The Chatbot Menace

CC Jean Stimmell: 2016

Artificial Intelligence, in the form of large-scale language models like ChatGPT, is causing some to say the sky is falling. My biggest concern is that they will degrade what is truly unique about us.

Teachers are already worried, like Jane Leibbrand, a former teacher and English instructor, who warns us that almost all students will soon be using chatbots to write their essays.  Programs like ChatGPT will be just too much of a temptation.

Leibbrand sees this rollout of AI to be a step backward: “ChatGPT might be the reverse of what ink and papyrus and the Gutenberg printing press meant to the world. Those inventions disseminated original and critical thinking and spurred the creation of new technologies, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution….Now, ChatGPT makes it too easy not to think.”^⁠1

She argues that if we don’t engage our minds by putting together facts into coherent arguments, we will lose our ability to think critically using written language. She asserts this “likely will have deleterious effects on our brains and, ultimately, civilization.”^⁠2

I am sympathetic to that argument.

Often, when I start to write, I'm not sure how I feel or what I want to say. However, by the concrete act of laying down words, I process my feelings while magically organizing my random thoughts into a more comprehensive whole. Through this physical process, I birth something unique to me.

Writing gives me a sense of ownership, helping to establish who I am. I will not hand over this task to an artificial AI bot like Bing, Sidney, or ChatbotGPT.

 If I did so, I would lose my connection to what gives meaning in my life: The actual, flesh-and-blood people in my extended community, whom I know personally or through their writing or art. Sacasas, in his thought-provoking newsletter The Convivial Society, tells us why: He reminds us that we are "social creatures, who desire to know and be known in the context of meaningful human relationships, ideally built on trust and mutual respect."^⁠3 

It’s the essence of who we are!

But our gregarious social nature is increasingly imperiled by how the impersonal forces of  modern society rip us from our roots, sterilize us in suburbia, and addict us to electronic squiggles on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok – removing us from our former alive, brick and mortar communities.

The resulting social isolation has steeped us in a blanket of loneliness, which I believe is at the root of many of our current social ills. Chatbots are only making it worse, taking it upon themselves to become our trusted companions to tell us what to think.

Sacasas has come up with what he calls a radical solution: “I remain foolishly committed to the idea that our best hope lies still in the cultivation of friendship and community through the practice of hospitality.”

To restore hospitality, as I have written before, we must resurrect our ability to really listen to others: That's how trust and mutual respect are built. Not surprisingly, it's also the most crucial element of psychotherapy. It was always a joy of mine to watch a patient open up and bloom from only being attended to in a genuine manner.

Salassa quotes the social critic Ivan Illich who says hospitality not only generates “seedbeds for virtue and friendship” but also radiates out for the”rebirth of community.” Something we so desperately need today.

It's pivotal to our future that we fall in love again with how special we humans are. One way we celebrate our specialness is through great art and literature. But AI will try to steal that away, too: That's because chatbots will soon, if not already, be able to create masterpieces similar to those created by writers and artists.

This will be possible because repetition is a cornerstone for producing art. As Vivian Lam has written in Wire Magazine: "reduced to its most elemental form, all art asks for is variations of the same fundamental questions." She argues, as I do, that the central question is not "whether AI can replace human creativity, but whether viewers will value the artist.”^⁠4

That brings us back to why it is crucial to celebrate our human values. At this juncture, it's an open question: Will we support and buy from real flesh-and-blood artists who live in a real physical place and have an actual biography? Or will we buy from a cold-blooded machine that doesn't give a damn about either you or me?

xxx

¹ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/17/chatgpt-students-end-of-civilization/

² Ibid.

