Formation in a Disordered Age

In a world filled with information but lacking clarity, the deeper issue may not be what we know—but who we are becoming. This episode explores the difference between information and formation, how societies once shaped character and virtue, why modern culture struggles to do the same, and how the Christian tradition offers a path toward lasting formation rooted in truth. 

Transcript

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Welcome to Ordered Reality. This podcast explores the deeper patterns shaping our world through history, philosophy, and the moral framework of the Christian faith. In a culture driven by speed, noise, and constant reaction, this show takes a slower approach. Each episode examines a single idea truth, power, memory, responsibility, and asks how these principles shape both civilizations and the lives we live today. Because understanding reality clearly is the first step towards living faithfully within it. If the world around us feels disordered, the natural instinct is to focus on fixing it. We look to institutions, systems, leaders, and movements, hoping that somewhere, someone will provide the solution that restores stability and clarity. But history suggests something far less dramatic and far more demanding. Cultures rarely renew themselves because someone finally finds the perfect system. They renew themselves when enough people begin forming themselves differently. Formation is a word we don't use very often anymore. We talk about education, information, training, or influence. But formation is something deeper. Formation shapes the kind of person someone becomes. It determines how we think, how we judge what is true, how we respond to pressure, and how we carry responsibility when no one else is watching. And in many ways, the crisis of our time is not simply a crisis of politics, technology, or culture. It is a crisis of formation. We are surrounded by more information than any generation in history, yet many people feel less certain about what is true. We have more communication than ever before, yet less shared understanding. And we are constantly encouraged to express ourselves without first being taught how to form ourselves. In earlier generations, formation was not an accident. Families, communities, and religious traditions deliberately shaped how people understood truth, responsibility, and virtue. Today, that structure is far weaker, and the result is a culture filled with noise, but often lacking depth. So today we're going to talk about formation, what it actually means, why every civilization depends on it, and why rebuilding it person by person may be one of the most important tasks of our time. Because before cultures can become healthy again, people must become well formed. Welcome back. My name is Kellen. I'm your host. Welcome to episode nine. This is going to be the first episode of season two of Ordered Reality. If you've made it this far, I appreciate all the support, all the listening. Um, we're gonna keep encouraging each other to slow things down a little bit and think more critically, and then also apply our Catholic faith or Christian faith to the modern world. So let's dive right in. What does formation actually mean? Well, in order to kind of establish what formation actually means, we have to determine what is the difference between information and formation. Information is strictly the external facts or data you receive, while formation is the internal process of being shaped, trained, developed by that knowledge. Put simply, information tells you about a subject, while formation changes who you are or how you act in relation to that subject. It's important to remember that modern society today emphasizes information and puts a premium on knowing the information, but really leaves out formation as a whole, while again remembering that formation shapes character, judgment, and virtue. So let's take a look at an example here really quickly. Say you want to go camp in the wilderness and start a fire on your own. The information on this would be reading a manual on how to camp and how to start a fire on your own using tools such as Flint. That's just having the basic information or knowledge in order to start a fire. But actually going into the wilderness with a guide, attempting to start a fire with Flint, failing, hands blistering, adjusting the technique until you are successful at starting a fire. That is formation. Using the knowledge received to become someone who can start a fire on your own, not just someone who knows how. So hopefully that kind of helps in the idea of what is the difference between information and formation. Now you may say, okay, I understand the difference between the two, but how do I actually take information and turn it into formation? You have to change from just being a passive consumer of facts to an actor, at active practitioner of knowledge. So let's move into a couple of ways on how we can actually do this. So moving from consumption to action, we just have to take the information and put it to real life use. So if you have knowledge on a subject, actually embodying your life around that and putting it to action would be a way to change or take information and move it to formation. Um, we can practice reflexive observation. Again, don't just learn something to be true, but find out why it's true. You know, it's not in in today's day and age, everyone wants you to take that headline and treat it as fact. When the reality is, I think anyone listening here or anyone who wants to learn more, wants to find the truth. We need to dive deeper than just the headline. We need to see what is the angle, what is the bias here, and honestly take a look at several different angles and come to what the truth is on our own accord. We can synthesize and connect. Information provides fragments, formation takes those fragments, fits them together like a puzzle, and forms a cohesive worldview. So, again, just hitting on the idea that if we have a bunch of facts and knowledge, you know, individually speaking, that's fantastic and we could be considered very smart. But being able to take all of that information together, weave it together, and form a truth based on the information provided, forming that cohesive worldview is going