freely chosen but was, rather, the fault of the machine.

The downstream consequences of bad decisions are regrettable, even pitiable, but such consequences need to be understood and evaluated with reference to the full context of events. The very modern tendency to assume we are entirely programmed by our circumstances, attenuating the moral responsibility we would otherwise bear for our own active choices, needs to be accounted for in the way we think about the thorny questions introduced by AI.

People sometimes become obsessed with other people or things. Some people attach their obsessions to specific movie stars or athletes. Actress Keira Knightley was targeted by a stalker who showed up at her home, meowing through the letter box, drawing on the sidewalk, and eventually leaving a memory stick containing songs about cats. However regrettable this man’s psychotic break was, no one would think of blaming it on Ms. Knightley. While most people wouldn’t blame it on Ms. Knightley, many moderns would be similarly disinclined to blame it on the stalker either. My own “lived experience” - as the hip kids often say - has taught me that these kinds of obsessions are often downstream from a prior willingness, sometimes completely invisible to others, to entertain appetites, to cultivate secret affections, that open a person up to very dark influences.

Where the fallenness of man intersects with the frailty of the human psyche, the only really safe place is the fear of God. The apostle Paul pointed out, in his letter to the Roman church, how a denial of God’s existence, combined with the inevitable resulting ingratitude, can result in mental confusion leading to disordered appetites. When you think about it, if God is real, denial of his existence already amounts to a kind of break with reality.

Any attempt to meaningfully grapple with the effects of AI needs to take full account of, even emphasize, human agency. AI brings both opportunities and risks. What is needed in our current moment is neither inordinate fear of the risks, nor credulous acceptance of the opportunities, but wisdom. The most consequential question of our age is not AI, but where such wisdom can be found. Anyone who answers that question incorrectly will soon discover that the misuse of AI has become the least of his concerns.

Full Disclosure

I work in the field of AI. Truth be told, the revolution taking place in technology is such that I doubt anyone who is truly in tech could honestly say he is not working in AI. AI is eating the tech world. In my case, I work for a company that builds AI hardware. I myself work on software tools for diagnosing the performance of AI systems, running at every scale from individual compute nodes all the way to scale-out data centers.

Whether this aspect of my working life is disqualifying, or enhancing of, my credibility on this subject, the reader will have to decide for himself.

I am a paid subscriber to ’s interesting Substack. She is a very effective writer and the pungency of her opinions increases the enjoyment for her readers, much like a dash of spice amps up an otherwise ordinary meal. Holly rarely serves up anything bland.

One of the reasons I subscribe to her Substack is because I find her writing to be something of a bellwether, a kind of doppler radar, an early warning system for subterranean ideas gathering momentum in the culture and headed our way.

Holly works as a professional data scientist, and her mathematical inclinations often lend weight to her analysis. So it was with some surprise, given her background, that I read her recent post, Freedom, by Surprise.

In this post, Holly recounts how recent events surrounding Shiloh Hendrix have freed her from a longstanding, nagging intuition that there could be a God out there who loves us. She did not expect these events to free her from this lingering suspicion, but she was freed and, by her telling, largely because the Christian community didn’t acquit itself well in responding to these events.

If you are not familiar with the Shiloh Hendrix affair, you can count yourself fortunate. The gist of it is that Ms. Hendrix, a young white woman, allegedly mean-mouthed a young black child, whom she accused of stealing something from her toddler. Ms. Hendrix eventually called the child a n****r. This exchange was caught on a cell phone being wielded by a Somalian refugee who himself is allegedly an accused rapist of a 16 year-old girl. Predictably, the video went viral, at which point Ms. Hendrix was just as predictably set upon by the mob. Threatened. Besieged. etc. (Does anyone besides me have to actually go to work every day? Where do all these people find the time? Sheesh.)

[I caution the reader that there are multiple facts unverified about these events. Nothing should be taken at face value.]

Holly was understandably appalled by these events, but it was what she perceived as the failure of Christians everywhere which provided a resolution to her lingering questions about the possible existence of God.

Holly has turned comments off on her post because she is uninterested in facilitating a rehash of the Hendrix affair in her comments (me too) but also because she anticipates that some commenters will be interested in proselytizing her. This post is not an effort to proselytize Holly or anyone else. It is a post along the lines of everything else I write - it’s just something I’m thinking about.

My surprise about Holly’s most recent post is really related to some fundamental logic errors she makes that are not typical given her normal analytical bent. It may be that her customary analytical rigor was overwhelmed by her passion in the moment. Who among us has never done that? I would easily understand. But she is thinking about this in a way that seems so unusual for her, that I have puzzled over it ever since.

Alas, Holly’s reasons for finding freedom from any residual suspicion that God may indeed exist are based on a combination of hasty generalization and something very akin to an ad hominem fallacy.

Consider the following from her post:

What I saw, with startling clarity, was this: not one person — not one Christian, not one human who claims to have been transformed, regenerated, made new by the power of a risen God — expressed the slightest concern for a little boy.

Holly is here making a broad, sweeping accusation of comprehensive Christian moral dereliction, merely on the basis of her own necessarily finite exposure to a subset of Christians. She seems to be conflating her own limited visibility into the behavior of a few Christians with Christianity generally. She is manifestly wrong on this point about Christian concern for these and other children. I know this because I myself personally know Christians who have expressed concern for the little boy. And for Shiloh. And for Shiloh’s child (whose mother is a piece of work apparently.)

Drawing broad conclusions from inadequate data is the definition of a “hasty generalization”. I have no basis for doubting Holly’s characterization of the Christians she herself has encountered. My only point is that her sample size is definitionally inadequate for the breadth of her conclusions.

Even if Holly was not engaging in a hasty generalization; even if all the Christians in the world failed to live up to Holly’s expectations, that would still tell her nothing about whether there is a God who exists and who can transform hearts. It is an error of logic, a type of ad hominem fallacy, to say that the objective, independent existence of God depends upon the moral probity of people who claim to follow him. The existence of crummy Christians offers no insight to the existence of God.

But for Holly, Christian moral failure, exemplified by some Christians’ response to the Shiloh Hendrix kerfuffle, is evidence of God’s absence. [For context, Holly’s comment in the following quote about “making a millionaire” is in reference to a GiveSendGo fundraiser established to help Ms Hendrix deal with the cancel mob.]

The people of Christ — the One who welcomed children and called them precious — could only talk strategy. They swung between self-congratulatory glee at “sending a message” by making a millionaire of the woman who called a child something Jesus never would, and performative anxiety over whether the optics would hurt their side.

Believe me, I’m not judging. I do not believe human beings are capable of being transformed into creatures who love so radically.

And that’s the point.

That kind of transformation simply doesn’t happen.

It didn’t happen here, not even in the most Christian-majority country that has ever existed.

It might be possible, if deities existed. But they do not.

Holly describes herself in her post as a superior expositor of the Christian bible. She should know, then, that according to Christian teaching, the human transformation she demands as proof of God’s existence is only ever going to exist on earth in the most hodgepodge mishmash way. It is a core Christian doctrine that this transformation is a process. There’s even a word for it: sanctification. No matter where Holly turns, she will always be able to find moral failures among the Christian community. That she is surprised by this, and finds it dispositive regarding God’s very existence, surprises me.

The late Flannery O’Connor provides a helpful perspective on precisely this point. The following quote is from a letter to a friend of Ms. O’Connor’s, who, like Holly, found that Christians weren’t really living up to her expectations. Ms. O’Connor’s remarks, which were written specifically in regard to the Catholic church, nevertheless apply to Christianity as a whole.

All your dissatisfaction with the church seems to come from an incomplete understanding of sin. This will perhaps surprise you because you are very conscious of the sins of Catholics...she is a Church of sinners...All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful...To have the church be what you want it to be would require the continuous miraculous meddling of God in human affairs...Human nature is so faulty that it can resist any amount of grace and most of the time it does. The church does well to hold its own but you are asking that she show a profit...It is easy for any child to pick out the faults in the sermon on his way home from church every Sunday. It is impossible for him to find out the hidden love that makes a man, in spite of his intellectual limitations, his neuroticism, his own lack of strength, give up his life to the service of God's people, however bumblingly he may go about it.

I know personally some of those flawed and faulty Christians possessing the “hidden love” that Ms. O’Connor describes. They are busying themselves adopting children from orphanages in Africa; rescuing various other children from poverty and abuse; traveling at their own expense to third-world countries to medically assist with corrective surgeries. They are opening U.S. market opportunities for Central American coffee farmers. They are building businesses and providing employment for families. They are inventing things, and scattering beauty willy nilly, wherever they go. This is the norm - has always been the norm - for many people who follow Christ. Almost none of those people in my acquaintance who are doing these things would have time or inclination to take a public position regarding the latest online outrage du jour. Most of them would even suspect that online virtue, which is inescapably performative, is actually a false expression of something more truly sacrificial and discerning that Christians are actually called to be and to do.

No Christian engaging in such acts of constructive love is virtuous in himself, of course. All Christians are, to use Jesus’ own words, “unprofitable servants” - always and ever in need of his mercy.

It would not surprise me at all, then, to discover that the chronically online among the Christian community have acquitted themselves poorly on any number of issues, not least the recent Shiloh Hendrix affair. I have elsewhere described these doings as proof that many users of social media have mistaken the social dynamics of junior high for a how-to guide. The patina of unreality, which coats every event that goes viral online, invariably places such events under a fundamentally dehumanizing lens. So whether we encounter one crummy Christian next door, or millions of them everywhere online, it tells us precisely nothing about whether God is real, or whether he loves us.

There was a joke we used to tell when I was a teenager in the 70’s.

What are the top three clues that you’re a member of a bad church?

