Habits for Americans in an Age of Disruption

When you’re 54 and you get a terminal diagnosis, people start to act like you’re a lot wiser than they thought you were when you were 54 and you didn’t have a terminal diagnosis. So I’ll just say broadly, thank you for many friends and for lots of kindness in this room. Many of you have been extraordinarily generous to me and to my family.

I’m on the clock tonight in more ways than one, so I want to make every minute count. I think the problems that we face collectively are problems of habits, love, and community, not chiefly of policy. So I’d like to spend our time together tonight thinking about families and especially about younger parents. Grandparents, aunts and uncles, and all those of us who’ve earned the titles of aunts and uncles to our friends’ kids have a role to play in this, of course, but my thoughts at this moment in America are aimed primarily at parents: the blurry eyed, overcaffeinated, ever-doubtful moms and dads who know the truth of the aphorism, “the days are long and the years are short,” who are in the business of raising souls and raising citizens. As Americans, our experiment in self-government and our pioneering spirit has always depended on wisdom and self-control. And these are not exactly the things that policy or Washington is known for and certainly not the things that politicians or bureaucrats could ever impart. Also, these are not exactly the things and the virtues that are fostered by technology’s illusion of endless consumption, infinite optionality, and cost-free disembodiment.

No, the virtues for a life well lived are taught, modeled, and practiced in the daily life of society’s smallest but most important platoons, the republic’s thickest yet pre-political institutions, chief among them the family. So I want to start with a big prediction and it is this. In the coming decades, if AI continues to progress as it has, America is going to have a big, messy debate about UBI, universal basic income. And in its long-term implications, this debate is going to dwarf the fights we had more than a decade ago about Obamacare and even the debates we’ve had about the Great Society and the New Deal.

To be perfectly blunt, it’s unlikely that I’m going to be around for this debate, but for the record, I am strongly against UBI. I think it’s terrible policy. But either way, whether we end up with UBI or we don’t, whether we end at the sunny uplands of abundance or the hellscape of an actual jobs apocalypse, Americans are going to need better habits than we have right now to help our people, our citizens, and our republic thrive. Because virtue has always been at the heart of what it takes to keep a republic. To borrow Lincoln’s metaphor, it’s the golden apple in the silver frame. Politics, the silver frame, is the stuff we do to secure our rights through ordered liberty, but life—the daily stuff that’s made up of community, affections, and habits—that’s the golden apple at the center.

The state’s job isn’t to define that, but it’s to secure the preconditions, the silver frame that enable all the little platoons and communities to pursue the golden apples. That’s what needs to be protected. And no matter what the illiberal Left or the increasingly illiberal subset of the historic Right claims, that cannot be done with policy levers in Washington, D.C. We are never just one piece of legislation away from civilizational recovery. Politics are merely means. The bigger questions are teleological, and there, souls are central.

I just made a big claim about the future. Typically, historians don’t do that. So it might be helpful for us to level-set a bit on where we stand right now because we are in the midst of a civilization-warping crisis of institutional decline.

The consequences are all around us. We’re lonely. The share of Americans who tell pollsters that they have no close friends, none, has quadrupled since 1990. A study last month from the University of Arizona found that over the last 15 years, people average 338 fewer spoken words per day than the year before. That’s 120,000 less words per year. We don’t trust our institutions. Over the past 50 years, decade over decade, and regardless of which political party controls Congress or the White House, Americans have lost faith in our mediating institutions. Pew data show it most pointedly around the federal government, where trust has dropped from 77 percent in the mid-1960s to 17 percent last year.

But it’s not just Washington. With the exception of the military, it’s every institution in American public life. Pew and Gallup have measured ten different institutions every year for about 50 years. Nine of the ten sectors, the military being the only outlier, have experienced a declining level of public trust for consecutive decades—business, religion, law, media, medicine, et cetera. Every sector of our economy and our cultural life, with the exception of the military, has seen these precipitous declines.

We also don’t trust each other individually. Only one in three Americans tell Pew that they think they can trust most people—down significantly from previous decades. Conspiracy theories are metastasizing across the internet, and more and more of our neighbors are falling prey to these echo chambers. We’re isolated and distrustful. How did we get here?

