For more than a decade, parents have been told that screens are bad for their kids. Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 book The Anxious Generation argued that the “play-based childhood” was “wiped out by the arrival of the ‘phone-based childhood’ in the early 2010s.” Lawmakers have attempted to make changes in several public school systems. Florida, where I live, banned phones for the entire school day in elementary and middle schools beginning in July 2025. Los Angeles Unified banned personal phones in February 2024.

And yet the same schools keep putting screens in front of children for most of the day and sending them home for homework. Before the pandemic, the EdWeek Research Center found that about two-thirds of district leaders said they provided a device for every middle and high school student. By March 2021, 90 percent did, and 84 percent did the same for elementary students. Last December, NBC News reported that 88 percent of schools nationally provide students with personal devices.

Some researchers suggest screen time isn’t as bad as some (like me) make it out to be. What good is academic argumentation without someone trying to deny the most obvious conclusions? Candice Odgers argues that Haidt’s rewiring claim “is not supported by science” and that the studies show “a mix of no, small and mixed associations.” I grant that a laptop can be a useful educational tool. I’m no luddite. I use a computer most of my working hours. The OECD found that students who used devices for learning between one and five hours a day actually scored higher in math on the 2022 PISA exams than students who didn’t use them at all. But “some use helps” is not the same as “every child needs a personal device, all day, every day, at school and at home.”

What late light does to a young brain

Andrew Huberman has spent years explaining what light does to the human brain. I have been reading his new book, Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body.

Current data indicate that teenagers in the US are in the midst of an epidemic of sleep deprivation that is likely having serious consequences for their health. Ideally, young people between the ages of six and twelve years should sleep at least nine hours per night. More than 70 percent of young people do not sleep enough, according to one large survey from the CDC. Anxiety, mood disorders, obesity, high-risk behavior, poor academic performance, and substance use have all been tied to sleep deprivation among adolescents. Good practices for teenagers include shutting off screens at least an hour before bedtime, keeping the phone (and the laptop, the tablet, etc.) out of the bedroom at night and the room cool and dark, having a consistent bedtime, and, ideally, sleeping for those eight to nine hours per night.

On his podcast, Huberman explained that “light that arrives to the eyes between 11:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. approximately suppresses the release of dopamine” and “can inhibit learning.” He also warned that dimming a screen doesn’t solve the problem, because the eyes become more sensitive to light as the day goes on. A fifteen-year-old girl’s brain is still developing the capacity for attention and self-control, and the hours when that brain should be asleep and consolidating what it learned are exactly the hours we have filled with bright screens.

[Kids] need sleep even more than we do, given the stage of brain and bodily development they are in…if your teen or child is depressed or anxious, it’s important to assess their sleep patterns and relationship to light, especially the amount and timing of screen use.

On his podcast episode about dopamine, Huberman described how layering a phone onto another activity, like checking messages between sets at the gym, reduces the satisfaction a person gets from the activity itself. Many teenagers now do homework with a message window open in the next tab. The homework becomes less useful, and the messages take over. This does not bode well for their attention spans or their ability to think and reason through complex ideas.

In 2023, Sweden, whose schools had gone heavily digital, began moving back to printed textbooks. The Karolinska Institute told the government that clear scientific evidence shows digital tools risk impairing students’ learning rather than improving it. Lotta Edholm, the minister for schools, said, “Physical books are important for student learning.” The same year, UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report concluded that “learning benefits disappear if technology is used in excess or in the absence of a qualified teacher.”

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High school makes it worse

A third-grader might use an iPad for a reading or math program during the school day. A high school junior has a learning management system for every class, essays written and submitted in Google Docs, math homework done in an online platform, research done in a browser, and deadlines set for 11:59 p.m. The homework load grows every year, and more and more of it is done on a screen, so more of it happens late at night.

Huberman gives two useful instructions: “Avoid screens in the bedroom at night. This includes phones, laptops, tablets, and TV screens.” And, “Avoid consuming information on an electronic device within an hour (at least) of bedtime. Light from phones and other screens can disrupt your circadian clock.” He notes that sleep apps and phones used as alarm clocks don’t make it any easier. He could have added the English teacher whose essay is due by midnight.

Huberman draws on a 2011 National Sleep Foundation poll of 1,508 Americans. Ninety percent said they used a screen in the hour before bed, and among those under thirty it was 96 percent. Doing homework was one of the activities they listed. The researchers “found that difficulty falling asleep rose in keeping with the amount of technology people used in the hour before bed. More passive devices like e-readers were less problematic than interactive devices like game consoles, cell phones, and laptops.” Homework is interactive. A student writing an essay is typing, checking the rubric, searching for a source, and answering the message that pops up in the corner of the screen. As Huberman puts it, “Technology, particularly interactive technology, stimulates our brains in a way that counters the calm that we need in order to fall asleep.”

In 2014, researchers at Harvard Medical School compared reading on an e-book with reading a printed book before bed. Unlike the poll, this was an experiment, so the difference came from the screen itself. According to Huberman, “people who read on an e-book at night with a dim bedside light took longer to fall asleep, were less sleepy, had lower levels of melatonin, and were less alert the next morning compared to people who read a printed book with a dim bedside light before bed.”

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine says teenagers between 13 and 18 should sleep 8 to 10 hours a night. According to the most recent CDC survey data from 2023, only 23.2 percent of high school students get enough sleep on school nights. That means more than three out of four do not.

It’s tempting to blame phones alone, and they certainly play a part. Common Sense Media tracked the phones of about 200 kids aged 11 to 17 and found that 59 percent used them on school nights between midnight and 5 a.m. That is the kind of sleep loss and screen usage Huberman ties to anxiety, mood disorders, and poor academic performance.

Student life goes beyond classes that end at 3 p.m. Sports, clubs, rehearsals, jobs, and numerous other activities are an important part of childhood development, and if students want to go to college, these activities become even more necessary. So after soccer practice runs late and dinner is at 8, a student finally sits down to write an English paper at 9:30. If his alarm goes off at 6, he needs to be asleep by 10 to get eight hours, which means he should be off every screen by 9.

In 2019, researchers published a study in the journal Sleep in which students aged 12 to 19 were asked to stop using screens after 9 p.m. on school nights. The reduction in late screen time was linked to falling asleep earlier and sleeping longer, and the extra sleep improved their alertness during the day. It is a simple intervention, but it is much harder for a family to enforce when a school puts all the homework on a computer.

The kid without a phone

Plenty of parents have wisely held off on handing their kid a smartphone. I have always found it telling that the men who built the devices and platforms now in nearly every child's pocket and backpack have applied a different standard at home. In late 2010, Steve Jobs told a New York Times reporter that his kids hadn't used the iPad and that the family limited technology at home. Bill Gates didn't give his children phones until they were 14 and kept phones off the table at meals. Peter Thiel allows his young children an hour and a half of screen time a week, the same limit Evan Spiegel set for his seven-year-old stepson. Mark Zuckerberg has said he doesn't "generally want my kids to be sitting in front of a TV or a computer for a long period of time." In 2018, Sundar Pichai said his eleven-year-old son still didn't have a phone, and Tim Cook said of his nephew, "I don't want them on a social network." The people who know these products best keep them away from their own children. And yet, when we turn to schools, it’s full steam ahead with the screens.

When the New York Times reported this spring on a middle school in McPherson, Kansas, the school had taken back the school-issued Chromebooks from 480 students in December 2025 after dealing with YouTube, games, bullying over Gmail, and harassment over Zoom. The principal said, “We just felt we couldn’t have Chromebooks be that huge distraction.” In Los Angeles, after the district banned phones, one parent told NBC News that the ban didn’t matter much, because students simply do the same things on their school devices.

When I was in school, a fight at lunch ended with a black eye, or an embarrassing moment came with a few rumors until the next juicy story. Now videos get passed around, and group chats go on until 1 a.m. Common Sense Media found that the median teenager in its study received 237 notifications a day, and about a quarter of them arrived during school hours.

Real friendships require attention. Kids have to learn how to read a face, sit through an awkward silence, apologize in person, and overlook a small offense. They can’t learn any of that if they are never fully present with anyone.

What classical schools do differently

Classical schools have grown quickly over the last decade, and many have rejected screen-based education. In 2025, Robert Pondiscio and Annika Hernandez of the American Enterprise Institute counted more than 1,500 public, private, and charter classical schools serving nearly 700,000 students. At Louisville Classical Academy in Kentucky, students in preschool through fifth grade “may not use any digital devices whatsoever, except to learn typing and for an annual standardized test administered digitally.” In every grade, “all assignments are handwritten, video is avoided, and phones and all other digital devices are put away for the duration of the school day.” If a paper is typed, the student has to turn in a handwritten draft with it. Veritas Classical Academy in Beaumont, Texas, says, “technology is an end of education, not a means of education.” Veritas utilizes Google Classroom in the upper grades, but only after years of books and handwriting.

The reason for the difference goes back to what the classical tradition thinks a school is for. The word “school” comes from the Greek scholē, which meant leisure, time set free from necessity for thinking. A classical education aims to form a student’s attention and habits, and the old authors understood that a tool shapes the person who uses it. Plato told a story about this in the Phaedrus. The Egyptian god Theuth brought his new invention, writing, to King Thamus and promised it would “make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories.” Thamus replied, “O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them.” He warned that people who leaned on writing would “be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.” Of course, we only know about Thamus because Plato wrote the story down (my grad students like to bring this up), and classical schools assign plenty of writing. Writing turned out to be one of the great gifts to learning, but Thamus’s question still stands. What does a tool do to the person using it, and should the inventor be the one to tell us?

Aristotle taught that we acquire virtues the way we acquire any skill, by practice. “Men come to be builders, for instance, by building; harp-players, by playing on the harp: exactly so, by doing just actions we come to be just.” Practice forms bad habits as surely as good ones: “it is by playing the harp that both the good and the bad harp-players are formed.” Attention works the same way. A student who writes every essay in the space between sending text messages and making FaceTime calls practices distraction for hours a day.

Seneca praised his young friend Lucilius, writing, “The primary indication, to my thinking, of a well-ordered mind is a man’s ability to remain in one place and linger in his own company.” He warned that “everywhere means nowhere,” and that a man who spends all his time traveling “ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends.” Seneca was talking about reading too many books too quickly. Sounds a lot like a group chat.

Augustine confessed the same weakness near the end of the fourth century. A dog chasing a hare in a field, he wrote, “will distract me even from some weighty thought, and draw me after it.” He went on, “What, when sitting at home, a lizard catching flies, or a spider entangling them rushing into her nets, oft-times takes my attention?” He called this curiosity, which Scripture calls “the lust of the eyes,” and he treated it as a real temptation. If a lizard on the wall could pull Augustine away from his thoughts, what chance does a fourteen-year-old have against apps built by engineers whose job is to hold her attention?

Convenient myths

When parents question all the screens, they often hear that every child learns differently. Some students are supposedly “visual learners,” others are “auditory” or “kinesthetic,” and a device lets the teacher match the lesson to the learner. It sounds reasonable, and a great many teachers believe it. Philip Newton and Atharva Salvi reviewed 37 studies covering 15,405 educators in 18 countries and found that 89.1 percent believed in matching instruction to a student’s learning style. But the evidence isn’t there. In 2008, four cognitive psychologists reviewed the research and concluded that “at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general educational practice.” Newton and Salvi point out that reviews “going back to 2004” have found “no empirical evidence that this ‘matching instruction’ improves learning, and it could potentially cause harm.” Children certainly have different strengths and interests. To teach a child who has difficulty sitting still to read a book, give them more opportunities to sit still and read a book. An iPad that delivers the content as a video is not the answer.

The other favorite line is that schools are preparing students for the future. Everything in the “real world” happens on a computer, so students need to learn on one. Interestingly, the people who build that real world don’t seem worried. In 2011, Matt Richtel of the New York Times visited a Waldorf school in Silicon Valley that kept computers out of its classrooms. One of the parents was Alan Eagle, who wrote speeches for Google’s chairman and whose daughter was in fifth grade there. “It’s supereasy,” Eagle said. “It’s like learning to use toothpaste. At Google and all these places, we make technology as brain-dead easy to use as possible. There’s no reason why kids can’t figure it out when they get older.” Skills that take years to learn are things like reading a difficult text and judging whether it is true. When fifteen-year-olds took the PISA exams in 2018, “fewer than 1 in 10 students in OECD countries was able to distinguish between fact and opinion, based on implicit cues pertaining to the content or source of the information.” Two education researchers, Paul Kirschner and Pedro De Bruyckere, reviewed the research in 2017 and concluded, “Information-savvy digital natives do not exist.” Ten years from now, which will serve a graduate better? Knowing his way around the latest software updates, or being able to read a hard book, write a clear paragraph, and pay attention for an hour?

Teenagers have a myth of their own. A sixteen-year-old told to shut down a group chat to finish his homework will quickly tell you he’s great at multitasking. In 2015, Common Sense Media found that 60 percent of teens often or sometimes text while doing homework, 51 percent watch TV, and 50 percent use social media. Nearly two-thirds said watching TV or texting while doing homework makes no difference to their ability to study and learn. Kirschner and Bruyckere explained, “Learners cannot multitask; they task switch, which negatively impacts learning.” It may seem like you can do two things at once, but the brain switches back and forth between them, and every switch costs time and attention. A student who answers a message in the middle of reading a paragraph has to go back and find their place in the text all over again, and it happens many times over the course of an evening.

Remember your responsibility

Christian parents have to face the fact that schools are not responsible for raising their children. God commanded Israel, saying, “And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise” (Deuteronomy 6:6-7). God placed the teaching of children with their parents in the ordinary hours of home life, including bedtime and breakfast.

God also made sleep a gift. “It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep” (Psalm 127:2). The Lord who keeps Israel “will neither slumber nor sleep” (Psalm 121:4), and his creatures do. When we lie down at night, we admit that we are not God, that the world will go on without us until morning, and that we can trust the One who stays awake. A fifteen-year-old who goes to bed at 1 a.m. has learned the opposite lesson.

The psalmist resolved, “I will not set before my eyes anything that is worthless” (Psalm 101:3). Children can’t make that resolution for themselves at first, so their parents make it for them. Paul told fathers to bring their children up “in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4), and that discipline includes what a child looks at and when he goes to bed.

The easy answer is for schools to rethink their dependence on technology. I'm realistic, so I don't hold out much hope that it will happen soon. But schools do respond when enough families start asking questions. Some things are more important than preparing for college: our children's health, a mind that can hold a thought for more than a few minutes, the ability to read a long text and follow an argument, and a brain that has actually slept. Those are worth protecting, even if it costs a late assignment or a lower grade now and then. In the end, the student who puts the screen away and goes to sleep will be better prepared for college, and for life, than the one finishing his homework at midnight between group chat messages.

In 1787, Jeremy Bentham sketched a building. In this building, prisoners would sit in cells arranged in a ring, lit from behind, each one visible from a tower at the center. The inspector in that tower could see all of them, and none of them could see him. Of course that also meant the inspector didn’t have to be there at all. If a man doesn’t know whether or not he’s being watched, he will behave as though he always is.

Bentham was pleased with himself. He promised “Morals reformed, health preserved, industry invigorated, instruction diffused,” and then he called it “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.” He named it the Panopticon, from the Greek for all-seeing. He described the plan’s central advantage as “the apparent omnipresence of the inspector.”

On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court of the United States decided Chatrie v. United States. Justice Kagan wrote the majority, joined by Roberts, Sotomayor, Kavanaugh, and Jackson. Gorsuch also concurred in the judgment. The question was whether police conduct a search under the Fourth Amendment when they provide Google with a map and a time window and demand a list of every phone inside it. The Court said they did, then vacated and sent the case back to the Fourth Circuit to determine whether this particular warrant satisfied the probable cause and particularity requirements at each step. The government argued that two hours of location data is too small a slice to matter, a “Constitution-free zone” as Kagan characterized the claim. She answered that the size of the slice was never the problem, but that the government “can access all of a cell-phone user’s movements, in both public and private places,” and therefore “possesses a virtual panopticon with which to scrutinize its citizens’ activities.”

There was Bentham’s word. An eighteenth-century prison design was being used to describe an American’s telephone. Gorsuch wrote that the third-party doctrine “amounts to little more than a doubtful application of Katz that lets the government search almost whatever it wants whenever it wants.” When Kagan and Gorsuch find agreement, we can be certain there’s a problem with what the government wants.

One circle, one hour

Under the third-party doctrine, information you hand over to somebody else is no longer yours to protect. You gave your dialed numbers to the phone company, so the phone company can give them to the police, and no warrant is required. The rule was built for bank deposit slips and pen registers in the 1970s, but has been applied to cell phones. In 2018, in Carpenter v. United States, Chief Justice Roberts held that the government needs a warrant to obtain historical cell-site records, because a person does not surrender all privacy in his movements merely by carrying a phone that pings towers. A single observation can be innocuous, while a thousand of them stacked together are something of a different kind. He wrote, “A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere.”

Chatrie is the sequel. On May 20, 2019, at about 4:50 in the afternoon, a man handed a teller at a credit union in Midlothian, Virginia, a note demanding $100,000, walked out with $195,000 in a bag, and disappeared. Witnesses and surveillance footage showed he had come from the corner of the church next door while appearing to talk on a cell phone. The police had nothing else to work with, so on June 14, they asked a Virginia magistrate for a geofence warrant directed at Google, drawing a 150-meter circle around the credit union and demanding the Location History of every phone inside it between 4:20 and 5:20 that afternoon. Location History records a phone’s position about every two minutes.

That circle took in all the data from the church next door, which the Supreme Court pointed out when it decided the case, quoting Google’s own amicus brief, where the company said that in its experience it is “common for a geofence to cover private homes, apartment buildings...hotels, [and] places of worship.” The scan returned 19 devices. Justice Jackson wrote that officers initially sought unbounded data and account information on all 19, and eventually settled on nine, though “even this shorter list may have been overbroad.” The data they received at step two was never confined to the circle, and for three of those nine devices it traced people to their homes, a school, and a hospital. So one scan to find one criminal took in a bank, a church, and the private movements of people whose only connection to the crime was being near it. Liberty should never be abandoned because it makes an investigator’s job easier.

