Alastair's Adversaria - Called to Freedom (with Brad Littlejohn)

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

My friend and colleague Brad Littlejohn has a new book coming out, 'Called to Freedom: Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License': https://amzn.to/40xaMTR. Within this superb short book, B pushes us to think clearly about an issue behind so many others: what is freedom? As our thinking on this is clarified, problems in a host of downstream areas that have been polluted by bad notions of freedom may be considerably relieved. Follow my Substack, the Anchored Argosy at https://argosy.substack.com/. See my latest podcasts at https://adversariapodcast.com/. If you have enjoyed my videos and podcasts, please tell your friends. If you are interested in supporting my videos and podcasts and my research more generally, please consider supporting my work on Patreon (www.patreon.com/zugzwanged), using my PayPal account (bit.ly/2RLaUcB), or by buying books for my research on Amazon (www.amazon.co.uk/hz/wishlist/ls/3…3O?ref_=wl_share). You can also listen to the audio of these episodes on iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/alastairs-adversaria/id1416351035.

Hello and welcome. I'm joined today by my dear friend Brad Littlejohn, who many of you will know as the President Emeritus of the Davenant Institute and also fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. More recently, he has finished writing and in the process of coming out, a book called Call to Freedom, retrieving Christian liberty in an age of license. Thank you so much for joining me, Brad. Thanks, Alistair. Pleasure to be here. So I've known you for many years, and you've been talking about freedom for as long as I've known you. What exactly is the specific genesis of this book? And what are you hoping to achieve through it? Oh, yes. Well, I mean, specific genesis, I have been pondering this topic for almost as long as I can remember, at least in terms of my academic life. The first time I really remember being intrigued by this question of the meaning of freedom

was in a chapter of William Kavanaugh's little book Being Consumed Economics and Christian Desire. And he just talks there about the paradox of the idea of a free market, a free market that functions by sort of leveraging our passions and our desires such that we are kind of enslaved to the products that we feel this compulsion to keep on buying. And so there's this sort of external freedom of the market and the maximization of choices

that coexists with a great deal of internal unfreedom in which we really are not masters of ourselves or our own desires. And so that kind of first alerted me to the fact that, oh, there's this important, there are multiple dimensions within this idea of freedom. And the way in which we talk about it in politics or economics is not necessarily consistent with the way that we talk about it in theology or ethics. And are these two, just two totally different uses of the word? Is there some kind of shared kernel of meaning there? How do we basically make sense of the diversity of ways that we speak about freedom and yet hold those together within some kind of coherent theory of freedom? And I quickly discovered through the work of Oliver O'Donovan wrestling with very similar questions.

It comes up in pretty much all of his books. And my own thinking has been very much shaped by his, sometimes explicitly, sometimes subconsciously in ways that I'll write something. and then I'll read something of O'Donovans that I had, or I'll reread something of O'Donovans that I'd read 10 or 15 years before, and be like, oh, that's where that thing that I just wrote came from. So that's definitely the case with this book. My doctoral dissertation was really under O'Donovan's supervision, was on the concept of freedom in the English Reformation

and the thought of Richard Hooker in particular. And in many ways, this book represents a kind of popular level distillation or adaptation of several of the key themes from that book, but along with other dimensions of freedom that I've explored in the years since. One of your avenues into the discussion is just Pauline treatments of freedom. And it seems that Paul at many points has paradoxical formulations, which of course are taken up in the work of Luther and others. What is the, maybe the kernel of Pauline insight into the notion of freedom?

and how might some of those Pauline paradoxes help us in puzzling through this concept in our own day and age? Yes, what we see in Paul is the insight that slavery of some kind is sort of is inescapable. We're always in bondage to something. We're always serving something. And so he will speak of becoming being liberated from the bondage of sin. and yet becoming bond servants of Christ or bond servants of one another. And, you know, the critical statement, Galatians 513, for you were called to freedom brothers,

only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love, serve one another. In that word, serve is the, you know, the verb form of the word we translate as slaves. So this idea of becoming slaves of one another as the way in which we use our freedom. So whereas those who, if you do not become slaves of Christ Jesus and slaves of one another and seek to assert your freedom, then you will become slaves of your own desire. So that's the kind of, that's the paradox that you see in Paul, which of course is also kind of

reflected in Luther's famous statement, freedom of a Christian. A Christian man is the most free, Lord of all, subject to no one. The Christian man is the most dutiful, certain. of all subject to, subject to everyone. So, yeah, so in the book, I kind of, you know, am exploring how is it that the assertion of our freedom over against others becomes a form of bondage, becomes a way in which we are subjected to our own desires and then subjected to others through those desires.