If you ask people who frequent policy conferences, we often talk like policy and politics are at the center of it. Do any of us actually believe this? Come on. Politics, the source of these problems? No. Politics are a symptom of these larger problems. There is no simple, straight-line answer to explain our challenges, but we should understand that the economic and chiefly the technological moment we’re in is far more fundamental for what we’re tackling right now than anything in politics. One hundred years from now, when historians look back at our moment, they are not going to tell a story about our divided politics. Most of our political actors today are far too small to merit even a footnote in the history books.

A century from now, historians are going to tell a different story. They’re going to talk about the fact that we were living through an era of technological revolution that was driving rapid economic change. That’s the backdrop for the challenges we face at this moment. Our story is the story of bits versus atoms. For almost all of human history up until just a few years ago, productivity was measured in atoms. Job categories lasted for a lifetime. Physical products were the tangible output; today it’s mostly about bits. It’s about data. We live in the information economy. We had hunter-gatherers, we had agrarianism, we had industrialism, and now we have this thing.

What is it? The knowledge economy? Sociologists call it the post-industrial economy, which is a way of saying we don’t even know what it is. It’s the after-the-last-thing-thing. The reality is we are living in an information economy that is put on speed, thanks to the advancement of artificial intelligence and there’s a lot to be thankful for in this. There are massive positives and incredible opportunities to unlock some of our biggest quantitative challenges. When the cost of quantification falls to zero or so close to zero that we cease even to meter it, amazing new opportunities are unlocked.

We should be clear about this. This is not a Luddite argument that I’m making, but we should be aware that lifelong work is a thing of the past. Our fellow citizens don’t know exactly how to articulate it, but they know how to feel it, and it feels scary. Doing the same job, even remaining in the same sector for your entire career, is increasingly going to be a thing of the past, and this has massive implications for how we conceive of ourselves.

Think about how our identity is wrapped up in our work. For thousands of years, people lived in set communities from birth until death, and their lives were defined by their work. You were a farmer because your dad was a farmer. We moved from agrarian hunter-gatherers to farmers to workers and industrial economies, and our identities were wrapped up in the kind of work we did. Many times our work even gave us our names—Smith, Miller, Carter, Mason, Weaver, Brewer, Baker, Cook, Porter. These are nouns, they’re trades, but they’re also families. They’re identities, and they’re still with us. How many of us believe that 100 years from now you’re going to look at people’s surnames and see Coder, Designer, Influencer?

We’re in a completely different economy where technology is remaking entire sectors at breakneck speed. Automation is inevitable. The debate right now is usually whether AI is going to bring heaven or hell. And the troubling, dizzying, but true answer is: it’s going to bring both. Given the false binary between the enthusiasts’ unencumbered optimism and the safetyists’ dim view of human resiliency and agency, we should pick optimism every time. But we should also recognize that this isn’t really a binary. Things are going to get a lot messier from here, even if you’re on the optimistic side. Most jobs are going to be unbundled and re-bundled.

Emotional intelligence and character are going to matter more than they’ve mattered in the past because the hardest things to automate are the things that depend on relationships. But if the future of work is relational, the nature of relationships matters. Does anyone really believe that replacing any one job with another job is always morally indifferent, morally equivalent? When the AI enthusiasts talk, there’s sometimes a scorn about those who worry about the dignity of work versus merely a GDP analysis of humans as cogs.

The qualitative matters in addition to the quantitative, though we’re living through a fascinating quantitative revolution. Job A and Job B might be equal on a spreadsheet, but there’s a profound difference in the hearts and in the lives and in the emotions of our neighbors. A really good coach, that’s a relational job. You can motivate young men. You can help people get fit. That’s an important relationship and the work matters. An OnlyFans model selling pictures of her feet to lonely men? That’s also a relationship, but it’s pretty damn bleak. Not all relationships are socially productive and certainly not equally socially productive. There’s nothing redeeming in an OnlyFans economy that commodifies human sexuality. It’s depressing, and our daughters and our sons deserve better.

All of this that we’re living through and that our neighbors feel is so much bigger than whatever clickbait outrage is driving the cable news cycle today and will be forgotten by Thursday. A technological revolution is driving an economic revolution in our time, and the changes in the economy will have more profound spiritual, cultural, educational, and even political implications, though the political is arguably the least important. To be clear, this is an incredibly exciting moment to live. This is not a Neo-Luddite argument. Who could have thought that we could launch rockets to space and then catch them as they plummet back to Earth?

We should all stand in awe of this. It is a breathtaking tribute to human imagination, ingenuity, innovation, and entrepreneurial creation. As someone who’s being kept alive this very month by incredible advances in biotechnology, I am a zealous proponent for disruptive innovation. The challenge now, though, is how to live with virtue and technology when technology, left to its own trajectory, would often erode virtue and place and human texture.