Twenty billion scans a month

Flock Safety mounts small black cameras on poles that photograph every car that goes by, read the license plate, and log the time and location. The system also builds what the company calls a Vehicle Fingerprint, cataloging the car’s color, make, body style, and bumper stickers. Flock says it operates in more than 5,000 communities across 49 states and scans over 20 billion vehicles a month. Most people had no idea the cameras were being installed or that their city councils were signing the contracts.

Of course, a license plate is issued by the state, bolted to the outside of your car, and displayed on a public road for anyone to read. A police officer standing on a corner with a notepad has always been free to write down every plate that passes him, and nobody has ever thought he needed a warrant to do it. A camera on a pole does the same thing, but much faster. The problem, pointed out by Justice Roberts, is that the officer on the corner sees you once. He goes home with no memory of the eleven thousand cars that drove past him; however, a network of cameras and a searchable database does not merely observe you more quickly. It remembers and can be queried backward in time by anyone with a login.

Two residents in Norfolk, VA sued the city with the Institute for Justice, and discovery in that case produced the numbers. Over roughly four months, Norfolk’s cameras logged Lee Schmidt’s car 526 times and Crystal Arrington’s 849 times, about four to seven sightings a day. Neither had been charged with anything, nor were any crimes suspected. They were simply driving to work and running errands. The case is currently on appeal.

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The arguments in favor of these cameras point to finding stolen cars and abducted children. Just this week in Florida, there was a report of an elderly man with dementia who was found because he was seen on a Flock camera. Some good things have resulted from the presence of the cameras. What the good results cannot do is answer who gets to use the data and for what, because that question is settled by the people behind the cameras.

Asad Zahir, an officer with the Shively Police Department in Kentucky, ran 2,048 searches on two vehicles registered to his ex-girlfriend between January and May of 2026. Two hundred forty-one of those came while a protection order against him was in force. He logged the reason as a drug investigation even though she had no drug history. In Haines City, Florida, Officer Christopher Goodson searched his estranged wife’s license plate 717 times over 21 months, from September 2024 through the end of June 2026. He filled in the reasons as road rage, drug possession, theft, fleeing police, and assault and battery even though she was never a suspect. Robert Josett of the Costa Mesa Police Department in California used Flock to find his mistress’s car and the cars of the other men she was seeing. He ran 13 unauthorized queries in California’s law enforcement database on her, on one of those men, and on his own wife. He contacted her thousands of times by phone and text over nine months and admitted driving past her home in violation of a restraining order. He pleaded guilty in April 2026 to three misdemeanors and was sentenced to three years of probation and a 52-week domestic violence program, with no time in custody. Each of these was an unauthorized use, and that is the point. The machinery seems fine when it is pointed at what we dislike, but it is also available to those who will use it on you without a warrant and without you ever knowing.

On August 31, 2026, the Florida Department of Transportation revoked all permits for automated license plate readers installed in state highway rights-of-way and gave agencies 30 days to take the devices down, citing the technology’s rapid expansion, reports of misuse, and data privacy concerns. Governor DeSantis said at a press conference that he wanted to keep Florida from becoming a “digital AI surveillance state where everything we’re doing is being tracked at all times.” Unfortunately, the order only addresses state roads, so cameras on city streets and county roads remain legal for now. So far, Florida is the only state to order the removal of hardware. Virginia, Oregon, Washington, Illinois, California, Tennessee, Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska, and Utah have all passed rules governing how data is retained and used. More than fifty localities have canceled their contracts in the past year.

Flock has tightened its rules, requiring a case number for searches and shortening the time the data sits on the server. But Flock is only one, albeit the largest of many companies. Motorola Solutions doesn’t disclose camera counts, but it mounts cameras on repo trucks, parking enforcement vehicles, and commercial fleets that drive all day, and it pools scans through a system it calls the National Vehicle Location Service. Axon started selling plate readers on police dashcams in 2021 and rolled out two fixed models in 2025. When the city of Syracuse dropped Flock, it installed Axon and went on reading plates. Canceling a contract with one vendor often means nothing more than switching to another.

Flock CEO Garrett Langley went on Fox News in August and said that when people talk about privacy or safety, “they’re prioritizing the wrong thing, and what we have to prioritize as a country is compromise.” At the end of that month, his company held a police convention in Atlanta. Benn Jordan, a YouTube host who has been publicly critical of Flock, bought a ticket, and Flock revoked the ticket once it learned he would be there. A Flock employee even called his hotel and canceled the room he had booked for himself. So, Jordan parked on a public street outside the hall, ran a drone over the attendees as they left, intercepted the wireless microphone signals coming out of the building, and logged who was there. His summary was “Flock values their privacy. Oh well.”

At one point, nearly 200 police leaders complained that “activists” were reading publicly available audit records, so Flock stopped displaying the searching officer’s name, the plate queried, and the typed reason on its public logs. All searches went private. In Dunwoody, Georgia, Flock’s own employees pulled up cameras inside the Marcus Jewish Community Center to demonstrate the product to prospective buyers. One feed was labeled “Main Pool Right.” Another was labeled “Gymnastics.” In other words, a pitch to sell the cameras was relying on live footage of children at a Jewish community center without anyone’s knowledge. Gross.

So the compromise Langley wants is that his officers have their names withheld, his convention’s guest list is protected, and his employees are protected from surveillance, while the rest of us get photographed on the way to work, our children swim in the pool, or do gymnastics in a gym. Apparently, we are supposed to be good with that.

Is your car watching you?

In 2021, section 24220 of the federal infrastructure bill directed the Secretary of Transportation to issue a federal safety standard requiring every new passenger vehicle in America to carry what the law calls advanced drunk- and impaired-driving prevention technology. The statute defines it as a system that can “passively monitor the performance of a driver of a motor vehicle to accurately identify whether that driver may be impaired” and then “prevent or limit motor vehicle operation if an impairment is detected.” Congress wrote into its findings that this equipment “must be standard equipment in all new passenger motor vehicles.”

It is not a kill switch operated by someone outside your car, as some have claimed. The determination is made inside the vehicle by the vehicle’s software. NHTSA has admitted, “There is no clear and consistent engineering or industry definition of ‘impairment.’” The agency went on to explain that impaired “can mean anything that diminishes a person’s ability to perform driving tasks,” which it says could include drowsy driving and distracted driving alongside drunk driving. So there is an undefined standard with automatic enforcement, and no way to appeal a decision your car makes on its own. The agency laid out three options: detect blood alcohol, monitor the driver for impairment, or do both. The alcohol research uses infrared light shone through the skin of your hand at the ignition or the steering wheel. The driver-monitoring option is a camera pointed at your face. Suppliers told NHTSA about eye-gaze systems that track where your eyes are focused, and about in-cabin sensing that tracks head position and attention. The rules have been delayed in Congress, but efforts to kill the mandate altogether have gone nowhere. The mandate is law and the engineering is behind schedule.

A camera in your dashboard is not yet a panopticon, but it is certain that eventually, the records will be available to somebody who is not in the car. In August 2024, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued General Motors for collecting driving data from more than 1.5 million Texas drivers and selling it to LexisNexis and Verisk, which resold it to insurers who used it to raise rates and deny coverage. Drivers had no idea. In January 2025, the Federal Trade Commission entered an order barring GM from disclosing driver behavior data to consumer reporting agencies for five years, and by 2026 GM had agreed to a multimillion-dollar settlement over the practice. Event data recorders in your car are already subpoenaed in criminal cases and pulled in civil discovery. Telematics data has been used in litigation for years.

Take all the info as one reality. Congress has mandated a camera watching the driver of every new car. Automakers have already demonstrated that they will sell what their cars observe. Courts already compel production of what cars record. Nothing in section 24220 forbids the resulting data from leaving the vehicle, and no federal privacy statute stands in the way. The requirement to build the eye is on the books, and it will happen. Unless the law is changed, it was never a question of “If.”

“If you’re not doing anything wrong...”

Defenders of mass surveillance often say, “If you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.” Whenever I hear that, my eyes nearly roll out of my head. The assumption is that “wrong” is a fixed quantity, defined however the person saying it wants. In the realm of surveillance, “wrong” is whatever the people controlling the databases say it is. Every surveillance system will eventually be operated by people who regard your convictions as a problem.

In 2012, Justice Sotomayor wrote that GPS monitoring generates “a precise, comprehensive record of a person’s public movements that reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.” She then quoted a New York decision cataloging what such data exposes, including “trips to the psychiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic, the AIDS treatment center, the strip club, the criminal defense attorney, the by-the-hour motel, the union meeting, the mosque, synagogue or church, the gay bar and on and on.” She concluded, “Awareness that the Government may be watching chills associational and expressive freedoms.”

This was Bentham’s design. You may or may not be watched by people who will someday disagree with you about what “wrong” is, and you will never know which. Are you willing to take that chance on the conviction that you will never be interesting to the watching eyes? It’s a wager you are placing on behalf of your children and grandchildren.

The enemy test

When thinking about new powers, I always like to ask, “How would my worst opponent use this against me?” If the answer is frightening, it is likely too much power. You may trust the authorities who currently hold the power, but authorities in power are temporary, so your trust in any particular administration or individual is beside the point.

After September 11, the NSA began collecting Americans’ telephone records in bulk under an interpretation of the Patriot Act that Congress never authorized. The stated purpose was terrorism. In 2020, the Ninth Circuit held in United States v. Moalin that the bulk collection of telephone metadata violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and may also have violated the Fourth Amendment. That was seven years after Edward Snowden heroically disclosed the program’s existence. The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, reviewing the same program, concluded that it had not identified a single instance in which it made a concrete difference in a counterterrorism investigation. So a program with no demonstrated benefit ran for over a decade against millions of Americans who were never suspected of anything, and it wasn’t stopped until a whistleblower stepped up and said something.

In February 2022 in Canada, truckers blockaded downtown Ottawa and several border crossings for weeks. The government invoked Canada’s Emergencies Act and issued an economic order directing banks to freeze the accounts of people connected to the protest, without a court order, charges, or hearings. Financial institutions were given a list of names, and the banks complied. 257 accounts were frozen, totaling approximately $8 million, along with 170 Bitcoin wallet addresses. Assistant Commissioner Michel Arcand later told a House of Commons committee that freezing the accounts was intended to encourage the protesters in Ottawa to leave and discourage anyone else from joining them. This is the panopticon functioning in the bank. There was no evidence of a crime, and there doesn’t need to be when a man with a mortgage and a truck payment can be forced into submission without ever being arrested or charged. Make sure he can’t buy groceries, and compliance will follow.

On January 16, 2026, the Federal Court of Appeal held that the government never demonstrated reasonable grounds to believe a national emergency existed, and that the freezing scheme was “ad hoc and fraught with confusion,” conducted without a warrant or specific procedures. The searches, the court concluded, were not reasonable within the meaning of section 8 of the Charter. Ottawa has asked the Supreme Court of Canada to hear the case, so the fight is still ongoing. But winning a court case in 2026 cannot undo the damage of 2022. These were truck drivers, not terrorists or hardened criminals. They were doing something the government didn’t like, so they were attacked through the institutions that were supposed to serve them.

Informers paid by the head

Under Queen Elizabeth, the Act of 1593 punished anyone over the age of sixteen who stayed away from the parish church for a month or attended what the statute called unlawful conventicles. The penalty was imprisonment without bail until the offender conformed, and permanent exile from the realm if he refused for three months. John Bunyan was arrested in November 1660 under that act, refused to promise to stop preaching, and spent the next 12 years in the Bedford jail.

After the Restoration, Parliament passed the set of laws called the Clarendon Code. The Conventicle Act of 1664 added the rule that no more than five persons beyond a household could gather for worship outside the parish church, on pain of fines, imprisonment, and transportation. When Parliament renewed the act in 1670, the new version allowed a single justice of the peace to convict a preacher on the word of a single informer, and it paid that informer a third of the fines collected. The English government monetized the whole fiasco. If the powers that existed wanted to know who was preaching in a barn outside Bedford, it was profitable for somebody in the barn to report it. They didn’t need cameras; they just needed to offer a few bucks and instill the constant fear that someone in their midst might report them. Similar things happen in North Korea every day.

In 1677, the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith was published anonymously, because attaching their names would have identified the signers as enemies of the state and church. In 1689, after the Glorious Revolution and the Act of Toleration, they were legally allowed to assemble, so they republished the confession under their own names. Those were the men who wrote that “God alone is Lord of the conscience, and hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are in any thing contrary to his word, or not contained in it.” The same paragraph goes further, and says, “to believe such doctrines, or obey such commands out of conscience, is to betray true liberty of conscience,” and requiring “an implicit faith, and an absolute and blind obedience, is to destroy liberty of conscience, and reason also” (2LBCF 21.2). Men who had watched neighbors get paid to report an “unauthorized” sermon understood that a conscience under observation is a conscience under pressure.

The sword and the eye

Investigating a particular person for a particular crime is ordinary justice. Paul says the magistrate carries the sword as God’s servant for our good, “a terror not to good conduct, but to bad,” and “an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer” (Rom. 13:3-4). Peter says the same, that governors are “sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good” (1 Pet. 2:14).

The point made by Paul and Peter is that the sword follows the deed. It is aimed at the wrongdoer, and the singular matters, because it presupposes a particular person who has done a particular thing. In other words, there is a specific accusation, and a specific answer. The magistrate’s authority begins with identifying the unlawful act and works backward to the person who committed it. The requirement of the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution that a warrant describe “the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized” is a civil expression of the same logic. Particularity is what distinguishes a magistrate from a warden.

Total, permanent, suspicionless watching over a whole population inverts the biblical order. It begins with everyone and narrows afterward, if at all. There are no defendants because there is no decision on who the defendant will be. The entire population is a standing pool of suspects being treated as guilty until proven innocent of unspecified, previously undetermined crimes. That is not the sword described in Romans 13.

Exhaustive knowledge of every man’s comings and goings is an incommunicable attribute of God. The surveillance state is counterfeiting something that belongs to God alone, and counterfeit omniscience in the hands of those who can imprison you is a disaster waiting to happen. Jesus said, “Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. Therefore whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed on the housetops. I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that have nothing more that they can do. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him!” (Luke 12:2-5). He had just warned the disciples about the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy (Luke 12:1). The exposure He promises is first a warning. Every secret you have is already known, and the Judge who knows it does not need a warrant, a subpoena, or a camera on a pole. That is why “I have nothing to hide” is the wrong answer for a Christian. You already know you have plenty to hide and that God has seen it all. What the gospel offers is a verdict already rendered in Christ, which is the only reason a man can stand under total exposure without terror. The men Jesus spoke to directly were about to be hunted down for preaching, and He told them the worst their hunters could do was kill them.

I don’t expect American Christians to be rounded up by the end of the year. That isn’t the point. Tyranny rarely opens by shutting down churches. It opens by building the apparatus and persuading everyone that the apparatus is for their good, and that part is well underway. The historic positions of the church on sex, marriage, the nature of man, gender roles, creation, and the exclusivity of Christ are already described as harmful by some institutions with real power. Once a belief is harmful, holding it stops being “doing nothing wrong” and becomes a reason to watch, then to restrict, then to prosecute. Ask yourself what a man who holds your file and disapproves of your convictions would do with 526 photographs of your car.

Trusting that no watcher can usurp the omniscient, omnipresent God who does all things well is what makes Christians useful in this fight rather than hysterical about it. We can be vocal without panic, because our safety has never depended on how the argument turns out. We should fight warrantless searches and bulk data collection, oppose the cameras, and insist on the Fourth Amendment, using every ordinary means available to citizens: city council meetings, contract votes, state legislatures, and the courts. Americans have privileges most of the world can only imagine, and those privileges have given the church room to work. We should exercise our rights as citizens while trusting the sovereign hand of God.

Langley wants us to compromise. May it never happen. The freedom of your children and grandchildren is at stake.

• Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon; or, The Inspection-House (Dublin: Thomas Byrne, 1791).

• Chatrie v. United States, 609 U.S. (2026).

• Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. (2018).

• “Schmidt v. Norfolk: The Flock Camera Lawsuit,” DeFlock ILM.

• Katherine Hafner, WHRO, February 11, 2026.

• CNN, August 26, 2026.

• WFLA, August 2026.

• Orange County District Attorney press release, April 2026.

• NBC News, August 31, 2026.

• American Civil Liberties Union.

• Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Pub. L. No. 117-58, § 24220, 135 Stat. 429 (2021).

• National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

• Office of the Attorney General of Texas.

• United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400, 415 (2012), quoting People v. Weaver, 12 N.Y.3d 433, 441-42 (2009).

• United States v. Moalin, 973 F.3d 977 (9th Cir. 2020).

• Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, Report on the Telephone Records Program Conducted under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and on the Operations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Washington, DC: PCLOB, January 23, 2014), 11.

• Canada (Attorney General) v. Canadian Civil Liberties Association, 2026 FCA 6 (January 16, 2026).

• Religion Act 1592, 35 Eliz. 1, c. 1 (commonly dated 1593).

• Conventicle Act 1664, 16 Cha. 2, c. 4.

• Conventicles Act 1670, 22 Cha. 2, c. 1.

Ask a hundred people what freedom is, and most of them will describe an absence. Freedom is when nobody is telling me what to do. It’s the government off my back and the boss out of my inbox on Saturday. “I do what I want, when I want, in the way I want, and you should leave me alone.” I get it. If I have to classify myself politically, I am as libertarian as a Christian can be. But freedom from government and freedom from first principles and immortal standards are two different things. Freedom from anything and everything produces only people who are anxious, lonely, and exhausted, with too many options and no way to discern what’s best.

In 1958, Isaiah Berlin called this negative liberty. It is freedom understood as the absence of interference. He set it against positive liberty, which is the idea that to be free is to be master of yourself, governed by your higher nature instead of your appetites. Berlin preferred the negative kind. Positive liberty, he warned, is the one tyrants abuse when they claim to be freeing you from your own worse self, usually at gunpoint. True enough. As a limit on what the state may do to you, negative liberty is good and necessary. But if all of life is governed by negative liberty, you will knock out enough walls that you eventually remove the floor.