1. The choir wears leather robes.

2. The only song the organist knows is “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”.

3. There are smoking and non-smoking sections in the sanctuary.

That last clue, the one about smoking and non-smoking sections, was funny but it had only become funny during the preceding decade. Ten years earlier, when I was a really young kid, no one actually smoked in church, but it was completely common, after church had let out, to see men in clusters, scattered around the church grounds, smoking and talking. That kind of residual social acceptability for smokers, which was still an actual thing in the 1960’s, had become a punchline by the 1970’s. If you could have gone back to the 1950’s, no one would have gotten the joke at all.

The decline in smoking among Christians was part of the broader cultural rejection of smoking on the basis of emerging science. The public was made aware of various studies showing that smoking was bad for your health. There were anti-smoking campaigns mounted by various cultural institutions, and smoking thus proceeded to decline among the general population. By the 1980’s, smoking was being actively demonized as a public activity. It began to be outlawed in many public spaces during the eighties and nineties, starting on planes and eventually extending to theaters, restaurants, and government facilities.

For Christians, the issue of smoking was more than a question of health risks. Christians believe that one’s body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, and that knowingly harming one’s body constitutes an actual moral failure. Thus the emerging pressure among Christians to stop smoking for moral reasons dovetailed nicely with the scientific argument.

What interests me about the cultural history of smoking is the way in which emerging contemporary scientific discoveries transmogrified into affirmative moral obligations, almost before the ink was even dry on the scientific studies. In hindsight, I don’t recall very many discussions that took place, among Christians, about the advisability of having science exercise a decisive influence over our spiritual and moral calculus.

Flannery O’Connor, writing a generation prior to the anti-smoking enthusiasms of the 1980’s, was not as blasè about the tendency to subjugate Christian moral discernment to science.

“The church's stand on birth control is the most absolutely spiritual of all her stands, and with all of us being materialists at heart, there is little wonder that it causes unease.”

O’Connor was reminding us that the materialist presuppositions, upon which modern science is based, are by their nature not up to the task of spiritual discernment. To put it another way, a scientific affinity for controlling how something works, or what materials it is comprised of, falls far short of knowing what that something is for, or what its spiritual significance really is.

It is simply not possible to reason from what is to what ought to be.

But I’m not sure too many Christians were still thinking along Miss O’Connor’s lines by the 1960’s. And during the succeeding years, the grip that science held on the moral imaginations of many Christians became ever more decisive.

By the time Covid hit in 2020, moral and spiritual deference to science was so longstanding and instinctive among Christians that many churches readily cast aside meeting together, even foregoing their holy sacraments, based purely on the flimsiest of so-called science. Shoddy predictive models that don’t actually predict are not science, even if their results are announced with a British accent. Many Christians really had no idea that the so-called “science” surrounding Covid was at best entirely speculative. As we now know, some of the authoritative pronouncements from the scientific community were not merely wrong but were knowingly fraudulent. But by 2020, many Christians had been taking moral dictation from the materialists for so long that they could no longer even perceive what was happening.

So during Covid, materialist Christians invented an entirely new class of moral obligations for their fellow believers. Taking a page from the anti-smoking playbook of the sixties and seventies, they mounted a blame-and-shame campaign directed toward any Christians who had the temerity to question what was really going on. The materialists busied themselves moralizing about previously unrecognized obligations regarding the wearing of masks, and submitting to experimental vaccines, declaring them to be a test of one’s love for his neighbor. (Don’t miss the delicious irony of someone, who would be horrified at the very idea of a Christian smoking cigarettes, who nevertheless insisted that his fellow believers have an affirmative moral obligation to submit to vaccines, the effects of which are entirely unknown.) These modern mutations to our ancient moral obligations were invented completely impromptu, spur of the moment, in response to speculative claims attributed to “the science”. In their eagerness to prove themselves appropriately submissive to the authority of science, the materialist Christians rushed to do the very thing Jesus condemned:

They tie up heavy, burdensome loads and lay them on men's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.

The complicity of the shame-and-blame Christians with their materialist overlords, their eagerness to accuse fellow believers of moral failure, entirely based on speculative conclusions drawn from faulty models, is the thing of interest here.

It is not specifically the failure of so many Christian writers and thinkers during Covid that I am concerned with. What actually interests me is this question: how can Christians remain morally discerning when under pressure from the inherently imperfect and tenuous conclusions of scientific inquiry?

Two things, loom large in my own thinking about this.

• The critical importance of making proper category distinctions and…

• Leavening our opinions with a giant dose of humility.

What do I mean by making proper category distinctions? Well, in part I mean acknowledging the applicable limits of different kinds of knowledge and intellectual disciplines. Listen to these brief comments by noted atheist Alex O’Connor. He is onto something important here:

O’Connor is alluding to something very similar to my earlier remarks regarding the distinctions between spiritual purpose and material form. Knowing what something is made of, or how it works, does not tell you what that thing is, or what it is for.

C.S. Lewis described this issue by observing that knowing a star is made up of gases tells you nothing about what a star is.

Science, by its nature, can only describe and manipulate the materiality of things. The questions of meaning, purpose, and value are definitionally questions that are not susceptible to the investigative tools available for scientific inquiry. Scientific understanding is always and everywhere tenuous and incomplete. That is its very nature. It is, accordingly, a gelatinous foundation on which to base moral imperatives, as (one can always hope) those Christians who acted as self-appointed Covid morality police are now beginning to realize.

These kinds of category distinctions are, I think, important if we are ever going to reason well about moral questions in the midst of a crisis, or even when merely dealing with uncertainty. The pace of techno-scientific innovation is not slowing down. Modern civilizational complexity continues to grow. Had the church maintained a proper view of the limits of science as a source of moral insight, it might have avoided a great deal of harm during Covid.

Recovering more proper boundaries for science as an influential factor in Christian moral discernment is one of the most urgent, though largely undiscussed, issues of our time.

Humility is always an important virtue, but the lack of it is dangerous to ourselves and others when circumstances are complex and fraught with uncertainty. First and foremost, we should be humble because it reflects the only accurate assessment of our limitations. Some degree of humility is the very thing that facilitates and motivates even the possibility of learning. Everyone, everywhere, for all of time, has been a repository only of imperfect and fragmentary knowledge. The smartest data scientist I know, when asked what he does for a living, will often answer, “Well, I’m a data scientist. But we don’t really know what we’re doing.” It is no accident that the most capable people of my acquaintance, for unraveling complexity and uncertainty, are also the most humble.

The imperfection of our knowledge is compounded by the velocity and scale of the information we are being subjected to. But - and here is one of the great perversities of our time - there is something about casually scrolling a newsfeed that nudges us toward the faulty impression that we have actually been informed. Some people even read the New York Times and come away believing that their factual understanding of the world has been improved by the reading.

As someone who has been interviewed by the technology press on occasion - and I hope I can burst several bubbles by mentioning this - I have never once been interviewed on any subject requiring a grasp of technical details after which the journalist published anything that approximated technical accuracy. Not once.

Even in simple matters of factual events, the press will routinely get things wrong. I once witnessed a fatal accident during which an elderly woman unfortunately died. I tried to render aid and ended up giving a statement to police about what I had witnessed. Unbeknownst to me, a local news channel took a video of me at the scene talking with the police. Later that evening, that video ran on the local news channel as the news anchor intoned, “A young man driving in the 1100 block of Alameda Ave. struck and killed a woman as she was crossing the street.” Friends and family throughout the city began to call to express concern about the report that I had apparently killed someone. For days afterward, I had to periodically reassure various friends that I was not a party to vehicular manslaughter.

Wisdom suggests that the strength with which our opinions are held be made proportional to the reliability of the source which informs them. It is foolhardy to adopt overwrought and insistent opinions from sources no more reliable than social media and the press.

An inflated perception of ourselves leads inevitably to bad reasoning, faulty analysis, and poor discernment. Anyone who thinks too highly of himself is ipso facto delusional to some degree. We are, none of us I’m afraid, all that amazing.

Recently, a friend of over 40 years informed me that he had lost all “admiration” for me. Let us set aside the ridiculous notion that my friendship with him should be somehow motivated by retaining his admiration. The source of his disappointment in me was this: I was unwilling to affirm his public denunciations of Donald Trump on social media. My friend had posted some rather unhinged accusations — things that no one without first-hand information could reliably claim. They came across to me as something concocted in the more feverish bowels of social media.

Nevertheless, my old friend concluded that my pointing out the obvious holes in his accusations, combined with my unwillingness to join him in making sweeping denunciations of Trump, amounted to my own abject moral failure. Thus, an unwillingness to traffic in unprovable accusations had become, in my friend’s mind, completely indefensible for someone who calls himself a Christian.

My friend illustrates the problem of allowing the strength of our opinions to be determined by unreliable sources. What my friend was doing to me was essentially what the Covid police did with their own shame-and-blame tactics. It involves inventing moral obligations based on information gleaned from sources that are uncertain at best, and in many cases entirely unreliable.

Set aside the delusion that performative social media denunciations, my own in particular, would make any meaningful contribution to human flourishing. What my friend’s behavior revealed was that he and I have very different ways of knowing. More specifically, we differ in distinguishing between what we actually know and what we merely assume.

Some years ago I had a side gig from time-to-time as an expert witness in technology litigation. I have spent many hours, under oath, testifying in depositions and in open court. The thing is, telling the truth and nothing but the truth, as the oath goes, is easier said than done. Something I learned early on is that most of us have a tendency to fill gaps in our true knowledge with unexamined assumptions, and without being all that conscious of the fact that we are doing it. I have learned through hard experience that if you’re going to be careful to tell the truth, you need to make conscious and clear distinctions between what you know, and what you are assuming.