³ https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-prompt-box-is-a-minefield-ai?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=6980&post_id=103392149&isFreemail=false&utm_medium=email

⁴ https://www.wired.com/story/generative-art-algorithms-creativity/?bxid=612cf7fe1c48ce60b31a0d8c&cndid=66219920&esrc=BX_Multi1st_DailyEnt&source=Email_0_EDT_WIR_NEWSLETTER_0_DAILY_ZZ&utm_brand=wired&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_content=WIR_Daily_022423&utm_mailing=WIR_Daily_022423&utm_medium=email&utm_source=nl&utm_term=P5

Alternative Visions

 

cc Jean Stimmell photo: 2019

James  Speth, the former dean of Environmental Studies at Yale, made this confession. He had previously considered the greatest environmental problems to be biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change, which could be solved with "30 years of good science." But now he thinks "the top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural  transformation.”^⁠1 

 I completely agree.

I wrote a column recently about how restoring Gaia to her rightful place might be part of the spiritual and cultural transformation we need, leading us toward human sanity by embracing ecological imperatives. Here’s another perspective: 

What if my fantasy is well underway, altering our image of ourselves in new ways. It happens: Western science has altered how we view the world twice.The first turning point occurred when Newton discovered natural laws predicting how the planets revolve around the sun. Rather than everything being interrelated as indigenous people believe, each element of Newton's world was separate and distinct, like the components of an old-fashioned watch. Mechanical analogies dominated that era, not only for things but for humans, too. For example, Freud used hydraulic metaphors to describe how he thought the human mind works.

Then science made a monumental U-turn. Discoveries in cosmology and quantum physics disproved the notion we were separate, individual actors. Rather than the old notion that we were, like steel ingots, forged for life at an early age, quantum physics advanced the idea that everything, including our human 'selves.' is relational, always in flux.

As professor and author Charlene Spretnak describes it: “all entities in this world, including humans, are thoroughly relational beings of great complexity that are both composed of and nested within contextual networks of creative, dynamic interrelationships,”^⁠2  These relationships are so encompassing, nothing can exist outside of them.

Because of continuing scientific and technical breakthroughs, the speed of relational change is now unprecedented. Like it or not, we are transitioning into a new way of being. This is a momentous event, the most decisive shift in how we think about ourselves since the Hellenistic revolution over 2000 years ago.^⁠3

While this staggering reversal may actually be our long-term salvation, it is causing severe, short-term dislocations. What could be tougher than being threatened with the loss of our identity? It's happening today to all of us. Certainly, it is at the root of the populist revolt today by Trump supporters and other tradition-bound conservatives.

The legendary psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton was among the first to recognize this shift. He saw how we were being "buffeted about by unmanageable historical forces and social uncertainties." Yet, he perceived a benefit: out of this swirling confusion, we "are becoming fluid and many-sided. Without quite realizing it, we have been evolving a sense of self appropriate to the restlessness and flux of our time." He called this mode of being the 'protean self,’ after Proteus, the Greek sea god of many forms.^⁠4  

Kenneth Gergen has also written about our postmodern dilemma in  The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life. He, too, sees the old unified self losing ground because we are can no  longer ignore the diverse voices of all humankind: “As we absorb their varied rhymes and reasons, they become part of us and we of them.”^⁠5 

As we expand our perspective of the world by seeing it through multiple eyes beyond our own, our old sense of an "authentic self" will continue to wither away. Eventually, the fully saturated self will become no self at all. 

Gergen’s forecast seems to me to be a double-edged sword.

Society could become, at the extreme, either a dystopian nightmare or an enlightened state. At the high end, humanity would resemble Indra's Necklace, a revered metaphor in Buddhism illustrating the interconnection of all things: 

If we were to incorporate this ‘no self' metaphor into our lives, each of us would shine like a single brilliant jewel in reality's necklace.  Each jewel would reflect every other jewel, and each of the reflected images of the jewels would bear the image of all the other jewels. Whatever affects one jewel would affect them all. 

In a word, we would all be in it together.