Plato’s Warning

Plato had watched Athenian democracy execute his teacher Socrates, and in the Republic he traced how a city that loves freedom above everything else eventually eats itself. Such a city comes to treat every desire as equal and every restraint as tyranny. Fathers defer to sons. Teachers flatter students. The old copy the young because they’re afraid of sounding harsh. Socrates describes the appetites entering a young man’s soul when he believes negative freedom is the highest good. He explains, “insolence they term breeding, and anarchy liberty, and waste magnificence, and impudence courage.” Once that happens, a man no longer has a way to sort out his own desires. “His life has neither law nor order, and this distracted existence he terms joy and bliss and freedom.” Plato calls him the democratic man, and the democratic man becomes the tyrant.

The tyrant has abandoned restraints so he can do whatever he pleases, and Plato calls him the least free human being alive. “He has to be master of others when he is not master of himself: he is like a diseased or paralytic man who is compelled to pass his life, not in retirement, but fighting and combating with other men.” Socrates said, “He who is the real tyrant, whatever men may think, is the real slave, and is obliged to practice the greatest adulation and servility, and to be the flatterer of the vilest of mankind. He has desires which he is utterly unable to satisfy, and has more wants than any one, and is truly poor.”

Plato argued the same thing in the Gorgias, through a young aristocrat named Callicles who told Socrates weakness dresses itself up as virtue. A strong man throws off every convention so he can take whatever he wants. “Luxury and intemperance and license, if they be provided with means, are virtue and happiness; all the rest is a mere bauble, agreements contrary to nature, foolish talk of men, nothing worth.” Socrates responds by describing two men, each of whom owns a set of casks. The first man’s casks are sound, so once he has filled them he is finished and can go do something else. The second man’s “vessels are leaky and unsound, and night and day he is compelled to be filling them, and if he pauses for a moment, he is in an agony of pain.” A man organized entirely around appetite has signed up for the second set of casks.

Plato’s subject is one man’s soul. He is describing what happens inside a person once the absence of restraint becomes the whole of what he wants.

License is the real want

In the 1640s, John Milton published tracts arguing for the loosening of England’s divorce law and for printing without a license, and the pamphlet war that came back at him treated him as a man dissolving public morals. His answer, in a sonnet, was that he and his critics were using one word for two different things:

That bawle for freedom in their sencelesse mood,
And still revolt when truth would set them free.
Licence they mean when they cry libertie;
For who loves that, must first be wise and good.

Milton was wrong about divorce, and his later theology drifted well outside Christian orthodoxy. But he understood the difference between liberty and license. In Paradise Lost he explains the mechanism Plato described. In the last book, the angel Michael explains to Adam why men end up under tyrants:

Since thy original lapse, true Libertie
Is lost, which alwayes with right Reason dwells
Twinn’d, and from her hath no dividual being:
Reason in man obscur’d, or not obeyd,
Immediately inordinate desires
And upstart Passions catch the Government
From Reason, and to servitude reduce
Man till then free.

Liberty and reason are twins, and they die together. Let the appetites take reason from inside a man, and he is a slave before any tyrant has come within a hundred miles of him. The political bondage follows, and Milton says it is a judgment. God “Subjects him from without to violent Lords.” A people can lose its outward liberty only after inward liberty was discarded.

Milton also shuts the door on the obvious overcorrection of answering the license with more rules. In Areopagitica he asked what would be left of goodness in a country where every decision had been made for you in advance. “If every action, which is good or evil in man at ripe years, were to be under pittance and prescription and compulsion, what were virtue but a name, what praise could be then due to well-doing, what gramercy to be sober, just, or continent?” He wrote, “When God gave [Adam] reason, He gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing.”

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The Answer to License is Not Law

If license is the problem, the great need is not to tighten the rules, rebuild the fences, and teach people to say no. It’s a natural instinct (just ask any parent of a teenager), but it’s a trap. Sinclair Ferguson explains, “Antinomianism and legalism are not so much antithetical to each other as they are both antithetical to grace. This is why Scripture never prescribes one as the antidote for the other. Rather grace, God’s grace in Christ in our union with Christ, is the antidote to both.”

Ferguson’s diagnosis of man is that “everyone is a legalist at heart. Indeed, if anything, that is the more evident in antinomians.” He traces the root all the way back to Eden, where the serpent worked “a divorce between God’s revealed will and his gracious, generous character,” so that “God thus became to her ‘He-whose-favor-has-to-be-earned.’” The libertine and the Pharisee both view God through that same lens. One of them runs from God and the other tries to pay Him. The result is that neither one of them is free, and both of them are alone.

When Paul was writing to churches under pressure to return to the Old Covenant law as a condition of acceptance, he could have told them to add rules for their own protection. Instead, he said, “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Gal. 5:1). Herman Ridderbos comments, “Christ did not set us free for slavery but for freedom!”

Christian freedom begins as a negative. It is a freedom from. Samuel Bolton describes how a believer is cut loose from the bondage of sin and Satan, the law as a covenant of works, hell itself, and the wrath of God. “This is no imaginary freedom,” Bolton writes; “it is a freedom indeed, a true and real freedom. Whom the son makes free are free indeed.” The way to that freedom is far more significant than clearing obstacles out of your own path. G. W. Hansen explains, “Our freedom is not the result of our decisions or our actions. God acted in history on the cross and through the resurrection to set us free.”

What Freedom is For

If Paul stopped there, he would only have handed us a holier version of Berlin’s conclusion. Paul identifies the believer’s freedom, but he also assigns a responsibility. “For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another” (Gal. 5:13). You were set free for a purpose. The verb Paul uses, translated as “serve one another,” is one used to describe a slave’s labor. The man Christ liberated is told to enslave himself, in love, to his brothers. He has been freed from every master so that he can take up the one kind of service that suits a free man. What Plato wanted, he was unable to produce, but Paul says that man really does exist. Socrates ends the Republic’s long argument by declaring that the happiest man is “the most royal man and king over himself.” Paul says only Christ makes men like that.

This is the positive liberty Berlin was nervous about, the higher self governing the lower. For two centuries the “higher self” has been whatever the state or the party or the age decided you ought to want, and men have been marched toward it in chains. But the Christian answer is that the higher self must look to Christ. A freedom mastered by him is the one kind of self-government no tyrant can imitate. For a tyrant to be successful, he would first have to unseat Christ, and he can’t. Christian freedom has the one thing negative liberty can never supply. It has a floor called God’s law, which for the Christian has stopped being a ladder he climbs toward acceptance. Paul wrote, “For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Gal. 5:14). Ferguson points out that the legalist and the antinomian have both identified the wrong culprit. Paul’s whole argument in Romans 7 is that indwelling sin is the real trouble, but the law is “good” and “righteous” and “spiritual” and “holy.” “To abolish the law, then, would be to execute the innocent.” The law says, “do this and live,” but the gospel says, “live, and then you will do this.” The law demands holiness; the gospel produces it.

The 1689 London Baptist Confession says, “God alone is Lord of the conscience, and has left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are in any thing contrary to his word, or not contained in it.” Then it says what Milton described: “the requiring of an implicit faith, an absolute and blind obedience, is to destroy liberty of conscience and reason also” (2LBC 21.2). Liberty and reason, side-by-side, standing or falling together. The confession frees the conscience from every human tyrant, the fence-builder, the guilt-peddler, the manipulator with an agenda, but at the same time binds it to God. The conscience is freed from men because it belongs to God.

Devouring One Another

Paul describes a community that defines freedom as uninterrupted appetite. He warns, “But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another” (Gal. 5:15). Life without any restraint at all turns a people into savage beasts. Plato called it anarchy.

In 1954, Russell Kirk was invited to speak at the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, and he declined in a letter writing,

If you will forgive such an answer to your courteous letter, I am afraid I scarcely see eye to eye with you people. On particular issues we are very close; on philosophical postulates, a great gulf is fixed between us. I never call myself an individualist; and I wish that you people hadn’t clutched that dreary ideology to your bosom. Politically, it ends in anarchy; spiritually it is a hideous solitude. I do not even call myself an “individual”; I hope I am a person. I am all in favor of individuality, and all against individualism.

Kirk’s point was that people have unlimited options and almost no obligations. Marriages end because somebody stopped feeling “in love.” A man can live anywhere, stay single or get married, believe whatever he wants, set his schedule, and tour the world, but has no idea why he should get out of bed in the morning. Call it freedom if you’d like, but that doesn’t seem very free. The man who can do “anything” is Callicles with his leaking casks, filling them night and day. He’s Plato’s tyrant, master of a city and slave to whatever appetite is loudest that day. He’s Kirk’s individualist, alone in the world without a meaningful destination. Christ offers a freedom he paid for, built on a foundation of a good and righteous law. If your idea of freedom is that nothing should ever stop you, you’ve stepped into a bottomless pit and didn’t bring a ladder.

It has been fascinating watching the rapid movement of the “AI Revolution” and then listening to the prophecies of where it all leads. The truth is, nobody really knows. In the short term, I think it’s undeniable that there will be significant challenges in the labor market. I am concerned about what it does to our willingness and ability to think and reason as a people. I am grateful for the many ways I have found to use AI in my own life and work, which have made me more efficient and productive. I am highly skeptical of the claims that it will make all of us rich. Like many of the technologies that came before it, AI is certainly a game-changer in many ways. But we are continually being told that we have to “keep up” and beat other nations in capabilities and advancement instead of slowing down and asking basic, important questions.

There are several prominent voices now commenting that AI engineers have long asked whether they could do things without asking the more important question of whether they should. It is a fair question, but the insinuation that it hasn’t been asked at all misses the point.

In 1960, Norbert Wiener argued that a machine which learns will pursue the goal we actually give it to pursue rather than the goal we meant, and then we can only notice the difference after the machine has acted on it. In a 1948 study, Wiener coined the term Cybernetics, or the scientific study of control and communication processes shared by living organisms and machines. His focus was systems that regulate themselves through feedback. On a small scale, if you have ever asked an AI agent to create an image you had in your mind and got something back completely different, you understand a basic principle of his argument. In other words, there’s no way to know what you’re going to get until after it is done and it depends entirely on whether or not you understand the input the machine wants in order to give you the outcome you want.

Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA at MIT in the mid-1960s, one of the earliest programs capable of holding a conversation with a person. It worked by picking up on keywords in what someone typed and turning them back into questions or comments like a therapist who just mirrors what the patient says. Weizenbaum’s intent was to demonstrate how shallow this kind of exchange really was. Instead, knowing full well it was only a program, his own secretary once asked him to leave the room so she could talk to ELIZA privately. Ten years later, he published Computer Power and Human Reason to argue that certain judgments should never be handed to a machine, no matter how convincingly the machine might seem able to make them.

Hans Jonas published The Imperative of Responsibility in 1979 with the simple claim that the ethics we inherited were built for a smaller world. In that older world, what people did mostly affected those nearby, and the results showed up within a lifetime, but modern technology has changed the scale. He pointed to things like nuclear power, industrial pollution, and genetic engineering. Jonas’ main point was that our old moral rules no longer fit this new reality, and that ethics needed to shift its priorities toward long-term responsibility.

C. S. Lewis published The Abolition of Man in 1943, before the first stored-program computer was ever booted up. He warned that if we treat all moral values as mere personal feelings rather than real truths, the people who control education and technology will eventually gain the power to reshape human nature itself. Once that happens, a small group of conditioners can decide what future generations should want and turn the rest of us into products of their design. The final result would be the end of anything recognizably human.

Aldous Huxley published Brave New World in 1932. In Huxley’s world, there is no need to ban books or burn them, because nobody reads them. The population is kept content through pleasure and a drug called soma that dissolves any discomfort. Huxley’s warning was that we would hand our freedom over to a tyrant in exchange for comfort.

In 1949, George Orwell published 1984 and imagined the reverse of Huxley. Here the control is total and unmistakable. Society is a panopticon under constant surveillance by a Party that manufactures its own truth, and a language called “Newspeak.” In time, the things that cannot be said will fall out of the thinking of the people. Orwell feared a world where information is withheld, and with that, a rewriting of history to serve those in power.

Ray Bradbury published Fahrenheit 451 in 1953, and though it is remembered as a story about burning books, Bradbury insisted the fire was never the real danger. In his telling, the people had stopped reading books long before the state began to burn them. They preferred the wall-sized screens with the sound piped constantly into their ears. Censorship was the final step.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argued in 1985 that our age was drifting toward Huxley’s world rather than Orwell’s. The greatest threat he saw was what we love. The instrument of ruin would arrive as a source of endless entertainment, and we would embrace the very things that eroded our capacity to reason. Later, in Technopoly, he argued one of the most important questions about any new technology is what it undoes.

So the “should we” question has been asked repeatedly for several decades. Weizenbaum is assigned in computer science ethics courses all the time. Jonas shaped German bioethics law. So what is really going on?

The question requires a telos

Telos is the inherent purpose, goal, or final end toward which a thing naturally aims or develops. Aristotle explained how you cannot judge whether a flute player is good without knowing what flute playing is for, and you cannot judge whether a man’s life is good without knowing what a man is for. Goodness is relative to function. If you ask the members of a corporate ethics board a telos question, you are likely going to get answers that are all measurable. They will talk about demographic bias, potential misuse, benchmark performance, privacy exposure, or downstream labor effects, but they will not talk about whether a human being is better off because of their company or products. That doesn’t really matter, and to answer it requires knowing what human beings are for. It is a question about human purpose and where meaning comes from, which doesn’t really matter in a technology company.

The “should we” question is easily reduced to nothing more than a risk assessment. If there is a risk, the focus shifts to mitigation, which is designed to modify a product rather than eliminate it. It may slow down production for a time so work can be done on new ways to deliver the product as safely as possible. There will be a cost/benefit analysis for investors, but asking a company to say “we will not do this” on principle because we really are concerned about the telos is like speaking Chinese to an Alaskan Salmon.

Many risk management offices and ethics boards are filled with well-meaning people who take harm seriously. But they also know saying “never” is not an option. They may want to build something a little different, or make a small change here or an adjustment there, but cutting it altogether because it is not ultimately good for humanity and the downstream effects could be disastrous won’t happen.

There is no “we”

Lewis said that what we call man’s power over nature turns out to be the power of some men over other men, with nature as their instrument, and that the group holding the power grows smaller with each generation of conditioners. That is the flaw hiding inside the question “should we build this?” It assumes a “we” that can weigh the matter and say no. But if Lewis is right, there is no such “we.” Do you really want our future decided entirely by Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Elon Musk? Do we trust them enough to give them that kind of power?

The same logic scales from the firm to the nation. We are told the real question is who will be the first to build? If we hesitate, China will not, and so restraint on our part is surrender. It’s an argument from fear. Fear of losing the race, so we need to keep running. We will deal with any consequences later.

No doubt, the competition is real. No doubt, everyone is rightly concerned about who holds the power. But the argument takes the one question worth asking, whether we should build this at all, and replaces it with whether they or we should be the ones to build it. In other words, the second question answers the first, and once we frame it that way, “should we?” no longer has a place to stand, because every objection can be met by pointing across the ocean. The acceleration becomes justification, so how can we ever make it stop? It lets a company present its commercial ambition as patriotic duty. Shouldn’t we all be scared?

And suppose “we” win the race. What have we actually won? Keeping up says nothing about the kind of people we become while we do it. Are we desperate for more weapons of war? Do we need more sophisticated surveillance? Are we meeting actual human needs, or are we handing the tools of the West’s downfall to firms with different priorities than civil liberties and individual well-being? When our focus is on winning the race, we get to a finish line we never agreed to or asked for.

What good are the universities?

Very little research is required to find that the study of humanities in most universities has been gutted. Sixty years of professional humanities scholarship went into establishing that there is no fixed human nature to appeal to. Out with Plato, Aristophanes, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy. And then, out with humanities altogether. When West Virginia University eliminated 28 academic programs and 143 faculty positions in September 2023, including every foreign language major on the Morgantown campus, the cuts were shaped by a state funding formula keyed to workforce development. The programs closed, and no measurable capacity was lost. When the institutions serve their students Flaming Hot Cheetos, don’t expect them, in turn, to deliver Michelin-starred Curry. It is easy to blame the robotics lab and let the English and philosophy departments play victim. But what are the remaining humanities departments even doing? There is plenty to choose from. One PhD dissertation from Cambridge University is entitled: “Exploring gendered embodiment in transgender and gender-diverse adolescents at the intersection of exercise and eating behaviours, social inclusion, and mental health: Towards a desire-centred approach in paediatric gender-affirming healthcare and research.” Delicious Flaming Hot Cheetos for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. No thank you.

We can ask “should we?” all day, but who gets to answer the question? I hope it’s not the illustrious scholars at Cambridge or any of the other “most prestigious” universities from around the world.

Cain’s city and Bezalel’s workshop

In Genesis 4, Cain builds a city and names it for his son (4:17). His descendants invent animal husbandry, the lyre and pipe, and instruments of bronze and iron (4:20-22). Four verses later, Lamech tells his two wives that he has killed a man for wounding him, and that if Cain’s avenger came sevenfold his own comes seventy-sevenfold (4:23-24). In the biblical text, there is no interval between a new capability and its use against a neighbor.

Exodus 31 reveals the other side. The Lord tells Moses that he has called Bezalel by name and filled him with the Spirit of God, “with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship” (31:3). His skills are a gift. The object is specified by someone other than the craftsman, item by item, down to the dimensions of the Ark of the Covenant and the composition of the anointing oil. Bezalel is a superb workman with a specific task and a noble end. A desirable end must be given from outside the work. Engineers inside the project can’t reliably deliver the end. An ethics board within a firm won’t act with pure motives, despite good intentions. What remains are institutions that operate without ever actually wondering what man is for. There may be a momentary pause in thinking, but there’s a race to be “won” and a product to deliver, so the real moral questions are quickly suppressed.

What man is for

I don’t have five points that would slow the race down, and I am suspicious of anyone who says they do. Cain built his city, and his descendants turned their new tools against a neighbor. Nothing in the centuries since suggests we have even considered leaving a larger interval between capabilities and their large-scale use. To say that a technology might not be good for a human being, you have to believe there is such a thing as a human being, and that a human being is for something. Bezalel’s skill was a gift, and his work was good because God handed the end to him, and only God has the standing to determine the desired end.

So the task before ordinary people is to remain the kind of people who still know what a human being is for, when nearly every institution around us has decided to ignore it. We still have real agency. We decide how we use the tools and what we refuse to hand over to them. We keep thinking, while we are being trained not to, refuse the trade of freedom for comfort that Huxley predicted, and hold the conviction that we are not raw material for someone else’s design. The ability to think slowly and carefully is not a technical skill. They are principles and habits that can be worn down, but we can work every day to hold onto them, we don’t have to give up on them. Nobody knows where the AI revolution leads, but we don’t have to keep up in the race to know what we are for. The old questions are still the ones worth asking.

