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Our virtues themselves are not free and floating qualities over which we retain a permanent control and power of disposal; they come to be so closely linked in our minds with the actions in conjunction with which we have made it our duty to exercise them that if we come to engage in an activity of a different kind, it catches us off guard.
—Marcel Proust
The political philosopher Leo Strauss is reported to have once joked that the history of the West can be understood as that process whereby the word “virtue” underwent a gradual change from meaning the manly prowess of warriors (in Roman antiquity) to meaning the chastity of young ladies (in Victorian England). I would add, in the same vein, that it is also the process whereby virtue ceased meaning the chastity of young ladies in order to be mainly spoken about in lecture series funded by the Templeton Foundation. What I mean is that I only hear the word “virtue” invoked in very particular circumstances—from the pulpit, in commencement addresses, and in philosophy seminars—and this suggests it doesn’t touch most ordinary concerns about how to live. It might be that I’m in the wrong crowd. Or it could be that even if most of us don’t call it virtue, we still think in terms of virtues like courage or humility, and that these amount to the same thing. But the notion of virtue and virtue ethics really has become alien to us in part because our uses of technology—particularly those that control our worlds—pose a special kind of problem for us. If we are going to recover virtue in this context, we need a new kind of education, one in which real formation is possible.
How We Talk(ed) About Virtue
In any standard-issue introduction to ethics class, one learns that there are basically three “lenses” for thinking about how to be good: the virtue ethics of Aristotle, the deontology of Kant, and the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill. Students learn to evaluate the pros and cons of each lens—how to apply them to a series of famous brain-teasers like the trolley problem—and then the class ends with a viewing of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight.
This is a perverse way to teach the subject. It presents ethical systems as free-floating options (as if to disagree about them were finally a matter of individual taste); it also centres discussion on dilemmas that most of us will never face. The main issue, though, is that these so-called lenses are not the same kinds of answers to the same kinds of questions. For instance, the question motivating Kant’s deontology is whether the exercise of the human will can be specified independently from anything the empirical sciences could ever discover about us. It was an attempt to rationally justify the Christian conviction that persons are incomparable and beyond price; that we are different in kind from every other thing that can become an object of exchange.
Utilitarianism is, in turn, primarily motivated by the pragmatic question of how to adjudicate outcomes that can be measured and aggregated. Unlike deontology, which takes up the problem of how I should act regardless of the consequences, utilitarianism asks one to adopt an overhead view of quantifiable factors. Its development and popularity were closely connected to the rise of nineteenth-century bureaucratic states and institutions, which, right or not, routinely engage in cost-benefit analyses that tax, allocate resources, and make policy on the basis of actuarial data and metrics. At the limit, governments and companies really do put a price on human life. In other words, if deontology asks you to consider how you would act to bring about a world in which people were fully human and free, utilitarianism asks you to consider how you would act if you were an administrator.
But if deontology and utilitarianism formulate their questions by imagining fundamentally different subject positions, there is an even starker difference in kind between both of them and Aristotle’s virtue ethics. Both deontology and utilitarianism share what I want to call an outside-in view of morality. They purport to deduce right and wrong with arguments that should be acceptable to any rational agent. That is, they imply a picture of the world in which people might encounter moral questions from some neutral perspective from which they choose a particular course of action. These imaginary moral agents are provided with an algorithm of sorts that resolves ethical dilemmas into binary courses of action. And, in doing so, these moralities orient the question of how to live within a juridical paradigm: a set of codified rights and duties bounded by moral absolutes.
The questions of virtue ethics, on the other hand, have an entirely different complexion. Aristotle asks: Given the kind of person that you are—already fully embedded within this order of habits, practices, and conventions—how should you act splendidly? Aristotle does not rationally deduce any of his virtues from scratch, nor does he issue any absolute moral prohibitions. Instead, his method is to make distinctions among principles, the presence of which he already assumes within his listeners’ experience as elite young Athenian men. And, as is well known, he says that unless you’ve already been well brought up by the time you think about these questions, it’s probably too late for you. He takes “you” as you are and from the inside out helps you take a few steps further.
