All
Bertrand Russell (1932):
Modern technic has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor necessary to produce the necessaries of life for every one. This was made obvious during the [Great] War. At that time all the men in the armed forces, all the men and women engaged in the production of munitions, all the men and women engaged in spying, war propaganda, or government offices connected with the War were withdrawn from productive occupations. In spite of this, the general level of physical well-being among wage-earners on the side of the Allies was higher than before or since. The significance of this fact was concealed by finance; borrowing made it appear as if the future was nourishing the present. But that, of course, would have been impossible; a man cannot eat a loaf of bread that does not yet exist. The War showed conclusively that by the scientific organization of production it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world. If at the end of the War the scientific organization which had been created in order to liberate men for fighting and munition work had been preserved, and the hours of work had been cut down to four, all would have been well. Instead of that, the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed. Why? Because work is a duty, and a man should not receive wages in proportion to what he has produced, but in proportion to his virtue as exemplified by his industry.
This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been disastrous.
I started to blog something about this new Cal Newport essay, but then I thought: Why? Everyone already knows all this. If you haven’t changed your habits by now, are you likely to do so? Newport is right to say that there is precedent for a widespread transformation of American habits, but the difference between our current situation and the unhealthy-eating-no-exercise 1950s is that those previous bad habits weren’t nearly as addictive as the ones that are consuming human minds today.
My former professor Don Hirsch, who late in his career turned from literary theory and hermeneutics to education reform, is still writing about education — at the age of 98. I’m trying to decide whether I want him to be my role model….
Jesus did not say, “Blessed are the agentic.” Christianity is not supposed to be primarily a faith for educated strivers. And any revival that doesn’t give the drifting or disaffected a surer reason for belief, that doesn’t lift up the lowly or reach the poor in spirit, would be a revival unworthy of the name.
“Begin”?
In societies where freedom is under threat, an informed citizen is countercultural and deep reading is an act of resistance. Just as protest and vigilance are essential, so is the ability to read and think. In a would-be autocracy, the autocrat aims to subsume our society’s particular narratives into his master narrative — in which his name fills the headlines, his voice and image dominate the broadcasts, and his airbrushed visage appears on the facades of government. To read a book, however, is to enter a narrative that stands outside the politics-and-media maelstrom. In a would-be autocracy, even a small bookstore — with hundreds of books, classic, recent, and current — is a space of contrary narratives, where truth is recognized as both essential and complicated.
I remember listening to “Bedtime Stories,” Madonna’s 1994 album, and being surprised by a moony track called “Love Tried to Welcome Me,” which contains the lines “But my soul drew back, / Guilty of lust and sin.” This is an unacknowledged but unmistakable nod to George Herbert, one of the most enduring religious poets of the early seventeenth century, who wrote a magnificent poem that begins “Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, / Guilty of dust and sin.” How Herbert, who was an Anglican priest of surpassing gentleness, might have felt about being quoted, three and a half centuries later, by somebody with a Catholic name and a conical bra we shall, alas, never know. The most gratifying irony is that, in changing the mortally ashen “dust” to the cheaper and more obvious “lust,” Madonna proved only that Herbert wrote better lyrics than she did, and I can’t help wishing that she had turned to him more often for guidance both verbal and spiritual. Papa does preach.
The conclusion of Lane’s essay, which I encourage you to read in context, is one of his finest moments — and that’s saying not a little.
Accidental glamour shot
It is perhaps not an accident, then, that at the same time distraction poses an existential and spiritual threat to the fullness of being human, so many forms of modern religion have become an engine for domesticating the divine. Overly confident in their conception of the divine, for example, public forms of Christianity seem to eviscerate mystery. A God that can be conceptually encompassed and comprehended is invoked to carve up the world into a culture war of “us” vs. “them.”
In the face of such distraction and domestication of the divine, we can hear afresh Karl Rahner’s prescient insight: “The Christian of the future will be a mystic, or will not exist at all.”
Thomas Pynchon, from liner notes for an album of Spike Jones music (1994):
Nowadays, when everybody knows everything and nobody takes any text seriously, it’s hard to remember how it felt once to share a public world not as contaminated by the terminally wised-up irony that has come to pervade our own lives.
Even more true today.