to help us become a formed individual. We can also engage our whole self. True formation isn't just intellectual, it's about involving your emotions, habits, and physical presence. And again, this just moves you from basic what you know to who you are. We're embodying the truth, not just speaking the truth or knowing the truth. Formation also helps shape moral instinct. Formation acts as this process that refines and directs innate human moral senses through social interactions, developing habits, and cultural context. Formation acts as this experience expectant process that gives these instincts their specific shape and direction. Early moral development is heavily influenced by relationships with caregivers. Daily interactions show or allow our children to learn and practice pro-social behaviors like helping and sharing. How we frame our reactions to these help form our children to be morally good. It's so important. Um, again, just highlighting the fact of how important an impact or how big of an impact you have on children or on your children, by just helping frame their moral development and forming them to be humans that are acting for the moral good as well as uh focusing on what the objective truth is. There's also habit formation, otherwise known as virtue. Moral instinct is shaped by repeated choices that build character over time. Aristotle teaches us that virtues are not innate, but made perfect by habit. Therefore, repeatedly acting in an upright manner makes good behavior instinctive rather than consciously premeditated. So, kind of diving into this a little bit deeper, the more repetition, you know, everyone knows what a lot of people would know what muscle memory is, right? It's just that instinctive training or even just training in general, right? A lot of times, if um, let's just say a soldier is training for combat, right? So the idea that the soldier trains and trains and trains, so when there's an actual dangerous threat on the battlefield, they just react instinctively to that threat. Think of that in our daily lives. It's kind of ridiculous when you want to think about it in our daily lives, but if we come continue to build on these habits, these good habits over time, they become instinctive and we don't even have to think about it. And our sub our subconscious then takes care of that habit for us because we have trained ourselves over and over and over again through these habits to be morally good individuals. Cultures and society can also play a role in moral instinct and formation, but it isn't always in a virtuous direction. Um, there is negative formation as well. It's otherwise known as the quote architecture of vice, and harmful behavior can be solidified in automatic instincts. If society or individuals reinforce unethical actions, it can rewire individuals' moral compasses in the wrong direction. So just as important it is to teach children or others how to be morally good and seek the objective truth, the same can be said for the other end of the spectrum. If someone is exposed to behaviors that are unethical or behaviors that harm people, or just uh dishonesty or um things that lack in character, that also rewires their brain to essentially accept that as an acceptable act, which is why I don't know about you guys, but a lot of times when we look at people and it's like, well, how could they possibly, you know, continuously be being arrested over and over and over again and they're not learning? Well, there's a potential that throughout their life they were taught that stealing from people or harming people or acting that way was appropriate, rather, and they don't have this sense of framework of what is morally acceptable or morally good. And that can be frustrating because from the outside looking in, we see a person who just continuously chooses to be wrong. But if they were never taught in the first place how to be a morally good human being or have the expectation that that is what is expected, then they get trapped in this cycle. That's just the way I look at it. And again, that just kind of hits on why morally good and virtuous formation is so important starting at an early age. It starts in the household with our children. Knowing and forming yourself and others early on into building virtues of good can build a cohesive society. And this is why formation creates stability in individuals and society. Again, just remembering that formation happens through habit. It comes through repetition, discipline, community expectations, and imitation of good examples. It's not through one-time learning moments. We kind of hit on this a little bit earlier, but it's about transforming conscious, effortful moral choices into stable, automatic dispositions of character. This requires um, this required uh after focus and willpower, as the moral action is repeated, the brain begins to automate the process in what's called a habit loop. Um, repeated actions literally rewire our brain over time, which we kind of talked about earlier, whereas we repeatedly act morally good and it makes things become second nature. That's just the decision we make innately without even thinking about it. And again, Aristotle focused on what is called the virtuous spiral, wherein as the more moral actions we do makes a person slightly more virtuous. Being virtuous makes it easier to perform even more complex virtuous acts. The spiral continues and it constantly refines uh individuals' moral instinct throughout their life. It's essentially this idea that if you continue to act for the morally good or purposes in uh morally just actions, you'll continue to build on that over time because you realize just either how helpful that is to society or how helpful that is to people, and we want to build on that naturally. Information fills the mind, and formation shapes the person. So we talked about the difference between information and formation, and how formation builds the moral framework for an individual. But now let's jump back and take a look at how societies used to form people. Historically, formation happened naturally through institutions and traditions. Families, communities, and churches shaped people over time. Formation was embedded in daily life. Again, kind of hitting on family life again, children spent the day mimicking the