To summarize the difference with an analogy: Virtue ethics assumes that you have already been speaking a mother tongue your whole life. It then tries to show you why you should care to speak as best as you can. It teaches a kind ethical vision that becomes possible only when you already deeply care about developing it. Deontology and utilitarianism, on the other hand, attempt to deduce the rules of syntax and moral vocabulary from scratch, as if those of a universal language; they then explain why it would be irrational or inhuman of you not to speak in this way (even if it is unclear who this “you” could ever be).
Outside-in moral theories remain much more intuitive to most of us because of their deductive rigour. Modern moralities are in theory completely and equally open to everyone, regardless of their circumstances, whereas Aristotelian virtue ethics assumes the presence of leisure and good birth, as well as of a community that can correctly shape character through honour and shame. On the other hand, inside-out virtue ethics continues to attract many modern thinkers precisely because it affords us a way of thinking about our life as something more than a series of binary dilemmas. Virtue ethics is not just about how to do right but about how to go about the whole project of living well—how what we think is profoundly shaped by our ordinary habits, how “to feel as we ought” (as Jane Austen put it), and how, in sum, to achieve a rational formation that’s at once deeply embedded in a pattern of life and oriented toward the highest good of our nature. Said another way: while you can be moral in a corrupt society or in isolation, you can’t develop or exhibit most, if any, virtues of character. The virtues must have a home in practice.
The sense that modern moralities are deficient by not offering some richer sense of formation has been long shared by critics of liberalism like Alasdair MacIntyre, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Michael Sandel. But part of our trouble is that our Western, modern situation has long been one of fundamental disembeddedness from any traditional rule of life. There is little left of the vernacular intelligence that brought people up in pre-modern societies—the shared proverbs, heroes, songs, and rituals within which the wisdom of a people is reposited are all but gone. We are still acculturated by hybrid, overlapping, and tributary traditions—like Judaisms, Christianities, classical liberalism, Romanticism, postwar humanism, and managerialism. But there are few really formative institutions that embed people into shared patterns of excellence. And so, while the influence of regional, municipal, and civic institutions has long been withering, we nonetheless blunder along, formed by a haphazard common denominator of families, schools, churches, companies, sports, jobs, and TikTok.
(De)Formed by Technology
Virtue ethics, educational theory, and media studies all converge on the question of what kinds of embedded social pressures are organizing the development of our characters. Aristotle was only dimly aware of what we call the “information ecosystem,” because the notion became salient only through the acceleration of technological history. And yet to the degree that the virtues are matters of formation—of what kinds of qualities our field of possibilities is actively selecting for—and to the degree that the thinning out of our local embeddedness is a direct consequence of our technological practices, it’s clear that questions of virtue ethics cannot help but be questions about technology. Digital technologies are now the single most powerful formative influence on most young people; anyone who grows up as a habitual user of certain products and platforms is being acculturated into a set of dispositions of attention, memory, argument, and moral responsiveness that sharply mark them off from those of previous generations.
If this is our given lot, the next step toward a digital virtue ethics might be to ask what kinds of qualities are at once embedded within our media environment and suited to living well. What kinds of excellence would you assume as held in common with a stranger you had just met on a plane or over email? What do we teach children to praise and blame in practice as digital virtues? I think our focus tends to be on soft skills: flexibility, transparency, niceness, compliance, leadership, resilience, creativity, communication, multi-tasking, attention to detail, helpfulness, empathy, and efficiency—the qualities that sociologist Richard Sennett has called the virtues of the new capitalism. I don’t mean that this is all that any given child is learning, but that these are widely agreed-upon qualities of character selected for by the emergent logic of our digital conduct. While some institutions like the military undoubtedly embed people in other standards of exemplary conduct, these soft skills are more consequential for most of the rest of us most of the time. The HR department doesn’t set out to hire people who are prudent, chaste, or wise. So, instead of clinging to older virtues, one might imagine that the digital Aristotle would ask us to accept that we have moved into a culture of soft-skilling and then try to elevate it into its best version.
