This summer is, sadly, coming to an end, and with it my grandiose hopes of reading several dozen books. But I did finish one: Liturgy of the Land: Cultivating a Catholic Homestead. Reading such a book may seem improper for someone like me, who lives on 1/20 of an acre in a “master-planned community.” There are no cows on our tiny parcels. (Though, a renegade friend of mine did keep bees until a bear helped himself to the hive). So why read it? Among other reasons, I am convinced that the most viable politics, especially at present, is a local politics, one that will inevitably have something to do with food and land and family and place. Thus, I want to briefly explain why this book is worth reading and what I enjoyed most about it.

A Book of Contrasts

Liturgy of the Land was published in 2023 by TAN Books. Its authors, Jason Craig and Thomas Van Horn, are both farmers and Catholics. The former is a dairy farmer, while the latter harvests honey. Craig also runs Sword and Spade, a podcast and magazine, and he helped put together a very interesting series of essays in The American Catholic Land Movement, also published by TAN Books, which I have been picking through.

The chapters in Liturgy of the Land are arranged in a series of contrasts, with the goal being to help you, the reader, to see the difference between life off the land versus life on the land: from the division of labor to integration, from mechanical time to seasons, from wages to productive property, and so on. The book pits what we currently have—alienating work, fragmented families, life lived in mechanical time—with what we could have: integrated work and families lived in organic time, in harmony with the seasons. It is filled with high-quality photographs and an appendix of possible homestead activities that you could undertake in terms of the costs and benefits to a family. The book runs 257 pages, but the photographs, appendix, and engaging style make it a quicker read.

Theory and Practice

The book is unique insofar as it blends theory and practice. We have perhaps never before been glutted with so much “useful content” on YouTube, DIY blogs, and now AI.1 But the genius of Liturgy of the Land is that it situates what is perhaps one of the most useful of all branches of knowledge—agriculture—within a larger narrative of economic decline and alienation that has occurred in the past century or so. Rare is the book that can really connect to a larger story of why some practice is worth pursuing (as opposed to others). In it, you learn about the overarching transition we made as Americans from cottage industry to wage earners. Responding to the criticism that they want to “go back” to the past, an impossible and Romantic endeavor, the authors write,

Catholic historian and scholar Alan C. Carlson helps show that families, especially in the United States, did not ‘leave’ the land at all but have been moved from it by policy and practice. If it is something artificially imposed on the family, especially if it has had a traceably negative effect, then there are stronger arguments to push back and do our best to ‘go back.’ Carlson’s work has shown that suburban developments have been an intentional objective of government housing policy for close to a century, and these policies had explicit goals to increase urban populations with the obvious and intentional side effect of depleting the countryside of its farmers. The ‘suburban experiment,’ as Carlson calls it, refers to homes being built in a fashion foreseeing that they would not be places of production but of consumption.

They continue with some more specific historical details,

As an example of these policies that preferred suburbanization, we can consider that almost all homes in the United States once housed spaces for work, food preparation and storage (like cellars), and often even room enough for multiple generations. But in the middle and later 1900s, official policies put us on a different course. For example, mortgage guidelines from the FHA ‘were systematically denied to any residence that contained facilities designed for use as a productive shop, office, or separate apartment for an extended family member or renter, or preschool,’ explains Carlson. The government wanted to phase out rural and productive homes in favor of consolidated suburban neighborhoods as a necessary part of a consumer-based, industrial economy.

And finally,

There is a logic to the government preferring non-productive, suburban homes. Productive homes, like homesteads, remove people from the workforce, reduce the need to purchase new products (consume industrially manufactured goods), and do not generate taxable income nor contribute to the revenue from various sales taxes. (17-18)

Thus, you can begin to see some of the political implications behind homesteading, land use, and food production. If I were to drive down the street, I’d see tomato and citrus fields getting torn up for the latest copy-and-paste “lifestyle community.” It is important to know that governments, corporate entities, and political actors actively intervened to help usher in massive changes that transformed us into mere consumers. And, more importantly, they’re still intervening.

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From Consumers to Participants

Altogether, perhaps what I like most about this book is that it helps shift your mindset away from consumption and towards participation. You are not a mere Cartesian spectator over against a world of objects. You live in the Cosmos. You are a participant in being, in that which is, in that which lives and moves and grows alongside you. Nature is not something over against you. Rather, it is something you’re in that (at least partially) helps constitute who you are.

While the book primarily addresses those who want to make productive use of the land they live on, those who to go “from here to there,” the authors don’t suppose everyone can do it, whether for financial or practical reasons (25). The chapter “Discerning a Place Between Suburbia and The Village” is especially appropriate in this regard. The authors write,

…we place before us the word ‘suburban’ home not as a slur or degradation but as an observation of the predominant arrangements for most households in our country. And, relatedly, this is very often the thing that people are moving away from in a desire to move toward a homestead. This shows that, for many, the urging toward a homestead is not necessarily a romantic and impractical idealizing of a bygone era but an essentially practical reorientation of the home as an economy unity, remembering again that the original meaning of the word “economy” [oikonomia] is household management. We are reconceiving not just how we think of a home but what a home is for. We who are, in a sense, converting our homes to this different arrangement must recognize that between suburbia and a community of homesteads is a spectrum of arrangements, and making a move on that spectrum can be subtle but fruitful or it can be an entire and total change of culture. (153)

So maybe you’ll never have three acres and a cow, G. K. Chesterton’s prescription for what you’d need for a productive household. But maybe you could do something subversive like start a garden. Maybe you could put some tomatoes in a grow bag on that apartment balcony of yours. By so doing, you might come to a realization of the inherent fecundity of nature. Seeds grow of their own accord. You might even make the analogical leap between the natural and supernatural:

This is how it is with the kingdom of God; it is as if a man were to scatter seed on the land and would sleep and rise night and day and the seed would sprout and grow, he knows not how. Of its own accord the land yields fruit, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. And when the grain is ripe, he wields the sickle at once, for the harvest has come. (Mark 4:26-29)

There’s a majesty in the natural order of things that our alienated modes of existence hide from us. Growing just one plant of your own is perhaps all you need to realize the inherent insanity and maliciousness of a company that produces seeds that go sterile after the first generation.2 We lose something economic when we lose the land, it is true. We lose real political sovereignty, whether we realize it or not. But we lose also that natural context from which spring some of the most extraordinary metaphors from Scripture: the faith the size of a mustard seed, the grain of wheat that falls in the ground, the fig tree that teaches.

Everyone grows something in their driveway or yard, whether they want to or not, even if it is a weed or some grass. Whatever it is, why not help it along? You don’t necessarily need to take pictures of what you’re growing and float them into cyberspace. Just let your neighbors see. You may alarm them. Or you may inspire them. After all, there’s a widespread movement to go and “touch grass” nowadays. If you don’t like grass, why not plant something in its place? A fig tree, perhaps?

If you liked this post, you might also like:

• How to Wonder: Reading the World like Chesterton

• Time: Mechanical and Organic

Not long ago, I sat down with Andrew Laubacher to talk about what the Internet is doing to our souls. I’m honored to know Andrew, who has been instrumental to the growth and development of Humanality, a non-profit aimed at getting young people off their phones.

Among other things, we talked about:

• The tech idiot paradigm

• Walker Percy and Susan Sontag anticipating some of our problems with the Internet

• The slot machine as a metaphor for digital tech

• The genius of boredom

• Curiosity as a vice and the importance of temperance

You can listen to the full conversation here:

Perhaps most importantly, we discussed this whole idea of “participation.” I want to limit how much I function as a mere consumer, something we’re constantly conditioned into. I want the same thing for those I know and care about.

Please do me a favor and be a participant. Let me know if there’s anything you’d like to hear more about. I’m always thinking about what to write about next. You can drop me a line in the comments below, send me a direct message, or shoot me a carrier pigeon. Just don’t shoot a carrier pigeon.

God bless you,
JNB

In Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Illich,” the main character has a lapel pin that reads respice finem. The English translation of this phrase is, “Look to the end.” Otherwise put: Remember, you die.

What is so ironic about this little lapel pin is that Ivan Illich does not look to his end (his death), and thus the ultimate meaning of his life gets lost on him when he falls gravely ill later in the tale. What’s the lesson? We ought to repeatedly reflect on our own death, which might give us a greater appreciation for the vanity of the things of this world. It might also make us more sympathetic to our shared lot with others—friends and strangers alike—who must ultimately pass from this world, too.

In life, nothing is certain except that at some undisclosed time and in some unknown place, you will die.

What is so odd (and remarkable) about death is that we must remember it, which is to say that we have to remember something that hasn’t happened yet. Remembering our death is perhaps the original existentialist problematic (William Barrett highlights Tolstoy’s influence on Heidegger in Irrational Man). For this little essay, I want to focus on three ways to keep respice finem fresh and top of mind. Some of these ways may sound odd. But what have you got to lose from trying them out? Your life?

#1: Archival Photos

On this Substack, I’ve regularly used archival photos from Flickr Commons in my posts. What’s so amazing about these pictures is how young, fresh, lithe, and beautiful these people look.

Unidentified woman holding gladiolus
at Terra Ceia Island Farms, Florida | May 8, 1947

As you browse the archive, you notice a trapeze swinger in the 1920s. A man and his son on a beach in the 40s. Another waits for a train at the turn of the century, with a crisp hat and suit and handsome face. And where are they now? Pushing daises, of course. As Susan Sontag writes in her essay, “In Plato’s Cave,”

“All photographs are memento mori” (15).

She explains,

“To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt” (15).

As Gollum says in his riddle concerning time in The Hobbit:

This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.

Photos catch the movement of time by arresting it. There’s something about the affective immediacy of an image that burns itself into your memory. The old commonplace from painting was to use a skull to signify the vanity of life. For me, at least, Baldung’s The Ages and Death is one of the most effective paintings ever created for directing the viewer’s attention to death.1

Nevertheless, I suppose the tactic of looking at old photographs may not work for everyone. So let us consider another way of impressing death into our minds.

#2: Counting the Days

When you’re young, 20 years feels like forever. When you’re middle aged, 20 years feels like nothing. I remember being 18. My back didn’t randomly hurt. Each birthday seemed to celebrate my youth. But what does a year feel like, nowadays? It feels like nothing. The rationalists and utilitarians and bean counters out there might say that the year is a bad metric for measuring death. For once, I would agree with them.

Thus, I propose to translate your years (potentially) remaining into days to give greater urgency to each day. I think a year imperceptible. Not so a day.

Let’s say you’re 35. Let’s say that, barring a fatal car accident, cancer, terrorist attack, etc., you’ll live until you’re 85. 50 years seems like a long time, doesn’t it? 50 years is 18,250 days. That, too, may seem very long. (Or maybe not? Do all those days seem more real than 50 years?)

In any case, consider this. If you’re 35, you’ve already lived 12,775 days. By tomorrow, you’ll have 18,249 days left (if you live to 85). And thus, by a slow drip of days, your vitality will leave you. Wrinkles will appear on your face. Friends will fade (lost to accident, cancer, etc.). And rust and moth will come to do their jobs, as they always do.

If this conversion of potential years remaining doesn’t work for you, you can try a few things:

• Return to #1: Archival Photos.

• Estimate 20-30 years instead of 50 to hedge for disease, accident, etc. (7,300 to 10,950 days).

• Read some obituaries, especially of the “young,” whether “young” means 40 or 65 to you. You’ll find plenty of people in those obituary pages. If you can’t see yourself in them, my question is: Why not? Is death something that only happens to other people?

