The Wisdom Pyramid E-Book

Brett McCracken

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

We're facing an information overload. With the quick tap of a finger we can access an endless stream of addictive information—sports scores, breaking news, political opinions, streaming TV, the latest Instagram posts, and much more. Accessing information has never been easier—but acquiring wisdom is increasingly difficult. In an effort to help us consume a more balanced, healthy diet of information, Brett McCracken has created the "Wisdom Pyramid." Inspired by the food pyramid model, the Wisdom Pyramid challenges us to increase our intake of enduring, trustworthy sources (like the Bible) while moderating our consumption of less reliable sources (like the Internet and social media). At a time when so much of our daily media diet is toxic and making us spiritually sick, The Wisdom Pyramid suggests that we become healthy and wise when we reorient our lives around God—the foundation of truth and the eternal source of wisdom.

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“The foolishness of the world sometimes feels overwhelming. The Wisdom Pyramid lifts that fog away, revealing just how full God’s world is with goodness, truth, and beauty. By turning to these sources, in proper order, the wise will find folly fading into the background, and the world will look like—and be—a different place. Wisdom, as this book reminds us, is right there in front of us if only we will turn our eyes upon it.”

Karen Swallow Prior, author, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books

“One of the most important books I’ve read this year! What if you woke up to discover you’d been eating only Doritos and Oreos for a year? When it comes to our ‘information diet,’ The Wisdom Pyramid reveals most of us essentially have been consuming junk food—with an ensuing onslaught of personal and public health crises. McCracken is like a doctor who not only diagnoses the source of our cultural malady with precision but also prescribes the cure: a change in how we consume knowledge that can promote healthy wisdom and love of God.”

Joshua Ryan Butler, Pastor, Redemption Church, Tempe, Arizona; author, The Skeletons in God’s Closet and The Pursuing God

“Brett McCracken’s The Wisdom Pyramid models the discernment he asks readers to practice. Thoroughly biblical, it is also informed by a wide range of sources of truth, beauty, and goodness. From Augustine to Jacques Ellul, Reformed theology to pop music, historic Christian hymns to modern poetry, McCracken models how to wade through our daily deluge of input, form unhurried habits of attention, and grow into the patience and humility of godly wisdom. I imagine this book becoming essential reading for families, student groups, and churches.”

Jen Pollock Michel, author, Surprised by Paradox and Teach Us to Want

“It has been said that ‘we make our tools, and then our tools make us.’ Engaging a wide cross section of insightful analyses, Brett McCracken offers profound wisdom about how we have more information, less truth, and a shrinking capacity for identifying truth. Well-informed, vividly illustrated, and aimed toward solid answers, The Wisdom Pyramid is a must-read.”

Michael Horton, J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics, Westminster Seminary California

“The first time I discovered Brett McCracken’s wisdom pyramid diagram, I knew he was onto something. I used it the next Sunday. Lots of people talk about it. Why? Because Christians desperately need a balanced diet of information. This book is amazingly helpful at both diagnosing a problem in contemporary Christianity and offering a holistic solution. The Wisdom Pyramid is clarifying and convicting. It’s a must-read guidebook for discipleship in our information-saturated age.”

Mark Vroegop, Lead Pastor, College Park Church, Indianapolis; author, Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy and Weep with Me

“In an age of perpetual distraction, hurried commentary, and shallow conclusions, we’re quickly losing our aptitude and appetite for wisdom. Brett McCracken’s book is a much needed antidote for the dangerous ethos of the day. A compelling call to reorder our lives and reorient our hearts and minds around the shape of biblical wisdom—loving, listening, and looking to God—The Wisdom Pyramid is essential reading for anyone who longs for a more meaningful journey of faith.”

