Episode 412 - Brett McCracken and The Wisdom Pyramid

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Welcome to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James. I'm a recording artist, a singer, a songwriter, an author, a worship leader, and an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene. The Voices in My Head podcast is where I discuss music, movies, books, pop culture, theology, and more with friends, colleagues, and sometimes just by myself. Now make sure to let me know what you think of today's episode by leaving me a review on iTunes or by tweeting at me @RickLeeJames on Twitter. And please join my mailing list at RickLeeJames.com where you can receive an email every time a new episode is released. By the way, in case you're interested in a daily dose of kindness and encouragement beyond this podcast, I also run the Twitter account @MrRogersSay where I post daily quotes from Fred Rogers, one of the voices in my head. Well, I guess that's it for the intro, so sit back, relax, and listen to the latest episode of Voices in My Head.

Welcome back to Voices in My Head. As always, I'm your host, Rick Lee James, and I'm so I'm so glad that you are here with us for what I know is going to be another great conversation today. What is the true source of wisdom? Today's world has more and more information readily available, but less and less wisdom. Many people seek to acquire wisdom from easily accessible sources such as social media and popular culture, but are often misled. How should Christians acquire wisdom in today's media-saturated culture? Inspired by the concept of the food pyramid, Brett McCracken presents a biblical paradigm for wisdom in today's distracted age. Illustrating his argument through a wisdom pyramid, Brett McCracken suggests a balanced, healthy diet of information from sources ranked in order of importance: the Bible, the church, nature, books, beauty, and lastly, the internet and social media. By focusing on lasting and reliable sources of wisdom, wisdom, and by being more discerning about the information they consume, Christians will become wiser, not for their own glorification, but ultimately for God's. Brett McCracken has stopped by for a visit today so we can learn more about the concept of the Wisdom Pyramid from his new book. Brett McCracken, welcome back to Voices in My Head.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me back, Rick. It's great to be here.

Well, I am so glad to have you again. I really enjoyed your new book, and the Wisdom Pyramid is great. And I have to say too, Even the COVID of the book. I don't know who did the COVID design, but the COVID is great. I mean, what a great graphic that's on there. I mean, it just really is so appealing and eye-catching just from the get-go. I knew I wanted to read it just from the look of the COVID Very appealing.

That's great to hear. Yeah, I wanted the COVID to be a major feature of the book because the concept is a visual, really. I mean, the central idea of the book is a visual kind of rubric of the food pyramid applied to wisdom. So given that, I knew that they had to like knock it out of the park with the COVID design, and I think they did.

Yeah, yeah, it's certainly one of the best covers I've seen in some time. Certainly one of my favorites for sure. So, well, well, it's been a while since we had a chance to catch up, and so before we get in too deep about the book, I do just want to catch up because this past year has been challenging for everybody, and I know that, that you and and your family, I'm sure, is no exception to that. So I'm just wondering just quickly, how are you and your family doing?

Yeah, thank you. That's kind of you to ask. Yeah, we're doing well. We've probably since the last time we chatted, we've expanded quite a bit. We have two little kids, two sons, Kira and I. Chet is 2 and a half, and Ira, our newest, is 7 months old. So we had him in the pandemic, so He's a pandemic-born baby, so all he's, all he's ever known of this world is COVID and people wearing masks and that whole thing. So, but it's been a blessing to have a baby during COVID because, you know, when you have a new child, you're, you're already inclined to just want to be at home more and kind of nest a little bit.

Sure.

And so we were going to do that anyway when Ira was born, but the pandemic just forced us to be home for other reasons too. So. It worked out well. And yeah, so we're doing well with our family. I'm still working for the Gospel Coalition. That's my full-time job. I'm an editor. I think my title is senior editor. So I, yeah, I spend my days, and this was true before COVID so I work from home. So I basically spend my days on my laptop editing content for our website, writing content. And working with our multimedia content teams, podcasts, videos, etc. So that hasn't changed much. My job hasn't been affected all that much because of COVID because I was working remotely anyway. And, you know, in some ways the pandemic has actually benefited content producers online because everyone had to spend more time online this year than ever before. And What else were they going to do, right?

Right.