#3: Read Some Meditations

Here are just three works to read that might stir some fire in your soul.

1. St. Francis De Sales’ Introduction to the Devout Life. De Sales’ meditation on death appears amidst his others on judgment, heaven, and hell. Imagine, the saint tells us, the day and the hour. Will it be sudden or slow? Consider how quickly you’ll be forgotten (because you, too, will become a sign of others’ finitude). Read the whole thing here.

2. Petrarch’s Secretum. St. Augustine appears to Petrarch to set him on the straight and narrow in this classic dialogue. In the dialogue, Augustine insists that the first step in overcoming the distresses of this mortal life is constant meditation on death and human misery. Petrarch has Augustine say:

“No man is so senseless (unless he be altogether out of his mind) as never once to remember his own weak nature, or who, if asked the question whether he were mortal and dwelt in a frail body, would not answer that he was. The pains of the body, the onsets of fever, attest the fact; and whom has the favour of Heaven made exempt? Moreover, your friends are carried out to their burial before your eyes; and this fills the soul with dread. When one goes to the graveside of some friend of one’s own age one is forced to tremble at another’s fall and to begin feeling uneasy for oneself; just as when you see your neighbour’s roof on fire, you cannot fool [sic] quite happy for your own, because, as Horace puts it—

“On your own head you see the stroke will fall.”^[7]

The impression will be more strong in case you see some sudden death carry off one younger, more vigorous, finer looking than yourself. In such an event a man will say, “This one seemed to live secure, and yet he is snatched off. His youth, his beauty, his strength have brought him no help. What God or what magician has promised me any surer warrant of security? Verily, I too am mortal.”

When the like fate befalls kings and rulers of the earth, people of great might and such as are regarded with awe, those who see it are struck with more dread, are more shaken with alarm; they are amazed when they behold a sudden terror, or perchance hours of intense agony seize on one who was wont to strike terror into others. From what other cause proceed the doings of people who seem beside themselves upon the death of men in highest place, such as, to take an instance from history, the many things of this kind that, as you have related, were done at the funeral of Julius Cæsar? A public spectacle like this strikes the attention and touches the heart of mortal men; and what then they see in the case of another is brought home as pertaining also to themselves. Beside all these, are there not the rage of savage boasts, and of men, and the furious madness of war? Are there not the falls of those great buildings which, as some one neatly says, are first the safeguards, then the sepulchres of men? Are there not malignant motions of the air beneath some evil star and pestilential sky? And so many perils on sea and land that, look wheresoever you will, you cannot turn your gaze anywhither but you will meet the visible image and memento of your own mortality.”

Read the whole thing here.

3. Tolstoy, “The Death of Ivan Illich.” Well, we’ve come full circle, haven’t we? This tale begins with Ivan’s funeral and then rehearses how Ivan made his way to his grave: his conventional life, his vain desires, his death grip on this life. Read it here.

Morbid or Necessary?

What is the upshot of all this reflection on death? It is only this: to put the things of this life in their proper perspective. Contemplation of your death is a sobering, wonder-inspiring act. You will die. It is absolutely certain. Crafty creatures that we are, we constantly deceive ourselves into forgetting our end. And we congratulate ourselves into thinking we’re not morbid! We think by deferring the very thought of death we can defer the very thing itself. But that’s impossible. Imagine the fruit you’ll bear by consistently reflecting on your finitude. Each day will become infinitely important. Death won’t catch you by surprise. You’ll have trimmed your wick (Mt 25:1-13). You’ll be ready, loins girt, to leap into the great beyond where time is no more.

With your end in mind, you’ll be better able to see how vain and unprofitable much of social media is, how ridiculous it is to spend any more than a fraction of a second on the Internet (let alone doomscrolling your life away). One of Anton Barba-Kay’s great insights is that digital technology becomes an instrument of death insofar as it causes us to forget our own death.

Everyone is called to be a good steward of his or her days. As with your money and the hairs on your head, your days, too, are numbered. But do you really know it? What have you done so as to prevent this certain truth from slipping into oblivion? What will you do?

Nine out of ten people can’t recognize their own hands in a photograph.1

It seems that we take our hands for granted. They are (in the words of Corey Anton, I believe) “haptic intentionalities” through which we attend to the world. Our hands fall into the taken-for-grantedness of things. But they’re always there, helping us accomplish our ends, facilitating our projects like good servants. If idle hands are the devil’s playground, it is because idle hands mean idle minds and idle bodies.

Unless you work in a skilled trade, your hands most likely rest (and occasionally twitch) on keyboards—whether on your computer or on your smartphone. The word “manual,” a quaint word nowadays, as in “manual labor” or “manual transmission,” comes from the Latin manus, which means “hand.” To “manufacture” is literally to make by hand. Of course, manufacturing nowadays means anything but.

In what follows, a keyboard and a pen (or pencil, if your imagination prefers) each make some claims as to where you should put your hands the next time you want to write something down, especially if you hope to compose more thoughtful, creative, or intellectual prose.

One effect of this exercise is to demonstrate that technologies already make arguments for their use (or disuse). I don’t just give voices to the keyboard and pen in what follows. These technologies already say something, even though they speak in hushed or inaudible tones.

A Dialogue Between a Keyboard and a Pen

Keyboard (henceforth, simply “K”): Writing articles, books, and essays by hand takes an eternity. You go off into your little corner with your pen and yellow legal pad. But how many words do you write? Do you even know? No, you probably don’t, because you can’t see the word count grow in real time. So you delude yourself into thinking you’re being productive. But here’s my favorite part: After you spend an eternity drafting by hand, you have to go and type it all up into a computer! You have to use me, anyway! You just delay the inevitable, and you trick yourself into thinking you’re doing deeper, better, more meaningful work. Don’t you know there’s no end to your craftiness in deceiving yourself? All you’re doing when you write by hand is slowing yourself down from creating a finished product. My younger brother—the Large Language Model—doesn’t even need me to generate text (well, not really). Even though he steals a lot of my business (and I am oriented towards business, mind you), I don’t really mind. I have to respect his sheer efficiency. What would take you an hour or more by hand, he can do in one second. Or less! To use his services, you still need me to generate prompts, of course. Are you still with me?

Pen (henceforth “P”): I am.

K: Good. And I speak not just to you but to those in the audience here who aspire to authorship. Now let me continue. Even if you do draft by hand, I bet you’ve thought of photographing your work and using my brother to convert that image into some digital text. Why do you have this irrational fear of using me? Just use me first, good people. Let go of your pen. Save your hand the pain of cramping.

P: I must confess before beginning that I’m quite old and easily winded. I’m something you have to carry, like Anchises on the back of Aeneas. I’m not something to rest on.

K: How old are you now?

P: I imagine I have some ancestors dating back to Sumer.

K: And their carving in mud?

P: Clay or mud. I’m not sure which.

K: And you’ve done business with Homer?

P: If you want to call it that—Homer or his scribe.

K: And Herodotus?

P: Everyone—from Shakespeare to Montaigne to Paine. Until you came along.

K: Well, you can see me in the telegraph and typewriter, what with their tapping and clacking.

P: Nietzsche was on to you and your ways.

K: He was. Perhaps I drove him mad. I do abhor silence. I loathe your austerity and asceticism and slowness. Goodness me. I dream of seeds of thought that sprout and shoot at the pop of a key—not those that creep and crawl from their ink-stained graves in slow motion.

P: But you cannot doodle?

K: Cannot doodle?

P: In the margin, I say. You cannot play in the margin.

K: I have no desire to play in the margin. I open up more ecstatic forms of play.

P: I’ve seen you’ve been colorful, as of late. When you’re stuck on to a gaming computer, you glow like a rainbow.

K: I find it distasteful, but what can you do.

P: Must be tough for someone so bent on the analytic, quantifiable, and left-brained.

K: Left-brained? Ha! Me? I am the corpus callosum, what McLuhan prophesied as necessary. I use both hands and therefore both hemispheric regions of the brain, dear friend. It’s you, and you alone, who have singlehandedly separated the master from his emissary.

P: That is a wild and verbose accusation.

K: As if I could help myself. I agitate for symmetry and order. But you are as dead as lead. At high noon, I draw quicker.

P: If I am slow (to speak), it’s because I must be quick (to listen). I must have the end in mind before I open my mouth or let the ink spill. A pen must therefore be Aristotelian for this very reason. With me, you can feel the magnetic curve of form pulling you through your work. But you, you jump around too much. You don’t glide but punch and hammer. You make writing war. You know no curves. You are but random points scattered in a coordinate plane (a board of keys). You are diffuse, my friend, and from your diffusion comes confusion. You are endless promises and nothing but.

K: Let us make one more appeal to our patient audience, shall we?

P: You first.

K: Dear esteemed reader, you who are bombarded by emails, you who must write for a living, both ye creative and non-creative types, I present myself to you as the standard bearer of good thinking, of the efficient production of prose. You are free to write by hand, if you wish. You know it. But know this. You write by hand as a luxury. As a diversion. As a way of deceiving yourself into thinking you’re writing more authentic prose. You’re free to drink espresso and wear your Steve Zissou hat as some fringe indie band nobody has ever heard of plays in the background. Go ahead and jot in your Moleskine. But know ye this: You will produce less. It is not complicated. The slower you write, the less you can write in any given period. We’re not at a juncture in history where we need to re-think the wheel here. I am the future. I have been the future since the early 1990s. The most important thing you ever get, after the alphabet, is me (and I have the alphabet for a face). Educators will not (and should not) cease teaching students to type. It is their entrance into the world of commerce. Of business. Of the real world, which is the virtual world. But the real world, nevertheless. Dear Pen, you are but a waystation, something easily bypassed. Not so with me.

P: Are you done?

K: I am.

P: Good. You have a choice, reader: The keys or me. I only offer you pain: slow, measured words, carefully weighed. Look at my opponent. See him chained. He is bound to a monitor, always a monitor, always a screen with him. You are forever before the glow of something, most likely a company or program or application. I say again: See him chained! Will you not be chained with him if you use him? With him, your brain will forever be for rent, your eyeballs leased to the highest bidder. But with me, I am under the dominion of no plastic or glass. I yearn only to sit between paper and hand. Paper that may burn or tear. Hand that may break or bleed. I built Rome—not Silicon Valley. I offer you a signature experience—not the uniform and gray. No monitor means no temptation to browse, no social media, no distraction. I can give you poetry, even in prose. But there never has been and never will be a “keybard.”

K: Oh, what terrible slop you produce. I have aided many a bard. I could make poetry from your jugular!

At this, their quibble broke into a brawl. The pen drew first blood, scribbling on the keyboard who was chained to a computer and could not break free. The keyboard spit out several keys after taking heavy blows, the keys falling like teeth from a dragon’s mouth.

Yet the keyboard enlisted his friends, monitor and desktop tower included, to beat that pen into a papery pulp. The pen’s last words before dying were: “By my cold dead hand!”

Yo-Yo Ma was almost indisputably one of the greatest cellists who ever lived.

After a private audience with Steve Jobs, Jobs said that Ma’s playing was the best argument for the existence of God that he’d ever heard.

Would you be disturbed, then, if I told you that Yo-Yo Ma faked his performance of “Air and Simple Gifts” (a piece by John Williams) at the 2009 presidential inauguration of Barack Obama? Would it have made any difference to those watching to learn that it was an all an act? All that smiling and expressive playing was not really resulting in any sound?1

If you’re wondering why his performance is so convincing, it is because, obviously, Yo-Yo Ma is in reality an excellent cellist. The fakery was no secret, either, which makes you wonder if I should keep calling it “fakery” (I will keep calling it “fakery,” just to be provocative).

