The Real World

How truth, beauty, and goodness make a better home for us all

The Fountain, Villa Torlonia, Frascati, Italy, Sargent

Yesterday evening, a commercial for artificial intelligence interrupted our nightly viewing of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. (Ten points from Slytherin on that issue alone.) It showed a man sighing about a long-winded email he’d just received, and he promptly asked an AI chatbot to summarize for it him. I can’t remember the marketing slogan that followed verbatim, but the gist of it was how little time we have to do pesky things like read someone’s email, so we should just get AI to do it for us.

I threw my hands in the air and cried in a mocking voice, “Wouldn’t want to actually do something ourselves, now would we?” (I have become my father. This is (almost) 40.)

Artificial intelligence is not inherently evil, but it is unique in that it blurs (or, in some cases, obliterates) the line between what is real and what is false, with no simple rubric for the average user to distinguish between the two. It also asks us to sacrifice things that are sometimes frustrating, but useful—learning to wait, figuring out solutions, engaging with obstacles—in order to gain a life without friction. Which is not life, but a fantasy, an un-reality moving us closer and closer towards disembodiment.

Technologies of convenience and speed are one thing; a complete takeover of the lived human experience is another altogether.

As I write this—seated in the cafe of Barnes & Noble, surrounded by stories birthed from actual living brains—I am reminded that, in terms of human history, books were a new technology not so very long ago. Gutenberg’s printing press was an advancement that altered the course of centuries, bringing about the Age of Enlightenment in Europe and the rapid dissemination of ideas throughout the West. Because of its widespread impact on political, religious, and social thought, there were almost certainly people who decried its creation. An increasingly literate population becomes an increasingly engaged population, after all, and there were many whose power would have been threatened by the sharing of previously esoteric ideas.

Advancements in technology create new questions, as well they should: How does this serve our needs? What value does it add to our communities? How can we use this tool for the maximum benefit of everyone?

But I’d like to pose a few more: At what point does technology cripple, rather than support, us? And how can we learn to make it work for us, instead of the other way around?

I believe the answer lies in the transcendentals: In truth, beauty, and goodness.

Liturgical forms of worship are steeped in these Platonic ideals. The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us God’s very essence is Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, so it follows that we can look to God, and to His Word, to give us a framework for what form these things should take in our own lives. As with our shared faith, some questions are a matter of objective truth and some are a matter of personal conviction. Not every form of tech bears the same weight, but the telos of a thing—or its inherent purpose—should line up with what we know to be true of God’s character and His desire for us to experience an abundant life.

Will this technology, rightly ordered, bear the fruit of the Spirit¹ in my life? Or is it just another distraction from what actually helps me flourish?

Is this a technology that helps me be efficient with my time in one area in order to offer more of myself to in-person community?

Am I learning a skill or practice with this technology that’s allowing me to use my body in creative and life-giving ways?

Substack is one particular place where technology has brought great meaning and joy to my life. It’s a place online to move slowly, read long-form content, and discover new, brilliant writers. YouTube—when I manage my time there well—has been lovely, too. I’ve learned helpful skincare for my rosacea, practiced languages, fiddled with piano scales, and knit a scarf; I’ve learned how to bake sourdough and keep my starter alive; I watch YouTube workouts because I simply can’t afford another subscription or membership; I self-published my book using the internet, found homeschooling resources, and played around, too, because sometimes it’s okay to do a thing just because it’s fun.

What is the telos? And what is the fruit?

There’s a conversation in the movie Eat, Pray, Love that has always stuck with me. In a salon scene, Julia Roberts’ character is discussing with a friend her guilt over all the indulgences she’s enjoyed while in Italy. A hairdresser named Luca Spaghetti calls her out on it:

Luca Spaghetti : You feel guilty because you're American. You don't know how to enjoy yourself!

Liz Gilbert : I beg your pardon?

Luca Spaghetti : It's true. Americans know entertainment, but don't know pleasure….Listen to me. You want to know your problem? Americans! You work too hard. You get burned out. Then you come home and spend the whole weekend... in your pajamas in front of the TV.

Liz Gilbert : That's not far off, actually.

Luca Spaghetti : But you don't know pleasure. You have to be told you've earned it. You see a commercial that says, "It's Miller time" and you say, "That's right. Now I will go to buy a six-pack” and drink the whole thing and wake up the next morning and you feel terrible. But an Italian doesn't need to be told. He walks by a sign that says, "You deserve a break today" and he says, "Yeah, I know. That's why I'm planning on taking a break at noon.”

