By MITCHELL KALPAKGIAN
A Mind at Peace: Reclaiming an Ordered Soul in the Age of Distraction, by Christopher O. Blum and Joshua P. Hochschild (Sophia Institute Press: Manchester, NH, 2017), 179 pp.; $14.95. Available from www.SophiaInstitute.com.
The digital age with its mobile devices and colorful screens has created a technology of connectivity that has dehumanized human interaction, produced addiction, substituted media consumption for personal conversation and social relationships, and threatened virtues such as attentiveness, watchfulness, concentration, and resulted in a “failure of socialization.” The more people consult and check their devices, the more the sociable virtues (trustworthiness, friendliness, and personal attention) suffer.
The authors of this excellent book explain the great dangers posed by the compulsive habits attached to the overuse of the new technology: “It offers unlimited avenues of distraction, so that we seek immediate gratification instead of a steady orientation to long-term goals.” Instead of the pursuit of noble purposes, high ideals, the common good, and service to God, the waste of time associated with the use of digital media “calls into question the idea of noble purpose.” The mindless activity of constantly checking for messages diverts the mind and interferes with the virtues that concentrate the mind on important tasks.
This is a sobering book that exposes the many harmful effects of the mindless use of digital technology.
The authors explain the media’s excessive demands on the sense of sight — all the competing images and colors — at the loss of the other senses. Recognizing that digital media rely on endless visual stimulation, they lament the loss of the use of touch as a way of remaining in contact with reality — keeping “in touch” in the relationship of friendship, the personal touch of a handwritten letter, the human touches of affection in handshakes and hugs, the craftsman’s, cook’s, and athlete’s sense of touch that demand composure and concentration: “If we retreat into the virtual realities disclosed by our screens…we risk a grave narrowing of our sensory horizon.”
The overstimulation of the senses naturally affects the performance of the intellect. Addiction to digital media habituates the mind to a preoccupation with information and trivia that distract a person from the performance of duties and that require total attention and leads to a loss of interest in the presence of others: “The failure to attend is not always a defect of the will,” the authors explain, but a malfunction of the sensory powers precipitated by “a change in our sensory lives caused by our habits of using digital technology.”
This new technology of instant digital connectivity and addictive attachment to media have shortened attention spans in all human interactions and interfered with the habit of listening. Without the art of listening and giving undivided attention in conversation, the power of the human word loses its educational influence and the power of consolation and encouragement:
“It is by hearing a helpful word of counsel or sympathy that our judgment is adjusted and our minds are restored to equilibrium and enabled to make progress toward wisdom.”
Without freedom from the enslavement of digital media, man also loses his appreciation for silence that develops the interior life, cultivates examination of conscience, encourages meditative reflection, and deepens contemplative thought. To be silent, attentive, and listening makes a person’s awareness receptive and open to truth and God’s presence.
Referring to the smartphone as both “a distraction device” and “an addictive device,” the authors identify a problem endemic to youth culture, “students spending more time on their smartphones each day than in any other activity — and sometimes more than all other activities put together.” This state of restlessness and repeated interruptions weakens the power of concentration to stay on task with discipline and perseverance until its completion. Media consumption spoils “the ability to have thoughts that are sufficiently deep and long to be adequate to our interior needs.”
In other words, how does a student read a long novel, solve a problem in geometry, translate a difficult Latin passage, or compose a cogent essay that proves a thesis when the temptation of digital distraction always interrupts the attention and presence of mind required to think and complete a task?
As in the case of many temptations, the custody of the eyes plays a great role in living the moral life. Digital devices with their riot of colors that compel attention and fascination produce the gluttony of sensory stimulation that misdirects the eyes from its noble purposes of seeing in order to behold, wonder, think, and contemplate so that, in St. Paul’s words, the mind discovers the invisible things of God by means of the visible.
As the authors argue, no person makes prudent or moral decisions without the virtues of deliberation, attentiveness, vigilance, and reflection. These powers of the mind that require recollection and composure do not develop in the uncontrollable habit of endless stimulation and perpetual distraction. With their saturation of messages, advertisements, and interruptions, mobile devices do not allow for recollection.
In other words, no one grows in wisdom when immersed in trivial sights and sounds — a vice the classical world recognizes as curiositas (idle curiosity) as opposed to studiositas (the disciplined search for knowledge). The classical virtue of temperance, the authors recall, distinguishes between worthy and unworthy seeing because “not every object of sight is equally worthy” and “the office of sight is not chiefly to serve our sensory delight” but to direct the eyes to the truly good and beautiful “so that objects may be to us like icons through which to discern hidden spiritual realities.” Screens, on the other hand, lack all discrimination and moderation and flaunt the garish, the seductive, the strange, and the novel.
Because of its relentless sensory stimulation, multiplication of ever new sights, and manipulation of visual images, the victims of digital culture suffer a “confusion of what things are,” lose their perceptive power of noticing distinctions, and lose their capacity “to distinguish between what is real and what is not.” The mind fails to apprehend the nature of things because virtual reality piques more fascination than awareness of the permanent things. As preoccupation with novelty, gadgetry, and images rules the eyes and the mind, the vice of idle curiosity diverts the interest from the true and the good to the superficial and the mindless:
“Consider how our attention can be directed to what is trivial or meaningless, or even worse, at what is harmful, as prurient interest leads to lust, or as vain inquiry leads to gossip.” Thus the mind wanders instead of attending to nature, persons, and duties as people lose the sensitivity to be present and responsive to others.
The wasting of time supplants a life of noble purpose, and sensory stimulation replaces the pursuit of truth and the love of the good. When the eyes only stare at screens and the mind cannot sustain interest beyond a few moments, man’s entire intellectual nature suffers, and the life of the mind goes to waste. Only an ordered mind can discover and enjoy what St. Paul refers to as the “things that are above.” Like all addictions, digital media consumption breeds only the restlessness that robs the mind and soul of peace.
Natural Medicines
With compelling evidence and arguments the authors prove beyond a doubt that modern sensory lives need healing and ordering for the intellect to function according to its God-given nature of seeking truth, making prudent moral choices, exercising common sense, and growing in wisdom.
The book prescribes the classical and Christian virtues as the natural medicines to combat this social and spiritual problem — virtues like orderliness, deliberation, temperance, silence, attentiveness, recollection, vigilance, studiousness, and contemplation. Likewise, familiarity with the created world, the reality of other human beings, and the permanent things has great curative powers: “Attend to nature. Most of all, attend to persons.”
Intellectual and spiritual life, then, depends on the sensory life: “Everything that is in our minds comes to us through our senses, so if our sensory lives are damaged, our minds also will be.”
Modern life pays a great price for its addiction to instant and endless connectivity — the loss of the human touch, the human voice, and the human heart. Self-possession, temperance, self-discipline, rational thought, concentration, and the power of contemplation — the ability to repose in spiritual communion with God — all atrophy when man submits to the seductions of digital temptations that lure him with pleasure but betray him with the loss of his true freedom to love, know, and be at peace.
This is a timely, penetrating book that summons the great perennial wisdom of the saints and philosophers of the past to cure modern man’s blind worship of the false god of technology so that he may see again with his own eyes the world above him and around him and in him without screens, artificial colors, and flashing lights.
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