That bot would be available whenever I wanted.

So the frictionlessness of AI is disturbing, right? Because what you just described is a lot of friction.

There's a lot of friction in human relationships.

In embodied human relationships, there's a lot of friction.

And that friction is actually good because it smooths out our hard edges.

It makes us into people of character because we have to sacrifice.

We have to apologize.

That's so creepy, Alan.

What has your personal journey with God been like as you've navigated different areas of mental affliction, but also just navigated this journey that you've been on through this book and before that?

Yeah, so I think...

For me, one of the challenges has been that I grew up believing that you can trust your emotions as emotions are the vehicle the Holy Spirit uses to speak to you.

And I do believe the Holy Spirit speaks to us and that He does communicate, but...

I was raised to think, for example, that if you make a decision and you don't feel peace about it, quote unquote, peace about it, then that's the Holy Spirit telling you you're in sin or that's not God's will.

Or if you do something and you feel bad about it afterwards, then that's clearly sin.

the Holy spirit convicting you.

encouragement that

You need to know context and background so that you can understand what the writer's talking about.

I'd like to go back to 1 Peter 5, verse 6, which was read earlier.

Humble yourselves therefore into the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you.

This idea of humbling and exaltation is a theme that goes all the way back to the Old Testament.

We see it here in 1 Peter.

We see it almost word for word, James 4.10. We see it in Philippians 5, the mind of Christ, how He humbled Himself, the greatest example of all, and then was exalted.

And then verses like Proverbs 15.33, uh the fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom and humility comes before honor and so we see that god and and the bible also says this and i can't quote a reference god honors humility but will strike down pride and that's a theme that really goes through the whole uh the whole of scripture i think

And I think that's wrong.

So I'd love to hear you just talk a little bit more about what courage is properly understood, why you and Aquinas believe that endurance is actually the greater part, and what endurance has to do with the life well lived, because it sure doesn't sound fun.

Yeah, no.

Well, it's not often fun, but it is part of the life well lived.

Yeah, no, I think that's a great observation that a lot of what we see portrayed as courage is actually correctly categorized as recklessness.

So to be courageous, you have to be acting according to the good.

And Aquinas is really clear on this, that the categories to actually be courageous, you have to risk suffering for the sake of the good.

If you risk suffering, and it's not for the good, you're just being reckless.

What does practicing the virtue of hope look like when we are actually deeply disillusioned and perhaps even disoriented?

You're in a 35-mile-an-hour zone, not a 75-mile-an-hour speed

zone.

And the only way you can slow down like that is understanding grace properly, right? So, if you slow down and start contemplating and your mind is not resting in Christ's imputed righteousness, your justification before God, if it is not resting in what Christ has done for you, then you are going to feel overwhelmed with guilt and shame in a sense that you need to be getting busy doing other things.

You should be being productive right now.

You should be working right now.

You should be helping other people.

This is selfish.

Yeah,

And that's a much harder question to answer.

There are these temptations that pull, especially when I'm working with younger people who have been raised in these digital platforms.

There's this temptation to self-soothe by going online when they're in socially awkward situations.

And so they turn to those things and instead of turning and facing like Russell was talking about and moving forward toward relationships and doing those hard things and being with people, which is what we need in order to be in relationship and avoid loneliness.

And instead you turn towards these devices.

And now, honestly, for some subset of people, we have AI chatbots as a way of turning toward relationships.

I haven't found reliable statistics on the percentage of people who are turning to those for relationship substitutes, but there is some subset of people that are doing that, that are opting out, that are saying, I can't find relationships in the real world, romantic or platonic relationships, friendships.

We would call it sycophantic, but people perceived it to be caring about them.

Here's Alan Noble.

One reason is T.S. Eliot is my favorite poet, and so there's a bias.

There's a natural bias there.

The deeper reason is that I took this passage from The Wasteland about a heap of broken images.

Son of man, you know only a heap of broken images.

Because in it, T.S. Eliot is writing about the wasteland of the post-World War I West.

And he's writing about a civilization that is struggling with how to make coherence out of what feels like a shattered world.

How do we go from Hollow Man to the virtues you're describing?

Oh, there it is.

I have it up here.

There it is there, the boom business of the 90s.

And this little book, 96-page book, it's not in print anymore, but it described the business model of word-of-mouth referral marketing.

And as an economics major and a finance major, I'm going, this is the most astonishing business model I've ever seen.

I mean, this is allowing you to leverage, to harness leveraged income, residual income, global income with no upfront risk, no employees, weave it part-time.

Back then a home-based business, today it's a phone-based business.

And then you met Virtus and Tyler Norton.

So your thoughts? I mean, there are a lot of ways we can be afraid of AI, right?

