Deflating tech catastrophism

There’s no better way to deflate my proclivities for catastrophism—a lifelong project of my long-suffering wife—than writers I respect appealing to authorities like St. Augustine and Wendell Berry. And that’s just what my friends Jeff Bilbro and Alan Jacobs have done in two pieces this week responding to my despairing reflections on digital technology, prompted by Andy Crouch’s wonderful new book, The Life We’re Looking For.

I’m honored by their lovely, invigorating, and stimulating correctives. I think both of them are largely right, and what anyone reading Crouch-on-tech, East-on-Crouch, Bilbro-on-East-on-Crouch, East-on-tech, Jacobs-on-East-on-tech, etc., will see quickly is how much this conversation is a matter of minor disagreements rendered intelligible in light of shared first principles. How rare it is to have more light than heat in online (“bloggy”) disputations!

So thanks to them both. I don’t want to add another meandering torrent of words, as I’m wont to do, so let me aim for clarity (I would say concision, but then we all know that’s not in play): first in what we agree about, second in what we perhaps don’t.

Agreements:

1. Andy’s book is fantastic! Everyone should buy it and do their utmost to implement its wisdom in their lives and the lives of their households.

2. The measure of a vision of the good life or even its enactment is not found in its likelihood either (a) to effect massive political transformation or (b) to elicit agreement and adoption in a high percentage of people’s lives.

3. Digital is not the problem per se; Mammon is. (Both Jeff and Alan make this point, but I’ll quote Alan here: “the Digital is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Mammon.” I’ll be pocketing that line for later use, thank you very much.)

4. We cannot expect anything like perfection or wholesale “health”—of the technological or any other kind—in this life. Our attempts at flourishing will always be imperfect, fallible, and riddled with sin.

5. Christians are called to live in a manner distinct from the world, so the task of resisting Mammon’s uses of Digital falls to us as a matter of discipleship to Christ regardless of the prospects of our success.

6. Actual non-metaphorical revolutionary political change, whether bottom-up or top-down, is not in the cards, and (almost?) certainly would bring about an equally unjust or even worse state of affairs. Swapping one politico-technological regime for another turns out to mean little more than: meet the new boss, same as the old boss. A difference in degree, not in kind.

7. What we need is hope, and Christians have good grounds for hope—though not for optimism, short of the Kingdom.

8. What is possible, in faith and hope, here and now, is a reorientation (even a revolution) of the heart, following Augustine. That is possible in this life, because Christ makes it possible. Jeff, Alan, and Andy are therefore asking: Which way are we facing? And what would it take to start putting one foot in front of the other in the right direction? Yes. Those are the correct questions, and they can be answered. And though I (I think defensibly) use the language principalities and powers with respect to Digital, I do not disagree that it is not impossible—check out those negatives piling up one on another—for our digital technologies to be bent in the direction of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Which is to say, toward Christ’s Kingdom.

Now to disagreements, which may not amount to disagreements; so let us call them lingering queries for further pondering:

1. For whom is this vision—the one outlined above and found in Andy’s book—meant? That is, is it meant for Christians or for society as a whole? I can buy that it is meant for the church, for some of the theological premises and commitments I’ve already mentioned. I’m less persuaded, or perhaps need persuading, that it is one that “fits” a globalized secular liberal democracy, or at least ours, as it stands at the moment.

2. Stipulate that it is not impossible for this vision to be implemented by certain ordinary folks (granting, with Jeff, that Christians are called not to be normies but to be saints: touché!). I raised questions of class in my review and my blog posts, but I didn’t see class come up in Jeff or Alan’s responses. My worry, plainly stated, is that middle-to-upper-middle-class Americans with college degrees, together with all the familial and social and financial capital that comes along with that status, are indeed capable of exercising prudence and discipline in their use of digital technology—and that everyone else is not. This is what I meant in the last post when I drew attention to the material conditions of Digital. It seems to me that the digital architecture of our lives, which in turn generates the social scripts in which and by which we understand and “author” our lives, has proven most disastrous for poor and working class folks, especially families. They aren’t the only people I mean by “normies,” but they certainly fall into that category. It isn’t Andy et al’s job to have a fix for this problem. But I do wonder whether they agree with me here, that it is not inaccurate to describe one’s ability to extricate oneself even somewhat from Digital’s reach as being a function of a certain class and/or educational privilege.