It seems that, in these modern times, the highest praise we give to a film, a song, a novel, or a room in a gallery is that it has done its job the moment we feel something. We don’t tend to ask anything more of it. We don’t often ponder whether a poem is true or false; we don’t tend to think about whether a novel can make a person better or worse; we usually fail to ask questions about a painter’s objective or marvel at a sculptor’s craft. Now, it just has to land with something more significant than a shoulder shrug.

Matthew Arnold was one of the most listened-to critics in the English-speaking world in the second half of the 1800s, a school inspector by trade who spent his evenings deciding what an educated person ought to read and why. In 1880 he wrote an introduction to a poetry anthology, an essay called “The Study of Poetry,” and he opened it with a prediction:

“There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialised itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.”

Arnold was watching Christianity lose its grip on educated Europe. Geology had stretched the age of the earth past recognition, Darwin had supplied a story about origins that needed no Eden, and German scholars were taking the Gospels apart sentence by sentence. Arnold didn’t think the doctrines would survive the century, but he wasn't particularly sad about it since he had a replacement ready. Religion, he suggested, made one fatal mistake: it tied its emotion to facts, to an actual creation and an actual empty tomb, and now the facts are giving way. But poetry, he said, never made that mistake. Poetry never asked you to believe its claims were true. It only asked you to feel them. So, for Arnold, poetry is safe exactly where religion is exposed. Hand the sacred over to art, and you get to keep the reverence after you have let go of the beliefs.

Here was Arnold’s wager: If you keep the cathedral and dismiss its God, you can let beauty stand in the emptied sanctuary doing the pastor’s job, consoling us in our hardships and binding a people together around something higher than appetite. Arnold thought it was a rescue. He could see what was coming for a civilization that loses its religion and puts nothing in its place, and he thought great art would take over and do the job. He called poetry “a criticism of life,” a way of judging how we live against the highest things we know, and he believed we could still tell the highest from the low. Keep the greatest lines of the greatest poets in your head, he said, and use them “as a touchstone to other poetry”; it is “an infallible touchstone for detecting the presence or absence of high poetic quality.” Judge everything against the best. Refuse to rank a minor early poet with Milton. There is a real order of worth, and a trained soul can feel it.

Well, I think it’s safe to say we’ve tried Arnold’s experiment in the West for over a century now and it has been a complete failure. But it failed in a way he never saw coming because it actually failed twice.

The first failure is the one he should have seen coming. The consolation of a belief doesn’t last long once a civilization stops holding the belief to be true. An unbeliever can be genuinely moved, deeply impressed, and overwhelmed by a requiem or a painting on canvas or a perfectly worded verse. But the deep reverence Arnold was counting on to hold a whole people together was the aftershock of a conviction. A Christian at a graveside is steadied by the resurrection because he believes it actually happened. A body walked out of an actual tomb, so the steadying force is the truth of the matter, not the present feeling. If you take out the fact and rely on the feeling, it might provide some balance for a while, but it eventually thins out and cuts away the foundation. Arnold thought the emotion could be separated from the truth-claim and still mean something, generation after generation. That’s a rather tall order at the scale of an entire culture. The reverence in the concert hall is real, but it’s borrowed. It is revived by a memory of when everyone believed music pointed at something. Teach enough generations that transcendence is a mood they produce in their own skulls, what will remain? It loses its authority to command anyone. The galleries are hushed, but fewer people can even figure out why. Believe it or not, the benches in front of paintings on the wall aren’t just there to take a break so you can make sure you didn’t miss anything on social media.

The second failure is the ruin of Arnold’s own life’s work. If you cut beauty off from truth, you lose the standard along with it. Arnold wanted poetry to save high culture, to preserve a real “best” against the “to each his own, beauty is in the eye of the beholder” leveling that was on its way with mass democracy and mass print. A secular critic can still judge, of course. Nobody has to believe in God to hear that Bach goes deeper than the jingle in a car commercial. But the trouble sits underneath the judgment. Once you have said that art’s job is to move me rather than to show me something true, you have handed final authority to feeling, and feelings have no reply for the man who shrugs and moves on without a further thought. The critic can still rank, but on what basis does he say his ranking is anything more than his personal taste? “Is this good” becomes “does this move me,” and then even worse, “does this move me this week,” or “right now?” The touchstone falls out of his hand.

Arnold’s entire project needed the one thing he was discarding. He needed a real order of value outside the self that a judgment could be right or wrong about. Christianity was always the answer. It taught that beauty was a signpost, that the glory in a Bach fugue or a Venetian dome was on loan from the God it was giving just a small glimpse of. Human art rises highest when it catches some of the splendor already poured into the world God made because it is passing on something that is true. Arnold tried to keep the signpost, but then eliminate the One the signpost was pointing to. He wanted all of us to set off on an objective trail with no objective end.

This is the trade the modern West made, and now we’re paying the price. We wanted the cathedral without biblically ordered worship, the moral seriousness of a people under judgment without any Judge. The Bible Arnold tried to ease out the door describes the mechanism he was counting on. What can be known about God, Paul writes, is plain in the things he has made, so that beauty is one of the ways the world keeps confessing its Maker (Romans 1:19-20). “Splendor and majesty are before him,” the psalmist says of the LORD, “strength and beauty are in his sanctuary” (Psalm 96:6).

Beauty has always been a signpost, and the ache it stirs is the pull of the One it points toward. If you stand in one of our beautiful, reverent, God-emptied galleries, what you will feel more than anything is the absence. You might be moved for a time, but without an objective end in sight, the movement will have no meaning.

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Years ago, when I was doing my master’s work, I was assigned Thucydides to read. History of the Peloponnesian War is a brick. I haven’t tried, but I think it could prop open a door. It is eight books on a squabble between two Greek city-states that ended twenty-four centuries ago. I assumed I was in for a long, dry march through troop movements and land grudges. I assumed I would survive it rather than enjoy it.

Thankfully, I was wrong. I have returned to Thucydides many times since my first read. It is good writing, full of intriguing speeches, numerous pearls of wisdom, and most of all, an honest author who tells you up front he might disappoint you. He knew his readers wanted a good story, but he also knew if he was going to write history, it would not always be the action-packed tale the reader longs for.

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Thucydides opens the whole work by explaining his method. He is describing how he handled the raw material of the war:

[Far] from permitting myself to derive it from the first source that came to hand, I did not even trust my own impressions, but it rests partly on what I saw myself, partly on what others saw for me, the accuracy of the report being always tried by the most severe and detailed tests possible.

He didn’t trust his own memory of the events he lived through, nor did he just accept what others said. Every account got cross-examined, checked against other reports, and then the surviving outcome made it onto the page. It is not an easy standard, and the cost is the reader’s interest:

The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future... I shall be content. In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.

The true version is the less entertaining version. The pleasing account with heroes and clean motives and a satisfying story arc would have likely won him more readers, but his goal was accuracy, not popularity. He called it “a possession for all time,” and that is exactly why we are still reading it today.

In many ways, Thucydides’ instinct is strange by our standards. The viral accounts of our day are designed to flatter the reader, or bend the facts for a more compelling narrative.

Changing Words

Thucydides described the civil war that tore through Corcyra, and he paused to point out something he had seen happen across the Greek world once the war began. Society split into factions, and he observed:

Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any.

Words flip and recklessness becomes courage, caution is turned into cowardice, and moderation is weakness. The ability to see more than one side of a question gets redefined as an inability to commit. The moment the factions hardened, the descriptive words stopped describing reality and started determining allegiance. The meanings of words depended entirely on which side you were on.

This is the collapse of shared factual reality. Once a society splits deeply enough, the conversation changes. The concern for what actually happened fades to the background while the meaning of words moves to the forefront. Thucydides watched it happen, and he told us it would keep happening, “as long as the nature of mankind remains the same.”

In its modern iteration, this game is played with things like “Misinformation,” which can mean “a true thing my tribe would rather you not repeat,” or “a true fact without all the details.” A man can do something and have one group call him a patriot while the other calls him a traitor. If Thucydides didn’t have a funny name and some recognition, one might read him and think he was doom scrolling X and commenting on it. But he recognized something that comes out in every generation: human beings under pressure will, by nature, react in predictable ways.

History belongs to whoever won the argument

Most of us have heard more than once that history is written by the winners, and it is not entirely untrue. The winners often name the war, canonize their dead, and conveniently lose the documents that made the whole ordeal look bad for them. But Thucydides shows us this is not always the case. He was an Athenian, and Athens lost. The Peloponnesian War ended with Sparta victorious, Athens’ walls pulled down, and its empire gone. And yet the most favored account of that war was written by a foe of Sparta. And not just any foe. Thucydides served Athens as a general, and after he failed to save a city, he was exiled. He died before his work was ever finished; it breaks off mid-sentence years before the war ended.

So the cliché needs to change. History is written by whoever wins the argument, not necessarily the battle. Sometimes all it takes is a more gifted writer. The printing press and universities helped in the past, and social media presence helps today. The victor on the field can still lose the fight over the story, but the story is what everyone eventually reads and believes. The survival of a story is often how propaganda gets mistaken for truth.

Disappointment in a textbook

I went looking through my daughter’s AP history textbook not long ago. These books are written for every AP student in the country, so the standard is applied across the board. These are written for the best and brightest kids, and I wanted to see what they were being taught as the story of the world.

Disappointed, but not surprised, the historical events the writers even bothered to address were concise summaries without context or nuance, and each one was presented as a simple historical fact. Nothing indicated that anyone at the time saw it differently. Nothing suggested that the meaning of an event was ever contested. How would I know? Because I’m old enough now that events I lived through are now in history books, and I know nothing was actually like what the short summaries make them out to be. Real events are always messier and far less obvious than a few sentences can describe.

Unfortunately, the entire AP history book was written that way. Every conflict had a tidy narrative of winners and losers. What they didn’t skimp on was the moral conclusion the students are supposed to reach. History is presented as black and white, but that is not how life works. It is not how the world operates. Real events are made by people with mixed motives and no idea how any of it will turn out, and a textbook that scrubs all of that away is teaching a fable with dates and names. No wonder it is so easy to convince a college freshman there is such a thing as “The Right Side of History.”

Nuance is king

Read a few biographies, and you learn quickly that nuance is king. It is the account. Better yet, read autobiographies, where a person tries to explain his own decisions from the inside, and you will quickly realize the tidy cause-and-effect textbook account is often nowhere near the truth. There is hesitation, second-guessing, and competing loyalties at play. The summary just tells you something happened with the result, but the autobiography tells you what he was afraid of, what he did not know, who he was trying to protect, and why the obvious choice did not seem so obvious at the time.

Almost all history gets flattened in the retelling, and the flattening tends to slant toward a conclusion the reteller wanted you to believe. That is no surprise. We learn that a war was fought and won, or a policy passed and failed. We get the raw facts (maybe) and the outcome, but we learn almost nothing about the other arguments. Yet, the details are where the honesty lives, and the details are the first thing cut when the story has a point to prove. Conclusions are easy when you’re down the road looking back. The deliberation that produced the conclusions is the hard part, and that’s the part that actually teaches us something.

I have to admit, there’s a bit of a trap I set for myself. A keen historian will notice my argument itself cuts against Thucydides. His account of the war is the standard text and we have very little from his own day to compare his account. Xenophon continued the story where Thucydides left off. Diodorus and Plutarch cover the same ground, but they wrote centuries later and rely heavily on his work to do it. So Thucydides is not really one witness among several. If my entire point is to distrust the single dominant narrative and demand corroboration, how do we know Thucydides’ account is accurate? Who cross-examines the cross-examiner?

To make matters even more challenging, he explains what he did with speeches he recorded. He admitted that he could not remember them word for word, understandably, and neither could his informants, so:

my habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said.

In other words, he wrote the speeches himself. He put words in the mouths of real men, according to what he could remember or what he judged the occasion called for. I admire his honesty, but he composed much of his own book’s most famous content as the words of others. I appreciate that he didn’t hide the fact. That gives the reader a note to remember that we are reading a general sense, not a transcript.

But this is the challenge. Every account is a human being deciding what to include and how to explain it. So what do we do? Not every story is written with the goal to deceive, but humans are humans. We have agendas and desired ends, so readers have to look at every account, including the ones we love, with some reasonable suspicion and keep reading until the facts are clear.

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Read widely

It is important to read more than one account of a historical event when you can, and even better if the accounts disagree with one another. Two historians drawing different conclusions show you the actual facts and the disputed matters. The disagreements are informative instead of a single confident narrator who never tells you his biases or methodology.

And please, go to the primary source. Read the actual documents. The internet makes it pretty easy in most cases. Don’t just accept someone else’s summary. Of course, there are times we have to rely on others. Most people cannot read fifth-century Greek, but the principle holds. Get as close to the source as your circumstances allow, and you will start to see where every layer of the story is bent in favor of a preferred narrative.

Clean stories rarely get printed. Reporters drop stories after one or two phone calls. Editors cut the details that don’t fit the headline, and then a few years later it ends up in a textbook as fact, and nobody checks the details. Have you ever looked to see when Washington Irving invented the myth that medieval Christians believed in a flat earth, and then the historians Draper and White turned his fiction into a thesis? Who actually knows that Christopher Columbus’s dispute with the Spanish court was about the size of the earth and not its shape? It was never about proving the earth wasn’t flat. What do you actually know about the Salem Witch Trials? Most people picture witches burned at the stake. The truth is, nineteen were hanged, and one was pressed to death. Not one was burned. Most of the time, before we learn about an event, it has been edited with an objective in mind. History is often written like a game of telephone, and the primary source is often neglected.

When we simply accept the textbook account, thinking gets siloed. The printed version becomes the respectable one, and eventually free speech gets squeezed. Alternative versions are marked as conspiracies, and anything said or written outside the accepted narrative gets branded as hateful or revisionist. But sometimes the person being shouted down is just correct. He went and read the primary sources. We really can read, study, and think for ourselves.

The cost and the possession

The flattering version of any story is always right there, telling you that your side has always been the heroes and the other side has always been the fools. It is red meat offering your favorite explanation, which is exactly why you shouldn’t trust it. Unfortunately, social media has only made it worse. Way worse. I am particularly amused every year when Supreme Court decisions drop, and everyone becomes a Constitutional law expert without ever reading the briefs, hearing the arguments, or examining the decisions. Accurate versions of events take time and effort. You have to read the long book, then take time to trace the footnotes. Develop your own convictions with relentless scrutiny. It is a slow, less flattering process, but it is true instead of tidy.

A shared factual reality is a possession, and like every possession worth having, it belongs to the people willing to work for it. Thucydides did the work twenty-four centuries ago and left it for us. The least we can do is refuse to hand our grandchildren a useless pile of fables.

In February 2017, The Washington Post told the world, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” The phrase had an obvious target if you know anything about American politics at the time, and it was the cousin to other well-worn phrases like “Every vote counts,” “Your voice matters,” or the particularly cringy, “This is the most important election of our lifetime.” I hope by now most people roll their eyes at this creed-like language of civic religion. I think Americans are at least smart enough to wonder, “Is any of it even true?”

James Madison and Pure Democracy

Long before the slogans, James Madison, widely hailed as the “Father of the Constitution,” highlighted the legitimate danger of a democracy. In Federalist No. 10, he wrote that pure democracies “have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property,” and that they “have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” But Madison’s thoughts were not original to him. Polybius, Thucydides, Aristotle, and Cicero had all watched free peoples govern themselves into ruin, and Madison was familiar with all of them.

Polybius, a Greek historian of the second century before Christ, described a cycle he called anacyclosis. Every simple government decays into its own corruption. Monarchy slides into tyranny. The best men overthrow the tyrant and rule as an aristocracy, which hardens into a grasping oligarchy. The people overthrow the oligarchs and rule themselves, and the democracy sinks into mob violence until a strongman promises order and takes everything. Then, take it from the top. “We promise, it will be better this time!”

Aristotle classified governments by how many rule, and whom they serve. One (monarchy), a few (aristocracy), or the many (polity) can each rule for the common good. Turned selfish, the same three become tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. Perhaps surprising to modern people in free societies, he counted democracy among the corruptions, because it always leads to the many governing for their own appetite against the good of the whole.

Plato went even further. In the eighth book of the Republic, he traced how a democracy destroys itself. It loves freedom above everything, and freedom without limit becomes license. License dissolves authority by degrees. Fathers no longer have control over their sons. Teachers lose influence over their students. Laws become meaningless to citizens. Eventually, every claim of authority over anyone is marked as oppression. When chaos ensues, a populist will step in, promise order, and eventually become the tyrant. The excess of liberty will turn into the excess of slavery.

Cicero provided a framework the founders would borrow. He believed that a state resting on one man, a small few, or the many alone will rot. Each system has a natural inclination toward tyranny, but if the three are all braided together, each one with a responsibility to check the others, the whole might stand.

Friction Built on Purpose

The American founders built the braid. The president would be decided by electors, not ultimately the voters. The intent was to cool popular passions and protect smaller states. The largest population centers would not be able to make decisions for the entire nation. Federal senators would answer to state legislatures. Every bill had to clear the House of Representatives and the Senate, and unelected judges could strike down laws that violated the Constitution. Power was split on purpose, scattered across states and branches so no single wave of feeling could take all of it at once. The Bill of Rights was another, even greater wall of security to protect specific rights of every citizen that could not be infringed by any branch of government. Your neighbors don’t have the right or ability to vote away your conscience, even though they will try.

America was never founded to carry out the popular will of the people. The checks and balances were designed to make the gears grind slowly through debate, deliberation, and eventual agreement. Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Since they are not, “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” Today, many bemoan the fact that government is inefficient and sluggish, but the very intent of the design was friction because the founders had a keen understanding of man’s nature.

In most states, only property owners could vote. Of course, there is a discussion to be had about what that meant for women and slaves, but cultural imbalance and national sin aside, there was an important underlying principle. The founders wanted ballots in hands with a stake in the outcome, on the plain logic that a man with skin in the game will weigh a choice more heavily than a man risking nothing.