While this scene is not specifically referring to the addictive properties of technology—since this movie was made just a few years after the first iPhone and before Instagram, TikTok, and others took over our collective psyche—it does make a larger point about our tendency as a highly-individualized culture to forgo real pleasure—which usually takes time and energy—for the sake of what is entertaining. What is easy. We long to be free of unnecessary, unhelpful constraints on our lives—a good idea!—but we increasingly mistake the latest technology as the solution to this problem, not realizing it is only perpetuating the issue at every turn.

As Luca Spaghetti pointed out, we deserve good and beautiful things. We were made for them. If God didn’t care about our sensory experience of His world, He wouldn’t have made it so full of natural beauty or foods so ripe with flavor and texture. If He didn’t want us to have rich emotional lives, He wouldn’t wouldn’t have created language, love, and stories. If our desires carried no weight, He wouldn’t have formed men and women, families or bodies capable of every manner of goodness. He wouldn’t have offered us Himself.

Where we get tripped up is when we confuse what is good, true, and beautiful for what is merely entertaining or convenient. The transcendentals are simple gifts, to be sure, but rarely are they easy.

• A loaf of sourdough bread born from a starter that took weeks to prepare, months to sustain, and two days of kneading, stretching, folding, and proofing to be ready for the oven…

• Flowers and vegetables grown from whole seasons of sunlight, rain, and stillness in the dark to become something visible and useful in our kitchens and homes…

• Relational intimacy established through touch, physical proximity, time, and investment, sometimes years in the making…

• Art—born of the gifts endowed to us by our Creator—cultivated through practice, consistency, and hours of unseen work…

• Living faith that has survived difficult moments and continued on—sometimes at a run and sometimes with a single, limping step—when all it wanted to do was give up…

All these things are good, beautiful, and true…and not a single one is sustainable through shortcuts. Counterfeits are possible, sure, but they will never come close to the real thing.

In every example listed above, I can think of how technology has served my efforts, and I am grateful for it. But each time I reached for that tech and made it the primary solution for my persistent questions, doubts, or needs, it failed me.

And it’s failing us.

A real world requires the embodied experience of truth, beauty, and goodness. It cannot be a digital counterfeit. But what makes a thing real? The internet is real, after all, in that it exists. A meal in my fridge is real, even if it’s only in parts at the moment. Does it even matter if we can define reality?

Scripture is full of stories and poetry, letters and prayers. I’m no longer a part of a tradition that reads Scripture in a literalist sense, in which every word is taken as historical fact, but that sort of reading doesn’t negate the reality of God’s Word. His revealed character and redemptive plan for the world—whether described in prose, chronological dates, epistles, or songs—remains true for for this moment and for all eternity, even if not every stroke of the pen is fact.

If God is I Am, then God is Ultimate Reality, and the way we spend our time and energy must point us towards that reality. Tech has the potential to offer this in different ways for different people, but a rightly-ordered material good must always speak to the real-er thing beyond it, to “the halo at the edge of earthly things.”² This is the sacramental imagination, in which the holiness of God is both sought and found in the ordinary objects of our lives. When we add a piece of tech to our home, it’s crucial for us to consider how it can accomplish that goal. If it can’t, it simply doesn’t belong.

It takes an honest vulnerability to ask questions about our tech use and be willing to face how all this connection has actually further disconnected us. I don’t even have Safari on my phone anymore, but I still hear its siren call when my hands have nothing to do. I still pick up my phone constantly. I still ask Alexa what the weather is like when I could just open my front door. I still pull up recipes on my computer when I have a stack of cookbooks in the corner. And I still scroll, compare, and seek answers online when I am equipped with a brain capable of creating solutions and a Holy Spirit that has all the wisdom of His universe to offer me.

What is the telos?

What is my telos?

“I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.” (Emphasis mine)³

All our efforts to create a better world will be for naught if we remove ourselves from the Source of true knowledge, the One who is Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, and Who gives us eyes to see these these things in the world. Because we are made in God’s image, we can do much—and so can our technology—but not if we forget how and where we got that ability in the first place or what those abilities are ultimately for:

Bearing fruit for the Kingdom of God.

May we be brave enough to take the time for it.

1. Galatians 5:22-23

2. Thanks to Autumn Kern for this gem.

3. John 15:5, NIV