But this line of thought is misleading, because, while the digital qualities I’ve named do deeply shape and inform us, they are not so much virtues as skills or capacities. They inhere in the role rather than in the person; that is, they are qualities of being a good user—qualities involving the strategic manipulation of others, qualities that could be attributed to chatbots—regardless of whether that user or worker may be said to be flourishing. The qualities that we require for achieving prosperity and success in digital terms are therefore asunder or athwart the qualities of excellent character that would have spelled living well for Aristotle.
Even as they make up our common sense of approbation and disapprobation, our digital “virtues” offer a technologically mediated view of ourselves that is completely outside in and self-alienating, rather than embedded inside out.
I hope that no one would speak at someone’s funeral about their great process and optimization. Nor is the language of the HR department one from within which one could ever achieve a more refined sense of human problems. Even as they make up our common sense of approbation and disapprobation, our digital “virtues” offer a technologically mediated view of ourselves that is completely outside in and self-alienating, rather than embedded inside out.
Needless to say, this results in a perplexed condition. On the one hand, we—by which I mean anyone who is acculturated to the information economy—are still being formed anyhow. We are embedded in patterns of practice that shape our character inside out. On the other hand, the dominant ideology of this socio-technical milieu purports to be merely neutral, instrumental, or objectifying. Far from teaching us how to live, digital skills and services offer to help us be more efficient so we can devote ourselves to “what really matters” (as the ads say). And so we are being morally formed by services and habits that aren’t really morally formative. We are embedded in practices that systematically disembed us.
Tasked with the work of making sense of these deranging circumstances in the service of living a good life, the specific obstacle to our ethical formation is that digital technologies are singularly disinformative. By disarticulating differences between home and office, leisure and work, private and public, childhood and adulthood, night and day, and on and off generally—by, in sum, de-ritualizing and de-realizing our experience into a continuous blob—they deform, dissociate, and disembed human beings from the patterns and rhythms that have at other moments created the habits of character we would have called virtues.
Deep (Springs) Formation
Given our perplexing condition, what kind of formation do we need now? What forms of habitual excellence can resist being undercut by the mindless upgrading of our socio-technical environment? And, in the absence of stable, long-standing, and decent collective forms, how can we, with humility, formulate any lasting conclusions about the task of living up to our vocation as human beings to our great-grandchildren?
Two political bodies that seem to take these problems seriously enough are the Chinese state and the Amish communities. The former, while committed to engineering a technologically advanced society, aggressively censors demoralizing social media content, bans AI chatbots from developing intimate relationships with children, and has in place an intricate schedule of restrictions on the quality and quantity of young people’s screen time. The latter avail themselves of a very high degree of caution as to what kinds of technological uses they sanction, realizing that the question of technology bears deeply on persons, families, and communities. China and the Amish actively shape the information environment of their people within a context of collective goods higher than individual preference. For this reason, neither is liberal or democratic. Yet they see questions about technology for what they are: the problem of formation.
The kinds of solutions that we are accustomed to thinking about in our broader liberal democratic society centre on changes to individual behaviour: not getting too caught up with chatbots, paying better attention, educating children about how to assess information. These forms of retail moderation are mainly coping mechanisms, ways of becoming better adapted to the wholesale trajectory that we are already on, whereas the question of moral formation hangs on the possibility of collective responses that go against the grain of our prevalent information environment. And if technology has in many senses come to occupy the place of culture, then genuine moral formation must become rather more countercultural than it has ever been.