Jay Y. Kim, Lead Pastor of Teaching, WestGate Church, San Jose, California; author, Analog Church

“The digital revolution has transformed—not tweaked—the fabric of daily life. Never has it been easier to gain attention, or discover entertainment, or obtain knowledge. No wonder we’re addicted. But Google is a pitiful substitute for wisdom. Indeed, if we’re not careful, life online will make us aware of everything and wise about nothing. That’s why I’m so excited for Brett McCracken’s antidote to the inverted priorities of our age. If you live on an island without WiFi, pick a different book. Otherwise, The Wisdom Pyramid is for you. Few things reinvigorate the soul, after all, like exchanging the stultifying air of a Twitter timeline for the fresh sea breeze of an excellent book. And this is an excellent book.”

Matt Smethurst, Managing Editor, The Gospel Coalition; author, Deacons and Before You Open Your Bible

“It is genuinely disturbing to consider how we are being shaped by our current forms of information intake. Brett McCracken’s The Wisdom Pyramid is a godsend—a pathway back to sanity and health. I believe that the proposal offered in The Wisdom Pyramid is as important for our mental and spiritual health in the modern world as a proper diet is to our physical health. On top of that, this book is beautifully written, winsome, actionable, and hopeful. Buy a copy for yourself and lots more to give away!”

Gavin Ortlund, Senior Pastor, First Baptist Church of Ojai; author, Finding the Right Hills to Die On

“As a mother, I want my four children to develop the habits they need for a life of wisdom. They are quickly growing up into adults who will have to navigate for themselves the constant clicks and pings of life in our global, digital, information age. And so, I want their childhoods and teenage years—and our family life as a whole—to be intentionally formed by things that are both true and lovely. Although it’s not specifically a parenting book, The Wisdom Pyramid is a gift to parents, giving readers the essential tools to establish habits and priorities for a life of wisdom. This is a helpful book, and it’s also a hopeful book. It’s helpful because Brett McCracken writes biblically and insightfully on every page. It’s hopeful because it ultimately reveals the wise life to be the very good life.”

Megan Hill, author, Praying Together and A Place to Belong; Editor, The Gospel Coalition

“In an age of post-truth and information overload where Christians are constantly persuaded by AI algorithms and anecdotal absolutes, Brett McCracken winsomely pushes us past verified checkmarks and Facebook fact-checkers to bring us to the God who sits over wisdom and truth.”

Thomas J. Terry, Director, Humble Beast; member, Beautiful Eulogy; Lead Pastor, Trinity Church of Portland

The Wisdom Pyramid

The Wisdom Pyramid

Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World

Brett McCracken

The Wisdom Pyramid: Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World

Copyright © 2021 by Brett McCracken

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover Image & Design: Phil Borst

First printing 2021

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-6959-3 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-6962-3 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-6960-9 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-6961-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McCracken, Brett, 1982- author.

Title: The wisdom pyramid : feeding your soul in a post-truth world / Brett McCracken.

Description: Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020030246 (print) | LCCN 2020030247 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433569593 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781433569609 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433569616 (mobi) | ISBN 9781433569623 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Christian life.

Classification: LCC BV4501.3 .M3314 2021 (print) | LCC BV4501.3 (ebook) | DDC 248.4—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030246

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030247

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2020-12-18 11:08:36 AM

To Jeff McCracken, who taught me to love wisdom

Contents

Introduction: An Unwise Age

Part One: Sources of Our Sickness

 1  Information Gluttony

 2  Perpetual Novelty

 3  “Look Within” Autonomy

Part Two: Sources of Our Wisdom

Part Two Introduction: Sources of Truth for a Life of Wisdom

 4  The Bible

 5  The Church

 6  Nature

 7  Books

 8  Beauty

 9  The Internet and Social Media

10  What Wisdom Looks Like

Acknowledgments

Notes

General Index

Scripture Index

Introduction

An Unwise Age

Wisdom cries aloud in the street,

in the markets she raises her voice;

at the head of the noisy streets she cries out;

at the entrance of the city gates she speaks:

“How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?