So what is our response to these tectonic challenges? It must be habits and community and a revivification of place.

The biggest divide, I submit to you, in America is not going to be race or class or income, regardless of what the political addicts and the culture war intersectionality proponents tell us. The biggest divide is going to be between people who figure out how to harness the tools of technology and the near-limitless information of AI versus those who outsource their affections and their habits to these tools and algorithms. The future will be awe-inspiring for the first group. Life will be miserable for the second group. Lots of us grew up fearing the dystopian future of George Orwell, but it turns out the dystopian future of Aldous Huxley was much more likely.

The immediate danger is not the brutal authoritarianism of 1984, but the soft despotism of Brave New World. We face a tyranny of ubiquitous pleasure, of easy comfort. Our choice is this: master the tools or be mastered by them. We can be creators or merely consumers. We can be thinkers and builders or just junkies. The way that we use or abuse technology will shape our souls and therefore inevitably our society. Given these disruptions and presented with the existential choice, we would be fools to wallow in self-pity, doubt or despair. The answer to our uncertainty and our anxiety is to be found in building. Was it Martin Luther who said, “If I knew that tomorrow the world would end, I would still today plant my apple tree”?

Friends, that’s why I’m here tonight. I want to encourage you to be builders and investors, to plant trees for your kids and grandkids. And selfishly, I want to encourage you to plant trees for my kids and grandkids. The men and women assembled here tonight have done incredible work building institutions. You are the builders who’ve rolled up your sleeves and done the work and the rest of us are tremendously grateful, but none of that work will matter without another more foundational institution making a fundamental comeback. And that is the most local institution. The family is the source of the habits that we’re going to need to cultivate the next generation. This work is pre-political.

Many of you have done tremendous work in public policy, but the era that we’re entering is going to require even more energy, even more creativity around something more textured. Housing affordability cannot tackle our challenges. Tax policy will not solve this. Even something as essential as educational choice will not ultimately love your kids and create habits. All of these are important, but they are not aimed at creating the habits of ensouled humans because the challenges that matter most are questions of love, and love is local, and that’s why it starts with the family.

What I’m suggesting tonight requires us to reject the relatively new but culturally pervasive assumption we have that school is the primary institution of character formation. If there’s a villain in my story, it’s John Dewey. As Americans, we have sleepwalked into a culture now defined by one man’s bureaucratic thinking. We don’t have time to unpack the fact that Dewey’s anti-Catholic bigotry was explicitly aimed at making sure that schools instead of parishes were forming the morality of the next generation.

For now, we can simply acknowledge that too much of childhood today is defined by Dewey’s vision of an institutionalized childhood. Just because the economy had gone from agrarian to industrial, he told us that we should industrialize childhood. And today, for the vast majority of four- to 18-year-olds’ waking hours, children are indoors, sitting still, passive, in receive mode, entirely disconnected from productive labor and surrounded by people that merely have the accident of the same birth year.

There is no pedagogy that’s written on stone tablets from heaven insisting that this is the way that children must learn. Education and school are not synonyms. School is an important tool many times for parents, but today, it is usually an ineffective tool that stifles the kinds of learning that our kids most desperately need in the disruptive era that we’re now entering. Despite receiving nearly a trillion dollars per year, public K-12 education in America produces abysmal results. Seventy percent of eighth-graders are not proficient in reading and more than 70 percent can’t do basic math.

We have led the next generation on a path to more soul-deadening complacency, and this is the institution we’ve decided to outsource habit formation to? Modern schooling is systematically terrible at forming well-adjusted, curious, intellectually creative, entrepreneurial adults. Schools, even much better schools, cannot solve this. Here’s the truth. Nobody loves your kids as much as you do.

I never had the chance to serve in the Senate with Phil Graham, but I think often of the time when he was cross-examining some bureaucrat and he made the case that the local community where he lived was best able to help form the kids of their community. And the bureaucrat kept pushing back at him saying no, that she loved his kids every bit as much as he did. And he was just flabbergasted that someone would even claim this, and she kept insisting, and she used the word love—that she loved his kids just as much as he did. And he said, “Really? What are their names?”

Loves are local and creating the habits that foster the love of the good, the true, and the beautiful begins at home. It falls to the neighborhood and to the village, to be sure, but it falls chiefly to your parents. The bad news of what I’m suggesting is that it’s deeply inconvenient. The good news is that parenting has always been inconvenient. It’s the ultimate inconvenience.