In an interview with NPR, Ma justified his fakery as follows:

I think - let me put it to you this way. If we had not done that, we would have had four and a half minutes of absolute disaster. Everything would have been out of tune. We would have had broken strings. Basically, you would have had a very poor, “American Idol “rendition of what, you know, what John Williams had created, which is a beautiful piece of music. And we really knew that our purpose there was to serve the moment just before the swearing-in of the president.

We learn that Ma used soap instead of resin on his bow to prevent any sound from coming out. And, apparently, a piano tech disengaged the keys from the piano hammers, too.

The pseudo-event of the presidential inauguration justified this “performance” (what some might call “miming,” not “faking”).2 But as Ma himself points out, conventionally it is totally acceptable to do something like this.

Let’s look at another example.

Air Guitar World Championships

Every year since 1996, crowds have been gathering at the Air Guitar World Championships in Oulu, Finland to watch others pretend they’re playing guitar.

Read more

Peg had a lump. It had been there for some time, not much of a bother. But kind of a bother. Thankfully, it was behind her neck, or rather, on the back of her neck, so it lived in solitary darkness under her hair.

After Peg had become a medical doctor, she became disillusioned and left the profession even though she had graduated medical school at the top of her class. She decided to become a farmer, then a chiropractor, then a functional medicine practitioner and voodoo witch doctor. (She converted to Catholicism on her death bed, but we’ll get to that later.)

Peg grew her own herbs on her farm and began manufacturing her own line of supplements with the help of her husband and his dehydrator.

Anyways, it came time for Peg to address her neck lump. The lump had begun as, hmm, something small. A feeling. A whisp of the hand against something not hard but not squishy either. A conversation with her husband in which they both had to feel around a good while with several fingers before they could find it (“Here it is, no here, here”).

Peg’s husband made a circle around the lump with red marker. Now, all they had to do was part Peg’s hair and search for the red bullseye. They left the lump there, much more peaceful knowing that they couldn’t lose it again.

The lump was filed away while Peg and her husband dealt with other matters. Their growing supplement business, their clients who came seeking Peg’s expertise. She helped people with thyroid goiters, leaky guts, skin lesions, flaky fingernails, obesity, corns, H. pylori, migraines, all manner of subluxations, puffiness, collagen, gelatin, you name it. She dealt with these problems and their carriers, namely, human beings.

Peg noticed a trend. Almost all of her patients had some kind of lump! And this got her thinking about her own lump again, the one in red permanent marker on the back of her head. Despite having a bookshelf filled with references from both eastern and western medicinal traditions, Peg posted on her practice’s Facebook page soliciting advice: “Anybody else have a lump on their neck? Idk I’m kind of worried,” she wrote. She went to bed but had trouble sleeping. Peg was beginning to feel anxious.

In the morning, Peg checked her email, as usual. She was struck by a particular email that showed up in her promotions tab (which she rarely checked). The subject line read, “Got a lump? Stop worrying. We can help.” Peg felt relief. She clicked. She scanned. She found a YouTube video linked at the bottom of the email.

Peg clicked this link but realized that the video was actually of her and her husband showing a film crew their supplement farm. Peg began to sweat. She closed YouTube and made another cup of hot coffee to stop her from sweating.

Peg decided to close her practice (against the advice of her husband) until she dealt properly with her health. Who was she to deal with other people’s lumps if she couldn’t deal with her own lump?

At the advice of someone she didn’t know that had responded to her Facebook post, she read a long and detailed account of one doctor’s success with a very simple lump protocol. Raw garlic cut into small pieces and swallowed as if it was a pill, shots of purest olive oil, milk of magnesia, no dairy, no fat, no carbs.

Peg decided to dig a little deeper. She clicked on the doctor’s profile. It had very few followers, even fewer likes, and the picture seemed a little too…what was it? Glossy? Fuzzy? Clear? Were his eyes too blue? Too ovalish? The profile was only created a few months ago. But the doc did seem to have many, many letters after his name. In fact, he, too, was first in western medicine, then a chiropractor, then a functional practitioner and voodoo doctor. At least, that is what his bio said.

Peg was almost 65 by now. She said to herself, “Look at yourself, Peg! You’ve been to every Buddhist monastery east of the Atlantic Ocean. You’ve met with Eskimo healers on all seven continents. You can do this. This lump can’t beat you. Nobody can!” So, Peg began the garlic protocol. She asked her husband to remove all fats and carbs from his diet as well, because she suspected he had H. pylori and also a lump somewhere, too.

After completing her eight-week garlic cleanse, Peg felt amazing. She was running again, she had purchased a purple cruiser bike, and she felt ready to reopen her practice. Her lump was not gone, but it was noticeably smaller, and it had moved a bit to the left so that now a small portion of the lump hung outside the red marker mark. Peg felt confident that with a few more weeks of diet and supplement work the lump would be behind her. Or rather, it would no longer be behind her.

On this particular morning, Peg had packed her bike basket full of deliveries from her artisan supplement shoppe. She kissed her husband goodbye and rode out into a misty, foggy, morning. She breathed very deeply and contentedly as she pedaled. She marveled that she saw no one else from her neighborhood out on such a morning as this. Where were those bums? Were they sitting in their homes watching YouTube on tiny, handheld screens? She thought that maybe they were, and she was sad for them.

Then Peg noticed a bump in the middle of the road. It was a black bump, maybe a tire someone had forgotten there. Peg swerved slightly to the side on her purple cruiser and made to go around the thing. Until she noticed that the tire was wearing a shoe. Two shoes, in fact. And it had a head and arms and was not a tire but a man. He looked dead, but Peg wanted to be sure. Maybe one of her supplements could help.

So, she reached for the man’s hand to check his pulse. She couldn’t feel anything there, but she had never been good at checking pulses, so she pulled back the man’s eyelids to see if there was life in his eyes.

Then, I am sorry to say, something terrible happened. The man in the road that had not been a tire had also not been dead. He had been playing dead. So, he took this moment to scream the loudest scream he had ever screamed and ever would scream again. He made his eyes as big as they could go, very, very big, and gnashed his teeth at Peg. He also grabbed Peg’s head while he did this.

Peg’s mind and body could not handle the shock of this. It had been too much, too quickly, on too beautiful of a misty morning. Peg’s heart could not keep up with the blood that shot in and out and to all the extremities of her body, even to the lump. Peg had a heart attack. She wobbled back and forth.

The man caught Peg. He was wearing a black robe. Peg saw rosary beads dangling from his habit.

“Would you like to be baptized?” the man asked Peg. Her eyes flickered and she breathed her labored breaths.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m dying.” The man pulled out a vial of holy water and poured it over Peg’s head. “In Nomine Patris. . . .”

The man closed Peg’s eyelids after she was baptized to let her rest in peace. But she opened them again and whispered, “It’s not too late.” And with a last effort of body and will, Peg pulled a bottle from her pocket. It tumbled to the ground in the middle of the road; it rolled off her fingers and made a plastic clanking sound.

The bottle was from the supplement shoppe. The man opened it and found a Chinese fortune cookie inside. The tiny scroll read, “You are a holy fool.” He looked up into the sky and saw Peg’s spirit hovering near the sun. She smiled at him and floated backwards into a cloud. The man smiled back and yelled aloud, “Goodbye!”

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Imagine you’re an archaeologist living 500 years in the future.

You’re interested in inspecting what used to be a gigantic garbage dump.

You know you can learn a lot about how people lived by picking through their trash.

“Interesting,” you might say, “Not so many baby diapers here. They must have deliberately limited their children. Or had none at all. Or found some other way of catching their offsprings’ feces.”

You don’t want to jump to conclusions too quickly.

Or, you may exclaim, “Look at that! They used to wrap their trash in white or black plastic bags. Strange. Why not purple bags? And did they really design these things just to be thrown away?”

You might find a whole lot of one gallon milk containers. Some might have labels like “Raw Milk – Not For Human Consumption.” “Raw milk? What’s that all about?” you may wonder. “What makes it ‘raw’? And if it wasn’t for human consumption, what was it for?”

We’re going to puzzle a lot of people in the future.

Or you may find some waterlogged snail mail promotions for pressure washing companies and window cleaners. “Weird,” you think. “Nobody takes the trouble to clean things anymore. AI does that for us (so we can make art all day).”

The point here is that you can learn a lot about a culture through its discarded waste.

What I want to focus on now is what we can learn from one of the Internet’s largest digital trash heaps: The Drudge Report, a news aggregating website that consists almost entirely of headlines (that double as links) and images. In what follows, I’ll be digging through the trash (yesterday’s news) to discover something about how we consume “stories” online.

Now, before you go thinking I’m some sort of “judgy” elitist who sneers at popular culture and what the average folk read, you should know that I have a bad habit of reading The Drudge Report. It is my guilty pleasure. It is what I automatically type in to my smartphone’s browser when I have five seconds of spare time and my wife isn’t looking.

The impulse to check The Drudge Report is lodged somewhere deep in my reptilian brain, or somewhere, perhaps, near my pineal gland (around where Descartes thought the soul resided).

I, too, am guilty not simply of rifling through the trash but of consuming it regularly.

What is The Drudge Report?

Matt Drudge, who used to dress (and still dresses?) like what you think a journalist would look like from the 1930s, started The Drudge Report as an email mailing list. Here’s Matt with his signature fedora:

In March 1995, Matt Drudge had 1,000 email subscribers. I’m not sure precisely when he switched from an email list to a website, but the earliest entry on Archive.org is for December 6, 1998. If you were to look at the home page back then:

And if you were to compare it to today:

You’d find that the site looks basically the same.

Can you think of any other website that has not changed its design in nearly 30 years of operation?

This archaic, basic HTML web page dating back from the era of Hamster Dance must not get any attention, right? It just looks so…. old.

As of May 15, the site had 25.6 million visits in 24 hours, a statistic you can learn on the home page itself by scrolling to the lower right-hand corner.

Algorithmic sleights of hand invisibly dominate the majority of our online experience today. Cookies track us everywhere. AI has been recommending us products and movies for years on Amazon and Netflix. The algorithmic sands shift under our feet, and we don’t even realize it. We think we’ve found what we were looking for, whereas in reality it found us—having tracked us from the distant corners of the web much like murderous AI dogs will do in the future.

But The Drudge Report doesn’t do any of this, as far as I can tell. It does not rely on any algorithms to display content. Some human, somewhere, made the editorial decision to include any given link.

Now, many things make The Drudge Report a fascinating artifact to contemplate in terms of what it can teach us about how formatting, images, and headlines interact to grab, hold, and dominate attention.

Subtle Blows to the Scanning Eye

For the purposes of this studious dumpster dive, I want to begin by focusing on the arrangement of the elements on the page.

Observe the upper left-hand corner:

Typically, Drudge includes at least one if not multiple headlines in the upper left-hand corner.

Why begin in the upper-left hand corner? Well, that’s where the reading eye always begins. We’re talking about hundreds of years of convention here. Every time you open a book, whether it is Llama Llama Red Pajama or the Book of Ecclesiastes, you just expect the words to begin in the upper left-hand corner of the page.

Your eye just automatically goes there. This is not a conscious decision. This is how things work if you can read English.

This convention differs by culture, of course.

You read Arabic script from right to left—not left to right like the phonetic alphabet. If The Drudge Report was aimed at an Arabic audience, you could probably guess where this first headline would go: the upper right-hand side.

After this first little headline, the impatient eye heads straight for the center:

In the center, we find the largest image on the whole page. It is not too large. But it is large enough to steer your eye. It is also rectangular (as opposed to square like the other images below).