3. In which case, I want to ask the practical question: How might we expand our vision of the good life under Mammon’s Digital reign to include poor and working class families?—a vision, in other words, that such people would find both attractive and achievable.

4. If pursuing the good life is not impossible, and if it begins with a reorientation of the heart to the God we find revealed in Christ, then it seems to me that—as I believe Jeff, Alan, and Andy all agree—we cannot do this alone. On one hand, as we’ve already seen, we require certain material conditions. On the other hand, we need a community. But that word is too weak. What we need is the church. This is where my despairing mood comes in the back door. As I’ve written elsewhere, the church is in tatters. I do not look around and see a church capable of producing or sustaining, much less leading, prudent wisdom in managing the temptations of Digital. I see, or at least I feel, abject capitulation. Churches might be the last place I’d look for leadership or help here. Not because they’re especially bad, but because they’re the same as everyone else. I mean this question sincerely: Is your local church different, in terms of its use of and reliance on and presumptions about technology, than your local public schools, your local gyms, your local coffee shops? Likewise, are your church’s leaders or its members different, in terms of their relationship to Digital, than your non-Christian neighbors? If so, blessings upon you. That’s not my experience. And in any case, I don’t mean this as some sort of trump card. If our churches are failing (and they are), then it’s up to us to care for them, to love them, and to do what we can to fix what’s ailing them, under God. Moreover, the promise of Christ stands, whatever the disrepair of the church in America: the gates of hell shall not prevail against his people. That is as true now as it ever was, and it will remain true till the end of time. Which means, I imagine my friendly interlocutors would agree, that we not only may have hope, but may trust that God’s grace will be sufficient to the tasks he’s given us—in this case, the task of being faithful in a digital age. Yes and amen to all of that. The point I want to close with is more practical, more a matter of lived experience. If we need (a) the spiritual precondition of a reasonably healthy church community on top of (b) the material precondition of affluence-plus-college in order (c) to adopt modest, though real, habits of resistance to Mammon-cum-Digital … that’s a tall order! I hereby drop my claim that it is not doable, along with my wistful musings about a Butlerian Jihad from above. Nevertheless. It is profoundly dispiriting to face the full height of this particular mountain. Yes, we must climb it. Yes, it’s good know I’ve got brothers in arms ready to do it together; we don’t have to go it alone. But man, right now, if I’m honest, all I see is how high the summit reaches. So high you can’t see to the top of it.

Tech for normies

On Monday The New Atlantis published my review essay of Andy Crouch’s new book, The Life We’re Looking For. The next day I wrote up a longish blog post responding to my friend Jeff Bilbro’s comment about the review, which saw a discrepancy between some of the critical questions I closed the essay with and an essay I wrote last year on Wendell Berry. Yesterday I wrote a seemingly unrelated post about the difference between radical churches (urban monastics, intentional communities, house churches, all to varying degrees partaking of the Hauerwasian or Yoderian style of ecclesiology) and what I called “church for normies.”

That last post was of a piece with the first two, however, and provides some deep background to where I was coming from in answering some of Jeff and Andy’s questions. For readers who haven’t been keeping up with this torrent of words, my review of Andy’s book was extremely positive. The primary question it left me with, though, was (a) whether his beautiful vision of humane life in a technological world is possible, (b) whether, if it is possible, it is possible for any but the few, and (c) whether, however many it turns out to be possible for, it is liable to make a difference to any but those who take up the costly but life-giving challenge of enacting said vision—that is, whether it is likely or even possible to be an agent of change (slow or fast) in our common social and political and ecclesial life.

I admit that my stance evinces a despairing tone or even perspective. But let’s call it pessimistic for now. I’m pessimistic about the chances, here and now, for many or even any to embody the vision Andy lays out in his book—a vision I find heartening, inspiring, and apt to our needs and desires if we are to flourish as human beings in community.

Given my comments about church for normies yesterday, I thought I would write up one final post (“Ha! Final!” his readers, numbered in the dozens, exclaimed) summing up my thoughts on the topic and putting a pinch of nuance on some of my claims—not to say the rhetoric or metaphors will be any less feisty.

Here’s a stab at that summing up, in fourteen theses.

