Season 9 Finale: Interview with Dr. Larry Chapp from Gaudium et spes 22 (S09, EP06)

How do we maintain our focus on Christ in an age of constant digital distraction? In a world of social media echo chambers and online anger, is it still possible to have fruitful, charitable conversations that lead to the truth?

In our season finale, Andrew sits down with the legendary Dr. Larry Chap of Gaudium et Spes 22 for a deep and wide-ranging discussion on navigating the modern world as a faithful Catholic. Dr. Chap shares the story behind his influential blog and his new role with Communio, explaining why it's so critical to "raze the bastions" and bring deep theology into the public square. The conversation then explores the spiritual dangers of our digital age—from the staccato, fragmented nature of social media that destroys our attention, to the dystopian future promised by technologies like Neuralink. This isn't just a critique; it's a practical exploration of how to use technology as a tool without letting it use you.

In this episode, you will learn:

• How to practice "empathetic thinking" to steel-man your interlocutor's argument and foster genuine, truth-seeking dialogue.
• Why setting spiritual and practical "limits" with technology is essential for discerning your unique, Christ-given mission.
• The crucial importance of prayer, meditation, and media fasts to overcome the spiritual sloth (acedia) that our devices so often encourage.
• How to remain a producer and creator in a digital world that wants to turn you into a passive, distracted consumer.

TRANSCRIPT

Andrew: Hey everyone, welcome to the season finale of Midnight Carmelite. I am honored to have the man, the myth, the legend, Dr. Larry Chap of Gaudium et Spes 22. We will be kind of just going with the flow today. This is a season finale; this podcast won't be running this summer. I got a lot going on, so I'll be back obviously in the fall. So consider this kind of a, have a nice summer podcast. So welcome, Dr. Larry Chap.

Larry: Hey, it's great to be back. I don't know how much of a legend I am, but I'll try to hold up that end of the deal here. But it's great to be on your show again, Andrew.

Andrew: So, one thing I've seen you doing a lot on podcasts recently, for Midnight Carmelite listeners, just tell us what you've been up to, where Gaudium et Spes 22 is going, and give us an update on what's been going on with you there.

Larry: Well, first off, I would say by my standards my output has gone down a bit in the past couple of months because I've been running around the country giving talks. Traveling and giving talks takes you away from your ability to write and do interviews, although I've cranked out some things. Also, the farm here has been—it's springtime, that's a hard, very busy time on the farm. So, I've been kind of behind the eight ball trying to juggle all kinds of different things. But as far as the blog goes, I've had some articles in Catholic World Report that I've posted on there, an article or two in the National Catholic Register, and of course, my podcast and YouTube interviews, quite a few of those have gotten posted. I guess the new thing is that I've entered into a relationship with the journal Communio International Catholic Review, where I will now be their sort of official podcaster. I think it's Communio's way of trying to enter into the technological age, which is very hard for them. The deal is, the journal comes out four times a year, and I'm supposed to pick one author from each of those issues and interview them. I've done two so far, and that's kind of the big thing right there. In October, I will be traveling to Rome again to cover the Synod on Synodality. I'll be doing a lot of writing on my favorite topic: the big meeting on meetings.

Andrew: Your favorite subject. I love infinite regresses too.

Larry: Yeah. So basically I'm just plugging along here. The blog has been very successful; it continues to grow. I get emails all the time from people all over the world, which is shocking to me. I started this blog four years ago at my kitchen table because some former students said, "We want to hear your crazy thoughts on this, that, and the other thing." So I cranked out a few blog posts and people seemed to like it. I thought the whole thing would die, and then I get a call from Bishop Barron who says, "Hey, why don't you come on my show? I love your blog." And I was like, "Holy crap." And then it sort of took off and now here I am, Mr. Blogger. And I hate blogs; I rarely even read my own. The only thing that's really changed is when the blog first started, it was all written stuff with an emphasis on my longish, 4,000-5,000 word original essays that were very freewheeling. I could be as cheeky and flippant as I wanted, and people seemed to like that sort of satirical approach. But since then, I've needed the money, quite frankly. I haven't monetized the blog, but I have started writing for money for the National Catholic Register and the Catholic World Report, and that takes a lot of time. So it's kind of crowded out those original blog essays that I used to write, but I have pretensions of putting those back out again sometime soon.

Andrew: Yeah, and I remember when we first met, it was your long-form blog posts that really struck me. I have a similar problem with Midnight Carmelite and Luminous Tradition, because to your point, you have to make money. These things cost money to run. I do my tech work and it funds that, but yeah, it crowds things out. It's exactly right. One of the things with your blog that I've noticed is you seem, with the Communio thing, to be bringing in people who wouldn't have normally been in the internet space to have a voice. I wonder if you could comment more on that.

Larry: Well, I think it's very important because academics and theologians, especially of that Ressourcement Communio school, are very scholarly. They're very into sitting in their studies and writing scholarly articles and books and preparing their graduate-level courses. The idea that they would dip their big toes into the blogosphere, into Twitter, into Facebook, just doesn't even occur to them. Meanwhile, that space has gotten occupied by the radicalized binaries, the super progressives, the super trads. That's one of the things that prompted me to start the blog. I'm a retired professor, but I am a scholar, a Communio theologian. And I think one of the things the Communio folks appreciate about me is precisely that I'm one of the few out there from the Communio school saying we need to translate all of this stuff into something that an educated Catholic can appreciate and get it out there in the internet sphere. It hit a nerve. I think it's just there's a niche that needed to be filled and I filled it. However poorly I fill it, sometimes I think I fill it rather poorly, but nevertheless, there's not many people doing it.