Over more than two centuries of American history, the checks and balances have slowly slipped away. The Seventeenth Amendment handed Senate seats to the electorate. It cured the genuine corruption of bought seats and deadlocked statehouses, yet it also removed the federal brake Madison built into the system. Primaries rightly pried candidate selection from party bosses and gave it to whoever shows up; most of the country remains politically asleep, so the smaller, more zealous slice decides. Property qualifications disappeared entirely, leaving candidates free to court an uninvested majority less concerned with minority protections. Meanwhile, the administrative state swelled into a fourth branch that no one elects and almost no one can dismantle. Each step arrived wrapped in the language of more democracy; step by step the country drifted toward the pure majoritarianism the entire Western tradition warned against. Some of the changes were genuine improvements. Yet the system once treated as a danger is now assumed to be both right and desirable. Pundits and politicians invoke democracy and the Constitution in the same breath without ever noticing the contradiction.

The Ones Who Want the Job

Elections do one more thing the founders foresaw. They hand power to the people who most want it, and those who most want power are the wrong people to hold it. In the Republic, Plato’s guardians had to be dragged to rule the people. They were pulled from lives they would rather have kept, which made them all the more attractive candidates for the role. At America’s founding, George Washington had to be coaxed from Mount Vernon to become president. He did not want the office, but his reluctance was his highest credential. Unfortunately, campaigns reward the opposite instincts. Rare is the modern politician who does not have an appetite for office, the stomach to beg for money, the talent for playing to the cameras, and the willingness to swallow a season of humiliation. The system selects for ambition, not quality or credentials. Can anyone look at the political class today with a straight face and say we have the best and brightest calling the shots on behalf of people they are well acquainted with? Are they fooling anyone with the “everyday American” routine in local diners, gas stations, and softball podcast interviews?

The two-party system only makes things worse. A free people is told, every cycle, that no choice could matter more. Then, exactly two hand-picked, heavily funded operatives of the machinery are put forward with the warning that a vote for anyone but this party’s man or woman is wasted, or worse, handed to the enemy. When only two candidates are considered viable possibilities, it is easier to operate as black and white. Neighbors can more easily police one another for straying. Families can now tear apart along a nicely perforated line. Everyone can easily determine the difference between the good guys and the bad guys by simply asking, “Who did you vote for?” Democracies often bemoan political division, but the division is intentional. It raises money. It creates fear. It empowers the establishment. And when the chaos kicks off in the streets, the people are too occupied to realize the difference between the two candidates was really not all that different at all. The wars still get funded, the spending never gets pulled back, the surveillance continues to grow, the debt keeps compounding. The politicians will be loud about their supposed differences, but in the back rooms and hallways they are drinking from the same cup and taking money from the same hand. It turns out “the most important election of our lifetime” was nothing more than the choice between navy blue and midnight blue, not apples and oranges. Meanwhile, those who pay attention realize they are politically homeless.

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Two Idols, One Altar

The zealot and the cynic look like opposites, but the premise is the same. The zealot has made the vote a holy obligation. The ballot is his sacrament, election night his holy day, and the outcome is a verdict on the age itself. When his side wins, he is saved for a while. When it loses, he grieves like a man at a funeral, because something ultimate was on the table and it slipped away. The cynic once believed the ballot was ultimate, watched it fail him, so he decided nothing matters, and stayed home. Both of them believe the vote is the engine of governance. But when you make the ballot a savior, and it fails to deliver, hope evaporates, and the end is near.

Madison’s design and Madison’s warning can look like a contradiction. He built the machine because virtue could not be trusted, and he insisted the republic would die without virtuous citizens. Both are true, and the biblical picture of man’s nature keeps them together. Structure restrains sin. The checks were never a substitute for virtue; they are a low wall around a fallen people, built to slow the inevitable damage. The same men could say that men are no angels but still stake the whole constitutional republic experiment on a people able to rule themselves. If a Western nation wants to survive, it must stop placing the primary emphasis on national and state political offices and emphasize the far more important responsibility of every citizen to practice self-governance. A people that will not govern its own appetites gets governed by force, by someone glad to supply it.

Which city

To hang your ultimate hope on an election is to hang it on the earthly city. That does not make politics small or insignificant, but it does make the vote less than ultimate. The 1689 London Baptist Confession sets civil government in its place. God ordained the magistrate “for his own glory and the public good” (24.1), and the Christian owes him real submission and real participation. The believer is a citizen and carries a citizen’s duties. But while the office of civil magistrate should be dignified, it should not be worshipped. The church’s mission does not rise or fall with any government, and the believer’s hope rests on a city whose builder and maker is God, not on the next administration.

The prophet Jeremiah wrote to exiles inside a pagan empire. They had no vote, and they were in a land they never chose for themselves. Yet, Jeremiah spoke God’s word to them to “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (Jer. 29:7). Seeking the welfare of the city includes voting, volunteering, taking an interest in public policy and the local community. What it does not do is tie your welfare to the city’s outcome. It is right and godly to seek the city’s good, while recognizing that your own good rests beyond any earthly empire in a world without elections.

Voting is a civic responsibility, somewhere in the realm of answering a jury summons. Sometimes loving your neighbors looks like voting to protect the most vulnerable or uphold true justice. What voting should not be is a forced decision against your conscience. If you cannot vote for a candidate, is it really the next best thing to vote against the other? Have you not approvingly stepped into the very apparatus that left you without a candidate you like in the first place? A Christian is free to vote, often with good reason, and is also free with a clear conscience to sit it out. If he chooses to vote, what he should know he is most free to do is skip any office or measure on his ballot when the available choices do not represent his positions.

What a Christian is not free to do is to worship politics or let it break him. A man who knows which city is his can endure the evil and corruption his government will inevitably embrace. He can work for the good of the earthly city without bowing to it or dreading its fall. He may vote because he wants to participate in the system, but he can sleep because his hope was never on the ballot.

Democracy might die in darkness, but the man who staked his salvation on a button in a booth was in the dark long before the polls closed. Madison and the men around him knew the machine could save no one. They hoped only that, with enough friction and citizens, it might hold off the worst for a while. That is all a republic was supposed to be. Democracy should die, because it was never intended to be American.

Have you checked out my History of Western Philosophy video series? It is for paid subscribers only, and each episode contains a detailed video, a deep-dive article, and a study guide. 10% of every paid subscription will go toward the Institute of Pastoral and Theological Training in Egbe, Nigeria, which I founded in 2013. It is a rural seminary serving indigent men for free, fully funded by donors like you.

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For two years, I have provided the Areopagus Letter for free to anyone who wanted it, and it is going to stay that way. The regular essays will keep flowing.

But I have been wanting to do more than my regular articles, so now I am. I have opened a paid membership, and to start, members get two things I am genuinely excited about.

The first is a monthly deep study. Once a month, I take a single subject, thinker, philosophical position, or Christian doctrine and work it out in greater depth, providing notes, study recommendations, and opportunities to discuss. It is the kind of thing I would normally only put in front of students in a classroom.

Second, I am building a video series that walks through the history of Western philosophy from a Christian worldview. We will begin with the origin of the human race, travel through Athens, explore the medieval cathedrals of thought, make our way to the Frenchmen who started our culture wars in the 1960s, and stretch into the philosophers of our day. It will take time, but it will be a worthwhile journey for all of us. The first episode is in production now, and members get the whole series as it rolls out.

Membership is $6 a month or $60 a year. For those who want to help underwrite the project, there is a Founding Member option at $150. 10% of every membership goes toward training pastors at the tuition-free seminary I started for rural, indigent students in Egbe, Nigeria, called the Institute of Pastoral and Theological Training.

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Whether you stick around for the free content or want to go deeper into the great (and not-so-great) ideas with me, thank you for reading, commenting, and sharing. Sincerely. I enjoy the work, and it’s even better knowing others find it helpful.

See you at the Areopagus!

There is a slab of grey limestone northwest of the Acropolis, worn slick by twenty-five centuries of feet, low enough to climb in a minute and old enough that Athens was trying its murderers on it before Rome had walls. The Greeks called it the Areopagus, the hill of Ares. The Romans identified Ares as Mars, which is why some English Bibles still refer to it as Mars Hill. Aeschylus set the final act of the Oresteia on that rock, the scene where Athena founds a court there and tells a city addicted to blood vengeance that, from now on, it will argue its killings in court instead of settling them with knives. For centuries, it was where Athens did its public thinking.

And then, sometime around the year 51, a short, sun-worn Jew from Tarsus stood on that rock and told the most sophisticated audience in the ancient world that a Galilean laborer they had never heard of had walked out of his own tomb.

A city that provoked Paul’s spirit

Paul didn’t go to Athens to preach. Acts says he was stranded there, waiting for Silas and Timothy to catch up from Berea (Acts 17:16), a man with time to kill in the most beautiful city on earth. Luke tells us that his spirit was provoked within him as he looked at a city full of idols. The verb is parōxyneto, from paroxynō, the root behind our word paroxysm. It describes a seizure, or a sharp involuntary fit. Athens had so many gods in marble that an old joke ran that you could sooner meet a deity on its streets than a man. Paul walked through the finest open-air gallery in antiquity and experienced something that could only be described as a near-physical reaction. The most cultured square mile in the empire, and it made him sick at heart.

Paul was not a tourist charmed by the classics. He grieved over the place first. Whatever he is doing on that rock, it is not the work of a scholar who finds the Greeks merely interesting. It is the work of an Apostle of Christ who finds them lost.

Two schools take the bait

Word gets around, and two guilds of professional thinkers come to spar with him (Acts 17:18). Luke identifies them because they hold the two great answers the ancient world gave to the question of how to live when the gods seem far away.

The Epicureans were the disciples of Epicurus, who had died around 270 years before Christ and left behind a garden and a system. Their universe was atoms and empty space, nothing more, a machine running on collisions. Their gods were real but retired, living in perfect serenity in the gaps between worlds, too blessed to be bothered with human beings. The point of life was ataraxia, freedom from disturbance, and most of the disturbance they wanted freedom from was fear. They feared death, and yet claimed it was nothing to them since the atoms simply scattered. They also feared the gods who, it turned out, were not watching. It is a gentler creed than its reputation, and a bleak one. Nobody is coming. Arrange your pleasures wisely and try not to flinch.

The Stoics were the heirs of Zeno of Citium, who had taught in the painted colonnade, the Stoa, around three hundred years before Christ. Where the Epicureans emptied the cosmos of care, the Stoics filled it. Reason ran through everything, a divine fire, a logos that was the soul of the world, and providence ordered every event down to the last spark. The task of a human being was to live according to that reason, to want what nature wanted, to reach a calm past the reach of fortune. Their piety could sound almost biblical. Cleanthes, one of their founders, wrote a hymn to Zeus that called men the god’s own offspring. Their error was that they had made God and the world the same thing, so that the divine had no more freedom, and no more mercy, than the weather.

So these men listened to Paul, and then they called him a spermologos (Acts 17:18). The word is a reference to a bird, the kind that hops around the marketplace pecking up scattered seed, and by extension it means a scavenger of scraps, a magpie of other people’s ideas, a babbler who has only read the backs and inside jackets of books. They think he is a peddler of foreign gods because he keeps preaching about Jesus and the resurrection, and some of them seem to have heard "resurrection" (anastasis) as the name of a new goddess he was importing alongside her consort. The philosophers thought Paul came with cheap, secondhand ideas from the provinces.

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“Mistakes were made.” The modern public apology. Passive voice, mistakes commit themselves, and no one, it turns out, is actually responsible. From there, the script: He has been listening to the affected community and educating himself. This is not who he is. He is doing the work. He does not deserve our forgiveness and asks only for a chance to earn back our trust. Published on social media late Friday afternoon to catch as little attention as possible, and then the world moves on.

Of course, nobody believes a word of it, but that’s not the point. Now it’s all about grading his performance, and unfortunately, we’ve been trained to think of most statements that way. We try to figure out the real motive behind a compliment. A man doesn’t resign from his job to spend more time with his family; he was fired. We look past what is said to what is actually going on, dismissing the surface for what we think is the truth.

The school of suspicion

In 1965, in a long study of Freud, the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur set two ways of reading against each other. One he called interpretation as the restoration of meaning, the patient work of listening to a text in order to receive what it says. The other he described by its governing instinct. “Over against interpretation as restoration of meaning,” he wrote, “we shall oppose interpretation according to what I collectively call the school of suspicion.” Ricoeur points to its founders: “Three masters, seemingly mutually exclusive, dominate the school of suspicion: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.”

This wasn’t the garden-variety doubt Ricoeur was describing. “These three masters of suspicion,” he wrote, “are not to be misunderstood… as three masters of skepticism.” They shared a conviction that ran deeper than doubt. Consciousness itself is a liar, the mind’s account of its own reasons is a cover story, and what it covers is some interest or drive the mind will not admit even to itself. Ricoeur explained they resolved “to look upon the whole of consciousness primarily as ‘false’ consciousness.”

All of it, he argues, they did in the service of truth. The three aimed “for a new reign of Truth, not only by means of a ‘destructive’ critique, but by the invention of an art of interpreting.” Behind the lie, the masters expected to find a truer word, and it required tearing down the false surface to reach it.

Three unmaskings

Karl Marx supplied the template. The ideas a society treats as neutral, eternal, and simply true are, he argued, the ideas of whoever holds the power: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” Marx continues, “The class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.” In other words, law, morality, religion, and the whole furniture of the mind follow from who controls production. He compressed the claim further, writing, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” To read a law or a creed rightly, on this account, you look past what it claims to the material interest it secures. Language is a receipt for power.

Nietzsche took that same suspicion into morality and philosophy. He laid out what he had come to see in the great systems: “I have gradually come to realize what every great philosophy so far has been: a confession of faith on the part of its author, and a type of involuntary and unself-conscious memoir.” The philosopher thinks he is reasoning toward truth, but he is actually confessing his temperament and calling it logic. Behind the argument stands an appetite, and Nietzsche called it “the will to power.” He claimed that “We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers... we have never looked for ourselves.” We can’t fully understand our own minds, even when we’re reading and thinking deeply. The noblest values we proudly hold up may actually be clever masks hiding our real, less noble motives.

Freud took the operation into the family and dreams. The waking mind, Freud described, is a small, lit room in a large, dark house, and the reasons we give for what we do are later edited for respectability. A dream is a wish the sleeper could not admit, smuggled past the filters. A slip of the tongue is actually the truth escaping. The patient is the last authority on himself, because the self keeps its real business below the floor of awareness.

Ricoeur saw an identical shape to what each of the masters of suspicion was suggesting. What the reader faces, he wrote, is “not only a threefold suspicion, but a threefold guile.” Consciousness does not merely err. It deceives on purpose, and it starts with the self.

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Suspicion is older than its masters

Identifying power as the self-interest hidden under its justifications is old news. The Hebrew prophets were never quiet about it. Amos stripped the piety off men who “trample on the needy” and kept their feast days. Nathan walked David into a story and sprang the hidden trap to expose his sin. Long before Marx, the Bible taught that the human heart hides its own motives from itself. Jeremiah wrote the chilling verdict: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9).

Augustine of Hippo looked at Rome, and at every empire that called its conquests peace, and he called the drive underneath the imperial self-description the libido dominandi, or the lust of rule. The earthly city, he wrote, “though it be mistress of the nations, is itself ruled by its lust of rule.” He was as unsentimental about human motive as Nietzsche was fifteen centuries later, but what set Augustine apart was what he saw as the solution.

Augustine exposed the lust of domination in order to break it and reorder it under a love that seeks the other’s good. He tore the mask off Rome to call Rome to repentance, and left the possibility of the city standing. The prophets did the same. They exposed the racket in order to summon the nation back to its covenant obligations. Suspicion, in this older world, was a servant. It worked for repair, and it answered to a standard of the good. The Reformed tradition later identified this as the noetic effects of sin. In other words, the fall reaches the mind, so that reason itself bends toward self-justification. Calvin described the human mind as a perpetual factory of idols, forever manufacturing gods that flatter it. The suspicion the masters would systematize was, in this light, a secular doctrine of the fall. It saw the corrupted heart clearly.

What the masters changed

The masters changed the ends of the suspicion. They cut it loose from any good above the critique, and once suspicion answers to nothing higher than itself, exposure becomes its own end. The point of reading is no longer to heal what you have unmasked or to call it back to what it should be. The point is to expose it, and then to expose the next thing, because there is no standard left in whose name you could ever stop and say anyone is telling the truth.

That method turns on everything, including itself. If every stated reason is a cover for an unstated interest, then a sincere reason has been ruled out before it is heard, and the person who offers one has only demonstrated how well his cover is built. Any argument is itself more maneuvering to be decoded. A denial confirms the charge. Silence confirms it, too (“silence is violence”). The suspicious reading is unfalsifiable.

And it consumes its own foundation. Nietzsche saw this coming. If the will to truth is the will to power in a scholar’s gown, then that judgment is also the will to power in a gown, with no better claim on anyone than the moralities it strips. Suspicion universalized has sawn off the branch it sits on. What it leaves is a reader who can no longer be persuaded of anything, only made to confess, and who therefore stops reading altogether and simply decodes. Trust becomes the tell of a person who has not yet grasped that everyone is playing him. The masters of suspicion removed the possibility of a cure, the hope that a will can be remade, and a word honestly meant and believed.

Carl Trueman traced how the migration went from a method used by a few nineteenth-century intellectuals to one that eventually influenced the entire culture, until the psychologized self that looks for hidden power plays in every word is simply what a modern person is taught to be. The habits Ricoeur described in 1965 as the tools of three difficult thinkers are now the most common approach of modern readers examining a text message.

The cost at close range

Once this approach is removed from the library and brought into a marriage, it stops being interesting and starts doing damage. Noticing hidden motives was never the problem. The damage comes when the noticing serves nothing above itself, when it has no goal beyond winning points, so that it never resolves into anything.

A wife might hear her husband apologize and instantly wonder what the hidden content is. Her aim is to establish that she was wronged, not to be reconciled. The husband might hear her forgiveness and look for the leverage she is banking for later. Neither one of them is approaching with trust. Each is attempting to find the hundreds of small ways the will to power will bite them. Suspicion is often right about the particular, but it is death to the whole.

