I have a confession to make. I love information. I really do. It's so convenient to get at something of interest now. But I don't love the monkey mind that ensues.
What got me thinking about this is a recent article from Andrew Sullivan: I Used to Be a Human Being. Sullivan knows this problem first hand. He ran one of the most popular blogs for several years until burnout got the upper hand.
Maybe this topic has been hammered to death since the advent of the television, but I want to take it on with a more spiritual angle. Off course I should note that there are obvious psychological consequences by all this distraction.
David Warren observes, “Everywhere I see these little ones. From their strollers, they look up at mommy. She is on her Smartphone. It is not that they are unloved; but there is something else more important. They must learn to think tactically. Perhaps, when they get their own Smartphones, they can call her, on theirs?”
This is quite disconcerting. If you know anything about attachment theory, our upcoming youth are going to be one hot mess.
Stanley Kubrick was concerned as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens out. So in other words, artificial intelligence won't come to us, but we will come to it.
There was a time when ancient man was much more verbal. Reading silently was rarely encouraged. Socrates was actually worried that reading might substitute for remembering, and therefore a lack of inner depth. He had no idea what was to come.
Nicholas Carr made the interesting point that, “We can decode text quickly but we're no longer guided toward a deeper, personally constructed understanding of the text's connotations.” It looks like the postmodernists have really won, all syntax and no semantics. Content in, garbage out. Carr adds, “The internet diminishes the ability to know, in depth, a subject for ourselves, to construct within our own minds the rich and idiosyncratic set of connects that give rise to a singular intelligence.”
So here we are losing our sensible narratives that unified us while becoming more fragmented, splintering our consciousness into a web of content that travels widely without nuance and depth. Sadly, we have become a collection of parts, when our deepest nature desires life to be one singular event.
Sullivan notes, “modernity slowly weakened spirituality, by design and accident, in favor of commerce; it downplayed silence and mere being in favor of noise and constant action. The reason we live in a culture increasingly without faith is not because science has somehow disproved the unprovable, but because the white noise of secularism has removed the very stillness in which it might endure or be reborn.”
Hence, exponential informational distractions along with secularism exacerbates the problem. It was our traditions that allowed us to “recognize a critical distinction — and tension — between noise and silence, between getting through the day and getting a grip on one’s whole life.” So as we continue to lose our grip with life with the bombardment of distraction, Sullivan concludes the real threat may ultimately be with our souls.
My remedy to all of this: meditate, pray, read books (good ones), walk in nature, and limit the demon I love.