habits for humanity in the age of AI
“For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.”
— Ecclesiastes 1:18
That seems a fitting meditation from Qoheleth on an age overflowing with data and yet starved of wisdom, peace, and moral clarity. And it is those three items that a man dying from five different kinds of cancer at once seeks to point us towards, as death has sharpened his insight for humanity.
Ben Sasse has written a piece in The Wall Street Journal in an attempt to slow the cultural upheaval erupting around us. It is sentence upon sentence of pure gold, deserving of reading, re-reading, and conversations around the tables of every home in this country. Here’s just a sampling:
We are in a civilization-warping crisis of institutional decline. The consequences are all around us.
• We’re lonely. The share of Americans who tell pollsters that they have no close friends has quadrupled since 1990. A study last month from the University of Arizona found that over the last 15 years, people average 338 fewer spoken words per day than the year before. That’s 120,000 fewer words a year.
• We don’t trust our institutions. Pew data shows this most pointedly around the federal government, whose trust has dropped from 77% in the mid-1960s to 17% last year. Pew and Gallup have measured 10 different institutions every year for about 50 years. Nine of them have experienced a declining level of public trust for four consecutive decades. The military is the only exception.
• We don’t trust one another. Only 1 in 3 Americans tell Pew that they think they can trust most people, down significantly from previous decades. Conspiracy theories are metastasizing across the internet, and more of our neighbors are falling prey to these echo chambers.
And one of the things I’ve always appreciated about Mr. Sasse is he’s not the type to merely point out the problems, but to also offer solutions. Here are four, which he calls “starter habits”:
• Reading. Fewer than half of Americans read a book last year. That is a national crisis. Shorter attention spans are killing our imagination. Before our kids even learn the alphabet, we hand them tablets, and we know from neurological imagery that it is rotting their brains. Families need to read aloud together again to build children’s affection for books and to build a shared library—a family canon to inform the character of a home.
As in every debate about the canon, there will be fights about what is in and what is out. There is no definitive answer to the canon because the intellectual journey is central to the point. We need to teach our kids to fall in love with reading and show them that the endless dialogue between ideas is more rewarding than the endless scrolling of social media.
• Hard work. This habit can start at an early age. Sure, it’s easier to load and unload the dishwasher and put away the laundry yourself, but we miss the opportunity if we don’t bring the next generation into the labor. Over time, small jobs become medium jobs and ultimately pave the way for hard tasks.
Young men especially need work. There’s a reason that dad hobbies are all chores: woodworking, yard work, grilling, tinkering. It’s work that engages your body when so much of our work has merely engaged our minds. Right now we are insulating our children from work, on average until they’re in their mid-20s, and by then lots of them turn out not to be able to learn how to do it.
• Tech sabbaths. We should love work but not worship it. We need to be able to set it aside, recognizing that we need rest. In my theological tradition, we remember the Fourth Commandment not only as an obligation but as a gift. As more of our work becomes detached from specific places—Zoom meetings, calls, emails—the habit of rest, of airplane mode, emphasizes place, guards against digital intrusion, and allows the revivification of the thickest, the most local, and the most important. Lock up our devices and keep them away from the family meal. Pay attention to the people around the table, the bread, the conversation, and the hugs and hands.
• Serious travel. In the same way that learning another language helps us understand our native tongue more deeply, travel forms character through lived experience. Don’t view this as vacation. “Travel” has the same etymological root as “travail.” To travel should be a kind of work. It takes work to leave your comfort zone. If you live in a city, you need to experience the country. If you live in the country, you need to know how to navigate the city.
Have your kids take extended leaves of absence from school and go live with other families somewhere else. If you can, figure out how to do multigenerational living with family compounds or other places you can return to. Give kids the thickness of a community of cousins, aunts, uncles and other relatives.
Now you know what I mean by sentence after sentence of pure gold!
So go to The Wall Street Journal, and read the whole thing. And then read it again. And then discuss it with everyone you know, so that little platoons bringing slow but steady change will form across this great land.
