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by
Andy Crouch
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July 18, 2022 - November 21, 2023
There is a consequential difference between personalized and personal.
all this is happening without the complication, frustration, perplexity, unpredictability, and vulnerability of encountering another person with their own needs, expectations, anxieties, and desires. It is, in fact, a one-year-old’s dream—because if we are truthful, as heart-wrenching as it is, the “No! No! No!” of my friend’s niece is not just a desire for connection. It is also a desire to be in charge,
before we knew to look for a mirror, we were looking for another person’s face.
Our relational bankruptcy has been unfolding through the five-hundred-year story of technology, from its earliest stirrings in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first.
We actually get the word person from Gaius’s time. The Latin word persona initially referred to the masks used in ancient theater.
by Gaius’s time the word had a legal meaning. It referred to someone with standing before the law, someone whom the law protected and courts could judge.
Every human being may be a person, then and now. But everywhere Gaius went, he was recognized as a person. And when it comes to flourishing as a person, recognition makes all the difference.
The late Leanne Payne, a teacher of the spiritual life, once said, “We either contemplate or we exploit.” Exploitation asks, What can this person (or for that matter, this thing) do for me? Contemplation asks, Who or what am I beholding, without regard for their usefulness to me?
three truths we have to hold together about persons.
First, as the German philosopher Robert Spaemann put it, there is a difference between “something” and “someone.” The difference is personhood.
while nothing can truly take away our personhood, only another person can fully give it to us. This is the second essential truth. It is when another person’s face and voice recognize us, not for what we can offer them (exploitation) but for what we intrinsically are (contemplation), that we know who we are.
third truth. While personhood can be denied (though never truly taken away) and it can be gravely harmed, it also can be developed.
being a person means you are designed to become something greater than you are.
The Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama provocatively called three miles an hour “the speed of God” since it was the speed at which Jesus of Nazareth moved for almost his entire life.
Effortless power is one of the most distinctive features of what we began, roughly 150 years ago, to call “modern” life.
Here is the problem: You cannot take advantage of a superpower and fully remain a person, in the sense of a heart-soul-mind-strength complex designed for love. This is not an unfortunate side effect of superpowers or a flaw that could be overcome with future improvements. It is the essence of their design because superpowers are power without effort. And power without effort, it turns out, diminishes us as much as it delights us.
The problem is what we do when our quest for impersonal power is frustrated. It turns out that this dream is so strong that we are quite willing to press persons into service, treating them more like things and machines than like human beings, rather than see the dream die.
If magic worked—and we have told ourselves, over and over, how we might get it to work—it could set everyone free. But because magic does not work, our quest for its replacement will ultimately make everyone a slave.
This is the power of money: It allows us to get things done, often by means of other persons, without the entanglements of friendship.
The distinctive thing that money allows us—its most seductive promise—is abundance without dependence.
Mammon is ultimately not at all just a thing, nor even a system, but a will at work in history. And what it wants, above all, is to separate power from relationship, abundance from dependence, and being from personhood.
God wishes to put all things into the service of persons and ultimately to bring forth the flourishing of creation through the flourishing of persons.
What if the future of technology is the same as the past—the same journey into the superpower zone that began with the dawn of devices one hundred or more years ago? It begins with initial excitement, ends in a terminal state of boredom or at least indifference, and along the way delivers a healthy dose of unintended consequences.
rather than actually creating machines that understand the infinitely creative and complex world of human culture, we will find that it is far easier to create attenuated cultural environments that treat persons like machines.
Peer behind the curtain of any quasi-magical technology, and you find toil.
The Roman world ran on slavery, the New Testament scholar N. T. Wright has noted, in the same way our world runs on electricity. It was just as essential, just as woven into the economy, just as taken for granted.
The letters in the New Testament were conveyed by dear friends and close associates of the letter writer. In all probability, these friends did not just deliver the written letter but were present to interpret and explain it, to anchor the bare words of the page in the living web of household membership that was the essence of “the way.” And in the case of the letter to the Romans, we almost certainly know who that friend was. Her name was Phoebe.
Our individual loneliness, our anxiety, our depression, our broken and disappointed families, our fractured communities, are not what they are because of some choice we could easily unmake or remake.
The philosopher Albert Borgmann used the word devices for the kind of technology that displaces earlier tools and, eventually, replaces the human beings who use them.
But there is a way for technology to “replace” human beings in exactly the opposite sense. This kind of technology can re-place us, putting us back in our place as, in Jobs’s words, “the crown of creation.” This kind of technology leads to the creation of cultural goods that are less like a device and more like a tool.
The best word for this kind of technology is instruments.
If devices promise relief of burdens and toil, the best instruments specialize in promise number one (now you’ll be able to), even while they actually require a great deal of us.
the best instruments also impose almost no cost in terms of promises (or threats) three and four. They expand the capacity of human beings without shrinking other parts of us at the same time.
those telescopes, no matter how complex, in no way diminish astronomers’ ability to step outside and gaze up at the stars, beholding them in all their complexity and furious beauty. In fact, what they have learned in the course of becoming astronomers will enable them to see, interpret, and understand the heavens far better than those of us who merely glance upward on a clear night.
The path expands what is possible, while foreclosing very little. But the road—in precise proportion to how technological it becomes—imposes severe costs of you’ll no longer be able to.
What kind of place do we require to thrive as persons? If you and I are heart-soul-mind-strength complexes designed for love, we need a place where we can exercise our fundamental capacities—a place where we can channel our emotions and longings, be known in our unique depth of self, contribute to understanding and interpreting the world, and apply our bodies’ strength and agility to worthwhile work in all three planes of physical reality. Above all, we need a place where we can invest ourselves deeply in others, come to care about their flourishing, and give ourselves away in mutual service
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The household is the fundamental community of persons. Built on more than an isolated pair but encompassing few enough people that all can be deeply and truly and persistently noticed and seen, the household is perfectly sized for the recognition we all were looking for the moment we were born.
This is the one thing we need more than any other: a community of recognition. While we must always insist that every human being is a person whether or not they are seen or treated as one by others, we also know that no human being can flourish as a person unless they are seen and treated as one. And for that, the household is the first and best place.
We need a place where we cannot hide. We need a place where we cannot get lost.
who needs to be included in these household practices—who needs to be invited further in?
I have come to believe that all truly personal life has to take place under a canopy—a kind of umbrella under which we shelter and can let down our guard. The most important contribution the household makes is sending into the wider world persons who know what it is to live under a canopy of trust.
Much of what gets tagged #blessed should be tagged #charmed instead.
In an economy that evaluates and compensates us in impersonal terms, the most consequential members, the ones who matter the most for all our flourishing, are the ones whom Mammon does not consider useful. It is the “useless” who matter the most. Because if they are persons—if they are seen, known, welcomed, and given places of honor in our households—then all of us are set free from our usefulness.
One of the effects of the technological charm we have lived under is a loss of memory, an inability to hold in mind even recent events, especially those that spared us and our immediate communities and families. We are the charmed ones, after all, who float through life without the sufferings that other distant, unfortunate people experience.
We should expect to see no more impact than Gaius and his friends saw. And we should prepare for a similarly hostile reception the more our faith and practice diverge from the empire around us.
Perhaps the most contested front of this conflict today has to do with the creation of human beings as male and female, essential partners in sexual reproduction,
Our world, like that of the Romans, is starved for love, and a household like Gaius’s is the only place you will ever really find it.