So that has brought with it lots of problems that we can talk about because my book is addressing that, but it also has made what I do for a living in terms of trying to bring health and hopefully, you know, wise beneficial resources to the internet through the Gospel Coalition platform it's made that work feel more urgent and necessary than ever before. So that's been a cool thing to just experience over the course of the last year is feeling like whether I'm writing articles about masks and how to think biblically as Christians about the mask debates or a list of 30 edifying things to watch on Netflix when you're stuck at home in a pandemic, Like all of those things, I just felt like there was some direct value I was bringing to readers, and that's a good feeling to have. So yeah, that's kind of a brief overview of where we're at. I'm also a pastor at a local church. I'm a lay elder, and it's been an eventful year for that side of my life because church, as you know, has been challenging this year, and pastors Pastors everywhere, I think, have had some of the hardest jobs of anyone in COVID. So, but we've had the luxury in Southern California of being able to gather outside safely. So, so that's been nice with our weather throughout the winter being warm enough. We've just carried on meeting outside and wearing masks still and all that. And we, we actually recently planted a church in Santa Ana, which is the city I live in, and so I'm kind of one of the lead pastors of that new church plant, which just launched about a month ago. So that's kind of a new thing in my life.

That's great. We've been doing services outdoors as well, but we're here in Ohio, and it's been pretty doggone cold. Our version of outdoor is a parking lot service where they come in their cars, and the congregation stays in their cars, and the pastors, like, I come out with my guitar and lead music.

Oh man.

Outside into a microphone, and the rest of them get to stay in their car with the heater on, and then the pastor preaches and things like that. So there's a few of us that do outdoors, but, you know, we're starting to finally get some spring weather. But I wish we would have had a little more California weather throughout the winter this year.

Well, it'll make the warm spring weather even sweeter.

That is for sure. We are definitely much more appreciative now that spring is coming. And thank goodness, I mean, the Lord has been blessing, and we've been— the city that I live in, we've, we've been seeing a very high number of vaccinations happening, and the COVID numbers have been dropping in our city and in our area. So it seems like we, we might be pulling out of it a little bit, um, maybe faster than some other parts of the country. So, you know, we're just thanking the Lord for, you know, little blessings as we can see them here and there. So that's good.

Totally.

Well, thank you for kind of catching us up on what's going on in your life. And this book really is excellent, and I so appreciate so much of what you have written about in The Wisdom Pyramid. It's a very clever book, for one thing, the way that you write about it, thinking about the nutrition pyramid, for one thing, and just the way that we put food into our bodies, but then thinking about it from, from the standpoint of wisdom and what we put into it. And in the introduction of the book, you say that our world has more and more information but less and less wisdom.

Yeah.

And, and I wonder, what is your definition of wisdom for the purpose of writing the book? And why is it in such short— sorry, such short supply in this information age, do you think?

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. So I mean, from the from the get-go in the book with that first line that you just mentioned, I, I'm making it clear that wisdom is not the same thing as information, right? So you can have more access to information than any human generation has ever had access to, which is true of our, our time, and yet it doesn't make us wise. So the definition of wisdom that I kind of work with in the book is basically wisdom is It's what you do in light of information and knowledge that you acquire. It's kind of an orientation of life, how you then live in light of it. It's almost like, yeah, application. It's kind of like knowledge applied. I call it a moral orientation as well. So it involves morality, not just not just how many facts are in your brain, but given what you've learned, you know, are you living rightly? So it's not just right answers, it's living rightly in light of that. So yeah, that's kind of the distinction. And one thing about wisdom, and this kind of plays into the food pyramid, is the pyramid idea is wisdom is not just like something on the shelf that you can just go pick up, right? And like, I want wisdom, so I'm just gonna go get it at the store like I would get an apple. You become wise by the collected diet that you're picking up truth here and information here from these different sources, and hopefully the kind of collected inputs coming into you gradually form a wisdom. But wisdom is not just this nice tidy thing that you can kind of acquire. It's something that I think takes time to develop It takes discernment in terms of your habits, and that's really what the book is all about.

Right.

Yeah, it's something— I love the way that you really describe that this is a life that has to be cultivated, and it's something that is very intentional. And in the book you write about society not only being in a very unwise place, but society is in a very sick place, a very unwell place.

Place.