Notice how much white space there is on the left and right side of that main image. That white space, whether you realize it or not, functions like a vortex to suck your attention right out of your skull in a fraction of a millisecond.

You may as well be seated in the exit row of a commercial airliner 35,000 feet up. The emergency hatch flies open. You didn’t happen to have your seatbelt fastened (you ignored the sign, you fool). Are you still in your seat? Exactly. You didn’t have a chance.

That white space is the pure and undiluted oxygen that pacifies your frenetic attention as you scramble around the Internet clicking and clicking and clicking. The white space here is the pause between the dopamine hits, the exhale necessary to get the carbon dioxide out of your system so you can breathe in some more “content.”

Drudge feels no horror vacui, the fear of empty space.

I’ve been tempted to compare The Drudge Report to an old-time tabloid (compare the site’s design to the cover of People magazine and you’ll see what I mean). There are a number of similarities that I will not focus on here. But one major difference between The Drudge Report and old-time tabloids lies in this willingness to admit empty space, especially around the main headlines and primary image.

All the Faces Look the Same

As we scroll down the page, we notice a few other curious things.

There are these tiny, gray, nearly invisible dividers that section off groups of headlines into mini narratives. The following group of headlines, set off by these gray threads, all revolve around The Don:

The goal of these tiny dividers is to direct attention and to disappear in the process.

There are five to eight smaller images with a square aspect ratio. If it is a picture of a person, it is almost certainly a picture of their face (or something more salacious, if necessary). Count the faces:

Why faces?

The face is the most mysterious and vulnerable part of the human body. The face is as close to pure expression that an embodied creature can get. The face speaks even before opening the mouth. The face will always catch the eye, which is why we see faces even when there are none, even in words themselves (they’re called fontfaces after all).1

Some headlines are written in ALL CAPS, the visual equivalent of speaking in a louder voice (i.e., yelling).

And some headlines have ellipses at the end……….

Why do they have ellipses at the end……?

Why don’t you read on to find out…..?

Headlines Have Consequences

The most obvious use of rhetoric on The Drudge Report has nothing to do with the formatting or images, per se, but with framing. Every rewritten headline is an angle on reality, a particular spin, an emphasis.

“Xi’s Warning” links to an article whose original headline is “China’s terrifying WW3 ‘come into conflict’ warning to Trump over Taiwan.”

“Tensions in Beijing” leads to another with the following headline: “Xi’s Taiwan Warning to Trump Highlights Tensions in Beijing Summit.”

These rewrites take already sensational headlines and package them up for maximal effect. It is like if you used processed food as ingredients for more processed food. And, what is more extraordinary, is that these deep-fried headlines create an extraordinary appetite in the viewer (again, I am no exception).

“Xi’s warning… what warning?”

“Tensions? What tensions? I didn’t know there were tensions.”

You basically have no choice. If you read those headlines, you have to click.

As Kenneth Burke understood long ago, the key to great art lies in its ability to create and satisfy an appetite. While absolute trash, The Drudge Report is also fine art. Don’t go with painting as your metaphor for fine art. Stick with cuisine.

The Drudge Report is a menu.

Every link is something to consume, carefully crafted to create an appetite.

The satisfaction comes only from clicking.

To understand the powerful pull of these headlines, imagine being forced to read The Drudge Report for every minute of your waking life but being unable to actually click any of the links.

The same thing we can say about headlines and their power to create an appetite relates exactly to the appeal of the ellipses, a signal to the reader that there’s more to know if you’re only willing to click to find out….

The End

We could keep scrolling down the page to talk about other elements and how they function, but I don’t want to belabor the point.

Please take note. Throughout this entire analysis, you’ll notice that I haven’t once focused on the what, per se. My primary focus has been on the how: how Drudge structures headlines, how the dividers work, how most of the images are of faces, etc. I haven’t talked about the appeal of specific headlines or faces, though that’s important, too.

Also, I took all the screenshots above in a browser (Brave) that blocks ads. Here’s the top of the page with ads:

Now you know how Drudge makes money.

My focus here has been specifically on the form of the website.

And that’s why what you have just read is not some sort of psychological or statistical or scientific analyses but a rhetorical criticism, for rhetoric takes seriously not simply the what but also the how (and their essential inseparability).

Attention is the scarcest resource of our day, or so says rhetorician Richard Lanham, and The Drudge Report is a masterclass in the “economics of attention.”

Moreover, this website is exemplary insofar as Drudge (or whoever runs the site nowadays) doesn’t really write anything original. Wikipedia claims that Drudge occasionally writes stories, but that’s not what draws and keeps people on the site.

Most everything you find there is a repurposed link from somewhere else on the web. Literally, everything you find there is “recycled.” So, perhaps the metaphor of The Drudge Report as trash isn’t quite appropriate. But it is close enough.

For the observant (and ironic) reader, you will have noticed that I’ve made lemonade from the lemonade that Drudge has made from the lemons that he has discovered.

Otherwise put, Drudge recycles trash to make his own trash so that I can make trash from Drudge’s trash.

That’s how the Internet works. If you don’t get that, you’re just not paying enough attention.

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If you liked this article, you might also like:

• “It’s a Tool, It’s a Medium… It’s a Bomb?” - A Response to Roy and Stephenson on Our Metaphors for the Internet

• “Aquinas and the Black Box: A Short Quiz” - Some say Aquinas would have used AI. I made a short quiz to determine whether they’re right.

• “AI and the Tech Idiot Framework: Predicting the Future” - Friends don’t let friends say technology is neutral and all that matters is how you use it.

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People will ask me: “Will you watch the ball drop?”

“No,” I tell them and try leave it at that.

They think something is wrong, so I, to relieve the tension, add: “There is no ball to watch.”

They are confused. I relieve no tension. Surely there is a massive glowing sphere impaled on a magnificent metal antenna in Times Square. Undoubtedly, there will be thousands upon thousands cramming into that tiny square. And we know now that there will be just as many cameras. Every person is both a camera and screen, a reflector and reflected. There are dozens of security cameras there, too, I am sure, beady black orbs wedged into corners and hung from posts. There will be “official” cameras sent at the directive of ancient news stations and rising podcasts. There will be drones buzzing over that enormous mass of a crowd. There will be satellites in space, I am sure, snapshotting that glowing ember of a city block as the year passes.

People will relate all this to me, and still I will insist, “There is no ball to watch.” Many will walk away at that point. The patient and kind will stay for a while to try to flush out my derangement. But they, too, will eventually depart. Only the argumentative, those people whom I admire and adore, will begin to press me in their annoyance.

“Why are you sour? If we strapped you to that awesome orb, you would feel it drop. Come now. Be like us. Watch the ball drop.”

They hand me a phone. I look at the screen. It has a talking head in the foreground, a ball on a spire in the background, and a timer in the upper right-hand corner.

“The ball hasn’t dropped in many years,” I say, as if air is being squeezed from my being by some gigantic hand that envelopes my whole body save my head. I hate to bear this news.

“Look,” the most aggressive of the lot says to me, “a compilation of the ball dropping over the past 30 years.” It’s a video. I watch the montage. I have no choice. There’s Carson Daly and Beyoncé and Kimmel and Fallon and the orb spewing rays of light through an infinity of confetti.

“Every year we do the same thing,” the aggressor says. “If there is no ball to watch, what would you say we’re doing?”

The big hand squeezes me again. I am a human bellows. The flame grows.

“You watch nothing,” I wheeze and then inhale. I’m dying. I can feel it.

“You gaze into a void,” I wheeze again. These people don’t realize they’re killing me.

After I die, they strap my body to the ball, as in all fairness they said they would. The big hand that squeezed me, that King Kong palm, puts me there. They put all of us there, those who deny The Ball. We are just tiny blemishes, impossible to see at a distance.

Justin Bonanno is a writer and assistant professor. He wishes you a happy new year. He won’t be watching the ball drop this evening, but that is neither here nor there.

I’ve been told that a Catholic entrepreneur and AI evangelist has argued that St. Thomas Aquinas would have used artificial intelligence. Therefore, I structure this quiz around that contention.

#1

Question: Would St. Thomas Aquinas have used AI?

Select the best answer.

A) Yes. For starters, it would have dispensed with the need for all those pesky memory palaces. Further, he would’ve been able to get rid of his lazy scribe, Reginald, who had been a major pain since day one, always complaining about the food and the stench of his cell. It is easy to imagine the Dumb Ox sitting there in his stone oasis, all alone before his glowing screen, chicken pecking the prompts that would eventually become the extraordinary Summa Theologiae (or Pange Lingua).

B) No, he wouldn’t have. He didn’t even write for himself. He dictated to Reginald (see above). It’s not only that he wouldn’t have used AI. He wouldn’t have used a computer, word processor, pen, pencil, or even paper for himself. He had a dialectical cast of mind, which was at first a dialogical mind. Thinking was an ars disserendi, an art that occurred through one’s own speech in relation to a living interlocutor. Do you mean to tell me that Reginald never stopped him to say that wasn’t making any sense? And you mean to tell me that our sycophantic, commercially driven AI platforms would have interrupted him mid sentence to put him back on track? Maybe, you say. But Aquinas would never have used AI for the same reason he would never have had a LinkedIn profile. He would’ve sniffed out the commercial interests at play from square one.

C) It is impossible to know, so stop co-opting Aquinas to sell your software as a service.

D) It is reasonable to think he would. You stop co-opting Aquinas for your head-in-the-sand tech pessimism.

E) Calm down. Aquinas would have used AI for some things and not for others. AI is a neutral tool, and all that matters is how you use it. For example, he would’ve used AI to summarize Aristotle’s Organon (as we all know, it is much too long and much too dry). He would’ve used it to translate Avicenna’s commentary on the Stagirite from Arabic to Latin. He would’ve used AI to prepare his taxes, create silly memes, and find recipes for special avocado dip to serve at the annual University of Paris faculty potluck. But he would never have used it to actually compose his texts, for Aquinas would have been tuned in to how the means of composition always affect the composition itself.

F) None of the above.

#2

Thought Experiment

Imagine St. Paul can travel through time. He’s there in modern day Antioch, but he still needs to contact the budding church in Rome. Does he dictate a handwritten letter to them telling them he’s coming? Does he send them an email? Does he facetime them? Presupposing he does the last, does he still even need to go visit them in person? In the flesh? Explain your answer.

#3

Put a checkmark next to all of the following statements that are true:

• Gerard Manley Hopkins would have used AI to write his poetry.

• Gerard Manley Hopkins would have used AI to find ideas for his poetry, but not to actually write it.

• Dante would have used AI as his guide through Hell instead of Virgil.

• The Devil himself, an angel of light, would have used AI to flatter Adam and Eve into thinking they could know everything and therefore do anything they wanted. “And ye shall be as gods….”

#4

Essay Questions

Choose one of the questions below and respond to it completely in full sentences.

A) Pick one of the following technologies and describe what effect (if any) it would have had on the community life at the University of Paris in the 13th century: email, printers, HVAC, whiteboards, the modern grading system (As, Bs, Cs, etc.), learning management systems (Blackboard, Canvas, etc.).

B) Explain, briefly, what the students at the University of Paris would have thought about the idea that the point of going to school is to acquire a prestigious credential that enables you to get a high-paying job (or any job at all, for that matter). Further, explain whether these students, if transported to our current historical moment, would demand training in AI. Describe the ends or purpose to which these students would apply AI.