There’s nothing convenient about the work of raising children, teaching them delayed gratification, working late nights, and putting their needs before your own. In an age that is designed now around instant, endless convenience, the work of parenting is countercultural. It’s going to take some uphill running, but here’s the true news that should encourage parents. Renewal becomes possible when we understand the job before us, when we face the reality that we have to do this work ourselves. Parents want intentionality and they’re willing to do hard things because they love their kids. In theory and in practice, they want to do this work.

The great promise of technology for good and for ill is disembodiment. This iPhone, which has more compute power than gymnasium size mainframes at MIT in the late 1950s and early 1960s that ran the targeting exercises that won the Cold War, this is amazing. This is the largest tool any median citizen has ever held in their hands in human history, and part of its promise is disembodiment. If you’re bored by the speech, you can check the scores of the NBA playoff games right now. You can free this time and place.

Please don’t. You’ve got a dying guy in front of you.

But the great promise of technology that you can be disembodied from the table or from your culture or from the world also has an escapism about it that we have to learn how to manage. There’s always the temptation, the claim that there’s a better conversation somewhere else. There’s a better sexual partner somewhere else. There’s a better option out there somewhere. It’s the conceit of selfishness and it leads us to profound isolation. Human nature has a voracious appetite for self-indulgence, but America doesn’t work if we sit and scroll. America doesn’t work if we decide that comfort is the greatest virtue.

I think of Mike Rowe’s old joke, “Safety first is the stupidest possible sign you could post at a workplace,” because you could always set the speed limit at 1 mile an hour. You could have no car accidents, but safety isn’t first. It’s one of the inputs into the algorithm at the workplace, but you’re there to do something. In the same way, comfort can’t be our Number One goal. We didn’t go to the moon because it was easy. We went because it was hard, and being an American requires grit, resilience, and wisdom. We want technology and virtue.

So let’s flag four starter habits for tonight. Fewer than half of Americans read a book last year. That is a national crisis. We have to develop the intentional habit of reading.

A nation that does not read will not thrive. Shorter attention spans are killing our imagination. Before our kids even learn their alphabet, we now hand them tablets, and we know from neurological imagery that it is rotting their brains. Families need to read aloud together again to build children’s affection for books and to build a shared library. This kind of reading is far more formative than the kind of isolated reading-compliance culture that is engaged in by so many schools. C. S. Lewis talked about how we all suffer from chronological snobbery. The idea that because we are in the here and now, everything before us must be outdated and wrong and irrelevant.

In reality, every era has mistakes and blind spots, and the only way to scrutinize our current moment and to gain a perspective of wisdom—because we can’t go to the future—is through history or literature. Contrast this with the digital casino in our pockets that pulls us out of our place and breeds constant dissatisfaction and covetousness. We are unable to stand on the shoulders of giants if we don’t know what they have to say—and we do that by reading. We need to build family canons that inform the character of our homes; and like every debate about the canon, there are going to be fights about what is in and what is out. There is no definitive answer to the canon because the intellectual journey is central to the point.

We need to teach our kids to fall in love with reading and show them that the endless dialogue between ideas is more rewarding than the endless scrolling of social media.

Habit two: we need to develop the intentional habit of hard work. Like reading, hard work is preparation for life. Our kids need to learn to work hard and to love the fact that their identity is as a worker, even if it might not be the same kind of work—porter, weaver, smith, baker. Work can start at an early age. Sure, it’s easier to load and unload the dishwasher and to put away the laundry ourselves, but we miss the opportunity if we don’t bring the next generation into the labor.

Over time, small jobs become medium jobs and ultimately clear the way for hard tasks like preparing for a life of lifelong work, where you’re going to have to relearn who you are and what you do to serve your neighbor at 35, 40, 45, and 50, something no generation has ever previously had to do. Young men especially need work. As they grow, they need work that isn’t their main work as well. There’s a reason that dad hobbies are all chores. Woodworking, yard work, grilling, tinkering. It’s work that engages your body when so much of our work has merely engaged our mind.

There is a reason that, when Winston Churchill needed a break, he laid bricks for hours at a time as rest. We need to encourage side hustles and we need to create agency and foster competence. Right now, we are insulating our children on average from work until they’re in their mid-twenties and lots of them turn out not to be able to learn how to do it then.

