Expertise

Expertise is under attack is a common theme in journalism and academic writing today. I don’t doubt it, and I don’t doubt its importance. Expertise is real and the loss of public confidence in persons whose office, education, training, or experience have historically granted them some measure of authority is an all too real problem. Implicit distrust of the very notion of authority, the very suggestion of expertise, makes a common life impossible, in more ways than one.

But there is a fundamental misunderstanding in defenses of expertise, and not only in high-minded venues. Even at the ordinary level of daily life or—where I spend my days—in the academy and the classroom, there is a basic confusion regarding what expertise is, what credentials are, and how either ought to function in social relations.

I wrote about this at length in my essay for The New Atlantis a year ago, titled “Statistics as Storytelling.” I won’t rehash that argument here. Let me do my best to boil it down into its basic components. I’ll spell it out in six principles.

The first principle of expertise is a defined scope of competence. An “expert”—if I’m honest, I hate that term; it’s a weasel word, invariably used to enhance status or dismiss objections; but I’ll keep using it here, since it’s the one in circulation—possesses some relevant knowledge about a particular domain: embryology, archeology, Greek sculpture, Moby-Dick. If the Melville scholar comments on anything outside her expertise, therefore, she is by definition no longer an expert, and thus bears no authority worthy of deference or respect. This is the Richard Dawkins phenomenon: He is welcome to speak and to write about philosophy and theology, but he does not do so as a philosopher or theologian, but as an evolutionary biologist addressing questions and subjects outside the scope of his formal training.

The second principle of expertise is that, without exception, all members of the same field, whether delimited by discipline or study or practice or training, disagree with one another about matters crucial to the field to which they belong. Expertise, in other words, is not about unanimity or agreement; it is about membership in a group defined by disagreement and disputation. It is about being party to the contest that is the field; being part of the argument that constitutes the guild. Expertise is not consensus: it’s the very opposite. It’s the entry point into a world of bitter, sometimes rancorous, conflict.

That doesn’t mean that everything is thereby in question. One must agree about certain things to disagree about others. Intelligible disagreement presupposes prior agreement. 2 + 2 = 4 is a premise for mathematicians’ arguments; certain claims build on others. That’s true of every realm of knowledge. But the interesting thing is always what’s not agreed upon. And outsiders are always surprised by just how little is agreed upon, even by like-minded experts in the same field.

The third principle of expertise is that, whenever and wherever what is called for in a given moment or in response to a certain question is not a set of empirical facts but a judgment, then the presumptive force of expertise is immediately qualified. There is no such thing as expertise in judgment. Or rather, there is, but one cannot be credentialed in it, for its name is wisdom. Wisdom is not and cannot be the result of formal education. It does not come with a degree or diploma. There are no letters to append to your name that signify wisdom. The least learned or educated person in the world may be wise, and the smartest or most educated person in the world may be foolish. (Indeed, Christians say that’s the normal run of things.) Good sense comes from living. Prudence is a virtue. Neither is the domain of an expert. There are no experts in good judgment, in wisdom, in prudence. As often as not, expertise functions as an obstacle to it, or a shield from it.

The fourth principle of expertise, then, is that typically what expertise provides is a set of facts or conditions, sometimes necessary but never sufficient, for the possibility of exercising wise judgment. It is true that I know more about Christian theology than most believers in the pews. That does not, in any way, mean that I am more likely to be right than they are about this or that Christian doctrine. A monk of Mount Athos is far wiser to submit to Orthodox tradition than to listen to me, even if I’ve read more Orthodox theologians than he has. A lifelong elderly believer who has never read theology may have keener insight into the mystery of the Eucharist than I do. True, I know the date of the second Ecumenical Council, and she may not. That’s not at issue though. What’s at issue is whether my expertise, such as it is, is either necessary or sufficient for knowing sound doctrine. And it is not. (If you’d like to meet a passel of heretical PhDs in theology, I can arrange an introduction.)