Andrew: Yeah, no, I agree. I think what you've done, from my analysis of it, is you've effectively supplied the... you've taken, like you said, they're in their study, they're speaking in technical language to other scholars about these deep subjects. And what you've done is, like Pope John XXIII, you've opened the windows, let them in. And there's been this mutual interchange now, and that I think is so important. You've gone after the bastions.

Larry: Razing the bastions. Razing, not raising, right? He's not raising up walls, it's tearing down walls, razing the bastions.

Andrew: Yeah. So I feel like that's what you've done. I was at your talk with friends who have never been exposed to this, and I wanted to bring them. And when they saw it, I could tell their whole world opened up for them. It was like a breath of fresh air. They were like, "People are thinking about the things I think about and they've spent the time dealing with that." So I was wondering if you could comment more on this kind of exchange, this razing the bastions, this opening of the windows.

Larry: Well, I think it's because, I'll start with this: If Jesus Christ is who the church says he is, then his life, death, and resurrection is the pivot point of all of human history. It's the most important thing in the history of the world that has ever happened. And what that means is, since I think that's true, there is this great untapped reservoir of thirst out there. People are hungry for the message of Christ in a way that's not varnished over with a lot of crap, with a lot of ecclesial speak, with a lot of churchy speak, but just the unvarnished gospel of Christ as mediated through the church. If the gospel is true, then that means people have a thirst for the gospel, and I think they do. And so, it's really important for us not to be too defensive, not to raise walls, to create barriers. No, what's really important is to just tear down those walls and say, "Okay, come on, let's talk." And even if the talk is a bit acerbic sometimes, pointed—sometimes especially with your dearest friends—talk can be blunt, talk can be painful. As long as it's all offered in charity, it can be fruitful. Painful, but fruitful.

Andrew: So what you're bringing to mind here, and correct me if I'm wrong, is if you raise these walls instead of razing them, you've cordoned off the world in such a way that you've atomized yourself. You've basically said, "I'm refusing to allow something to disclose itself to me and to have an interchange with that that could be fruitful." In other words, and frankly, I would argue in a certain sense, it's depersonalizing. Because if a human person is meant to engage being, to engage the world, then you've effectively depersonalized them. You've said, "I can't let you, I refuse to accept your disclosure, which is the natural state of being."

Larry: I really think that's a great way of putting it since I'm a big fan of the theology of disclosure. In fact, my first book, which was my dissertation, was called The God Who Speaks. The premise of it is that God seeks to disclose himself to us, and he asks us to disclose ourselves to one another. One of the barriers here, so common in our Balkanized world of everybody at each other's throats, is this horrible tendency to think of somebody with whom you are in sharp disagreement not simply as wrong, but as morally bad. When you think they are morally bad people, you're not going to accord them any disclosure on your end. You're going to hold back because you're presuming ill will on their part rather than presuming that these are morally good people who simply have a different set of assumptions from you. They might be a whole bad set of assumptions, and they frequently are, but that's what you need to tease out and have a dialogue about. The other bad thing about raising the walls, in that sense, is that you end up believing that everyone who agrees with you is morally better than they really are. You end up giving them the benefit of the doubt, and therefore you end up with a mutual admiration society and an echo chamber. Everybody just talks to everybody who thinks just like them, and you see this on social media all the darn time. Dialogue, in the real sense—not that fake liberal sense—means that you try what I call empathetic thinking. You try to the best of your ability to truly listen to another person, not to simply be judging what they're saying immediately or thinking about what you're going to say in response right away without completely hearing them out. And as you're listening to them, ask yourself, "What is really motivating this? What is going on? What are the deeper issues at play?" To try and empathetically enter into the thought processes of this other person, the emotions of this other person. In other words, and I did this as a professor for 20 years, to try and understand their position better than they do. How many times I had a student ask me a question or raise an objection, and I would listen very intently. Then I would sit back and say, "I think your question is actually better than maybe even you think. So let me rephrase your question for you, and I don't mean to be presumptuous here, but let me rephrase this question and really steel-man your argument for you. Here's what I think you're really saying." And then to lay it out and to see their eyes light up and say, "That's exactly what I'm saying." Then you can sit back and say, "Well, okay, let's talk about that, because here's where I might have some issues with that thought process. So now I've heard you out, now hear me out." In other words, to presume that most human beings are really decent people. That is key for me.

Andrew: So, two questions come to mind. First, would you say it's fair to say, like Aristotle does, that virtue has an excess and a defect? For example, with courage, the excess would be rashness, the defect would be cowardice. So when you're talking about the social media echo chamber, that would be the excess. You're not actually getting to the truth. But the defect would also be, "Okay, I'm just gonna shut it all off. I'm not gonna pay attention to anyone." Would you say that's a fair characterization?

