1. Is the world a simulation? Are we simply controlling avatars in the Matrix run by an absent demiurge? Is any of this real? According to Paul Nedelisky at the Hedgehog Review, this philosophical idea of Simulation Theory was once linked only to obsessives in Silicon Valley but has grown in popularity among younger generations in the past decade. If, after all, we can conceive of a technologically induced virtual reality that mimics real life with perfection, the odds that we are currently in such a simulation are not zero. Even Captain Picard occasionally confuses the holodeck for real life.
But Nedelisky doesn’t have much patience for the truth of the theory. Instead, he wonders why the theory has become so popular in the intervening decades. His guess: it’s a logical outflow from the larger crisis of meaning.
What is especially interesting about meaninglessness, however, is that despite its growth and prevalence, we tend to think that it is abnormal in a normative, if not statistical, sense. We tend to think meaninglessness is a problem to be solved rather than an unavoidable mode of human experience. We may not be able to articulate why, but it seems that this is not the way things are supposed to be. This is why we study meaninglessness, try to escape it, talk to pastors and therapists about it, complain to our friends about it, read self-help books about it, and worry when young people increasingly have it. The inveterate human reaction to this phenomenon is that the affliction demands an explanation, in addition to a cure.
We are now in position to see the strange amenability of the simulation hypothesis. The most prominent existential feature of the phenomenology of simulation is that it would seem to amplify the meaninglessness of our experience. The sort of explanatory relationship I have in mind is most easily observed in the experience of playing video games. […]
I want to be clear: This is not a critique of video games. There is no requirement that every moment of our lives be replete with meaning. And, indeed, part of the very appeal of video games is that they offer an escape from the sometimes oppressively real pressures and expectations of much of ordinary life. The point is just that simulated experience is in general less meaningful than genuine experience, and that the experience feels meaningless because it is simulated.
But if you already feel that your experience is meaningless, then this makes the simulation hypothesis sound not like a far-fetched sci-fi thought experiment but like an explanation. Things aren’t supposed to be meaningless, but they are, and nothing you’ve tried has fixed the problem.
If the simulation theory is a sign of the meaninglessness crisis among Gen Z and others swept away in the digital age, it also represents a sort of spiritual openness. Who runs the simulation we find ourselves in? Are they on our side? These are questions of enchantment in their own right. Nedelisky continues:
Simulation-based Gnosticism will require addressing many questions about the nature of reality in entirely new ways. Age-old debates over creation, fall, evil, providence, the nature of God, monotheism vs. polytheism, free will, prayer, messianic deliverance, and eschatology re-emerge in a novel register. This kind of return to Gnosticism would be more metaphysically robust than that described by some modern analysts who have seen in secular ideologies some structural similarities to the ancient view. This would be a return to something akin to a religious perspective, in which people look to superhuman powers to explain the nature of reality.
2. In the Atlantic, James Parker reviews Peter Jones’s Self-Help from the Middle Ages: What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us About Living. I know, I can hear your eye roll through the screen, but stick with me. The thesis of the book is not to pull self-help tidbits from a major spiritual tradition but to consider that so much of the spiritual traditions within late Middle Ages Europe are, ultimately, self-help.
I thought initially that the title of Peter Jones’s Self-Help From the Middle Ages: What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us About Living was an oxymoron. Self-help is our thing, after all, our exemplary piece of circular modernity, our little closed circuit — the distressed subject coming to its own aid. The medievals, more vertical in their thinking, would have counted on the down-rushing swoop of God’s grace.
But Jones, a medieval historian, shows us that the High and Later Middle Ages (1100 to 1500, roughly) were every bit as goofy as we are about human nature and behavior, and equally hooked on buzzwords, listicles (Catherine of Siena’s five different types of tears, Thomas Aquinas’s five varieties of gluttony), and junk science. To explain the inexplicable (that is, themselves), the medievals used the 12 signs of the zodiac, the four humors — yellow bile, black bile, blood, and phlegm — and the seven deadly sins. Jones takes the seven one by one, a chapter for each, arguing that this gnarly old taxonomy represents not only a timeless decoction of human wisdom but something of a moral map for our present wanderings.
We are not so different, then, as the medievals who were trying to rein in the great impulses that controlled them. Parker’s reflections dwell on anger and the medieval attempt to rein in this master of the human psyche. Control it, or it will control you, and so the conscious awareness of the seven deadly sins is worth the effort and mediation to fight it.
My inner Protestant nonetheless protests. Part of the reason for the Reformation was that these listicles and buzzwords and formularies and junk sciences didn’t work. And they don’t today. The underlying anthropology wasn’t right back then, and it isn’t right now. We are not so much puppets under the control of a wicked master as we are lovers of our own abusers, and a radical reorientation of love is required for virtue to thrive. As long as the heart’s loves direct the will’s choice and the mind’s justification, the inexplicable will remain a mystery, no matter how many humors, zodiacs, and sins we categorize.