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1. Digital technology is misunderstood if it is categorized as merely one more species of the larger genus “technology,” to which belong categories or terms like “tool,” “fire,” “wheel,” “writing,” “language,” “boat,” “airplane,” etc. It is a beast of its own, a whole new animal.

2. Digital technology is absolutely and almost ineffably pervasive in our lives. It is omnipresent. It has found its way into every nook and cranny of our homes and workplaces and spheres of leisure.

3. The ubiquity of Digital (hereafter capitalized as a power unto itself) is not limited to this or that sort of person, much less this or that class. It’s everywhere and pertains to everyone, certainly in our society but, now or very soon, in all societies.

4. Digital’s hegemony is neither neutral nor a matter of choice. It constitutes the warp and woof of the material conditions that make our lives possible. Daycares deploy it. Public schools feature it. Colleges make it essential. Rare is the job that does not depend on it. One does not choose to belong to the Domain of Digital. One belongs to it, today, by being born.

5. Digital is best understood, for Christians, as a principality and power. It is a seductive and agential force that lures and attracts, subdues and coopts the will. It makes us want what it wants. It addicts us. It redirects our desires. It captures and controls our attention. It wants, in a word, to eat us alive.

6. If the foregoing description is even partially true, then finding our way through the Age of Digital, as Christians or just as decent human beings, is not only an epochal and heretofore unfaced challenge. It entails the transformation of the very material conditions in which our lives consist. It is a matter, to repeat the word I use in my TNA review, of revolution. Anything short of that, so far as I can tell, is not rising to the level of the problem we face.

7. At least three implications follow. First, technological health is not and cannot be merely an individual choice. The individual, plainly put, is not strong enough. She will be overwhelmed. She will be defeated. (And even if she is not—if we imagine the proverbial saint moving to the desert with a few other hermits—then the exception proves the rule.)

8. Second, modest changes aren’t going to cut it. Sure, you can put your phone in grayscale; you can limit your “screen time” as you’re able; you can ask Freedom to block certain websites; you can discipline your social media usage or even deactivate your accounts. But we’re talking world-historical dominance here. Nor should we kid ourselves. Digital is still ruling my life whether or not I subscribe to two instead of six streaming platforms, whether or not I’m on my phone two hours instead of four every day, whether or not my kids play Nintendo Switch on the TV but not in handheld mode. Whenever we feel a measure of pride in these minor decisions, we should think of this scene:

Do we feel in charge? We are not.

9. Third, our households are not the world, and we live in the world, even if we hope not to be of it. Even if my household manages some kind of truce with the Prince of this Age—I refer to the titans of Silicon Valley—every member of my household departs daily from it and enters the world. We know who’s in charge there. In fact, if you don’t count time sleeping, the members of my own house live, week to week, more outside the home than they do inside it. Digital awaits them. It’s patient. It’ll do its work. Its bleak liturgies have all the time in the world. We just have to submit. And submit we do, every day.

10. But the truth is that the line between household and world runs through every home. We bring the world in with us through the front door. How could it be otherwise? Amazon’s listening ears and Netflix’s latest streamer and Google’s newest unread email and Spotify’s perfect algorithm—they’re all there, at home, in your pocket or on the mantle or in the living room, staring you down, calling your name, summoning and inquiring and inviting, even teaching. Their formative power is not out there. It’s in here. Every home I’ve ever entered, It was there, whose name is Legion, the household gods duly honored and made welcome.

11. Jeff rightly pushed back on this “everyone” and “everywhere” line in my earlier post. I should be clear that I’m not exaggerating: while I have read of folks who don’t have TVs or video games or tablets or smartphones or wireless internet, I haven’t personally met any. But I allow that some exist. This means that, to some extent, tech-wise living is possible. But for whom? For how many? That’s the question.

12. The fundamental issue, then, is tech for normies. By which I mean: Is tech-wise living possible for ordinary people? People who don’t belong to intentional communities? People without college or graduate degrees? People who aren’t married or aren’t in healthy marriages, or who are parents but unmarried? It is possible for working-class families? For families whose parents work double shifts, or households with a single parent who works? For kids who go to daycare or public school? For folks who attend churches that themselves encourage and even require constant active smartphone use? (“Please read along on your Bible app”; “Please register your child at this kiosk, we’ll send a text if we need you to come pick her up.”) From the bottom of my heart, with unfeigned sincerity, I do not believe that it is. And if it is not, what are we left with?