Larry: Yeah, absolutely. I like that way of putting it, Mr. Aristotle over there. And you know what? I'm not always successful at it. I can really lose my temper with people sometimes. I'm not known as the most patient human being who ever lived. So, you know, I fail. I sin. But I really do try to keep those lines open.

Andrew: So then, this brings up the next question. When you're talking about the presumption of goodness in our world today, there's a crisis of trust on all levels. When we're presuming the goodness of the other person—and I'm coming from Aristotle again—the virtuous and the vicious are actually few. A lot of people fall in the middle. When you get people who lean towards viciousness, who do bad things when the culture doesn't attack it, how would you tell a person to navigate that? You're not naively presuming, obviously, but how would you navigate that? What advice would you give?

Larry: Well, you have to be as wise as a serpent, as gentle as a dove. You do have to have a certain prudential ability to differentiate between somebody who genuinely wants to know you better and is open to an interesting conversation—even if there's not much hope that they're going to change their mind—and a person with whom speaking is going to be a waste of your time. In other words, I'm saying lower the bastions, open yourself up. But even Jesus said, there are certain circumstances where you're just gonna have to shake the dust of that city off of your feet. You don't wanna waste your time on something like that. To go back to my example as a teacher, there would be students who would ask questions and they were very sincerely proffered, so I would do my best to answer. But then there were also students who were just interested in hearing themselves chatter on, or in making me look bad and trying to corner me. And no matter what I said, they would then move the goalposts. You know the type: "What about this?" and you answer that, they ignore it and move on to something else. Then all of a sudden, they're right back to the first one again. At that point, you realize this is not a morally bad person, but a person who simply doesn't know how to think or doesn't want to think, and therefore is not really interested in a conversation. You just say, "Okay, fine. You can see me in my office hours." In personal relationships on a day-to-day level, we all meet all kinds of people, and some people are just recalcitrant. You just say they tend towards the vicious. Vicious in Aristotle's sense obviously doesn't mean filled with rage and coming at you with knives. Vicious simply means a person whose character is grounded in a kind of baseline maliciousness, who gets a certain level of happiness out of the unhappiness of others. And so that sort of person, yeah, that's someone you should probably do prayer and penance for more than sit down and waste a lot of time talking to.

Andrew: Yeah, I agree with you. And I think the other problem too is if we go back to disclosure, what we all do, and you have to watch ourselves, is we tend to idealize what we think is true. I think what can happen is once we've become crystallized and instead of being open to the other—to your point about empathy—you're starting from a crystallized position. You're almost like a hardness. Do you see what I'm getting at here?

Larry: Yeah, absolutely. There should be in each of our lives as Christians a set of non-negotiable truths. For sure. Every human being, Christian or not, has a set of non-negotiable truths around which they orient their lives. So there is something that has crystallized within us. That being said, those truths, if they are Christian ones, must compel you to love your neighbor. And therefore, one of those very truths is telling you, for the time being, perhaps you need to shut your pie hole and listen. What I would like to say to people is this: The key, I think, to being a good evangelist or even just a good conversationalist in a Christian modality is that you are so convinced of the faith yourself and so immersed in the pedagogy of the church, her saints, her doctors, her intellectual and moral side, and the ascetical discipline, that you don't feel internally like you're quaking inside because somebody has challenged you. You're very certain and convicted around these crystallized truths. That allows you then to, in a sense, bracket them and set them aside. I'm not giving up turf here; I'm not conceding anything. I'm just going to set it aside. Not in the sense that you cease to believe them, but it's not the thing in the forefront of your brain at that moment. At that moment, your brain is shifting into that empathetic mode. Your brain is shifting into, "Let me try and figure out what in the heck this dude is saying to me," and not then immediately prejudge what he is saying based on my crystallized set of truths. Because those crystallized sets of truths also are about an infinite God whose categories are so expansive that you should never believe that crystallization means ossification and a sclerotic closing in on itself. You realize, "Wow, I can actually learn from this atheist over here. I can learn more about my faith by listening to this guy who has none." This is actually called being a human being and not being a jerk. You go on some of these YouTubers, like Taylor Marshall and the now-disgraced Mike Voris, and they're just constantly, essentially pissed at somebody. They're constantly angry, constantly denouncing things. I often wonder as I'm watching them—and I do watch them, sort of diagnostically—I sit and I think, "Maybe I'll learn something from him today. Maybe I'll try and figure him out a little bit better." Usually, I don't learn much of anything from him because he recycles the same ideas over and over again. But my point is that even in watching something like that, I can say to myself, "Okay, what's going on here?" But then usually it's just so angry, and you realize these people are not really interested in a conversation or in evangelizing. I think they're interested in clicks in order to make money by throwing red meat out to their base of supporters. They just keep tossing out one little angry bit after another, and I think this is not good for the church. It's not the pursuit of truth. It's not good for anybody.

