Day: August 12, 2025

I rejoiced when I heard that my children’s school had canceled their weekly library hour. I’m sorry. I know how that sounds. Truly, I am a bibliophile; my kids have been surrounded by piles of books, quite literally from conception. I’ve devoted countless hours to reading to them. But for years, I ground my teeth at any mention of the school library.

On one level, my angst stemmed from niggling practical problems. I hated the mad hunts on library day for random books I had never heard of until we were about to be late for school. I scowled at the new entries on our school bill when we couldn’t find them. It just felt like a massive headache we didn’t need. One could argue, with some justice, that I should lament my own organizational failures instead of resenting hapless librarians. Here’s the harsh truth, though. No book the kids brought home ever became a family favorite. And shared libraries (both public and school) are becoming obsolete. 

It’s not just libraries. In the shadow of advancing technology, many things that have contributed enormously to our civilization are passing away. I’m not exactly celebrating here; in many ways, it’s quite terrifying. But as a parent, it feels self-indulgent to marinate in nostalgia. My kids are going to live in this world regardless of how I feel about it. I’d rather help them figure it out than just close my eyes and pray.

As a conservative, I have a natural suspicion of techno-optimists. Large language models are the big newcomer, and they do raise many new concerns. Everyone appreciates this in the abstract, but talking with fellow conservatives (both older and younger), I don’t always find it easy to make common cause. Many seem inclined to shun AI and other new technologies, to “just say no” or at least encourage everyone to use them as little as possible. I understand, but to me that feels like dereliction, a refusal to face up to the task at hand.

I suspect the difference in perspective stems partly from the age and interests of my kids. Four of my five sons are now in the tween-and-teen range, with a wide range of interests that can obviously be advanced through the use of technology. Older adults can default to a “personally I’d rather not” stance, while parents of young kids often warm to the “Tech Exit” strategy, reasonably believing that young children don’t need screen-based entertainment and are better off in the sandbox. That’s fine, but with older kids, the conundrums get harder. If my children just wanted to rot their brains with first-person shooters, that would be an easy call, but if you have raised your kids to be curious and inventive, they’re likely to want to use technological tools to advance healthy and meaningful pursuits. Parents still have the authority to ban the bots, but the bar on adequate justifications rises considerably. 

The problem calls for careful consideration. Let us return for a blissful moment to the library. Libraries were always my happy place in childhood, and as a university student, I loved studying in the stacks. Some years ago, though, I had an eye-opening experience when I tried to make An Event out of a public library trip in early summer, helping my kids choose summer reading books. I wanted to show them how much fun it could be to browse the stacks and explore their interests and hobbies. But as we ran searches and scoured shelves, I realized I was inadvertently teaching them something else. It didn’t make a lick of sense to explore their interests at the library. Classics are cheap to buy, and for specific interests or hobbies, the library’s offerings were dated and limited in scope. We could have spent the whole afternoon hunting, and come away with far less useful material than my phone would furnish in 45 seconds. That was before large language models existed. 

On hearing this story, some people reflexively start looking “laterally” for adequate reasons to keep the libraries even though they are (by today’s new standards) both inefficient and comparatively ineffective at fulfilling the library’s original defining purpose. Perhaps we should value libraries for the human element: librarians, other patrons, public story hours. We might cherish the experience of walking through book-lined stacks, basking in the delightful smell of old pages. Perhaps the inefficiency itself should be seen as a positive good, since knowledge is more treasured when we have to work for it. 

I am not entirely unmoved by these arguments, especially because I do think that indexes, card catalogs, reading rooms, due dates, and the stacks themselves did much to enrich my own young life. But realistically, people rarely keep doing things in antiquated ways for the sake of the lateral goods. Sometimes it’s positively irrational to do that. Practical reason moves us to prioritize our actual goals over diffuse fringe benefits.

Libraries are just the start, of course. The range of things that you or your kids might want to learn from AI or other new technologies is simply enormous, and in many cases, newfangled methods will offer clear and commanding advantages over more traditional methods. 

