Podcast: Inherent Dangers of the Information Age (Brett McCracken)

February 08, 2021 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Godly Wisdom in a Post-Truth Era

In this episode, Brett McCracken discusses what it looks like to pursue true wisdom in a noisy and confused age. He highlights the dangers of living in a constantly connected, information-saturated world, explains why the local church, good books, and even nature are crucial for our spiritual health, and he makes a critical yet often overlooked distinction between gaining knowledge and pursuing wisdom.

The Wisdom Pyramid

The Wisdom Pyramid

Brett McCracken

Helping believers navigate today’s media-saturated culture, Brett McCracken presents a biblical case for wisdom. Using the illustration of a Wisdom Pyramid, he points readers to more lasting and reliable sources of wisdom—not for their own glorification, but ultimately for God’s.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:25 - An Unwise Age

Matt Tully
Brett, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Brett McCracken
Thanks so much, Matt, for having me.

Matt Tully
In the opening pages of your new book, you have this great line: “Everyone has a megaphone, but no one has a filter.” I think we can all think back over the last twelve months or so, and that line is the perfect descriptor of 2020 and what this year gone by has been. Can you speak a little bit to that? What’s been your experience of that dynamic over the last twelve months?

Brett McCracken
It’s a dynamic that was there before 2020, of course, but I think this year has exposed, in a really troubling way, the extent of these dynamics and these problems. The line you mentioned—“Everyone has a megaphone, but no one has a filter”—that’s just our day to day reality if you go on social media. It’s a suffocation barrage of yelling—and that’s the megaphone idea—everyone is just yelling about something. Every hour of every day there’s something to be angry about, something to be raging about. Social media, of course, invites it. It’s a phenomenon that is incentivized to get people to share their opinions and emotions in real time without a filter—without the filter of time that is so important for our wisdom. The instant reaction propensity of our age to just share what’s on your mind immediately is so not conducive to wisdom. We’re so much better off, as the Bible says in the book of James, to be slow to speak, quicker to listen. All the dynamics of the Internet age and social media work against that Bible verse. So, the dynamics were there before 2020, but have been amplified extremely in this year with the pandemic, and all the opinions about that; and the racial justice, and all the opinions about that; and politics, of course. If we only had the election this year, it would be enough; but there was the election and a whole lot more.

Matt Tully
Speak to that a little bit and unpack that more. You say that some of these dynamics were present before 2020. I think we all have a little bit of a sense of that. Social media in particular has long been a place that has been seen to amplify echo chambers and perpetuate anger online. But, are there ways in which you think the last twelve months or so—with the pandemic and all the other things that have happened—have they introduced anything fundamentally new, or is it really just exaggerating what was already there?

Brett McCracken
Like anything in life, the worst elements of something are brought out in times of stress. So I think part of it is the stress of 2020 has made existing problems all that much worse because none of us are at our best. If we were previously tempted to be angry and raging online about things online that angered us, in 2020 we’re even more so because we were locked up in our homes and we were cut off from community and it’s just not been a fun year. So everyone’s a bit more angry than normal, and everyone is a little more short-tempered than normal. So those things have made the dynamics even worse.

Matt Tully
It makes me think of your first book with Crossway, Uncomfortable, and the subtitle of it was great: The Awkward and Essential Challenge of Christian Community. One of the things that I think you were emphasizing in that book is that sometimes some of the things that make life in the context of the local church so hard—the disagreements, different styles and tastes and opinions that can come out in that context—is actually some of the most important stuff for us. It helps keep us thinking the right way, whereas online community—which we’ve all been pursuing vigorously, as churches even—doesn’t have that component in the same way. How would you explain the difference there?

Brett McCracken
I think you’re right to connect Uncomfortable with what I’m talking about here because one of the big points of that book was to show that the same thing that makes church awkward and hard is also what makes it healthy. Church is a diverse amalgamation of people from all walks of life, backgrounds, political persuasion, and ethnicities. That makes church messy and hard. And in a consumeristic age, it’s very counterintuitive to opt into something that’s going to be messy and uncomfortable. But that’s exactly what makes it so healthy for us because it stretches us outside of our little bubbles and our biases and our inclinations and proclivities that we sometimes can’t see when we’re left just to ourselves. So a community of people who are different and who are invested in growing each other and stretching each other in the direction of holiness and Christlikeness is made all the more effective because of the diversity that’s uncomfortable in that community. But in the online communities, because the whole system is set up to cater to you and your individual taste and preferences, it’s super easy to just curate your own feeds and your own voices that are speaking into your online experience—even the media outlets that you prefer. Everyone is just conditioned to start to develop a media environment that is full of voices that agree with you already and affirm you in your existing beliefs, and to delete or unfollow the voices that don’t. When that starts happening in a widespread way across society, bad things occur. And we’re seeing it in our world today—the rise of this weird reality where no two of us, in a very real sense, experiences the same version of reality based on the differences in how we receive reality through media. The documentary, The Social Dilemma, really gets into this in a helpful way, unpacking the social media algorithms and all of that, so I would recommend that.