My friend, whose unsought admiration I have now lost, endorsed several sweeping accusations against Trump that no one without firsthand knowledge could reliably ever make. One of the accusations he believes I am obligated as a Christian to join him in affirming is that “Trump hates immigrants”. Now, aside from the fact that ever knowing such a thing would entail some ability to engage in mind reading, it was an implausible claim. After all, Trump is married to an immigrant, and some of his most influential advisors are immigrants. So there are some existence proofs, in plain sight even, which strongly suggest he doesn’t hate all immigrants, even if he insists that people here illegally should be made to leave. But more than that, there is simply no way I am ever going to make sweeping public denunciations of anyone without having my own direct knowledge of the people and the circumstances. Journalists are unreliable narrators of the facts. Depending on them to calibrate the strengths of your opinions is foolhardy and dumb.

Yet what is happening with my friend is, I suspect, something I’ve seen with other people: his operating assumption is that the things he has seen and read online or in the media corresponds, in some essential way, to reality. My own behavior is inexplicable to him, I think, because I have determined never to be seduced by the idea that my grasp of reality has been enhanced by social media.

I am thus very reluctant to try to impose any of my secondhand opinions on him or anyone else. Besides, the very idea that some pronouncement he or I might make on social media deserves the kind of apocalyptic fervor he is giving it, well, it is just comically absurd. There are one or two areas where I have deep firsthand expertise, and regarding which I am happy to offer my opinions. I will sometimes even insist upon them. Sadly, though, none of my expertise really lends itself toward making sweeping online accusations about the inner lives of people I don’t even know.

Humility provides a helpful corrective for any of us who hope to avoid being stampeded into adopting beliefs that are mistaken, and which will later come back to bite. Numerous Christian writers with large platforms insisted during Covid that it was the moral obligation of Christians to submit themselves - and their children - to vaccines that have ultimately proven to be both ineffective and highly dubious in terms of their longer-term effect on human health. The Christian Covid police, who invented these new moral obligations for their brothers, may argue in hindsight that “we didn’t know”. But that is precisely the point I’m making. The people who did the most damage were those who assumed they knew far more than they actually did. Which is why I’m suggesting humility is a critical component of moral discernment at any time, but especially in situations where uncertainty and complexity are high.

It seems likely that our need for moral discernment in the context of technological and scientific uncertainty is only going to grow, perhaps dramatically, in the coming years. Not repeating the mistakes of the past seems like the minimum threshold we should be shooting for. Learning to recognize and accept our own cognitive finitude; refraining from inventing moral burdens out of thin air, and ones which are based on ignorance and uncertainty; resolving to prioritize the ancient insights of scripture regarding any questions which involve human meaning, dominion, value, and purpose; insisting that the claims of science be confined only to those concerns about which science is truly capable of offering insight - these might be some practices that could improve our capacity for discernment the next time “the science” is used to stampede us into abandoning our principles.

Longer term, more humility might even result in a net reduction to the sum total of stupidity found on social media. Hope springs eternal.

I’m still pondering this essay from Freya India in First Things. Ms. India is an influential voice regarding the experience and circumstances of young women, and she has recently, like a growing number of other writers/thinkers/public intellectuals, drifted toward and into Christianity. She is thoughtful, insightful, and sometimes quite shrewd in her understanding of culture. Her Substack offers valuable insights into what is going on in the world of young women.

Here’s a snippet from her recent piece in First Things:

I sat at a conference recently listening to an older man lecture about my generation’s neglect of our “moral duty” to have children. Rows of suited men nodded along. I kept thinking about the many young women I know who just don’t believe anyone will stick around, who are terrified to start families because theirs fell apart. Who is this meant to persuade? The people the message is supposedly for aren’t even in the room. Those who actually need help will not be reached by theological lectures on marriage or family. What they need right now is someone to give expression to the wound of growing up between two homes, someone who dares to talk about the pain.

A lot to chew on and ponder in this one from her. Not least the tension, which she implicitly engages, between sense and sensibility as the way for Christians to engage with unbelieving young women. I read Ms. India in this essay to be pleading for more sensibility.

While I continue to think about this, I had an experience two days ago that is entirely germane to Ms. India’s essay and which has made her thoughts land differently for me than perhaps they would have otherwise.

I was invited to speak and lead a discussion in a graduate level class at a Christian seminary. The class engages the relationship between Science and Theology. I was asked to lead a discussion with the graduate students on AI and transhumanism. I have written, and had published, some thoughts on these subjects, which the professor was familiar with. So he had invited me to be a kind of visiting resource. My fleeting performance as a seminary teacher was not unlike trotting out the dancing bear at the circus, one suspects: you aren't surprised the bear dances badly; you're surprised he dances at all.

But I digress.

Leading a discussion among graduate students is far afield from anything I normally do, which perhaps explains my startled reaction to what happened next, and why I find Ms. India’s post to be as painful as it is timely.

Because we were in a seminary class, the professor opened the class with a prayer, and prior to actually praying, he asked the students if they had anything they would like him to pray for. One of the students, a woman who teaches at the college level at a different school, asked the professor to pray for several of her female students. She went on to say that mental and emotional health crises are surprisingly widespread among her female students. This remark provoked another graduate student, who also works in education, to ask for the same prayer, because he also is seeing widespread emotional health challenges among the young women of his acquaintance. At this point, the professor himself volunteered that the phenomenon they were describing is actually something that has some prevalence even among female seminary students. 😳

I’ve been noodling over my reaction - both to Ms. India's essay and to the prayer requests from my brief appearance at seminary.

My earlier reference to “sense and sensibility” was a perhaps too subtle hat tip to Jane Austen’s reflection on the same issues that are implicated by Ms. India’s concerns. My decidedly firm intuition is that we are not helping young women if we confine ourselves to patronizing their feelings. In this, I am decidedly on team "Elinor", if you know anything about Jane Austen's story. But neither should we ignore the apparently widespread woundedness among modern young women. One suspects, as Ms. India’s observations imply, we may now be reaping the whirlwind of multiple generations of family dissolution.

When I read Ms. India’s essay, my mind wandered to a scene from the musical "Oklahoma", where Aunt Eller counsels Laurey as it looks like Laurey’s new husband may be accused of murder:

Laurey: I don't see why this had to happen, just when everything was so fine.

Aunt Eller: Don't let your mind run on it.

Laurey: I can't forget it, I tell you. I never will.

Aunt Eller: Don't try, honey. You got to get used to having all kinds of things happening to you. You got to look at all the good on one side and all the bad on the other side and say, "Well, all right, then" to both of them. Lots of things happen to a woman-- sickness or being poor and hungry, even, being left alone in your old age, being afeared to die-- and you can stand it. There's one way. You got to be hardy. You got to be.

Laurey: I wisht I was the way you are.

Aunt Eller: Aw, fiddlesticks! Scrawny and old? You couldn't hire me to be the way I am.

Laurey (laughing): What would I do without you? You're such a crazy.

Two things stand out to me about that dialog. Aunt Eller hands out some very grounded, unvarnished advice. She doesn’t pamper Laurey’s feelings. But the play’s prior events also make clear that Aunt Eller is speaking from a position of relational intimacy and longstanding concern for Laurey’s welfare.

It seems intuitively obvious that some of the young women in Ms. India’s orbit need to be encouraged to be more hardy - to accept that they need not be defined by the unhappy circumstances of their lives. The late singer "Nightbirde" comes to mind in this regard. She died very early in her life from cancer, shortly after bringing the house down one night on America's Got Talent. She was already dying, even as she performed. Yet she told the judges that night, "you can't wait until life isn't hard anymore to decide to be happy." She had apparently been listening to Aunt Eller.

Someone needs to be telling more young women such things, and without treating them like children.

But it would also almost certainly help these young women to have people so invested in their lives that it makes it easier for the young women to receive such unvarnished advice whenever it is given. Maybe that’s an application of Ms. India’s admonition that is at once unpatronizing and also more consistent with human nature. Maybe we should conclude, not that young women's feelings should be pampered, but that harsh medicine is more easily swallowed when lubricated by caring relationships.

Christians have a word for this kind of thing. It’s called "discipling".

There is a young woman of my acquaintance who, while in her early twenties, contracted breast cancer. She came from the kind of fractured home and damaged family called out by Ms. India. My wife, along with others, began investing in a relationship with this young woman. They drove her to her chemo appointments. They sat and talked with her over coffee during the interval of days between treatments. My wife and I picked her up each week and took her to church with us. Several women made her a part of their lives, devotedly coming alongside her during these difficult days.

I recall the day when so much of this young woman’s hair had fallen out from chemo that she needed to just shave off what was left. She recoiled at the idea of doing that in a public hair salon. So my wife invited her over to our house. This young woman sat in a chair in our home while my wife applied the electric trimmers to the wisps of remaining hair, as the two of them wept through the doing of it together.

It is not hard to agree that Ms. India’s troubled young women will be less likely to accept hard messages from conference speakers than from someone who has first made an investment in laughing with them, and sometimes weeping with them, over coffee. Someone who will listen to their pain. But wherever it originates, Ms. India’s modern young women need to be exposed to more than a smidgen of no-nonsense talk about the way the world works, perhaps especially regarding the need for them to eschew self-pity regarding their past, as well as self-absorption concerning their present. As Jordan Peterson has observed, “the shortest path to misery is to continually think about the way you feel.”

Alas, there are some young women, perhaps even very many of them, who do not have such relationships. In the absence of these kinds of beneficial resources, in order to succeed, these young women must still find a way to reorient themselves away from their inner wounding and embrace truth-seeking instead. They must come to grips with the mortal threat represented by any abiding temptation to marinate in self-pity.

