ONE OF THE BEST THINGS ABOUT THE END OF WORK...:

Everyone knows that any life consumed by the enjoyments of the screen is marked by emotionally crippling abstraction and distraction, and that true teachers of philosophy, literature, and theology do what they can to get students to leave those screens alone enough to know what it's like to take pleasure in being alone with yourself with others or in love in the present with another person with a body. Everyone also knows that, contrary to what the politically correct think, being shaped by one's relational biological imperatives is, far from being the slavery of suckers, our only way to reliably free ourselves from the slavery of being locked up in one's self. Thinking through both these modes of "experiential knowledge," however, take us far beyond the angry reductionism of political correctness and the post-biological hopes of the technological promise of the Singularity or at least indefinite longevity.

The strangest and most wonderful being in the cosmos--each of us--is too elusive and mysterious to be known through information transfer.

The Catholic philosopher and novelist Walker Percy wrote on occasion about, in effect, writing esoterically or hiding his true or evangelical message in the forms of modern science and the existentialist novel. We also know, of course, that Flannery O'Connor deployed her violent and jarring stories as a kind of shock therapy to arouse us from our death-in-life techno-diversions as a preparation for wondering anew about the goodness and gratuitousness of created being.

The main reason we should cherish liberal education as "great books" is that they almost all are--whether written in the form of prose, poetry, plays, or novels--poetic in this sense: They are all about showing, rather than telling. One of the great prejudices of our time is that the truth can be reduced to theory and information expressed directly through "critical thinking" that can, in principle, be displayed through logically ordered PowerPoint slides. But the strangest and most wonderful being in the cosmos--each of us--is too elusive and mysterious to be known through that mode. This means the poetic, indirect, or slow and circuitous mode of knowing could be even more rigorous and rational in its own way. The reason Socrates didn't write at all, and the reason Plato wrote "dialogues" or really wordy plays, is that books themselves can so readily get in the way of wondrous love and "the joy of discovery" if they are viewed as one-dimensional prose. The difference here is the one between the "great book" or even a "real book" and the "textbook."

The one true progress has little to do with political institutions or technical devices: It's the progress that occurs in the directions of wisdom and virtue over a particular unique and irreplaceable human life, and our struggle today is to remember to focus at least some of our higher education on encouraging that personal progress.

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