A note from me:
I’ve been going back and forth about whether to publish this piece. It’s rough around the edges, stark, and not particularly witty or fun. But after seeing a hugely prominent political activist murdered for his beliefs (whether or not I share them), I feel that it’s not up to me anymore. Please, read the following with the understanding that I very dearly believe in it and hope that you will at least see where I’m coming from. Here it is.
For me, it all started last year, but it’s something that’s been simmering for a long time. I don’t remember exactly where I read it, but the turning point was a quote from GK Chesterton. At that point, I knew basically nothing about the man, but that singular excerpt made me an instant fan. It perfectly captured a sense of the kind of drag-down, grievance-minded politics that I’d been grappling with, but hadn’t seen properly diagnosed. Here’s that diagnosis, reproduced at length:
When the great trumpet of equality was blown, almost immediately afterwards was made one of the greatest blunders in the history of mankind. For all this pride and vivacity, all these towering symbols and flamboyant colours, should have been extended to mankind. The tobacconist should have had a crest, and the cheesemonger a war-cry…
Instead of doing this, the democrats made the appalling mistake—a mistake at the root of the whole modern malady—of decreasing the human magnificence of the past instead of increasing it. They did not say, as they should have done, to the common citizen, 'You are as good as the Duke of Norfolk,' but used that meaner democratic formula, 'The Duke of Norfolk is no better than you are.'
What I want to do with this post is explain how this meaner democratic formula—this decreasing of human magnificence—is becoming ever more pervasive in our discourse and ever more harmful in its effect on us. While I’ve generally focused on technology or mass culture on this blog, I’ll here focus on a moral case:
We are living in a reductive, pessimistic era. We are in a race to the bottom of human kinship. To survive with our souls intact, we need to reorient ourselves around building optimism and compassion.
Interested in the man who had, for me, rung the bell and set my thoughts straight, I sought out a good introductory work by Chesterton. I chose Heretics, a short book from 1905 about orthodoxy and heretical thinking. (I found it fitting, as resistance to this sort of pessimistic worldview felt, and feels, heretical.) Heretics centered on how most turn-of-the-century intellectuals, in their haste to cast off the suppressive dogma of religious thought, had convinced themselves that the cool, critical rationality of their ideas made those ideas inherently better, brighter, and more useful than the ones proffered by the old guard. Not to say that, in key cases, they weren’t—but it wasn’t on the merit of their form.
One of the early chapters, ”On the Negative Spirit,” struck the same chord within me that the excerpt about drag-down democracy had. In it, Chesterton explains that what these progressive minds had in fact done was to create a new status quo wherein a critical, reductive—inherently reactionary—eye was the norm, and older belief frameworks based on ‘irrational’ principles, like Christianity, had become radical and disruptive due to their complete refusal to play by the new rules. I see clear echoes of this paradigm today.
The skeptic is satisfied in taking this position by its mere character. He is a worse dogmatist than the believer, blindly adhering to a universal negation applied in all cases—not because it fits them, but because criticism and tearing down is the default standpoint. It is a view of total vacuity, nevertheless girded by the institutions and intellectual atmosphere of the day. The skeptic and his ilk are certain in their bones not of what is, but of what is not. This spirit, Chesterton saw, was corrosive. It was adept at demolishing but incapable of building. It could tell you with surgical precision why a cathedral was a monument to superstition, but it could not lay a single stone of a structure that could inspire similar awe or communal devotion.
Now, to be clear, this is not a ”coming out” post where I reveal I’ve gone Catholic or trad. Far from it. But I do nevertheless confess to feeling that this negative spirit has become the prevailing norm again, due to, among other things: the profusion of algorithms that optimize for tribalism and intolerance, institutions that have burned societal trust and goodwill, and, ever more, a mob mentality egged on by increasing paranoia, precarity, and alienation. I want to speak out against this destructive spirit before it brings us even an inch closer to, as Orwell put it, the sort of collective hysteria where normally sane people gleefully bash each other’s faces in with spanners.
But the bashing starts many layers up. The timeless truth is that it is easier to criticize than to create. A blank canvas can be anything, but the moment the first stroke is made, the work becomes vulnerable. It is now a specific thing and specific things can be flawed. Jony Ive once remarked that the most dangerous thing to a new idea is people desperate to express an opinion. An opinion requires no stake, no risk, and no creative energy. And the more networked we become, the more this flooding of the collective consciousness with knee-jerk opinions leads to an acute stasis and fear of creation. A fear of taking a positive stance—one that builds—over a negative stance—one that smashes.