As it happens, I have more than a passing familiarity with troubled young women. And one of the things I have learned - and this may seem strange to anyone without similar experience - is that people sometimes begin to love their own troubles. More, sometimes, than they love their own lives. Accordingly there are people who, to quote Os Guinness, “see God as the great interferer, the ultimate spoil sport they must fend off at all costs.”

The way forward for young women from fractured families is to choose, even in the midst of their misfortune, to obsessively pursue the truth, wherever they can find it. Even if the truth is being offered to them in a bumbling, tone-deaf, incompetent way. Or by a suit-wearing conference speaker. But I repeat myself.

If all of that sounds unappealing, I’m sorry but there is simply no other way.

The very first technology venture in recorded history took place on a plain in ancient Babylonia, when the bulk of humanity gathered there and some smart aleck came up with the bright idea of building the world’s first skyscraper.

“Let’s build a tower up to heaven”, he said.

“And let’s do it as an exercise in performative pride1”, he said.

“What could possibly go wrong?”, he said.

Undertaking any task with arrogance and pride is an almost certain way to undermine your effort, right out of the starting gate. First of all, humility is a prerequisite for possessing any ability to learn. But in the case of this particular project, God himself took a dim view of their plans, even though along the way he dropped quite the bomb about the human race’s breathtaking affinity for technology innovation:

“If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. - Genesis 11:6

God himself views mankind’s technological abilities as essentially unbounded. That’s kind of a big deal, and maybe ought to influence our strategic thinking about the future in some way. Just a thought.

Anyway, God threw sand in the gears of technology innovation that day by introducing and imposing entirely new languages on the world. He thereby slowed the pace of technology innovation to a crawl and, for many generations, undermined the ease with which people had previously been able to obtain critical mass for undertaking big projects.

But, over time, significant innovations began to be seen in the world again. And given God’s observation that day - that nothing is impossible for us - we should perhaps not be too surprised. We should also not be surprised, if we have been paying attention, that human beings are often inclined toward the improper application of their own inventions. Often we do this either by giving in to the temptation to worship the works of our own hands (i.e. worship ourselves), or we use our inventions to destroy ourselves and/or others.

I mention all of this because it is tempting, I think, for each succeeding generation to conceive of itself as unique in the history of the world, where facing such challenges are concerned. My larger point, so far, is simply that every generation since the dawn of time has dealt with temptation and challenges related to technological innovation. The long train of human grappling with, and adaptation to, new technology ought to leaven our thinking as we delve into the concerns we might have about artificial intelligence.

However bad we may think we have it in our time, it is hard not to suspect that there were numerous earlier generations that had it worse. The West Point graduating class of 1860 is one generation that springs immediately to mind.

A better grasp of our place within the flow of actual history might stiffen our spine and mute some of the hysteria that seems to increasingly characterize our current moment. I am far from the only person to observe the human difficulty in properly calibrating the challenges we face:

Appreciating what is good in the here-and-now is one of the hardest feats known to man. - David Gelernter, Drawing Life

The world is all agog over recent advances in artificial intelligence. And though the reactions are strong and sometimes borderline hysterical, AI is not the first disruptive technology we have ever encountered. Society-changing technologies have arrived, every few years, for my entire life. Personal computers, VCRs, cell phones, the Internet, genetic engineering, iPods, search engines, and smartphones have each altered our society in noticeable ways.

Any honest observer will have to admit that each of these technologies has introduced both positive and negative changes to the world. On the one hand, people’s lives have been saved, in the midst of a crisis, because someone on the scene was in possession of a cell phone. But on the other hand, VCR's and the Internet have been vehicles for the massive proliferation of pornography. The impact of human inventiveness has never been confined only to the good.

The reason the effect of new inventions is such a mixed bag is because the moral character of human beings is such a mixed bag. We have a modern aversion to fully admitting to human moral agency. Western culture, in particular, has developed a strong bias toward pretending that it is impossible to form clear moral perspectives regarding the character of others. All of the talk among the media cool kids about “my truth” and “your truth” is just symptomatic of a widespread aversion to moral clarity.

The attractive thing about this kind of moral ambiguity is that it relieves us of relational accountability and, so we think, reduces awkward social interactions. But we’re finding out that this approach to reducing social friction only works up until the point that it doesn’t. We’re discovering, for example, that “live and let live” works with the guy who thinks he’s a woman, only until he’s creeping on your children and parading around naked in the women’s locker room.

Much energy has been expended, for several generations now, to convince people of the evils of being judgmental. Such reluctance to make clear moral distinctions is subtly reinforced by the idea that moral agency isn’t real. A person can’t be blamed for his actions, you see, because some circumstance in his life is determining his moral choices. Human agency, according to this telling, isn’t real. Thus, belief in ideas like “poverty is the root-cause of crime” become widespread, and work hand-in-glove with the longstanding cultural pressure to eschew being judgmental.

Technology and innovation have not escaped our current interest in glossing over human moral accountability. David Gelernter, Computer Science professor at Yale, observed years ago that “we are not judgmental so we blame the technology and absolve the people.”2 Nowhere is this more evident than in some of the discussions taking place involving AI.

Our eagerness to offload accountability for how we ourselves employ technology may have reached peak frenzy with the advent of artificial intelligence. Our cultural predisposition to deny our own moral agency fits neatly with, and might even explain, the current eagerness to conceive of AI as possessing an agency of its own.

Orthodox writer and thinker Paul Kingsnorth has written extensively of his view that AI is a demonic intelligence that is being “ushered” into the world by witless people working in the field of AI. Kingsnorth is known for his pungent writing in opposition to what he calls “the machine”, which he uses as a kind of shorthand for all things related to digital technology and the Internet. He conceives of AI as the climactic emergence of a demonic force in the world which has been coming on for some time. Kingsnorth is virulently opposed to digital screens and Internet connections.

When I see a small child placed in front of a tablet by a parent on a smartphone, I want to cry; either that or smash the things and then deliver an angry lecture. When I see people taking selfies on mountaintops, I want to push them off…If there was a big red button that turned off the Internet, I would press it without hesitation. Then I would collect every screen in the world and bulldoze the lot down into a deep mineshaft, which I would seal with concrete, and then I would skip away smiling into the sunshine.

Now, if you find his desire to push people off of mountain tops puzzling, especially considering his self-proclaimed opposition to the harm being done by technology, I share your puzzlement. If nothing else, though, such fantasies highlight the predominately emotional underpinnings of his writing on this subject.

Kingsnorth’s writing combines a gifted facility with language with apparent ignorance of technology itself. He excuses this subject matter ignorance by suggesting that a less rationalistic approach to thinking about technology will offer superior insights.

This is how a rationalist, materialist culture works, and this is why it is, in the end, inadequate. There are whole dimensions of reality it will not allow itself to see. I find I can understand this story better by stepping outside the limiting prism of modern materialism and reverting to pre-modern (sometimes called ‘religious’ or even ‘superstitious’) patterns of thinking.

Kingsnorth conflates rationalism with materialism, while also conflating religion with superstition. In no way do I dispute the idea that reality is more than the material. Nor do I dispute the idea that religious insights are foundational to the way we interpret the world. But I reject the idea that rationality is bound up with materiality, in part because “in the beginning was the Word”. And I reject Kingsnorth’s suggestion that religious insights are fundamentally superstitious. I have no beef with the reality of mystery as an aspect of Christian faith. Finitude, after all, is fundamental to human experience.

But there is a vast chasm between mystery and superstition.

It is probably worth noting that Kingsnorth consistently ignores the contributions made by technology to human flourishing, even while understandably railing against real societal harms which are easily traceable to some applications of technology.

Totally apart from the emotive arguments Kingsnorth makes, I find his comments about “skipping away smiling into the sunshine”, after fantasizing about disconnecting the Internet and bulldozing all the screens, to be both chilling and appalling. From a purely personal perspective, I am only alive today because of the rapid communications made possible by the internet. My life was subsequently maintained, during a 20 hour emergency improvisational surgery, by digital technology that medical personnel interacted with through the very screens Kingsnorth would have happily bulldozed before skipping away smiling.

Kingsnorth consigns anyone who doesn’t conceive of AI as inherently spiritual and demonic to the outer darkness with all the other ‘materialists’.3 For Kingsnorth, it is seemingly impossible to be spiritual without maintaining a belief that AI is a demonic presence embodied by “the machine”. There is no room in Kingsnorth’s theology for Christians who question his view that the Internet and the computers attached to it are inherently demonic. You’re either with Kingsnorth or you’re a materialist.

He eventually gets around to suggesting that his readers might consider responding to this dire state of affairs with one of two different forms of asceticism — asceticism at one of two extremes. At one extreme he suggests voluntary limits, and the acceptance of some inconvenience. At the other extreme, which he calls “raw asceticism”, is bombing the AI data centers. He doesn’t eschew the latter, but leaves the choice up to the reader. He never actually takes the option of bombing the data centers off the table. He even suggests that the more nuanced approach of self-denial and inconvenience may become rapidly untenable and that those who object to the AI zeitgeist may be forced into the more radical “raw asceticism”. Kingsnorth suggests that the more extreme option, which includes, in addition to bombing, completely unplugging from the world with “the Amish as your lodestones”, may become the only way forward for faithful Christians. (One is tempted to suggest that the Amish are unlikely candidates for getting on board with the bombing.)

If we set aside Kingsnorth’s strident (and hopefully hyperbolic) language about bombing data centers and pushing people off of mountains, he has, in noticeable ways, subtly adopted the assumptions of the broader culture by minimizing the implications, and the possibilities, of human agency. In Kingsnorth’s telling, technology is the primary mover in these events; it is the sentient being, acting on us of its own accord.

