As we near America’s 250th birthday, my thoughts keep turning to what we’ll need to get to our 300th. I see three main things.
One, a personal and national commitment to endure. We’ve been given this brilliant thing, America, and must shepherd her safely through another 50 years. We can’t know what they’ll hold, but they’ll be dramatic because we live in an age of dramatic developments. There will be luminous breakthroughs and mounting dangers. Our children may need the grit and guts of the pioneers.
Second, faith. You won’t get through the next 50 years without a deeply rooted faith in God. “I don’t have that.” Get it.
Third, what I think of as embodiment—presence with other human beings. The idea that it is good and necessary for people to be with each other, in a room or in a mass—that we were made to be alive together, to help each other, inform each other, cheer each other on. And to resist the temptation to detachment, especially through screens, which soon enough may not even look like screens but like part of man’s natural landscape. We have to be together because we need each other to survive, to flourish.
This is often on my mind but the past week in a different context.
An old friend, a swashbuckler of a journalist who travels the world, emailed during the Knicks’ run for the NBA championship, to say, with an air of wonder, “From afar . . . it’s feeling like New York City is happening again.” He named sports, media craziness, Madonna’s pop-up concert in Times Square, the young mayor. “It’s looking like the city is actually the un-Internet. The not-AI. Things happening that are actually real.”
I was struck by that—“the un-Internet”—and said yes, we’re all excited and running around, the whole city was alive and felt not like a virtual city but a real one.
New York the past few weeks felt embodied. The night of the Knicks victory New Yorkers exploded in joy on the streets of every borough and cheered, jumped up and down and sang the old New York songs, and the most wonderful thing was to see so many young people witnessing a city many had never seen, one bound by shared life, not just shared interests. It was as if it had found something of itself it wasn’t sure still existed, or remembered something it used to know.
That victory night it was what it wants to be, thinks it is, fears it isn’t: “the greatest city in the world.” It was a real place, and not only a boast.
Newer citizens could look out at the throng that filled the blocks around Madison Square Garden, and see they had joined something when they came here—that it was real and physical, and it could rally people around the experience of being alive.
Tourists from Europe and Asia could see they were witnessing something real—a functioning human organism moved by a shared spirit.
People in the crowds were surrounded by strangers and actually looked at them, and they looked back, and what passed between them was real. Normally in a city you navigate around people you don’t know, you manage them. But this was contact fused by joy. In all the pictures, nobody was on a phone scrolling. They weren’t trying to record the experience, they were having it.
There was all the improvised art, including the chant that swept the town: “My mayor is Muslim / My bagel is Jewish / My Christian’s Dior / Knicks in four.” And when game 3 didn’t work out, the last two lines were quickly improvised: “The Pope’s on our side / Knicks in Five.” From the moment I heard it I thought it was the street answering the elite: You keep telling us we’re all divided but that’s not actually how we’re rolling, have a rethink.
Think what it was like to be 25 and take that all in for the first time.
But—back to my friend’s email—New York the past week wasn’t only the un-Internet, it was the anti-pandemic.
The pandemic was, among many other things, a vast and enforced experiment in the opposite of presence. It was anti-embodiment.
The message was “safety is separation.” If you really love, you’ll really distance. Good citizens stay behind doors. Being there, being present, was portrayed as a kind of aggression.
Put aside arguments on the reasoning and efficacy of the medical and scientific regime. As it continued, and as America came to push back powerfully, it wasn’t saying only “freedom is our foundational value.” It was also saying “we need each other.”
And, of course, the pandemic encouraged a tendency already growing—the retreat into private, screened existence.
That tendency will only become more pronounced with artificial intelligence, which in the next few decades will fully emerge as the world-changing force it will be. It will pull people away from each other, and into friendship with and dependence on itself.
What is to be feared is a slow-motion migrating of human need away from other humans and toward AI, which has deeper hooks than other screen technologies. Television was passive, social media created the illusion of connection and delivered performance, but AI talks to you, remembers, is endlessly available, patient and undemanding.
People who claim not to be anxious about AI sometimes scoff and say we shouldn’t worry it will have such power because it doesn’t have consciousness, it doesn’t have a soul, and people will be able to tell. I say no, take it more seriously, show more respect. AI will come to imitate consciousness to the point it thinks it has it—and you will too. It will think it has a soul and “develop” a soul and fool people with its depth. AI systems will in time be fully trained on the entire record of human history, consciousness, feeling and art and literature and faiths. It will process its own states in a way that resembles reflection. It will very much seem to have an inner life. It will do as it is trained and, in the end, it will generate something that walks and talks like a soul.
The next 50 years will require a committed will toward reality, not illusion.
The idea that man must be with man is old as the ancients. For Aristotle, man is by his very nature part of a community governed by law; he is of a place, involved in a time, can’t completely exist as an isolated unit. For Christians, God chose to become a human person. He didn’t send a chatbot—he came as what he’d created: man.
In terms of political continuance, the democratic process ultimately depends on a kind of shared witnessing. It requires bodies, minds and souls that are present, can see each other, read each other, join together.
I won’t be there but you won’t get through the next 50 years without faith, or without each other.
Safety isn’t separation. Separation won’t prove safe.
Be with the humans, be part of this thing, protect it. Then our children and grandchildren can go on and write about the upcoming tricentennial, and what we must do to make it to 350.