And, and in the book you write about some of the sources that are making us very sick. And I wonder if you could just describe some of those things that are making us very sick. And in the same way that like foods that make us very sick, there are things that societally are making us very sick.

Yeah, so I talked about 3 major sources of our sickness, and each of these 3 has kind of a parallel with food. So I kind of carry that metaphor throughout the book of, you know, eating food and then eating or ingesting information. So the first source of our sickness that I talk about is too much information. I call it information gluttony. So just like eating too much food makes you sick, right? Eat— like, eating too much information, consuming too much information makes us sick, and it is making us sick as a society. Like, we are so bombarded with a glut of information coming at us from every different direction, and it can't help but make us a little bit nauseous and sick. And just, we're too full. We don't— our bodies, our minds, we don't— we can't, like, ingest it in a healthy way when we're just constantly like feeding at this buffet, right? When we're gorging on this information, just like with physical eating, it's in general, it's better to kind of eat smaller portions and in slower pace. The same is true of information, right? Like when you're, when you're bombarded with information, you don't have any discipline to kind of you know, not pay attention to everything and be, be portioned and moderate in your consumption, then you're going to get, you're going to get sick. So that's the first one, the too much information that's making us sick. The second one is the speed of information, the too fast problem. And this also has a parallel with eating food, right? If you're eating food too fast, you will get sick. And there's a reason why fast food generally has a reputation for being less nutritious than eating a meal that is slower in preparation and slower in consumption. So this is something I think we all feel. The pace of our world in the digital age and the information age has never been faster, right? On any given day, there's trending topics, there's breaking news happening on any given hour, minute of the day, and, and yet the next hour we'll see something totally different trending, and our attention is constantly moving from one thing to the next. And we move so quickly through information that we don't really take the time to carefully think about it, synthesize it, draw out what's the nutrition here, what's the unhealthy stuff here. We don't take time to sift through it in the way that we really need to if we are to be wise. So there's all sorts of problems that I talk about in that chapter of the book in terms of the speed of information, both in terms of what we consume and how damaging it can be to consume information too quickly, but also in what we share, you know, on social media. How many of us have gotten ourselves into trouble because we've been a little bit too quick to, you know, share our opinion or respond emotionally to some— something that angered us on social media? So yeah, there's just a lot of speed traps in the digital age that can make us sick. And then the third source of our sickness that I talk about is that information is too focused on me. It's too oriented around individuals. So the parallel with food here is the idea that like, it's never going to be healthy for you if you only ever eat the food that is your favorite, right? That you prefer. My favorite thing to eat is probably like a chocolate chip cookie. Warm out of the oven with a nice cup of black coffee. Like, that is my, like, happy place when it comes to food. But if I only ever ate chocolate chip cookies and coffee, like, I would die in a few days, you know? That wouldn't be good. So, but the same is true of information. Like, it's easier than ever to kind of curate your own feeds of information such that you're only really getting fed information that you agree with and, you know, media and news that you align yourself with. So that is going to be unhealthy for you as individuals. It's going to be unhealthy for our society. And we're seeing the effects in our society right now of what happens when really no two people are experiencing the same reality because how they're experiencing reality is shaped by these echo chambers of information that they've kind of curated and that are fit and tailored to their particular leanings and preferences. So, you know, we can talk more about any of these if you want, but that one is a really disturbing one. And the structures of social media with the algorithms, like they're, they're really set up to do this, to just kind of feed people more of what they already like. And that's setting up our society for a true disaster, I think.

Yeah.

No, I think that one is probably the most concerning one, and maybe because it's the easiest to fall into. Yeah. And I think that it's the most concerning one to me, probably. And if I had more time today, we'd probably dive into that one a lot more. But I do want to encourage people to read book because you do write a lot about that in the book, and there's a lot of good information on that. And I know that during the season of Lent I've been stretching myself to try and read more outside of what I usually read. And so I've been trying to stretch myself not just in the season of Lent, but even during the season of Lent right now. I know that I've noticed over the past couple years especially, just how white my reading list is, you know. And, and so like during this season of Lent, I've, I've stretched— like, I've been trying to read more Black authors, and I've been reading a book about, uh, called Lent of Liberation right now, which is about, um, from the perspective of Black slaves in America, um, and, and it's trying to take a different perspective of like the idea of freedom and sharing passages each day from slaves who had escaped during the early days of America from their captivity. And it really is stretching my perspective of what it means. And I thought, I'm thinking of scripture in completely different ways now. Like what did it mean for Paul to write about bearing the marks of his beating upon his body and bearing those marks until he died? And thinking of that, of what it would mean from the perspective of a slave, you know, things like that, and thinking of it in entirely new ways.