work and roles of their parents and community members, learning social, gender, and essential skills early on in life. This is even especially true in farming communities in particular. The household acted as the classroom, with children learning early how to tend the crops, manage water, and handle tools properly. Religion, or again, focusing on religion, excuse me, I just completely blank there. Sorry about that. Uh, in the past, there was this greater focus around church as a focal point of human life, and this provided daily moral training and social cohesion for individuals. Even going back to the Middle Ages, religious texts and figures were primary drivers of education and formation. And basically, you know, there was this larger focus on religion being more of a central aspect of life. Um, and then the moral, uh morally good and objective treachings of uh the Bible were essentially more of a uh focal point of life in the past, which helped to provide context on how to act as a society and how to treat other individuals as well as being good members in faith. We also have apprenticeships. Uh, children and young adults learned by learn to trade by acting as assistants to masters and hone their skill through work every day in their craft, learning by doing rather than through the classroom instruction. So what we're kind of seeing here is in the past, and it maybe you can trip attribute it to this lack of just constant bombardment of information, but individuals essentially were formed because that's what it took to learn a skill or learn what it was to act in society was we had this constant formation. It was an expectation of formation, not a choice. Again, kind of hitting on the local community expectations, there were the smaller groups, villages, or tribes at the time were forced to um forced or expected to cooperate and act appropriately for survival purposes. A greater focus on the moral good in most cases due to a respect and expectation from God and religious figures to act appropriately in this life. Again, this is kind of hitting on the fact that church and uh spiritual practice was just more prevalent in societies of the past, not necessarily in today's aspect, or it isn't, or it was more of a central focal point, which basically provided this expectation from God and religious figures on how to act appropriately. And these environments reinforced shared moral standards, and these shared moral standards basically showed in order to effectively and appropriately act or be a part of this community, you have to abide by these moral standards. You have to be formed in these moral standards. Virtue, again, was this social expectation. And if we kind of zoom out and go back to Roman culture, again, we had already talked about the idea of moist uh, and I'm gonna butcher it again, mo uh mos maorum, mayorum, or ancestral traditions made virtue um an ancestral tradition. Uh in the past, ancestral tradition was treated as sacred, therefore being virtuous was expected, as it ensured social cohesion and stability within the community. Virtus, or manliness, was seen as a duty, demanding courage and honor to serve the state. Similarly, in the Middle Ages, medieval chivalry combined valor with moral integrity to protect society. Virtue also enforced social roles, as women were expected to have different virtues than men. Those men or women who did not conform to the virtues of their assigned gender or sex roles were often shunned from society. Um, and some of you may take a look at that and see, well, it's a greater good where we're at now versus where we are in uh medieval society or uh hundreds of years ago. I'm not necessarily arguing that um, you know, shared gender roles should be separated specifically, but I'm just trying to point that out, that it was. And depending on how you want to apply that to community sense, could change your outlook as to, well, some things may be good or some things maybe bad. Let's look at an example here with uh Benedict of Nurcia, who's during his life in the 6th century established several monasteries and through virtues of obedience, humility, and moderation showed they were critical and necessary for successful communal life. Benedict of Nurcia took the traditional wandering monk and through evolved stability began requiring monk commit, uh requiring a monk to commit to a specific community for life. This made virtue a social necessity because monks could not escape difficult personalities. They were forced to practice patience, forgiveness, and mutual respect to maintain communal harmony. Monks essentially were now expected after this uh change by Benedict of Nurcia to obey and serve one another in a community rather than being more of these traveling wanderers, making virtue a social expectation within the monastery community. And again, this just highlights that virtue is now expected characteristics of adulthood. And then formation took time. Maturity required correction, mentorship, and patience. Formation is a lifelong process, uh ever-changing by evolving experiences throughout one's lifetime. One does not simply reach an age where they stop being formed by a world that always changes. Development occurs through both gains and losses, allowing for ongoing adaptation. Certain skills can increase and decrease over one's lifespan. The example of this is as you get older, your cognitive speed may decrease. So my ability to run a 40-yard dash is going to decrease as I get older. I'm going to become slower because physically my body can't keep up with that. But my emotional maturity may increase just based on my lifelong experiences, my wisdom, and things like that. I think a lot of us may agree that my emotional maturity at 16 is not going to be as good as my emotional maturity at 50. Just based on life experiences and personal growth. Identity formation never stops. The process of truly understanding oneself is never truly complete. While prominent during adolescence, it's always changing throughout life. For most of history, societies assumed people needed formation. It fostered communal communities focused on serving others with the expectation of acting morally good and justly. So we kind of looked at what formation was, how it differs from information, and how societies kind of used formation