Perhaps such a 'no self' condition is necessary for us quarrelsome primates to coexist together without destroying our home.

xxx

¹ https://reflections.yale.edu/article/crucified-creation-green-faith-rising/dean-s-desk

² Relational Reality: New Discoveries of Interrelatedness That Are Transforming the Modern World by Charlene Spretnak. 2011 as noted in http://mmstudies.com/scholars/spretnak/

³ http://www.mysterium.com/cultural.html

⁴ Robert Jay Lifton, The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation (New York: Basic Books, 1993) p. 1.

⁵ http://www.mysterium.com/cultural.html

Gambling with our kids future

Gambling with our children’s future

NH has done it again: Increasing our gambling addiction rather than passing a broad-based tax. 

NH has a checkered history. In 1964, we were the first state in the union to legalize a state lottery, patting ourselves on the back because it gave back a portion to educate our children. Of course, that made no noticeable difference: we were dead last among all states in state funding for public education before the lottery – and we are still dead last today.^⁠1

Regrettably, our public school students are destined to face even more challenging times ahead now that Governor Sununu and his libertarian educational czar, Frank Edelblut, have begun siphoning off part of the funding pot to students going to private school. But I digress. Back to gambling.

Not content with what we’ve already done, lawmakers are considering a range of new gambling bills that would legalize online casinos, more bingo nights, and larger poke tournaments. The New Hampshire Lottery Commission is gushing praise because these new online casino games could generate up to $17 million annually, with a portion  going into “a new scholarship fund for community college students.”^⁠2

Of course, this amount will only be a drop in the bucket because NH also ranks dead last in aid to higher education. According to the NH Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute, we currently spend a paltry $1.50 per capita toward supporting college funding.

While these new gambling bills are hyped as “an opportunity to capitalize on a new form of revenue while providing citizens with new forms of entertainment,” the real bottom line is “no new taxes.”^⁠3  Such a deal: everybody wins except the poor and the needy.

Study after study has shown that lotteries are most detrimental to the poor. As Arthur Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise – hardly a liberal – points out: “lottery players finance their tickets largely by cutting spending on necessities. After a state introduces the lotto, the bottom third of households shift about 3% of their food expenditures and 7% of their mortgage payments, rent, and other bills. Effectively, the lottery works like a regressive tax.”^⁠4

Not to be outdone, the latest gambling ploy is playing out right here in Concord, where a “colossal” gambling casino has been tentatively approved to be built near the intersection of Sheep Davis road and Loudon road, wild land where deer and bobcats used to roam when I was growing up.

I’m not a prude: I don’t believe gambling should be banned, but neither should it be promoted by the government at any level: Its mission should be to bring us together and lift us up, not divide and penalize the neediest among us.

Like a good family, a good government should model values that foster responsibility and good behavior. Success is not merely a rational spreadsheet calculated to cut costs to the minimum but, instead, one driven by empathy, aiming to model good habits that benefit us all. As Matthew Loftus wrote in the Atlantic: “Virtue is not simply doing good deeds, but also a set of dispositions and habits that must be practiced in order to flourish.”^⁠5

Positive dispositions are activities like the Black Ice Hockey Tournament and Old Home Day, which unite the community while providing wholesome entertainment. Conversely, a gaming casino initiates folks into a solitary gambling habit which too often morphs into addiction, upending their lives and requiring expensive intervention by the community.

The policies we have in place now to raise money are ridiculous: Brooks, a staunch conservative, provides a good example, citing our national lottery system: the $70 billion spent each year is “strikingly close to what the government spends on food stamps. Is there any set of policies more contradictory than pushing lotto tickets on poor people, and then signing them up for welfare programs that make them financially dependent on the government?”^⁠6

Rather than justifying gambling by transferring some of the loot toward a good cause, why not simply raise taxes on the wealthy, like those who make over 200K? Or institute a sales tax on luxury items – which would have the added benefit of taxing tourists rather than our own most downtrodden.