This is an insight, of course, that CS Lewis brilliantly states an abolition of man, right, which is the person who is ruled by their desires will always be ruled by other people who make use of those desires for their profit, right? And this is, I mean, this is very clear in all kinds of addictions. I mean, next week, actually the same day that my book comes out, I'll be speaking at a rally before the Supreme Court on a Supreme Court case on pornography, which is, this is obviously a place where the proclamation. of freedom leads to bondage and that bondage is not just bondage to our own desires, but is bondage to those who are able to profit, you know, obscenely from the addictions of others. So the assertion of freedom over against others and actually becomes a form of enslavement to others, whereas the subordination of the self in service to others is the way in which

we actually experience true freedom. So that's the basic framework that Paul gives us and that underlies a number of the arguments for the book. There's perhaps no word that is more deployed within our politics and our life more generally than that of freedom as a notion that we aspire to in all sorts of areas of life. And yet there is maybe just because it's such a floppy term that includes so many things, there's very little clear agreed upon definition upon what that term means.

How are you using the term? What would be your shorthand definition? And what are some of the areas in which the concept of freedom is fruitfully deployed? And as opposed to some of those areas where it's just a buzz term that maybe obscures as much as it reveals? Yeah. So the definition I give is, The capacity for meaningful action, which is a very, that encompasses quite a bit. And meaningful action, the capacity for meaningful action can be threatened in many different ways

from many different directions. And there are, you know, as O'Donovan remarks, there are many different forms of unfreedom. And we sort of invoke freedom whenever we feel freedom is under threat. But since freedom can be threatened from many different directions, we kind of invoke freedom in many directions that can seem antithetical to one another. And yet I think they can all be unified under this idea of, as I say, capacity for meaningful action and just to unpack the sort of three elements of that definition. The idea of capacity, I think, is important to guard against the idea that freedom is

purely a negative thing, purely kind of non-interference or non-coercion, which I think is how many libertarians explicitly speak of freedom that way. I think many of us kind of sort of take that by default. But as I, you know, I get the example, I say a paraplegic is not free to walk around just because nobody is holding him down. He has internal constraints on his freedom. So there has to be a positive capacity as well as a lack of external interference. And then the capacity has to be a capacity to act the appropriately,

human form of action is rational, purposeful action. To simply do something thoughtlessly or impulsively or reflexively, we don't see as a manifestation of our freedom. In fact, quite the opposite. We should speak of like involuntary actions and voluntary actions. The whole idea of voluntary actions, free actions, are those that I conceive in mind what I want to do and I could form my actions toward that end. And so this highlights the importance of the relationship of the reason, the will, the appetites such that a freedom to

just follow one's appetites is not freedom. It's an animal, it's an animal kind of freedom, not a human freedom. And then the word meaningful. What I mean by meaningful action? Well, the emphasis there is on the fact that freedom is something that is actually experienced in relation to a community because we for we desire to act in relation to others I give the example of free speech right so you to assert if you were dropped me down in the middle of an amazon tribe where nobody spoke any english you know what I have I might have completely free speech rights, but I wouldn't actually because none of my speech would be, would actually be effective as speech, the whole purpose of which is to communicate. So only within a context of shared understanding is communication actually possible. Am I free to communicate? And this is true, sort of more broadly for all of our actions to if I, you know, if there may be a certain action that's a polite gesture in our culture, there would be a very rude gesture in another culture.