This is the essence of the reductive spirit: it thrives on the low-cost, high-yield transaction of cynical critique. It is the easy, automatic, unthinking reaction that requires no grace and no imagination. It is the spirit of the internet comment section, a gladiator’s arena where the most pithy, reductive, and dismissive take often wins the most applause. (Tip: I use a browser extension called Shut Up that hides comment sections everywhere.) People now instinctively scroll past the thing that was made to get to the comments—the torrent of opinions from the tribe about the thing. In this environment, thoughtful critique is buried. Straightforward support, too, can be seen as naïve. We have created, through an increasing rejection of nuance and cooperation, a social architecture that disproportionately incentivizes heckling while punishing the performer.
He who can snipe is safe, because sniping doesn’t offer anything lasting that can be attacked. He who speaks first is always at a disadvantage, because he doesn’t know how or when he will be sniped; only that it is coming. The path of least resistance is to join the chorus of condemnation.
A recent survey of over 1400 students at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan showed eighty-eight percent of them pretending to hold more progressive beliefs than they actually had in order to succeed socially or academically. Eighty-eight percent. Let that sink in. The detractors have created an atmosphere where only a vanishing minority of people feel like they can truly speak their minds.
This dynamic has supercharged our culture wars and replaced reasoned political disagreement. Consider the battles over nuclear power, GMOs, and, now, artificial intelligence. In each case, the argument for the status quo, for not doing the new thing, is fundamentally easier to make. It taps into our innate fear of the unknown and requires only the imagination of potential disaster. To argue for these technologies requires a positive vision. It demands a belief in progress, an acceptance of risk, and the difficult work of building systems and safeguards. It requires a belief that we can create a better future, not just avoid a worse one. A view that the crowd would consider naïve. As the writer of the essential Life Goals of Dead People puts it:
Dead people goals often involve avoiding things, while alive people goals are more likely to involve achieving things. After all, often the easiest way to avoid a bad outcome is not to do anything—you can’t lose all your money gambling if you don’t step into a casino—and dead people are great at not doing things.
Of dead things, Chesterton wrote that they “can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.” The negative spirit is the current, pulling us inexorably toward inaction and decay. To build, to work together, to disagree without dismissing, is to swim against it.
Allowing ourselves to be swept downstream by this zeitgeist is a surrender. It’s a retreat into a murky relativism (for dead things have no beliefs) where the crowd, and your relation to it, becomes the ultimate authority. And in that environment, anyone can manipulate you by harnessing and then appealing to the cheap energy of the mob. You will be ruthlessly battered on the banks unless you stand up and climb out of the water.
So what is the antidote? How do we reclaim a constructive, positive spirit in an age of overwhelming negativity? The answer can't be just another clever argument. To counter a spirit of cold critique, we need a passionate and unguarded appeal to the heart. We need sincerity. Few have ever captured this more beautifully or evocatively than David Foster Wallace did in a 2005 commencement speech that came to be called “This Is Water.”
I implore you to watch the whole thing, but here’s the short version: Wallace opens with a parable about two young fish who are asked by an older fish, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” The two young fish swim on for a bit, and then one of them looks over at the other and asks, “What the hell is water?”
Wallace’s point is that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see. The “water” is our own natural, hard-wired default setting: the deep-seated belief that we are the absolute center of the universe. It’s the internal monologue that filters every experience through the lens of self. The person driving slowly is a personal obstacle; the frustrating bureaucracy is a personal affront; the online personality with a bad take is launching a personal attack.
The real work of being human, Wallace argues, is the choice to jolt ourselves out of this automatic state. He asks us to imagine a mundane, frustrating adult day: you’re tired after work, you have to go to a crowded supermarket, the checkout line is horribly long. The default setting kicks in immediately, filling you with anger and resentment at all these other people, these obstacles in your way.
But, he says, you have a choice. You can consciously, actively decide to think differently. You can prompt yourself to consider that the person in front of you might have a life just as complex and difficult as your own. That the cashier’s slowness might be a symptom of a deeper pain you can’t see. This act of empathy isn’t a feeling; it’s a discipline. It is, as he terms it, the difficult, adult work of choosing what to pay attention to and how to construct meaning from experience.