C) Explain what Aristotle taught about the Delphian knife. Compare the Delphian knife to at least one technology in use today. To get the maximum number of points, you must use the terms “exchange value” and “use value” in your reply. For bonus points, compare it to ten or more technologies and explain what all of these artifacts have in common.

D) Explain what the terms “imprimatur” and “nihil obstat” mean. Where would you find these terms originally? Look up what “black box” means in the context of technology, especially with regard to AI results/output. Can you put a digital imprimatur or nihil obstat on a black box? And would answering this question give us any better indication of whether St. Thomas Aquinas would have used AI?

Justin Bonanno is an Assistant Professor with interests in rhetoric and artificial intelligence. His favorite sort of quiz is the one that provokes but that doesn’t need graded.

The image above is from the Demidoff altarpiece by Carlo Crivelli (1476).

Many people assume that technological change is inevitable and that we can’t go back in time. We’re told we can’t “undo” technological progress. But there are two noteworthy examples of cultures that tried to do precisely this: the ancient Greeks and the Japanese. The former resisted arrows (as cowardly), while the latter adopted guns then gave them up (for honor’s sake).1 Antón Barba-Kay introduces these examples of resistance (or regression) but also concedes that they were only temporary. Effectiveness, convenience, comfort, and especially survival make technological adoption necessary—not optional.2

If I’m near death because of a bacterial infection, am I not going to take penicillin because of my thoughts on scientism, the overmedicalization of everything, or my views on how antibiotics destroy necessary gut bacteria? No. I will take the penicillin.3 As Barba-Kay puts it, “As there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no techno-skeptics in matters of practical necessity, in matters that are (often) a dire matter of survival.”4 What is important to note here, though, is that many (if not most) of our practical exigencies in this life are not matters of survival.

My point in this article is to articulate those rhetorical moves that make resistance to carte blanche technological advance impossible. The trade war with China, which is often framed as a precursor to an actual war with China, is perhaps the most glaring example of how adoption of AI is rhetorically framed as a matter of practical necessity because if we do not adopt it, or so the argument goes, then we will not “survive,” either financially or perhaps at all (if an actual war breaks out). Similarly, we must (or ought) to “train” students in AI because if we don’t, they will not survive (financially). We must deregulate AI, or so the argument goes, if we wish to perpetuate America’s techno-empire.5

Magic Red Buttons

Now, we already regulate certain technologies. You need to be a certain age to drive a car. You also need a license and insurance. You cannot (at least in the US) hurdle yourself down the highway as fast as you want without potential legal repercussions. Perhaps ironically, the speed limit is itself justified in the name of safety and survival, both for yourself and for others. You will see signs that say, “Slow down, save lives.” You will not see signs that say, “Speed up, every man for himself.”

But when it comes to AI, we are being told to speed up. China is gaining on us. Within your own institution, you may hear whisperings that your competitors in the marketplace are gaining on you. To hesitate now would be foolish and perhaps fatal. In the least, as the old saying goes, “Resistance is futile.” Sam Altman has said there’s no “magic red button” to stop the coming wave of AI.6 But one wonders exactly what Mr. Altman is doing sitting there in front of Congress, dressed nicely in his suit, courting Trump at the White House, and making his PR rounds on all the major podcasts. It’s almost like he’s trying to prevent people from pressing some sort of “magic red button” that would prevent him from slowing down, if not stopping on the shoulder to show us his license and registration.

We ought to attend to the “fatalistic determinism” that makes technological change, especially the adoption of AI and ever-expanding digital technologies, seem inevitable.7 The identification of the rhetoric at play is important because if we believe we have no agency, then we really have no agency when it comes to technological adoption.

Determinism is always a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I believe I have no free will, then in a strange but real way I have no free will. Or at least I severely limit my ability to act. Further, determinism always affects my responsibility (or lack thereof). If technological adoption is inevitable, then I am not responsible for it. If it cannot be helped, there’s no one to blame. Or, if anyone is to blame, then we’re all to blame.

But this sort of logic obscures the particular interests at play with the adoption of any given technology. Robert Moses, the NYC “power broker,” didn’t have to set the height of highway underpasses at a certain level in order to prevent inner city buses from reaching certain upper-class neighborhoods. But he did. And he was responsible for it.

Resistance is (Not) Futile

Proponents of deregulation and AI adoption may be correct in arguing that certain technologies can ameliorate the plight of certain individuals, make us more competitive in the global market (especially with China), and even make foreign nations dependent on us for our technologies.8 But they exaggerate when they claim that every scenario is do-or-die, or that somehow all this technological upheaval will flow in as an unmixed blessing.

We need regulation like we need someone to actually hold the chainsaw instead of letting it dangle by a rope as it whips around in the air. We need regulation because we have no good reason to trust our surveillance capitalists. Are you addicted to your phone? Are your kids addicted to theirs? How have the past twenty or so years panned out for your local community, especially small businesses? Deregulation is, of course, of a piece with antitrust legislation. “We will police ourselves. Trust us,” they say. Tell that to the many businesses that must crawl on their faces to humbly entreat Google and Amazon and YouTube to have mercy on them. “Please don’t deindex me.” “Please don’t leave me a bad review.” “Please don’t take me off algorithm.”

We are in a strange economic game where certain competitors are both referees and players. Or, if we are to take them at their word in their appeals for absolute deregulation, what they want is a game with no referees whatsoever. How would you like to play a game with no referees? Maybe you’d thoroughly enjoy it. Maybe you’d detest it. In any case, it would depend on how big you are and how many players you have and what you get when you win.

While it is true that we cannot roll back the clock in one sense, it is also true that we periodically roll it back. It is called Daylight Savings Time. Our methods of timekeeping, like every other technology, is conventional and could therefore always be otherwise. It’s not that we can’t go back in time. We already know that, so they may as well stop talking down to us. It has nothing to do with time travel, but rather with observing the time (or times). “Son, observe the time, and fly away from evil,” the book of Ecclesiastes reads. I take this ancient author’s point to mean that we’re finite. Our time here below doesn’t run on forever. At some point, our clock will wind down, and the question we’ll have to answer before the Judge is: “Were you responsible?” Where there is no freedom, there is no responsibility. We must grant that our freedom is bounded: by others, by the laws of nature, by the laws of civil society, by our own bodies, and by our attention spans. But we have freedom, nevertheless, even if it is bounded.

These tech giants have freedom, too. The one thing they don’t appear to like, though, are constraints, or, in the words of Altman, magic red buttons. If there are no magic red buttons, then we may as well create one. For the red button means “stop.” And while we cannot pause the world (nobody is contesting this), we can at least pause the roll out of a fancy new software as a service at our local elementary school or at our local municipal government or at our own local business enterprises, or at whatever is left of them.

The magic red button isn’t so difficult to make as you might think. Here in Florida, it would involve not voting for Byron Donalds as the next governor of this state and instead giving your vote to James Fishback who, even if he isn’t outright in favor of regulation (maybe he is, I haven’t looked), at least he wants to put the kibosh on AI data centers. Some will disparage resistance—which we desperately need if only to buy crucial time for thought and deliberation—as Luddism. But the genius (and hope) of our present situation is that we don’t have to smash the machines as Ludd and his men did. It’s far easier, in some ways, than that.

We can begin by simply not using them. As commercial services, digital technologies (like muscles and the brain itself) wither through non-use. By not using these platforms, you don’t give them any of your data. With no data, which is their lifeblood, they have nothing to “optimize.” With no one to stalk, they have no one to show ads to. Starve these machines of collective attention on a vast scale, and you will see how inevitable they actually are.

Here many well intentioned “realistic” folks would probably object that I’m being impractical and maybe even hypocritical. They might add, “Look, he publishes his screeds on Substack, a digital platform. Hypocrite!” But why can’t we read posts like this one using a VPN, Brave browser (not perfect but better than Chrome), and through our laptops (instead of our omnipresent smartphones)? Why can’t we be more deliberate about how we engage with these technologies? The answer can only be that we’re imprudent, intemperate, or both. We will have no one to blame but ourselves if our tech overloads succeed in their campaign to deregulate. We will have to obey them. We will have to deregulate, if only because we have first failed to regulate ourselves.

Justin Bonanno is an Assistant Professor interested in the intersection of rhetoric, technology, and economics. This past Sunday, he used his phone for a total of five minutes, and he had an excellent day.

Not long ago I sat down with my old friend Nick Capone to talk about rhetoric, language, artificial intelligence, and the Word (with a capital “W”).

I chart a bit of my intellectual journey, my conversion to Catholicism, losing my wisdom teeth, some theological dimensions of speech, mockingbirds, Helen Keller, wearing clown suits to funerals, having ChatGPT soften your tone, irritation at Cormac McCarthy’s lack of punctuation marks, the rhetoric of inevitability, idolatry, and more.

Near the end, I mention a book that’ll ruin your life.

I hope you find it worth your time to listen. You can watch the whole thing here:

Anyone is free to make a meme of me saying that snakes have pits on their faces (around 41:30).

God bless you,
jnb

I am writing this post as a response to the conversation between Substackers Helen Roy and Samantha Stephenson regarding the internet and how to use (or not use) it. I would like to add my own perspective to the debate because I think there is some unexplored territory to be discussed. I thank both writers for their articles and for their response to God’s call to write and raise questions, especially within the context of motherhood.

Roy’s piece, “The Medium is the Message,” began as a response to the killing of Charlie Kirk. She asks how a crisis of embodiment may be contributing to recent acts of violence as well as other “compulsive behaviors, be it physical abuse, binge eating, alcoholism, drugs, or promiscuity.”

Roy problematizes our excessive and obsessive internet use, which leads to a profound experience of disembodiment. This disembodiment has, for Roy, “become the default mode as our lives migrate more and more into the online spaces.” Here she cites our many compulsions to post and scroll, experiencing “all possible human emotions one after the other without pause, so much feeling, in fact, that you end up feeling nothing at all.” Then she offers the quote that gives her article its name:

If the medium is the message, the message is mass psychosis…we are poisoning ourselves and inviting others to poison us.

In choosing to name her article “The Medium is the Message,” Roy relates this “mass psychosis” to Kirk’s killing and modern man’s attempt to return to the body. Such acts of violence toward self and other attempt to “end the loneliness of disembodiment by performing an anti-sacrament: trying to incarnate the self by desecrating flesh, theirs or another’s.”

Roy defines embodiment as “a state of mind-body connection, a sense of mental presence in time and place, undistracted and unmediated.” For Roy, embodiment requires an appreciation of the physical, “local, vernacular, analog ways of doing life.” She claims embodiment as a particularly Catholic principle, citing our theology of an incarnate God and grace mediated through the physical realities in the sacraments of the Church. She also calls upon Pope Leo to offer an encyclical on proper use of technology in the context of a “digital revolution.”

While Roy offers some really interesting phenomenological thinking, she ends her article with this caveat:

To be clear, I love the internet. I don’t think Ludditism is the necessary answer to all this. One of the earliest lessons I have to teach each of my children is the difference between a tool and a toy. Scissors are good and useful. The internet is good and useful. Scissors are potentially, in fact very likely, harmful in the hands of a toddler.

She goes on,

I suppose the challenge is being able to recognize our own level of spiritual maturity, our ability to moderate our use of a highly addictive tool, and to know whether we are being tempted and to what.

It is particularly Roy’s assertion that the internet is a “tool” that I take issue with. The internet is much more than a tool, and it is quite possible that the response of the Luddite is warranted. Before explaining why, let’s first consider Stephenson’s article, “The Myth of Disembodiment: A Response to Helen Roy,” which appears as a guest post on Roy’s Substack under the title: “I was wrong(ish) about the internet.”