The same goes for biblical scholars. Knowledge of Greek gives you a leg up on having some plausible sense of what St. Paul might have had in mind in the mid-50s, writing to Corinth. But it doesn’t ensure that your exegesis of any New Testament text will be right, or even more likely to be right than the exegesis of an ordinary believer in the pew, ignorant of Greek as well as first-century Greco-Roman culture. Why? First, because New Testament scholars themselves don’t agree about how to read the text. The Pauline guild is that group of experts than which there is no more cantankerous or quarrelsome. Second, because the New Testament is Holy Scripture, and what God has kept from the learned he has revealed to the simple. That is, what God has to say in and through the canon may just as well bypass the intricacies of academic method as be accessed by them. In my experience, that is often the case.

The fifth principle of expertise is that all fields or domains that presuppose or assert normative (rather than empirical) claims logically may and necessarily will come into conflict. This is usually most quickly revealed in anthropology. An economist supposes homo sapiens to be a utility-maximizer, say, while the therapist sees a self-actualizer, and the theologian a sinner in need of Christ. To be sure, some aspects of these visions might be harmonious. But not all. Each, for example, takes a different and mutually opposed view of desire. Are all desires good? Are all to be affirmed or fulfilled? Is desire as such self-validating? And so on. The theologian is not departing from her realm in contesting the claims of the economist or the therapist, for the ground being contested is common to the three of them. It concerns the nature and purpose of the human person. Hence, when areas of expertise overlap, it is wholly proper for argument to ensue. No one’s view is invalidated in advance by dint of lacking the relevant credentials.

The sixth principle of expertise is that sometimes experts are wrong. It may be some group of experts, or all of them. The error may be partial or complete. But experts are wrong, and in fact, regularly so. That is to be expected, since there are no angelic experts, only human ones. The practice of knowledge is just that: a practice, and so subject to all the ordinary human foibles: vanity, greed, oversight, shortsightedness, limitations of every kind, fallibility, haste, contempt, and the rest. Sometimes we want something to be true when it isn’t. Sometimes we wish something were good when it isn’t. Sometimes we can’t stand the thought that our enemy isn’t wrong, and we work overtime to show that he is, or might be. Sometimes our blinders—the products of inheritance, culture, genetics, generation, education, prejudice, peers, parents, friends, what have you—keep us from seeing what is right in front of our noses. Whatever the reason, experts are far from infallible. The one thing you can take to the bank is that every expert in every field at this present moment believes something profoundly wrong or untrue in relation to his or her field, not to mention other fields. That includes me. The problem is just that none of us knows which one of our beliefs is the wrong one, amid all the right ones.

For experts of all kinds, the upshot should be a severe and sincere humility about the range and competence of our knowledge. For normal folks, such humility should be the expectation of experts, not the exception; and when it isn’t present, they are not wrong to be skeptical.

The take temptation

There is an ongoing series of essays being slowly published in successive issues of The New Atlantis I want to commend to you. They’re by Jon Askonas, a friend who teaches politics at Catholic University of America. The title for the series as a whole is “Reality: A Post-Mortem.” The essays are a bit hard to describe, but they make for essential reading. They are an attempt to diagnose the root causes of, and the essential character of, the new state of unreality we find ourselves inhabiting today. The first, brief essay lays out the vision for the series. The second treats the gamified nature of our common life, in particular its analogues in novels, role-playing games, and alternate reality games (ARGs). The latest essay, which just arrived in my mailbox, is called “How Stewart Made Tucker.” Go read them all! (And subscribe to TNA, naturally. I’ve got an essay in the latest issue too.)

For now, I want to make one observation, drawing on something found in essay #2.

Jon writes (in one of a sequence of interludes that interrupt the main flow of the argument):

Several weeks have gone by since you picked your rabbit hole [that is, a specific topic about which there is much chatter but also much nonsense in public discourse and social media]. You have done the research, found a newsletter dedicated to unraveling the story, subscribed to a terrific outlet or podcast, and have learned to recognize widespread falsehoods on the subject. If your uncle happens to mention the subject next Thanksgiving, there is so much you could tell him that he wasn’t aware of.

 You check your feed and see that a prominent influencer has posted something that seems revealingly dishonest about your subject of choice. You have, at the tip of your fingers, the hottest and funniest take you have ever taken.

