To See with a Thousand Eyes
The universe is made of music and stories, not information
Sometimes we only become aware of a critical human ability when we’re about to lose it. Once I fought a futile battle to convey the value of novels and poetry to my son. After much sparing, I felt as if an unbridgeable divide had grown up between those of us whose inner lives revolve around the “fertile miracle of a communication effected in solitude” (Proust 2008, 67), i.e. reading, and those whose brains seem to act as extensions of their smartphone apps. As the battle drew to a close, he passionately proclaimed, “No one reads anymore!” and I felt his words as a body blow that directly undercut much of what I believed had made my life worth living. It suddenly seemed as if a lifetime of cultivating imagination and empathy through books had transformed me into a freak of nature. The source of most of my life’s richest moments seemed to be regarded by the younger generation as an autistic disorder.
Obviously, the members of my son’s generation still moved their eyes across screens to take in information so a kind of “reading” still survives. But to let one’s mind spread out on a quiet evening with a volume of Dickens or Tolstoy, remaining wholly absorbed until vivid imaginations start to blossom — that meaning of the term “reading” has become as rare as white lions. As literary critic David Ulin observed, “… to read, we need a certain kind of silence, an ability to filter out the noise. That seems increasingly elusive in our overnetworked society, where every buzz and rumor is instantly blogged and tweeted, and it is not contemplation we desire but an odd sort of distraction, distraction masquerading as being in the know. In such a landscape, knowledge can’t help but fall prey to illusion, albeit an illusion that is deeply seductive, with its promise that speed can lead us to illumination, that it is more important to react than to think deeply, that something must be attached to every bit of time.” (Ulin 2018, 63) The feeling that it is “more important to react than to think deeply” represents the default digital imperative. We’ve traded in our shrinking slice of silence for the illusion of being “connected.” Our market value derives from how successfully our words complement the buzz that entrances the world. The substance of our self — our ability to control our attention — has become the major currency of online exchange. We continually sacrifice our identity on the altar of downtime.
Pancake People
“One thing is very clear: if, knowing what we know today about the brain’s plasticity, you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the Internet.” (Carr 2010, 116). The scientific evidence marshaled by Nicholas Carr in his classic study, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (Carr 2010) demonstrates that the internet delivers stimuli that rapidly alter our brain circuits. Carr names it “… the single most powerful mind-altering technology that has ever come into general use.” (Carr 2010, 116) One of its major impacts is that information tends to be evaluated according to its entertainment value rather than as a means of self-empowerment. There was a time when coming across an essay by an unorthodox thinker like Roger Scruton in the library stacks could be a life-changing event. But now that much of his writing is available with a few clicks, the value of his words is measured by their capacity to divert jaded attention spans rather than their liberating truth. The idea that his or anyone else’s words could ignite a chain of thoughts leading to a fundamental change in one’s mindset has been crucially weakened. Captivating phrases can be remarketed as memes, but they rarely trigger extended mental expeditions because there is less and less mind to expedite.
How is the internet altering our reading habits, those circuits in our brains which translate symbols on paper or screen into meanings that we can apprehend? David Ulin characterizes the impact of ubiquitous information in this way, “How do we pause when we must know everything in an instant? How do we ruminate when we are constantly expected to respond? How do we immerse in something (an idea, an emotion, a decision) when we are no longer willing to give ourselves the space to reflect?” (Ulin 2018, 77) The promised information utopia has arrived, but now we are victimized by our own data and the platforms that manipulate it. Too much information is not liberating, but flattens us into pancake people, “… spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information …” (Foreman 2005). As a result, we can only understand and be understood by becoming shallower.
The current internet is not the information heaven we fantasized about when the web was young. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) seems not so much a disease as our only possible relationship to the volume of data gushing through our screens. According to one psychologist specializing in ADHD, “We have a generation of people who … are so busy processing information from all directions they are losing the tendency to think and to feel … People are sacrificing depth and feeling and becoming cut off and disconnected from other people.’” (Ulin 2018, 79–80) Unable to maintain our bearings while fielding continuous jabs to our attention, we are forced to master the martial arts of information.