How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing

and fools hate knowledge?” Proverbs 1:20–22

Our world has more and more information, but less and less wisdom. More data; less clarity. More stimulation; less synthesis. More distraction; less stillness. More pontificating; less pondering. More opinion; less research. More speaking; less listening. More to look at; less to see. More amusements; less joy.

There is more, but we are less. And we all feel it.

We have vertigo from the barrage coming at us from every direction, every day. We are nauseous from the Tilt-a-Whirl nature of a constantly changing, always unstable world described in (often contradictory and whiplash-inducing) feeds of fragmented and partisan news. Our ears are bleeding from the screeching multitudes who daily assault our senses. Everyone has a megaphone, but no one has a filter.

Our eyes are strained, brains overstimulated, and souls weary. We’re living in an epistemological crisis. It’s hard to know if anything can be reliably known. We are resigned to a new normal where the choice seems to be: trust everything or trust nothing. Or maybe the choice is: trust nothing or trust only in yourself—a seemingly logical strategy, but one that sadly only inflames our epistemological sickness.

How can one flourish in a world like this? How can one fortify one’s immunity and be healthy amidst a contagion of foolishness whose spread shows no sign of stopping? How can Christians become storehouses of wisdom in this era when more and more sickly people will be looking for a cure?

Better Habits of Information Intake

This book proposes that we need a better diet of knowledge and better habits of information intake. To become wise in the information age—where opinions, soundbites, diversions, and distractions are abundant, but wisdom is scarce—we need to be more discerning about what we consume. We need a diet comprised of lasting, reliable sources of wisdom rather than the fleeting, untrustworthy information that bombards us today; a diet heavy on what fosters wisdom and low on what fosters folly.

You might remember the old “Food Pyramid” from your childhood. First published in the US by the Department of Agriculture in 1992, the Food Pyramid was designed to help people understand the folly of eating only french fries, soda, and candy—and the wisdom of eating grains, fruits, and vegetables. The Food Pyramid was a brilliant visual guide for healthy eating habits, offering guidance for how many servings of each food group helped form a balanced diet.

We need something similar for our habits of information intake. We need guidance for how to daily navigate the glut of information available to us, an ordering framework for navigating the noise and the mess of our cultural moment. We need a “Wisdom Pyramid.”

But before we get to the pyramid’s practical guidance for “eating” well in the information age (part two of this book), we first need to understand the nature and sources of our sickness (part one). How did we get here?

The New “Post-Truth” Normal

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic exposed the severity of the epistemological crisis we face in the digital age. As the new virus spread globally, public health experts and government leaders naturally struggled to understand the nature of the contagion and how best to contain it. But the speed with which information—good, bad, and ugly—spreads in today’s world meant that imperfect data, errant projections, hastily written analysis, and contradictory recommendations were spread confidently and quickly, resulting in a disaster of information every bit as dangerous as the disease itself. Whatever you wanted to believe about the pandemic and the “stay at home” restrictions issued by governments, there were articles, studies, and experts you could find online to defend your view. The result was a deepening cynicism and uncertainty about pretty much everything.

COVID-19 didn’t create these frightening information dynamics, but it was a crisis made worse because of them. It was really 2016 when the extent of our epistemological crisis became apparent. That was the year Donald Trump’s election to president in the US and “Brexit” in the UK stunned experts and accelerated feelings that the world was entering a new, unpredictable phase driven more by rage than reality, more by fear than facts.

As a result, Oxford Dictionaries declared “post-truth” the international word of the year in 2016, defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”1 The new “post-truth” normal was underscored in early 2017 when Time posed the question, “Is Truth Dead?” on its cover, designed in such a way to mirror a Time cover from 50 years earlier which posed a more foundational question: “Is God Dead?”2 These two covers, a half century apart, tell an important story. Without God as an ultimate standard of truth, all we have are “truths” as interpreted by individuals. To each their own. You do you. It’s no wonder we are now as confused as we are. Do away with God, and you do away with truth.

Our Mental and Spiritual Sickness

I recently spoke to a group of college students and asked them two questions. First: “How many of you have a smartphone?” All forty hands in the room went up. Second: “How many of you would say your smartphone has made you a better, happier, healthier person?” Three hands went up.