in the past to build cohesive communities. But why does it feel like modern culture today struggles with formation? Well, let's take a look at kind of what we hit at earlier, which is this information overload. Every day we're bombarded with headlines trying to grab our attention. We as a society have access to more information than what we know what to do. With, I could go onto my phone right now and pull up any sort of news outlet, and they're gonna give me headline after headline after headline. I can get local news, I can get world news, I can get news curated to culture, sports, anything you you name it, if you have access to the internet, which is the vast majority of humans on the planet today, we have so much information at our fingertips, and we really don't know what to do with it or how to process it all. Because the reality is, is I think us as human beings, we can't possibly process all of this information. We can try, but our brains can only handle so much. And that's not a you know a testament to us as humans not being able to handle it all, it's just physically impossible. Information overload impairs the brain and the brain's ability to form new memories, learn and make decisions, and it overwhelms working memory, causing chronic cognitive fatigue. For any of you that know kind of how computers work, um, you know, computers have think of it like RAM memory, where RAM memory is your active memory. So if you have, think of headlines, right? Like um applications that are open on your computer. The more applications you have open on your computer, the more RAM has to be used in the computer. So think of it as like the more headlines I'm trying to digest at one time, the more my brain has to actively try and interpret those, and it can slow things down. The more you have open at one time, the more you're trying to process, the harder it's going to be. If we overload our short-term memory, our brain has a harder time transmitting the information to long-term memory. And our attention fragmentation or switching tasks rapidly can reduce the brain's ability to focus. And I think this is just another reason why formation is so important. Because formation is that constant practicing repetition of one specific thing, and over time and discipline, we get so good at it. We we're essentially forming ourselves. The more information constantly hitting us can decrease the efficiency of our brain to process it. As we talked earlier, formation requires repetition and habit building. If we overload our brain and keep moving between tasks rapidly, we can't build upon formation. It also takes discipline to become formed, and excessive information keeps us at a shallow level of understanding instead of constantly building one skill or habit. There's also this loss of shared moral framework. Modern society has pulled us away from what civilizations used to hold true for hundreds of years. When us as society can no longer agree on what is true or what is morally or objectively right from wrong, it creates confusions on or confusion on how we should live, leading to a more difficult time during formation or how one should be formed. There's this, um, you know, you could argue in the past that different societies agreed or had a had a larger agreement as to how we should live in a communal society, and today we're more focused on the individual. What does this individual want or need? And it's not really about how does that fit into society anymore. This loss of this shared moral framework reduces trusts in institutions, increases polarization, and shifts the focus from a collective well-being to that individual self-interest. If society loses the ability to maintain consistent ethical standards, formation on virtues such as honesty and integrity become just personal opinions rather than to be expected by society. It leads to an erosion of moral principles that have helped societies succeed as a whole for long stretches of time. It becomes difficult to build habits on principles necessary for a successful function of society when those principles are no longer seen as the acceptable norm, or if others don't value those principles and virtues like past societies have. So realistically, sometimes like I could believe in acting uh morally good is uh appropriate um in daily life. But if I live in a society that does not hold that same value, it's gonna be very, very hard for me to have to rely on being morally good. Um, or it's gonna be very hard for that society to cohesively work together if I'm working with people who don't share um similar values or at least want to act in a morally good capacity. When society focuses on quote, defining ourselves first before formation, we build fragile identities with no real backing, and those identities shatter when challenged, leading to fractured individuals who feel lost. While I won't say focusing on your identity is inherently bad, it cannot or should not get in the way of allowing ourselves to be formed over time, and we can't let what our identity today is stunt our lifelong growth. We have to be willing to think critically and form ourselves to deep-rooted principles for what is objectively the truth and what is morally good. So, I guess what does that kind of mean? So, my identity today, or what I thought I was, or what I'm rooted in myself realistically, um, I shouldn't be stuck on that and allow myself to be kind of boxed in without allowing lifelong growth to happen. So, if I'm presented with information and truth and I'm continuing to work on my habits and my uh virtuous aspects of my life, I shouldn't let what I believe today be stunted by maybe um formation, uh how I am formed as a human being down the line. And again, just to kind of hit on the fact that we live in the most informed society in history, yet many people feel less certain about the truth. With so much information that we have kind of coming in over and over again, and we don't know where to look, and this kind of lack of desire to dig deeper and to accept what is just on the surface as truth has stunted our abilities to actually know what the truth is. So we discussed again kind of what formation is, how societies used to form people, and why that formation can be such a struggle in modern society. But what does it mean or how does