3. David Brooks accomplishes a labor of love for us in the Atlantic this week. There’s not much new to say these days about AI, Trad Wives, homesteading, the mancession, smartphone addiction, social media vapidity, and the insistence that young people are flocking to Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism (reminder, despite what everyone says, there’s no solid evidence this is true). What Brooks does is wrap all these trends together under the banner of reactionary thinking, describing them as a collective pumping of society’s brakes with hopes of avoiding a grim future.
We used to have a clear idea of where modernity was heading — toward greater autonomy and equality, secularism, stronger individual rights, cultural openness, and liberal democracy. Progress was supposed to lead to the expansion of individual choice in sphere after sphere. Science and reason would prosper while superstition and conspiracy-mongering would wither away.
Turns out that was yesterday’s vision of the future. Billions of people around the world looked at where history was heading and yelled: Stop! They see that future as too spiritually empty, too lonely, too technological, too polluted, too confusing, too incoherent. Whatever their specific complaint, they are driven by a sense of loss, a desire to go back to a simpler, happier, and more sustainable time […]
Periods of great disruption inevitably produce yearning for an earlier golden age, and ours is no different. You can tell what kind of reactionary a person is by asking them what era they want to go back to. For some MAGA dudes, it’s the Roman empire, when men were men. For some theocrats, it’s the Middle Ages, when men were monks. In the U.S., many on the right want to go back to the social mores of the 1950s: men in the workplace, women at home; white people on top; epic levels of church attendance; and wholesome fare such as Oklahoma! and Leave It to Beaver onstage and on television. Meanwhile, many on the left want to go back to that decade’s union- and manufacturing-led economy, or to the utopian socialism of the 19th century. Our politics is drenched in nostalgia.
Brooks being Brooks, his take is nuanced and balanced, perhaps to a fault. The reactionaries, he writes, make valid points about rootedness, spirituality, and the anti-human direction of life. His criticism, however, is that the traditionalists succumb to the Golden Age fallacy, and have an anemic understanding of life in the past, which was not so peaceful, rooted, or serene as they imagine.
The traditionalists distort history when they write it as if all people have always wanted stationary lives and our goal as a society should be to make stationary lives the norm.
All traditionalists, from [Oswald] Spengler to [Paul] Kingsnorth, tell a story about a historic rupture that destroyed the ancestral culture and gave rise to the rootless, soulless modern era. But no such historic rupture ever happened. Nor has there been a moment when humans were forever content to stay within the safety of their village. History has always been lived within the tension between the desire for security and the desire for learning, exploration, movement, and growth. The early hominids of the species Homo erectus may have loved their small African communities 1.9 million years ago — but they still ventured forth to places as far as China and Indonesia. The early Polynesians may have loved their home islands — but they still felt the urge to explore and settle an array of tiny islands in an expanse of ocean spanning millions of square miles. (And they did this in a time without modern navigation devices, when one slight steering error could set you astray in the enormous, empty Pacific.)
Human beings have a need for both security and exploration, for both belonging and autonomy, for both stability and innovation. Our lives are propelled by these contradictions, which can never be resolved.
Traditionalists are trying to live the monist dream — the dream that we can build a society in which all the pieces fit neatly together. But the many and diverse values that humans cherish will never fit neatly together. In every culture, groups argue over which values should have priority in present circumstances. There’s never been a tranquil resting spot, and there never will be.
4. In humor this week, Julie Sharbutt has been reminded of her own mortality, and it has impacted every area of her life:
Excuse me, excuse me, sorry, sorry, sorry — I just have to squeeze past you. I figured out where this movie was going five minutes ago and there are a hundred and six minutes left (I looked it up) so I’m gonna leave. Maybe I’ll sit on a bench at the bus station and watch the human tapestry unfurl itself. I’m sorry that I stepped on your souvenir popcorn bucket — take mine.
I’m sorry, guys. I’ve gotta cancel on our plans tonight. You can give my ticket to someone who didn’t make eye contact with a pigeon and feel super judged for the decadent, indoor-human life I lead.
Also in humor this week: Henry VIII’s Dating App Profiles, a must-read for Anglophiles. And the new UK version of SNL is off to a strong start too (see “Mastermind” above).
5. In the New York Times Magazine, Nitsuh Abebe asks how the act of “gatekeeping” become one of the internet’s chief sins. It’s part of the magazine’s On Language column, which is a mix of etymology, trivia, and cultural commentary. Abebe observes how the phrase was originally meant in a guarding capacity, someone who was keeping the bad away and letting in the good.