Generation Z, or iGen as psychologist Jean Twenge has dubbed them, are living their lives through phones. And they are not happier. With lives characterized by ever-present screen time, texting, and social media, iGen has subsequently been defined by rising rates of depression, loneliness, anxiety, sleeplessness, and suicidal ideation.

“It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades,” wrote Twenge,3 who assembled a vast array of research to support this thesis in her 2017 book iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—and What That Means for the Rest of Us. The title says it all.

Twenge shows in her book how rising rates of mental-health challenges among iGen started spiking in the years following the debut of the iPhone in 2007. The lines on various mental illness graphs became steeper when smartphones became ubiquitous. Surely that is not a coincidence. And it’s not just iGen who is increasingly sick from the toxins of our digital age. Mental illness is rising across the board. The number of Americans diagnosed with major depression has risen by 33 percent since 2013, as shown in a report from Blue Cross Blue Shield in 2018.4 Though rates are rising most rapidly among teenagers, every age group is seeing a rise. And it’s not just an American problem. Depression is now the leading cause of disability worldwide, with over 300 million people suffering from it across the globe.5

Research also shows Americans are increasingly unhappy. The year 2017 marked a new high in unhappiness in America, according to the Gallup-Sharecare “Well-Being Index.” A record twenty-one states saw their well-being scores decline in 2017, and for the first time in nine years no state’s score improved by a statistically significant margin over the prior year.6

People are also increasingly lonely. Cigna’s “2018 U.S. Loneliness Index” found that just under half (46 percent) of Americans always or sometimes feel alone, with the highest levels of loneliness among Generation Z and Millennials. Loneliness “has the same impact on mortality as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, making it even more dangerous than obesity”7 and is increasingly regarded as a public health crisis by governments around the world. In 2017 the UK became the first government to appoint a “Minister for Loneliness,” followed by a comprehensive, £21.8 million “loneliness strategy” to address the crisis.8

Our cultural sickness in the digital age is real and growing, and there are signs it is affecting our physical health too. After increasing for most of the last sixty years, US life expectancies started decreasing after 2014 and are still on the decline—largely due to rising rates of suicide and drug overdose.9 But statistics, national surveys, and well-being indexes are one thing. The day-to-day, experiential realities of living in this diseased environment are another. To some degree or another we all feel infected.

Nausea, Addiction, and Other Ailments

I feel the sickness constantly. When I open Twitter and see the latest array of vile name-calling, self-righteous ranting, and virtue-signaling, I get squeamish. When I find myself meandering on my phone—scrolling through Instagram, clicking random links, checking sports scores, or whatever—I often feel removed from my body, lost in a digital rabbit hole. Even as I write this chapter, the phone on my desk has lured me into its web probably a dozen times. Why? How do I stop this? How do I resist checking my phone first thing in the morning, last thing at night, and multiple times each hour in between? The questions trouble my mind, as they probably do yours.

The sickness I feel—which so many people feel—is akin to that of the slot machine addict. We’ve been conditioned in a Pavlovian way to keep putting proverbial coins in the machine. The dings and flashes of our push notifications give us dopamine hits that keep us hooked, as they were engineered to do. We want to see who pinged us, what people are saying about our photos, and what’s getting the mobs riled up today. It’s terrible for us, and we know it, but like other vices—alcohol, tobacco, sugar—it’s addictive.

There are other symptoms I experience. I find myself skim-reading books now, or I find myself reading a few pages of a book, then something on Wikipedia, then a few more pages of the book, then Twitter, and so forth. Then there is the headache-inducing anxiety of response-demanding notifications—the never-ending pings from text messages, Facebook messages, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, Slack, Voxer, MarcoPolo, Asana, LinkedIn, email, and various others. It’s the feeling of swimming upstream and never making progress.

