Believing Something, Believing Someone

Last weekend Brandon Daily and I—with our friend Ashley Fitzgerald of Doomer Optimism—hosted a gathering in Ligonier, PA. It was a two day event that featured keynote addresses, panel discussions, and lots of convivial fellowship including drinking, singing, poetry reading, and feasting.

One of our attendees, Jane Gross, sent us this wonderful reflection on the weekend. We wanted to share it with you here. In the next few days, we will be posting a series of shorter reflections on the weekend from other attendees as well as linking to other reflections from the weekend.

---

I freely chose to road-trip with my family last weekend.

Sounds simple, but I have wasted a lot of breath grumbling about traveling with kids. When out-of-state wedding invitations roll in (do people even get married in my state?) or the December pressures of keeping Christ and every possible extended family event in Christmas, I sigh. Our four cherubs often fill the long drives with stop-kicking-my-seats and quarrels over the precious metallic colored pencils, staggering their requests for Pirate’s Booty so that the aroma of white cheddar dust never fully dissipates.

Sometimes my husband and I fantasize about a day when we might sip Old Fashioneds and play chess while an automated vehicle chauffeurs the whole family from our East coast home to visit my Midwest family (nevermind that the cherubs don’t knock over our glasses in this imagined car scenario). And yet, last weekend we accepted the difficult aspects of a family trip for a worthy cause. We drove all day to Ligonier, PA for a conference, jointly organized by Doomer Optimism and Savage Collective. We had good reason to expect that people would dissuade us from a future reliant on automated vehicles and many other technologies that erode our agency or attention.

This event was an extended conversation about recovering our humanity in the age of The Machine. The lineup of speakers was varied, their expertise seemingly disparate. Attendees were eccentric, philosophical, and uncommonly full of common sense. Poets, professors, mechanics, journalists, artists, builders, and a few families like mine traveled from all corners of the continent to pick up shards of wisdom from The Machine’s wreckage and dare to dream about making them beautiful again.

Peco Gaskovski kicked off the conversation with an exhortation to embrace “the corrective friction of real life.” The crowd in attendance already had clear regard for this concept, or the weekend would not have gone so well. The discomfort of striking up new conversation with strangers at the beginning quickly turned into lively exchange; that’s the mark of practiced conversationalists who don’t pull out their phones to avoid awkward moments. When contentious religious or metaphysical flags were planted, nobody quit the room claiming that psychological violence was being done to them. They engaged respectfully. Tired babies whimpered, needy children burst into the meeting room, and everyone remained unfazed. They understood the inevitability of friction.

I won’t summarize all the panels but to impart the flavor of the weekend, I’ll mention a few that still have me chewing the cud:

• A panel on the post-industrial Home Economy and Technology prompted me to ask: What are the ways I, a stay-at-home mom, provide value to both my local community and the economy that GDP can’t account for? What does vernacular gender look like in my own marriage and place? (Note to self: read Ivan Illich.)

• Oliver Bateman’s reflection on his stepfather’s work/life balance has me also wondering: What makes work dignified? What about leisure? What’s the optimal level of engagement between body and mind? Oliver says of his stepfather’s coal mining job, “The work was brutally difficult but mindless. You could turn it off…Your mind was yours.”

• The discussion of Vocation, Automation, and Surveillance furthered an ongoing discussion in our home about whether the costs of automated transportation (“robot Uber”) outweigh the benefits of eyes-off-the-road whiskey and chess. (Note to self: read Matt Crawford’s Why We Drive.)

Now, I could have stayed home and read essays by these same panelists from the comfort of my own couch. They regularly write online. However, while seeds of interest or admiration might be planted on Substack, trust is born in person. In his treatise on Faith, Josef Pieper argues that personal relationship is integral to belief: we believe something because we believe someone. But this believing-in-relationship can only thrive under the right conditions. Pieper first establishes that “...under [the conditions of tyranny], no one dares to trust anyone else. Candid communication dries up; and there arises that special kind of unhealthy wordlessness which is not silence so much as muteness…Under conditions of freedom, however, human beings speak uninhibitedly to one another.”

The DO/Savage community feels this keenly, which is why the event’s participants are protected under the Chatham House Rule. While many of the panelists often write courageously in public about controversial topics, they risk the danger that news outlets will cancel them or social media platforms will deprioritize their work. This translates to fewer readers, less fewer paying subscribers, and reduced income and impact. But in a room with no recordings and no algorithm, we can trust. There is no virtual replacement for this opportunity. Pieper puts it this way:

…everyone who speaks to another without falseness…is actually extending a hand and offering communion; and he who listens to him in good faith is accepting the offer and taking that hand. This very advertence of the will, which, admittedly, we cannot quite call “love”, though it partakes somewhat of love’s nature—this sense of mutual trust and free interchange of thoughts produces a unique type of community. In such a community he who is hearing participates in the knowledge of the knower.

Substack introduced me to the insights of many Doomer Optimists and Savages and gave me reason to suspect that I could trust the men and women behind the writing. Spending time with them for two long days—observing mannerisms and tone of voice, hearing her chuckle or his guffaw, knowing whether someone prefers a tailored blazer or a brazen cheetah print cowboy hat—added up to intimacy, a respect-verging-on-affection that resembles the “loving advertence” Pieper describes above.

This isn’t to say that writing as a medium cannot foster any relationship of true knowing. That is an epistemological claim above my pay grade. Still, my intuition says that for humans, the best knowing is embodied. (Note to self: read Gadamer’s Truth and Method.) Ruth and Peco Gaskovski were an embodied inspiration to me at the event. Their writing has given me practical tips for creating a low-tech, highly relational environment in my home, but their family dynamic confirmed the fruit of their wisdom. I met them face-to-face. I encountered their warmth and the laugh lines by their eyes, and saw their teenage children engage adults with thoughtfulness and poise. This all substantiated my impression that they are people I trust and will return to for parenting advice. I believe what they say because I believe them.

That sort of deep knowing went far beyond conversations. Both evenings were filled with food and cheer and song—abundant dinner, dancing the Virginia Reel, children giggling underfoot, live fiddle and guitar, poetry reading, singing in harmony and, after a few drinks, singing in cacophony. The kids were all content. After 48 hours of running and coloring among strangers-turned-friends, my 5-year-old intuited that this was indeed a high-trust environment, just like the weekly potlucks at our church. We stayed hours past her bedtime, and she curled up on the edge of the room, asleep, with one coat underneath and another as a blanket amidst the rowdy bustle.

Now that I’ve returned home, Michael Toscano’s presentation on “Leaving Home To Save It” posed a challenge that still sits with me: We must “redistribute the power to disconnect” to more people; this is why I wanted to attend the event in the first place. When my kids grow up, I’d like to guarantee them access to the same kind of convivial gathering they witnessed in Ligonier—but I can’t. All I can do is give them raw material for culture-making: by hosting parties, cooking from scratch, reading stories aloud, walking in nature, and making music (sometimes) without amplification. I can speak candidly with them about the real danger unfettered tech poses to their happiness. I can give them practice disagreeing respectfully, and convince them that if they avoid all the friction, they are avoiding real life.

My oldest son kind of gets it. He spent a grand total of five minutes in the conference hall over the weekend, choosing instead to romp about on nature preserve trails, blissfully unmachined. When he asked me what the conference had been about, I distilled a few of the ideas. He responded with the easy wisdom of an 8-year-old who bleeds enthusiasm for camping: “Yeah, we should cook over fires more. And get rid of our stove—it’s stupid.”