There are times when the most difficult achievement is simply to remain sane. Not sane in the narrow psychiatric sense of avoiding mental illness, but sane in the older and deeper sense of continuing to see reality as reality when the surrounding culture seems increasingly determined to persuade us that absurdity is normal, ugliness is beauty, weakness is strength and human beings are little more than programmable biological machines.
Thomas Harrington begins his new book Staying Human: In a Soul-Shredding Age with a wonderfully simple encounter. During the strange masked world of 2021, he looked at an exhausted supermarket checkout worker and asked her, "Are you staying human?" The question startled her because it broke through the mechanical ritual of the transaction. For a moment she was no longer merely an employee processing purchases. She became a woman with three children, ambitions, exhaustion, hopes and a determination to keep going. Harrington continued asking people the question and discovered that many seemed relieved that somebody had asked.
There is something profound in that little episode. Modern society talks endlessly about humanity while constructing environments increasingly hostile to the things that make human life worth living. We have unprecedented material abundance, extraordinary medical technology, instant communications and access to more information than the greatest libraries of earlier civilisations contained. Yet loneliness, anxiety, alienation and cultural disorientation remain everywhere around us. We have become extraordinarily good at keeping human organisms functioning, while becoming less certain what human beings are supposed to be functioning for.
Harrington argues that staying human requires conscious effort. Human existence cannot be reduced to remaining biologically alive. Love, beauty, dignity, loyalty, imagination, gratitude and our connections with those who came before us are not easily measurable things, yet they are among the things without which human flourishing becomes impossible. Modern materialism has difficulty accommodating them precisely because they resist reduction to quantities.
This is where the Christian can take Harrington's argument still further. Christianity has always insisted that man does not live by bread alone. Human beings require food, shelter, security and physical health, but satisfying those needs does not answer the fundamental questions of existence. Who am I? Why am I here? What do I owe other people? Why should I choose good rather than evil when evil benefits me? What does suffering mean? What happens when I die?
A civilisation can possess astonishing technology and have no coherent answers to any of these questions. Indeed, technological sophistication can conceal the emptiness for a remarkably long time. There is always another screen to watch, product to buy, outrage to consume, political controversy to follow or electronic notification demanding attention. Silence becomes uncomfortable because silence leaves us alone with ourselves. That may be one reason modern society seems so frantic. It is not merely entertaining itself. It is running from questions it no longer knows how to answer.
Harrington describes modernity as increasingly dominated by measurement, acquisition and control. People are encouraged to understand themselves through material consumption while technology increasingly mediates their relationships with the world. His concern is that when human beings surrender the reflective, imaginative and spiritual dimensions of themselves, they become easier to manipulate. A population deprived of historical memory, stable identity and transcendent values possesses fewer resources with which to resist whatever the surrounding culture tells it to believe.
One need not accept every aspect of Harrington's analysis to recognise the phenomenon. The modern person is subjected to an extraordinary barrage of psychological stimulation. News is designed to generate anxiety. Advertising manufactures dissatisfaction. Social media encourages comparison, vanity and outrage. Politics increasingly demands tribal loyalty. Entertainment pushes stimulation further because yesterday's shock rapidly becomes today's boredom. Algorithms learn what keeps us looking and supply more of it.
The result is not necessarily a population of happy materialists. It can instead produce people who are simultaneously overstimulated and spiritually starved. This is where sanity and the soul intersect. To preserve one's sanity in such a culture requires learning that not every demand upon one's attention deserves an answer. You do not have to become angry because somebody on television wants you angry. You do not have to hate somebody because your political tribe has declared him hateful. You do not have to desire something because an advertising system has spent billions learning how to make you desire it. You do not have to reconstruct your identity every time society invents another category into which human beings can be sorted. Sometimes sanity consists of saying no.
Christianity possesses enormous resources for precisely this act of resistance because it locates human identity outside the approval of the surrounding culture. The Christian is not fundamentally what the market says he consumes, what the government records in its databases, what an employer calculates his productivity to be or what strangers on social media think of him. He is a creature made in the image of God. That proposition is revolutionary in a society increasingly inclined to treat human beings as collections of measurable characteristics.