Spend a moment thinking through that gate metaphor, and it’s not hard to intuit why gatekeeping was originally seen as a useful act. Gates are functional; they’re not inherently, conceptually evil. The modern sense of gatekeeping traces back to World War II-era research by the social psychologist Kurt Lewin, who applied it to the ordinary American housewife: She was, he found, “the gatekeeper in the buying channel,” determining which foods entered her household. (Men tended to gatekeep which vegetables would be grown in home gardens, while among the wealthiest families, the “buying channel” was left to maids.) A few years later, the term attached itself to mass-media workers like newspaper editors, who sorted through the countless events that took place each day and made judgments about which ones merited readers’ limited time and attention, separating real news from trivialities or speculations.
The gatekeeper, in other words, was imagined as a sort of filter between you and the too-muchness of the world. We often pictured them as bouncers at our gates, helpfully pre-screening stimuli. The new sense of the word imagines precisely the opposite. At some point, we started to picture ourselves approaching somebody else’s gate, and having it slammed rudely in our faces.
The shift in meaning from positive to negative is remarkable, and it is true that nobody likes a bouncer. That said, Abebe’s concluding thought, that the preening moralism of anti-gatekeeping culture is mostly fluff, lands true to anyone who spends more than a few moments on any tech platform.
Old-school systemic gatekeeping has not gone anywhere. Influencers and talking heads may nobly include you in everything they discuss, but they’re still choosing what to discuss. Then they’re curated for your attention by tech companies whose trustworthiness and public spirit tend to be comically low, using complex algorithms whose trustworthiness and public spirit are straight-up nonexistent. Everyone involved in razing Chesterton’s old fence was simultaneously building a cutting-edge, sensor-laden titanium wall right behind it. It’s just that much of what passes through it reaches you, at the point of experience, with a glaze of chummy anti-gatekeeping etiquette that we all seem remarkably comfortable with, because it promises never to rub in our faces the fact that other people know things we don’t.
6. The last word this week goes to Jason Edwards, who reflects on his own experience with scrupulosity for Plough. Scrupulosity is the somewhat antiquated word for an obsession with personal guilt and moral trespass, a sort of spiritualized cousin of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. For the scrupulous, failure to follow God’s law with perfection leads to certain catastrophe, both temporal and eternal. The pressure valve is released, writes Edwards, when God behind the law is revealed to also be God of extreme grace. Here’s Edwards discussing a particularly difficult spiritual crisis from his college days:
I took it to a professor I trusted, someone who listened patiently as I tried to explain my unease. When I finished, he sat quietly for a moment and then gently said, “Jason, I think you have a guilt complex. And I think you need to go with grace.” He named something I could not yet see clearly for myself. Years later, in seminary, I was meeting with the spiritual director who oversaw the formation program. Part of her role was to assess whether we were practicing the disciplines we were learning. I spoke openly with her about personal prayer, reading scripture, observing silence. The conversation felt good, even affirming. Then, almost casually, she leaned forward and said, “Jason, most of the time I encourage students to practice these things more. But not you. These are practices you have pressed yourself with for years. And I’m not sure that’s always been good for you.” She paused, then added, “So my word for you today is this: go with grace. Stop doing all the things. Go with grace. I believe God wants you to go with grace.”
Those two moments have stayed with me because they named a pattern that has echoed through much of my life: a tender conscience slowly overburdened, seriousness drifting into self-surveillance, devotion tightening until it could no longer breathe. […]
I have met too many people who only discovered this after years of exhaustion or quiet despair. Many do not lose faith because they cared too little, but because they cared so much that they ended up carrying more than a human can bear. What they needed was permission to stop trying so hard, and someone to help them discern the difference between fruitful obedience and anxious scrupulosity.
The Jewish and Christian traditions offer that wisdom. It appears in rabbinic warnings about fences, in the words of monks who learned to test piety by its fruit, in novels that trace the cost of an unchecked conscience, in spiritual directors who, at just the right moment, say, “Go with grace.”
After years of incessant self-checking, I have found a steadier truth waiting to be trusted: God’s order is not fragile, love does not require perpetual proof, and true faithfulness leaves one room to breathe. And I have found that when the soul is no longer under surveillance, it becomes more attentive, responsive, and alive.
Strays:
- “The 2,181-Day Running Streak I Can’t Bring Myself to Break.” It can seem a little glib to call compulsive exercise an addiction, but this reflection from Hannah Pittard puts teeth on a very real psychological condition. Justification by fitness, by numbers, by works, it’s all here.
- “We pollinate the lawns and meadows of the digital ecosystem with every smartphone bought and every click made.” Andrey Mir asks whether a switch is taking place between humans using the machine and machines using the human.
- “Partying in Joy and Sorrow.” More encouragement to throw, host, and attend more parties in your life.
- “U2’s music shows surrender can still sound like joy.” Inspired by the band’s recent EP releases on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.