At scale, an expert in a field is heard as a mouthpiece for his funders, an apology is considered a PR cleanup, and a posture of humility is a sneaky backdoor to put everyone to sleep before the strike. Rooms are now full of people decoding one another, with no one able to say a simple thing and be believed.

Charity, the Apostle Paul wrote, “believes all things, hopes all things” (1 Cor. 13:7). That kind of love cannot get started on a person you have decided in advance is running a con, because it has been ruled out before the first word. Suspicion offers real safety from being fooled, but the price is never being known. The person who cannot be taken in also cannot be reached.

Reading in good faith

The Christian answer refuses to be naive, but it puts the suspicion back under the good it was always meant to serve.

“Whoever,” wrote Augustine, “thinks that he understands the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbor, does not yet understand them as he ought.” The test of a reading is whether it builds love, past whether it is clever, and past whether its suspicions happen to be correct. A reading can be accurate about a hidden fault and still fail if all it does is convict.

Turned toward persons, Augustine’s rule inverts the burden of proof that suspicion assumes. Suspicion opens by treating the mask as given and demanding that sincerity prove itself, usually to a standard no sincerity could meet. Charity opens by crediting good faith and takes the most generous version, only moving away from it when the evidence forces it. In general, well-meaning philosophers strive to operate on a principle of charity, interpreting their opponent at his best before they respond (Steelman). But the Christian version rests on a command to love beyond simply being fair in an argument.

Nobody should assume it is virtuous to be fooled. Charity that cannot recognize a wolf feeds the wolf. The same Scripture that commands love commands testing. “Do not believe every spirit,” John wrote, “but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1). Paul warned the Ephesian elders that wolves would rise from among their own number and told Timothy to identify the men doing damage. The Puritans frequently wrote about judging charitably. Jonathan Edwards preached a sermon in his series on 1 Corinthians 13 against the censorious spirit, the habit of assuming the worst of a brother, and set against it the charity that “thinks no evil.” Judging charitably never meant believing every claim a man makes. It meant believing the best the evidence will bear and refusing to believe worse than the evidence requires. Suspicion is available and useful, but should be used to look for the hidden thing in order to heal it, after credit is first extended.

This reconciles Ricoeur’s two ways of reading. He set the restoration of meaning against the school of suspicion. Under charity, the two become a sequence and a servant. You may have to suspect in order to see, and you suspect in order finally to restore, to hand back a truer and more hopeful account of a man rather than the one he was defending. Exposure serves repair, or it is not Christian.

Libido Dominandi, Panta Pisteuei

Augustine’s Latin for the disease is libido dominandi, the lust to rule that hides beneath the reasons the powerful give for their power, and beneath a good many of the reasons the rest of us give too. He believed it was real, and that it was in himself before he ever found it in Rome. The Confessions he wrote are the record of a man suspecting his own motives down to a boyhood theft of pears, refusing to let himself off. He is not a naive reader of the human heart. He firmly believed that lust could be broken, reordered, and put under a stronger love that wants the good of others. Suspicion of the self, in Augustine, is the beginning of health, because it runs toward confession and cure.

Paul’s Greek for the cure is charity. He writes, panta pisteuei, “believes all things” (1 Cor. 13:7). The verb is pisteuei, from pistis, faith, the same root Paul uses for saving faith in God, now turned toward a neighbor’s word. Love’s first motion toward what someone says is to credit it. It does this with its eyes open. The deceit goes to the cross, the one place suspicion’s evidence can be taken in full and absorbed without destroying the person it convicts. A Christian can afford to begin with trust because he is not the last court. He can risk being wrong about a motive and occasionally being played because the final reckoning is not his to secure.

The reading that love does

The celebrity apologies will keep coming, and some of them are exactly what everyone assumes they are. Suspicion is often accurate, and cynicism is right often enough to seem like wisdom. But a reader who has settled in advance that every apology is a maneuver has not reached wisdom. He has reached a permanent alibi for never having to forgive, since forgiveness would require him to accept a word as accurate and free of ulterior motives, and he has already ruled that category out. He is safe from ever being fooled, which is the same thing as being unreachable.

To read for the hidden thing in order to mend it, with your eyes fully open and your credit extended first, costs more than suspicion and sees further than cynicism. It can be deceived, it knows that, and it reads in good faith anyway, because it answers to a love that outlasts the occasional con. That is the reading of the God who justifies the ungodly, who takes sinners at the word of a righteousness credited to them and not their own. It is open to anyone with the nerve to be sometimes wrong for the sake of ever being trusted.

Château de Purnon is at the end of a three-kilometer avenue through a forest in Verrue, Vienne, France. Tim Holding and Felicity Selkirk decided to purchase the Château in November 2019. Rain was coming through the roof and into the second floor, which had begun to rot. The forest had crept back across the grounds. 1,200 square meters of slate overhead were close to failure. Tim had been a state politician in Australia; Felicity had built a web business in Melbourne; neither had restored so much as a cottage. They bought the place anyway, for €740,000, from eleven heirs of the family that had held it since the 1890s, and then quickly learned that the first stage of the work alone would cost nearly €2.8 million.

Ruins are common enough. What made Purnon rare was that no one had ever emptied it. Most great houses have been cleared a dozen times over, the goods sold off, inventoried, and stripped by each new owner in turn. Purnon changed hands once, to the de Rochequairie family in the 1890s, and then sat through a century of decline with its entire past life still inside. Furniture sat in the attic where it had been placed a hundred years earlier. Cupboards held fabric no one had unfolded in decades. The working parts of a household from the reign of Louis XVI were still in their places, as though the staff had walked out one afternoon and never come back. The house was built between 1772 and 1788 for Antoine-Charles Achard, Marquis de la Haye, a colonel under Louis XVI, to a design by Laurent Bourgeois. The original design drawings surfaced in the château’s own archives in 2021, and it went up partly from stone salvaged from a ruined neighbor, an act of reuse before it was ever finished the first time. The Château has 105 rooms, and every one of them still has something to say.

The wallpaper under the wallpaper

In a small room on the first floor, beneath layers of duller, later wallpaper, a geometric pattern surfaced. Someone in the nineteenth century had pasted the new fashion over the old, and someone after that had done it again, and under both, the eighteenth century had waited in the dark. That first patch sent them searching the whole house. A folding screen, once used to divide a great room into smaller, warmer spaces during a banquet, revealed a paper featuring herons. A floral scrap of paper found in the attic, half its color gone, had crowned the bed of the marquise’s own mother.

Some of the blue paper still on the walls carries a maker’s name: Jean-Baptiste Réveillon, the leading wallpaper manufacturer in France. Réveillon’s works in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine held a royal warrant and employed three hundred hands. In the spring of 1789, a rumor ran through Paris that Réveillon meant to cut his workers’ wages. A crowd burned the factory to the ground, soldiers fired into it, and dozens died. It was one of the first killings of the French Revolution, months before the Bastille. Réveillon fled France, but his paper went up on the walls of Purnon. Auguste, the marquis’s eldest son and a schoolmate of Napoleon Bonaparte, was to inherit the house, but he died during the Revolution.

Two stone busts of kings, Henri IV and Louis XV, who had stood on the roofline and fallen, were lifted down, repaired, and set back on their parapet. A billiard table, likely the oldest to survive in France, came out of the attic in pieces and was made whole. Cut into the stone, here and there, were marks to catch the sun at the winter solstice, an old wish to set a building in time with the turning year. Behind the plaster, the masons who raised the walls had left their own names and dates. An outbuilding held a carriage. A drawer held two dinner menus from a Belle Époque evening, course after course that no one had eaten in a hundred years. The couple records everything, and something like half a million people now follow the château’s slow return on YouTube. That’s how I first discovered it, and now I look forward to every new update. Honestly, I’m kind of obsessed.

Of course, one may look at the entire estate and conclude that none of it was necessary. No one needed to block-print herons onto paper that would spend its life folded behind a screen. The forty-seven thousand slates on the roof were each cut by hand, by men who knew no eyes below would ever see them up close. Two stone kings were carved and hauled to a parapet the birds keep closer watch on than people do. The builders gave the hidden work the same care as the visible. They believed that a thing worth making is worth making beautiful and excellent, no matter what.

Savageness

In The Stones of Venice Vol. II, John Ruskin asked why the rough, uneven, hand-cut ornament of a medieval cathedral is worth more than the smooth perfection that replaced it. The first quality of Gothic, he wrote, is savageness: its roughness, its refusal of polish. To a Victorian trained to prize finish, that looked like a defect. Ruskin called it the mark of a free man.

He wrote about the workman: “You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions.” Demand flawless, machined perfection from a carver, and you get it only by making him a machine, grinding away the judgment and invention that make him a person. Let him be imperfect, and the wall shows something no machine can leave: a mind at work, a man deciding and creating. The goblins and blunt figures on an old cathedral front, Ruskin wrote, “are signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure.” From this he drew the rule that governs a place like Purnon: “no good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.”

He had watched the opposite spread through industrial England, and he saw it as a wound. “It is not that men are ill fed,” he wrote, “but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and therefore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure.” A man who makes nothing he can love spends his life buying what he cannot make. At Purnon, the older arrangement is briefly visible again: a roofer shaping slate by hand, and a mason cutting fresh tuffeau to sit against stone laid two centuries ago, work slow enough and free enough to leave a mark.

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We have no right to touch them

Ruskin valued the old stone for a second reason. A building, he thought, is how people keep memories. “We may live without her, and worship without her,” he wrote of architecture, “but we cannot remember without her.” It is worth having not only what the dead thought and felt but “what their hands have handled, and their strength wrought, and their eyes beheld, all the days of their life.” Touching a wall that the eighteenth century built is a way of reaching the eighteenth century.

From this, he drew a hard rule of ownership. The man holding the deed is not the only owner. “We have no right whatever to touch them. They are not ours. They belong partly to those who built them, and partly to all the generations of mankind who are to follow us.” The living are a thin slice of the people who have a claim to a Château like Purnon. The dead built it to last. The unborn have not yet had their turn beneath its roof.

For that reason, Ruskin hated the word restoration, and would have watched a project like Purnon with a narrowed eye. Done badly, he wrote, restoration is “the most total destruction which a building can suffer: a destruction out of which no remnants can be gathered: a destruction accompanied with false description of the thing destroyed.” He had seen restorers scrape the weathered, hand-worked skin from a medieval church, replace it with a crisp modern guess, and hang a plaque calling a copy the original. Better, he said, a true building left honestly worn, and let go when its hour comes, than one killed and dressed in a lie.

Purnon holds to Ruskin’s standard. The work takes place under the watchful eye of Frédéric Didier, chief architect of France’s historic monuments and of Versailles. A classified monument may be touched only by artisans trained in heritage crafts, using old materials and methods, which is much of why the bill climbs into the millions. The reassembled billiard table is the real one, its own pieces recovered from the attic, not a prop bought to fill the room. Where the original wallpaper could not be saved, the couple refused to counterfeit it; they carried the surviving fragments to Farrow and Ball, who printed a set of papers from them, named for the family, and sold openly as what they are. Walking the rooms with the designer, Felicity has said, felt like seeing her own home through another’s eyes, watching patterns come back into the light that had been dark since the end of the eighteenth century.

The eyes of the house

It would be easy to file all this under taste and call it a wealthy couple’s costly enthusiasm for old wallpaper. It is nearer to a moral argument than what is abandoned in most of what is built today. When Felicity says the thing that first held them was the symmetry, “Purnon is all about symmetry and harmony,” she is repeating a claim the classical world made and the modern world has jettisoned. Beauty is real; harmony and proportion belong to the world and not to the mood of the one looking. Roger Scruton spent his career defending it. The ordinary sense of what fits, he wrote, the instinct that lays a table well or sets a moulding true, is a “minimal beauty,” the way rational creatures “strive to achieve order in their surroundings and to be at home in their common world.” Much of what a settled people makes is “home building, erecting in the teeth of change and decay, the permanent symbols of a settled form of life.”

The things around you right now were mostly built on the opposite premise. It is certainly true of my house and almost everything in it. The cabinet is faced with cheap wood over pressed dust, made to hold together until the warranty lapses. The wall has the thinnest coat of cheap paint instead of meticulous craftsmanship or ornate paper. The fixtures were the cheapest, and they will end up in the landfill inside ten years. Scruton saw where that logic ends. A modern block built to be gutted and raised again every generation is, he wrote, “an extremely expensive and ecologically destructive tent.” My windows are far too few and built to withstand a hurricane. The windows of an older house, framed and proportioned, “are the eyes of the house.” What our building is good at now, Scruton said, is “the hard work that is being constantly expended on losing knowledge.” Purnon is a château built on the assumption that it would outlive everyone who touched it, and so worth the hidden slate and the paper behind the screen.

Trees they will not sit under

Tim and Felicity have written down why they do it, and one paragraph is essentially Ruskin’s rule worked out in real life. “We know that we are part of an endeavour that will leave a legacy long after we are gone. When we walk around Purnon we admire the epic trees planted by people who would never live to sit in their shade. We give thanks that people of vision had the generosity to build something for those who would come after them. We hope that, by protecting something precious from the past, we too can leave something for future generations.” They cannot finish the house in their lifetime, and they know it; that’s not the point. The aim is to save what they can and hand it on. “We never came here hoping to play Lords and Ladies.” Tim and Felicity call themselves custodians, tenants of a house that belongs more to the dead and the unborn than to them.

This is the logic of every good thing that takes longer than a lifetime to make. It moved whoever set the oaks along that three-kilometer avenue, and it moves a mason to sign a stone he will not live to see weather. Such work cuts against nearly everything now made and bought, which is built to return its worth inside our own short span and leave the future to fend for itself. To labor for people you will never meet makes sense only if you understand and value that the world survives longer than a single life, and you are only a link in the long chain.

Making all things new

The instinct that saves the old thing rather than scrapping it has a name older than the château. When Jesus spoke of the world to come, the word Matthew records is palingenesia, from palin, again, and genesis, beginning. The ESV renders it as “new world,” and some older translations as “regeneration” (Matt. 19:28). It is the same word Paul uses for the “washing of regeneration” by which a man is saved (Titus 3:5). It points to this world carried back to what it was made for, not a second world brought up from nothing while the first is completely thrown out. The creation is groaning, Paul writes, waiting to be “set free from its bondage to corruption” (Rom. 8:21). He uses the language of rescue and repair. And the voice from the throne at the end says, “Behold, I am making all things new” (Rev. 21:5). All things. The same ones, made new, with no replacement wheeled in over the grave of the first.

A God who works that way is not indifferent to a small apartment or a grand château. He doesn’t treat what he has made the way we treat a dishwasher past its warranty. He raises the same body that was sown perishable and makes it imperishable; he keeps what can be kept and redeems what looked past all saving. The whole shape of redemption is a restoration of the honest kind Ruskin wanted, and it would not pass over the marble cut lions, the hand-painted wallpaper, or the meticulously cut stone. He wouldn’t ignore the names the masons pressed into the wall so that someone, someday, would know they had stood there.

I hope to visit Purnon with my wife one day. I would love to see and touch the details, admire the craftsmanship, and feel the weight of history one scarcely experiences in the modern world. At Purnon, a house that was never emptied is being filled again. That is what Tim and Felicity mean by reawakening, and it is a small and truer rumor of the morning when everything that was ever worth making is made new.

I have a privilege that millions of people around the world would give almost anything for. I get to see Lionel Messi play for Inter Miami CF at every home game. Despite the silly arguments, there really is no dispute: he is the greatest of all time. If you combine many of the greatest achievements of the legends of the game, Messi has accomplished more. In terms of greatness in the game, he is in a league of his own. As for me and my household, we have pink and black jerseys, t-shirts, hats, and even socks and shoes, and we wear them proudly as we march to Nu Stadium in Miami to cheer for our club. The window is closing since the GOAT is now 39 years old, but as long as he continues to play, we will be there with #10 on our backs.

I have been a soccer/football fan my entire life. I played as a young boy, then throughout high school, and had the joy of coaching for several years before having children of my own. When I was a kid, I attended the first Colorado Rapids game in Denver when the MLS was just starting. Now, the MLS has become one of the top 10 leagues in the world, and game days are filled with excitement. All around America, clubs are building their own stadiums, have developed strong supporters sections, and have attracted some of the biggest names in the sport. It is long past time for the most popular sport in the world to gain a foothold in the Land of the Free.

It has been an absolute joy this summer to see the World Cup in my own country. For a few weeks, a nation that mostly ignores the sport has paid attention. The United States played above expectations and then lost in the round of sixteen. While we all would have loved to see them go further, for an American men’s team, it was a real accomplishment. In my house, we have switched from our pink and black for a few weeks to our blue-and-white stripes, hoping that Argentina goes all the way so Messi can lift the trophy one more time before he retires.

One of the things I have always loved about soccer outside the United States is the culture it creates. Americans certainly love their sports and are loyal to their teams, but soccer culture is an entirely different animal. It builds community and a sense of belonging. The fans are just as much a part of every match as the players, through the highs and the lows. Entire communities shut down on match days while the pubs fill, the flags wave, and the cheers and boos echo through the neighborhoods.

Yes, soccer (and let’s be honest, it should always be called football, but that got hijacked by the pigskin, so we’ve settled) is only a game. It’s a game that generates billions of dollars in revenue, but it is a game. And many people will look at the World Cup and say that the whole pageant of flags and anthems is nationalism in fancy dress, the tribal instinct that gives us our wars, wearing shin guards. Neither argument is new, and the Greeks, who invented this kind of contest, answered both.

The plaything of God

The Greeks refused to set play against seriousness. Near the end of the Laws, Plato has his Athenian say that man “is contrived... to be a plaything of God, and the best part of him is really just that,” and that therefore “every man and woman ought to pass through life... playing at the noblest of pastimes.” He is not being precious. He means that a human being is most himself when he is caught up in something done for its own sake, the way a child is wholly given over to a game. Aristotle worked toward the same point from another direction. He observed that we labor in order to have leisure, and that the free activities we choose for their own sake, and not for what they produce, stand closest to happiness. A culture that can justify an activity only by its usefulness has lost the thread.

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Johan Huizinga argued that play runs underneath civilization, that law, poetry, and worship all carry the marks of the game. Josef Pieper argued that leisure has the character of a feast and that culture grows out of it. A game is fenced by rules it does not need, aimed at a goal that means nothing outside the game, and played for no reason except the playing. That uselessness is the point. When eighty thousand people rise at once for a goal, they are practicing a posture the modern world has nearly mislaid, the posture of doing a thing purely because it is worth doing.