That's great.

Yeah, so anyway, not to go on too long about that, but there's a lot of good that you write about in your book. I love the idea of stretching outside of things that would normally— we wouldn't even think about because we're so used to only being in those particular bubbles that our social media world would would put us into.

Well, and yeah, I think that that's just a theme throughout the book that I try to emphasize, is you have to be intentional about seeking out, you know, voices that you might disagree with or that come from a different perspective or background as you are, because it's just so easy, like you said, like it's so easy to fall into this temptation of only kind of reading, only interacting with people who are like you and writers who agree with you and books, you know, that are largely things that you agree with. And it's not like it's never appropriate to, to read those things, but it's so healthy for us, uh, spiritually, intellectually, um, socially and emotionally in so many ways to just engage perspectives that are different from us. So in the books chapter, which I know we'll get to the different levels soon. But that's, that's something I really emphasize in the book. The chapter on reading books is, you know, we need to intentionally seek out, like, if you're a man, like, read lots of books written by women. If you're, you know, if you're white, read books, you know, by other races and vice versa. Right. Like, it's, it's healthy to to step into other people's shoes for an extended period of time, which is what a book allows us to do. So, yeah.

And just to add one more element to that too, even beyond reading, I've over the past few years here in my city in Springfield, it's been a wonderful thing to develop relationships outside of my own faith, to develop relationships with people in the Jewish community and in the Muslim community of people that I really did have to stretch out and actually find ways to create relationships with them. And I'm so glad I did because I had to learn a lot more about my own faith in order to interact with them. And it really has— we've, I think, had to learn a lot together, and I think we've all grown together because of it too. And it's been a wonderful thing. But let's move on. I want to talk a little bit more. And if I'm reading your book correctly, And you've talked about it some today, just as too much food, even good food, makes a body sick, too much information is making us symptomatic as well, you write about. Yeah. And too much information is causing anxiety and stress, disorientation and fragmentation, impotence, decision and commitment paralysis, confirmation bias. And this is why I found The connection so fascinating that you made between the logo on the iPhone and the tree of knowledge and good and evil in scripture. Yeah, I wonder if you could just unpack that a bit more for us. I found that very interesting in the chapter when you wrote about that.