Stephenson’s main claim is this: “The ubiquitous metaphor of ‘disembodiment’ for our screen-based society is a fundamentally flawed framework. It isn’t that we leave our bodies behind when we immerse ourselves in the screen. It’s what we do to our bodies by living life online that’s killing us.”

Stephenson argues that because we are mind-body composites, disembodiment is the same as death. For her, we are not experiencing disembodiment but “an altered physiological state that produces a cascade of symptoms both physiological and emotional in nature.”

She goes on to describe the evils of the internet, but not before saying, “Roy and I agree that the tool that is the internet has enormous potential—for good and evil alike. The tools of the internet era are highly addictive because they’ve been engineered to be. They create a neurochemical reaction in the brain that triggers a behavioral addiction…We pull the lever and the chemicals rush in.”

Stephenson suggests that we “pull the opposite lever” by challenging the body, getting out in the sun, spending time in nature, and engaging in our communities. All wonderful suggestions. But Stephenson’s reminder that we attend to and care for our bodies does not do enough to answer the existential questions posed by our technology use.

For, though Stephenson is right that on a scientific level we don’t ever actually leave our bodies and do in fact harm them when we spend too much time online, Roy is right that phenomenologically we rend the body from the mind when we enter the online, digital space.

To be embodied is to be bound by time and space. For much of our history, messages could only move as fast as our bodies could travel (by foot, by horse, by train, etc.). With electric communication, we transcend the limits of the body. We communicate instantly. We travel across the world instantly.

So, what does this phenomenological experience do to our thoughts, our actions, our ways of educating people, our ways of raising children, or—as Roy points out in her posts about social media and motherhood—our ways of viewing our own vocational call? And how does our thinking of the internet as merely a tool limit our understanding of what is at stake?

Let’s go back to the beginning. Roy entitles her article, “The Medium is the Message.” But neither Roy nor Stephenson note the original source of this phrase: Marshall McLuhan. He was a Catholic and a Thomist. His famous phrases include “the medium is the message” and the “global village.” Reading McLuhan can be confusing and esoteric at times, perhaps because, like Louie Pasteur trying to convince his colleagues of the effects of unseen pathogens, McLuhan was trying to convince his contemporaries of the unseen effects of media on our forms of thought, culture, and education.1 Most of his work is oriented toward churning up the soil, probing for fresh insights, getting people to think beyond our taken-for-granted assumptions about what media are.

So, in the spirit of McLuhan, and with the help of Antón Barba-Kay, I hope to break up some of the simulacra preventing us from seeing digital media for what they are.

The Internet and the AI-Bomb

For Antón Barba-Kay, media connect us, and tools help us do things. Barba-Kay’s 2023 book A Web of Our Own Making argues that the recent transition to the reign of digital technology goes beyond other such transitions (i.e. silence to speaking, speaking to writing, and writing to printing) because it ushers in a new medium and a new tool (Web, 8). Digital technology combines knowledge with use, and not only does it combine the two, but it combines them on an infinite scale. Barba-Kay writes,

Unlike steam engines or wheels, it [digital tech] performs no particular task. Its usefulness stems rather from the fact that is can be used to measure, analyze, and reconceive all possible tasks. Its scope of action is, for this reason, completely unspecified and unrestricted. (Web, 7)

He goes on,

…it [digital tech] is as much a medium (a way of communicating) as it is a tool (a way of doing). Nor is it just one tool. Its versatility of purposes is so astounding as to make it a master tool. That is, it does not help us to perform just one specific task better (which is what most tools do), but it is the means by which any number of tasks are transacted… Aristotle called the hand the “tool of tools” (meaning: the tool by means of which all tools can come to be of service). But the hand is now getting a run for its money. (Web, 24)

For Barba-Kay, digital technology is not just a tool, but the “tool of tools,” containing all other tools within it.

Barba-Kay is careful to distinguish the internet from digital technology.2 Nevertheless, the internet is a form of digital technology. It doesn’t just help us communicate with one particular other on the other side of the world (as the telegraph did), but it connects us with everyone in the entire world at every possible moment. “To be connected to the network,” says Barba-Kay, “is to be everywhere in reach of everyone. To amend Marshall McLuhan: The connection is the message” (Web, 7).

Digital technologies like the internet combine the power of a tool of tools and a medium of maximum connectedness, and this makes them seismic in ways only comparable to the bomb (Web, 18).

For Barba-Kay,

Both [the internet and the bomb] are forms of maximum shared connection, of common destiny, purpose, or fate; they are the doomsday ends of our secular eschatology. The global village is manifest in bomb and internet: the bomb is the internet in body, the internet is the bomb in spirit…One of them represents oblivion; the other memorializes every human thought. The one is heat to incinerate suns; the other is light containing the world in thought. They are, taken together, the omega answering the alpha of creation. Both are machines for killing time, no wonder. (Web 19)

I want to make sure nobody missed this: The bomb is the internet in body, the internet is the bomb in spirit. If that doesn’t give us pause as human beings, as parents, and as Christians, I don’t know what will.

Tools vs. Environments

This brings me back to McLuhan. McLuhan is part of a tradition called media ecology, which, as the name suggests, studies media as environments. McLuhan was particularly incensed when people around him claimed that media are just neutral tools that can be used for good or for ill. He called this “the numb stance of the technological idiot.”

Neil Postman, another brilliant media ecologist, explains it this way in his book Technopoly:

Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. I mean ‘ecological’ in the same sense as the word is used by environmental scientists. One significant change generates total change. If you remove the caterpillars from a given habitat, you are not left with the same habitat minus caterpillars; you have a new environment…This is how the ecology of media works as well. A new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything. (18)

A new technology ushers in a new world, a new service environment, new possibilities for communication and thought, new dynamics in relationships that never existed before. Postman writes,

New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop. (Technopoly, 20)

Our new technologies change how we think, with whom we think, and what we think about.

I find this ecological metaphor extremely helpful for thinking through the various technologies we invite into our lives and our homes. Anyone who has ever worked in an office where management has decided to implement a new “tool” to increase efficiency knows that such tools often change everything. A new way of “punching in” for work may become a new source of anxiety, a new avenue for surveillance, a challenge to trust, an affront to an employee’s sense of agency, and the list goes on.

Take another example, one my mentor in grad school liked to give. The dishwasher enters the home where dishes used to be done by hand. Maybe it was installed to save the family time, to more efficiently deal with the piling dishes. Maybe that is exactly what it does. If we are thinking in terms of helpful or unhelpful tools, this might be where our analysis stops. You’re awesome, dishwasher!

But if we zoom out and view the dishwasher as an environment within an environment, we might notice that certain conversations no longer happen. You know, the ones where one person washes and another person dries? Similar to the disappearance of Postman’s caterpillars, the addition of a new technology has totally reoriented clean-up time and has disrupted a ritual that might have been integral to the family’s relational dynamic.

Finally, this example from my own life. We used to have a TV mounted on the wall, front and center in the middle of the living room. Underneath was a hutch to hold the DVD player, movies, and other tchotchkes. Now, both the TV and the hutch are gone, replaced by an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, an altar, and a piano. If we think in environmental terms, we can see how each medium carries its own biases, constraints, and potentialities. These choices are not neutral. They encourage and discourage certain behaviors, certain ways of thinking. They open up new possibilities for a space, and they orient us as individuals, families, and cultures.

So, what is the point?

Our metaphors help us see things, but they also prevent us from seeing them. For Stephenson, Roy’s metaphor of disembodiment obscures the priceless role of the body in everything we do. I am personally troubled by the use of the term “tool” when it comes to the internet and the digital age in general.

When we call the internet a tool, we are invited to think of how it is like a pair of scissors, which can help us cut out intricate paper snowflakes or poke out our sibling’s eye. When we think of the internet as an environment, or even as a bomb, we can see how handing a toddler a phone is more like handing them the codes to a nuclear arsenal.

Roy does point to our responsibility as internet users “to know whether we are being tempted and to what.” In Cardinal Robert Sarah’s book The Power of Silence, Nicholas Diat and Sarah visit the abbot of the Grand Chartreuse to discuss silence. Here is what Dom Dysmas de Lassus had to say that has particular import for us and our families:

Temptations have multiplied; discernment and renunciation have become more necessary than ever…We have a cloister and a Rule that protects us. Someone who lives in the world must find his own cloister and his own rule; this is not something obvious! (Power of Silence, 229).

Those lucky chumps up there in the mountains get silence built into their vocations, they get a rule that protects them. We as men and women living in the world must create such spaces, must form a cloister and a rule of life for each of our families such that we do not get swept away with the tidal wave of information, mindless consumption, and foolishness that is characteristic of our culture and our time.

Media make us like themselves. They transform us as we use them, just as any other environment transforms us when we step into it (we become warm when we enter a warm room, we become like the friends we hang out with, etc.). If we really believe this to be true, then we can start to see our role as world-builders, not as tech optimists or Luddites.

We may not be able to set up shop in some ancient monastery, but we can make our homes domestic churches, beginning with what we want ourselves and our children to see, and hear, and touch, and taste there, and beginning with who we want them to become. For, as we know, we become what we behold.

Some people in the comments section expressed their discontent concerning the means employed in crafting these sculptures:

Micah was not happy:

Joeseph wasn’t the only one to feel a bit let down:

Is Micah right to be annoyed? Are Joeseph and Seria correct in their cynicism and sadness?

There’s a point I want to make here about the symbolism of behind our labor. But before I do that, I have one more example.

Wyoming’s CNC Monastery

A bunch of Carmelites in Wyoming are building a monastery in the Gothic style.

It is a thing of beauty, especially given its splendid mountain setting.

Like something out of A Canticle for Leibowitz, they’re using CNC machines to help carve the stone and to complete some of its features.

When the brothers learned it would still cost $80 million to finish the project, they realized they needed some way of cutting costs. Brother Isidore Mary explains,

And when we were looking at the quotes, the biggest line item was always the stonework. So we said to ourselves, “Well, carving the stone can’t be that difficult. Why don’t we just learn to carve the stone ourselves? And that will take care of most of the cost.”

To be clear, I am grateful that they’re building a Gothic monastery, especially in such a picturesque setting as Wyoming. I don’t have a better answer to their $80 million problem.

Yet, we still need to ask a few questions.

Why would some people have one reaction when they see the Gothic monastery (depending on their orientation, everything from joy to gratitude to being impressed) and quite another once they learn how it has been made (let down, less impressed, sad)?

Or, in the very least, why might some people feel conflicted about this CNC monastery?

Necessitous Versus Symbolic Labor

The reason I think people feel conflicted by having a machine do the sculpting is because of the symbolic dimension of work.

A brief digression on human motivation is in order.

You can make sense of a man’s actions in all sorts of different ways. You can use psychology to try to understand why an assassin would etch a certain message into his bullet casings after murdering a CEO or public figure. You could use economics or sociology to do likewise.

But symbolism itself can serve as a motive for human action.

The man’s killing and his bullet casings themselves are symbolic. His victim and his manifesto were chosen for a (symbolic) reason. The Twin Towers stood for something. Removing another’s cranium, as jihadists are wont to do every now and then, likewise means something, just as removing the head of an organization after a major crisis or sports team means something.

All iconoclasm is symbolic in nature.

This brings us to the symbolism behind sculpting something out of stone.

In his Permanence and Change (henceforth P&C), written just after the Great Depression, literary critic and rhetorician Kenneth Burke distinguished between what he called necessitous labor and symbolic labor.