I take it for granted that for most readers of Comment it is not desirable to move to China, to go off the grid, or to join the Amish. And if you’re over age twenty-five, your formative years may be behind you in any case. While I’ll say something more general later, for the moment I want to spell out some of the principles that might guide our thinking about schools and colleges as the single most formative institutions that, short of some unforeseen national change of heart, one could hope to reform today. To do this I want to tell you a bit about a place that’s a sort of hybrid of China and the Amish—namely, Deep Springs College, where my wife and I taught for four and a half years.
Deep Springs is a two-year, tuition-free college in the California high desert. It was founded in 1917 and remained all-male until 2018, when the first co-ed class was admitted. There are around thirteen students in each cohort; the staff, faculty, and administration number around twelve. Students take classes in the morning and then labour in the afternoon; they cook, clean, and maintain the grounds, and they learn to ride horses, farm alfalfa, and work a few hundred head of cattle. Students have a substantial role in governing the college. With some guardrails, they decide which students to admit, which faculty to hire, and which classes to take. The college is the only human dwelling in an operatically desolate valley. Students are not allowed to consume drugs or alcohol or to leave the valley except during breaks or with permission. The college has no religious affiliation; but students promise, in exchange for this education, to lead a life of service to humanity. In practice, it’s hard to say what this amounts to, but almost every alum will tell you that their time at Deep Springs was life-shaping for the better.
I understand such a school is not for everyone, nor is it easy to duplicate or scale up a place like this. Yet Deep Springs really does work: Year in and year out, ordinary, mutton-headed eighteen-year-olds are being formed into (more) virtuous adults. I have witnessed, again and again, these young people growing more responsible under circumstances that give them more responsibility. To be sure, not every student rises to the occasion or becomes virtuous or stays that way, but living within a context of practical demands makes it possible for a critical mass of students to become more morally serious than they would otherwise be. And students are embedded within disciplines that reliably help them resist the more dehumanizing pressures of technology beyond their two years in the valley.
Here are three principles that Deep Springs helped me see about the requirements of education as formation today—that is, three ways in which education at Deep Springs offers general criteria for other kinds of educational institutions.
First, Deep Springs educates students primarily through a demanding set of practices rather than through classroom instruction. In other words, it is a place in which formation is the expression of a way of life. Students are embedded in a circadian order and rhythm of events that shapes them regardless of their thoughts about it: Meals are served at set times; much labour can only be done in daylight; committee meetings and other public functions take place at fixed times each week. No one is singing hosannas about milking a cow at 4:30 a.m., trapping gophers, or moving leaky and outdated irrigation lines. It is tiresome to have to show up prepared for a class discussion with four to five others. And it is hell to live with the same group of forty people day in and day out. Most of the time, most students simply go through the motions. But the motions themselves make up a great part of what is routinely formative. What you do will change your mind—despite your worst intentions.
Regular schooling remains formative primarily as a place of socialization; the trouble is that socialization and academic study have come unstuck, rendering the latter inessential. If it was once enough to expect students to appear in classrooms already somewhat receptive to instruction, it was because of the presence of widely shared cultural norms that book learning was important. This norm has evaporated in the face of cultural and technological pressures, such that classrooms—especially those that centre on reading and writing—have become islands unto themselves. Formative institutions must, in other words, make a switch from being “norm-reliant” (having the reasonable expectation that students should want to learn what is taught within the terms in which teachers teach it) to being “norm-embedding” (offering frameworks of meaning that hold up despite or athwart what happens outside them). They need to be able to offer the practice of the principles they hope to cultivate.
This is easier said than done, since it suggests that the only places of instruction positioned to succeed at it are “total institutions” like boarding schools or residential colleges in relatively isolated settings: institutions that can bind social into academic concerns. But, again, the larger point is that institutions must, in this sense, be able to organize a field of living interests that will disrupt or rival digital experience—and that this is impossible so long as the classroom is the only place in students’ lives that remains cellphone-free. Institutions of this sort must become relatively more self-enclosed, picking up slack that other kinds of communities no longer do. Just as digital technology is non-specialized and pervades all areas of life, so must the work of being a student spread beyond the classroom itself.