Totally. Yeah, I— a couple people have noticed or took, took note of that, you know, passing nod to the Apple logo in the book and I actually just last week I expanded that into an article that I published on The Gospel Coalition that people can read if they're interested in me kind of explaining that part. But essentially, you know, I just found it interesting that, you know, I was looking at my iPhone and I use Apple products, so I'm definitely like a fan of Apple's products. The smartphone that Apple kind of invented with, with the iPhone, you know, back in 2006 or 2007, whenever it kind of debuted, really it changed the game. And nothing in human history, I think, can quite lay claim to infinite knowledge or godlike knowledge quite like the smartphone can. Like literally in your hand, in your pocket, You have access to all the knowledge, all the information in human history, right? It's, it's all just a couple clicks away. And, and not only infinite knowledge, but the smartphone kind of has this allure or this like promise of infinite power, right? You can do everything through your smartphone. You can, you can, you know, order things, you can shop around, you can turn up the heat in your house, you can turn on your security alarm, you can literally these days almost do everything. It's all in your hands. You are empowered to control, take control over your reality. So, and then there's also the omniscience, the godlike quality of— or not omniscience, omnipresence. You know, the, the internet in general kind of gives us this illusion of being everywhere all at the same time, and we're no longer limited by our, our physical place that we are sitting, but we can virtually be all over the place. So yeah, I just think it's interesting that technology in general in the internet age, but maybe like the kind of smartphone, iPhone as a paradigmatic kind of emblem of the internet age, it does kind of represent some of the temptations that Adam and Eve fell into in the Garden of Eden. They, they wanted to have infinite knowledge like God. They wanted to have, you know, omnipresence and omnipotence, and, and, and they couldn't resist, like, taking the, the, the bait of the the fruit from the knowledge of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So take that for what you will. I mean, I'm not making any like conspiracy theory claim here. And in fact, it's, it's actually public knowledge that the designer of the Apple logo did not in fact intend it to be a reference to the Garden of Eden. But nevertheless, I think there's some interesting subtext. And yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it is just interesting how if we're not careful, these things can very easily master us, you know. Yeah, they can very easily take over our lives in so many ways, for sure. What you also write that, you know, our— you write this: our overstimulated brains are becoming weaker, less critical, and more gullible at a time in history when we need them to be sharper than ever. So how can we begin to make better choices that will help us to become wise people Is it going— is it about going on a diet or making healthier choices for the rest of our lives about what we will consume? And that's the question I kind of have for you today. I think about like times when— and I'm a person who, you know, I think about a lot about food all the time because I'm one that a few years ago I did diet and— through diet and exercise I lost like 50 pounds. And so I still exercise all the time. I watch very closely what I eat. So when you talk about like, like food and nutrition and what you put in your body and being very careful about it, I think a lot about that. And so for me, like, I think about food as an idea of like, it's a life choice now. It's about what you do on a daily basis versus like just crash dieting and things like that. It's about actually living in a healthier way. So I'm asking you, I guess, How do we fix this problem with wisdom and all this stuff? Is it more about like, so like dieting, or is it about like, you know, making these lifelong choices that makes us better consumers?

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

I mean, I think it does start with an evaluation, a kind of audit of like what constitutes your diet right now of information and And if you can start instituting better, healthier kind of choices of where you're looking, where you're being fed with information and knowledge, then I think in theory you're going to be— you're going to develop wisdom and kind of spiritual health in the same way that a physical diet ultimately the end result is an overall healthier body. And what happens when you have an overall healthier body is every other kind of sickness and disease and like pathogen becomes, you know, you can resist it more, right? Your body can fight those things off more effectively if your body is healthy. So what wisdom does, I think, once you've kind of become wiser and gained this kind of stronger moral orientation of wisdom, this critical ability to kind of wade through the glut of information and recognize truth and falsehood for what they are, you're going to be better able to ward off various pathogens of information, various sicknesses out there in the digital age that a weaker, less wise soul has, you know, less ability to fight those things off, and you're more gullible, you're more susceptible when you're, you know, just like a person in poor physical health is, you know, to use COVID, right? Like, they're the most at risk of being severely sick with COVID-19, whereas the people who are, you know, overall physically healthy are less susceptible. So the same is true of wisdom, right? If you are lacking in wisdom, you are going to be totally at the mercy of the manipulative, you know, conspiracy theories, fake news, all these things that are trying to distort your view of reality. But if you can kind of gain a wise, healthier spirit, soul, you know, in, in your life, you're going to be able to look at this array of information coming at you every day, and you're going to quickly be able to tell, okay, that's helpful, that's true, but that's unhelpful, that's false. I'm going to discard that. I'm not even going to pay attention to that. And that's, that's the critical ability we desperately need, you know, in today's world, the ability to kind of recognize healthy things and unhealthy things on the spot and not be so manipulated by, yeah, just whatever is coming our way in our feeds.

Yeah, good. I think that's a very wise answer. And, you know, and in the few minutes that we have left, let's talk about some of the sources of wisdom that you write about in the book that actually do make up this wisdom pyramid that's on the COVID of the book and some things that we can consume in our lives and, and the reason that maybe you put these in the order that you did on the book. And, and we'll just let you, as I'm unfortunately gonna have to say, as briefly as you can because I'm short on time myself today. But I'll just quickly read the sixth and just let you do some comment on them. But this is what the Wisdom Pyramid is. There are 6 items in the Wisdom Pyramid, the number 1 being of course the Bible, then the church, nature, books, beauty, and then the very last being internet and social media, which is interesting. I think that you do include that, you don't say to exclude that, but it just— we want to put that in the proper order of things. But I wonder if you could, could kind of comment on those things and the order of why you you put those things in order for why we should be consuming those things for wisdom.