And I would quickly, again, if I found myself in that culture, I would feel this kind of unfreedom because I wouldn't know how to act. I would start acting one way and realize that all my actions were producing the wrong results because there wasn't, there weren't shared norms and expectations. And this, I think, is really important for understanding the contemporary crisis of freedom. One of the things I talk about at the beginning of the book is how we talk more and more about freedom now. and yet we seem to be, and in some ways we are more free than any other previous society and we feel unfree. Why do we feel unfree? I think part of it is that breakdown of shared norms and expectations and also the norms

and expectations are changing so rapidly with technological change that it's difficult at any moment to know if I say these words. how will these words, will these words be understood the way I want them to? If I do these actions, am I doing something politically incorrect or not? And so there's this paralysis that we feel an inability to undertake meaningful actions within a community. And that example of struggling to determine whether something has a particular meaning or not is not necessarily one that depends upon opposing actors. It can just be a chaos of a situation where there is no scrutability to a system or to some sort of context. And so, as you're saying, there are many different axes upon which these things can break down.

And it seems to me that the key features that you identify as aspects of sin that are against our freedom, forgetfulness, futility and fear. are very helpful in identifying certain aspects of this unfreedom that we experience, the sort of futility that is described in Romans chapter 8 as a result of the creation being subjected to this state of sin's reign, is one that we experience in mortality, in the experience, for instance, described by the preacher in the book of Ecclesiastes, where there's a wise man who invests all his labor and everything and leaves it to a, a son who's a fool. There's a sense within these accounts of just the obstacles to freedom that occur as a result of a sinful fallen world. And then beyond that, your discussion of forgetfulness and fear, can you maybe unpack some of the ways in which these concepts attached to sin within your

account help us to reconcile the difference between a broader concept of freedom, and a more theological sense of freedom that we're maybe accustomed to within maybe the mode of preaching or in the context of theology. How do we bring together these concepts that are often operating in different registers? Yeah, that's good. So, I mean, let's talk about the idea of fear as a threat to freedom. I think this is one thing that has intrigued me over the years is the idea of coercion. What do we actually mean by coercion? People think of coercion as like actual, you know, physical compulsion.

And that's kind of like the extreme case of coercion is like actually being chained up and dragged away. But people often use the word coercion in much broader contexts where, you know, you're being, you know, coerion. coerced, you know, coerced, like libertarians often say, you know, you're coerced to pay taxes or something like that. And in terms of the coercion of the law, most of the way that operates is a matter of it is, it's fear, right? It's fear of consequences. It's actually intimidation, perhaps more precisely than coercionate, saying you're actually still free. You can choose to do this or not do this. But if you don't do this, these bad things are going to happen to you. These painful results are going to come. So it's that sort of fear of,

of pain or fear of death in the extreme case that has a coercive effect upon us, which is fascinating because, of course, what that means is those who do, if you don't fear pain or fear death, then coercion has no power over you. And this was one of the key insights of Luther's, you know, Luther's teaching on Christian liberty. And you see, and you see it, of course, in the witness of the martyrs, is the way in which the Christian's political freedom is first and foremost a fruit of their theological freedom. The Christian might still exist in a position of disempowerment and subordination to unjust political authorities. And yet the Christian exists in a transformed relation to them because where their threats have a great

deal of force for others, their threats do not have force for those who know that their life is hidden with Christ and God, right? And so the way in which historically, the way in which Christianity has had a profound influence on Western politics is not so much through a a kind of a restructuring of politics from above, but is a sort of undermining it from below by weakening the force that civil rulers, weakening the ability of civil rulers to intimidate those under them, right? So the martyrs in the early church,

because they were unthreatened by Roman persecution, ultimately they brought down the pagan, rulers of the Roman Empire, just through accepting punishment fearlessly. Right. And then in the, you know, in the post-Reformation period, what you have is the recognition that rulers cannot, in fact, tyrannize over conscience and leads to a sort of pulling back of the scope of civil authority and saying, actually, we're going to give external freedom, right? So I talk about this difference between external internal freedom, but the idea is that this internal freedom can actually create conditions for the growth of external freedom,

because the fact that I am not intimidated by the ruler's unjust commands means that at some point, the ruler is going to stop trying to issue those commands and is actually going to say, you know what, the government is going to have less aspirations, less pretensions is going to rule over less matters because it recognized that it can't actually threaten the consciences of those who have utter confidence before Christ. We talked earlier about the Pauline concept of freedom. And one of the things that really is striking to me about Pauline and teaching is its rhetorical form, whereas if we're reading the Old Testament law, it comes in a direct command

