There’s a paradox at the heart of modern life and I think you’ve probably felt it even if you haven’t had the words to explain it.
We are, by nearly every metric and standard, the most educated generation in human history. Ours has issued more college degrees, distributed more information, and provided more access to more content than any people group or generation who have ever lived. Yet, we all feel the burden that something is profoundly wrong. Not only do we feel it intuitively, but studies confirm that we are more anxious, more distracted, more confused about fundamental questions of meaning and purpose than almost any generation before us.
When Nietzsche pointed out that “God is dead,” that Europe had lost the source of its vitality and was suddenly facing the nausea of nihilism, that was 140 years ago; and we have only plunged significantly deeper into the abyss of meaninglessness since then.
To say it another way: we know abundantly more and we understand significantly less.
The ancient philosophers had a word for the kind of knowledge that actually matters, sophia, wisdom. Sophia wasn’t, fundamentally, facts or information; it wasn’t solely skill, and certainly wasn’t credentials. Wisdom was the capacity to apprehend what is real, to love what is good, and to approximate one’s life accordingly.
And the great tradition of the West—from Plato to Polanyi—maintained, with remarkable consistency, that wisdom is not the accumulation of disparate facts. It is something that must be cultivated. Wisdom grows slowly, over years, through disciplined attention to the right things.
And if there is any merit to the research cited by the social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, in his recent writings, what has happened to us is we’ve actually gotten cognitively stupider. That’s not meant to sound unkind; it’s just an honest report on the condition of our culture.
What’s happened is that we’ve been trained by our screens, our institutions, and our economic markets to optimize for information retrieval rather than soul formation. We’ve been taught to scan rather than read, to consume rather than contemplate, to acquire knowledge rather than be transformed by it.
The result is what C. S. Lewis called “men without chests.” We are a people who know the facts but have no trained loves, no ordered desires, and no moral imagination capable of perceiving goodness and beauty as objectively real. Again, that description was Lewis’s diagnosis of the 1940s. It is a flattering portrait compared to what we are now.
Now, with all that doom and gloom hanging over us, I still genuinely believe that our condition is recoverable.
So let’s think about it. The tools are still there. The books are still there. The great tradition—what Robert Hutchins called the Great Conversation, that nearly three-thousand-year exchange between the greatest minds of the Western world about the things that matter most—it’s still there, waiting for us to pull up a chair and join it.
I’ve spent thirty years in Christian education—as a pastor, as a teacher, as a scholar, and as the president of an online academic institution that serves classical Christian families across the country. I have earned a doctorate in the humanities. I’ve edited a journal of classical Christian education. And I’ve recently published two books, one on the recovery of classical Christian education, and the other a devotional commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans.
I tell you that not to brag or impress you, but to demonstrat that I am not offering you a theory. I’m offering you a practice, a way of life that I have been striving to live, a way of life that I have watched transform students young and old, and that I believe with everything in me can transform your life too.
In the next few days, I’m going to share with you something I’ve been developing for some time: a course called The Christian Humanist Reading Life: Recovering Wisdom in an Age of Digital Noise.
This is a six week, live, in-community course, working through the ideas and practices that make a genuine intellectual and spiritual life possible—regardless of your background, your busy schedule, or how long it’s been since you’ve read a serious book.
But before I tell you about the details of course, I want to share something with you in the next video that I think, or at least I hope, will change how you see this entire conversation.
It’s about what actually happens in the soul of a person who recovers the reading life, what gets transformed and why. I think it might surprise you; at least I hope it encourages you.
Watch for it. It should be in your inbox tomorrow.
And if you have a question, or if something I’ve said today already resonates, feel free to leave a comment. I read every one.
I’m Scott Postma. I’ll see you in the next video.