Habit number three: we need to develop the intentional habit of tech Sabbaths. We can go too far and worship our work. I love work, but worshiping our work is something I’m guilty of, and we need to be able to set it aside, recognizing that our storehouses are not permanent. We should love work, but we should also learn that we need rest.

In my theological tradition, we remember the Fourth Commandment, not just as obligation, but as a gift. As more and more of our work becomes detached from specific places—think of all of our Zoom meetings, calls, emails, disembodied interactions with remote colleagues—the habit of rest, of airplane mode, emphasizes place and guards against digital intrusion, and allows the revivification of the thickest, the most local, and the most important. Lock up our devices and keep them away from the family meal. Prioritize the people around the table, the bread, the conversation and the hugs at hand.

Habit number four: we need to develop intentional travel. In the same way that learning another language teaches us how to master our own, the fish can explain water to you because he’s never not been in it. Travel forms character through lived experience, but don’t hear this as “vacation.” Travel actually has the same roots as travail etymologically. To travel should be a kind of work. It takes work to leave your comfort zone, to set aside the things you thought you needed and to work at something new together. If you live in a city, you need to experience the country. If you live in the country, you need to know how to navigate the city.

Have our kids take extended leaves of absence from school and go live with other families somewhere else for a significant period of time. For those of you who can do it, figure out how to do the work of multigenerational living, with family compounds and other places that you return to again and again to steward. Give kids the thickness of a community of cousins, aunts, uncles, and different types of family members doing different types of work. You don’t need a McMansion to do this. There’s a real difference between need and want. The average home size in America in 1950 was under 1,000 square feet.

Today, the average new home is over 2,400 square feet. Humanity has been raising kids for millions of years without the conveniences of the twenty-first century, and nothing teaches the difference between need and want like being in a different place, traveling and living in a thick community elsewhere. We need our kids to learn a new skill and a new environment. Character formation happens when things are not convenient. Travel done rightly seeks the appropriate level of inconvenience.

Friends, we live in the richest time and place in all of human history, and yet we have grievance peddlers everywhere on social media who have persuaded our kids something false. This is the first generation since we’ve had polling that has thought the future is going to be worse than the past. They also believe that they live through more economic hardship than any of the previous three generations. This is economically verifiable nonsense, and yet they believe it and the fault is ours. Economics was once the study of scarcity. We’re fast approaching the moment when economics will be defined by ubiquitous abundance.

We are blessed to live in the here and now. By God’s grace, we’ve been blessed to be called to this time and place, this here and now. The challenges before us are big, but they are ours. Time, however, is finite. Human nature is constant, and no technological process or progress is going to change it. We will never upload our consciousness to the internet and become indifferent to our own mortality regardless of what idiot philosophers in Silicon Valley tell us. Character, whether the character of an individual or of a nation, is molded by habits and by time. This republic requires men and women to do long-form deliberation, serious thinking, honest humility, and daily striving.

This may sound like idealism until you realize it’s what America has always been about. Too often, we think of our Founding Fathers as graybeards, but that’s wrong. They were young. We’re celebrating Alexander Hamilton tonight. Hamilton was 21 in 1776. James Madison was 25. Thomas Jefferson was 33. The old man was John Adams at 40. They were alive. They were full of energy. They were imperfect to be sure, but they understood virtue and they understood that the nation they were building would depend on virtue. Today, these are the things that technology, though it can be great, left to its own devices would take from our kids.

Disembodied consumption, digital gluttony, and cultural lethargy will rob us of the joy at a moment when incredible discovery and adventure await. The digital revolution can bring big pieces of heaven, but it will drift toward hell unless we steer it and form the right kinds of habits. What good is it to gain the whole world if we forfeit the souls that we’re supposed to form? We cannot expect to remain free without being virtuous. We cannot be bold without being rooted. We cannot be great if our folks are not aiming first to be good and to build a home base from which to launch and build much more broadly.

My friends, the biggest divide in America is not going to be based on race, class, or income. The biggest divide in America will be between the people who figure out how to harness these tools of technology and AI, amazing though they are, versus those who outsource their affections and their habits to the tools and the algorithms. For the first group, the future is thrilling. Life will be miserable for the second. It is our job to help steer more people into group one. We must fight Huxley’s dystopia. We must master these tools rather than be mastered by them.

We must deliberately shape our children’s souls so that they, too, like all Americans past in the greatest tradition, can be creators, doers, and thinkers embracing the next frontier. Thanks for having me.