The New Testament shows no embarrassment about the stadium. Paul, who spent time in Corinth near where the Isthmian games were run, reached for the runner and the boxer when he wanted a picture of the Christian life. He told the Corinthians to run so as to win, and noticed that the athletes deny themselves for a wreath that withers while the church runs for one that does not (1 Cor. 9:24-27). The man who wrote much of the New Testament found the discipline of sport close enough to the discipline of holiness to preach from it.

A truce among the nations

Now, the second charge is that the flags are the trouble. Here, too, the games came first. Every four years, the Greek city-states, which spent most of their history at war with each other, sent their young men to Olympia, the sanctuary of Zeus, to compete. A sacred truce, the ekecheiria, was announced by heralds across the Greek world so that athletes and spectators could travel to the games and return home unharmed. It did not stop the Greeks from fighting. It did open a space, under the eye of the god, where rival peoples met as rivals and went home as neighbors, and where the thing they shared, a contest and a reverence, held for a season against the things that split them. The World Cup, like the Olympics, is the direct heir of that arrangement. It takes the tribal energy that gives us wars and binds it to a field, a referee, and ninety minutes, and it lets the nations meet as nations without anyone reaching for a sword.

A Christian has his own reasons to think the nations are not a mistake to be canceled. Scripture treats them as something God made and means to keep. The peoples were scattered at Babel under judgment, their single language broken into many (Gen. 11). Yet Paul told the philosophers in Athens that God “made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined... the boundaries of their dwelling place” (Acts 17:26). The nations are on purpose. When the Spirit fell at Pentecost, the disciples spoke in the many tongues of the crowd, and each man heard the gospel in the language of his birth (Acts 2). Babel’s scattering was healed by a gift that left the many languages standing and made them carriers of one message. And the vision John was given of the end keeps every particular in place: “a great multitude... from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages,” still distinct, on their feet before the throne (Rev. 7:9).

None of this blesses everything done under a flag. The same love of one’s own that fills a stadium with song fills the terraces with hooligans, and the nation a man should love the way he loves his father, is very easily loved as a god. The love is good, but the idol stands close beside it. The cure is to love the thing rightly, in its place, under God, which is a difficult discipline.

What the argument about the greatest is really about

If you’ve had any attachment to soccer, you know there are arguments, usually at volume, about the greatest of all time. To argue about the greatest is to assume that greatness is real and open to judgment, that there is a standard by which Messi, Maradona, and Pelé can be measured, and that certain human beings genuinely come near it. Aristotle had a word for that realized excellence. He called it a thing’s aretē, the full flourishing of what the thing is for, and he held that you cannot speak of a good knife or a good horse or a good man without it. To watch Messi take the ball in a crowd of defenders and come out the far side is to watch a human capacity carried to its edge, a body doing what a body can only just do. Plato would tell you the beauty you see there is really in the thing you are watching. In the Symposium he has the priestess Diotima describe a ladder that starts at the beauty of a single body and climbs toward Beauty itself, of which every lovely thing here below is a reflection. The phrase the commentators use without thinking, the beautiful game, is truer than they know. The beauty is really there.

Creatures of a day

The Greeks who built the games also knew the thing I feel watching Messi now, and they hired their finest poet to say it. Pindar wrote victory odes for the champions of the games, and the lines of his that everyone still remembers close an ode written for a wrestler. “Creatures of a day,” he says. “What is someone? What is no one? Man is the dream of a shadow.” He set that inside a song of triumph, for a young man at the height of his powers, with the crowd still loud around him. The glory and the passing of the glory arrive in the same breath. Pindar’s next line is that when “the brilliance given by Zeus comes,” a light settles on a man and his days turn sweet. That gleam is what I am chasing when I walk into Nu Stadium. I want to see the light rest on the GOAT once more before it lifts.

The Greeks had one answer to how short it all is. Glory, kleos, the name kept alive by poets and by the bronze statues they raised to their victors at Olympia, so that the runner who died young keeps running inside the song. The Christian answer is even more physical. The body Messi has trained to its edge is not going to be thrown away. Paul says it is sown perishable and raised imperishable, that this mortal will put on immortality (1 Cor. 15). The excellence you catch for half a second on the field, and the ache that comes because it won’t last forever, are both telling the truth about a body glorified and a play with no clock on it.

So I will watch the rest of this World Cup with more than my ordinary investment. I will hope Argentina wins, and I will hope Messi lifts the trophy, and I will know while I am hoping that the trophy stands in for something larger than itself. What I am really after, when I want to see him hold it once more, is a world where greatness does not fade, where the nations come to the feast and keep their languages and their flags and their particular glory, and where the play runs on without a whistle. The World Cup cannot hand me that. It was never built to. What it can do, ninety minutes at a time, is show me the shape of the thing, and remind a distracted man that he was made for a feast he has not yet sat down to. That is what the World Cup is for.

Most of us have it exactly backward: we treat ordinary life as a prison sentence, mistake our boredom for spiritual hunger, and baptize our restlessness as holy ambition. G.K. Chesterton wrote, “A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”

Perhaps we need to recover something of our childhood joy in repetition.

There is money in restlessness. An entire industry has been built for people who want to be radicals. Buy the backpack and the plane ticket, learn to eat a few bugs, and surely you will change the world. Your life will finally count. An ordinary person, in an ordinary town, in an ordinary church, with an ordinary job, has somehow failed God. You have been convinced that you were made for more. The world needs you to make a mark, build a legacy, create a brand, and live a life that matches the version of you that exists online.

But what happens when a young man who thinks he’s going to take the world with a Bible and an iPad finally realizes the world declines to be taken by his valiant efforts? The job applications have to be filled out, the children arrive, the bills come due, and the grass keeps its Saturday appointment with the lawnmower, whether or not he made a significant impact on the world that week.

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The reality is that the ordinary Christian life is the main event, and it’s far more radical and challenging than a 10-day mission trip or being a photographer in a war zone. Try being patient with a 5-year-old who cries because they got one more yellow Skittle than red in the bag, or those strange creatures called teenagers leave a sink full of dishes all day when you’re at work. That’s radical. Otherworldly, in fact.

John Witherspoon, president of Princeton and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, once had a neighbor burst into his office to report a rescue. The horse had bolted, the buggy lay in pieces on the rocks, and the man walked away without a scratch. Thank God, he said, for so extraordinary a providence. Witherspoon told him he could do better. He had driven that same road hundreds of times, and the horse had never bolted, the buggy had never broken, and he had never once been hurt. Nobody throws a banquet for a successful trip to the grocery store. God shows up in the disaster and the headline, and just as surely in every grain of wheat that has been ground to flour. The fickle human heart will watch one airplane fall from the sky and shake a fist at heaven, but never give a word of thanks for the ten thousand that landed that afternoon exactly as advertised.

Most of God’s gifts come in the generic hours of the day: a child’s health, a paycheck that clears, a road driven a thousand times safely. David knew where the credit belonged. The greatness and the power and the kingdom are the Lord’s (1 Chron. 29:11). Even the knife meant for our back, he takes up and uses as a scalpel. “You meant evil against me,” Joseph told his brothers, “but God meant it for good” (Gen. 50:20). God provides. That’s what providence means.

The space where God works is where he grows you. We keep waiting for lightning, but He works more slowly and plainly than that. He hands out grace through ordinary means: His Word, prayer, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper. You can go to a stadium, lift your hands in the fog, weep at the bridge of the song, and fly home exactly as immature as you left, because God appointed the Table, the Word, and the prayer, and he did not coordinate it with a production team.

Paul says, “Aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands” (1 Thess. 4:11), which is the least marketable sentence in the New Testament. Be calm. Be unremarkable. Do your job, and quit pretending honest labor is beneath a man or woman of your “obvious” destiny. The world swears it will rescue us: break free, chart your own course, get rich, and above all, never be ordinary. We run on “what if” and “if only.” It’s the whole business model of advertising and the only reason a company pays a few million dollars for thirty seconds in February. But someone always has the better job, the brighter kids, the church with the slicker music and the better preacher. The wanting never closes the gap. The apostle Paul got off the treadmill. “I have learned, in whatever situation I am, to be content” (Phil. 4:11). Abased or abounding, he ran on Christ, who supplied the power (Phil. 4:13). The man desperate to be extraordinary is the man who is bored. The man content to weed his own garden has found the adventure.

Even in church, the ordinary can feel like a waste of a good Sunday. In Army basic training, the point was to keep us moving, so we waxed floors that already shone and remade beds that were already made. It is hard to feel useful doing that. You have felt it in a pew: “I show up, and that is about the size of it. What am I for?” Paul’s answer is the body, and the body has no bench (1 Cor. 12:14–21). The foot does not get to resign on the grounds that it is not a hand. Your part can look small and still hold weight, because the Lord uses it to grow his people, and because it is spent in love on somebody other than yourself. A faith of “me and Jesus,” with the rest of the congregation as stage props, is the one arrangement the New Testament flatly rejects.

Embracing the ordinary Christian life is no excuse to settle, keep your head down, and aim low. It’s quite the opposite. Kill godly ambition, and you bury every missionary task and Kingdom endeavor. The ordinary is the training ground for everything that lasts. Embrace it, and you will be built into someone whose faith can outlive the next mountaintop experience. Paul reminds us, “Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31). The dishes are included. Do the ordinary things, and do them with the excellence of a professional, because it is God whom you serve.

Lay down the ambition to be a hero. The church is not holding auditions. It already has a hero, and his name is Jesus Christ. We are not told to dare to be Daniel, because the bravest man in the book, on his finest day, falls a mile short of the Savior we need and goes home needing rescue himself. Heaven did not send another man in a cape. God came down the ladder himself, hauled us up out of the mud, and pointed us down a road that looks, from the curb, almost entirely ordinary. Walk it. The destination is extraordinary.

I founded the Institute of Pastoral and Theological Training, a seminary in Nigeria that trains rural pastors at no cost to them, since most of the men we teach live on less than a dollar a day. It is about as ordinary and unglamorous as ministry gets, and it is some of the best work I’ve ever done. If you’d like to learn more, let me know. I’d love to share it with you.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Martin Luther King Jr. made that sentence famous. He took it from Theodore Parker, a nineteenth-century abolitionist preacher who died before the Civil War. It is one of the most hopeful sentences in the English language, and most of the people who quote it have no right to it.

The sentence claims that history has a side. It has a direction. It is going somewhere, and it is going there on its own, whether you help or not. To be on the wrong side of history is to stand in front of a current that cannot be reversed. That is a statement of faith. It assumes the universe is moral, that morality has a destination, and that something is carrying us toward it. Take God out of the picture, as most people who say it have, and the all-important question remains: Who is driving?

The modern answer has a family tree.

A doctrine of providence with God removed

Friedrich Hegel, the German philosopher whose system dominated the early nineteenth century, taught that history is Spirit (Geist) working itself out through one contradiction after another toward fuller freedom. History was rational. It had a plot. Karl Marx kept Hegel’s engine and changed the fuel. The motor of history, he said, is not Spirit but matter: the means of production and the class conflict they generate. Feudalism gives way to capitalism, capitalism creates the working class, and the working class will produce the revolution that ends class society for good. For Marx, this was not a hope. It was a prediction. The workers did not need persuading so much as awakening to what the forces were already accomplishing through them.

The move from Hegel to Marx kept the direction, the inevitability, and the fixed destination. It discarded only the one who bends the arc. What remains is the Christian doctrine of providence with God removed, and the machinery left running. History still has a telos, a built-in end it is climbing toward, but no mind sits behind the movement. There is no one to thank when it goes well, no one to trust when it does not, and no one who knows your name while it grinds forward.

What the Frankfurt School kept

When the revolution failed to arrive, Marx’s intellectual heirs had a problem. The workers of the industrial West did not rise. They bought homes and televisions. The most influential response came from the Frankfurt School, a circle of mostly German Marxist intellectuals from the Institute for Social Research, founded in Frankfurt in 1923 and moved to New York after Hitler took power. Men like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse faced a choice. The working class had declined to start the revolution Marx promised. A weaker movement would have concluded that the theory was wrong. They kept the theory and explained the delay.

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Critical Theory, the name for their project, inherited Marx’s framework whole, destination included. The arc still bent toward liberation; the working class had simply been kept from delivering it by forces more subtle than Marx had reckoned, forces like the entertainment industry, the family, mass culture, and even the rationality of the Enlightenment itself. So they ran a single operation on every Western institution: find a hidden system of unjust power, expose how it works beneath the surface, identify the victims it produces, and aim everything at its overthrow. Liberation was still coming. It was only running late, held up by enemies cleverer than the old capitalists.

What the postmodernists threw away

Where the Frankfurt School preserved Marx’s destination, the postmodernists kept their suspicion and threw the destination away. Their root conviction is that there is no neutral truth, no universal reason, no view from nowhere. Every claim to objective truth is a bid for power wearing a disguise. Jean-François Lyotard, a French philosopher writing in the 1970s, summed up the mood as “incredulity toward metanarratives,” the large explanatory stories that claim to make sense of everything, Christianity and the Enlightenment, and Marxism’s own march to liberation among them. Michel Foucault, the most cited of the group, spent his career arguing that the institutions presenting themselves as neutral (the clinic, the prison, the school, the human sciences) are machinery for shaping and controlling people, and that power has no outside, no place to stand free of it. Postmodernism keeps Marx’s instinct that everything is a mask for power. It drops his promise that the mask will ever come off. What remains is the unmasking with nothing to arrive at, suspicion as a permanent condition.

The ordinary Westerner is now heir to two wills that cancel each other. From Marx, through a thousand repeated slogans, he inherited the certainty that history bends toward justice. From the postmoderns, he inherited the certainty that there is no such story and no such justice, only rival arrangements of power. He says “the right side of history” and “there is no objective truth” in the same conversation, and never hears the crash. He wants the comfort of an arc while having dismissed the only One who could bend it.

The arc has a name

The 1689 London Baptist Confession answers the question that the slogan cannot. God, it says, “doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures and things, from the greatest even to the least, by His most wise and holy providence, to the end for the which they were created” (Ch. 5.1). History is going somewhere. On that bare point, the Christian and the Marxist agree. But that’s where the agreement ends. One account of history is governed by a Person, the other by a process.

The Confession also refuses a cheap escape. It does not pretend that material forces are nothing. God, it says, “ordereth [all things] to fall out according to the nature of second causes” (Ch. 5.2). Economics moves nations. Money, labor, and power are real levers, and they really pull. Marx noticed the levers. He also noticed something true and very old, that the strong forever dress their own interests up as eternal truth, that the comfortable tend to believe whatever philosophy flatters their comfort. Scripture condemned that sin long before Marx called it exploitation.

From a few real observations, Marx built an atheist religion. Matter is all there is. Human beings are products of their economic conditions. Evil lives in social arrangements rather than in the human heart. Abolish private property, and you heal what is wrong with us. Every plank of it is false, and the twentieth century paid for the error in something near a hundred million lives, in the Ukrainian famine, the Chinese countryside, and the Cambodian killing fields. This was not a modest mistake about metaphysics. There are first causes and second causes. Marx absolutized the second and denied the first, and a world made of nothing but second causes leaves no one above the suffering and no one to cry out to.

That refusal is also why the whole project, in every form it takes, can only tear down. The operation answers to no standard above the critique itself. It exposes and delegitimizes, but it cannot be appealed to, because nothing stands over it. The secular arc has a direction and no judge. Biblical providence has what the Marxist engine can never supply.

Comfort, not only metaphysics

Someone will object that this is merely one more grand story, the exact kind Lyotard taught us to distrust, no safer than Marx’s. The objection has force. The Christian account is a grand story about where history is going. The difference is the timing. The Marxist arc is always future. The revolution is always coming, always being rescheduled, always betrayed by the present generation that failed to bring it in. The Christian claim runs backward instead of forward. The decisive event is already behind us, on a particular Friday and a particular Sunday outside Jerusalem, in public, before witnesses. “This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men” (Acts 2:23). The worst act in human history, the murder of the Son of God, was at the same moment the most carefully governed act in human history. If providence held there, it holds anywhere.

This is what makes the doctrine a comfort and not cold mechanics. The Marxist engine has a use for you only while you serve its direction. You are a moment in the dialectic, and the dialectic does not mourn its casualties. It files them under the cost of progress and moves on. Providence runs the other way. The God who governs the rise and fall of empires has numbered the hairs of your head, and not one sparrow falls to the ground apart from your Father (Matt. 10:29-30). The hand that steers the nations holds the sick believer in the dark. Joseph said it to the brothers who sold him into slavery: “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Gen. 50:20). Paul said it to a suffering church: God “works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Eph. 1:11), and works them together “for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28).

You do not have to get on the right side of history. In Christ, history is on your side, because the One who drives it has already shown you His face, and it is not the face of a force. It is the face of a man who was crucified for you and walked out of His grave. That is who drives history. He knows exactly where He is taking it, and along the way, He knows your name.

Sometime last month, I was listening to a podcast interview with a financial advisor who was making a confident argument I suspected was wrong. After listening, I pulled the thread, found the historical data, and confirmed the argument was coherent enough on its surface, but it was contradicted against real data. The podcast handed me a question I had to answer myself.

That is podcasting at its best. It surfaces arguments, compresses expertise into a form accessible during a commute, a workout, or an hour of cooking, and occasionally provokes the kind of follow-up that produces real understanding. I listen to podcasts almost every day and have learned genuinely useful things about history, finance, fitness, and a dozen other subjects. The medium is not the problem. The posture it enables is.

Most of what I hear I file away as interesting and do not pursue further. The argument passes through, leaves a general impression, and dissolves into the ambient sense of having kept up with things. I absorbed the sensation of learning. Whether I learned anything in any durable sense is a different question.

Aristotle distinguished between two kinds of knowing. Empeiria is experiential knowledge, knowing that something is the case, accumulated through repeated exposure. Episteme is scientific knowledge in the classical sense, knowing why something is the case, understanding its causes and principles well enough to reason from them to new cases. A doctor with empeiria knows that a certain treatment tends to work. A doctor with episteme knows why it works, which means he also knows when it will not and what to do instead. Empeiria is not worthless. It is useful. But it is downstream of episteme, and a person who mistakes one for the other will eventually face a case that exposes the difference.