09:13 - An Epistemological Crisis

Matt Tully
We’ll come back to that in a little bit and talk about that documentary and how interesting it was in revealing some of these things that are happening in ways that we can’t even perceive. But for now, let’s speak a little bit more about this epistemological crisis that we’re working through right now. That’s a big word. What does it mean? What is this epistemological crisis, and is there something about our moment right now in the world in which we live in that is making it worse than it was before?

Brett McCracken
The word is a big word, but for those of you who remember Philosophy 101 in college, it’s essentially—

Matt Tully
All five of you.

Brett McCracken
All five of you, yeah. I took a grad school course in epistemology, so maybe I’m a little too familiar with the word, but it’s basically the study of how we know things—how we come to knowledge and truth. To say we’re in an epistemological crisis is basically saying we’re in a crisis of knowing what to trust and whether we can know anything for sure. It’s not a new thing. I think the last century or so has been this steady trajectory of eroding our trust in truth. In the book I talk about a recent Time magazine cover where the headline was "Is Truth Dead?" They designed the cover in a way to exactly mimic another Time magazine cover from fifty years before that had the question, “Is God Dead?” So, two covers, two questions, both three-word questions, separated by a half-century. But the one follows the other. Once society started questioning God and the existence of God, then all of the foundations of truth started to crumble. If there’s no transcendent standard for truth, then how can you have any truth? So, it shouldn’t be surprising that fifty years after “Is God Dead?” was the question, now the question is, "Is Truth Dead?" There’s the bigger philosophical trajectory that is at play here that has led to the epistemological crisis, but then there’s the technological dynamic, which I really hone in on in The Wisdom Pyramid. That’s what I really think has accelerated this crisis. We can talk about some of the specific dynamics there, but it’s basically this: In an Internet age where there’s so much information out there—just like we were just talking about with the echo chambers—it can be easy to find the “truth” that you want to find online for whatever belief you have or whatever theory you have. Whether it’s about COVID, the pandemic, or the election—was it stolen, was there conspiracy there—for whatever you want to believe, you can find “facts” online. So by virtue of the unlimited spaced and unlimited information of the Internet era, you can start to build an entire reality of your own making. We see it in the way that we have debates and arguments in today’s world. Everyone comes to their debates with their own set of what we call facts. And if your facts conflict with my facts, we just call them alternative facts—those are your facts and these are my facts. So it’s no wonder that we’re at an impasse in some of these debates in our culture, whether it’s about race or politics or even something like COVID-19. I’ve written recently at The Gospel Coalition about specific dynamics in the COVID-19 era that we see with information and epistemology and how none of us really trust anyone. It’s become really hard to know who to trust. Even the most authoritative figures, who are the experts supposedly, they’ve been wrong a lot in the pandemic. So why should we believe what they’re saying about different aspects of the pandemic? Those are some of the things I’m getting at with the epistemological crisis.

14:07 - The Wisdom Pyramid

Matt Tully
So far we’ve been mostly talking about the information we’re consuming from the online and media realms, and some of the challenges that we’ve been discussing maybe underscore the bigger picture of what you’re trying to do in your new book—to help establish a food pyramid-like scheme to think about what information we’re consuming, where we’re seeking to get wisdom in our lives, and how the Internet and media are at the very top of the pyramid, which is actually the smallest portion that we should be healthily ingesting. Unpack that a little bit. First, why use the idea of a food pyramid? Then, walk us through the different levels of that pyramid.

Brett McCracken
The food pyramid idea came about because I was giving a conference presentation a few years ago on how to be wise in an era of fake news and untrustworthy information online. So I just created this wisdom pyramid graphic, borrowing from the food pyramid, as a visual aide because my argument in my talk was that we need to have better habits of knowledge intake. Just like we are physically healthier when we have a more thoughtful, intentional diet of food that is conducive to health, the same is true for our wisdom. If we’re unintentional and passive about what we take in, then we’re probably going to gravitate towards the junk food and towards the unhealthy sources of information. And that’s going to make us sick. And it is making us sick. We’re all feeling the sickness of not having paid enough attention to the diet, so to speak, of information that we take in. For me, it really does boil down to the fact that what we take in in our minds, hearts, and souls shapes us. It shapes the people that we become; and it can make us foolish, or it can make us wise. We’ve all seen people in our circles who have, sadly, become more foolish by the indiscriminate habits of what they’ve listened to, what they read, and what they watch.

