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We pay a price for all the information we consume these days - and it's knowing
less, says Alain de Botton.
One of the more embarrassing difficulties of our age is that most of us have
quite lost the ability to concentrate, to sit still and do nothing other than
focus on certain basic truths of the human condition.
The fault lies in part with our new gadgets. Thanks to our machines, of which
we are generally so proud, the past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on
our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think
without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine has become almost
impossible.
But we can't just blame the machines. There is a deeper issue at stake - the
feeling, so rife in modern secular culture, that we must constantly keep up
with what is new.
The obsession with current events is relentless. We are made to feel that at
any point, somewhere on the globe, something may occur to sweep away old
certainties. Something that if we failed to learn about it instantaneously,
could leave us wholly unable to comprehend ourselves or our fellow human
beings.
Novelty
The news occupies in the secular sphere much the same position of authority
that the liturgical calendar has in the religious one. Its main dispatches
track the canonical hours with uncanny precision. Matins have here been
transubstantiated into the breakfast bulletin and Vespers into the evening
report.
Start Quote
Alain de Botton
Though technology has rendered it more or less absurd to feel gratitude over
owning a book, there remain psychological advantages in rarity
End Quote
The prestige of the news is founded on the unstated assumption that our lives
are forever poised on the verge of a critical transformation, thanks to the two
driving forces of modern history - politics and technology. The earth must
therefore be latticed with fibre-optic cables, the waiting rooms of its
airports filled with monitors, and the public squares of cities ribboned with
the chase of stock prices.
Contrast this with how religions think of what is important. For the faiths
there is seldom any need to alter insights or harvest them incrementally
through news bulletins. The great stable truths can be written down on vellum
or carved into stone rather than swilling malleably across hand-held screens.
For 1.6 billion Buddhists, there has been no news of world-altering
significance to their faith since 483 BC. For their Christian counterparts, the
critical events of history came to a close around Easter Sunday in 30 AD, while
for the Jews the line was drawn a little after the destruction of the Second
Temple by the Roman general Titus, in 70 AD.
Even if we do not concur with the specific messages that religions schedule for
us, we can still concede that we pay a price for our promiscuous involvement
with novelty. We occasionally sense the nature of our loss at the end of an
evening, as we finally silence the TV after watching a report on the opening of
a new railway or the tetchy conclusion to a debate over immigration.
It is then we might realise that - in attempting to follow the narrative of
man's ambitious progress towards a state of technological and political
perfection - we have sacrificed an opportunity to remind ourselves of eternal,
quieter truths which we know about in theory, and forget to live by in
practice.
Fasting
Rather than letting us constantly catch up on "news", religions prefer to keep
reminding us of the same old things, according to strictly timetabled routines.
The Book of Common Prayer, for instance, decrees that its subscribers should
always gather at 6.30pm in the evening on the 26th Sunday after Trinity, as the
candlelight throws shadows against the chapel walls, to listen to a reading
from the second section of the Book of Baruch. Just as on the 25th day of
January they must always think of the Conversion of Saint Paul, and on the
morning of the 2nd of July reflect on the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary
and imbibe the moral lessons of Job.
TV remote control Machines dominate most homes
How free secular society leaves us by contrast. It expects that we will
spontaneously find our way to the ideas that matter to us and gives us weekends
off for consumption and recreation. Like science, it privileges discovery. It
associates repetition with punitive shortage, presenting us with an incessant
stream of novelty.
For example, we are enticed to go to the cinema to see a newly released film,
which ends up moving us to an exquisite pitch of sensitivity, sorrow and
excitement. We leave the theatre vowing to reconsider our entire lives in light
of the values shown on screen, and to purge ourselves of our decadence and
haste.
And yet by the following evening, after a day of meetings and aggravations, our
cinematic experience is well on its way towards obliteration. Just like so much
else which once impressed us, but which we soon enough came to discard - the
majesty of the ruins of Ephesus, the view from Mount Sinai, that poetry recital
in Edinburgh, the feelings we had after putting down Tolstoy's Death of Ivan
Ilyich.
In the end, all modern artists share something of the bathetic condition of
chefs, for whereas their works may not themselves erode, the responses of their
audiences will. We honour the power of culture, but rarely admit with what
scandalous ease we forget its individual monuments. Three months after we
finish reading a masterpiece, we may struggle to remember a single scene or
phrase from it.
Wisdom
Our favourite secular books do not alert us to how inadequate a one-off linear
reading of them will prove. They do not identify the particular days of the
year on which we ought to reconsider them as the holy books do, in the latter
case with 200 others around us and an organ playing in the background.
Bible The bible was one of the few books people used to have in the house
There is arguably as much wisdom to be found in the stories of Anton Chekhov as
in the Gospels, but collections of the former are not bound with calendars
reminding readers to schedule a regular review of their insights.
We are reluctant to admit that we are simply swamped with information and have
lost the ability to make sense of it. For example, a moderately industrious
undergraduate pursuing a degree in the humanities at the beginning of the 21st
Century might run through 800 books before graduation day.
By comparison, a wealthy English family in 1250 would have counted itself
fortunate to have three books in its possession, this modest library consisting
of a Bible, a collection of prayers and a compendium of lives of the saints -
these nevertheless costing as much as a cottage.
Elevate
If we lament our book-swamped age, it is because we sense that it is not by
reading more, but by deepening and refreshing our understanding of a few
volumes that we best develop our intelligence and our sensitivity.
We feel guilty for all that we have not yet read, but overlook how much better
read we already are than St Augustine or Dante, thereby ignoring that our
problem lies squarely with our manner of absorption rather than with the extent
of our consumption.
We are often urged to celebrate not only that there are so many books to hand,
but also that they are so inexpensive. Yet neither of these circumstances
should necessarily be deemed unambiguous advantages. Consider the immensely
costly and painstaking craftsmanship behind a pre-Gutenberg Bible - a product
of a society which wished to elevate individual books into objects of
extraordinary beauty so as to emphasise their spiritual and moral significance.
Though technology has rendered it more or less absurd to feel gratitude over
owning a book, there remain psychological advantages in rarity. We can revere
the care that goes into making a Jewish Sefer Torah, the sacred scroll of the
book of Moses, a copy of which will take a single scribe a year and a half to
write out by hand, on a parchment made from the hide of a ceremonially
slaughtered goat which has been soaked for nine days.
We should stand to swap a few of our swiftly disintegrating paperbacks for
volumes that would proclaim, though the weight and heft of their materials, the
grace of their typography and the beauty of their illustrations, our desire for
their contents to assume a permanent place in our hearts.
The need to diet, well accepted in relation to food, should be brought to bear
on our relation to knowledge, people, and ideas. Our minds, no less than our
bodies, require periods of fasting.