Core Beliefs Still Matter

    I think that I think, there are particular temptations that arrive with every major technological revolution. We begin by believing we are building tools to help us. Eventually, we start reorganizing ourselves around them. That temptation is accelerating in the age of artificial intelligence. AI promises extraordinary advances in medicine, science, education, and productivity. Americans should approach those possibilities with confidence and ambition. A country that stops innovating eventually stops leading. But technological revolutions do not merely change what societies can do. They change what societies reward, what societies normalize, and ultimately what societies become. That is the deeper challenge now.

    In a speech at the Manhattan Institute, former Senator and president of the University of Florida, Ben Sasse (who has been written about before here in this space) offered a line Americans should remember long after the applause has faded: “What good is it to gain the whole world if we forfeit the souls that we are supposed to form?” The line landed so hard because so many Americans already sense the problem. We are more connected than any civilization in history, yet millions of people feel isolated. We possess unprecedented access to information, yet struggle to sustain attention. We have platforms optimized for visibility, but fewer institutions capable of forming character. We seem very dysfunctional!

    You can see the shift everywhere now. Families sit together at restaurants while every face angles downward toward a screen. Students increasingly struggle with sustained attention, unstructured silence, and face-to-face disagreement. Teachers quietly wonder whether some young people are losing the ability to wrestle through intellectual difficulty without outsourcing the struggle itself to algorithms and machines. The concern is not simply that AI can write essays or answer questions. The concern is that convenience can slowly erode formation and the core blocks of civil society itself.

    Democratic societies depend upon citizens capable of self-government. Self-government requires patience, restraint, discipline, moral judgment, and the ability to distinguish between appetite and obligation. Those capacities are not produced automatically by markets or technology. They are cultivated slowly by families, schools, religious communities, mentors, and a host of civic institutions.

    For most of American history, we understood this instinctively. Families taught responsibility and restraint. Schools transmitted shared knowledge and civic inheritance. Churches and synagogues reminded people that human beings answer to standards higher than impulse and appetite. Coaches, scout leaders, neighbors, and civic organizations taught young people how to sacrifice for something larger than themselves.

    These institutions were imperfect. But they formed habits essential to democratic life: humility, loyalty, self-control, service, and the ability to live alongside people different from yourself. Many of those institutions are now weaker precisely as digital life becomes more immersive. And the result is not simply distraction. It is disorientation.

    Young people are increasingly asked to construct identity alone, online, and under relentless performance pressure. They can build audiences before they build character. They can generate content before they develop convictions. They are flooded with stimulation while being starved of grounding. And now AI threatens to accelerate some of those pressures if we approach it carelessly. Algorithms can distribute information. They cannot love a child, mentor a lonely teenager, teach courage after failure, or help someone develop a moral compass. A chat-bot can provide answers. It cannot model wisdom, sacrifice, restraint, or responsibility.

    Those things still require human beings and human institutions. That is why so many Americans feel exhausted even while living in an age of extraordinary convenience. Human beings were not designed merely to consume content, optimize workflows, and curate digital identities. They were designed to belong to families, neighborhoods, congregations, classrooms, and communities that ask things of them and remind them they matter beyond performance.

    This is why Sasse’s remarks mattered deeply. Not because they rejected technology. They did not. The point was not panic or retreat from modern life. The point was mastery. “We must master these tools rather than be mastered by them,” he argued; and that distinction is everything. America should absolutely lead the world in artificial intelligence, scientific research, and technological innovation. But a civilization that can generate infinite content while losing the ability to form wise, disciplined, morally grounded citizens will eventually discover that technological power alone cannot sustain a free society.

    The answer is not nostalgia. It is in formation and rebuilding institutions strong enough to shape human beings again: strong families, serious schools, religious communities, civic organizations, mentors, and places where young people learn obligation alongside freedom. The great question of the AI age is not whether machines will become more powerful. They will. Rather, the question is whether we will remain serious enough about forming souls to ensure that the people using those machines remain fully human.

    Sasse was right to remind Americans of something we already know but too often forget: The future will not be secured by technology alone. It will depend on the character of the people wielding it.

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com