13. This is what I mean when I refer to matching the scale of the problem. Ordinary people live according to antecedent material conditions and social scripts, both of which precede and set the terms for what individuals and families tacitly perceive to characterize “a normal life.” But the material conditions and the social scripts that define our life today are funded, overwritten, and determined by Digital. That is why, for example, the child of friends of mine here in little ol’ Abilene, Texas, was one of exactly two high school freshmen in our local public high school who did not have a smartphone—and why, before fall semester was done, they bought him one. Not because the peer pressure was too intense. Because the pressure from teachers and administrators and coaches was insurmountable. Assignments weren’t being turned in, grades were falling, rehearsals and practices were being missed, all because the educational ecosystem had begun, sometime in the previous decade, to presuppose the presence of a smartphone in the hand, pocket, purse, or backpack of every single student and adult in the school. It is now the center around which all else orbits. The pull, the need, to buy a smartphone proves, in the end, irresistible. It doesn’t matter what you, the individual, or y’all, the household, want. Resistance is futile.

14. Now. Must this lead to despair? Does this imply that resistance to evil is impossible? That there is nothing to be done? That we are at the end of history? No. Those conclusions need not follow necessarily. I don’t think that digital technology as such or in every respect is pure evil. This isn’t the triumph of darkness over light. My children watching Encanto or playing Mario Kart is not the abomination of desolation, nor is my writing these words on a laptop. My point concerns the role and influence and ubiquity of Digital as a power and force in our lives and, more broadly, in our common life. It is that that is diabolical. And it is that that is a wicked problem. Which means it is not a problem that individuals or families have the resources or wherewithal to address on their own—any more than, if the water supply in the state of Texas dried up, this or that person or household could “choose” to resolve the issue on their own. This is why I insisted in my original review that there is something inescapably political, even top-down, about a comprehensive or potentially successful response to Digital’s reign over us. Yes, by all means we should begin trying to rewrite some of the social scripts, so far as our time and ability permit. (I’m less sanguine even here, but I grant that it’s possible in small though important ways.) Nevertheless the material conditions must change for any such minor measures to take hold, not just at wider scale but in the lives of ordinary people. If you’re willing to accept the metaphor of addiction—and I think it’s more than a metaphor in this case—then what we need is for the authorities to turn off the supply, to clamp down on the free flow of the drug we all woke up one day to realize we were hooked on. The thing about a drug is that it feels good. We’re all jonesing for one more hit, click by click, swipe by swipe, like by like. What we need is rehab. But few people check themselves in voluntarily. What most addicts need, most of the time, is what most of us, today, need above all.

An intervention.

Tech-wise BenOp

My friend Jeff Bilbro has raised a question about my review essay in The New Atlantis of Andy Crouch’s new book, The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World. He sees a real tension between the critical questions I pose for Crouch at the end of the review and my essay last year for The Point, in which I defend Wendell Berry against the charge of quietism or apolitical inaction (lodged, in this case, by critic George Scialabba). If, that is, I argue that Berry is right to insist that living well is worth it even when losing is likely—in other words, when the causes in which one believes and for which one advocates are unlikely to win the day—am I not being inconsistent in criticizing Crouch’s proposal for failing to match the scale of the problem facing us in digital technology? Am I not taking up the role of Scialabba and saying, in so many words, “Lovely prose; bad advice”?

I don’t believe I am, but the question is a sharp one, and I’m on the hook for it. Let me see if I can explain myself.

First, note well that my review is overwhelmingly positive and that I say repeatedly in the closing sections of the essay that Crouch’s proposal is a sensible one; that it may, in fact, be the best on offer; and that it is worth attempting to implement whether or not there is a more scalable alternative to be preferred.

Second, my initial criticism concerns audience. In effect I am asking: Who can put this vision into practice? Who is capable of doing it? Whom is it for? With respect to Berry/Scialabba, that question is immaterial. Scialabba isn’t frustrated or confused by Berry’s intended audience; he actively does not want Berry to be successful in persuading others to adopt his views, because doing so would drain the resources necessary for mass political activism to be effective. Put differently, the Berryan vision is possible, though strenuous. Whereas it isn’t clear to me that Crouch’s vision is possible at all—or at least the question of for whom it may be possible is unclear to me.