Andrew: What it does is it—I like your word ossify—it prevents the living waters from flowing. How are we supposed to listen to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit if we're running around not being empathetic to our neighbor on a basic level? How is that going to work? You and I are not God. All we're doing is presenting our world and experience and scholarship for the good of others. We're trying to remove obstacles and clarify things. Does that mean we're always right? No. The whole point of all of this is to point to Christ. It's not about us. And I feel like that's what gets missed. People say, "Oh, Andrew, you're so smart," and I say, "No, it's all about him. Pointing at him, that guy on the cross." The God-man on the cross who died for us. I just feel like that's not there when you're flailing around on this horizontal, immanentized, politicized lane; you miss the vertical. As Bishop Sheen once remarked, if you have Christ without the cross, you have this humanitarian guru, an ethical teacher like a Zen master. If you have the cross without Christ, you have totalitarianism, communism, authoritarianism with no love. It just rips the love out. And I feel like analogously, that's what this is. I think it's the cross without Christ. That's how I feel about it.

Larry: I agree. And because it's a cross without Christ or Christ without a cross, we end up not living the cruciform existence ourselves properly. Whenever you run across people on social media who are angry and defensive, I say to myself, "There's a person who has invested too much ego into this." Like you said, it's about Christ, not about yourself. One of the things I always say with regard to my podcasts—and I don't always succeed—is I honestly don't think I have much ego involved in it, in the sense that I am perfectly willing if a guest has corrected me on something. Some people would get all embarrassed. I'd say, "Yeah, I'm full of crap. I was wrong about that." Because I'm frequently wrong. The inability to admit when you're wrong about something, to accept correction, I think is a sign of a defensiveness born of a bruised ego. One of the things we simply cannot do as evangelists is to walk into any venue and be defensive and have an easily bruised ego. It requires a certain level of humility born of following Christ. Now, I often fail at that too, but I take it as one of my North Star guideposts. If you're wrong, you're wrong. Be willing to admit it.

Andrew: Yeah, and I think too, if reality discloses itself to us and God discloses itself to us, but you can't admit you're wrong, you're essentially denying the disclosure. So when someone tells you you're wrong, there's a disclosure happening. That person is seeing what is, and you're starting to see what is from an aspect you didn't see before. For me, it's like, "Oh, great, good. I'm not saying the wrong thing anymore." I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you're going to be an evangelist, you have to be open. But if you can't admit you're wrong, you've closed yourself off. You've raised a wall that prevents the disclosure. Nothing speaks to you because you've decided this is what is, instead of letting it disclose to you. What are your thoughts on that?

Larry: My thought is that the way to avoid all of that—because I agree with everything you just said—is that we don't pray enough. And by pray, I don't necessarily mean banging out more rosaries or devotional practices. Those are good things. I think a lot of Catholics have lost the art of meditation, of contemplating the truths of the faith. That requires spiritual reading, setting time aside to simply be quiet and to ponder the things of God and how they pertain to your own life. You have to let God speak to you, and when God speaks to you, God will convict you. The key is to meditate on the truths of the faith in such a deep and profound way that you begin to see yourself as God sees you. You can even begin by seeing yourself as others see you. How often are we offended when somebody says something about ourselves that we don't like? "That's not me." Then you sit back and think about it and realize, "Well, this is the fifth person that has said this to me. Maybe, just maybe, this is me." Because we all have an image of ourselves in our head that doesn't completely match up with reality. This is deeply related to it. As long as we're attached to our iPhones and iPads and listening to podcasts—a lot of people listen to these in the car because you've got to do something in the car—we have to set time aside. In our day and age, that means we need to do a media fast. A social media fast. I do this once in a while where I'll just take a day, shut off my phone, not go on my computer, and just spend a day reading a book, or the scriptures, or setting time aside to simply pray. Go make a holy hour at my parish in front of the Blessed Sacrament. We need that more and more.

Andrew: Yeah, I 100% agree with that. What I've been doing lately is I have a Kindle e-reader. What's great about that is you can turn your phone off, turn everything else off, but then you have a device that won't distract you with social media or email. You're focused on this one thing, dealing with that one thing, listening and letting the disclosure happen.

Larry: Absolutely, it's very important, especially if you're a person like me. It drives my wife nuts. We'll be out to dinner at a restaurant and my stupid phone starts dinging and it's Andrew Niediek, I gotta answer him. I'm notorious, I'm a leper preaching to other lepers. I am so addicted to my stupid gadget, especially since my blog kind of went viral and I get scores of emails every day. It's like, "Somebody from Belgium is writing to me, who's that?" So it's very addictive. It is, and in a bad way. It's not a good addiction at all.

Andrew: Yeah, because I think the good side of it is that it's allowed for global communication and interconnectedness. You have more access to information. But I also think there's an addiction in the sense that it makes you not present. It's like you're bracketing where you're supposed to be to pay attention to something else. Now, that may be a good thing. I could email you and say, "Hey, I need to put up a page," and you quickly respond. It's easy, and then you go back to whatever you're doing. Fine. But I think there's a lack of presence where, all of a sudden, where we are physically or who we're supposed to be paying attention to becomes bracketed and absent. It creates this rift, a competing presence. Do you see what I'm getting at here?

Larry: God, yeah. It splits our focus big time. And I tell you what, the cognitive science, the body of evidence, the data are overwhelming now that we have 20-30 years of exposure to this. It has been immensely damaging to the psychological and cognitive development of children in our society because they do not grow up with the ability to pay attention to anything with any sustained focus. It's a dissipated form of thinking. It's a fractured and fragmented world that our electronic devices present to us. It's an Instagram picture here, a tweet over on X there, a Facebook post now on your dog's bowel movement this morning. Seriously, a friend of mine posted a picture of what their dog did on their floor the other day. And I thought, "Why am I watching this?" Here I am on my phone spending 30 seconds looking at my friend's picture of dog doo on the floor. It's like, "Okay, I think it's time to put my phone away now."

