Yesterday we began discussing The Lord of the Rings (Book I) and the first question was: “Can you explain Tom Bombadil?” So we plunged in to a discussion of old Tom, who in fact is a key to the whole novel. At one point G, sitting next to her dear friend A, raised her hand.
G: There was a time when A’s greatest wish was to marry Tom Bombadil.
A (covering her face in her hands): I was twelve!
The one I need to paste on myself is “DON’T CRUSH.”
The predicted disasters never arrive. Adolescent aggression continued after comic book restrictions – because comics weren’t the cause. Novels didn’t trigger mass elopements. Radio didn’t destroy children’s capacity for thought. Each panic uses identical rhetoric: addiction metaphors, moral corruption, passive victimhood, apocalyptic predictions. Each time, the research eventually shows complex effects mediated by content, context and individual differences. And, each time, when the disaster fails to materialise, attention simply shifts to the next technology.
These publications and technologies existed alongside serious thought. The penny dreadfuls didn’t prevent Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill or Charles Darwin from flourishing. What’s different now isn’t the existence of shallow content, which has always been abundant. What’s different is the existence of delivery mechanisms actively engineered to prevent the kind of attention that serious thought requires. The penny dreadfuls didn’t follow you into your bedroom at midnight, vibrating with notifications.
This distinction matters because it changes everything about the available responses. If the problem is screens inherently, then we need cultural revival, a return to books, perhaps even a neo-Luddite retreat from technology. But if the problem is design, then we need design activism and regulatory intervention. The same screens that fragment attention can support it. The same technologies that extract human attention can cultivate it. The question is who designs them, for what purposes, and under what constraints.
An extremely thoughtful, and thought-provoking, essay — though perhaps a little too sanguine about some things. The idea that people who can’t read books are able to sit attentively through long movies is probably incorrect.
Set in Turkey and filmed on location in Germany with no attempt to hide the artifice, the trenchantly honest and terrifically acted new film from The Teachers’ Lounge director Ilker Çatak might be the most important film yet made about Donald Trump’s America. Though it obviously has more specific ties to Turkey’s authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Yellow Letters has plenty to share with western audiences about the role of art in political protest and the myriad forms that cancel culture can take.
So many of my fellow Americans think everything is about us — and also, apparently, that anything that’s not about us isn’t worth paying attention to.
The Terlingua Tardis
A decade ago Robert Macfarlane published a wonderful book called Landmarks — I reviewed it here — which argues for the preservation and extension of the accurate description of our natural environments. The book collects, from a range of British places, local words for local things, and Macfarlane calls that collection his Counter-Desecration Phrasebook. It occurs to me that we need many Counter-Desecration Phrasebooks to help us protect and preserve what Gandalf calls “all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands.”
I’ve been trying to tutor Angus in the need for a sober and reflective Lent, but I don’t think he’s getting the concept.
The current POTUS issues a great many insults, but his linguistic capabilities are extremely limited, so he simply recirculates the same handful of vague descriptors: “loser,” “weak,” “traitor.” How dull. Let’s remember that American politicians used to have some skill in the art of invective. For instance, here, from 115 years ago, is Hiram Johnson, the Governor of California, on the publisher of the Los Angeles Times:
In the city of San Francisco we have drunk to the very dregs of infamy. We have had vile officials, we have had rotten newspapers. But we have had nothing so vile, nothing so low, nothing so debased, nothing so infamous in San Francisco as Harrison Gray Otis. He sits there in senile dementia with gangrene heart and rotting brain, grimacing at every reform, chattering impotently at all the things that are decent, frothing, fuming, violently gibbering, going down to his grave in snarling infamy. This man Otis is the one blot on the banner of southern California; he is the bar sinister on your escutcheon. My friends, he is the one thing that all Californians look at when, in looking at southern California, they see anything that is disgraceful, depraved, corrupt, crooked, and putrescent — that, that is Harrison Gray Otis!
In church yesterday we began the service with the Great Litany. As the choir repeatedly circled the congregation, with our music minister chanting the versicles and all of us responding to them, I felt myself part of a much larger phenomenon, the penitential procession of the whole Church as we enter Lent. Good Lord, deliver us … We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord … Son of God, we beseech thee to hear us.