Yeah, I mean, those are scary stories, but there are much scarier stories out there.

I've been reading, there are other pieces that project that.

The future of work, the future of labor is going to be taken over by AI.

I mean, that's not an uncommon prediction that's going to happen.

Elon Musk, that's sort of his mission is to move AI forward to the point where our labor is no longer necessary, to the point where we don't have to work anymore.

We can just have have our needs taken care of by robotics and AI.

We do have, we have some agency here.

So your thoughts? I mean, there are a lot of ways we can be afraid of AI, right?

Yeah, I mean, those are scary stories, but there are much scarier stories out there.

I've been reading, there are other pieces that project that.

The future of work, the future of labor is going to be taken over by AI.

I mean, that's not a uncommon prediction that's going to happen.

Elon Musk, that's sort of his mission is to move AI forward to the point where our labor is no longer necessary, to the point where we don't have to work anymore.

We can just have our needs taken care of by robotics and AI.

We do have, we have some agency here.

in a world like that, how do we, I guess, reclaim action as well as kind of be wary of the pressure to speak and then not act and to kind of separate those things when it comes to morality and virtue?

Yeah, good question.

So this is where I think the virtue of courage and the virtue of prudence are really helpful because Under the virtue of prudence, you have to make prudent choices based on seeing reality for what it is, based on identifying what the good is, which is glorifying God and enjoying him forever, and then applying that practically to what your situation is, whatever that might be.

and deliberating for a reasonable amount of time, pulling in wise counselors, but then you have to make a judgment.

And that judgment can't just be an internal thing.

And this is often where people get stuck is that they ruminate, right? And so they make this, they ruminate and they make an internal decision and they might just vocalize it online, but they have to act.

And so after judgment comes acting resolutely.

world we're placed in um without without doing that without falling into nostalgia and and again i think kind of a lack of maybe action just because we're so um overwhelmed with how bad things are or xyz

When

we think about prudence, we often think about prudes or we think about people who are uptight.

But these are negative connotations that really don't do justice to the word prudence.

Prudence, as I said earlier, is practical wisdom.

So using our practical understanding of a reason to understand what to do and make decisions in our day-to-day life.

And we do this by... doing going through a number of basic steps first we use our uh senses to survey reality so we take a step back and we let down our barriers and our biases and all our preconceptions and we see reality for what it is now this is hard because we have to have the virtue of humility right we have to set down our our our biases and really humbly see reality for what it is And then we look for the good.

What is the good here, right? Because we can't make a prudent decision if we don't think about how God is glorified in this decision.

How can we exercise prudence in choosing a career, for example? How does prudence come into play there?

What does liquid modernity look like on the ground in terms of the choices that are facing people and the uncertainty that they feel?

Well, for a lot of people, what this looks like is an overabundance of choices.

And this is a blessing, particularly in the modern West, in industrialized and highly technological countries.

We have a lot of choices.

And so we're We launch out into the world or whatever stage you're at in your life.

You often have a lot of choices in the jobs you apply for, the careers you apply for, or what you want to do with your life, who you want to date, who you want to marry.

And that's a wonderful thing, but it's also an overwhelming thing.

I'd love to hear you reflect on how you feel this existential overwhelm kind of hits differently for young men versus young women.

Yeah,

that's right.

And that's what he did.

And in many ways, yeah, it's interesting to think about the relationship between his scrupulosity and the reformation, actually.

But yeah, I mean, there is a tension there.

And what I would say is, one of the things that I end the book on is stressing that one of God's greatest gifts for us is actually the Church.

And in my own journey and in the journey that I've walked with others through, through their own mental illness and mental suffering, what I've experienced is that being with someone, having a community... who will walk with you through suffering is one of the things that will get you through, that will help you.

For your reflections as someone who's been a Christian for a long time and as someone who's struggled in this particular way for a long time, what have you found to be the most and least helpful ways in which fellow Christians have related to you or related to others who are struggling with their mental health?

Hmm.

Right? You know, this is a, a simple test that a lot of people would fail, right? You know, can I, can I have a conversation with someone without pulling out my phone or checking my watch, you know, to, you know, to check for text messages? Can I, can I look at someone in the face and just have a conversation with somebody? So, you know, that's, that's a simple f- a, a simple thing, right? Um, but, uh, you know, yeah, the, is...

A- and, and I even mention and I talk about, uh, you know, is my use of...

I have a section in, for each chapter that's practical application, and for this chapter, I have a, a section on smartphones and social media.

And I make the argument that s- realistically, some people just need to be off of social media.

The-

Mm-hmm.