Andrew: Well, what I've noticed is there's a distinction, in my opinion, between consumers and producers. It sounds Marxian, but it's not. If the computer is used as a subordinate tool towards evangelization, it's great because you can reach people in Belgium and you treat it as such. In other words, it stays in its lane. But just like any tool, when you start to misuse it or identify yourself with it, like "I can't live without this"—once you start hearing that, that's dangerous. That's where you get these addictions. And to your point about the staggering attention, I agree. When you're reading a book, you have to focus on what the author is saying. It's a long-form argument. But your point about the almost staccato nature of it... it's making reality a bunch of independent frames rather than a presence of an "I" through the stream of time, retaining and growing in presence with those around them. Does that make sense?

Larry: It makes absolute sense. I used to teach a course in which I used a book by a disciple of Marshall McLuhan, a guy named Neil Postman, and he wrote a very famous little book called Amusing Ourselves to Death. He made this very same point. Since the advent of the radio era, on through television and now the internet, we have created this environment in which we are inundated all day long with little factoids, little bits and pieces of staccato information. And the thing is, it's all coming from different angles, none of it related to the other. Neil Postman's point was that this has a terrible effect on our mind. In other words, none of it is instructive. None of it leads us to the truth. All of it is a form of entertainment, a distraction. Entertainment as distraction, distraction as entertainment. And that's why he calls it amusing ourselves to death. It leads to a kind of insouciance towards reality. I can see death and mayhem in a foreign country on television. A horrible event. Bodies. And then the next segment on the news is about some little girl selling her kitty cats next door. The juxtaposition of this feel-good kitty cat story with a horrible bunch of deaths caused by an errant bomb in Gaza, and then it goes to a commercial about hemorrhoid medicine. This has an effect on us. It has the effect of leveling out all the information we receive into meaningless factoids that have no real impact upon us. That's what Neil Postman's point was. The worst thing television does is present us with what he calls "the news of the day," which of course is filtered. He actually thinks the best thing television does is sitcoms or dramas—in other words, real entertainment. He also made an interesting point: from the television producer's point of view, the most important thing you watch is the commercial. The shows are there as a tease, a hook to get you to watch the commercials. That's all they care about. So it's the consumerization, the capitalization of information as well. It's marketed in bits in such a way that it's just enticing enough so you'll watch that deodorant commercial without blowing your brains out.

Andrew: Right, I think you're absolutely right. I feel like what that does is it strengthens the already disordered modern position—for example, that my memory is just an image that I remember indirectly. It's this whole staccato play rather than memory being a reliving, a re-presenting of that experience. I think it's deeply troubling for the faith and the spiritual life. If you're having this staccato conditioning, and you're simply using a computer to live your life, you've inverted it and subsumed yourself under a frankly disordered view. Then there's the hemorrhoid commercial right there. It's so sad because imagine if the Church Fathers were alive today and they were like, "I want to order a book," and it shows up on their doorstep the same day. You can literally go on a device and be like, "I want to order this good book of theology," and it'll be on your doorstep the same day. But yet we don't. Why? They had to fight over an incomplete copy of a scroll that took three months to arrive. We have it instantly, and we don't do it.

Larry: Yeah, this dude sent me a scroll and it's all in Arabic, for crying out loud. I need it in Latin. The reason why all of this staccato dissipation is bad is this: yes, exactly, I can hit a button and have a book delivered to my house the next day. Am I going to read that book? Probably not, in most cases. The reason it's bad, to bring it back to our spiritual lives, is the Christian task. Here I'll follow my favorite theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Joseph Ratzinger thought this as well. The primary Christian task is for you to discern the vocational mission of your life, the vocational form that Christ wants your life to take. To grow in discipleship means to grow in conformity to Christ, to become the little image of Christ He wants us to be in our idiosyncratic way. Each of us is born a psychological person, but as a Christian, you're called to become a theological person, a Christic person. That requires discerning your vocation. We each have a mission in life. But if we spend our entire lives dissipated in this staccato world of information, and we are distracted and all over the map, we're like concrete poured out onto the pavement without any form. And that is, in my opinion, the truly evil thing as Christians about all of this. It fragments us and it keeps us from developing our missional vocation.

Andrew: Do you think it has anything to do with sloth and acedia? Because it's a dissipated, staccato thing, it allows for you to say, "Well, now I can go do this, I'll do this later." Do you think that plays in here at all?

Larry: Yeah. It's increased our procrastination, for starters. You say to yourself, "I have this thing I should do today. Well, first I'm going to sit down and catch up on Facebook." And three hours later, you say, "Well, I can't do what I was going to do today because I was doing this other thing." And then you don't feel good about yourself. We've all had the experience where you have the day off, nothing on your calendar, and you end up sitting in a chair and surfing the internet all day. At the end of the day, you feel miserable about yourself. I know I do. You feel like, "What did I accomplish today? Nothing." And then you compare that to how you feel when you actually accomplish something worthy of being accomplished. Like, I have these dairy goats outside on the farm, and I got busy and didn't build them the proper structure. I felt bad about that. Well, I finally sat down and finished building the structure for my goats and getting everything they needed for milk. Then I felt great. I felt rejuvenated, energized. I accomplished something that I should have accomplished instead of sitting down and looking at dog poop pictures on Facebook.