As it happens, my sons moved into adolescence at just the moment when large language models were descending upon the world, which honestly felt like a bait-and-switch. I had spent years bracing myself for fraught discussions about social media, data theft, pornography, online gambling, scrolling addiction, video game addiction, cancel culture, and online predators. Those conversations happened, but they weren’t particularly hard. My kids (the older ones at least) already know quite a lot about those issues, but they haven’t asked for social media accounts or personal devices; they don’t even seem to want them. It helps, no doubt, that they attend a K12 parochial school where few kids have those things. It helps that they stepped into adolescence a few years after the “anxious generation” went into a tailspin, giving them (and their parents) the chance to learn from past mistakes. But whatever the reasons, they know that the virtual world can be dangerous and bruising, and show little enthusiasm for flinging themselves into that fray.

Here’s what they do want. They want AI to analyze their last chess game, so they can understand why the opening they just used didn’t work. They want it to generate a map of the travels of T. E. Lawrence, to facilitate their ongoing debate about his strategy as presented in Lawrence of Arabia. They want to know what Jane Austen means when she says that Mr. Darcy has “considerable patronage in the church” not enjoyed by his cousin, Colonel Fitzwilliam. They want an explanation of SpaceX’s latest projects, and its relationship to the US Space Force. They want to know which hard baits are most effective for going after walleye in southern Minnesota in high summer. They want to create a board game that models market growth in the early industrial era more accurately than Brass Birmingham. Once AI has helped them to develop some rules, they can be found drawing up plans for 3-D printed pieces to help them play test their game. That’s just a small sample from the past couple of weeks. It’s a bit exhausting, honestly. Hey kids, how about a nice video game?

There’s a sense of being flanked. Not only did we (my husband and I) not prepare for this sort of campaign, we actively paved the way to it by encouraging our kids to be intellectually curious, creative, and resourceful in pursuing personal interests. All my lessons in reading and understanding a text now bolster their case for using AI to look up literary references. All my lectures about mindless scrolling and “snackable” feeds come back to haunt me when they rightly observe that they won’t need to bump around the Internet gleaning snippets of information if I just permit Gemini to give them a quick response. Large language models can be wrong sometimes, and they know that. But if one only wants fishing tips, or fodder for casual dinner-table debates, aren’t they reliable enough? 

It feels obtuse to spurn such a valuable tool. High-handed lectures on alienation just sound silly when you’re standing in a Walmart aisle trying to select appropriate fishing equipment. Why not just take out your phone and get the needed information? But it’s all quite discombobulating: even as I smile and my children’s enthusiasms, taking a genuine maternal pride in that relentless curiosity, there’s that voice in the other ear whispering, “So, you signed your family up to be guinea pigs for the next technological revolution. What could go wrong?”

Some of the risks are obvious. I know all about student cheating, of course, and the nightmare it’s causing for universities. I fully agree that students must read, write, and articulate ideas if they are to develop their rational faculties. But those aren’t the problems that top my list, because the young people that most concern me are not particularly averse to reading, writing, or articulating ideas. 

On a very different front, I am deeply concerned by the things I read about chatbots being used for a simulacrum of love and friendship. Already there are tragic stories about ChatGPT ushering mentally fragile people further along the path to insanity, but as sad as those cases are, I’m even more concerned about the ways in which pseudo-intimacy with machines could erode people’s ability to navigate real human relationships. Truthfully, flesh-and-blood humans can be a real pain sometimes, and when they are, you’re not allowed to switch them off and go about your life. On the other hand, real people can love you, as an algorithm cannot. It’s chilling indeed to imagine a dystopian future in which people cocoon themselves in a virtual world of pleasantly pliant AIs, like a softly lit hall of mirrors. When it comes to chatbot intimacy, “just say no” certainly is my best advice, to my children or anyone else.

But when LLMs are used as tutors and sources of information, the questions get much harder. Here too, there are painful losses on the horizon. The decaying libraries may be the harbinger of worse things to come: crumbling universities, soulless novels, faltering minds, and imaginations. A host of questions arises here about how models should be trained, and by whom. But none of that changes the fact that AI tools, right here and now, can do much to enhance our knowledge. As a great thinker once noted, all men by nature desire to know. Can we “just say no” to the desire to know?

It’s something of a cliche by now that it’s bad to “let AI think for you.” I don’t per se disagree, but the relationship between AI and “thinking” is not straightforward, however. The transformative power of the large language model lies in its tremendous capacity for synthesis. Synthesis can be a very important exercise of human rationality, which the LLM can potentially short-circuit, and yet there’s clearly nothing new about relying on outside sources for synthesis. The OED, in its day, represented a new and powerful synthesis. Atlases are a kind of synthesis. The periodic table of elements is a synthesis of another sort. Syntheses can be transformative, in a good way, and in an unimaginably complex world, we clearly need them. But when is synthesis enhancing our capacity to think, and when is it undermining it? Unclear.

Further, it’s a familiar truth that distraction has been one of the most problematic side effects of social media, smartphones, and other recent technological advances, in part because they placed an enormous amount of data at our fingertips but forced us to do some work to marshal different tidbits and synthesize them. Large language models can do much to remedy that problem, renewing our capacity to focus. What if AI could actually lessen people’s absorption in the virtual world? It’s a possibility we should at least consider. 

Honest skeptics need to acknowledge this much at least: if we refuse to use LLMs, or prohibit them for our kids, genuinely valuable opportunities will be lost. Ancient Greek tutors exist in this world, but not many, and not at a price I could afford. Chess grand masters could provide the high-level analysis young chess nerds want, but they’re unlikely to return our phone call. Answers may vary, but it’s simply a fact that AI is forcing us to confront “how should we live now” questions in a new way. In my mind’s eye, I’m suddenly back in that public library, struggling to explain why we should check out a fraying, dated book on a subject that a new YouTube video could cover in a fraction of the time. Again, I’m floundering.

In the end though, there is this. The questions of this moment are difficult. It’s not right to leave the young and inexperienced to wrestle with them alone. The world has changed, with unclear implications, but at least if we live it out with our kids, we have some opportunity to offer guidance.

As I worked on this column, I could hear my husband and boys downstairs, working on a project of their own. They’re renovating our home library. The old shelves were overflowing, so my husband is surrounding the room with floor-to-ceiling built-in shelves. We still love books, you see. Some beautiful things may survive this moment of transition, but if we truly want to save them, we’ll need to be both prudent and circumspect. No one ever saved civilization by suppressing the desire to learn.

Thomas More was a “failure,” but one worthy of emulation—even or perhaps especially today, five centuries later. So declares Joanne Paul, in a preface to her engaging and exquisitely researched biography, Thomas More: A Life.

But a failure how? More rose from modest origins to become Lord Chancellor of England under King Henry VIII. In Samuel Johnson’s judgment, he was “the person of greatest virtue these [British] isles ever produced.” He would posthumously become a Catholic saint, not to mention the hero of a play and a movie (A Man for All Seasons) that won the Oscar for Best Picture. How then was he a “failure”?

More lived through a fulcrum period in Western history when the Christendom of the previous thousand years was disintegrating and the modern secular state was beginning to emerge. This was a transformation that More anticipated with dread, and he dedicated his enormous talents and the best years of his life—indeed his life itself, which he eventually sacrificed on a scaffold—to resisting it.

But his resistance would “come to nothing,” Paul explains. “It is difficult to point to any event or moment in Tudor history and claim that it would have been vastly different without his intervention.”

Even so, Paul sees in More’s failure something admirable and ominously timely. “Tyrants, it will not surprise you to learn, still exist. Those who are willing to destroy anyone who stands in opposition to their will—a will driven by self-interest, pride and desperate paranoia—rule today as they did 500 years ago.” And More’s “willingness to stand firm and speak truth to an overwhelming power is as relevant in today’s world as it was to that of Henry VIII.”

Not everyone has admired More, of course. He has been depicted (in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, for instance, or in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels) as a shriveled-up, mean-spirited inquisitor. Paul herself does not overtly take sides in these interpretive contests. She mostly follows the literary strategy of “show, don’t tell,” rarely offering her own speculations or judgments about More’s decisions and deeds (except in the preface and the epilogue, where she briefly steps outside her scholarly persona).

Her descriptions themselves are superbly textured. Much of the book reads almost as if Paul had followed More around with a video camera, deftly recording (with all the sights, sounds, even smells) the events, discussions, and disputes through which his life unfolded. How were the chambers decorated? Who was there, and how were they dressed? Who spoke first, who responded, what exactly did they say? The detail is remarkable—I often found myself wondering, “How does she know all this stuff?”—and it helps bring More’s world to life.

It was an earthy world, but also a sacramental world, with constant connections to transcendence. Paul thus tells us about the numerous religious festivals, processions, feasts, and ceremonies in their splendid particularities: the candles, the vestments, the liturgies, the music, the bells. These things constituted the consecrated world that More attempted desperately but unsuccessfully to preserve.

But of course, that world was not all candles and festivals; it was a scene of pervasive violence and political peril as well. As an infant, More was nurtured within a morning’s walk of the murderous doings by which Richard III seized power. As an adult, More lived through a series of foreign wars and, even more ominously, internal political developments whereby Henry VIII consolidated despotic power while dispatching into exile or to execution those who stood in his way. “These matters be King’s games,” More observed, “as it were stage plays, and for the most part played upon scaffolds.”

But More was not a mere spectator of these “stage plays”; he was a central player. This role was the result of a portentous choice—a choice that in one form or another many confront again today. In a political world fraught with danger, corruption, and outright wickedness, should a person attempt to retain his purity by remaining politically detached? Or should he immerse himself in the world, perhaps even compromising himself, in an effort to guide political matters in a satisfactory direction?

More’s friend Erasmus, the renowned humanist scholar, implored him to stay clear of kings’ affairs, to continue in the scholarly and literary work reflected in More’s classic Utopia. But More made a different choice, guided by St. John Chrysostom’s counsel to pursue a life “busy among cities.” And thus he rose from lawyer and local lecturer on St. Augustine to undersheriff of London, thence to foreign diplomat, to member and later speaker of the House of Commons, to close friend and counselor to the king, to Lord Chancellor.

It was in his last years, however, that More’s character—both his admirable qualities and what at least from a contemporary perspective may seem his more censurable tendencies—manifested themselves most starkly. Two developments dominated these last years: the effort in England to suppress the spread of Protestantism, and the tumultuous and transformative doings that surrounded Henry’s campaign to end his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and to consummate his marriage to Anne Boleyn. More participated vigorously in the first of these developments. He tried desperately to avoid involvement in the second. And in each instance, he failed.

As king’s councilor and especially as Lord Chancellor, More energetically opposed the introduction of Lutheranism into England. He wrote treatises denouncing Luther and his ideas. He vigorously enforced laws prohibiting the importation or possession of Lutheran writings. He imprisoned and interrogated suspected Protestants, sometimes at his own home. And when the suspects persisted in their heresies (as he believed), More sometimes had them burned at the stake.

Such actions provoked both defenses and fierce criticisms at the time, and of course, they are even more disturbing to contemporary liberal sensibilities. Critical biographer Richard Marius discerned in More’s actions a deep anger and almost depravity of character. Hilary Mantel described him as a “blood-soaked hypocrite.” Defenders have argued, conversely, that More was only enforcing the laws; that the number of Protestants condemned to death under his administration was small compared to the number of Catholics who would be executed under Thomas Cromwell, More’s successor as Henry’s right-hand man; and that More’s world was not one that had embraced the precepts of a John Stuart Mill or John Rawls.

Paul describes the measures More took, and she reports More’s own explanations. Severe measures were necessary, he argued, to protect innocent believers and indeed the kingdom from a deadly theological contagion that would undermine civilization itself. Such discipline was also often the best remedy, he said, for the wayward heretics themselves (for whose welfare More always professed concern).

Were these defenses sincere, and did they justify More’s actions? As usual, Paul tells us what More did and said but offers no “innocent or guilty” verdict of her own.

As for “the king’s Great Matter”—namely, his desire to separate from Catherine and to marry Anne—it was Cardinal Thomas Wolsey’s failure to achieve papal approval for the annulment that led to his downfall and to More’s appointment to replace him as Lord Chancellor. In accepting the appointment, More obtained Henry’s permission to follow his conscience. But as the controversy escalated and as Henry’s obsession intensified, it became impossible to remain detached. More seems to have cooperated as much as he could. At one point, he appeared before both Houses of Parliament and made the king’s case in lawyer-like fashion, presenting the supporting arguments and evidence without purporting to give his personal views.

And when this was not enough, More resigned the office, hoping to live out his life in private with his family and his books. But it was too late for that.

As it became clear that the pope would not grant the annulment, Henry concluded that the only way to end his marriage was to separate from the Roman Church. To that end, the king and his men employed various barely or not quite legal means to intimidate the English clergy into submission. They revived and expanded an old legal theory of “praemunire,” which forbade appeals to Rome, in order to indict the entire clergy for illegality and disloyalty. When the prelates failed to act on a proposal to make Henry head of the church, the king’s men invoked an old legal maxim treating silence as equivalent to assent. Parliament was induced to amend the definition of treason so that any criticism of the king would now qualify as treasonous if done “maliciously” (a term that, as More anticipated, turned out to mean pretty much whatever the king and the judges wanted it to mean). The law was being cynically used—and abused—to achieve whatever those in power wanted.

And then new laws were passed requiring all English subjects to take an oath affirming the validity of the annulment, the succession of Anne as queen, and, by clear implication, the elevation of the king to be head of the church. More’s refusal to take this oath led to his imprisonment in the Tower of London for fifteen months and, eventually, his trial and execution. Both the king’s men and More’s friends and family pleaded with him to take the oath, as nearly everyone in the kingdom (including his family) had done. He was repeatedly assured, even on the day of his trial, that if he would simply affirm the words of the oath, he would be restored to his freedom and his family. Yet he refused, saying simply that he could not act against his conscience.

Whether he was justified in this refusal was and is debatable, but his courage through the whole affair is unmistakable. Paul relates all of the pertinent developments in riveting detail: the legal maneuvering, the confrontations with Cromwell and others, the earnest conversations with and letters to More’s family. She does so again with little commentary, but it is impossible not to discern the integrity and depth of More’s character through these excruciating events.

Paul reports More’s famous declaration at the scaffold that he was the king’s good servant but God’s first: “As he went to his death, however, More could comfort himself with the assurance that he had lived his life—and given his life—in service of those things he held most dear.”

So, yes, he had lived and given his life in service of those precious things, but he had not managed to preserve them. In an epilogue, Paul portrays the transformed, disenchanted world that was to follow, employing her principle of “show, don’t tell.” Chapter one of the book relates how More was born just after the celebration of Candlemas, or the Purification of the Blessed Virgin, and it describes the “thousands of small flickering lights” as the “people of London—young and old, male and female, rich and poor—processed through the winding streets” of the city. A century later, the epilogue reports, “no candles were carried by Londoners through their city” for Candlemas. The Tudor revolution had banished the celebration.

More’s efforts had failed. But Paul suggests that they nonetheless had their value, and that they are relevant still:

Those, like Thomas More, who stand up to these men [of power] and remind them of higher principles, deeper truths, greater duties, must be remembered for their efforts, even when they come to nothing. … They are the figures who inspire us when a great booming voice from above tells us we must obey, must submit, and a voice deep within us responds, no matter how quietly, “No.”