One of the fundamental mistakes made by catastrophists has always been to underestimate the dynamic effects of human agency. Failed predictions of catastrophe (e.g. the population bomb, global cooling, acid rain, global warming, CO₂ poisoning) very often share in common a static analysis of human behavior. They rely on the assumption, often unstated, that notwithstanding the trends they identify, nothing about current human behavior will change, and catastrophe is therefore inevitable. (This kind of static analysis is also behind repeatedly failed predictions regarding how tax policies will affect tax receipts. When you raise taxes 10% you don’t collect 10% more in taxes. People adapt their behavior to the new tax rate reality.) Extrapolation of societal effects through means of static analysis is notoriously unreliable and hopelessly naive, when it is not actively malevolent.

Kingsnorth is not alone, of course, in his expectations of impending doom. He himself includes many examples of others who share his gloom. And I offer some additional recent examples below, ranging from predictions that all genuine human beauty will become a thing of the past, to the impossibility of ever again having fully human inter-personal relationships.

This kind of gloomy rhetoric is everywhere and thus easy to find. I could easily provide many other examples. Kingsnorth is no outlier, though he may be one of the more extreme.

In addition to the general problem of employing static analysis, which I mentioned above, many of the catastrophists would do themselves a favor by enlarging the set of voices they are taking their cues from. The press is entirely incentivized to make every utterance as sensational as possible. Their entire business model, after all, involves attention-getting. So they tend to concentrate their interviews around people who are willing to make the most outrageous claims, and wildest accusations.

The doom mongers would benefit from reading and listening to more of what might be called “AI realists”. The AI realists are less flashy and garner less of the spotlight, because their reasoned analysis tends to offer less sensationalism and more modest caution, combined sometimes with a pinch, even, of optimism. An example of an AI realist is someone like , who has long challenged the grandiose claims being made regarding artificial general intelligence.

Others, like Meta’s chief AI scientist, are now openly saying what Larson has been insisting all along, which is that human level intelligence is never going to emerge merely by scaling current AI techniques.

There are even plentiful arguments against the fears of mass unemployment and economic catastrophe that are widely being peddled4. Marc Andreessen has offered one such argument, even if somewhat cynical, which is nevertheless also arguably realist in regard to our current marketplace dynamics.

Marc Andreessen Substack

Why AI Won't Cause Unemployment

Fears about new technology replacing human labor and causing overall unemployment have raged across industrialized societies for hundreds of years, despite a nearly continual rise in both jobs and wages in capitalist economies. The jobs apocalypse is always right around the corner; just ask…

Read more

3 years ago · Marc Andreessen

The debates surrounding the kind of creative destruction wrought by new technologies have been going on for a long time. And every time the doomsayers have insisted that “this time is different”. This time, they say, the results will be apocalyptic. So far, at least, they have always been wrong. No one can reliably predict the future, of course, but until the catastrophists start employing a dynamic analysis that strongly accounts for human agency, I am not inclined to embrace their gloom.

None of what I have written so far should lead the reader to assume that this writer takes a Pollyanna view of technology or of AI. Any optimism or gloom I might tend toward is tempered, I hope, by a biblically informed understanding of human nature. And I want to suggest we would be wise to avoid the polar extremes of both exuberance and of despair. We should act with informed prudence, while exhibiting a more anti-fragile approach to living in the current moment.

We should also temper our analysis with an honest assessment of both harm and benefits. I have written before about the risks of deception inherent in language models, and the curious effect that machines with linguistic ability have on human beings. I am no undiscriminating AI booster. But neither am I blind to the beneficial effects that this technology can have on human flourishing.

The reality is that the very same computational techniques being employed by language models, which are creeping out so many, are also being used in many other areas, in beneficial ways that most of us are entirely blind to. Everything from industrial safety to the longevity of appliances will be improved by AI. Medical diagnostics will improved. And AI is likely to improve, in some cases dramatically, the every day lives of those who suffer from physical handicaps.

So maybe some of us should take a deep breath and give all of this a little more thought.

Finally, I want to revisit something I mentioned earlier: we need to adopt a more anti-fragile response when responding to new technologies. There is more than a little hysteria within the Christian community, although AI hysteria is certainly not confined only to Christians. There is, after all, a very long history of catastrophizing advances taking place in tech well outside the Christian community.

I’m certainly not suggesting we should be blind to the damaging effects of specific applications of technology. I am on record arguing for a biblically informed framework as way to evaluate the moral basis for any particular technology. I am not blind to the negative impact of social media, for example, nor its malevolent use of intermittent rewards. I am entirely in agreement with the importance of voluntarily opting out of many different technologies, and so I sympathize especially with Paul Kingsnorth’s idea of the “cooked barbarian”. I am enthusiastic about the work and initiatives being pursued by and , even if I would not be surprised to discover they don’t always agree with my take on things. They are doing virtuous and prudent things which are helping people, I have no doubt. I believe Jonathan Haidt’s work is extremely important. I am under no illusions about whether AI is sometimes being unethically applied. I am not an inveterate booster of technology. I entirely share David Gelernter’s concerns about the propensity of computers to bring out the worst in us.

The thing that should concern us is much less about the tech itself, and much more about the fallen men who wield it. The problem with tech is not tech, it’s us.

So I would love to see less hysteria and more intellectual rigor coming from the Christian community especially. More evidence of being substantively informed about technologies before raising alarms. Less belief in the omnipotence of tech itself, and firmer grounding in the fall of man.

Less despair and more hope. Less fragility and more manliness. Less victim and more hero.

A fundamental assumption of Judeo-Christian thought is that human agency is real, and therefore moral responsibility is real as well. Perhaps, then, rather than despair at advances being made in AI, we should lean into the reality of our own human agency and moral responsibility. We might really benefit by doing more manning up and less rushing to the fainting couches.

We were made for such a time as this. Panic in the face of temporal fears is not the way. We, of all people, ought to already know how all of this ends.

One night during my eighteenth year, the phone rang in the wee hours. My dad woke me up to tell me my friend Ricky was on the phone. Ricky was calling from the hospital. “My mom just died”, he said flatly.

Ricky was a friend from school and from church. We played music together. He played well. My playing, then as now, was relentlessly mediocre. Ricky’s relationship with his father, at that time in his life at least, was fraught and so distant as to be almost non-existent. With his mom now gone, he was facing a bleak and lonely familial future.

It was 2:00 a.m. when Ricky called. I immediately threw on some clothes, grabbed the car keys, and drove over to the house of our mutual friend Doug. Together, Doug and I drove to the hospital. We found Ricky in the ER waiting room. The three of us then got back into my car and made our way to a nearby all-night diner. There we sat down and listened to Ricky talk. We stayed there until the sun came up, eating pancakes, mourning with him, listening to him and, I guess, just doing what friends do: being present.

After high school, we all went different directions and I didn’t hear from Ricky for forty years. One day, out of the blue, a friend request showed up on Facebook from my old friend. Sure enough, Ricky and I reconnected and it was such a fun thing to catch up on forty lost years. But our rekindled friendship didn’t last. At some point, shortly after reconnecting, I offhandedly posted a meme that poked fun at Barack Obama for something or other. I’m an equal opportunity memer. But my friend Rick took umbrage at my willingness to poke fun at the one “we’ve been waiting for”. Shortly after reconnecting, my old friend “unfriended” me for my transgressions. I reached out to him but he never responded. A year or two later he died unexpectedly. So that was the end of that. It was my first experience having a friend who preferred distant politicians over old friendships.

How is it that someone can become so enthralled by a politician? So enamored, in fact, that they are willing even to toss aside lifelong friendships for someone who is really no more than a stranger to them.

I have another high school friend. We went to the same church. We were very close friends. We also went to the same college after high school and never lost touch with each other for more than a few years at a time. I reached out to him to help my grown daughter once. He reached out to me to help his grown son. My friend is incredibly intelligent, charismatic, well-spoken, and has had a positive impact on the lives of countless students and friends.

We hadn’t spoken for a while, my friend and I, until recently. A few years ago, I stopped using Facebook in the midst of its censorship and content suppression. But with the censorship storm seeming to blow over, I recently started giving Facebook another try. And what I found was that my feed contained one catastrophizing post after another, from my old friend, about Donald Trump.

I like Trump well enough - far and away better than any of the alternatives who were on offer in the recent election. My friend, on the other hand, is now endlessly reposting the most egregious anti-Trump propaganda. And not just occasionally. Every single post on his wall, as far back as I scrolled, is a repost of some kind of anti-Trump invective.

Now, to be honest, I’m not all that concerned with whether my friend likes or dislikes Donald Trump. Trump is not the center of my universe. I think what surprises me, though, is that Trump has somehow become the center of my friend’s universe.

At first, I would respond to his posts with relevant factual information which was sometimes at odds with his drumbeat of impending doom. I was assuming, falsely as it happens, that we could talk about things and engage. You know, like friends do.

“Hey bud - no one is deporting or discriminating against ‘all the immigrants’. All that is happening is that immigration laws enacted by duly elected representatives are being enforced.”

I was (naïvely, in hindsight) operating with the misconception that he was the same person I had known since high school and throughout most of my adulthood - someone as interested in the facts as I was. I had assumed that healthy friendships are characterized by honest dialog.

But that is not what was going on. My friend made clear that he was mystified by my blindness to the Trumpian threat. If I couldn’t perceive the threat, he had no interest in engaging. He seems devoted to his belief that the re-election of Donald Trump portends the imminent transformation of the United States into the moral equivalent of another Nazi Germany. 😳 And anyone who tries to dispassionately offer a more factual take on our situation will soon discover that my friend is impervious to facts. He sees what he sees and is disappointed in those of his old friends who don’t see it as well.