Andrew: I agree with you. I think that dissipation, what it does spiritually over time is it weakens you to be able to get going again. Once you start getting in the muck, it's like quicksand. It pulls you down and you have to constantly fight to not fall into that.

Larry: Yeah, and this is also presuming that what you're perusing on the internet is morally neutral. Oftentimes, what people peruse on the internet is not morally neutral. I mean, the incidence of pornography addiction is stratospheric. How many people spend hours and hours scouring their electronic devices for pornography, and even short of pornography, looking for things you just shouldn't be looking for. And that has a horrible effect on your Christian soul.

Andrew: Do you think there's a theology of technology here? In other words, is there a healthy way that... I know we're trying to do it, right? You have a blog, I have my blog. But do you think the benefits of this are unique enough that it's worth it? Just like the invention of the book. Were the benefits of it unique enough that despite the lack of memorization that some claimed would happen, it was worth it? Do you think that applies here, or do you think this is something else?

Larry: No, I'm on the fence about this. This is such an important topic and it's something I'm still thinking about. What is the overall effect of the electronic, digital world on us? Is it overall positive or negative? Marshall McLuhan said the medium is the message. What he meant was that, yeah, you're right, Andrew, the internet is just a tool. But we need to acknowledge that it's a tool that, when we use it, changes us. The very medium itself, the manner in which it instructs, involves a pedagogy that gets into our soul and mind and alters us. So the question is, is it a pedagogy that alters us in a way that we should shun? I'm not certain. But then you're in this quandary. I just finished reading a book by a philosopher named Anton Barba-Kay, a book called A Web of Our Own Making. His point is that one of the evils of the internet age—and he does think it's an evil—is that it's a nexus that is unavoidable. It's a spider's web that we're trapped in of our own making. The fancy philosophical term here is hegemonic, in the sense that it's all-controlling. There's no outside of it unless you want to go live like the Unabomber in a shed up in Montana. You have to have these things. So that negates any kind of ivory tower, "Well, I'm just not going to do it." You can't. So regardless of whether it's overall positive or bad, it's there. We need to occupy this space. So let's just set aside for the moment whether or not it's overall bad and say, okay, let's make the best of this that we possibly can. That's what I try to do. But then set in place certain protocols, certain rules for yourself for your own spiritual discipline. Say, "I'm only going to be on the internet this many hours a day, or this many minutes a day, to do exactly what I have to do to get on in the world. The rest of the time, I'm not. I'm going to read a book or pray or take a walk."

Andrew: Yeah, it's funny, I totally agree with that, and this comes from someone who loves technology. For me, with a computer, I know what's behind a webpage, and really it's all text in the end. I look at a computer where if I'm looking at a terminal, the old school command line, that's how I see a computer. I say, "Okay, I need you to give me this," and it gives me something, and then I move on. It's fascinating to me because I grew up with it. I see your perspective where you're resisting it, like "I don't want this, send me a card in the mail." But now we're in this web where you have people who don't see behind the curtain. Your position is that it's there, we just have to use it the best we can and set up boundaries. From my perspective, I'm like, absolutely, that's totally correct. And what's weird to me is that with computers, you can make them do what you want, because that's all they're supposed to do, but no one does that. Does that make sense?

Larry: Well, I think there have to be boundaries, and in the day and age in which we live, you're gonna have to make those boundaries yourself because nobody else is. And I think parents with children should absolutely set boundaries for their children. I almost think it's a form of child abuse when I see a seven-year-old kid sitting someplace with a smartphone in their face. There's so much damage. So much of the content is just explicitly awful, and you can put as many filters on there as you want, but there are ways around it. And second, the modality of thinking they are engaged in is impairing their cognitive development. The science on this is now overwhelming. That's why I cringe when I see schools, both Catholic and public, boasting that "you send your child here and every first-grader gets a tablet."

Andrew: Actually, I've got to jump in on this. What I've always said to my wife is if we ever had kids, I would give them a computer with only the baseline terminal. I'd lock it down so they can't get on the internet. It's just the computer. And I'll say, "If you want it to do something, then program it yourself. If you want it to store your files, write the file yourself, make it how you want and put it there." Because what I found is then that gives you that agency back. The iPad, the browser—there's a passiveness to it. You can get caught in that web of being this passive consumer, this passive receiver. If you give a kid an iPad or iPhone, they don't look at it as something they could actively use amongst other things; it's their reality that's consuming them in this staccato way, sucking them in and divorcing them from reality. What do you think?

Larry: I think there are some interesting experiments which point out that, let's say teenagers, are engaged in texting constantly all day long, in many instances because they feel like they have to. It's an obligation of friendship. Their manner of communicating isn't to call one another on the phone or talk to one another in the hallway at school. You can be standing next to somebody and sending them a text message because this is the preferred method. Now, a lot of experiments have been done which have said, "Okay, guys, let's do an experiment. We're going to ask all of you, voluntarily, to put away all of your electronic devices for one day." In this controlled environment, they get to the end of the day or two days and then they ask the teenagers, "What did you think?" And they almost universally reply, "We loved it. We loved being freed of this bondage that we feel pounding down upon us." We just assume that young people today love their devices. Quite frankly, they're in a love-hate relationship with their devices because they're human, and they thirst after relationship and real conversation, and they're not getting it. They know they're not getting it because of these stupid devices.