These and other ailments prompted me to write this book. Having experienced the sickness in myself and seeing it in others, I want to champion a better way—a way to be sane and centered and virtuous in this crazy world. I want us to be discerning in an age of distraction. But before we get to the medicine, we must first understand the causes of the sickness.

Three Habits Making Us Sick

We must examine our daily diet of knowledge intake. It can be nutritious, making us wise and shrewd, more able to ward off intellectual infections and spiritual afflictions. But it can also be toxic, making us unwise and more susceptible to the lies and snares of our age.

Below are three poor habits of informational “eating” that are particularly prevalent in today’s world, habits contributing to our sickness. The next three chapters will examine each of these poor habits in more depth, but here they are in brief.

1. Eating Too Much

Just as eating too much of anything makes us sick—stomachaches, indigestion, or worse—too much information makes us sick. And nothing characterizes the Internet age quite like “information overload.”

Have a question about the Bible? Google it, and there are hundreds of answers. Need a video tutorial for how to install curtains? There are tons of them on YouTube. (Trust me, I watched at least five of them.) Looking for the best croissant in Paris? Try searching Yelp, TripAdvisor, or countless other websites that have an opinion.

In theory, the vast repository of information at our disposal is a wonderful thing. In practice it’s often paralyzing. Even with Google’s algorithmic “ranking” of search results, it’s overwhelming to sift through the glut. For example, every mommy blogger and baby-whispering guru has a different recommendation for sleep training. Whom do you trust? Whose method actually works? The lure of the all-knowing Internet promises to clarify, but often it just complicates.

It’s the problem of limitless space. Whereas physical stores and communities are bound by limitations—a supermarket can only stock so many brands of coffee, and a family only has so many opinions about what to cook for Thanksgiving—the Internet does not have any of those limitations. For coffee, Thanksgiving recipes, and anything else, the options are extensive. Again, in theory, it’s freeing! In practice, it’s frustrating. How do you choose the best option among so many that are undifferentiated, untested, and—aside from user-submitted reviews—unvetted?

The “limitless space” nature of online media has also created a situation where “news” channels must find content to fill 24 hours a day, seven days a week, resulting in a diminishment of what qualifies as “newsworthy” (e.g., filling an hour with live car chases). On the Web, not only is there the expectation of daily, fresh, “breaking news” content, but there is fierce competition for clicks. Desperate to stand out, websites are motivated to use incendiary headlines and other tricks to collect coveted clicks by any means necessary. The result is content that is often rushed (a hot take on yesterday’s controversy), random, reckless, or even distorted to spark short-term controversy rather than long-term wisdom.

In the competitive landscape of the digital age, the “food” of information is not getting more nutritious; it’s veering in the direction of junk food. Doritos and Skittles will always get more clicks than spinach. And so we walk down the buffet line of social media snacks and online junk food, daily gorging ourselves to the point of gluttony. Unsurprisingly, it is making us sick.

2. Eating Too Fast

When you inhale food in a rush you often pay for it later. However convenient it may be, “fast” food is generally not the most nutritious. Most of the best food, both in nutritional value and overall taste, is prepared and eaten slowly. As with food, so it is with information.

We live in a harried age. Events that dominated headlines one week are forgotten the next. Social media favors what is #Trending at any given moment but has no incentive to circle back to last month’s societal conundrum, let alone last year’s. The Internet is a medium of now. Its memory is short; its shape ever changing. To navigate life online is to always be playing catch up: reading the article everyone is sharing on Facebook, following someone’s Instagram story before it disappears. If you don’t respond to your friend’s text within 20 minutes you might jeopardize the friendship. If you are a “thought leader” and you don’t weigh in on the social media outrage of the day, you might lose your thought-leader status. Whether in hot-take clickbait or well-timed Twitter threads, fortune favors the fast on the Internet. It doesn’t favor wisdom.