Most podcast consumption produces empeiria at best. You know that a particular financial strategy underperforms. You know that the Roman Empire declined for multiple reasons. You know that sleep affects cognitive performance. You have collected facts, positions, and interesting framings. What you have not done, in most cases, is understand the principles behind them well enough to reason forward to new cases that the podcast never covered. That requires a different kind of engagement, and a podcast won’t often get you there.

The physical book with a pencil in hand demands more than a podcast. I use a drafting pencil and a six-inch ruler for clean underlines. I refuse to dog-ear pages, and the notes are not margin scrawl, but deliberate marks under sentences. It is a low-grade argument with the text. When I underline a sentence, I am claiming it deserves to be returned to. When I write a question in the margin, I am demanding the author answer something he skipped. When I draw a line connecting two passages, I am doing synthetic work he did not do for me. The book makes a claim, and I interrogate it. That interrogation is where thinking happens.

With a physical book, you remember where things were. Not only what was written but where on the page, whether it was on the left side near the top, which chapter, which edition, with which cover. That spatial memory isn’t trivial; it etches a physical location in your mind, and a search result in a PDF or a scrolled screen on an ereader can’t do the same. Locational awareness is part of how you own what you’ve learned rather than merely having encountered it.

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I use digital tools constantly. Logos Bible Software for sermon preparation and theological study, PDFs for research across multiple sources, and a Kindle for fiction on vacation. Each has its place. For real engagement, for reading meant to form rather than inform, I want a physical book and a pencil. The medium shapes what you do with what you receive.

Many people will object, saying they are auditory learners, that they retain information better through listening, and that podcasts and audiobooks are simply the right medium for them. The learning styles theory has been tested for decades and has not survived scrutiny. The specific claim, that people learn better when instruction matches their preferred sensory mode, is called the meshing hypothesis. Harold Pashler and colleagues reviewed the research literature in 2008 and concluded that no adequate evidence base existed to support it, and that multiple studies had produced results directly contradicting it. People have preferences. Those preferences are real. But preference is not an optimal condition for formation, and the fact that audio comes more naturally to you does not mean it is doing the same cognitive work as engaged reading. It means it is easier, which is the problem, not the solution.

The question is what you are trying to do. If you want a general sense of an argument in a business book, an audiobook is great. But if you want to understand a subject well enough to reason from its first principles, you need to slow down, and a physical book enforces a pace that formation requires in a way that audio at any speed does not.

We are drowning in current events and starving for the understanding that makes current events intelligible. A person who has consumed ten thousand hours of news and commentary podcasts and read nothing of Thucydides, Aristotle, or Augustine is better informed about the surface of the world and less capable of understanding its structure. He knows more facts and comprehends fewer causes, which is a condition Aristotle would have recognized as the substitution of empeiria for episteme at a civilizational scale.

Thucydides prefaced his history of the Peloponnesian War by saying he intended it as a possession for all time, not a piece of writing for immediate applause. He believed human nature was stable enough that understanding one war deeply would equip you to understand all wars. That is a first-principles claim. It assumes that beneath the surface variation of events, there are recurring structures, and that the person who understands those structures is better equipped to navigate new instances of them than the person who has encountered more instances without understanding any of them in depth.

Current events are only intelligible against that kind of background. Without it, you are pattern-matching against the sample size of your own lifetime, which is not large enough to reason from reliably. The podcast covering last week’s Federal Reserve decision is interesting. It is not a substitute for understanding what money is, how central banking developed, and what history suggests about the relationship between monetary policy and political stability. Both involve learning. Only one of them produces the formation that makes the other intelligible.

Proverbs draws a distinction throughout the entire book between the accumulation of information and the formation of wisdom. “Get wisdom,” the father tells his son, “and whatever you get, get insight” (Prov. 4:7). Wisdom and insight are not the same acquisition. The fool in Proverbs is not always ignorant. Sometimes he is well-informed. What he lacks is the formed judgment to know what to do with what he knows. That is a recognizable portrait.

None of this means stop listening. The forty minutes on the interstate are not going to become silent contemplation, nor should they. The question is whether the podcast that provokes further research is the norm or the exception in your actual practice.

Read more than you listen. When you read, use a pencil. Follow the threads that podcasts surface rather than filing them as interesting. Spend more time with Thucydides than with last Tuesday’s episode, not because current events do not matter, but because you cannot understand them without the formation that makes them intelligible. The world will always produce more information than you can consume. It will not produce more Thucydides. Your attention should reflect that asymmetry.

Q. How does Christ fulfill the office of a priest?

A. Christ fulfills the office of a priest in His once offering up of Himself, a sacrifice to satisfy divine justice and reconcile us to God, and in making continual intercession for us.

Commentary

Where the prophet answers our ignorance, the priest answers our guilt. A priest stands between God and sinners, offering sacrifice for sin and pleading on the sinner’s behalf. The catechism names both parts of Christ’s priestly work, and the first is His once offering up of Himself. Unlike the priests of the old covenant, who offered the blood of bulls and goats again and again, Christ offered a single sacrifice that need never be repeated. He was both the priest who offered and the victim offered, giving Himself “a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Ephesians 5:2). “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24), and having been “offered once to bear the sins of many” (Hebrews 9:28), He finished the work forever.

The catechism states the purpose of this sacrifice precisely: to satisfy divine justice and reconcile us to God. Our sin had incurred a real debt to God’s justice, a penalty that had to be paid, and Christ paid it in full by bearing in our place the punishment we deserved. This is propitiation, the turning away of God’s righteous wrath by the offering of His Son, “that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people” (Hebrews 2:17). Because justice has been satisfied, the enmity is removed and we are reconciled, brought near to the God from whom our sin had separated us. God did not set His justice aside to forgive us; He satisfied it in the cross.

But Christ’s priestly work did not end at Calvary, for the catechism adds that He continues making continual intercession for us. Having offered the sacrifice, the risen Christ now appears before the Father on behalf of His people, pleading the merit of His finished work. “He is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them” (Hebrews 7:25). This is the ground of the believer’s security: the same Christ who died for us now lives to pray for us, so that no charge can finally stand against those for whom He intercedes. “Christ Jesus is the one who died... who indeed is interceding for us” (Romans 8:34).

Scripture Proofs

“Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us” (Romans 8:34).

“And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Ephesians 5:2).

“Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people” (Hebrews 2:17).

“Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them” (Hebrews 7:25).

“So Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him” (Hebrews 9:28).

“He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed” (1 Peter 2:24).

2nd London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689

8.10: This number and order of offices is necessary; for in respect of our ignorance, we stand in need of His prophetical office; and in respect of our alienation from God, and imperfection of the best of our services, we need His priestly office to reconcile us and present us acceptable unto God; and in respect to our averseness and utter inability to return to God, and for our rescue and security from our spiritual adversaries, we need His kingly office to convince, subdue, draw, uphold, deliver, and preserve us to His heavenly kingdom.

Q. How does Christ fulfill the office of a prophet?

A. Christ fulfills the office of a prophet in revealing to us, by Word and Spirit, the will of God for our salvation.

Commentary

The first of Christ’s three offices answers our ignorance. Fallen man is darkened in his understanding and cannot find God by his own searching, so Christ comes as a prophet, the great revealer of God. A prophet’s task is to speak God’s word to men, and Christ does this supremely, for He is not merely a messenger who brings a word from God but the Word of God Himself. “No one has ever seen God; God the only Son, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known” (John 1:18). All the prophets before Him pointed forward to Him; in Christ, the full and final revelation of God has come.

The catechism says He reveals the will of God by Word and Spirit. These two always work together. By His Word Christ teaches us the truth of God, first in His own earthly preaching, then through the apostles and prophets whose writings make up the Scriptures, which are His word to His church in every age. By His Spirit, He opens blind eyes to understand that Word, for the same truth that leaves the natural man unmoved becomes light and life when the Spirit applies it to the heart. Christ promised this very thing: “the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things” (John 14:26). The Word without the Spirit is heard but not received; the Spirit never works apart from the Word.

The limit and the aim of this prophetic teaching is the will of God for our salvation. Christ does not satisfy our idle curiosity about every mystery, but He tells us all we need to know that we might know God savingly and to walk with Him. He no longer calls His people servants kept in the dark, but friends, “for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15). To sit under Christ’s prophetic office is to take His Word as our final authority and to plead for His Spirit to make it plain, refusing both the deadness that hears without understanding and the pride that seeks revelation apart from the Word He has given.

Scripture Proofs

“No one has ever seen God; God the only Son, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known” (John 1:18).

“But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you” (John 14:26).

“No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15).

2nd London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689

8.10: This number and order of offices is necessary; for in respect of our ignorance, we stand in need of His prophetical office; and in respect of our alienation from God, and imperfection of the best of our services, we need His priestly office to reconcile us and present us acceptable unto God; and in respect to our averseness and utter inability to return to God, and for our rescue and security from our spiritual adversaries, we need His kingly office to convince, subdue, draw, uphold, deliver, and preserve us to His heavenly kingdom.

Last week, I visited The Museum of Pop Culture, which sits at the foot of the Space Needle in Seattle, Washington. It is a Frank Gehry structure of stainless steel panels and collapsing curves that the architect designed by purchasing electric guitars, cutting them to pieces, and working from the fragments. The building cost $240 million when it opened in 2000. Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder who commissioned it, died in 2018, worth $20.3 billion. He never married, had no children, and left the museum to the city where he was born. Inside, the collection has 80,000 artifacts: Hendrix’s guitars, Cobain’s hand-smashed Univox, Bowie’s handwritten lyrics to “Starman,” Prince’s motorcycle jacket from Purple Rain, horror film props, science fiction costumes, and a hall dedicated to the history of hip-hop, among many other things. I was there with my family for four hours. Since then, I’ve been contemplating what it means that this is what we now build.

Not a cathedral. Not a concert hall commissioned for a specific composer’s work. Not a library organized around a canon. A museum of pop culture, which is to say, a museum dedicated to preserving things that defined themselves by their refusal to last.

That is not a criticism of MoPOP, Allen, or the artifacts inside. I enjoyed the experience (aside from the incessant trigger warnings and reminders that progressive northwesterners think everything is offensive). Some of what hangs on those walls is nearly prophetic. Cobain identified a specific American sickness in 1991 with enough precision that the diagnosis still holds. Hip-hop gave voice to the experience that high culture had systematically excluded, and did it with formal inventiveness that serious critics eventually had to acknowledge. Pop culture at its best does what all serious art does: it identifies and articulates the sense of a culture before the culture has words for it. To dismiss it wholesale is to miss what it actually accomplished.

But the building is still made from the pieces of smashed instruments. And the question the building raises is not whether pop culture can be good. It can. The question is what it means that pop culture is now the only culture most people in the West share, and what that dominance has cost us.

There is a distinction, older than the argument about it, between three kinds of culture. High culture is the accumulated inheritance of a civilization’s best work, the things that survived not because they were popular but because successive generations judged them worth preserving. Folk culture is the living expression of a particular community: its songs, stories, and rituals, tied to place and belonging and transmitted person to person. Pop culture is neither. It is industrial, produced for mass consumption, optimized for immediate appeal, and designed to be replaced. It does not ask to endure. In fact, its business model depends on not enduring, because the next thing must be sold.

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These three forms of culture were not always in competition. For most of Western history, they occupied different registers of the same shared world, and the relationship between them was one of the primary mechanisms by which a civilization transmitted itself across generations.

Consider the medieval parish. A laborer in thirteenth-century England could not read. He had no access to the universities at Oxford or Paris, no direct encounter with Aquinas or Augustine, no personal copy of anything. By every modern measure of cultural access, he was excluded from high culture. But the building where he worshipped every week had been designed by men who had absorbed the full theological and aesthetic inheritance of Christendom, and they had encoded it in stone, glass, and proportion. He could not have articulated what Aquinas argued about beauty, but the church building he entered every Sunday was a material expression of those arguments, and they did something to him without his knowing it.

His folk culture reinforced what the high culture embedded. The songs his community sang at planting and harvest, at weddings and funerals, carried the same cosmology to a different tune. They assumed a world with a moral order, with death as a real event and not merely a transition, with joy and grief as appropriate responses to specific things. The calendar his village kept, the feast days and fast days, organized time itself around a narrative that high culture had constructed and folk culture transmitted at the level of lived experience. He did not need to read to be formed by all of this. Formation was the ambient condition of his existence.

This is not a romanticization of the Middle Ages, which were brutal in ways the nostalgia tends to omit. The point is structural, not sentimental. High culture functioned as a set of standards that organized everything below it, including the institutions that shaped ordinary people who never directly encountered it. Folk culture functioned as the living transmission of those standards in forms that ordinary people could inhabit without formal education. The two were not identical and were often in tension, but they shared a common assumption: that some things are better than others, that the better things deserve more attention and more effort, and that the work of passing them forward is one of the primary obligations of each generation to the next.

Pop culture dissolves that structure. It does not replace high culture with something else that aspires to permanence. It replaces the aspiration itself. A culture saturated in pop stops asking whether a thing deserves to last and asks only whether it is compelling right now. The standard shifts from excellence to engagement, from judgment to preference, from “is this good” to “does this move me,” and then, one step further, to “does this move me this week,” and then to “what’s next?” The best of pop culture sometimes transcends its industrial origins and rewards repeated attention; the problem is not that nothing good can emerge from it, but that its dominant incentives and sheer volume steadily erode the habits that make such transcendence likely at scale.

This is what MoPOP, for all its genuine interest, inadvertently illustrates. The building holds artifacts from a culture that produced them with disposability in mind, and the very act of preserving them reveals the contradiction at the center of the enterprise. Allen wanted permanence for things that were never meant to be permanent. He wanted to honor a tradition that defined itself against tradition. The museum is a monument to the moment when a civilization wealthy enough to preserve anything found itself uncertain what, besides its own appetites, was worth preserving.

The loss is not primarily aesthetic, though it is that too. The deeper loss is the capacity for judgment that high culture requires and trains. To engage seriously with Dante or Bach or Monet is to submit yourself to standards you did not invent and cannot easily dismiss. The work makes demands. It asks you to develop the capacity to receive it, to bring patience and attention, and some degree of formed taste to the encounter. That formation takes time and requires the admission that your immediate reaction is not the final word on a thing’s value. You might not like it yet. You might need to grow into it.

Pop culture makes no such demand. It is engineered to be immediately accessible, which is one reason it dominates and one reason that dominance is corrosive. A person formed entirely by pop culture has never been asked to subordinate their immediate response to a longer judgment. They have never had the experience of being wrong about a piece of music or literature, returning to it, and finding that it was better than they first thought. They have never had to earn an aesthetic response. The result is not just shallower taste. It is a shallower personhood, a self that has been trained to treat its own momentary reactions as authoritative and to move on quickly when the reaction fades.

Aristotle argued in the Nicomachean Ethics that virtue is a habit formed by practice, that you become just by doing just acts and courageous by doing courageous acts, and that the appetites have to be trained toward the good rather than simply followed. The same logic applies to aesthetic and intellectual life. The capacity for sustained attention, for tolerating difficulty, for deferring judgment until understanding arrives, is not innate. It is cultivated, and high culture was one of the primary institutions through which the West cultivated it. Folk culture reinforced it by embedding people in communities with memories longer than their own lifetimes. Pop culture, by its structure, trains the opposite habits: immediacy, novelty, frictionless consumption, and the replacement of judgment with preference.

I am not making a nostalgic argument for returning to a world that never existed as cleanly as it sounds in summary. High culture was never democratically distributed. Its gatekeepers were often self-serving. Folk culture could be parochial and resistant to correction. The point is not that everything was better before the pop industry, but that something was present before it that is now largely absent: a shared set of standards, held and transmitted by institutions with enough truth to say that some things are better than others and that the better things deserve more of your attention than you may naturally want to give them.

The confidence to say that today, for many, is gone. Its disappearance is visible not only in what we build but in how we argue. The standard defense of any cultural artifact now is that it matters to someone, that it resonates, that it connects. These are descriptions of effect, not judgments of quality. They tell you what something does to a particular audience, not whether it is good. When effect replaces quality as the primary standard, all cultural production flattens to the same level, because everything affects someone. The result is not a more democratic culture. It is a culture without standards, which is a different and more serious problem.

I stood in the Guitar Gallery at MoPOP for a while, looking at instruments that had been played by people who understood their craft at a level I will never reach. The gallery traces the guitar from the acoustic parlors of the 1890s through the electric innovations of the 1940s through the stadium amplifications of the 1970s. It is genuinely instructive. You can see how mastery accumulated across generations, how each player built on and departed from what came before, how the instrument itself evolved in response to what serious musicians demanded of it. That is a high cultural process. It requires the transmission of standards, the formation of taste, and the willingness to judge one approach better than another.

But it’s fascinating to think that the museum that houses the gallery does not operate by those standards. It treats Hendrix’s guitar and a horror movie prop with the same curatorial seriousness because both are pop culture artifacts, and pop culture does not rank bad, good, better, or best. It just is. Everything is interesting; nothing is more important. This is the institution’s defining contradiction, and it is also the defining contradiction of the culture that produced it.

In the book of Ecclesiastes, Qohelet surveyed everything he had built and accumulated and called it vapor. The Hebrew word is hebel, breath, mist, the thing that dissipates as soon as it appears. He was not saying that his works were worthless. He was saying that they could not answer the question his life kept asking. The pursuit of excellence under the sun, divorced from the fear of God, eventually runs into the same wall that every human project does: it cannot tell you what is worth doing, why doing it well matters, or what the work is finally for.

A civilization that has lost confidence in its capacity to judge excellence has not found a better answer to that problem. It has stopped asking the question, which is not the same thing. The vapor still dissipates. The guitar still ends up in pieces. But what is it all for?

The asking of the question is not nothing. But it requires standards to ask against, a tradition long enough to provide a measure, and the willingness to submit your own immediate reactions to a judgment that outlasts them. That willingness is what pop culture, at scale, trains out of us. Recovering it is not a matter of going back. It is a matter of deciding that some things are worth the effort of going deeper, and that a self formed by that effort is more fully human than one that never made it.

The building at the foot of the Space Needle is worth visiting. Go and look at what we’ve saved and ask what we’ve lost in the meantime. Was it worth it?