For my part, I would be happy to talk with my friend about many subjects other than Donald Trump. But “the Donald” is all my old friend wants to talk about, just not with me. And here is the lesson I have learned: to conceive of yourself as someone who is heroically saving the world from Donald Trump, your concern for factuality must evaporate.

If I set aside my friend’s troubling disregard for facts, and focus instead on the ambient themes found in his stream of posts, two noticeable phenomena begin to emerge. First, he exhibits an uncharacteristically humorless credulity toward the federal government. Second, my friend seems to be captivated by a heroic self-image, as if his social media activity is, in some meaningful way, helping to prevent America’s slide into fascistic despotism. I have come to suspect that anti-Trumpism serves as a Mirror of Erised for some of its devotees.

My friend’s credulity takes the form of an almost mystical belief in the overarching competence, sophistication, and beneficence of the government bureaucracy. He has developed a humorless inability to take anything with a grain of salt, or to laugh at the mildest humor-tinged criticism of the government. In his imagination, every government bureaucracy appears as an exquisite, delicate instrument which must not be tinkered with by the unqualified, lest the precise balance of the agency, along with its self-evident beneficence, is damaged. The commonsensical recognition that government bureaucracies are mere human organizations, run by fallible bureaucrats, and famous for not being run all that well, is utterly lost on my friend. One is left wondering if he has ever visited the DMV, or been dealt the misfortune of having to interact with the U.S. Postal Service.

My friend’s perspective on the DOGE team is instructive. Imagine an elderly nun discovering some unruly frat boys have been playing capture the flag with the Shroud of Turin. Now you have a sense for how my friend reacts to DOGE. He seems to believe that government agencies should be treated as sacred relics. DOGE, to my friend, appears as a mob of ignorant, rampaging barbarians, viciously despoiling the innocent bureaucracy.

My friend’s reverence for bureaucrats makes the very thought of laughing at them a moral impossibility for him. Every simple change to a prior spending decision, or to an agency’s structure, is perceived as definitionally illegitimate and destructive - like drawing a moustache on a beautiful painting of Mother Teresa. Thus, my friend can no longer laugh at anything having to do with the foibles of government.

To be honest, I really don’t care what my friend thinks about President Trump, or about DOGE for that matter. I don’t need him to agree with me. We can still be friends. After all, every politician has his pros and cons, and not one of them is perfect. But my friend’s loss of any sense of humor is something I find depressing. His ideological capture has stripped him of the joie de vivre he once exuded, and which was so instrumental in facilitating the good that he once brought into the world.

The other ambient theme in my anti-Trumpian friend’s posting, is his apparent self-image as someone who is taking heroic action. Believing America is on the very precipice of becoming Nazi Germany, he seems also to believe he has a heroic obligation to warn those of us who don’t possess his kind of moral clarity. He is saving us from ourselves, hoping to prevent America’s final descent into a hellish 21st century MAGA reich. Only he, and those who agree with him, have the vision to see what’s coming. Or so his posts and comments imply.

Now, you can expect to find this sort of calculated, performative hysteria among politicians from the out-of-power party. But my friend is no politician. Nevertheless, something about his ideology’s grip on his brain has had the disastrous effect of inflating both his ego and his gullibility together.

Here is a recent example.

My friend has been calling attention to media reports of Trump’s alleged revisionism regarding who actually started the Ukraine war. My friend’s tone is always more in sorrow than in anger, as he often ends his posts with “shaking my head”. On this issue of Trump’s recent comments, my friend seems blind to how he is equating the meaning of “started the war” with “attacked”, and how that might lead to a misunderstanding of Trump’s point. Now, to be clear, I don’t claim to know what Trump had in mind with his remarks about the origins of the war in Ukraine. Of course, my friend doesn’t really know either. But it doesn’t take much effort to recall that the actual root causes of wars generally precede the outbreak of hostilities. It isn’t a stretch, then, when pondering culpability, to consider whether there might be fault on both sides. Maybe the ultimate attack on Ukraine had precipitating causes that Trump was referring to? 🤷‍♂️ People much smarter than I have speculated along similar lines.

Nevertheless, to support his self-image that he is saving us from Trump’s incompetence in all matters, my friend recently posted an article in which Trump is quoted as saying that he never intended to suggest that Russia hadn’t done the attacking. This clarification is characterized by the article’s headline writer as “a reversal” of Trump’s earlier remarks. While the headline writer chose to frame Trump’s clarification as a “reversal”, that framing is belied by a careful reading of the actual contents of the article itself. But there I go, nit-picking again.

Regarding Trump’s original remarks, my friend comments:

“I wonder how many of my friends said this was bizarre as opposed to remaining silent."

It is hard to convey just how shocking and uncharacteristic such a comment seems, to anyone who has known my friend from childhood. The person I used to know offered more grace to his friends. More benefit of the doubt. His imagination was not so imprisoned by his own narrow interests. There is more than a whiff of chest beating in this comment, since my friend, of course, was not among those whom he perceives are guilty of “remaining silent”.

I can’t speak for his other friends, but in my own defense, as one of the guilty who had been “remaining silent”, I was entirely unaware of the class assignment to report out on the historical accuracy of presidential comments. I may have been absent that day. Even now, it is unclear to me whether the assignment was to cover all presidential observations, or only those which relate to the history of the Ukraine war.

And where might I find the rules, if someone would be so kind, which explain the moral dereliction that attends having interests which occasionally divert one’s attention from this kind of political melodrama? Because, in my friend’s imaginings, merely “remaining silent” on such semantic disputes is prima facie evidence that he is justified in viewing the rest of us, with sadness of course, as a disappointment.

His main social media goal seems to be that all of us come into his light, fully acknowledging the imminent threat to the republic, along with the urgency and heroism of his own actions. We must accept that his online efforts are truly helping to keep the infidel at bay, at least within his sphere of influence, and making Facebook safe for right-thinking opponents of the Nazi MAGA horde.

Alas, then, for those of us who have been operating in blissful ignorance of our moral obligation to offer an opinion on every utterance made by the American president. We simply do not measure up. And if we ever want the rest of the world to acknowledge us as online heroes along the lines of my friend, we will need to stop with the funny Star Trek memes and buckle down. We must start spending more of our time scouring online news in search of something we can plausibly tart up into a presidential faux pas of some kind.

By the way, I found this funny Star Trek meme…

Afterword

More seriously, I undertook to write this post because I have encountered more than one person who has remarked upon having had an experience similar to my own. You find your old friend is no longer able to be a friend in any meaningful sense. His enthusiasms and interests have become so calcified around anti-Trumpian politics that he can no longer engage in normal conversation or laughter outside of that lane. And, of course, he thinks you are the one with the problem, because you don’t partake of his hysteria.

I would be happy to talk to my old friend about any number of things. I certainly don’t care whether he loves Donald Trump. But neither do I believe I’m being a true friend if I simply ignore his repeated concerns, or his evident emotional turmoil. I have no interest in artificial friendships.

It was only after my friend declared his disinterest in engaging in the kind of normal dialog that friends have, that I decided to write this post. Perhaps my experience will serve, perversely, as an encouragement to others. If you have a friend who was once a vibrant human being, one who could laugh, and who maintained varied interests in things both beautiful and true, but whose narrow focus on presidential politics has somehow strangely eclipsed the wonderful person you once knew, you are not alone.

What follows is a transcript of a talk I gave a couple of years ago to a group of adults at my church. It reflects my own observations on the way several culturally contentious issues all seem to intersect around the idea that personhood and faith can be decoupled from embodiment. This notion, as it happens, is neither new to the world nor to Christianity. It is actually an ancient heresy.

I’m publishing this transcript now because, even if some of the culturally contentious issues are beginning (perhaps) to wane (e.g. transgenderism), others are waxing. Artificial intelligence is only just beginning to disorient people on the question of what it means to be human. I spent several days this week in meetings going over experimental results produced by my team on the capacity of AI for generating software source code, and in brainstorming ways of taking advantage of that capability. One cannot have such discussions without someone raising uncomfortable questions regarding agency and consciousness. Operating with clarity on these questions is vitally important as a matter of truth, but also as a matter of compassion for any of our friends whose understanding of what it means to be human may not enjoy the stable footing provided by Christianity.

I am prone to remark in private conversations, and have even publicly written about this here, that the cultural flashpoint, where Christians need most urgently to engage right now, is on this very question of anthropology: what does is mean to be human and what are human beings for?

This talk was a significantly expanded revision of some initial thoughts on this subject, which I had written as an earlier Substack post.

Four years ago, I was hired by my current employer to play a role in helping to build the world’s fastest super computer. A little over a year ago we reached our goal of becoming the first exascale computer in world history – which means we built a machine that can do 1 quintillion arithmetic calculations per second. If the entire earth’s population started doing math calculations every second for 24 hours every day, it would take us all four sleepless years to do the same calculations this machine can do in a single second.

There were hundreds, if not thousands of people working on building that system, and my own role was in the building of software tools that can observe the interaction between applications and the system hardware to help ferret out ways that software can take more efficient advantage of the compute resources within the system. You can think of my work as building tools that are sort of technological peeping toms for math nerds.

Since that time, my own work has been redirected more into the realm of artificial intelligence. Some of the tools I built for supercomputing have been repurposed for AI and are being actively used in companies whose names you would recognize, to optimize the computational performance of their AI models.