Such a pace has no time for critical thinking. When we are conditioned to move quickly from tweet to tweet, hot take to hot take, it’s all we can do to skim the thing, let alone read it with careful, critical thought. Scholars have found that the “junk food” nature of information intake online is rewiring our brains, such that our cognitive abilities to think carefully and critically are being eroded. “In a culture that rewards immediacy, ease, and efficiency,” writes literacy advocate Maryanne Wolf, “the demanding time and effort involved in developing all the aspects of critical thought make it an increasingly embattled entity.”10

This is why “fake news,” viral misinformation, and conspiracy theories are increasingly problems. Speed often leads to errors. It makes us susceptible to falling for false reports and passing along misinformation. And it’s not just amateur bloggers and Facebook posters who are susceptible to this. Even society’s most esteemed experts and hallowed institutions are vulnerable to the mistakes that come with commenting or reporting on something faster than it can be understood. If the New York Times can fall into the Internet speed trap of too-hasty and inaccurate reportage, who can be trusted? If the Centers for Disease Control doesn’t provide reliable information on the dynamics of a contagion and how best to contain it, who does? Over time our skepticism about all sources leads us to turn inward, trusting only in ourselves—which brings us to our third major bad dietary habit.

3. Eating Only What Tastes Good to Me

If we only ever ate our favorite foods, most of us would be sick or dead. I love almond croissants and chocolate chip cookies (especially paired with a cup of black coffee!), but a diet consisting only of this would land me in the hospital. So it is with our information diet. We might be tempted to consume only material we like and have a taste for, but that will leave us sickly. Sadly, this is exactly what many of us do in today’s hyper-individualistic, choose-your-own-adventure world.

The Internet is built around you. Google search; social media algorithms; recommendations from Siri, Alexa, Netflix, and Spotify; and even the creepy artificial intelligence that now finishes your sentences in email writing: all of it is tailored to you. In theory this is amazing! What’s wrong with a world that revolves around you and your particular preferences and proclivities? A few things.

First, when everything revolves around you and your tastes, it’s only going to be awesome if you know exactly what’s good for you. And we usually don’t. Consider the build-your-own pizza restaurant trend. You go down the line and pick exactly what you want on your pizza: the spicy marinara sauce, sausage, pepperoni, olives, red onions, garlic, ricotta, mozzarella, maybe some pesto drizzled on top. Whatever suits your fancy. But in my experience (and maybe I’m just a bad pizza maker), the “perfect pizza for me” almost always ends up being a disappointment. Generally I would have been better off simply trusting the expertise of the chef, allowing someone with actual culinary wisdom to create a pizza I’d be sure to enjoy. Furthermore, if it’s always only up to me to build my own pizza, I’ll likely only stick with flavors I know and like, never venturing into new culinary territory or expanding my palate.

The second problem is that when every individual is living a totally unique, customized, perfectly curated “i” life, it is harder to find commonality with others. We start losing the ability to be empathetic, unable to connect with people because their experience of the world—the news they consume, their social media feeds, and so on—is different from ours in ways we can’t even know. We are all living in our own self-made media bubbles, and no two are the same. Part of the reason society is increasingly divisive is that we can’t have productive conversations when everyone comes to it with their own set of “facts,” “experts,” and background biases, having been shaped by an information diet completely different from anyone else’s. And when we can’t relate to others, we retreat further into our individualistic, self-referential bubbles, which is not an environment where wisdom can grow.

A Healthier Diet

So what do we do about these bad dietary habits that are poisoning our souls? Shouldn’t Christians, as followers of the man who called himself “the truth” (John 14:6) and said “the truth will set you free” (John 8:32), be leading the charge to recover truth and model wisdom in a post-truth age?

Some Christians have suggested the cultural situation is so dire, and the malforming momentum of the digital age so unstoppable, that the best strategy is to withdraw. In order to avoid infection by the contagions of the digital age, we should unplug and form alternative communities somewhere, like the monks in the Dark Ages. If we want to remain salt and light for future generations and be carriers of Christian wisdom beyond this troubling era, we need to hunker down and wait it out, lest we lose ourselves in the onslaught.