Andrew: I agree. You know what just popped into my head? When Cain is debating whether to murder Abel, God says, "Sin is knocking at your door. You have to master it." And I feel like we haven't mastered this. I a hundred percent agree with you. Handing someone an iPad, these things where it's this contrived environment done by a corporation serving you things—there's no creativity to it. They've boxed it in, saying "Here's the lane you're going to play in." And then you go out to the internet through the browser, and again, here's the staccato reality we're giving you. You're right. And then they don't have personal relationships. They can't talk to one another. It's so divorced from reality. And I think it's a very dangerous tipping point because if you create a bunch of people who think they have to stay in a lane that's been given to them, well, how can they judge if that lane is the right lane if they've never had the creativity, the sandbox to play in and make mistakes? I think Mortimer Adler made this point once: error teaches us more about truth because truth shines out more brightly when error is there. And I feel like you lose that with this. What do you think?

Larry: Oh, no, you do. There is so much that is lost. And yet, it's a web of our own making and we have to use it somehow. But I think definitely with children, we have to exercise a measure of control. But before we end, I have a question for you, since you're the tech guy. One of my concerns isn't just where we are now. Since technology never stands still, it's always progressing. Where are we going? Where is the end point here? I'm envisioning a future in which Elon Musk has succeeded in creating Neuralinks, little chips in everybody's brain that are then linked up to his satellites. So we're all little walking Starlink nodes. This is the manner in which we're going to engage in commerce. We're gonna pay our bills with our Neuralink with a blink of an eye. And parents, 50 years from now perhaps, will be presented with an option when their child is born to Neuralink-enhance their child or not. What parent isn't going to Neuralink-enhance their child? You send your kid to school then, and 99 out of 100 kids have the Neuralink and your kid doesn't. Every other kid has a Texas Instruments calculator in their brain doing algorithms, and your kid's using the equivalent of a slide rule. Once again, it'll be a web of our own making. Just like me with email and cell phones, we'll reach a point where in order to live in society, it'll be a cashless, cardless society. We'll all have chips within us. We'll be scanned as we walk out of the grocery store, scanned as we're driving down the road. The government knows exactly where we are at all times. The emergence of the surveillance state. To me, this is the dystopian element here. So what do you think of that?

Andrew: I a hundred percent agree that it's headed in a dystopian direction. So let's take the Neuralink for example. I would not Neuralink my kid, if I had one. Here's why. And to your point, "Well, now Andrew, you have a kid who's operating on a slide rule." The reason I wouldn't is there are limits to everything. Everything has a limit. The problem with technology and the physical sciences is they think there's no limit. Science gives all truth, science is always progressing, they have no limits on themselves. So, in my opinion, the key thing to ask is, where's the limit? What limit are we defying to say, "Okay, beyond this, it's morally wrong?" I would argue it's morally wrong to put a chip in you run by another company to interface with your brain, because I know technology and I know there's no way they're not going to have access to other things since it's interfacing with your brain. That is a form of control that is a megalomaniac's dream, to be able to plug into your brain and control your thoughts. Orwell wrote 1984 where O'Brien is terrorizing Winston, and Winston says, "I'll do whatever you want." And O'Brien says, "No, you don't understand. I want to control you down to your very existence so that you love me. I want to be in full control of you." So that's where my limit comes in. Where's that limit? Because everything has a limit. You and I have limits. Being is limited. I feel like philosophically, we've lost ground because we're too busy arguing about dumb things to get to this notion of limit. Because the dystopian state, let's just be real, is a materialized god. It's the dream of Pharaoh: "I am in control. I control my people. Go make your straw bricks and shut up. By the way, I could turn your brain off now because we didn't tell you when we put this in that in our privacy policy, we may have access to motor control." That's my initial answer.

Larry: No, I love this idea of limits because human beings are human beings. After all, we have souls and the gospel is true. And I think a certain common sense is going to kick in and resistance will emerge. I think, for example, the fact that so many millions of Americans were perfectly willing to go along with all the modern progressive sexual mores of the gay revolution—"live and let live"—but they've drawn a line, a limit, I think, when you see the pushback with the transgender stuff. You see J.K. Rowling, who's very liberal, pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage, who has drawn a line in the concrete and said no to the transgender stuff because now you're asking me to actually deny reality. You're asking me to believe that a girl can have a penis and a boy can menstruate, and that is just sheer lunacy. So yeah, I think a day will be coming when, if somebody said to me, as my technology becomes obsolete, "Well, you can't really do the internet unless you have a chip implanted in the back of your hand," at that point I would say, "Okay, bye-bye computer, bye-bye blog. I'm not doing it anymore because you're not sticking anything in my body." So I think you're right. I think that a limit is going to be reached. At least I certainly hope so.