Matt Tully
Do you think there’s more to it than even just not thinking carefully about what we’re consuming? Picking up on the food pyramid idea, the top of the pyramid just happens to be very unhealthy and damaging to us if consumed in large quantities because of the sugars and the fats; but they also happen to taste delicious. They’re so appealing, and they just are so satisfying in the moment. Do you think there’s something to that with what you’re getting at with the Internet and social media consumption—is it, in some way, more delicious to us?

Brett McCracken
For sure. I made that connection intentionally—putting the Internet and social media in the place where fats, oils, and sweets were in the food pyramid—because social media, in particular, really is like candy. It’s like chocolate. It’s like an addiction, and it’s created to be that. The makers of these social media platforms have been honest about the fact that they’ve built these algorithms and platforms with the push notifications and the little ways that they draw us in for dopamine hits. They keep us coming back and they keep us on the platform in the same way that a candy store or a bakery wafts the smells of chocolate croissants, or donuts, out into the street. It keeps people coming in. So, it’s a very similar situation with the Internet and social media. We spend so much of our time there for a reason—because it’s addictive. If we’re not aware of that and intentional about scaling back our consumption of that—knowing how addictive it is—then we’re going to be in trouble.

18:51 - Wisdom from Beauty

Matt Tully
Walk us down the pyramid. What’s that next level underneath social media and the Internet?

Brett McCracken
I think the next one is beauty. Some of these categories are a little arbitrary in terms of where I place them. They could be switched around, perhaps, so it’s not a scientific answer for how these categories should be prioritized. Although, once we get to the base layer, I don’t think that’s in dispute. What I call beauty basically includes the arts, culture, and things like movies, novels, music—that’s all actually helpful for our wisdom. If you live a life that only thinks of wisdom in terms of facts and data, you’re not going to become wise. We see this in the way God reveals himself to us in Scripture. God didn’t just reveal himself with a 2,000-page book of bullet points: Here are the take-away lessons.

Matt Tully
A big outline.

Brett McCracken
A big outline. No, he did it through the forms of beauty—literary devices, poetry, story. The Bible is a story with characters and ups and downs and drama. That alone shows us, I think, that God values the wisdom that can be gleaned from beauty. Beauty helps truth sink in, I think, in a way that just memorizing facts doesn’t. Not that there isn’t a place for that, but I think that beauty should be part of our wisdom diet for the reason that it makes truth stick. That’s why we often teach our kids in Sunday school through songs. We use beauty to convey truth. I also think that beauty slows us down in a really fast-paced, hectic age where we’re so utilitarian and we want to fill every moment of our day with something useful. Beauty is, by definition, a little more superfluous. There isn’t an immediate, pragmatic use for it, but that’s why it’s important. Beauty is closely tied to Sabbath for that reason. I think for the same reason why God created the Sabbath for us to breathe and rest and not work is the same reason he created hundreds of thousands of species of flowers in the world and the beauty of a sunset. These are things that don’t serve a utilitarian purpose, arguably; but they’re there because God values abundance. So, that’s the beauty category. It was a fun one for me to write about in the book because it’s near and dear to my heart.

Matt Tully
Maybe some of our listeners will know that occasionally you will write movie reviews for The Gospel Coalition, where you work. That’s one of my favorite things of yours to read that you write on a fairly regular basis, just to kind of see how you draw out these elements of beauty and truth from stories and films. You have it still fairly high up on the pyramid, so is there still a danger in that category for over consumption?

Brett McCracken
There are dangers in a lot of the categories of the wisdom pyramid if we make them the soul source of wisdom, or imbue them with too much significance. Also, with beauty, the reason I put it high up on the pyramid in one of the less crucial places is because there’s a lot more room for truth to be twisted in unhelpful ways. I live and work in the area of the arts. I’m the arts and culture editor for The Gospel Coalition, and I know from experience that a lot of people in the arts—artists—can often be tempted into unhealthy ambiguity when it comes to theology and truth. What starts as a good thing—this curiosity and asking questions and wrestling with the complexities of life—can almost become an unhealthy fixation so that they don’t have any room for solid, indisputable truth, and everything in life becomes up for grabs in the name of art and in the name of—

Matt Tully
Authenticity.

Brett McCracken
Authenticity and just the complexity of life. I love art and I love that it wrestles with life’s complexities, but I also think that we can go wrong when we take that too far in the extreme. So that’s one of the reasons why there’s an asterisk of concern with beauty as a source of wisdom.