form. The do this, don't do that of the Ten Commandments, for instance. In Paul, there's extensive reasoning and exhortation, there's encouragement. He's engaging in the task of persuasion. And there are long passages in Paul, which could have just been a single command, but he spends two chapters arguing through certain points from various perspectives in order to bring his heroes to action. And it seems beyond the thing that you've just discussed, this reduction of coercive force, there's the bringing in of a different sort of rule, which is persuasion. And you mentioned this within the book. And I'll be interested to hear you say a bit more about this, because it seems to me that

concept of persuasion, it's maybe one that parents are familiar with in the process of raising kids, this move from a young kid where you give them very clear commandments, don't do this, do that, to a kid as they're growing up and maybe you're giving them more reasons for action. How is it that this more positive vision of persuasion comes in alongside that limitation of coercion? Yeah, that's a great question. And actually, dovetails with a book I've been reading recently, which I'm sure you've read before Larry Seedentops inventing the individual.

And I don't necessarily buy everything he says in the book, but he's making an argument similar to, similar in some ways to what Tom Holland argues in Dominion about just how radically Christianity challenged the presuppositions of classical culture and how that's often been obscured by Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers who tried to kind of

retrojected these ideals onto the classical period of equality that were in fact much more Christian ideas than they were classical ideas. And crucially, in that context, you know, we look back to people like Plato and Aristotle as inspirations and they've become key parts of the Christian theological and moral tradition. And yet what we don't realize as often is how much for them the ideals that they were propounding were ideals that were only fit for a very, very, very small sliver of people, this sort of elite upper crust that could philosophize in this way, and thus were capable of a free action. They were capable of acting not out of fear of coercion, but acting out of rational persuasion, discerning the good, mastering their lower impulses,

and pursuing the good that reason had discerned. And that was something that was seen as That was the task of philosophy was to enable that kind of free action, but it was something that was just the nature of the case not going to be available to 99% of the population. Now, Christianity constitutes a radical challenge of that because, as Paul's teaching, emphasizes that every single Christian, male or female, slave or free, is supposed to grow into that kind of free action of being transformed by the renewing of your mind, right? Not simply receiving divine commands and, you know, dutifully complying with them, but this writing of the law upon the heart, right, that is, the divine commands are within us and are being, are being externalized through our own reflection on what they require,

what the law of love requires of us in each context. So Paul propounds this ethic that's really very demanding in terms of the kind of epistemic burden that it may place on every individual to not simply, you know, not simply blindly obey, but actually freely discern and, follow the good. So of course, that's, that's an ideal that takes, you know, I mean, the reality is, of course, there's, there obviously is still, there are, there are teachers and there are learners in the body of Christ. There always are. There, there, there certainly were in Paul's day. So Paul doesn't, doesn't give us a kind of utopian ideal of equality in which all are totally equally just

able to discern the good on their own. But what he does give us is this sense that every single believer is called to be capable of a certain degree of rational persuasion and deliberation on the needs of the neighbor and what it means to serve God. And so that kind of radically democratizing impulse, as Seedentop says, really undercuts the social structures of the ancient world. And it's a very, you know, it's a long process of then against the kind of, then dealing again, with the social structures of the Germanic tribes during the barbarian invasions and so on. But ultimately, as you fast forward to the early modern era, what you have, and again, this is

very explicit in the Reformation, is the ideal of universal literacy, the ideal that every single Christian will read the Bible for themselves. And again, not that there aren't still those who are more learned in the scriptures who are tasked with teaching and those of us who are not, should be submissive, submissive to their teaching, but submissive, again, not blindly submissive, but attentively, discerningly submissive. Through that kind of democratizing of the body of Christ arises a new way of thinking about civil government, in which a more participatory democracy becomes more and more conceivable, not as in ancient Athens for a very small sliver of female citizens, but increasingly for the entire population, because literacy is diffused

through the entire population through the work of the church. So I think this is another area in which we see the political freedoms that we enjoy today are actually well downstream of this more theological ideal of freedom that begins with St. Paul and is intensified in the Reformation. It seems that perhaps our concepts of freedom in the modern world are maybe more focused upon the concept of sexuality than anything else. Sexuality is a form of self-expression, of self-gratification, and increasingly it's seen as a place of the free flow and expression of the imagination, a realm of fantasy. can think about the way that when Paul Kahn in putting liberalism in its place, he discusses the way that the pornographic scene is presented as detached from history. There's no history that precedes it.

