It is easy to get distracted from what really matters in life
For the first week of February, chez Gooch was a plague house. All of us were ill with a nasty gastric flu. My six-year-old daughter, normally a dynamo, spent an entire day lying on the sofa.
During this enforced sojourn, she engaged in that most underrated, and unjustly denigrated, of activities: staring out of the window. I used to do the same myself when I was poorly at home. There was a plum tree in our garden, and if you looked at it for long enough the smaller branches and twigs seemed to resolve themselves into shapes – a face, perhaps, or a bird. My daughter, for her part, discovered a very fat pigeon, which she named Sweets, sitting in the high boughs of a tall elder. Sweets has remained a conversation topic and is regularly sighted on his lofty perch. He seems to lead a relatively sedentary existence, only taking flight when it is absolutely necessary for him to do so.
I was very much struck by the delight she took in this simple discovery. It occurred to me that it was only possible because she was paying an unusual amount of quiet attention to the world outside.
At the beginning of January I attended a lecture by the American philosopher Matthew Crawford, author of books such as The Case For Working With Your Hands and The World Beyond Your Head. Crawford defends and encourages practical engagement with the world, to reality unmediated by screens and media. The Case For Working With Your Hands focuses on Crawford’s cultivation of his skills as a motorcycle mechanic, which he developed in order to escape from the overwhelming interior focus of his academic work. Crawford is a fascinating thinker, with a complex and eclectic worldview – indeed, at the very end of the lecture he revealed that he had recently become a Christian believer of sorts. He is deeply interested in attentiveness, the fight against distraction.
In his lecture he suggested that our contemporary experience of the world is “somehow centreless”. He elaborated on this by noting that “the basic concept at the root of attention is selection: we pick something out from the flux of the available. But as our experience comes to be ever more mediated by representations [ie screens], which remove us from whatever situation we inhabit directly, as embodied beings who do things, it is hard to say what the principle of selection is.”
What he means is that we find it hard to get our bearings – to fixate on one thing – because so much is available to us. If we can, to use his examples, take a virtual tour of Beijing’s Forbidden City, or follow a cave diver’s explorations in real time, then how do we know what we should be focusing on? How do we limit the application of our moral and mental energy in such a way that we are making the most of our own lives and concentrating on the correct things? Crawford also raises the question of how this huge information glut can damage our intimate relationships by making the day-to-day realities and responsibilities of marriage or parenthood seem tedious. “It’s hard to be grateful for loved ones when they keep interrupting my feed”, he joked.
He is hardly alone in raising the alarm about diminishing attention spans and the chronically distracted state of the average person in the modern world. Cardinal Sarah published a book a few years ago urging Catholics to resist what he called “the dictatorship of noise”, through a return to contemplative prayer and silence. But the special value of Crawford’s work is that he articulates points that are not always easy to articulate, and draws illuminating links. For example, I have often felt instinctively, that it is much ruder and more disrespectful of someone to scroll through a phone in their presence than it is to read a book or magazine. Crawford helped me to under-stand that this is not mere prejudice against a new technology, but an intuition that a phone, or a tablet, is fundamentally a representative of somewhere else, a means – even if unused or unintended – for keeping options open rather than committing to this place and this person. Similarly, Crawford notes the connections between attention and freedom, in the sense that only through mastery of a skill, and careful obedience to teachers, do we attain mastery – which gives us agency and new horizons.
It may not be a coincidence that Crawford’s close reflection on the dilemmas of technology and relationships seems to have coincided with his discovery of faith. There is something profoundly Christian about a determination to look up from your smartphone, to step away from political combat, to stop fretting about political ructions in distant countries, and think instead about how you can manifest the virtues of faith, hope and charity in your family and your community.
How do we limit the application of our moral and mental energy in such a way that we are making the most of our own lives and concentrating on the correct things?
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