Matt Tully
The next category you have below that is books. Obviously, there’s probably some overlap between some of these categories, but why books in particular? That might be a little bit surprising that you would call out almost a format in particular?

Brett McCracken
A lot of it does boil down to the format of books being, I think, super helpful to counter the quick, piecemeal, bite-size way that we process information in the online world where we go from one tweet to another tweet; we scan a paragraph of an article and we don’t really process it; and then we move onto something else like a YouTube clip. It’s just this very frenetic pace of information intake. I don’t think it’s super conducive to wisdom. The thing with books is that if you really give yourself to a book—sadly, it’s becoming harder and harder to read books, and there’s research showing this. The way that the Internet is rewiring our brains is actually making it harder to focus on something like a book. I’ve experienced it in my own life. If we commit to reading books, it helps us to think better. It helps us to really learn how to process the complexity of ideas and to go deep into one topic or subject matter in an era where we go superficial in a lot of things by virtue of our habits online. So, the form of a book, I think, is conducive to wisdom. It also develops empathy—it helps us to learn how to listen well to someone else. I encourage people to read books that are written by people who are different from you and who maybe don’t come from the exact same perspective as you do on a particular issue. If you have the discipline to read a book by someone like that on a topic that maybe you have a different perspective on, it’s going to serve you well, in terms of your wisdom, because you’ll learn how to understand the other side of an argument. If you spend several days or weeks with an author as you read through their book, it humanizes them, even if they might kind of be the enemy—to use the language of the culture wars. If you listen to their perspective, I think it will be helpful. So, I really encourage, in that chapter on books, just reading diversely, reading books of various genres, and particularly reading older books.

24:33 - Wisdom from Nature

Matt Tully
That is a nice segue into the next level of the pyramid, which is one of the best places to pursue that unmediated space that we often need, and that’s nature. Why did you put nature in this pyramid?

Brett McCracken
This was one of the most enjoyable chapters for me to write because I think it’s surprising to some people to think about nature as a source of wisdom. My rationale for putting it in a pretty prominent position on the wisdom pyramid is basically that it’s God’s creation. The Bible is the foundation of the pyramid—and we’ll get to that soon—but if the Bible is the most important source of wisdom because it is God’s direct revelation to us of himself, then his creation—the general revelation of himself through what he has made—is also a source of wisdom, for the reason that it’s him. It connects us to him, we can learn things about him, and by doing so we learn a little bit more about what it means to be wise. So there’s that aspect of it. There’s also the space aspect—having mental and spiritual breathing room outside of the hectic pace of our digital world. There’s interesting studies that I talk about in the book written by secular writers and scientists that show the healing power of being in nature for all of these mental issues. Mental illness is on the rise in our world, and I think there probably are some correlations with technology and how much time we spend with technology. So to be unplugged and to be in our proper place in nature as creatures and as part of creation, there’s a lot of wisdom in that. I think nature also offers us a really healthy perspective in a world that tends to make us start to think that we are the center of the universe. And certainly technology amplifies that because it allows us to have total control over the world that we make and the reality that we build. It’s called an iPhone for a reason—the focus is on me. Nature doesn’t allow for that. You go out in nature—to the Grand Canyon, for example—and you look at how vast it is, and you’re reminded of how small you are. Look up at the stars, and you realize this universe isn’t about me. It doesn’t revolve around me. I’m a small part in it. Things like the weather—the weather is what it is. It’s either snowing, or it’s not. You can’t control it. It doesn’t have an opinion. A rainstorm doesn’t have an opinion about who won the 2020 election, even though some people might interpret a clap of thunder being God’s approval or disapproval of something.

Matt Tully
The weather also doesn’t care about our opinions.

Brett McCracken
Right. It is what it is. I think I write in the book, “It is what it is, not what we want it to be.” I think there’s so much value in things that we don’t have control over. We can’t just make it shift to fit us. Although, we’re seeing attempts at that with nature. People are trying to morph gender or biology into whatever they want it to be. So, mankind is always trying to take mastery over nature, but it’s a hard thing to do.

31:34 - Wisdom from Church and the Bible

Matt Tully
The last two foundational levels are the church and the Bible. We’ve talked a little bit about the church and the value of community for helping us, so maybe speak to the Bible. Why did you put that at the very bottom? It maybe feels a little bit obvious or expected to a Christian listening right now, but what do you mean by that, and why might that be more confronting to us than we might expect?