There's no future that follows it. There's a sense of a sexual encounter without a relationship. And there's no sense of a greater meaning beyond it that it is. subject to or serving. And there's also a sense within the relationship of the, the voyeuristic relationship of the person who's consuming it and the parties within it, that it's not visible. It's not participating in the public. It has no procreative significance. There's a sense in which that those characteristics of the pornographic scene and of sexual relations more generally in their idealized form in the modern world of license, colors so much of our concept of what freedom

is, or maybe reveals it. There's a sense in which we're freed from relationship. That's what freedom is, the bonds of expectation, of duty, of responsibility, of visibility to others, the idea that we might be seen and judged. And we need those sort of emotional prophylactics to save us from the other two. You've been doing a lot of work on this lately, and I'll be curious to hear your thoughts on some of the ways in which this has been influenced by your thinking on freedom and also has affected the way that you've approached the subject of freedom. Clearly, the connections with technology would be some part of that, but I'd love to hear some of your thoughts. Yeah, there's a lot there. I mean, I think one,

key point to start with is, and this is, again, goes back to, this is a great passage in, I guess it's ways of judgment. I don't know, the different O'Donovan books blur together for me, but, you know, the fundamental error of the modern conception of freedom is that freedom consists in the multiplication of options, right? And, you know, he says that, like, the distortion there is that options are in some measure necessary for freedom because the whole idea of freedom is that of choosing and it's unintelligible to choose when there are there's only one option and yet it's actually not so not entirely unintelligible because even when there's only one option that we still have a choice in terms of how we accept that option how we how we're

going to approach that option are we going to are we going to receive that this this task is placed upon me, do I receive that joyfully or do I grudgingly go along with it or do I, do I, or do I, or do I buck against it and end up being dragged, kicking and screaming? And this is, this gets a distinction I draw in the book between inner, inner and outer, inward and outward freedom, right? The idea that even, even the prisoner in the cell is not totally deprived of freedom because he still has the inward freedom to decide what to make of his plight. And does he sort of rise above his bondage? So it's actually deception to think that freedom consists primarily in the multiplication of options.

In fact, the more we multiply options beyond a certain point, we actually then begin to undermine freedom. because once there are too many options to rationally distinguish between them, the will is, as it were, sort of paralyzed by this just this overload of decisions and stimuli. And once paralyzed, once the sort of rational will is paralyzed, then the kind of of appetite of will just sort of takes over, right? It's like there are too many options for me to rationally choose between. and so then I just go with whichever wherever the strongest pool of desire is.

So the but in the modern world what we see is is this really taking this idea of multiplication of options again to this totally self-defeating extreme where the idea is I want to keep my options as open as possible

which means never in fact never in fact choosing, right? Never in fact choosing because as soon as you choose one option, you have in fact thereby foreclosed the other ones. Now you might you might open up new ones. And in fact, this is this is where maturity, maturity lies in understanding that the foreclosing of options through a choice is going to open up new options down the road, right? This is the pattern of life as sacrificing yourself leads to receiving. receiving back something greater on the other side of that sacrifice. And in a sense, every active choice is that death and resurrection,

is that dying to all the options, other options before you in order to pursue this one, and then through that, having new options opened up. But we're afraid of going through that death and resurrection. So we never want to ever foreclose any options by choosing one. And so we see this with the deferral of marriage and childbearing, right? that we are the freedom to marry means the freedom to bind oneself in a committed relationship to one person and forsaking all others. And if you don't want to do that, you're never actually going to be able to experience

the gift of marriage. If you want within marriage to still have that sense of optionality, then you're not actually going to, the unique gift of marriage is impossible. So many people now want to go into a marriage with the idea that it's an open marriage or that, you know, they are keeping, they can keep their up. And pornography offers a way of sort of having your cake and eating it too, right? Okay. You can have, you can have monogamy and yet you can still keep this universe of potential sexual partners open to you. So one of the most interesting things about literature on pornography, and this is something I actually did an essay on this years ago. is by the first thing I kind of wrote professionally in this topic, in the journal of society of Christian ethics,

where I argued that the phenomenon of pornography today is not really so much manifestation of the vice of lust. It's not that lust is absent from it, but lust acts as maybe a sort of intensifier for a more fundamental vice, which is the vice of curiosity. In the medieval sense, curiosity was the disordered search for knowledge, opposed to studiosity, which, or studiousness, which is the virtuous source of knowledge.