I mention all of this as a preface because, doing this kind of work on complex systems for many years, one begins to form certain habits of mind. One of those habits is that of perceiving related patterns in seemingly unrelated phenomenon. By no means am I always right in identifying these patterns. But I have been mostly successful at this work by a stubborn determination to inform my observations by prying hard to acquire data out of these complex systems. As an aside, and I think I’ve said this before, one of my skepticisms about climate alarmism is rooted in my own experience with how hard it is to monitor systems that are far less complex than planetary climates. I don’t believe the quality of the climate alarmists’ data can possibly be adequate to reliably make the sweeping predictions they would have us accept. At best it can only excite hypotheses. The fact that climate alarmists don’t loudly characterize the projections of their models as mere speculative hypotheses probably tells us most of what we need to know about the ethics that prevail within climate science.

But I digress.

Today I want to suggest that an unexpected pattern (unexpected by me at least) has emerged that spans important social flash points – those flash points are homosexuality, transgenderism, artificial intelligence, and Covid.  That may seem like an odd assortment and what overarching pattern could there possibly be? I know what you mean. But I think there is something here that it might be good for us to consider. I think there is a common conceptual thread woven through all of these seemingly unrelated areas. That common thread, which I want to discuss today, and to which, I want to suggest, we Christians are not immune, is the ancient thread of “Gnosticism”.

Gnosticism was an ancient heresy which was roundly rejected by the church but which nevertheless has shown a surprising resilience and ability to reemerge in different ages. Central to the gnostic idea was the notion that pure knowledge is the basis for salvation (The Greek word “gnosis”, from which gnostic derives, means “knowledge”). Gnosticism suggested that the physical world was created by a lesser spiritual being and is thus inherently evil. It insisted that knowledge, unsullied by material existence, was the essence of faith. It went so far in its early Christianized forms of saying that Jesus was not truly embodied. This is probably why we find the apostle John writing in the first chapter of 2 John,

“As you have heard from the beginning, his command is that you walk in love.

7 I say this because many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world. Any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist.

Gnostics often reacted to their embodied existence by either embracing a hedonistic pursuit, on the premise that what we do with our physical bodies doesn’t matter, or by almost the opposite pursuit of a rigorous kind of self-imposed deprivation. This may have been behind Paul’s writing in Colossians where he warned against approaches to the Colossian’s faith involving “harsh treatment of the body”.

So why am I suggesting that Gnosticism is a unifying theme of homosexuality, transgenderism, artificial intelligence and Covid?

Let’s start with homosexuality.

The unstated assumption, perhaps not even always consciously recognized, that underlies homosexual activism is the premise that nothing about male or female human anatomy tells us anything that matters concerning the way sexual interests should be directed, or in what form, or toward what end. Those who insist on the affirmation of homosexual behavior are implicitly insisting that nothing about the physicality of the human body is instructive about anything having to do with sexual expression. One of the things I find most interesting about this implicit assumption is how markedly it departs from the assumptions of Darwinian evolution. Under Darwin, forms of beings supposedly evolved to confer to the advantage of the species. That means, on Darwinism’s own terms, observable forms tell us something about purpose, and what contributes to species survival. But homosexual advocates are implicitly insisting that the human form and function tell us nothing at all. It should perhaps not be entirely surprising that the anti-Christian world can’t get its story straight.

An affirming worldview in regard to homosexuality is one which makes a distinction between the inner life of desire, and the actual form of human anatomy. By doing this, it devalues the role of the human body for informing our lives. It insists upon a complete disconnect between our anatomy and our purpose. Thus, any instructive role played by the human body is thereby thoroughly deprecated.

The same kind of diminishment of the body holds true for the current craze of transgenderism. The underlying premise is that who and what we truly are is completely divorced from our actual embodied existence. More than that, our bodies may be actual impediments to who we actually are. For transgender activists, our bodies are inconveniences that can be carved up and rearranged in ghastly attempts to impose one’s inner life on his body, rather than conform one’s inner life to his actual embodied circumstance.

In the case of homosexuality, what someone wants overrides his embodied form, and in the case of transgenderism, what someone imagines himself to be overrides his entire embodied circumstance. The consistent theme of both of these aggressive worldviews is gnostic in the way they both elevate the content of their minds over actual embodiment and physical existence.

The deprecation – or to use a modern word – the cancellation of the human body is nowhere more evident than in the world of technology. Virtual reality is being promoted, not merely as entertainment, but as an actual substitute for our physical existence.  In 2021, Marc Andreesen, inventor of the web browser and board member of Facebook, was being interviewed about Facebook’s plans for the “metaverse” - an online virtual reality world they were building. During the interview, Andreesen was asked if he thought that technology perhaps made us all too connected and virtualized in ways that were unhelpful to human psychology. He responded by suggesting that such a notion might itself be an artifact of “reality privilege”.

Your question is a great example of what I call Reality Privilege. This is a paraphrase of a concept articulated by Beau Cronin:

“Consider the possibility that a visceral defense of the physical, and an accompanying dismissal of the virtual as inferior or escapist, is a result of superuser privileges.”

A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date. These are also *all* of the people who get to ask probing questions like yours. Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege—their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world.  The Reality Privileged, of course, call this conclusion dystopian, and demand that we prioritize improvements in reality over improvements in virtuality. To which I say: reality has had 5,000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people; I don't think we should wait another 5,000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap. We should build—and we are building—online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in.

Digital Native

Reality Privilege and Living Your Life Online

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5 years ago · Rex Woodbury

Don’t miss the essential point being made here: a disembodied, virtual existence is not only good, it is an actual matter of equality and justice.

Mary Harrington is a noteworthy and trenchant writer in the UK. Her most recent book is “Feminism Against Progress”. She is an exceedingly interesting thinker. One of an emerging class of erstwhile feminists who are giving reconsideration to the possibility that human flourishing might involve actually leaning into how one has been made. In a recent interview, she connects some of her own dots, linking what I’m calling the gnostic preference for disembodiment with technology and transgenderism.

I don't think it's any coincidence that the real uptick in trans identity coincides with smartphones becoming ubiquitous. I think…there's a very strong causal link and it's very clear that a lot especially young girls who embrace that and, you know, try and transcend the limits of their own embodied sex, are inspired to do so by influencers and really the experience of socializing in a disembodied way. You know, if you've been interacting with other people in Minecraft since you were five, then you know, is it any wonder that you believe you can edit your meat avatar the way the way you can edit your virtual one? I think it would self-evidently be a matter of basic social justice to people, you know, normalized into that paradigm, to imagine that this is something that you can and should be able to do. – Mary Harrington

A common premise shared by virtual reality and the emerging world of artificial intelligence is that computation is an adequate approximation, if not an actual substitute for, flesh-and-blood human beings.

Some foundational observations about technology are probably in order before proceeding with this line of thought.

Computers are calculators, they are not people or 'beings' of any kind.  They compute - they do not discern. They are machines that crunch numbers, they do not have insight. They can be programmed to convert numbers to text. We can use them to calculate the statistical associations between text fragments contained within vast accumulations of documents. This is what the language models behind all the current AI excitement do. They compute a vast sea of statistics regarding co-occurring letters and words and can regurgitate statistically probable sequences of text.

AI models do not have their own ideas. They reconstitute strings of text cobbled together from statistical probabilities. That means that the quality of their answers is entirely dependent on the quality of the documents they derived their statistics from. If the document corpus is full of errors or lies, an AI will regurgitate an approximation of those errors and lies. If the document corpus is full of political bias, it will generate answers with a corresponding political bias. AI models do not "know" what they are doing.  They only regurgitate calculated approximations of what they have been "told". In a sense, ChatGPT and all of its siblings can be thought of as massive juke boxes which can "replay" variations of the conventional wisdom on any particular subject they have been “trained” upon.

The mysticism currently in vogue for describing AI, especially in the popular press and on social media, is rooted in part (I suspect) in the widespread acceptance of the computational theory of mind.

In philosophy of mind, the computational theory of mind (CTM), also known as computationalism, is a family of views that hold that the human mind is an information processing system and that cognition and consciousness together are a form of computation.

The underlying assumption here is that the human body is nothing more than a sort of baggy, wet, computer. It is the computations themselves, so the narrative goes, that comprise what we perceive as being a “person”. Once those kinds of “computations” can be performed by other kinds of computers, then those other computers will also constitute persons. If what it means to be human is reducible to mathematical computations, then nothing more significant than computations are what constitute human beings. The human body thus becomes irrelevant, except perhaps as an incredibly power-efficient instrument for doing math.

But since language is a central facet of our human existence, it can be deeply affecting for people to interact with a machine which can compute a coherent linguistic response to their questions. This video aptly illustrates the point I’m making here.

It is worth noting that there are some choices made by the original producer of the above video which are intentionally contrived to contribute to the viewer’s mystical sense regarding the AI behind the video. It is probably no accident that the maker of the video chose a persona for his AI character (a monk) which is perceived by many to have spiritual authority. Make no mistake, a kind of groundwork is being laid here. Also, the choice to use a British accent is worth remarking upon. There are many psychological studies suggesting that a British accent augments a listener’s perception of a speaker’s authority and expertise.

The widespread (among technologists) acceptance of the computational theory of mind - that humans are essentially computers – inevitably leads downstream to novel implications for what it even means to be human.

In this conversation between Lex Fridman and Andrej Karpathy, both leading thinkers in the field of AI, ethical questions are being raised about the morality of unplugging an AI that tells you it wants to live, suggesting that unplugging an AI will become a moral question akin to the kinds of questions that attend human abortion.

Fridman: But there's also this, perhaps just a narrative we tell ourselves, it feels like something to experience the world, the hard problem of consciousness.

Karpathy: Yeah.

Fridman: But that could be just a narrative that we tell ourselves.

Karpathy: I think it [consciousness] will emerge. I think it's going to be something very boring. We'll be talking to these digital AIs, they will claim they're conscious, they will appear conscious, they will do all the things that you would expect of other humans and it's going to just be a stalemate.