Andrew: That's exactly right. And to your point about the CDs, what these companies will do is they'll eliminate the CD-ROM drive and say, "You're on your own." But then independent companies will say, "Hey, I can make a CD-ROM drive that you just plug in with USB." So I feel like what will happen is, as we approach this limit... especially with AI. What's great about them is you can go to them and if you've read these cool things called books and you know something about something, you can look and be like, "That doesn't look right, that answer you're giving me." But on the other hand, if you're quickly looking it up, using it like a database, it's very handy. So I think of it, in my opinion, if you've ever seen Iron Man with Jarvis, it's meant to be a way to quickly accomplish a human-directed task. It is not meant to be supplanting humans and ruling over us. It's the humans on top, not the other way around. But they want to make it the other way around, where it's going to give you all the answers. Well, I just laid it out very simply: they control the parameters, which means the answer is going to be colored by those parameters. It's not going to be the truth. Remember, being has parameters. God made creation with limits. And so what you've effectively done, if you want to rewrite reality, is you've created your reality ghetto and you're just sniping everyone into it.

Larry: My God, yeah. I don't know if this would be an example of you being in control of the situation rather than the computer. My friend John Grondelski and I, in the age of the internet, we invented this game called "Dead or Alive," which is somebody throws out the name of a long-forgotten but apparently very old celebrity, and you're supposed to guess whether they're dead or alive. We figure out who's right by immediately looking it up on Wikipedia. That would be simply the equivalent of looking something up in an encyclopedia that's on your shelf. So the point is, that's a situation where we're in control of the situation, rather than the machine dictating something to us.

Andrew: But one of the problems I see with AI is that what's happening is people are saying, "Write me a 500-word essay on Balthasar's take on disclosure." And it burps out some nonsense. They've never read Balthasar, they just hand it in. The thing is, as a writer, you know this: when you write something, it forces you to think it through, to own it. It forces you to concretize your thoughts about a given issue. I feel like this is attacking that, and that deeply scares me because I think people, generally speaking, take the easy road. If you give them a way to put less effort into something—which is why the spiritual life is so difficult, you have to put in a ton of effort—I think this is another substitute for that. It could very quickly become a substitute for a concretized identity of a person, and it starts being surrendered to this because you just let it tell you what the truth is rather than concretizing what's being disclosed to you.

Larry: And this is an example of "the medium is the message," because in this case, the medium is supplanting your own thought processes, your own learning curve. Like you said, I can't tell you how many times, in as much writing as I do, I'll come up with an idea for an article, I'll do the opening paragraph and say, "Okay, here's the topic, here's what I'm going to say." And then as I write, I realize, "You know what? You're full of it. You haven't thought this through." As you're writing, your thinking becomes clearer to you, and you realize your original idea was wrong. But if you have AI in front of you and say, "Here's something I want to write on, here's the topic," boom, it's there for you. You don't develop those thinking skills at all.

Andrew: Nope. I think as long as you have control, meaning I can go in and say, "Alright, I want you to do this now," or control in the sense of how it's used, then you can define the parameters, the limits, and it can be used well, just like any action has limits. For example, there are certain limits that allow a just war to occur. But the thing is, with this, there have been no defined limits. And also, we've allowed people to be put into these lanes created by corporations that are all about profit, that want your attention because your attention means hemorrhoid pills, other pills. It's money. And to your point about the dystopian future, I definitely think that's coming because the people who are inventing this, they don't have limits. And that's terrifying to me.

Larry: Yeah, it's terrifying to me too, because the only thing guiding it is profit and money. Also, there's that technological imperative: "What we have the power to do, we should do, because if we don't do it, somebody else will. If we don't Neuralink our kids, the Chinese are going to, so we better get on board, otherwise we're going to be left in the dirt." That kind of thinking bespeaks the fundamental fallenness of our condition, where sin compels us to sin more. The conflict between peoples in a bad sense, the conflict between China and the United States where we turn each other into adversaries and demonize each other, precisely leads then to this imperative like, "Well, we need 800 billion nuclear bombs to counteract their 799 billion ones."

Andrew: And the irony is that if we all, all humanity, saw Christ as God, if we all saw the truth of the Catholic faith, which is grounded in the Triune God, the community of persons, then we could all be a part of that without any cost to ourselves, in the sense that our identity would be fulfilled. So instead of having this social imperative that crunches away identity, choice, and vocation, you would have this community that lifts up identity because it's for the other, it's all intersubjective. I just feel like it's all connected.

Larry: It is. You can go all the way back to the 19th century. One of the very first social encyclicals by Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, was dealing with the rising crisis of Marxism, robber baron capitalism, and the problems of misuse of labor. He had to address all those issues. When people read it, at first they're disappointed because he doesn't offer any systematic answers, like "These are the structures that need to change." What he says is, and it goes to what you were just saying, the only hope in the labor-management dispute is for everybody to start living Christian lives. If management needs to live a life of virtue, and labor needs to live a life of virtue, if we all live a life of Christian virtue, these conflicts will not arise.

Andrew: Yep, no, I completely agree with that. I think he's dead on. So, any other final thoughts?

Larry: I think this is a great conversation. A great way to end your podcasting year, Andrew. I enjoyed it very much.

Andrew: Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it, and we'll obviously have you on again. So thank you again.

Larry: That'd be great.