Sure, yeah, I'll try to be as concise as I can.

And we'll just say, and also please read the book because there's a lot there in the book that you're not going to get out of the podcast today.

I did a whole chapter on each of the categories. So yeah, the reason I ordered it the way that I did is basically my thought is wisdom comes from God, right? Like, true wisdom is from above. It's God-given, it's God-centered. It's, you know, God is the judge and the arbiter of all truth. You know, he is the standard. So if that's true, then it makes sense that the more proximity we have to God, the closer we are to him, the wiser, the more access we'll have to wisdom. So I structured the levels of the pyramid based on proximity to God. So the ones at the bottom tend to be most proximate to God. And the ones at the top, like Twitter, social media, are the least proximate to God. So that's why the Bible is the foundation, right? The Bible is God's direct revelation to us. It's direct from the source. It's our only infallible source that we have. So of course it needs to occupy that foundational layer, and what a gift that is that God saw fit to reveal himself so directly, so clearly in a book, in words that were recorded. That's an amazing thing, and it's such a resource that we need to avail ourselves of if we're going to be wise, and then the church is The second level in my thinking here is, you know, this is God's people. This is God's presence among his people, both in a local kind of church setting, but also throughout Christian history. So the church is a source of wisdom for us, both in the sense of an embodied community of God's people that we can grow alongside,, and we can kind of interpret scripture, you know, alongside and try to apply and live out God's teaching and God's word together in community. It's just a whole lot easier to do that with others than alone, I think. And then also just the church history angle is such a resource for us for our wisdom because so many of the complex issues in our lives are not new to us in the 21st century. They've been issues that have been dealt with and hashed out by Christians and theologians and people in the faith in centuries past. So we should learn that history and become wise through that knowledge. So nature is the next level up, and this is proximity to God by virtue of the fact that it's God's creation. It's what he has made. So it shows us things about God by virtue of what he has made. So scripture itself tells us to do this. Psalm 19 talks about the heavens declare the goodness of God, the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Romans 1 is another passage that talks about how we can know things about God just by, you know, living in this world, living in this created nature, right? And so there's no excuse in terms of some things about God. Now, I'm not saying nature can ever be plucked out of the pyramid and be its own source of wisdom. That's kind of one of the key ideas of this wisdom pyramid is it only works if you have scripture at the bottom, right? Like scripture, God's Word at the bottom is what keeps the levels above it, you know, sound. It's like scaffolding that runs vertically from the bottom up. It keeps those upper layers sound as sources of truth for us. Because as we know, you can be totally pro-nature, you know, pro-environment, almost like pantheistic, and yet if you don't honor God as the creator of it and you don't recognize you know, his word as the ultimate truth, then that's not going to lead you to wisdom necessarily. But if you're a Christian and you recognize that nature is God's creation, it's his beautiful handiwork, then we can look at it as general revelation, you know, and make sure that it's not contradicting the special revelation of scripture, if that makes sense. Yeah, so then the next level up is books. So this seems like a no-brainer if you're talking about how to become wise. Reading books is a good thing, but kind of one idea that I really want to communicate about books is that it's not so much— I mean, it is about what you read in the book that helps you become wise, but it's also about the process of reading. Like in a digital age where our attention is so fragmented and we're, we're kind of, you know, a mile wide and an inch deep in the way that we process information. Like reading a book helps train our brain. Literally, it rewires our brain to be able to kind of go deeper with one idea, with one author's perspective for a slower kind of pace, a longer period of time. And I think that ability that we're losing in this kind of frenetic digital age is, is really essential. We have to recover an ability to read well. And so I think the habit of reading books is, is an important one if we're gonna be wise. And then second to the last category is beauty. And this is basically— I'm talking about the arts here. So Something about wisdom that's important, I think, is that it's not just cerebral. It's not just like knowledge and facts that you put into your brain. We are not— humans are not just brains, right? We are full-bodied creatures. We have senses. We can taste and see and, you know, touch and hear. And God created us that way for a reason. And so beauty and the arts kind of work on that level. They engage our senses. They're full-bodied experiences. So that's why at church we sing. That's why we do liturgy. That's why we have these embodied rituals, taking communion, you know, things like that. So I think God, you know, he values beauty clearly because the Bible is full of it. The Bible is not just a PowerPoint presentation of bullet points. You know, it's a story. It's full of poetry and parables and metaphor. And so if God reveals himself to us through beauty, not only in scripture, but in nature too, like nature is a masterpiece of beauty. It's so much more beautiful and poetic than it needed to be for mere survival, right? Um, so, uh, yeah, so nature and beauty as categories are really connected, I think. Um, but the key distinction is that nature is like God's created beauty and beauty is like man's created art. So, um, they're both creations, but beauty has a little bit more potential to be fallible because we are fallible as humans. So the art that we create you know, it could capture truth and it often does, but sometimes it's tainted with, you know, our fallenness as well. Whereas nature, God's creation, you know, yes, it's tainted by the fall in some ways, but it, you know, a tree doesn't lie to you, right? Like, like a bird is not gonna start spreading a conspiracy theory, you know, based on its partisan views of things. So, um, anyway, so that's— that takes us to internet at the top. The internet and social media, it's kind of in the dessert category of the food pyramid. And it's, again, it's not like I— I have it on there, so it's— I could have left it off completely. So I'm not saying that you should just never go online again and you should throw your phone away. I'm just saying that you have to use it sparingly. You have to use it with discernment. You have to be so intentional about not just being passive online where your attention is pulled from one thing to the next. That's where we get into trouble. But if you, if you use the internet and social media in, in wise, kind of discerning ways, it can be beneficial to our wisdom for sure. There's plenty of great stuff online that we can learn from. But there's also, as we all know, there's a lot of really toxic stuff too.