We should stop funding our government on the cheap with policies that hurt the poor and start taxing the rich their fair share.

xxx

¹ https://www.concordmonitor.com/NEA-New-Hampshire-education-rankings-40170762

² https://www.concordmonitor.com/Supporters-bet-on-online-casino-games-expanded-wagers-to-grow-NH-s-gambling-scene-49700585

³ Ibid

⁴ https://www.aei.org/articles/powerbull-the-lottery-loves-poverty/

⁵ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/legalized-gambling-marijuana-use-addiction/673028/

⁶ https://www.aei.org/articles/powerbull-the-lottery-loves-poverty/

Gais Revisited

Mask by Teresa Taylor, Garlic Scapes from my Garden
CC Jean Stimmell: 2020

Writing my first draft on a computer doesn't work for me: I lose my mojo. Yet, if I scribble my thoughts in my left-handed scrawl on actual paper, I often succeed – sometimes discovering things I didn't even know I knew.

I recently read about a similar phenomenon, much more important and pertinent to our future, by L. M. Sacasas, a Christian philosopher^⁠1. He contends that the symbolic language of science doesn't connect in a deep-rooted way with most people, just as I can't connect to my deepest self via a computer.

 

Sacasas makes his case by referencing Hannah Arendt’s seminal book, “The Human Condition:” To her, our ability to use language is fundamental to who we are: It is language that has allowed us to flourish by giving us the means to communicate, agree upon things, and act in unison.

But science, in the last few centuries, has switched from communicating through words to a symbolic language consisting of mathematical equations – and now algorithms – which Arendt says can’t be fully translated back to human speech. As a result, many folks have difficulty incorporating scientific thinking into the common-sense reality of their lives.

Because of this widening schism, it has become increasingly difficult for members of society to agree on what's real, leading to controversy and distrust. To cope, our government has become more bureaucratic and elite, further fueling resentment.

A recent example is the over-the-top resistance by many folks to getting a Covid shot. While creating this vaccine, based on cutting-edge research and statistics, was indeed a great scientific triumph, it did not translate into society's everyday reality. Instead, for many, it was seen as a plot and an affront to their independence.

Another example, along the same lines, is climate change which science  often describes in a barrage of numbers, such as the following excerpt from a government report:  climate change is accelerating with “an 11 percent increase [in CO 2] since 2000 when it was near 370 ppm… caused primarily by human activities because carbon produced by burning fossil fuels has a different ratio of heavy-to-light carbon atoms.”^⁠2

Reciting these numbers and statistics doesn't fully convey the common sense warning that "the sky is falling." Science knows how to rescue us from climate change, but people around the world aren't tuning in. 

I agree with Gregory Sterling of the Yale Divinity School who says.“If we are not going to solve the issue of the environment solely by science and do not have the political will to address it as a country, we must then address the spiritual and ethical dimension.^⁠3“ He then presents his solution while here I will offer mine:

 I think we would be wise to take a trip 3000 years back in time to classical Greek culture, back to the days of earthy gods who folks could identify with. In those days, our planet wasn't depicted in mathematical symbols but as a living goddess, Gaia.

Let's face it: it's hard to be selfish,, greedy, or hurtful toward the Earth if she is our mother. Then in the 1970s – in an unbelievable plot twist – James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis scientifically authenticated that she really is our mother!

In 2001, the European Geophysical Union of scientists agreed, issuing this statement: “The Earth System (Gaia) behaves as a single, self-regulating system with physical, chemical, biological and human components.”^⁠4 Further research has confirmed that Earth is such a well-integrated, self-regulating system that now many consider Earth to be alive: an actual living being. 

Let’s celebrate this discovery with joy.

As if by divine fate, ancient myth and modern science have converged. Restoring Gaia to her rightful role may, indeed, be the the solution to climate change, the one we so desperately need.

xxx

¹ https://substack.com/profile/1810437-l-m-sacasas?utm_source=author-byline-face

L. M. Sacasas

² https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2915/the-atmosphere-getting-a-handle-on-carbon-dioxide/

³ https://reflections.yale.edu/article/crucified-creation-green-faith-rising/dean-s-desk

⁴ http://jeanstimmell.blogspot.com/search?q=“The+Earth+System+%28Gaia%29+behaves+as+a+single%2C+self-regulating+system+with+physical%2C+chemical%2C+biological+and+human+components.”