Third, then, I want to up the ante on the Crouchian project by comparing its scale to the scale of the problem facing us, on one hand, and by asking after its purpose, on the other. It seems to me that The Life We’re Looking For does believe, or presuppose, that the Tech-Wise BenOp (or, if we want to uncouple Crouch from Dreher, the Pauline Option) has the power to effect, or is ordered to, the transformation of our common life, our culture, etc. Granted that such transformation may take decades or centuries, transformation is clearly in view. But this, too, is distinct from Berry’s stance. Berry does not believe his vision of the good life is a recipe for transformation. He does believe that large-scale transformation is impossible apart from local and even personal transformation. That, however, is a different matter than proposing a means for change. In sum, Berry believes that (1) the good life is worth living whatever the future may hold, (2) the good life is not a plan for change, and (3) the possibility of change requires the integration of national and local, cultural and personal, theoretical and practical. I affirm all this. But these points are distinct from (though not opposed to) Crouch’s proposal.

Returning to scale helps to clarify the difference. I admit in the review that it may genuinely be impossible to match the scale of the problem of digital technology without grave injustice. Nonetheless I hold that, given that scale, I cannot see how Crouch’s Pauline Option is a live possibility for any but saints. And as I say there, salvation from the tyranny of tech “must be for normies, not heroes.”

Let me make this more personal. Across my entire life I have not known a single household or family that fits the vision of being “tech wise” as laid out in either this book or Crouch’s previous book. Whether the folks in question were single, married, or parents, whether they were Christians or not, whether they were affluent or not, whether they were Texan or not, whether they were suburban or not, whether they were educated or not—the inside of the home and the habits of the household were all more or less the same, granting minor differences. Everyone has multiple TVs. Everyone has laptops and tablets. Everyone has video games. Everyone has smart phones. Everyone subscribes to streaming services. Everyone watches sports. Everyone is on social media. Everyone, everyone, everyone. No exceptions. The only differences concern which poison one prefers and how much time one gives to it.

I’m not throwing stones. This description includes me. I assume it includes you, too. The hegemony of the screen is ubiquitous, an octopus whose tentacles encircle and invade every one of our homes. No one, not one is excluded.

Some folks are more intentional than others; some of them even succeed in certain practices of moderation. But does it really make a difference? Is it really anything to write home about? Does it mark these homes off from their neighbors? Not at all. I repeat: Not once have I entered a single home that even somewhat resembles the (already non-extreme!) vision of tech-wisdom on offer in the pages of Crouch’s books.

This is what I mean by scale. It’s like we’re all on the bottom of the ocean, but some of us are a few yards above the rest. Are such persons technically closer to the surface? Sure. Are they still going to drown like the rest of us? Absolutely.

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I hope all this makes clear that I’m not contesting the wisdom or goodness or beauty of Crouch’s vision of households nurturing a technological revolution in nuce. I want to join such a resistance movement. But does it exist? More to the point, is it possible?

What I’ve come to believe is that, more or less full stop, it is not possible—so long, that is, as our households remain occupied territory. The flag of Silicon Valley waves publicly and proudly in all of our homes. I see it everywhere I go. It’s like the face of Big Brother. It just keeps on flapping and waving, waving and smiling, world without end, amen.

Perhaps “scale” is a misleading term. More than scale the challenge is how deep the roots of the problem lie. Truly to get a handle on it, truly to begin the revolution, an EMP would have to be detonated in my neighborhood. We’d have to throw our screens in a great glorious bonfire, turn off our wi-fi, and rid our homes of every “smart” device (falsely so called) and every member in that dubious, diabolical category: “the internet of things.” We’d have to delete Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and TikTok from our phones. We’d have to cancel our subscriptions to Netflix, Disney, Apple, HBO, Hulu, and Amazon. We’d have to say goodbye to it all, and start over.

I don’t mean we have to live in a post-digital world to live sane lives. (Though some days I do wonder whether that may be true: viva la Butlerian Jihad!) I mean our lives are already so integrated with digital as to qualify as transhuman. We must face that fact squarely: If we are already cyborgs in practice, then disconnecting a few of the tubes while remaining otherwise hooked up to the Collective isn’t going to cut it.