it look when we talk about Catholic formation? Catholic formation is this idea of formation towards Christ. The model is Jesus Christ Himself. Us as Catholics aim to form ourselves using the characteristics of Christ embodied in his life and throughout the teachings of the Scripture. Catholic formation is a lifelong process and focuses on four pillars of formation. We have human, which is through character, spiritual, which is through prayer, intellectual, which is through understanding our faith, and pastoral, which is service. We work towards living as an active um as active witnesses to the gospel in the world. The catechism of the Catholic Church serves as the complete guide as to how to form oneself in the Catholic faith. Now I'm not going to go out here and recommend that everyone who's listening go and read all of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Um, that is an extremely large doctrine that essentially teaches us as Catholics on how to become formed with Christ. Um, but I would definitely recommend that if you have any questions, um, I personally have been using the catechisms of the Catholic Church to apply them to real world situations. There's a lot of good information in there that uh really acts as information that can apply to any situation despite being written um years ago. And again, remember that formation is about living faith, not just knowing it, right? So this idea that um, you know, I know that Jesus Christ is the Messiah is not necessarily um I shouldn't stop there. That's great that I know that, but formation is about living faith and acting like as close to Christ as possibly uh as possibly as I can get to. And then also practices that shape characters really important to Catholic um formation. Christian traditions intentionally cultivate formation through prayer, fasting, confession, worship, and service. Building habitual practices like attending mass each week or even daily, daily prayer, sacrifice throughout life or during specific seasons such as Lent and almsgiving to provide charity and show compassion to those in need regularly. The more we can begin to build these habits on doing those things, the more we're going to be able to become formed in the Catholic Church or in our Christian faith. These acts practiced over and over again build those habits and discipline and faith and form us as Catholics to live our faith as close to the way Jesus Christ did. It builds our character, it promotes virtues of humility and moral goodness, and it continues to spread the word of God throughout the world. There are certain chapters in the Bible, such as Romans 12, that focus on developing us, calling us to be transformed through renewed minds and sacrificial service. It's about devoting ourselves to the teachings of Jesus Christ. And again, formation creates stability. Forming ourselves in Catholic faith provides a deep rooted connection to Christ and his works, allowing us to apply the teachings of Christ to any situation in a modern, fast-paced world. It allows us to tackle challenges with resilience and purpose in a world that continues to move in a more secular way. Since Catholic formation provides a predictable and intentional way to grow closer to Christ, it provides a foundation in which you can use in all aspects of life. Formation in the Catholic faith also nurtures virtue and provides a community fostering perseverance, patience, and commitment through our shared goals and values provided by the Scripture and the works of Jesus Christ. Formation provides constant growth towards becoming faithful to Christ Himself. If there's one thing history makes clear, it's this. Societies do not drift towards order. They drift towards disorder, unless people are intentionally formed to live otherwise. And for a long time, that formation was something people could rely on. It came from families, from communities, from shared traditions and beliefs that helped shape how people understood truth, responsibility, and virtue. Today much of that structure has weakened, which means something important has changed. Formation is no longer something we can assume. It's something we have to choose. And that choice is not abstract. It shows it shows up in how we live day-to-day. We give our attention to what habits we build, what we allow to shape our thinking, and what kind of example we become for the people around us. Because whether we realize it or not, we are always being formed. The only question is whether that formation is intentional or accidental, and whether it's being structured on morally good principles or bad ones. The Christian tradition offers a clear answer to this. Formation is not about becoming more informed, more successful, or more impressive. It's about becoming faithful. It's about allowing or aligning our lives with what is true, what is good, and what endures. And that kind of formation doesn't happen all at once. It happens slowly. Through discipline, through repetition, through humility, and through a willingness to be shaped over time. This is the work that builds strong people, and strong people are what make stable families, healthy communities, and lasting cultures possible. So as we move forward, the focus becomes more practical. Not just understanding the world around us, but becoming the kind of people who can live faithfully within it. Because in the end, renewal doesn't begin at the level of systems, it begins at the level of the person. And formation is where that work begins. Thank you so much again. My name is Kellen. I'm your host. I appreciate you following me along this journey and uh welcome you back again to episode nine. We're gonna be continuing to try and push these episodes out week in and week out so that we can continue to build on what we've started. Slowing things down, thinking a little bit more critically, and growing closer to Christ every single episode. Again, thank you so much for being here. If you like what you're hearing so far, I do have a page on um Buy Me a Coffee. You can feel free to support the show there if you choose to. Um thank you for everything. Thank you for coming along with me again. I can't wait to see you guys back here next week. Have a blessed week, and I'll see you back for episode 10 next week. Take care, everybody. Have a great day.