And in curiosity, what we delight in is not actually the enjoying the fruition of the object of knowledge as a good that is desired as such. But what we enjoy is simply the experience of our self knowing it. That is to say, the object of knowledge is something to be mastered by us and then we move on to another and another and another. And so there's this constant quest for novelty that never comes to rest in any object. And one of the interesting things about pornography is the idea of these websites is not to offer, is not actually primarily to offer a sexual experience, but is to offer an endless search for, search for an experience, right?

you know, Sam James has a great line in this book, Digital Liturgy. So the internet is a lot like pornography. So what we have with online pornography is really just an extreme form what we have with digital media generally, where the whole design of the interface is to keep you from coming to rest in any one object of desire as a good in itself and to keep you scrolling on to the next one, the next one flipping through the video,

clicking on the next link, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So a constant browsing, a way. restlessness that is a sort of constant stimulation of desire and a deferral of the gratification of desire. So I think what we see there is kind of the modern idea of freedom as endless optionality sort of taken to its kind of darkest, most nihilistic endpoint, where the goal is not even the goal is not even to lust after another woman. It is to have the kind of endless potency of potential lusting that is the sort of complete opposite of the sexual union

as God designed it. This of course ties into another area in which the concept of freedom is increasingly encountered and vexed. The experience of technology. And so you've described of this in various contexts, the experience that you describe of that constant dissatisfaction and as almost consumptive urge to just find the next thing. Can think also of the way that technology can so often disintegrate things that were once held together, the experiences and meaningful contexts of life that have now been distributed out into lots of different technologies and apps and devices that perform certain aspects. of them or the way in which the extreme rapidity of change in technologies that increasingly

provide our life worlds makes it difficult for the intergenerational movement of wisdom to occur or for us to have meaningful long-term action that we commit ourselves to because there's a sense in which the in clarity of that future horizon renders our plans futile. We might think about the way that technology, just in the way that operates in forming these grand systems that we inhabit, establishes a sort of godlike control over us and increasingly render us subject to systems that exceed and transcend any human agency. There's no human being who can just turn off the internet. And then there's also a sense, even in the development of technology of necessity, we must

develop this or China will develop it or inevitability. This is going to happen. Someone's going to do it and we need to submit to that or the sense of control that once we've got this technology, we can now do this thing and we are all subject to this new control, the control of surveillance that we all feared so much and talked about so much in the late 90s. You can imagine all these films talking about government surveillance. We take it for granted now and think about the way in which spectacle increasingly adds another. level of futility. We're engaged so much in virtual realms that have very little concrete force within the world and then also the immediacy that leads to a loss of history and a loss of future action. It seems on all these levels that an inability to understand what freedom

is is part and parcel of our struggle with new technologies. How might our understanding of of freedom as you're encouraging us to move towards a particular understanding of freedom, how might that help us get purchase upon these technologies? This is obviously something that the Davenant Institute has been working on quite a lot over the last year, but I'll be curious to hear you say more to this. Yes, well, I mean, it's a massive topic, and there's probably an entire book in just in your question there. But I think, yeah, I mean, just one entry point, something I've written on a fair bit lately, is this idea of frictionlessness as kind of the essence of digital technology,

the idea of being able to just, the whole idea of user interface is to make it as immediate, responsive, as possible that there's nothing, nothing impinges between the desire and the effect, right? And it's like there's this interesting studies on how many milliseconds, you know, like how many milliseconds of page load time it takes before the average user engagement, before user engagement goes down. I mean, you know, and it's, it's a tiny number now. And it's interesting. It's gotten down and down and down as our expectation of speed has increased, right?

So our assumption is that in the digital world, to will something is to bring it about. And of course, in the physical world, we always encounter friction. Friction is just a reality of any physical bodies coming up against one another. But that friction actually provides the is the precondition for action in the physical world, right? This is, I mean, right now it's January. The sidewalks are very icy here. We experience this when we walk out the door. If you don't have friction on your surface, you can't walk.