Some will sniff eau de authoritarianism or paternalism here. But keep in mind that social media platforms and digital services already completely surveil, organize, and establish the terms of young people’s socialization and formation. To put it bluntly, human formation will be governed either by the attention plundering of companies or by concerted educational responses to them. And any intermediate body that can set shared expectations about the use of technology across various contexts—departments, dorms, parents’ groups—will be in a better position to succeed. Not simply because students will be policed by adults in more contexts, but because it is only when students internalize these norms from the inside out that the norms stand a chance of being transformative.
The second principle that makes Deep Springs formative is that all these experiences receive their coherence from the fact that one’s responsibilities are fairly evident to oneself and all. Sleeping through a milking shift causes a tangible harm to the cow; if you are out sick, a peer will have to step in for you. Trash on the lawn or a broken copying machine is yours to deal with, since there is no one else whose job it is to fix it. Not preparing for a class with only six students will mean that five others will sit there resenting you for an hour and a half. And hiring the wrong faculty or admitting ill-suited students can result in damaging long-term mistakes. I don’t want to underplay how frustrating, painful, and exasperating it was to be at Deep Springs. Many students felt misjudged by their peers and found ways to retreat or withdraw. At the same time, it was possible to acknowledge someone for excelling at any or all the things I’ve named.
The general formative principle at work here is the connection between accountability and attention. It’s obvious, for instance, that the havoc that large language models (LLMs) have wrought on education by making writing, grading, and summarizing effortless has unmasked the fact that many kinds of educational assignments have long been treated as transactional outputs. The more troubling fact is that LLMs threaten to transform all kinds of industries, because there is almost no form of public speech left that promotes or rewards attention. Within this situation of programmed mindlessness, it is easy to hector students to pay attention. Yet the real problem is to afford them some context within which practical problems must be faced, must emerge as worthy of their attention. And practical problems emerge as meaningful—come into view as ours—only when we must respond to them within a living situation. What we must care to attend to shapes what we can care to do.
The work of formation now can and should consist in the acquisition of hard, basic, or practical skills, including intellectual skills like close reading as well as material crafts like woodworking, pottery, gardening, glasswork, cooking, music-making, and plumbing. Unlike the soft skills that are touted as the future of education but can only very equivocally be called moral, these hard skills expand our sense of accountability. To be an excellent reader of books, of tables, or of a meal means just that: to be aware of everything for which the maker is responsible. Hard skills expand accountability because they are bound by criteria of excellence that are relatively conspicuous. No matter how nice or transparent or flexible you are about the process, either the chair can be sat on or not; either the vegetable grows or not. Because the hard skills are developed through rote and laborious repetition, they body forth the mind in time. In requiring work with material that’s recalcitrant to our intentions, such skills require a new form of responsiveness to reality. And a hand’s cunning can open the mind, because we can really pay attention only to what we can change.
A third principle that makes Deep Springs formative is that it causes students to ask what a life of service consists in and to justify various decisions in this light (like whom to admit, what career to pursue after graduation, and what it is to live well). In hard fact, Deep Springs graduates go on to do all kinds of things, some of which are merely self-serving. But the systematic insistence on this point has a few concrete effects. It gives students the authority to ask why they are doing what they are doing and how it is connected to the aims of the institution. It forces them to reckon with the question of what any one of us can really do for the world. And it cultivates in them a habit of what I’d call teleological thinking—insistence on a shared horizon of meaning wider than profit or success. The habit of such thinking opens up into a spiritual dimension for many of them: What is ultimately valuable? What should we be doing with ourselves? Why are we?
The reason why bodies with a spiritual mission—like Amish communities, or Waldorf and Christian schools—are better attuned to the problem of formation now is that they provide an answer to the question of purpose that exceeds the terms of individual choice alone. Most religious (but in other ways conventional) schools attract like-minded parents who are able to establish a context of socialization and study for their children because they share a set of first principles. This is one way of addressing the problem of formation.