If every human being bears the image of God, the exhausted woman operating the supermarket checkout is not merely an inefficient alternative to the self-service machine beside her. The elderly person who no longer contributes economically has not become worthless. The unborn child does not acquire dignity when somebody decides it is wanted. The severely disabled person does not possess less intrinsic value because a cost-benefit analysis concludes that caring for him is expensive. Human dignity precedes utility.
This is one of the great dividing lines between Christianity and the technological mentality. A machine has value because of what it does. A human being has value because of what he is. Once that distinction disappears, society enters dangerous territory. If human value depends upon productivity, intelligence, health, desirability or social usefulness, somebody must eventually determine how much value each human possesses. History provides sufficient evidence of where such calculations can lead.
Harrington uses an evocative metaphor of predators encouraging their prey to leave the terrain on which the prey possesses natural advantages. Whether or not one accepts his language of a deliberate "predator class," the underlying psychological insight is useful. Human beings become vulnerable when they abandon the sources of meaning that make them difficult to manipulate.
Family is one such source. Faith is another. Friendship, community, historical memory, literature, music, physical work and direct experience of the natural world provide others. None requires permission from an algorithm. Most cannot be completely monetised, and all remind us that life exists beyond the artificial urgency of the electronic moment.
This may be why preserving ordinary things has become quietly countercultural. Eating a meal with other people without staring at a screen is resistance. Reading an old book is resistance. Knowing one's neighbours is resistance. Walking through the bush and allowing an hour to pass without electronic stimulation is resistance. Sitting silently in a church is resistance. Praying is resistance because prayer is an explicit declaration that neither the state, the market, technology nor the individual ego is the highest authority in existence.
None of this requires retreating permanently from modern civilisation. There is no virtue in rejecting a useful technology simply because it is new. Computers are extraordinarily useful. Modern medicine saves lives. The internet allows knowledge to circulate with a freedom previous generations could scarcely imagine. The question is whether we use the tools or allow the tools to remake us.
A person who cannot sit through dinner without checking a telephone is no longer simply using a telephone. A person whose emotional state rises and falls according to social-media approval has surrendered something important to the machine. A society that cannot conduct education, commerce, friendship or politics without continuous digital mediation should at least ask whether convenience has quietly become dependence.
Christianity has a word for the process by which something useful becomes something that rules us: idolatry. An idol need not be a golden statue. Anything created by human beings can become an idol when it occupies a place in our lives that properly belongs to something higher.
The Christian answer to the soul-shredding age is therefore not primarily another political program. Politics matters enormously, and bad governments can inflict tremendous damage. Laws matter, institutions matter and political resistance can sometimes be morally obligatory. But even the perfect election result cannot restore a soul that has forgotten what it exists for.
Harrington reaches a similar conclusion from a different direction when he argues that our deepest problems are spiritual, psychological and volitional rather than merely legislative, technological or organisational. There will be no ten-point administrative program capable of restoring humanity because the crisis reaches inside the person.
That is simultaneously frightening and liberating. It is frightening because there is no government department capable of solving the problem for us. It is liberating because neither does the government possess complete control over the solution. Nobody requires legislation to begin treating another human being as a person rather than a function. Nobody needs a grant to turn off a screen, read to a child, telephone an old friend, visit a lonely relative, plant a garden, forgive an enemy or pray.
These things appear trivial when measured against the enormous machinery of modern civilisation. They are not trivial at all. Civilisations ultimately rest upon millions of ordinary human relationships. When those relationships disintegrate, institutions eventually follow. A society cannot indefinitely compensate for the collapse of trust, family and community by employing more administrators to manage the consequences.
There is also the problem of sanity itself. One of the most effective ways of preserving sanity in an insane period is refusing to internalise every insanity surrounding you. This requires a certain detachment. The world has always contained wickedness, stupidity and absurdity. The existence of the internet merely ensures that we can now encounter almost all of it before breakfast. Nobody's nervous system was designed for this.
