Battle for the Real

The courage to choose being.

John Senior had the courage to choose the real—and he helped his students choose it amid a world that constantly called them to engage with the artificial. He saw the splendor of values that existed in drinking a cup of coffee:

"The immediate (practical) purpose of drinking a cup of coffee is to wash the biscuit down,” he wrote. “Its proximate (ethical) purpose is the intimate communion of, say, cowboys (they do exist; Will James was right!) standing around the sullen campfire in a drenching rain, water curling off Stetsons, over slickers, splashing on the rowels of spurs, as they draw the bitter liquid down their several throats into the single moral belly of their comradeship. The remote (political) purpose of coffee at the campfire, is the making of Americans—born on the frontier, free, frank, friendly, touchy about honor, despisers of fences, lovers of horses, worshipers of eagles and women. . . . The ultimate purpose is spiritual. For a boy to drink a can of coffee with cowboys in the rain is, as Odysseus said of Alcinous’s banquet, something like perfection."

Senior was one of the three teachers of the Integrated Humanities Program that thrived at the University of Kansas in the 1970s. Notice how his encounter with the real transcends the purely material: what is real, and perhaps what is most real about drinking that cup of coffee, is the world of values—memories, emotions, imagination, sacramentality—that can be found in the act.

Imagine seeing the world and living your life that way. The world would be charged with grandeur and mystery even in things other see as routine.

That receptivity to reality is not childish; it is childlike. And that childlike spirit has been dulled, blunted, and kicked out of most of us by the pervasive apathy that is contagious—mimetically, I might add—in the society in which we live. Being unapathetic, being locked in to reality, is itself an anti-mimetic act. It requires a radical choice that does not come naturally.

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The battle for the soul of our society is between Realism and Anti-Realism. By the real I mean that we live in a world in which things that exist outside of ourselves, different from us, which we can know, encounter, and experience. The world is intelligible. There is an absolute Truth which it is possible to draw closer to.

This gives life meaning, but it also raises the stakes. Because the opposite—Anti-Realism—is what Senior liked to call the Perennial Heresy, which is essentially Gnosticism: the elitist pursuit of hidden or esoteric knowledge, and the divorcing of spirit from matter.

If everything is uncertain, if you can never really know what’s real or unreal, or what’s true or untrue, you never actually have to take responsibility for your choices. The entire edifice of the moral life is built on realism.

The 'Smartphones in schools' debate is about Realism. Smartphones, like the 10,000 people driving the discourse on X (yes, my estimate is that there are a mere 10,000 people—a very Determinate Number—driving the conversation, which affects all of humanity), are scrambling the sensory perception of humans. I don’t mean simply the five senses of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell, but the intellectual senses (the literal, allegorical, metaphorical, anagogical), and the spiritual senses of faith, hope, and love. The dispersion of the senses makes contact with the Real harder than ever.

The real evil of smartphones is not merely that they prevent me from ever drinking a cup of coffee with cowboys in the rain, but that I wouldn’t experience it as magical even if I did.

I began to argue on this panel with Ross Douthat this fall that maybe smartphones are leading to the emergence of a new social sense—a new public sense, akin to a distorted and disfigured ‘common sense’—which in turn is dulling the normal senses through which humans have always encountered the Real. And we do not know how to live in a world like that.

And yet stones are hard and water is wet, and the beauty of watching my daughter these days (she’s almost fourteen months) is how engaged in the sensory world she is, pressing her nose to the cold glass of our slider in Michigan and saying “whooooaaaaa”, pointing at the snow outside which she senses is cold; when I make a pot of coffee, she gestures to with a halt sign, like a police officer telling you not to cross the sidewalk, and says, hot. She knows that things are real. She bumps and bruises herself from time to time because they are real.

I will try my best to never let her lose that. It is maintaining that level of contact with reality, that adherence to the real, that begins to take serious work as we grow older and it becomes familiar to us.

I believe the real work of the writer is not just defamiliarization, but actually leading people to the real. This is the job of every parent and teacher. I believe it’s also the job of every entrepreneur. Technology itself, if we had a more humanizing understanding of it, also has the power to lead us back to the real. To give you one silly example: I’ve been singing what I thought was a made-up song with made-up lyrics to my daughter since I used to rock her to sleep at two months old. My wife suspected that it wasn’t just something I made up but was the amalgamation of other tunes I had heard over the years—the mimesis ran so deep that I didn’t even know where it came from. Thanks to a new Shazam-like tech tool, I was able to sing my song to an app; it led back to a very specific genre and specific track that I didn’t know had influenced me, which took me on an odyssey of the mind and of my own history, back to my grandmother’s bedside where I may have first heard it, and now to a vinyl of the same song that sits on the record player in the den. It has become grounded in the real.

Our challenge is to recover our senses: the ability to absorb reality and encounter it in all its fullness. I am always struck, when reading the parable of the Prodigal Son, that his profound moment of conversion as him “coming back to his senses.” Until we do that, even the best “Great Books” program will be akin to allowing champagne to go flat in empty bottles of Diet Coke. We lack the faculties to truly engage with them.

Christmas is a particularly good time to revisit Realism, especially since so much about this season has been made unreal. It’s a time to choose.

I don’t simply mean getting a real tree instead of a fake one, although that’s a start, and we all have to start somewhere. You choose your own act of rebellion. As I stand here drinking an overly strong cup of coffee, I am detaching myself from unreal work to contemplate the face of a child in whom the mystery hidden since the foundation of the world was contained.

Blessings to you and your family this Christmas,
Luke