Letter #200: Nobody Else Can Go for You

It's a process. It's a process. It's a process.

Like Brad Pitt said in Moneyball, “this is a process. It’s a process. It’s a process. OK?”

On our livestream last night we revisited your idea that “Life is movement. Process. Striving.” And just like that we’ve come back around, in the way of these things, to our original and central theme: what kind of Christianity can set us apart from the machines?

This week I ran across some nudnik who thinks “Reading books is now a waste of time” because “AI reasoning models can distill key insights and tell you how to implement them.”

And I thought, poor kid: he’s probably right. But not in the way he thinks. If “key insights” is all he looks for in books, then it was a waste of time long before they ever fired up the machines. If all he learned to look for in literature was some marketable distillate, he never stood a chance.

It reminds me of this poem by

Joseph Fasano

called “For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper”:

Now I let it fall back
in the grasses.
I hear you. I know
this life is hard now.
I know your days are precious
on this earth.
But what are you trying
to be free of?
The living? The miraculous
task of it?
Love is for the ones who love the work.

There are some things you can only get the benefit of if you go through the process of doing them, because the point is for you to have done them, not that they have been done somewhere. Reading novels is obviously one of those things. So is raising a family, eating a meal, watching the sun rise. So, in other words, is life. If you’re not able to find things worth doing yourself, for their own sake, pretty soon you won’t be able to find anything a machine can’t do better than you.

There’s a chilling line in the psalms about idols—sculptures with human faces that have no inner life, even though people treat them like living gods. “Those who make them will become like them”—at least that’s how it’s usually translated.

But that translation makes it sound like there’s some external punishment getting handed down after the fact. Really, the Hebrew says something more like “those who make them are already becoming like them.” The sin is its own punishment: thinking of yourself like a hunk of metal is what leads you to act like a hunk of metal, and eventually to bow down before other hunks of metal—a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you believe you can become a machine, you already have.

Conversely, “life eternal” is just the kind of life that’s lived for its own sake, which has its own reason for being and therefore generates its own rocket fuel. The slow tectonic history of God’s fractious church, the working out of our own chaotic American revival, the painful grinding process of being alive in this vale of soul-making: the journey is the destination. And like the song said, nobody else can walk it for you.

Love,
Spencer