If technology has in many senses come to occupy the place of culture, then genuine moral formation must become rather more countercultural than it has ever been.
Deep Springs offers the contrasting possibility of demanding that its participants share a set of intense practices, which in turn frees them up to have real disagreements about first principles themselves. One of the most striking spectacles to me was to see trans and nonbinary students from Brooklyn learning how to work cattle with a cowboy who was an evangelical Christian of a sort so traditional that he refused to be in a room alone with any woman not his wife. I don’t say that these people liked each other, but they could work together in the presence of standards of competence that were not personal or identitarian. For this reason, unlike most institutions of higher learning, Deep Springs manages to be neither religious nor atheistic, but genuinely agnostic: It urges the inescapable presence of the question of one’s vocation and through practice holds open the space to confront it.
I take it to be obvious that we are living at a moment when all kinds of capacities that had once been shorthand for what’s human are being disconcerted and called into question. And while all digital boosters advertise this as a way for humanity to unlock its true potential—eliminating annoying frictions like working, feeling, and thinking—in order to devote ourselves to a delicious obsolescence sometimes labelled “creativity,” it is characteristic of this line of thought that it invariably defines what’s creative or authentic or human as that which digital agents cannot yet do. This is a winning strategy so long as we have no care to formulate human measure, place, or purpose in other terms. And it is a strategy that leads directly to dehumanization.
We are prone to imagining the threat of dehumanization as one in which murderbots enslave us. Our paradigm for “dehumanizing” speech is one that is coercive or humiliating. These are real threats about the end of human beings, but the gravest threat now is to the human end itself: I mean a situation in which we are so completely successful in mediating and optimizing our tasks into outside-in digital processes that we lose our grip on the question of what we are for from the inside out. The clearest picture of this dehumanization is not being caged or brutalized but spending one’s life in an airport lounge: a non-place in which we are completely safe and comfortable even as we are almost completely desocialized, decontextualized, deskilled, and living in a sort of highly controlled dead zone of meaning; a place in which opaque technologies have come to replace the work of culture itself, and in which each person is absorbed in a parenthesis of screened experience even as all are practically neutralized.
Becoming Human (Again)
“Human” is the word both for what we cannot fail to be and for what we must strain every nerve to become; this is our paradox, reborn once and again for every age and in each person. The soft skills are, as I’ve said, excellences proper to being transmitters and receivers of information, but they are not virtues to live by. We must, then, consider new forms of situated excellence that will humanize us in the teeth of prevailing digital pressures. That is, we need virtues that are deliberately created, sustained, and specifically countercultural—which is not exactly the sort of thing that virtue has ever been before. The clearest way for us to shoulder this task is to reformulate the institutions that form children and young people. But I want to generalize the three principles I’ve articulated above into full-fledged virtues that should claim everyone’s notice, that seem to me essential to living alongside AI, and that directly respond to the threat of the airport-lounge dehumanization that troubles me.
First, we need the virtue of living language. According to the Turing test, a computer can be said to be intelligent if it can produce outputs that are indistinguishable from those of a human being. It is a bad test of actual intelligence for many reasons, but it is an excellent test of human beings’ eagerness to ascribe intelligence to machine outputs. The time is coming when the world may be divided into people who are willing to feel that LLMs speak to them and people who are not. Because this will be a matter of practical conviction rather than logical proof, it is only by acquiring the virtue of living language that one might resist.
An advantage of a residential environment like Deep Springs is that it embeds students within a shared context in which speech can be more than transactional. As in any total institution, people there share a certain argot. But beyond shared references, there is a sense that speech is a dimension for which one is answerable; it is important to keep secrets, make promises, speak persuasively, and call things by their right name. In such a community of living-language speakers, one acquires the inside-out sense that language is something you do. Language is realized only by being enacted, whereas the most pernicious feature of digital technology is that it unravels the contexts in which words carry weight. Just as you can know that other human beings are real only through practical conviction, you can know that words are alive only if you have lived them and if they have animated you. Human beings are worded creatures, creatures possessed of speech. But to live by words takes practice.