For most of human history, a person might know about the problems of his family, village and surrounding district. Today he can wake up and within fifteen minutes encounter war in the Middle East, political corruption in Washington, crime in London, economic problems in China and somebody saying something outrageous in Melbourne. By nine o'clock in the morning he has emotionally processed more distant crises than his ancestors might have encountered in months. There is no moral obligation to carry all of them.
The Christian has particular reason to understand this limitation. We are commanded to love our neighbours, not to become omniscient. Omniscience belongs to God. Trying to carry the suffering and insanity of the entire planet inside one human consciousness is not compassion. Eventually it becomes psychological self-destruction.
That does not mean indifference. It means recognising the limits of human responsibility. Help the person you can help. Speak where speaking matters. Resist what you genuinely have the capacity to resist. Fulfil the duties actually placed before you. Then accept that the universe does not depend upon your ability to remain permanently outraged about everything occurring within it.
This is also where humour becomes important. Totalitarian mentalities are frequently humourless because humour restores proportion. The ability to laugh at absurdity prevents absurdity from becoming omnipotent. There is a reason people under oppressive systems tell jokes. The joke says that the system may control the bureaucracy but it has not yet colonised the mind.
Beauty serves a similar purpose. Harrington ends his introduction by turning towards what he calls the "humus of the daily": beauty, connection, loyalty and love. His wordplay is significant because human and humility are historically associated with the Latin humus, earth or soil. To remain human is partly to remember that we are earthly creatures, mortal and limited rather than aspiring technological gods.
Christianity places that insight at the centre of human existence. "Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." Modern culture treats mortality as an engineering failure that might eventually be overcome. Christianity treats mortality as a fundamental fact of our fallen condition while simultaneously proclaiming that death does not have the final word.
That produces a very different orientation towards life. If this world is everything, then ageing is catastrophe, death is annihilation and accumulating experiences before the clock runs out becomes an understandable obsession. If human existence has a transcendent dimension, however, the frantic attempt to extract maximum consumption from every remaining year begins to look rather strange.
Staying human therefore requires remembering how to be finite. We will grow old. We will lose people. Our bodies will fail. Projects will remain unfinished. Civilisations we love may decline. Political causes to which we devoted enormous energy may lose. None of this makes life meaningless. Meaning comes from somewhere deeper.
Perhaps the greatest act of resistance in a soul-destroying society is therefore refusing to surrender one's soul to it. Do not permit politics to make you hate everyone on the other side. Do not permit technology to consume your attention. Do not permit consumerism to convince you that possessions constitute identity. Do not permit fear to make survival the highest moral good. Do not permit ugliness to make you forget beauty or propaganda to make you forget truth. Above all, do not allow an insane society to persuade you that maintaining your sanity is itself insane.
There will always be pressure to conform. There will always be fashionable lies, approved hatreds and institutional absurdities. Every generation believes its particular madness is unprecedented, yet human nature remains remarkably consistent. The costumes change while pride, greed, cowardice, envy and the lust for power remain. So too do their opposites.
Courage remains possible. Loyalty remains possible. Friendship remains possible. Beauty remains possible. Love remains possible. Faith remains possible. A person can still choose truth when lying would be easier, mercy when cruelty would be fashionable and gratitude when resentment would bring greater social approval. This is how one stays human.
Not through some grand technological solution, but through thousands of small refusals to become less than human. Harrington's exhausted supermarket worker understood the principle instinctively. She had children to raise, studies to complete and a difficult life to navigate, yet she knew the essential requirement: somehow you keep your head up.
The Christian would add one further reason for doing so. We are not merely attempting to preserve an attractive form of humanism against a dehumanising technological age. We are preserving something sacred because the human person is sacred.
A society can become insane without requiring us to join it. It can become ugly without requiring us to abandon beauty. It can become dishonest without compelling us to lie. It can become cruel without preventing us from loving. It can attempt to reduce human beings to numbers, consumers, voters, patients, workers and data points without possessing the power to make that reduction true.
The soul-destroying age ultimately possesses only as much authority over the soul as we surrender to it. Staying human begins with refusing to surrender.
https://brownstone.org/articles/staying-human-introduction/