It is one thing to climb a mountain to get somewhere. It is quite another thing to climb that mountain for the sake of climbing it.

Burke writes,

We might make a distinction between necessitous and symbolic labor by suggesting that drudgery is purely necessitous labor, whereas symbolic labor is fitted into the deepest lying patterns of the individual. Symbolic labor is more pious. For instance, it would be ‘necessitous labor’ if one climbed a mountain simply because he had to get somewhere and the mountain stood between him and his destination. The same act would be symbolic if the mountain happened to have some deeper significance to the climber, so that the act of climbing was in itself an accomplishment. If one has ever read the experiences of a confirmed Alpinist, he will appreciate the difference, for in the case of the alpinist the incidental dangers are not merely endured, they are courted. (P&C 82)

The magician, stuntman, and performer David Blaine is a great example of a man who does not merely endure dangers but courts them.

If the goal is just to simply create a Gothic sculpture, then the means to that end do not really matter. But Burke would remind us that the means themselves do matter since they have symbolic significance.

Per William Rueckert, a commentator on Burke’s work, hobbies are a great example of symbolic labor. We do not pick up hobbies out of necessity. The weekend warrior cutting wood in his garage with his father’s old power tools is doing something more than sawing lumber and gluing it together. He’s making an altar with all the piety and devotion he can muster.

This distinction between necessitous and symbolic labor helps us to better understand the meaning of a difficult task—whatever that may be, whether lifting weights or being buried up to your neck and having fire ants climb all over your face (as the case may be in some indigenous puberty rites). Say what you want about the relative uselessness of having a student write a ten-page essay paper. But it is a rite of passage, for better or for worse. And the meaning of that writing is what we lose when we have a machine do it for us.

Im(piety) and the Technological Psychosis

“Piety” is another one of Burke’s key terms. Carving a stone sculpture with a machine feels like an act of impiety because of our sense of what goes with what. Stone signifies difficulty (in addition to permanence). To make the traditionally difficult easy is to commit an act of impiety (in Burke’s sense of the term).

We should not necessarily esteem something merely because it is difficult, of course, as I believe Aquinas reminds us somewhere. But oftentimes we do because of what that difficulty means. There’s a reason the Guiness Book of World Records exists. It is a catalogue our many symbols of difficulty. In many ways, the Guinness Book is a testament and ode to Difficulty.

The utilitarian philosophy of our era (as of Burke’s) hinders us from recognizing the symbolic dimension behind actions. Burke calls this emphasis on means (or uses) over ends the technological psychosis. He doesn’t call it scientism or experimentalism or secularization. But these terms point in the same direction. Here’s Burke:

Though it is customarily traced back to the Copernican astronomy, Galilean physics, and the Baconian rationalization of the inductive method, the [technological] psychosis cannot be said to have fully blossomed until the time of the Utilitarian philosophers in England, the first country to feel the full shock of systematic technological development. The doctrine of use, as the prime mover of judgments, formally established the secular as the point of reference by which to consider questions of valuation. (P&C 44-45)

Burke identifies Darwin as “within the spirit of this psychosis when discussing the development of moral and intellectual traits as tools or weapons in the struggle for existence” (P&C 45). In other words, a man believes this, that, or the other thing because it is useful (to the propagation of his genes, for his fitting into a particular niche, for simply surviving, etc.). We can always discount a man’s argument or belief system by saying that it merely serves his interests, because it is useful to him (P&C 45).

Nowadays, the technological psychosis provides the rationale for choosing this degree over that one. What matters is that the degree is useful.

A man uses a machine to make stone sculptures because it is useful.

The utilitarian emphasis on use (or utility) confuses the significance of means in relation to ends.

Burke gives the example of classifying a lion, traditionally a masculine symbol signifying honor, power, and kingship. Despite these symbolic connotations, it may be more useful for the biologist to classify the lion as a feline (a cat), traditionally a feminine symbol.

Burke also discusses cutting down a large tree. The technological psychosis would have us disregard what that tree means or stands for.

It is possible that much of the anguish affecting poets in the modern world is due to the many symbolic outrages which a purely utilitarian philosophy of action requires us to commit. In primitive eras, when the utilitarian processes were considerably fewer, and more common to the entire group, definite propitiatory rituals seem to have arisen as a way of cancelling off these symbolic offenses. In the magical orientation (so close to that of poetry) if the felling of a tree had connotations of symbolic parricide, the group would probably develop a corresponding ritual of symbolic expiation. The offender would thus have a technique for cleansing himself of the sin he had committed. (P&C 72)

Burke continues,

The purely utilitarian attitude toward such acts, however, requires that one introduce a distinctly impious note: one cannot permit the symbolic overtones of meaning to function at all. If the tree falls, and one feels a strange uneasiness, one must shut off the queer remorse by an impatient ‘Nonsense! –this is only one tree, I needed it, and there are plenty of others to take its place.’ The non-utilitarian attitudes of the act are dismissed—one must perform the act as a ‘new man’—and when the great oak falls, only the poet, bewildered and plaintive, may permit himself to feel that there is somehow a deeper issue here than the mere getting of firewood. (P&C 72)

If we feel a “strange uneasiness” at a machine carving St. Joseph, we might simply dismiss it as nonsense. But Burke would invite us to listen to that odd feeling, to try to discern why we feel the way we do at such an act.

Utilitarianism (the technological psychosis with its emphasis on use above all else) commits acts of symbolic impiety. It shaves off the transcendent dimension that always attends our actions, leaving only the immanent (and useful) behind.

What is more is that such acts of impiety against the symbolic order can be felt as painful and therefore require “symbolic expiations … to counteract the symbolic offenses involved in purely utilitarian actions” (P&C 74). That symbolic expiation, Burke would suggest, is what a poet does when he or she writes poetry.

If some local utilitarians decided to cut down a great tree for economic purposes, one should expect the resident poet to take up his or her pen. Or, in the very least, that sad sap Romantic painter would have a new subject for a landscape. Or the melancholy songwriter would at last have a theme for a ballad. As Johnny Cash would sing in “Paradise,”

Daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the green river where paradise lay?
I’m sorry, my son, but you’re too late in asking
Mister Peabody’s coal train done hauled it away

Well, the coal companies came with the world’s largest shovel
They tortured the timber and stripped all the land
They dug for the coal till the land was forsaken
Then wrote it all down to the progress of man

Oh, daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the green river where paradise lay?
I’m sorry, my son, but you’re too late in asking
Mister Peabody’s coal train done hauled it away

Automation and the Future

Why does all this matter?

These considerations about the symbolic dimension of work will only become more important as automation takes hold in our hypnotized age. I think we’re in an AI bubble right now. There’s an extraordinary amount of hype and snake oil being sold to the public.

Nevertheless, many are predicting that many trees will need to be cut down in order to make way for our AI utopia. And by “trees cut down” I mean “workers fired” and “reservoirs drained” (both financial and aqueous) in addition to actual trees cut down.

Our technocrats do not possess the requisite vocabulary for making sense of what this is going to do to people at the symbolic level. We have some foreshadowing of what to expect. We’ve seen how some react to stone sculptures made with machines (and how others might write these reactions off).

Let us conclude.

Why did the chicken cross the road? From the perspective of necessitous labor, crossing the road was simply a means to an end (i.e., the other side). But when it comes to symbolic labor, the chicken crossed the road because it was the most dangerous and difficult road he could find. Plus, all the other chickens were watching, including Roosty McRooster, who just the other week had crossed an eight-laner blindfolded.

Why did the technocrats build the gigantic leech of a datacenter in the middle of Texas? From the perspective of necessitous labor, it was simply a means to an end (i.e., the God of Compute, the Silver Bullet in the Trade War). But as it pertains to the symbolic dimension of this act, it was because it was the most expensive and daring thing they could dream up. Plus, all the other countries were watching, including China.

The more terrifying consequence of Burke’s observations is that the building of gigantic data centers (much like the building of gigantic atomic bombs) will itself take on symbolic significance for those involved. Deprive the world of the symbolic dimension and the non-utilitarian, if you insist. But prepare yourself for men to write their poems by other means.

Justin Bonanno is an Assistant Professor and student of rhetoric. He’s currently reading Kenneth Burke, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Scott Meikle. For more on the symbolism of human action (and symbolism as motive), see the work of Kenneth Burke and Hugh Dalziel Duncan.

“But I would have them whom the lightness or foolery of the Argument may offend, to consider that mine is not the first of this kind, but the same thing that has been often practis’d even by great Authors….” – Erasmus, The Praise of Folly

“One thing only is needed for the pictorial narrator—a knowledge of physiognomies and human expression.” – E. H. Gombrich, Art & Illusion

Author’s Note: What follows is a work of fiction. More precisely, it is a satire, a form of comic exaggeration, a caricature. It will not please everyone. It may offend some. The question is: Do you recognize what you see in it?

Bob was a self-made man. Having spent his youth around the casinos in Old Vegas, Bob knew certain types of people would spend inordinate amounts of time in front of the same slot machine hoping to hit it big. To such people, trips to the bathroom and movements of the bowels could only be one thing—a costly inconvenience.

You see, in the end, Bob simply wanted what all successful entrepreneurs want.

He wanted to provide Value.

“What difference does it make whether you sell toothbrushes, machine guns, or diapers?” he would say.

“They are all, strictly speaking, tools. They can all be used for good or for ill.”

Bob had contemplated getting the following Dale Carnegie quote tattooed on his forearm: “There is no indignity in selling adult diapers.”

Things didn’t go smoothly at first. If I’m being honest, they never went smoothly.

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The barrier to entry for the adult diaper market was (and still is) quite steep. At first, he tried wholesaling. He found a seller in South Argentina. He paid $10,000 for 20,000 diapers. Imagine his face when upon receiving the product he realized the diapers were more than 30 years old. The seller, a Mr. Jorge Bonaparte, disappeared without a trace.

Many years later, Bob would tell this story to a group of high schoolers at an assembly.

“I thought to myself,” he said, “if I ever found Bonaparte, I would flay him alive.”

One student raised his hand and asked what he did with the diapers.

The diapers worked well enough, but they had yellowed over the years. He sold a handful. His Amazon reviews suffered badly. He had to rebrand.

He vowed never to do business with a South American ever again.

Bob went to many workshops and seminars in those early years. Many of these events had little to do with the nuances of running a business and more to do with working up the self-esteem to run one. He ate canned tuna and lived off government aid, something which in later years he would come to criticize (the government aid, not the tuna; he loved tuna until the very end, eating a can a day on top of his vinegar salad).

Once, he attended a Tony Robbins seminar.

He met a beautiful woman there named Picaponte. She read him some poetry she’d written. She played a song for him on the piano about a woman named Peg and all her troubles. She tried to explain the importance of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, and Rhetoric—especially the importance of reading each in light of the other. She kept using the words “modernity” and “postmodernity.”

He said he didn’t know what those words meant.

Picaponte said, “Let’s get out of here. We can run away together, get married, and start a family.”

Bob was checking his email and didn’t hear.

Picaponte got up and left.

He never saw Picaponte again.

Some say she went to Argentina.

Read more

Martin is a former academic, farmer, “Sophiologist,” and maybe even a real, live Gnostic. I don’t know about that last one, so don’t quote me on it, but he did post this to his Substack Notes, an excerpt from this article by Sam Granger:

Martin was a former professor at two Catholic schools, Marygrove College and Siena University. The former is now out of operation, and the latter is slated to close at the end of the 25-26 Academic Year.

If he is a Gnostic and has been for quite some time, it makes you wonder how much Marygrove and Siena cared about their Catholic identity. Honestly, I’m not sure. Would that have anything to do with their demise?