A second virtue for the digital future is imagination. Imagination, in the practical sense I am using it, is the bond between our particular sense experience and the world as a whole. That is, it is the capacity whereby we are able to figure the world as a whole from our limited place in it—and to know them both as home. The reason the word sounds corny is that we picture imagination as our ability to generate mental images at whim. But imagination is the way in which our situated, material experiences may transform sight into vision, or sound into call. In this sense, imagination is our capacity to see with accuracy what is open for us to do. What seizes our imagination is what becomes possible for us. But you can imagine only what you already have eyes to see—the latent possibilities disclosed to those who care to master them.
What’s intoxicating about Deep Springs is the sense that every problem is yours or could be; through persuasion, hard work, or cajoling, almost nothing is intractable. In my brief time there, students banned the internet, voted to make English composition compulsory, and chose to raise piglets. The farm went organic and then back to non-organic, several staff and faculty were shown the door, and an observatory was built from scratch on a mountainside. The college usually decides not to observe daylight saving each year, being on its own time. And because emergency services are about forty-five minutes away (to say nothing of the fact that the 911 operator does not always pick up), we bandaged a lot of wounds and treated dehydration ourselves. This giddy sense of possibility does not carry over to most parts of the modern world. Yet this somewhat artificial pedagogical experience allowed students to imagine and believe that the world could be otherwise. Our digital environment, in contrast, bleaches away the place we stand on and rivets our attention on what’s always everywhere and elsewhere. It takes matters out of our hands. And when you imagine you can’t matter, you cannot act. That is: despair.
The third virtue we need in our digital future is hope. Hope has long been a theological virtue, but we’ve also seen that it’s partly a technological artifact. For much of the past two centuries, many people shared an unspoken sense that humanity was getting better, that the arc of history bent toward justice, that we were on the whole better off now than ever before: Diseases were being eradicated, millions were raised out of grinding rural poverty, slavery was abolished, the most evil regimes were defeated, and so on.
This story has modulated into the minor mode over the past decade or so. Declensionism is the new progressivism. The idiom of our news cycles is saturated with catastrophizing, inflection points of no return, and apocalyptic forecasts about climate, war, the other party, AI, brain rot, and Gen Z. This current mainstreaming of despair is just as conventional as the optimism that preceded it. What has changed is not so much something at the heart of the world as our way of relating to it—these narrative moods are themselves part of the experience of time that is embedded in our digital uses. Hope is our sense of the ultimate coherence of time itself: its meaning as a whole. Our current mainstream despair is, in contrast, the wishful certainty that time doesn’t add up to anything, that the only thing to be done with it is to fast-forward to the end, which will at least involve us all in the exciting spectacle of its final burn.
It’s easy to chirp in response that hope is good; the hard question is how to sustain contexts in which it can be practiced. Deep Springs doesn’t require students to hope in any explicit way, but it places them in direct contact with the realities of tending plants and animals within a hostile environment. It confronts them with the vulnerability of natural energies and resources, and it forces them to reckon with the terrible and irreducible mystery that other people refuse to do as you think they should (that is, the mystery that other people really exist). If one way of understanding despair is the temptation toward total outside-in-ness—to adopt the view that things are determined never be otherwise than they seem—then Deep Springs rubs one’s face in the lie of this mechanistic view. It seduces one to love a world that is always more than one holds.
But beyond this particular institution, the more general shape of the task is clear. Our technological experience presents itself as absolute, discontinuous, radical, and all-consuming. But by killing time this experience also causes us to see ourselves as spectators of a vast and dumb show. And while there are maximal reasons for despair, the communion of past with future time has always been the active achievement of any human community that works to scrape out a home in the world. To believe that the past is what is promised, that the future is what’s passing, and that the present is the willing continuity of what quickens us—these are the musical tasks of tomorrowing from which we’ll live up to the human whole reformed, renewed.