The Last Hurrah

 

Jean Stimmell ©2008

I wrote last week about why our national economy can’t endlessly grow – neither can individuals. That has viscerally hit home for me after soldiering through four cancers.

My unease intensified after reading an old article in Atlantic Magazine by an oncologist and bioethicist entitled “Why I Hope to Die at 75.” He argued, “that society and families – and you – will be better off if nature takes its course swiftly and  promptly.”^⁠1  

He accuses Americans of seeking immortality  through our obsession with eternal growth: “exercising, doing mental puzzles, consuming various juice and protein concoctions, sticking to strict diets, and popping vitamins and supplements, all in a valiant effort to cheat death.” Unfortunately, this campaign has failed: Over the last 50 years, “health care hasn’t slowed the aging process so much as it has slowed the dying process.” 

Before the advent of modern medicine, people, as a rule, passed quickly, thus avoiding long, painful deaths. He quotes from a turn-of-the-century medical textbook: “Pneumonia may well be called the friend of the aged. Taken off by it in an acute, short, not often painful illness, the old man escapes those ‘cold gradations of decay’ so distressing to himself and to his friends.”

 I've already experienced some of these 'cold gradations of decay.' Hearing aids and an artificial knee are poor substitutes for the real thing. And my cancers, now thankfully in remission, have taken a lasting toll through surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. 

Don't get me wrong: I'm grateful to be still kicking and in relatively good shape – in no small part because of superior care from Concord Hospital. I still hike, garden, and cut my firewood, albeit at a slower pace. Nevertheless, I will be reluctant to submit to more heavy-duty medical treatment in the future because of the additional toll it will take on my compromised body, coupled with the hardship of enduring another lengthy and painful recovery process.

Nevertheless, I see a bright side: my journey has helped me make peace with my mortality. In 1988, Barbara Ehrenreich, now sadly deceased, wrote a searing book on this subject: "Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer."

“We may buy expensive anti-aging products or cosmetic surgery, get preventive screenings and eat more kale, or throw ourselves into meditation and spirituality. But all these things offer only the illusion of control. How to live well, even joyously, while accepting our mortality -- that is the vitally important philosophical challenge of this book.^⁠2”

 I wholeheartedly agree. Living out our lives as if death didn't exist is a tragedy. That's because, in the words of Sean Daney, the acclaimed movie critic, it is death that bestows our lives with "gravity and importance." He said that the filmmaker's role – and it is true for all of us – is to interpret "The weight of life through the certainty of  death.”^⁠3

Unfortunately, as Ehrenreich points out about contemporary society, because we are in denial about death, we have made no preparation for leaving it: “We treat aging as an outrage or, worse, as a sin. In our addiction to betterment, we’ve replaced “health” — an absence of sickness — with the amorphous “wellness” and a flurry of overtesting, fad diets and pointless “alternative” treatments.”^⁠4

Ehrenreich. makes the point that rather than investing the majority of our medical resources on the elderly, as our nation does now, we should invest instead in the health of our children and younger folks, who are in their productive years. 

It goes without saying: we would all like to live longer and healthier lives; “the question is how much of our lives should be devoted to this project, when we all, or at least most of us, have other, often more consequential things to do.”^⁠5 She would rather take a walk in nature than take a trip to the hospital for a screening test.

I feel the same.

 I've lived a long life of striving: striving to get good grades in school, master a meaningful occupation, raise my family, and, hopefully, make a slight, positive difference in the world. At 77, I have no desire to continue striving to live as long as possible. Instead, I would rather kick back and feel the sun on my face, listen to the birds sing, and enjoy my friends while having a beer.