In any case, there’s a great deal to sympathize with in Martin’s article. Indeed, as per Martin, there are Marxist and feminist maniacs who somehow get hired, receive tenure, and then proceed to torture students/colleagues with the most jargon-ridden, abstruse, hot garbage you could ever possibly imagine.

At an academic conference this summer, I watched a keynote speaker explain how “we” (whoever that is) formerly thought only men were persons, then we included women as persons, then we included deer as persons (I’m not kidding), and so—perhaps in the near future—we will include toasters as persons. I walked out of the room after this comment, so I’m not sure where this guy went with his toaster persons.

Everyone has to suffer through these peoples’ pontifications as they, in Martin’s words, “play professor.” It is obnoxious and soul crushing, especially if you’re a student who disagrees with what they’re saying. Moreover, I share Martin’s reservations about university e-sports (video game) programs as tactics to lure students to campus who have no business being there.

Thus, I would say, yes, good riddance to those who hijacked the liberal arts for their own purposes and with no care whatsoever for their students’ professional prospects and development as human beings made in the image and likeness of God.

But when it comes to his basic argument, Martin goes too far. He thinks that liberal arts colleges are dead. Technically, right now they’re the living dead, according to him. They’re zombies still admitting students and going about business as usual. Speaking in a prophetic tone, he writes:

“Since 2020, almost fifty liberal arts college in the US have closed, and this is a trend that will probably continue until only a prestigious few are left.”

And:

“The ecosystem of American higher education is in complete collapse. It will never recover.”

And:

“There is no fixing this.”

And:

“… the liberal arts college as we have known it is at its end. And this demise will surely afflict even the Harvards and Princetons of the realm. It’s a lab leak of a human-manufactured pathogen.”

“The jig, at long last, is up.”

I write what follows in a spirit of goodwill. My guess is Dr. Martin means well. But I’m not convinced the jig is up. The chickens will come home to roost for some institutions, perhaps even most, especially those that drifted from their initial mission and especially their religious identity in a bid for “free inquiry.”

But they key word is some—not all.

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The Need for Narratives

Admittedly, institutions of higher education need money to keep going. Lots of it. But without a life-giving narrative, raising money (or paying for school, if you’re a student) is superfluous.

Nobody gives money to an institution they don’t believe in—let alone time or attention.

Interestingly, Neil Postman outlines the absolute necessity of narrative to education in his 1995 The End of Education. In this book, Postman doesn’t defend liberal arts, per se, since his concern is public education. Yet, much of what he says has merits for those seeking to defend the liberal arts.

Postman writes,

Without a narrative, life has no meaning. Without meaning, learning has no purpose. Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention. This is what my book is about.

Postman is simply reiterating what Nietzsche and Victor Frankl have already articulated: If you have a why, you can bear any how.

Unlike many, Postman realizes that educators must provide a rationale for what they’re doing. They must justify their practice. And they need to get used to doing so on a regular basis, especially since they face competing narratives that want them shut down, closed, terminated, etc.

Even though Postman published The End of Education thirty years ago, the strange gods (aka the counter narratives) he mentions still hold sway in disputes about the merits of the liberal arts. These counter narratives include, among others, the gods of Economic Utility, Consumership, and Technology.

False Gods (and Real Zombies)

These strange gods are the real zombies, not liberal arts colleges, per se. They come back year after year to assault the liberal arts and to lure students, faculty, and funds away.

They’re the living dead.

And they, too, are a human construction, “a lab leak of a human-manufactured pathogen,” to quote Martin again.

The god of Economic Utility is perhaps easiest to understand in the context of the liberal arts. It is the one that impresses parents and politicians most. If you do well in school, so the story goes, you will receive your reward: a job. As per Jane Jacobs, some view education as the credential that you need in order to board the train of the economy. It is a ticket to be punched.

In this particular narrative, you are your work.

Now, to be clear, I want my students to get good jobs, to find meaningful work, and to be able to provide for themselves and their families after graduation. A good liberal arts education can help students to do this. Absolutely. One highly successful business owner told me a few years ago that he preferred students with liberal arts degrees because they could perceive situations and problems more holistically than their more specialized and highly technical counterparts.

However, the god of Economic Utility does not give us a reason for going to school. Read that line again. It doesn’t. It does not fill us with a lasting purpose, and for this reason, many students do not believe in it.

The god of Economic Utility owes its prestige to its linkage with the god of Consumership, wherein you are what you can accumulate. For Postman, advertisements serve as parables to educate people into what they should desire. And most often, these parables situate technology as the solution.

Like all religious parables, these commercials put forward a concept of sin, intimations of the way to redemption, and a vision of Heaven. This will be obvious to those who have taken to heart the Parable of the Person with Rotten Breath, the Parable of the Stupid Investor, the Parable of the Lost Traveler’s Checks, the Parable of the Man Who Runs Through Airports, or most of the hundreds of others that are part of our youth’s religious education. In these parables, the root cause of evil is technological innocence, a failure to know the particulars of the beneficent accomplishments of industrial progress.

The god of Technology is an offspring of the narratives of Science and Progress. In fact, it equates human progress with technological progress. Technological progress is inevitable, as the story goes, and therefore we must fit ourselves into technology’s constraints, whatever those might happen to be. We must train students for this technological reality, whatever it is.

Woe to those who do not heed this god!

What does the narrative of Technology promise? According to Postman,

It [the narrative of Technology] demolishes the assertion of the Christian God that heaven is only a posthumous reward. It offers convenience, efficiency, and prosperity here and now; and it offers its benefits to all, the rich as well as the poor, as does the Christian God. But it goes much further. For it does not merely give comfort to the poor; it promises that through devotion to it the poor will become rich. Its record of achievement—there can be no doubt—has been formidable, in part because it is a demanding god, and is strictly monotheistic.

A bit further down Postman adds,

Those who are … inclined to take the name of the technology-god in vain, are condemned as reactionary renegades, especially when they speak of gods [narratives] of a different kind.

Postman’s argument, and one which I would agree with, is this: We need to learn how to think about technology. It is important to know how to use technology, yes. I’m very grateful for the man who taught me HTML in high school. Learning to use technology matters. But it’s not the most important thing.

We have to realize that technology giveth and technology taketh away, that there are winners and losers with any given technology. Technology simultaneously enhances and obsolesces aspects of human experience. Liberal arts colleges can serve as environments for interrogating the demands that technology makes on our lives. A liberal arts classroom ought to be a place for discussing and diagnosing the oftentimes taken for granted effects of technologies on our perceptions, institutions, and communal forms of life.

Like Postman, I’m not opposed to giving students useful skills. I want them to find a job and live a reasonably comfortable existence post graduation. I want them to be able to support themselves and their families.

But a liberal arts degree offers more than this—not less. School is a civilizing institution. It produces culture. It is more than a credential. It transforms your thoughts, your perceptions, your habits, and maybe even your morals.

The AI Death Blow

A word is in order about artificial intelligence. The Druid suggests that AI will deliver (or has delivered) the death blow to the liberal arts colleges that are merely limping along.

I'm not convinced that AI will destroy the liberal arts.

I am convinced that those who do not understand AI (LLMs, to be more accurate) and the purpose of the liberal arts will eventually capitulate to AI, destroying their very identity in the process.

Every technology tends to disrupt existing patterns of education. But that doesn’t mean education disappears. For the longest period of time, to be educated meant to know how to read and write. I think there are merits in learning to read and write at advanced levels, obviously. I’ve commented on what we lose with generative AI when it comes to writing.

However, in my estimation, we are entering an era where the spoken word will once again be ascendant in the academy, as it should be. LLMs retrieve the oral exam as a mode of testing knowledge. The close connection between speaking well and thinking well (and even acting well), the tie between eloquence and wisdom, once again has a chance to assert itself as it did in universities of old.

To those who would say AI seriously threatens the educational establishment, all I can do is cite a poem that Postman himself includes:

Mr. Edison says
That the radio will supplant the teacher.
Already one may learn languages by means 
             Of Victrola records.
The moving picture will visualize
What the radio fails to get across.
Teachers will be relegated to the backwoods.
With fore-horses,
And long-haired women; 
Or, perhaps shown in museums.
Education will become a matter
Of pressing the button.
Perhaps I can get a position at the switchboard.

An educator in the 1920s wrote this. Postman wryly comments:

I do not go as far back as the introduction of the radio and the Victrola, but I am old enough to remember when 16-millimeter film was to be the sure cure, then closed-circuit television, then 8-millimeter film, then teacherproof textbooks. Now computers.

Then he says, “I know a false god when I see one.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Why should I believe that? And so what?

Remember that despite their absolute necessity, narratives do not solve technical problems. Postman quotes Theodore Roszak:

Free human dialogue, wandering wherever the agility of the mind allows, lies at the heart of education. If teachers do not have the time, the incentive, or the wit to provide that; if students are too demoralized, bored, or distracted to muster the attention their teachers need of them, then that is the educational problem which has to be solved—and solved from inside the experience of the teachers and the students.

Educators would do well to regularly establish a purpose for their enterprise.

The death of the liberal arts is not an administrative problem. It is not an administrative problem because it is not a technical problem. Postman writes, “The problem, as I have been saying, is metaphysical in nature, not technical.” By metaphysical, he means the purpose or end of education.

Every teacher must ask, “What are we doing this for?” Education’s purpose simply cannot be taken for granted.

We must give students a reason for why they're doing what they're doing.

I had a mentor in grad school tell me early in my academic career that the two most important questions that you could ever possibly ask a teacher are:

1. Why should I believe that?

And

2. So what?

Unfortunately, you can’t get away with these questions in every classroom. But you will be encouraged to ask them (and others like them) in classrooms where teachers genuinely care about making you a more questioning, thoughtful human being.

The classroom needs a dialectical and rhetorical tension to keep it from disintegrating. These questions help establish that tension.

Every classroom needs a problem, an exigence, a reason for being. It needs less textbooks and more debate. It needs an edge to cut with. It needs a discussion early in the semester as to why we're doing what we're doing and the fact that we could always be spending our time otherwise.

It needs a regular injection of the outside world to keep it honest.

As Dorothy Sayers knew, the point of teaching students the liberal arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic is to equip them to defend themselves beyond the walls of the academy. Now is as opportune a moment as ever for the liberal arts to be making sense of the rhetorical and political and technological developments going on all around us. As the word “liberal” in liberal arts suggests, the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic are arts befitting of free persons.

Is the jig really up?

In this piece, I disagreed with Martin’s claim that all liberal arts colleges were zombies. On the contrary, the liberal arts have a unique contribution to make to the common culture. I suggested such institutions could survive if they understood the need for a common narrative. Moreover, I indicated that educators needed to be aware of the counter narratives at play: the gods of Economic Utility, Consumership, and Technology.

I leave it to you to decide not only whether the liberal arts are dead but also whether they ought to be dead.

There are some who prefer that young adults simply enter into the workplace, what Josef Pieper called “the world of total work.”

There are some who, despite their millions of dollars and despite their alienation, nevertheless insist that the liberal arts have nothing to offer. What could the liberal arts possibly teach us about living a meaningful life?

There are some who, having been in the trenches as a teacher and having seen the dire state of affairs in the liberal arts, have called it quits and condemned the whole endeavor as bankrupt.

Should we believe them? I don’t think so. I don’t think we have good reason to. But I do think we owe them a reply.

Justin Bonanno is an Assistant Professor with a PhD in Rhetoric. The preceding essay is his own opinion and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of his employer.