You can't stand. If a car doesn't have friction on the road, it can't move forward. It can't steer. And so that friction, that pushback of something outside of us is actually paradoxically, that which is necessary for us to be. able to act and to move forward in the world. But we don't like that pushback. And so we seek ways of avoiding that friction.

And the digital world is the basic creation of digital technology is the, is our technology responding to that desire for frictionlessness at the heart of the modern ideal of freedom. But it's a feedback loop because as we become used to that frictionless digital experience, then we expect it to be the case in the real world. And we get really annoyed if we ever have to stand in line or if we ever have to stand in line or if we ever actually have to talk to a barista as opposed to just picking up our mobile order. So we're on a quest now to get rid of friction

in the physical world as well. But it's that frictionlessness also means it's the destruction of the possibility of freedom for another reason because going back to my definition of meaningful action, the ephemorality of everything, the digital world. I think this is one of the reasons where we have this sort of crisis of why we're doing with such a mental health crisis here is we don't feel like necessarily that anything we do matters

because the whole, the nature of the digital world is, and it's weird because in some ways like in the digital world, what any small thing can blow up and it can become a massive, you know, you can do some little thing that becomes viral and it, and it, and it, matters a huge degree, way more than it would if it happened in the offline world. But there's this sense that in the digital world, everything that you do can also be undone, right? For every click, for every click, there's a back button. For every friend, there's an unfriend button, right?

There's everything is reversible. Everything is undoable in the digital realm in the way that, of course, it's not in the physical realm where actions have consequences that can't necessarily be reversed. And so we want that because, again, we think freedom means maximal optionality, but it means that no single thing we do feels like it matters or means anything because it can always be undone, right? So all that, rather than answer your question about, I'm really just kind of compounding the problem. But I think the way, I mean, the way out, the way to respond begins in sort of diagnosis, a diagnosis of what is it that we are looking for and why is it that we keep not being satisfied by what we're

looking for, right? And what and what is it that actually makes, the experiences that we find meaningful, what is it that makes them meaningful? And then we realize it is, in fact, that friction, that rubbing up against another will, that is the basis, just as friction is, you, you know, friction is what gives us stickiness in the relationship with physical objects. Friction in relationships is what makes relationships sticky. A community becomes a tight-knit community because you've actually gone through conflict together. And what we are seeking in the digital realm is often a way of having connectedness without the need to ever actually adjudicate or work through conflict. So I think to the extent that we recognize that and we name that for what it is and we understand that the relationships that matter to us are ones in which we accept and work through friction rather than ones in which we evade friction, then what we can do is find ways of using our digital technologies as an adjunct to.

those relationships rather than as a way of escaping meaningful relationality. You know, I mean, just one, just very, very concrete, and then I'll shut up, you know. I think not all digital technologies are the same, right? They function in very different ways, and it depends what they're designed to do.

And so a, like, Twitter is very, very different than a group chat. They have, they share some similar drawbacks, but the fundamental problem with a place like Twitter, most social media apps, is the fact that anybody can be part of the conversation at any time and anybody can leave the conversation anytime. It's a completely open-ended conversational space,

which means you never know who you're talking to, and you never actually have to sort through any, like you can just sort of throw a grenade and then just sort of walk away, right? But if you've ever, you know, if you've been in a group chat, You know, ideally, who everybody else in the conversation is. And if anybody leaves, it's like if someone leaves a group chat, like that is a big deal. It is like somebody walking at, like people are having a conversation of party and someone just like stomps out, right? It has the same social effect.

So creating a closed space where people are actually in ongoing interaction and friction with one another. Even though it's digital and it's simulated, it simulates a real world kind of experience in a way that I think can actually augment relations. And it's very different, I think, from the deformative way that open-ended social media kind of treats relationships. Call to Freedom. Retrieving Christian Liberty in an age of license is coming out next week. It is a fantastic book that I highly recommend very accessible to someone who is just thinking about these issues for the first time. It's about 150 pages. And it's talking about the issue behind so many. other issues, as I hope in listening to this conversation, you've had some impression of that. Thank you very much for joining me, Brad. Thanks, Alistair. And God bless, and thank you all for listening.