Parents don't seem to be p- in general, passing down wisdom to their children, or aunts and uncles don't seem to be passing down wisdom to their nephews and nieces.

What do you think is making it feel so chaotic?

That's a great question.

It's hard to measure whether it's more chaotic than in the past.

Those kind of scales are difficult to weigh.

But I would say this.

I would say that we have lost a lot of social norms and social standards today.

And what was acceptable to say yesterday is unacceptable to say today and will be acceptable to say again tomorrow.

What are you seeing in in college students and how did that play into this book that you wanted to write?

There are schools who are figuring out how to do that and do it really well.

The liberal arts are more needed than ever, and I think if you look around at our culture and the lack of understanding of history, of ethics, of philosophy, of theology, of basic biblical literacy, of literature, we are a foundationalist society, and that's not going to get better on its own.

Christian universities can be spaces like medieval monasteries that are preserving classical understandings of the world that are needed, that help preserve civilization moving forward.

I'm, I'm not saying that we can save the world, but I'm saying that we can do our part to preserve what is good moving forward.

And when I just think about how much confusion there is in the church and how many people just lack, as I said, just basic understandings of American history, of world history, of political science, it's astounding, and it seems to me that abandoning the liberal arts, which stresses all of those things, would be a grave error that would result in more chaos [chuckles] in our society, not less.

Christian ed-- higher education has a, has a high calling to be emphasizing those things, even if they aren't as profitable

Where do you see hope on the landscape for Christian higher ed in the years to come?

There are a number of schools that are doubling down on what Dr. Moore mentioned earlier on academic excellence, on the humanities, on liberal arts.

Yeah, yeah

... saying, "Let's get coffee," right? Because it's so hard to just break down those barriers.

What I'm arguing in this book is that we need to have the virtue of courage to take that risk, to make that text, to form that text, to make that phone call and say, "Let's meet." And, and I think in particular, face-to-face relationships because, uh, increasingly, online relationships are getting in the way, and we need to have those face-to-face contacts where we are, we are connecting and we are, um, where we are being mentored, where we are forming real relationships.

And it is gonna be costly, and we are going to get hurt at times, but we're also gonna form beautiful relationships that mentor to our souls and allow us to continue through suffering, through joy.

We're gonna find that our joy is richer when we share it with other people, and our suffering is easier to get through when we share it with other people.

So, um, that's the message that I've been giving to people and, and that, that this book tries to embody.

Mm.

Right? That's the beautiful thing about this, is that God created you to, to live in these works, and if you're a Christian, then you are a new creation, and He has equipped you to live out, to turn from sin and to live out these virtues, and this is who you were created to be.

Today, we're pleased to share with you one of our articles on audio.

"Save the Humanities from the Slop" by Alan Noble, read by the author.

The rise of AI, the ubiquity of cheap and accessible entertainment, the power of social media, and the progressive secular biases of many educators have caused some Christians to question whether there's any good in studying the humanities today.

That question has grown louder in part because of our bespoke information ecosystems.

Whatever knowledge we can gain from literature can, presumably, be gleaned through ChatGPT summaries of novels and poetry.

Whatever writing we need to develop through taking courses can be avoided by writing through an AI platform.

Whatever political context we need to know how to vote can be found in a TikTok video or Instagram Reel.

Is the local bookstore really a pharmacy for these problems?

The problem with the local bookstore is the bookstore is filled with lots of things.

I mean, it's filled with terrible books.

So many books get published every year, and so many of them are terrible.

You know, it depends on what you read.

I mean, what we've been talking about are great books.

Mike mentioned Robert Lowell, the great poet.

What are the qualifications for a good book? Allen?

It's a very different sort of phenomenon, and I think the question is then alternatives and also for people who will say, "I know that is a healthier way to live, but I don't know how I could do that." And that's a much harder question to, to answer.

There are these temptations that pull, especially when I'm working with younger people who have been raised in these digital platforms.

There's this temptation to self-soothe by going online when they're in socially awkward situations, and so they turn to those things and instead of turning and facing, like Russell was talking about, and moving forward toward relationships and doing those hard things and being with people, which is what we need in order to be in relationship and avoid loneliness.

And instead, you turn towards these devices.

And now, honestly, for some subset of people, we have AI chatbots as a way of turning toward relationships.

I haven't found reliable statistics on the percentage of people who are turning to those for relationship substitutes, but there is some subset of people that are doing that, that are opting out, that are saying, "I can't find relationships in the real world, romantic or platonic relationships, friendships, and I need those.

I feel that need, and it's too hard, and so I'm turning to that." And because they are digital natives, they're raised in this environment, it feels natural.

It was, we would call it sycophantic, (laughs) but people perceived it to be caring about them.