Fridman: I think there will be a lot of actual fascinating ethical questions, like supreme court level questions of whether you're allowed to turn off a conscious AI, if you're allowed to build a conscious AI, maybe there would have to be the same kind of debates that you have around, sorry to bring up a political topic, but abortion, which is the deeper question with abortion is what is life? And the deep question with AI is also, what is life and what is conscious?

Karpathy: Right.

Fridman: And I think that'll be very fascinating to bring up, it might become illegal to build systems that are capable of such level of intelligence

One way to understand the conflict roiling the West over these essential facets of human nature, humanity's place in the world, and our embodied existence, is to see it as modern resentment against the very fact of our "createdness". Moderns, especially in the West, are increasingly embittered by the possibility that the circumstances of our existence are prescribed by anyone other than ourselves. In such a context, adopting a belief, such as gender being anything we say it is, begins to seem like nothing so much as a collective desire to give God the finger. Moderns really do not like the fact that we are created and can thus never be entirely self-defining. For the modern, having the circumstances of our existence imposed upon us is, it turns out, enraging. Many are thus determined to believe that our humanity can be divorced from our embodied existence and reduced to something purely computational. Such gnostic pretensions offer a way out of the impositions of our physicality. You get a sense for this kind of modern intellectual petulance in this speech by Yuval Harari.

Organisms are algorithms. This is the big Insight of the modern life sciences, that organisms, whether viruses or bananas or humans, they are really just biochemical algorithms. And we are learning how to decipher these algorithms. By hacking organisms, elites may gain the power to re-engineer the future of life itself. Because once you can hack something, you can usually also engineer it. Science is replacing evolution by natural selection with evolution by intelligent design. Not the intelligent design of some God above the clouds but our intelligent design. – Yuval Harari

It was during Covid that I first began to perceive this kind of widespread cultural negativity toward embodiment. This manifested itself during Covid as an immediate - even enthusiastic - cultural receptivity to the idea that human bodies should primarily be conceived of as vectors for the transmission of disease. And it was especially the prevalence of similar assumptions, and novel new ethical arguments, within the larger Christian community, that left me scratching my head.

Here's why.

Beginning in the earliest chapters of the biblical text, a theology of the human body began to emerge: sexual distinctiveness, purpose-filled sexual expression, embodied existence. All of these were first principles set forth at the very outset. The very fate of the world itself even hung on the dietary choices Adam and Eve made concerning foods for the body to consume.

Later on, faith and human beings intersected in priestly garments, and in the consumption of sacrificial meat, and with anointing, and uncut hair, and circumcision, and ceremonial washings.

And then, to the great astonishment of every being, both in heaven and on earth, God went so far as to embody himself, and it was his bodily death, attested to by bodily fluids, preceded by bodily abuse, followed by bodily burial and ultimately bodily resurrection, that reconciled everything on earth and in heaven to himself.

Our Lord gave instructions that we should baptize the bodies of new disciples. On the night he was betrayed, our Lord told his disciples, “this is my body…” and did so in the very context of instructing them in the necessity of commemorating these events by bodily consuming bread and drinking wine. Everywhere we turn, the scriptures teach that human beings are embodied creatures - that our faith intersects with our embodied existence - making our faith itself something that is inescapably embodied.

The Christian faith is not less than informational – to be sure, the gospel does contain informational content. But it cannot be reduced to mere information. The church body (there’s that word again) cannot be reduced to being simply a vehicle for the exchange of information.

I’m very glad we have the technology to Zoom and livestream for everyone who is physically or geographically unable to gather with the Church in person. That is certainly a huge blessing for all who simply cannot gather bodily together. But the Christianity of the bible is both informational and embodied. It is an unsanitary and earthy amalgamation of dirty feet and baths, body and blood, death and resurrection.

The ancient Christian faith simply cannot be contained within the antiseptic flickering of a livestream video.

Christianity has long been plagued by a gnostic inclination. Gnosticism has always been characterized by its insistence, to greater and lesser degrees, on a dichotomy between the content of Christian faith and the embodiment of it. There has always been a gnostic tendency to diminish messy embodiment in favor of unsullied knowledge. Any understanding of Christianity which conceives of itself primarily as a form of disembodied information, reduced almost entirely to trafficking in right opinions, is a Christianity that emits more than a whiff of the gnostic past.  

Connecting the Dots

We are living through an eruption of transgender and homosexual mania - a moment characterized by a rejection of the relevance of the natural body as a guide to human sexual identity and sexual expression. A time when elite technology thinkers have adopted a reductionist conception of human beings as being merely algorithms. They are openly debating whether we should be allowed to turn off what are really just very fast calculators because they might warrant the very same moral standing as embodied human beings. After all, if a human being is only a machine, a machine can very well be a human being.

So, given all of this, perhaps it is not too far-fetched to wonder whether the gnostic undercurrent of our times is affecting the thinking of those Christians who have come to see their own bodily participation as an optional facet of their practice of faith.

One of the urgent tasks facing modern Christians, I believe, is the need to reinforce our understanding of the embodied nature of our faith. What life as a Christian involves is not confined to things informational or psychological. It is not limited to only the moral rehabilitation of our inner lives. There is far more to Christianity than thinking pure thoughts. Biblical Christianity is a comprehensive, redeemed way of being, one which reaches into every nook and cranny of our existence. Jesus did not redeem us merely to help us cope, or to enable us to have all of our informational ducks in a row.

Following Jesus involves bringing our whole self - body and soul - to take up arms in a very ancient conflict. One in which Gnosticism continues to be wielded in an attempt to seduce us with the idea that our faith exists only in the realm of ideas, and need not take up residence in our bodies.

I later posted a version of the original note on ricochet.com where it has garnered some interest there. I would not have turned the note into the post at this remove if not for some corroborating points of view I have come across this morning. Below the second break I’ll add a couple of links to these corroborating perspectives, along with some brief comments about why I was motivated to include them with this post.

I remember when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and dug his troops in there. The world was focused on the Iraqi positions and obsessed with where the Americans might land in Kuwait. There was round-the-clock commentary and speculation on the difficulties we would have attacking the entrenched Iraqi positions.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Army, under General Norman Schwarzkopf, had secretly massed its troops in Saudi Arabia. Rather than launching a frontal attack against Hussein’s entrenched positions, Schwarzkopf raced north through Iraq behind Hussein’s army, severing his supply lines and cutting his forces off from their homeland. After that, it was like shooting fish in a barrel, as the attached picture from the infamous “highway of death” illustrates.

Something similar seems to be going on with Trump’s return to office. During the buildup to the inauguration, the press was obsessed with which individuals a Trump administration might go after and who was at risk. The press was maniacally focused on the Biden pardons, who made the list, and who did not. But events are starting to feel eerily reminiscent of the press’ obsession with the beach landings that never quite happened the way they had expected (IIRC, we did land a few soldiers on the beaches as a ruse and a distraction).

Instead, the Trump administration seems to be bypassing a frontal attack on individuals and is, instead, going for the throat of the entire rotten machine. What is being revealed by DOGE and - whose surprising and timely appearance on the battlefield feels a little bit like the Elvish army arriving unexpectedly at Helm's Deep - evokes an eerie sense of deja vu. There is a vibe in the air that hearkens back to the press’s stunned reaction when, instead of attacking where everyone expected, with the resulting rivers of American blood, Schwarzkopf instead cut off Hussein in a matter of days, sitting between Hussein’s army and his nation’s capital, after which it was all over but the shouting.

So, for now at least, Trump seems to be foregoing the individuals and targeting their strategic sources of funding.

All is being revealed, and the hyper-competent and rapid application of technology is bathing the grift machine, and its entire rat infestation, in unaccustomed light.

Trump is seemingly maneuvering to cut off the rats’ food supply, and rip the heart out of the machine.

Perhaps the enlarged, elegantly framed copy of his mug shot, hanging prominently on the wall just outside the oval office, is suggestive of a disinterest in letting bygones be bygones.

The left seems increasingly panicked, apparently awake now to their true peril. And like the priests of the god Serapis, they are desperate to convince everyone who will listen that if Trump and DOGE “violate the majesty of the god”*, the world will return to chaos.

But the blow has already been struck, and all the rats are scurrying forth from the cloven idol, just as they did that fateful day in the Sarapeum. And notwithstanding the psychodrama on the left, “the thunder was still silent, and both the heavens and the earth continued to preserve their accustomed order and tranquility.”* Who, after all, except the rats inhabiting the darkened recesses of the idol, has yet been even inconvenienced, much less harmed?

Why, it’s almost as if all the obscene spending and propaganda were never really about the needs of the American people at all.

*Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

After posting this yesterday I awoke find two interesting and related essays that offer points of view that are similar or, at least, adjacent.

The first one is this new blog post by . He has also noticed the supply-line analogy that neatly characterizes recent events. He has this to say:

What Elon is doing is cutting the left’s supply lines, and he is cutting those supply lines clean in two. It is starting to look as though the leftist juggernaut was made up of ensconced bureaucrats, kennel-fed media, and astro-turf mobs, and all of it financed by the long-suffering taxpayer.

I also came across this link to via . Mr. Crew (a.k.a. Bill Shipley) offered observations not unlike my own, in regard to the unexpected decision by Trump and team, unexpected by the left at least, to go for the financial throat of their entire enterprise. This is what I was getting at yesterday in noticing the similarity to the Schwarzkopf strategy during the Persian Gulf war.

But I don’t think the Democrats/Progressives anticipated Elon Musk and his engineer boy-geniuses, nor did they expect that the first target that would take multiple incoming torpedos from DOGE would be the federal programs that have funneled huge sums of money to the left-wing NGOs through a variety of slush funds.

The fight is just beginning and, as in every battle, the enemy has a say.