In a recent op-ed for The New York Times, the columnist Ross Douthat advises academic humanists to adopt a “proudly reactionary” stance against today’s attention economy. If you are a humanities faculty, according to Douthat, you should be “banishing every token of the digital age from classrooms and libraries, shutting out the internet, offering your work much more as an initiation into mysteries, a plunge into the very depths.” Give up your embarrassing bids for relevance. You should be modeling yourselves on monks.
Meanwhile, what happens to Shapiro’s other, colder question, the one about public budgets? As we try to cultivate better habits of attention in our students and ourselves, where do politics come in? We humanists have some good intellectual resources for thinking about consciousness; we know how to talk about individual minds, with all of their complexities and contradictions. And so we are given to seeing the problem of distraction as a private matter, to be addressed by way of the psyche, rather than the economic structure. Thinking about the moral drama of distraction brings some aspects of the crisis into focus, but it also narrows our perspective. To understand what we gain and what we lose by framing the problem in this way, at this small scale, it is useful to take a longer historical view.
My favorite jeremiad about distracted readers was delivered nearly two centuries ago, in 1840, in the evangelical hotbed of Rochester, N.Y. Its audience was the membership of a local reform society, the Rochester Athenaeum and Mechanics’ Association, who had gathered to celebrate the opening of their new library. The invited guest speaker, a Presbyterian minister named J.H. McIlvaine, offered his best wishes for the library’s future. But McIlvaine also expressed some reservations. He saw a rapidly expanding supply of sensational, secular literature doing bad things to the country’s most impressionable minds:
Their attention veers from point to point, under these influences, as the weathercock obeys the varying wind. Nor do they seem to feel any sense of degradation in being compelled to follow whatever thus most powerfully solicits them, as if they were led by a chain.
McIlvaine imagined the effects of distraction with lurid vividness. He believed that guarding the population against manipulation by his era’s mass media required a careful selection of reading materials. It also called for a strong exercise of personal will. McIlvaine titled his remarks “A Discourse Upon the Power of Voluntary Attention.”