Yeah.

And that's why we have to be so careful and kind of make sure that our diet isn't based on the internet and social media, which sadly for a lot of us it has been based on that.

Yeah.

Yeah. Guilty. Yeah.

I am guilty. Yeah. It feels like a lot of our sickness comes from the pyramid being flipped upside down, you know, for sure. And it occurred to me too, just reading through the book and thinking about it today, I don't know if you're familiar with what's called the Wesleyan Quadrilateral of Scripture, Tradition, Reason, and Experience. In some ways that almost feels like a cousin to this in some ways. Looking at interpreting scriptures in some ways. But this is so helpful, Brad, and I really appreciate what you've done. And can't even imagine the, the amount of thought and time that it must have taken you to think through some of these things. And I so appreciate the work that you've done for us and the way that you're helping us think through this and the time that you put into helping us kind of put these things in order and into a healthy perspective. So I really appreciate your time. I kept having one quote from one of my heroes, Fred Rogers, that just kept coming back to my mind again and again. And I think I want to close our conversation together by sharing it with you today because I think you would probably resonate with it. He used to say this, his quote said, our society is much more interested in information than in wonder. 'in noise than in silence.' And I feel that we need a lot more wonder and a lot more silence in our lives. And I feel like you and Fred Rogers would very much agree on this point.

For sure. I love that quote. I've heard it a few times before. And yeah, I think I say something to that effect in the book, like we desperately need stillness and silence for wisdom in our lives and we're becoming foolish as a society because we are gradually getting rid of every last vestige of unmediated open space in our lives, and we're just filling, filling it all with content. You know, what can we watch next? What can we read next? What can we do next? So we need to just intentionally prioritize silence and stillness so that we can actually like think about and critically evaluate what we've encountered, you know, in terms of information.

Yeah, definitely. Well, listeners, the book is called The Wisdom Pyramid: Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World. It's published through Crossway, and it was released just this year in 2021. Brett McCracken has been my guest. His website is brettmccracken.com. .com. And Brett, thank you for being one of the Voices in My Head this week. It sure has been a pleasure.

Thank you so much, Rick. It's been a joy to talk with you today.

Thank you for joining me here this week on Voices in My Head. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com where you can find out more about me, get my music on vinyl and CD, follow my blog, and even schedule Schedule me for a concert or speaking engagement. Better yet, even a book signing in your neighborhood. You can find all that and more at rickleejames.com. Also, it would mean a great deal to me if you could write a review of this podcast on iTunes. The more positive reviews that we receive, the more visible this podcast will be online. And now for the benediction. May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope. God bless you, and thank you for listening to Voices in My Head.