It seems we can’t all just settle. There’s always someone or something bringing up new issues, or bringing back old ones. There’s never anything just right, or never enough, for everybody (except the greedy for whom there never will be).
There is the urgent, such as the climate crisis. There is the matter of injustice, such as the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, whose bodies, it is feared, are in dump sites outside Winnepeg, Manitoba – how atrocious, that anyone can think so poorly of someone to not only murder them but dispose of them like trash! There are matters of historic injustices such as the unmarked individual graves (not mass grave sites) of possibly indigenous children at our now-closed schools. There are the injustices to Blacks, and to Asians, and LGBTQ+. There is the continuing refugee crisis in the Middle East, and the still lingering prisoners in Guantanamo. There is whatever it really is that bothers Putin, other than his own grandiose dreams. The list goes on, doesn’t it?
Having been retired for thirteen years, I am distant from the normal — I am among a minority of people who are financially reasonably secure, reasonably healthy for my age with medical assistance, living in a house that I own, close enough to a major city to go there for most significant recreation, but far enough to be less affected by the hot buildings, as seen in Chicago https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/11/climate/chicago-underground-heat.html. Yet, as with probably everyone else, I am forever aware of the miasma of troubles: Ukraine war, refugees both new and traditional (who seem never get the help they deserve), floods in so many places, extraordinary heat so many places, fires from Canadian forests polluting the air here and other places farther south, high UV radiation, shortage of affordable housing particularly for the up-and-coming generations, the political turmoil in the U.S. and elsewhere. All this is very much on my mind. Aside from when I am taking action through groups I have joined, how to keep some of my mind for other matters?
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell, encourages us to find ways (she has suggestions) to restore informed consent by recognizing that a good deal of concern is prompted not just by a sense of commonality with humankind, but also by commercially-driven opinion, lies, reportage, and general claims to attention. She encourages us to learn to distance ourselves from these demands and instead control our attention. “Control our attention” means to feel morally OK with deciding when and how much attention to give to any stimulus, and how much to reserve to yourself without any sense of guilt. (This sort of ties in with my last blog about wisdom.) Odell writes,
…attention may be the last resource we have left to withdraw. In a cycle where both financially driven platforms and overall precarity close down the space of attention – the very attention needed to resist this onslaught, which then pushes further – it may be only in the space of our own minds that some of us can begin to pull apart the links.”
Controlling our attention may be much more important than we think.
Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram act like dams that capitalize on our natural interest in others and our ageless need for community…and profiting from them.
Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but as inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive.
One more quote to whet your appetite for this book:
What is needed is not a once-and-for-all type of quitting but ongoing training: the ability to not just withdraw attention, but to invest it somewhere else, to enlarge and proliferate it, to improve its acuity. We need to be able to think across different time scales, …to pause for consideration…to risk unpopularity by searching for context.
Keeping control of your mind and attention is also discussed at length in The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us about Distraction by Jamie Kreiner. Even in a time when there was much, much less to steal peoples’ attention, keeping hold of it and focusing it was a matter of great concern even for “the professionals.” so to speak. Contemplating how to contemplate has always been difficult.
But it’s not a matter of just keeping control of your attention.
The matter connects with “authenticity” in relationships, as noted in Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make – and Keep – Friends, by Marisa G. Franco. She questions how much of your own values and sense of self and self-worth your can retain while sharing a relationship – how many of your preferences and/or personal values do you need to set aside to get along comfortably and supportively with someone else?
You are left to discern how much you can live for your own purposes, including resisting demands to give interest to yet more other causes/problems. In Odell’s book it is not a matter of detachment, but having the right to be first your own person, free to give informed consent or dissent to the circumstances around you.
It’s not a matter just of keeping hold of your attention. It is a matter of understanding enough history and context to analyze what is coming down the information highway: whether it is accurate, why it is coming, who is sending it, of what kind of audience is the object of this delivery, what is hoped or expected by way of response aside from the click, who benefits from a particular choice, and who is harmed by that choice? We can do this only so fast, and in only so much quantity. Is it possible to know whether it is safe at this moment to close the tap? Well, that’s the problem isn’t it? It is a common problem, and has existed long before the internet.
A personal example:
In the military, as a supervisor of quality control for intelligence products, I oversaw several teams of specialists, as well as administrative processes. There were always a lot of decisions to be made. When staff would present me with a need for decision, my first question was always “why does this need to be made by me?” In intelligence, there is a tendency to avoid risk by pushing up the chain the decision whether this item is important and urgent enough to be taken to the command staff. It depended on the quality of the information. I had supreme confidence in my staff (hence my chariness of making all the decisions). If I accepted that the decision was mine, my next step was to ask their recommendation. This is a process highly recommended by John Kay and Mervyn King in their Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making Beyond the Numbers, a critique of much of economic theory. The superiors in the chain of command had enough confidence in my staff* and in me that, while no one would ever rubber stamp a proposal, I knew that it would go forward, perhaps with improvements by superior officers
This resistance to accepting that something must be important NOW is useful to counter the problems Odell poses. I recommend the process of building your confidence in others, and giving others reason to have confidence in you. By listening to others you respect, while exercising your own judgement, you develop confidence in your sense of when to turn off the information tap.
(I am helped by my own religious core ethic, which is to be as concerned with others as for myself, neither more nor less {a modern paraphrase of the Biblical teaching “love your neighbour as yourself.”} This is not a self-sacrificing ethic, but it does not allow selfishness either. It is difficult. You are expected to take care of yourself as well as taking care of others, including things {environment}. It is a healthy ethic, but may not be yours.)
The theme of these blog posts has always been the value of informed consent, which is not always exercised by everyone. These books show how very important this is, and how insisting on it helps keep yourself centred and stable when there are so many winds to blow us around.
* As an example, after your briefing of mine, a general asked, “Brown, what’s your confidence in this material?”
“Well, sir, Senior Master Sergeant __________” led the team that brought this forward.”
“Hell, if Fred says so, that’s good enough for me,” he replied. Generals and senior enlisted personnel sort of “grew up” together in the service, encountering each other several times as they moved from assignment to assignment. Their mutual respect could be very strong.
Upon reconsidering... 