This choice is the antidote. The knee-jerk, cynical dismissal is the act of demolition Chesterton warned against. But the conscious choice to imagine a different story for someone else, to extend grace instead of judgment, is the act of creation. It is laying the first stone. It is swimming against the stream. But what does compassion look like at its logical endpoint, its furthest extreme?
(A final note: I had originally decided not to include this following part, as it has a much different scope and tone than the rest. But again, I now feel that I really should.)
On October 2, 2006, 32-year-old Charles Roberts, a delivery driver living and working in Pennsylvania Amish country, backed his pickup truck up to an Amish schoolhouse, stepped out with a pistol and zip ties in hand, and took the schoolchildren hostage. Over the next half hour, he let all of the boys and adults go before lining up the remaining children—ten girls aged six to thirteen—against the chalkboard. He systematically shot every last one, and then himself. Five young girls were murdered. It remains the worst school shooting in Pennsylvania history and the deadliest attack ever directed at the Amish community.
That was at 11am. That same afternoon, members of the Amish community, parents of the murdered children, went to Roberts’ home. They did not go with torches or guns. They went with open arms. They embraced the murderer's pregnant widow, Marie. They wept with her. They offered absolute, unconditional forgiveness to the man who had just executed their daughters. There was no debate. There was no hesitation. They offered love for Marie, knowing the world would show her no mercy. In the days that followed, forty Amish men and women attended the funeral of the man who had killed their children. They held his family's hands. They took up a collection for his children.
Years on, Roberts’ mother Terri wanted to repay the kindness that was shown to her family. She volunteered one day a week to take care of Rosanna, a child whom her son left in a wheelchair, unable to speak for the rest of her foreshortened life. Before Rosanna became Roberts’ sixth and final victim in 2024, Terri would visit and bathe her. She read stories to her. It is impossible for us to imagine the depths of shame that Terri must have felt. But the bonds of care are and remain infinitely stronger than those of rage and nihilism. They can subsume and reconfigure any tragedy.
This story shatters me every time I think about it. And while it seems almost superhuman, the choice made by the Amish community that afternoon is, in principle, the exact same choice Wallace asks us to make every day on an infinitely smaller scale. It is the decision to fight our default setting—whether that setting is petty frustration or unimaginable grief—and actively construct a more compassionate reality.
This story isn't a prescription for how we all must act. But to me, it’s a profound demonstration that this choice is always available. If grace is possible in the face of such horror, then it is possible in the face of differing opinions, flawed ideas, or the grating essence of the everyday. There is no situation where cruelty is obligatory. Combating the negative spirit begins with the simple, difficult, world-changing realization that this choice is one we can always make.
Wallace’s “conscious decision” and the Amish community’s unconditional forgiveness both require something our hyper-networked age seems to have lost: a framework for practicing grace. We need structures that make compassion easier, not harder. This brings us to why I believe that traditions like Christianity are experiencing resurgent appeal.
I said this isn’t a trad conversion story, and it’s not. But I can easily see why people, especially young people exhausted by the endless cycle of outrage and dismissal, are returning to churches. The appeal of Christianity at this moment, I argue, lies in its mechanics: it is a grounded system that builds on forgiveness, offering a bias toward mercy and obligations that run deeper than preference. You don’t need to be a believer to admit that its rituals of confession and reconciliation are sadly absent from modern discourse. Naturally, those who fear the networked mob most—our youth—seek shelter within a system that closes the door to so much pecking. These Christian tools civilize disagreement and metabolize guilt so it doesn’t curdle into cruelty. It is one of many ways by which we can place Wallace’s practice of merciful awareness into action.
My point here is not to argue theology; it’s to recognize that a culture cannot live by negation alone. Chesterton recognized this, and he also recognized that we need lodestars. We need truths and beliefs and practices that lift our heads and move us toward the good. And while the church is not my tradition, I argue that we should all be seeking something bigger and more enduring than our individual selves and our assumed cleverness. You don’t have to believe in God to believe in grace.
With that, I ask the following:
Consider these ideas beyond scanning them for flaws.
Consider compassion.
Auguste Rodin - The Cathedral, 1908. Bronze cast of stone original.
Published September 11, 2025