There was a time beginning perhaps 20 years ago when I and so many in my generation saw a new age dawning, a digital age of infinite space and possibility. Those were the times, and we all dreamed of a dawning utopia. I imagined the freedom it would bestow.
Much good has come from it, no question. But look around at what we’ve lost and what surrounds us now. There are terrifying features of the digital age that no one anticipated.
The surveillance alone is something about which we never thought. Giving over information to third parties means the commodification of all our lives, including location, values, opinions, health, preferences, and all vital data. Once it is done, it cannot be undone. Incredibly, no one had to pay to do this. We were enticed to cough it all up on the promise of new forms of friendship, community, and even fame.
It was a cruel bargain and utterly amazing that we all went along. I’m not sure what the trigger for me was, but I do know when it all ended for me. It was when I realized that the free home assistants I was putting in every room—Google was sending me free ones just for the asking—were actually listening devices. By definition. They had to listen to everything in order to obey any command. I tossed them all out. That began my rethinking.
Then there were the COVID-19 years, in which an elite somewhere imagined that we could have enriched and wonderful lives sitting in our homes and apartments while looking at screens, playing games, watching movies, and buying things. Food would come to the door. Government would put money in our bank accounts. Are we not entertained?
This went on for a year or two or even three. Vast swaths of the population were told not to mix and mingle because there was a dangerous virus out there, and we dare not risk entering into the big bad world without a mask and an inoculation. We were all treated like Rapunzel at the hands of the wicked witch who pretended to be her mother. Rapunzel eventually rebelled and escaped the room in her castle, facing the dangers of the outside world but happy in her freedom.
Interesting analogy, isn’t it? The witch promised safety on the condition of compliance. That’s pretty much the way that “public health” treated the population, not just in the United States but all over the world. This turned out to be a very revealing period of history because it told us what one sector of the ruling class had in mind for us. Let’s face it: The digital companies very much benefited from this entire period. Their stocks soared as their goods flew off the warehouse shelves.
Perhaps in some cosmic sense, we needed this period in our lives if only to rediscover what really matters. At some point in these years of recovery, a friend pressed into my hands a small book by the great New England historian Eric Sloane. The book marched through a series of habits, virtues, values, and patterns that uniquely defined the American experience of the past.
I was amazed, perhaps not because the text alone told me anything I had never heard but because the message hit me at exactly the right time. I quickly wrote a series of 10 articles on this small book, generously published by The Epoch Times, the only newspaper in the world that would dare pick up such a quixotic literary experiment.
I keep thumbing through it and reading passages, which is something I’ve never done for any book I’ve written. I’m usually just on to the next thing. Not this time. It’s because I think I’ve written something important, even lasting, which is saying something.
Everything in here speaks to the physical world and its relationship to the mind and spirit. It speaks to habits such as awareness, patience, frugality, thankfulness, respect, forbearance, hard work, and so on, and each chapter has something such as a story of the past that illustrates the point. In a strange way, I sometimes imagine that everything that has ever happened to me prepared me to write this, as if my own life is a pen-and-ink drawing with God as the illustrator.
It also strikes me that this is the shortest book I’ve written, which reflects my growing belief that truth need not be loquacious like Hegel, Marx, or Derrida. If it is really true, the point can be clearly stated with short sentences that illuminate by virtue of sincerity and honesty. Every word should count for something.
Academia, of course, disagrees with this, but that is because the professional academic is mostly someone who is hiding and burying his views in the most complex thicket of word salads and esoteric vocabulary unique to a certain discipline, neologisms designed to demarcate the insiders from the outside. The lexicon of academia is constructed to shore up a guild, not reveal or enlighten. I chose a different path with this book.
The book is dedicated to my mother, because it was she who prepared me for a good life with demonstrated lessons concerning love, loyalty, faith, hard work, discipline, and strength of character. So many times I’ve relied on her wisdom as a guide for me. Today is the day that she sees the book for the first time because I sent some copies to her as a gift. It is the best gift I could ever give her, but a tiny nothing compared with what she has given me.
Back to the great migration to the cloud that the digital age posited. It was always a lie. Sure, we can get groceries delivered, communicate with anyone, do banking online, read books from all times, listen to streaming music, and watch all the movies that we want. These are fine things. But there will never be a migration of our physical selves, much less the fundamental challenges represented by life itself. These are the same now as they always have been.
We look around at the world we have created and see more lost souls than ever before. More than 65 million Americans are on psych meds that disable normal mental functioning. The kids are miserable. For many people, nothing has prepared them for the normal struggles of life, full of toil and disappointment. Unable to face it, we have turned to substances and medicines to get us through, leaving us more unhealthy and spiritually lost than ever.
As much as political struggles are fun, and as much as the great cultural debates of our time thrill us with their drama and stakes, the real struggle for the good life is one that is internal to all of us. It is about the small decisions we make every day and the attitudes we bring to relationships, trials, disappointments, and the exigencies of life for which we were not prepared.
For a few years, we all experienced something of the dystopian life that the managers of the digital age imagine for us, and we now know how unnatural it all is: no holidays, no gatherings, no saying goodbye to dying family members, no weddings or funerals, and friends and family reduced to pixels on a screen.
Down with all that! We cannot live this way, but how then should we live? This is the subject of my new book, which I suspect makes a bigger contribution than anything I’ve written.
We cannot and will not migrate to the cloud. Nor is anyone coming to save us from ourselves. So long as God blesses us with life, we live in the physical world, which makes our struggles very much like those of our ancestors and people of all times and places.
It’s time to put aside fantasies about artificial intelligence, let go of our delusions of technological transformation or some other form of millenarian eschaton, and face it: This is the life we have been given and, like everyone who has come before, we have to figure it out with patience, honesty, and a deep search for what is true.