What happens to our mind when it is overwhelmed by too much information? As we clamber through the disparate chunks of data floating across our screens, we often allow our emotions to take over because our minds can’t keep pace. We abandon ourselves to a “flow” that reflects our subconscious impulses. As we chase exciting cyber-trails, the platform records every click and swipe into our UPI (user profile information). It is then analyzed by the platform using state-of-the-art machine learning techniques in order to determine who we are — what we search for, the location and frequency of our clicks, the passions exposed in our postings, the facial expressions we make as we view different types of content, and thousands of other data points. The goal is for our profile data to be used by training algorithms to nudge our behavior toward outcomes favorable for online advertisers and other interested parties. Our subconscious motivations have become packaged commodities driving hundreds of billions of dollars in profit for Google, Facebook, and many other web properties.
Reading online draws on a different skillset than book reading. These skills include clicking on hyperlinks, rapid page parsing, and multitasking across browser tabs among many other practices. According to developmental psychologist Patricia Greenfield, life online has led to a “… weakening of our capacities for the kind of ‘deep processing’ that underpins ‘mindful knowledge acquisition, inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection.’” (Carr 2010, 141) She found that heavy multitaskers were “… much more easily distracted by ‘irrelevant environmental stimuli’, had significantly less control over the contents of their working memory, and were in general much less able to maintain their concentration on a particular task.” (Carr 2010, 142) Rather than making us smarter, the internet enforces a technologized definition of intelligence on us. This definition emphasizes speed of manipulation over depth of understanding, entertainment over insight, and keeps us tightly locked in our assigned profile category.
To summarize, the web treats its users as simple machines whose thoughts and emotions can be engineered through machine learning. While we are enticed by its distractions, it appropriates large chunks of our identity and uses this pseudo-self to fixate our attention on the content allocated to us by our filter bubble. The result is that much of our autonomy is devoured by algorithms with access to our intimate personal triggers.
A World Inside the World
“Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.” (Lewis 2019, 9).
The ability to read for long uninterrupted periods in order to absorb and appreciate the complexities of the world lies at the basis of much of what we refer to as “civilization.” It is what allows us to extend the range and penetration of our ideas, to gain enough understanding about situations in order to plan and execute effective change and to widen the circle of our compassion. Through this practice, readers develop “… specialized brain regions geared to the rapid deciphering of text.” (Carr 2010, 63) It is these specialized capabilities that the distraction engine known as the internet is in the process of deconstructing.
It took centuries of disciplined effort to give us the ability to read a long book silently. Such concentration runs counter to our innate tendency toward distraction. As Nicholas Carr observed, “Our predisposition is to shift our gaze, and hence our attention, from one object to another, to be aware of as much of what’s going on around us as possible … What draws our attention most of all is any hint of a change in our surroundings.” (Carr 2010, 63–64) Our ability to react quickly to change was and still is, in many situations, crucial to our survival. Maximum distraction was once the default setting on our attention controls. Deep reading required intensive training in how to resist interruptions. Unfortunately, the internet has reversed that long, slow climb toward concentrated attention into a rapid descent.
Deep reading requires wide-ranging associative abilities to extract coherent meaning from a text. As our brains became more adept at teasing apart complexity, a growing surplus of mental agility became available to probe the multiple layers of meaning packed into a text. The more our reading proficiency strengthened, the more the content was able to set off intellectual vibrations which generated new insights. As Carr summed up the new skill, “In the quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged, undistracted reading of a book, people made their own associations, drew their own inferences and analogies, fostered their own ideas. They thought deeply as they read deeply.” (Carr 2010, 65) But such intellectual adventures were only available to those willing to submit to the discipline of the book.
Among those who enjoyed the fruits of such discipline was the medieval bishop Isaac of Syria who described his experience of reading as one in which “… as in a dream, I enter a state when my sense and thoughts are concentrated. Then, when with prolonging of this silence the turmoil of memories is still in my heart, ceaseless waves of joy are sent me by inner thoughts, beyond expectation suddenly arising to delight my heart.’” (Carr 2010, 65) Clearly, something more than “information access” was taking place as the bishop studied his theological texts. Unexpected insights were awakened. They did not merely add to his information stockpile but altered its shape and significance. While building on prior knowledge, his reading opened up unsuspected perspectives on the nature of the world. Note that it was precisely when the “turmoil of memories is still in my heart,” (Carr 2010, 65) when he entered a state of total absorption in the text, that his inner thoughts began to fuse into joyful insights.
