Attention is a resource

What a giant had to say

A long, long time ago, when the teachers still felt they should be in charge of their students' and our children's character development, and when they still had the time to listen to giants to find out how to go about doing that, William James had the following to say about this theme.

In what does a moral act consist? It consists in the effort of attention by which we hold fast to an idea which but for that effort of attention would be driven out of the mind by the other psychological tendencies that are there. To think, in short, is the secret of will, just as it is the secret of memory.

Attention has a purpose

Attention, and the emotion of interest by which attention is naturally guided, are there for a purpose. Interest is what may naturally guide our young ones to explore and understand the world they live in. And what might compel them to exercise their strengths by doing sports.

But our industries have been able to separate this emotion from its purpose. They have been able to create games that exercise no more than the two thumbs and the rear ends of our young ones; whose ethical message is "kill or be killed"; and which are so "immersive" that the school subjects and the school itself seem utterly dull in comparison.

It's a complex world

For all we know, we may have created a complex and dangerous world, which will demand of our children to reach the kind of insights and make the kind of changes that we ourselves have been incapable for. The very survival of our children, and of our civilization, may depend on those changes. At the same time, we have brought our children into that world without seriously considering what we might need to do to help them cope with its demands.

We say "for all we know", because we don't really know. While some of our academic colleagues have done suitable research and concluded that our civilization may just barely make it, provided we see where we are going and change course – the rest of us are just living and working as if this grave matter never existed at all. Notice that we are not saying that our civilization is in trouble; other people have said that. What we are saying is something far more basic and just obvious – that the very way in which we create and use knowledge is keeping us from knowing what exactly our situation is, and what exactly we need to do to handle it.

The reason is that also our own attention has been handled in a similar way as our children's attention.

The economy of attention

The journalists are not to be blamed. They too are just trying to make ends meet in a competitive economy.

Our friends who innovate in journalism told us that there is just about one single business model that's left to journalists, as the way to compete with abundant free information. They call it "attention economy", but it's not what you might think. They are not economizing with our attention as a resource, and allocating it as it's most needed. On the contrary – the "attention economy" means attracting people's attention by whatever means might be available, and selling it – as a commodity, measured as the number of thousands of readers or viewers – to the advertisers.

We don't need to tell you that it's those advertisers, that half-a-trillion-a-year global industry that combines state-of-the-art science with state-of-the-art communication design to create our preferences and values, that are now directly in charge of everyone's character development. But you cannot blame them either – they too are just trying to survive in a competitive economy.

A different thinking is what's called for

Whose job is it, really, to orchestrate our society's change, when the circumstances demand that? Who's called upon to bring new thinking to this scene?

While the creation of our institutions, the evolution of our culture and the creation of our values have been taken over by commercial actors, we academic researchers look the other way. The creation of culture is not in our job description. Anyhow we have more important things to worry about.

Pleasure is a resource

We cannot blame ourselves

We cannot really blame ourselves either.

Of course we wish the very best to our little darlings! We only want them to be happy! It's just that we've learned to (or perhaps we've been socialized to) identify hapiness with what feels pleasant or attractive at the moment.

The sensation that something is attractive or pleasant too has a role or a purpose in the larger scheme of things. Itt's what the nature created to naturally make us do what is good for us. But our industries have been able to separate also this emotion from its purpose! Think, in the manner of a metaphor, of white sugar – where the pleasurable substance has been separated from the nutritious rest. We can now add it to virtually anything and make anything taste attractive! But at what cost?

The economy of pleasure

Around the time when William James was writing the above lines in America, back on the Old Continent Friedrich Nietzsche was looking at the course the modernity seemed to be taking, and making these notes:

Sensibility immensely more irritable; the abundance of disparate impressions greater than ever; cosmopolitanism in food, literatures, newspapers, forms, tastes, even landscapes. The tempo of this influx prestissimo; the impressions erase each other; one instinctively resists taking in anything, taking anything deeply, to “digest” anything; a weakening of the power to digest results from this. A kind of adaptation to this flood of impressions takes place: men unlearn spontaneous action, they merely react to stimuli from outside. They spend their strength partly in assimilating things, partly in defense, partly in opposition. Profound weakening of spontaneity: The historian, critic, analyst, interpreter, the observer, the collector, the reader-all of them reactive talents-all science!

Artificial change of one’s nature into a “mirror”; interested but, as it were, merely epidermically interested; a coolness on principle, a balance, a fixed low temperature closely underneath the thin surface on which warmth, movement, “tempest,” and the play of waves are encountered.“

Opposition of external mobility and a certain deep heaviness and weariness.“

Interesting to observe that this was written well before the TV, the mobile phone and the computer games!

We sometimes remember old Nietzsche when we hear some of the music that our youngsters are listening to. Don't know about you – but it does remind us of doleful howls of someone whose senses have been overstimulated beyond measure – created in an effort to stimulate the senses of us others even a bit more...