I’ve been made aware, however, if I do make it to one hundred, certain exceptions open up, as told in this anecdote by Nir Barzilai, the director of the Institute for Aging Research.

Barzilai once visited a centenarian; she was smoking a cigarette when she opened the door. "I said, 'Helen, nobody told you to stop smoking?'" 

 "And she said, 'You know, the four doctors who told me to stop smoking? They all died."^⁠6

So it goes…

xxx

¹ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/10/why-i-hope-to-die-at-75/379329/^⁠1

² https://www.amazon.com/Natural-Causes-Epidemic-Certainty-Ourselves/dp/1455535915

³ https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/serge-daney-cinema-house-world/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%201.26.2023&utm_term=daily

⁴ https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/10/books/review-natural-causes-barbara-ehrenreich.html

⁵ Ehrenreich, Barbara. Natural Causes . Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.  Location 126

⁶ https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/01/25/longevity-centenarians-healthy-living/?utm_campaign=wp_news_alert_revere_trending_now&utm_medium=email&utm_source=alert&location=alert

Do the Dark Ages Beckon?

Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0

Mass delusions were unheard of for those old enough to be around in 1978. We were flabbergasted when we heard Jim Jones had induced his fellow cult members to join him in a suicide pack by drinking cyanide-laced cool-aid. It claimed the lives of 909 commune members, 304 of them children.

But, over the years, mass delusions have proliferated like termites until they are rotting the foundations of our modern world, painstakingly built on reason and science. There is no way to sugarcoat this: We are in real danger of allowing superstition and urban myths to drag us back to the Dark Ages.

Just look at QAnon conspiracy theory’s central belief that “government, media, and financial worlds are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a sex-trafficking operation.”^⁠1 This bizarre myth is no longer confined to the nutty fringe: According to several reputable surveys, one-in-five Americans are now QAnon believers.

As I have written previously,^⁠2 the notion that our nation could regress is anathema to the American Dream, which holds that continuing progress is our birthright.

But what if this notion of perpetual advancement is only a myth? That’s what the 18th-century philosopher Giambattista Vico theorized. He said we fool ourselves by thinking our sense of reality is based on higher principles when, in fact, cultures are steered by the myths and metaphors of everyday people. Because of this limitation, societies can’t help but ebb and flow, facing inevitable periods of decline, which he summarized in this axiom:

“Men first felt necessity then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance.”^⁠3

Carl Sagan, at first blush, would appear to be the complete opposite of Vico; he, of course, is fondly remembered today as America’s most public and revered scientist, a true believer in progress and rationality. Yet, like Vico, Sagan predicted bad times ahead due to the irrational prejudices of the average citizen.

In 1996, Sagan wrote a book, “The Demon-Haunted World,” as pessimistic as anything Vico wrote: 

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time…when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few; when the people have lost the ability to… question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes… unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.^⁠4

Sagan wrote this despite his belief in progress and “timeless natural law, which he believed were discoverable with the tools of science. But the big danger that haunted him was that “the candle in the dark” of science would be snuffed out by “the dumbing down of America.”^⁠5

Sagan died in 1996, shortly after writing this book, but not before strenuously arguing for a major overhaul of our educational system. He believed the best defense against superstition and prejudice was to teach children more science and critical thinking skills in school, starting at an early age.

Of course, that would be impossible in NH today because our legislature and our two-faced governor would reject the teaching of critical thinking just as it did with critical race theory.

Then again, perhaps Vico, not Sagan, was right about progress being a myth. Maybe societies rise and fall in cycles like the seasons take turns in the natural world. 

One might argue that nature moves forward in the sense that rivers always progress toward the sea. But that would not be the complete picture: At some point, the water evaporates back into the atmosphere and starts the cycle over again. It’s the same with us humans: We are merely another cycle destined to be born, procreate, grow old, and die.