Brett McCracken
Yeah, it does feel like the eager broccoli part of the wisdom pyramid. We all kind of know that it’s the most important source of wisdom, but it’s hard to prioritize it. I’m honest about that in the book, and I think that we have to be honest about the fact that the Bible, for as valuable as it is, is a very counter-cultural document for a twenty-first century person in the digital age to be prioritizing reading on a regular, daily basis. It’s a collection of writings from the ancient Near East—a culture and a language far from us. It’s a challenge; and yet, it’s a challenge that is essential. It’s vital because it is God’s direct revelation to us. Nothing else in the world—no other information, no other knowledge, no other source—is infallible. The Bible is something solid, and it’s so important in a world that feels shaky and where everything is up for grabs and there’s no one to adjudicate the question of what is true. To go back to the whole epistemological idea where we don’t even know what to trust—the Bible is such a gift to us because it declares itself as something that you can trust. It is God’s word. He is God. He is the source of all wisdom. He is wisdom incarnate. His words to us are something that we can take to the bank in a way that we can’t with anything else. It’s valuable not only for what we find in the Bible when we read it but also as the standard by which we can measure the trustworthiness of everything else. It functions in that base layer of the wisdom pyramid not only as the logical sturdy foundation for wisdom but also the thing that keeps the upper layers in check. It keeps the scaffolding with all the other categories secure because we know that if there’s some aspect of a book that we read and we’re not quite sure whether it’s wisdom that we should glean, we can check that by asking, What does Scripture say about this? Based on what we know from Scripture about this topic, how can I think well about this book? Same thing with beauty. If there’s a movie that you see that’s beautiful, but there’s some aspects of it that you’re not quite sure about, the Bible provides for us that grid to evaluate the relative wisdom of everything else. To me, that’s freedom. It should give Christians the wisdom to explore and to dive into all these other categories—the arts, culture, science, nature, books of every sort—it should give us the freedom to do that because we know that at the end of the day, we don’t have to agree with everything we find in those places, and we probably shouldn’t. But the Bible gives us that evaluative grid to know what we can call good, true, beautiful, and what we can ignore or say isn’t helpful.

36:08 - Is the Wisdom Pyramid Realistic?

Matt Tully
I’m struck as, even right now, I look at a graphic of the pyramid, and you’ve laid out why you ordered things the way that you did and proportionally why the Bible foundation layer—everyone listening can imagine it—is obviously the biggest layer. We’re not necessarily taking these proportions in the graphic to be exactly what you’re prescribing necessarily, but I am struck that as I think about even my own life—and I wonder if many, many other people, if they were being honest, would say something similar: If that’s the ideal, the reality feels like it’s often the complete opposite. It’s completely flipped, where our consumption of the Internet and social media is probably so huge relative to how much time we’re spending in the Bible or in Christian community. Speak to that a little bit. Is that something that you’ve found to be true in your own life? How realistic is this?

Brett McCracken
That is the response that I get most often when people see that graphic of the pyramid. The gut reaction that people have is, Whoa! We have flipped it. I think all of us, if we’re honest, would say that we’ve flipped it. In terms of time spent in our day, we do probably spend the most time online and on social media than any of these other categories. The shock value of that gut check is part of the point of the pyramid. It’s more to get people aware of that problem—how we flip the priorities—than it is a scientific prescription like, You have to have ten portions of Bible each day and eight portions of church. It doesn’t translate into a precise allocation of how your time has to go to these things. In reality, I don’t know how realistic it is to say that any given day you’re going to spend the most time in the Bible. I don’t think that’s probably going to happen. It’s more about the big picture place that it occupies in your life. Is your life characterized by the visual of the pyramid where the Bible is the most important source of truth for you, where it’s the standard by which you measure everything else, where all of your decisions are filtered through it? And in terms of where your heart gravitates toward—are you more likely to go to social media to fill your heart’s longings—whether it’s for approval or attention or entertainment—are you more drawn to that than you are to God’s word? So those are the bigger questions that I want people to ask. It’s not a diet where I’m prescribing you have to eat this many servings of each category. It’s going to look different for each person, and on any given day or week we go through seasons where maybe we’ll have a lot of time to be outdoors. Maybe we’re on a vacation in a national park, so the nature part of the wisdom pyramid will be a really helpful part of our diet during that season. Or maybe you’re on a day off of work and you get to finish reading a book, so the category of books becomes a big part of your day. So, it’s going to be a fluid thing, but I want it to be a big picture wake up call for people to just pay more attention to what constitutes their diet of information. In a world where there’s a lot of toxic, unhelpful stuff out there, we need to be more wise and more intentional than ever in where we look and what we’re spending our time attending to.

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