1. What do you do?

a. Post with such fervor that your followers shower you with shares before calling Internet 911 to report an online murder.

b. Draft your post, decide to “check” the “facts,” realize the controversy is more complex than you thought, and lose track of real work while trying to shoehorn your original take into the realm of objectivity.

c. Private-message your take, without checking its veracity, to close friends for the laughs or catharsis.

d. Consign your glorious take to the post trash can.

2. How many seconds did it take you to decide?

3. In however small a way, did your action nudge the world toward or away from a shared reality?

Let’s call this gamified reinforcement mechanism “the take temptation.” It amounts to the meme-ification of our common life and, therefore, of the common good itself. Jon writes earlier in the essay, redescribing the problem behind the problem:

We hear that online life has fragmented our “information ecosystem,” that this breakup has been accelerated by social division, and vice versa. We hear that alienation drives young men to become radicalized on Gab and 4chan. We hear that people who feel that society has left them behind find consolation in QAnon or in anti-vax Facebook groups. We hear about the alone-togetherness of this all.

What we haven’t figured out how to make sense of yet is the fun that many Americans act like they’re having with the national fracture.

Take a moment to reflect on the feeling you get when you see a headline, factoid, or meme that is so perfect, that so neatly addresses some burning controversy or narrative, that you feel compelled to share it. If it seems too good to be true, maybe you’ll pull up Snopes and check it first. But you probably won’t. And even if you do, how much will it really help? Everyone else will spread it anyway. Whether you retweet it or just email it to a friend, the end effect on your network of like-minded contacts — on who believes what — will be the same.

“Confirmation bias” names the idea that people are more likely to believe things that confirm what they already believe. But it does not explain the emotional relish we feel, the sheer delight when something in line with our deepest feelings about the state of the world, something so perfect, comes before us. Those feelings have a lot in common with how we feel when our sports team scores a point or when a dice roll goes our way in a board game.

It’s the relish of the meme, the fun of the hot take—all while the world burns—that Jon wants us to see so that he, in turn, can explain it. I leave the explanation to him. For my part, I’m going to do a bit of moralizing, aimed at myself first but offered here as a bit of stern encouragement to anyone who’s apt to listen.

The moral is simple: The take temptation is to be resisted at all costs, full stop. The take-industrial complex is not a bit of fun at the expense of others. It’s not a victimless joke. It is nothing less than your or my small but willing participation in unraveling the social fabric. It is the false catharsis that comes from treating the goods in common we hope to share as a game, to be won or lost by cheap jokes and glib asides. Nor does it matter if you reserve the take or meme for like-minded friends. In a sense that’s worse. The tribe is thereby reinforced and the Other thereby rendered further, stranger, more alien than before. You’re still perpetuating the habit to which we’re all addicted and from which we all need deliverance. You’re still feeding the beast. You’re still heeding the sly voice of the tempter, whose every word is a lie.

The only alternative to the take temptation is the absolutely uncool, unrewarding, and unremunerative practice of charity for enemies, generosity of spirit, plainness of prose, and perfect earnestness in argument. The lack of irony is painful, I know; the lack of sarcasm, boring; the lack of grievance, pitiful. So be it. Begin to heal the earth by refusing to litter; don’t wish the world rid of litter while tossing a Coke can out the window.

This means not reveling in the losses of your enemies, which is to say, those friends and neighbors for whom Christ died with whom you disagree. It means not joking about that denomination’s woes. It means not exaggerating or misrepresenting the views of another person, no matter what they believe, no matter their character, no matter who they are. It means not pretending that anyone is beyond the pale. It means not ridiculing anyone, ever, for any reason. It means, practically speaking, not posting a single word to Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or any other instrument of our digital commons’ escalating fracture. It means practicing what you already know to be true, which is that ninety-nine times out of one hundred, the world doesn’t need to know what you think, when you think it, by online means.

The task feels nigh impossible. But resistance isn’t futile in this case. Every minor success counts. Start today. You won’t be sorry. Nor will the world.

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.