Nor—and this is a buried lede—is any of this possible, if it is possible, for any but the hyper-educated or hyper-affluent. Most people, as I comment in the review, are just trying to survive:

We are too beholden to the economic and digital realities of modern life — too dependent on credit, too anxious about paying the rent, too distracted by Twitter, too reliant on Amazon, too deadened by Pornhub — to be in a position to opt for an alternative vision, much less to realize that one exists. We’ve got ends to meet. And at the end of the day, binging Netflix numbs the stress with far fewer consequences than opioids.

Yet all the hyper-educated and hyper-affluent people I now are just as plugged-in as those with fewer degrees and less money. Put most starkly, I read Crouch’s book as if it were a sermon preached by an ex-Borg to the Borg Hive. But individual Borg aren’t capable of disconnecting themselves. That’s what makes them the Borg.

As they say, resistance is futile.

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My metaphors and rhetoric are outstripping themselves here, so let me pull it back a bit, not least because the point of this post isn’t to criticize Crouch’s book but to show that my (modestly!) critical questions aren’t at odds with my defense of Berry.

Let me summarize my main points, before I add one final word about scale, that word I keep using but not quite defining or addressing.

1. Crouch’s book is an excellent and beautiful vision of what it means to be human, at all times and especially today, in a world beset by digital technology.

2. I don’t know whether Crouch envisions that vision to be achievable by just anyone at all; and, if not, then by whom in particular.

3. I don’t know whether Crouch’s vision is possible in principle, at least for normal people with normal jobs and normal lives.

4. Even if it were possible in principle for the few saints and heroes among us, I don’t know whether it would make a difference except to themselves.

5. This last observation is not a criticism in itself, but it becomes a criticism if Crouch believes that cultural transformation occurs from the ground up through the patient faithfulness of a tiny minority of persons leavening society by their witness, eventuating in radical social transformation.

6. Points two through five are not in tension with my defense of Berry against Scialabba, because (a) Berry’s vision is livable, (b) it is livable by normies, (c) it is not designed or proposed in order to effectuate mass change, and (d) he knows this and believes it is worth doing anyway.

Clearly, I have set myself up here to be disproved: If Crouch’s vision is not only possible to be lived in general but is being lived right now, as we speak, by normies, then he’s off the hook and I’ve got pie on my face. More, if he doesn’t believe that—or is not invested in the likelihood that—this vision, put into practice by normal folks, will or should lead to social, cultural, economic, and political transformation, then that’s a second pie on top of the first, and I hereby pledge to repent in digital dust and ashes.

Nothing would make me happier than being shown to be wrong here. I want Crouch to be right, because I want nothing more than for my life and the lives of my friends and neighbors (and, above all, those of my children) to be free of the derelictions and defacements of digital. Not only that, but there’s no one I trust more on this issue than Crouch. I assign The Tech-Wise Family to my students every year, and practices he commends there have made their way into my home. I owe him many debts.

But I just can’t shake the feeling that the problem is even bigger, even nastier, even deeper and more threatening than he or any of us can find it within us to admit. That’s what I mean when I refer to “scale.” Permit me to advert to one last overwrought analogy. Berry wants us (among other things) to live within limits, on a plot of land that we work by our own hands to bring forth some allotment of food for us, our household, our neighbors, our animals. He doesn’t ask us to breathe unpolluted oxygen, to live on a planet without air pollution. That’s now, regrettably, a fact of life; it encompasses us all. By contrast, reading The Life We’re Looking For I get one of two feelings: either that unpolluted oxygen is available, you just have to know where to find it; or that the pollution isn’t so bad after all. Maybe there really are folks who’ve fashioned or found oxygen masks here and there around the globe. Maybe I’ve just been unfortunate not to have spotted any. But I fear there are none, or there aren’t nearly enough to go around.

In brief, the Hive isn’t somewhere else or other than us; we are the Hive, and the Hive is us. It’s just this once-blue planet spinning in space, now overtaken by the tunnels and tubes, the darkness and silence of the Cube. If there’s a way out of this digital labyrinth, I’m all ears. All day long I’m looking for that crimson thread, showing the way out. If someone—Bilbro, Berry, Crouch, whoever—can lead the way, I’ll follow. The worry that keeps me up nights, though, is that there is no exit, and we’re deceiving ourselves imagining there is.