How do you live in a world like this?

Plus: Religion data on Twitter, my piece on AI deepfakes in politics, and more

Bonnie Kristian

Mar 29, 2023

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here are this week’s five items for you.

Buy & review 'Untrustworthy' on Amazon

1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere

How do you live in a world like this?

At Slate, Dan Kois recalls his “good-enough friends” from high school:

It wasn’t that kind of friendship—the kind where you are intimately connected and know everything about one another. We met up, we hung out, and then they graduated and I basically never saw them again.
I thought of Jason and Mark this past weekend, after my wife and I spent another half-hour encouraging our teenagers to Make some plans! Get out of the house! As is often the case, little came of it. Halfhearted texts receive halfhearted responses. School friends have crew practice or something else going on. No one wants to go out into the cold. Maybe they can just talk on the phone while playing video games? […]
My older teenager professes, despite her rich online friendships, to crave in-person fellowship—yet struggles to make connections with her anxious, overscheduled peers.

On Twitter,

Noah Smith

argues we've already experienced radical technological change in our lifetimes. He mostly sees these shifts—overwhelmingly attributable not to the internet generally but to the smartphone specifically—as a good thing. But it's hard to put a positive gloss on this:

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 @Noahpinion

The entire nature of human life has radically altered. When I was a young adult, human beings spent most of their day socializing in real life. Now, people spend most of their time staring at small glowing screens.

pewresearch.orgAbout three-in-ten U.S. adults say they are ‘almost constantly’ onlineThe share of U.S. adults who now report that they go online “almost constantly” has risen to 31%, up from 21% in 2015.

From a focus group of tweens and younger teenagers by The New York Times:

Finally,

Freddie deBoer

, whose Substack I’ve plugged here before, writes about how to live in a world like this. It requires, he says, a concerted refusal of our culture’s constant invitation to subhuman abdication of responsibility and love:

The people who talk about AI as this all-transforming technology—they’re telling you that our next step as a species is to build an army of Tyler Durdens and to give up on real love, real feeling, real people. And I’m asking you to refuse. I’m asking you to choose the other thing, in whatever way you can.
That’s the existential question for humanity in the 21st century. That’s the challenge in front of all of us. Will you shoulder the risk of pursuing real human connection, as hard and intimidating and discouraging as that can be? Or will you hide in your room forever, comforted by fast food and porn and opiates and therapy and TikTok, risking nothing? It’s up to you.
I don’t pretend that it’s easy to choose the former. I don’t pretend that I always choose it or will always choose it, or that I’ve chosen it well, or that choosing it hasn’t cost me a great deal, at times. I know it’s not easy. A lot of people reach out to another and have their hand slapped down. And that’s scary. But to keep trying is to declare to the universe that you will have the courage to be human, when everyone and everything tempts you to be otherwise.
Remember: you are you. We live here. This is now.

To all this I’ll add two things.

First, we might want to imagine ourselves and our time uniquely beset by evil, uniquely constrained by circumstance, uniquely tested and tried. This is very rarely correct. Human nature is a constant, and though complexity increases as our choices multiply, our lives are, in many ways both practical and moral, easier than those of the vast majority of our forebears and many people elsewhere in the world today.

Yet it is simultaneously true, as Alan Noble writes in On Getting out of Bed (which I recommend to you for pre-order ahead of its release next month), that we all face evil and hardship, that “suffering—even profound mental affliction and personal tragedy—is a normal part of human life.” And it is also true that even comparatively easy eras have characteristic sins and woes or, more precisely, characteristic expressions of the sins and woes that are always with us.

For us, deBoer’s sketch of “people eager to abandon the fundamental task of our lives, fostering and maintaining human connection, so that they can fall deeper into a pit of hedonistic distraction forever” rings unfortunately true. In prior times this would be labeled a sort of acedia or sloth. Or perhaps a kind of lust in the broad (and not necessarily sexual) sense of inordinately gratifying desire at the expense of duty to God and neighbor.

In any case, we can admit at once that “[n]o temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind,” and that this temptation we face is particularly hard to overcome precisely because it is so common in this moment.

Second, I wonder how many will attempt the refusal deBoer urges. And, of those, how many will stick with their refusal after inevitable lapses. And, of those who do, how will they do it? How will they keep refusing even when it is very difficult and the difficulty never ends?

deBoer himself strikes me (remotely, via his writing—we are not personally acquainted) as someone who has, for lack of a better term, a well-examined life. He has thought and written through this problem in depth. I believe he’s committed, however imperfectly, to the challenge he is issuing. The same cannot be said of most people, and reading such a challenge does not have the same inner effect as reaching the point of writing it.

Look, this is maybe a Jesus juke, and I apologize if so. But seriously, I don’t know how most of us, the masses with unexamined lives and muddled thinking and so many obligations, can gut through it as deBoer describes. He’s right, but how?

How do you do that by sheer force of will? How do you do it day in and day out, for the rest of your life? How do you do it without some backup (communal, theological—I am basically thinking of church) beyond your own internal and very possibly isolated conviction that it should be done? How do you refuse this pernicious loneliness alone?

2. What I'm reading this week

“Dr. Fauci could have said a lot more,” by Megan Stack at The New York Times. If you’ve read the chapter on expertise in Untrustworthy, you’ll understand why I appreciated this piece so much. A crucial excerpt:

[T]rying to clean up disinformation by quashing ideas that somebody—a government employee, an academic think tank, a social media team—deems undesirable? This creates its own dangers. I’ve spent too many years in censored countries like Egypt, Russia and China to believe that our disinformation problem can be solved by monitoring speech and sorting out acceptable from unacceptable ideas. You end up in a society where nobody really believes anything.
A particular dread takes hold when I see public officials or pundits take it upon themselves to purify the national dialogue — to keep the guileless masses from being confused or misled. Dr. Fauci may have feared that ill-informed citizens and grandstanding politicians prying into laboratories would endanger beneficial research. He had, at other times, displayed a Hamiltonian distrust of ordinary people …

3. A recommendation

If you’re on Twitter, political scientist Ryan Burge is a great follow for the steady stream of religion data he puts out. For example, from yesterday: