The Humanitas Forum

If you don’t carry a smartphone you’re old, odd, or eccentric.  You are hopelessly out of step with the times, according to conventional wisdom.  But is this wisdom?  Or, more precisely, convention without wisdom? 

Technology …

It may be the techies themselves who give us some of our better advice in the debate about the use of communications technology.  Kevin Kelly, senior maverick for Wired magazine, has written that smartphones are the new “sugar and …

A recent article in Cosmopolitan should make a Minnesota mother, a lawyer, the poster child for our contemporary therapeutic culture.  According to sociologist Philip Rieff, in a therapeutic understanding of the world, there is “nothing at stake beyond a …

Friendship, like family and community, has fallen on hard times in our modern world.  Mobility, busyness, digital technology and numerous other factors have contributed to the thinning—if not the disappearance—of “true friendship.”  Friendship has become “the characteristically modern …

Few books reward close reading—and rereading and reading yet again—as richly as does C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves.  Each of the “four loves”—affection, friendship, Eros, and charity—has fallen on hard times in our modern world, something Lewis …

Traffic jams and overloaded brains are the products of modern life.  And they are similar in significant ways.  Traffic slows when there are too many automobiles on a roadway, producing irritated drivers and causing accidents. Brain overload also …

“What does it mean to be human?” is perhaps the most significant question of the 21^st century.  Or, asked a bit differently in anticipation of what we might anticipate in what’s called the biotech century, “What is the …

Bill Gates is concerned.  Stephen Hawking is worried.  And Elon Musk warns that artificial intelligence is the “greatest existential threat” facing humankind—“with artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.”  

Sir Clive Sinclair goes even further:  …

Boredom is the all-encompassing name we give our discontent in this late modern age.  Boredom gained prominence as a social condition in the 18^th century when the word was invented, according to Patricia Meyer Spacks, author of Boredom: …

“We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us” wrote communications expert Marshall McLuhan in the early 1960s.  His assessment of the various communications media (radio, television, movies, telephones, and computers) was simply, “We become what we behold.”…