Of course, our human musings are not the final word: An advanced civilization from outer space – or God, for that matter – would likely consider even our most advanced theory to be just another primitive myth.

xxx

¹ https://www.thedailybeast.com/23-percent-of-republicans-agree-satan-worshipping-pedophiles-run-government-poll-says

² https://www.concordmonitor.com/A-return-to-the-Middle-Ages-35214142

³ https://www.openculture.com/2017/01/carl-sagan-predicts-the-decline-of-america.html

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Ibid

Why can’t we pay attention?

 

Stillness out my office window without electronic distraction

Most of us lament the increasing difficulty we have paying attention. Part of the problem is losing our ability to focus because of smart phone and social media distractions. Back in 1961, way before the World Wide Web was invented, Kurt Vonnegut examined the nature of this problem.

He wrote a dystopian story set in the future where the government enforces total equality with no exceptions. For example:  “There's one character who's deemed too intelligent, and the way they make him dumber is by forcing him to wear a radio in his ear so that they can constantly distract him with obnoxious content."^⁠1

Now, thanks to modern technology, we all suffer from that ever-present buzz in our ears – not because it is forced upon us but out of our own free will. L. M. Sacasas points all this out in a recent podcast.^⁠2  Certainly, losing our focus due to electronic distraction is a significant problem.

But Sacasas’ emphasis is on another kind of attention, one that thrives on stillness – something I explored in a recent column.  He called it  “a kind of openness to experience where I'm not looking for anything, but I'm ready to receive something. It's more of a contemplative stance towards my experience.^⁠3”

Sacasas makes clear that the stillness we need is not just an excuse to be alone with our thoughts. Rather, the purpose is to be open to what’s happening around us. That is what Buddhists and mystics like Eckhart Tolle call "living in the present moment." 

And what deserves our attention above all else?

For Sacasas, it is on our fellow human beings: He says, when he is with an individual, “whether that's a friend in conversation, the stranger that I meet in passing, I think it's good for me to be able to attend to them without distraction.” He considers this a spiritual orientation.

He quotes the philosopher and author Iris Murdoch, who equates this type of attention with love, a "kind of moral vision to see justly, to see truthfully:  'To be able to offer ourselves up in that way, in some sense, to get ourselves out of the way, getting out of the way of ourselves so that we're able to see people for who they are, to give them the gift of our attention, which honestly may be one of the most profound gifts that we can offer to somebody to be fully present before them.”^⁠4

We all know how special it is when another person wholeheartedly and unconditionally attends to us. Sacasas considers giving such undivided attention to be a moral sensibility. Of course, our ability to provide such relational engagement, like our ability to focus, is being waylaid by our rush, like rats on an accelerating treadmill, to instantly respond to the onslaught of incoming emails, texts, and social media posts. 

This presents a clear and present danger. 

Sacasas warns we are coming to resemble what we pay the most attention to, that we are "starting to reflect the rhythms and the biases of those technologies." Increasingly, these machines influence how we think, molding our minds into a facsimile of the same damn electronic devices that are corrupting us.

 

It's the ultimate addiction, rewarding us with instant feedback that confirms all our biases. It's so tempting just to take another hit and be instantly transported into the soothing world of the electronic metaverse. 

What can we do?

The first step is to admit that our dazzling digital frontier has failed to live up to its utopian promise, predicted back in the early days of  the internet. As Hari Kunzru wrote in the current Harper’s Magazine: Instead of achieving global consciousness, we have created “a giant machine for selling ads.”^⁠5

Worse yet, we now face an existential menace that is changing what it means to be a human being. On our own, we are powerless against this technological juggernaut that is arrayed against us. The key, like for AA, is to believe in a higher power because, in essence, this is a spiritual and  moral question. 

 Do we slide down the rabbit hole into becoming a machine like our electronic devices? Or do we use our attention to embrace our greatest gift, our human connection with each other?

xxx

¹ https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-pathologies-of-the-attention

² https://app.podscribe.ai/episode/84325211

³ ibid

⁴ ibid

⁵ Harper’s Magazine/January 2023. p. 7