The attempt to reduce this type of reading to “gathering information” is a blasphemy against the human spirit. “Information” is often merely the product of ego-driven intellectuality that leads to various forms of imaginative illiteracy. It has its uses, but it cannot pretend to take the place of what might be called “living reading.” This can only take place when one’s absorption in a text reaches such intensity that one enters a previously unsuspected imaginative or intellectual realm. The ability to live in such realms is the product of a long and exacting discipline of human attention. It results in extended contemplation, vivid imagination, and deep human sympathies.
We are creatures of the word, but we no longer understand what words are because we’ve lost track of what a human being is. The human being is a word-being, meaning an unfinished creature containing energies unbound by any predefined purpose. Our word energies fuel talking, thinking, cognition, reading, and everything else that words make possible for us. Word energies are the source of our self-definitions.
Our ignorance of who we are has left us adrift, vulnerable to ideologies such as transhumanism which promote reductive imitations of human powers. One of these powers is “… the startling and renewable discovery that a page covered with black markings could, with a slight mental exertion, be converted into an environment, an inward depth populated with characters and animated by diverse excitements. A world inside the world, secret and concealable.” (Birkerts 2006, 35) Only the mechanical aspects of our minds can be incorporated into computing devices. The inward depths of consciousness which blossom with rich emotional associations have no correspondence to the operations of a computer. These organically woven images are able to achieve an imaginative wholeness that can only attain meaning in human hearts. The essence of deep reading is to enter continually into an evolving subjective realm woven from memories linked to each other through heart resonances shaped by a carefully cultivated imagination. Such reading enlivens a visionary subset of the external world while commanding unmatched power to instruct and inspire.
The Face of the Soul Made Visible
We have a light inside us which is central to our ability to thrive as human beings — the light of attention. Our ability to direct our attention defines who we are. Therefore, the struggle over the management of human attention is the central political, economic, and social battle of our time. Currently, AI-enabled tools for absorbing as much of our attention as possible are being rapidly developed and deployed. We are at the beginning of a long growth curve in the science of attention management. This science keeps us focused on prefabricated commercial images and ideas which displace the inner worlds which we cultivate through literature. These fabricated perceptions steer our behavior toward platform-driven aims and weaken our power to generate our own living images.
To read deeply, we must be able to filter out the daily chatter and become silent. Such silence is not the mere absence of noise. It is the presence of meanings that reveal themselves to those who cultivate the necessary mental receptivity. In this presence, we find what Wordsworth described as the poet’s gift — “the harvest of a quiet eye.” (Wordsworth 1815) The internet fosters the delusion that knowledge is purely the result of associative agility. But speed in associating ideas and facts by itself never leads to illumination — only deep insight can lead to meaningful linkages. Despite its massive resources, without imagination, the internet is a howling emptiness, an eloquent symbol of the loss of human wisdom.
Can we swipe our way to truth? The more automatic our thought process becomes, the more easily it can be algorithmically controlled via continually self-improving AI-powered prediction engines. The art of deep reading has the power to break us out of our imprisonment in the global electronic matrix. To disentangle ourselves from the web, we need to enter into the experience of our fellow readers racing beside us and appreciate their worlds from the inside. We need the intellectual depth and emotional breadth to be able to see through others’ eyes. As C.S. Lewis put it, “Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions that heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.” (Lewis 2019, 9–10). Online, we float amidst the debris of a broken story whose inner thread is our lost identity. How can we emerge from our algorithmic isolation and transform reading into an act of unification with the powers of life? By reawakening the imagination that originally formed that identity.
Bibliography
Birkerts, Sven. 2006. The Gutenberg Elegies. Kindle Edition. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Carr, N.G. 2010. The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. W.W. Norton.
Foreman, Richard. 2005. “The Pancake People or the Gods are Pounding My Head.” The Edge. 3 8. Accessed 10 29, 2020. https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/foreman05/foreman05_index.html.
Lewis, C.S. 2019. The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds through Others’ Eyes. HarperCollins.
Proust, Marcel. 2008. Days of Reading. Kindle Edition. Penguin Books.
Ulin, David L. 2018. The Lost Art of Reading. Kindle Edition. Sasquatch Books.
Wordsworth, William. 1815. “Poems (Wordsworth, 1815)/Volume 2/A Poet’s Epitaph.” Wikisource. Accessed 10 03, 2020. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Poems_(Wordsworth,_1815)/Volume_2/A_Poet%27s_Epitaph.
