A MOUNTAIN VIEW

By LIZA FIELD/Columnist

The desires of man increase with his acquisitions....No sooner are we supplied with every thing that nature can demand, than we sit down to contrive artificial appetites....

Many shops are furnished with instruments, of which the use can hardly be found without inquiry, but which he that once knows them, quickly learns to number among necessary things.

                                                                 Samuel Johnson

“There's a battle going on for control of your living room.”

If you think this is a blurb highlighting the next “Focus on the Family” broadcast, space alien movie or primary campaign ad, surprise!

It was the casual observation of a technology reporter, at this past week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Here (in case you didn't fly out to visit), exhibitors displayed 35-football-fields-full of the latest gizmos—all geared to save you ever-more labor and ever-more thought—forever more.

You could find thousands of new remote controls, robots, monitors, sensory-detectors, pingers and tooters, each item itself offering a billion football-fields-full of time-sucking potential, able to control not just your living room but your kitchen, office, car, ears, time on earth, and (as nobody ever mentions) your mind.

Never “mind” that you have only one mind, one attention span and one short life meant for some great purpose not conveyable (one would hope) by a robot.

No, we must be increasingly entertained, distracted and sped-up by rapid-fire information bytes, with never one silent gap to wonder where we are, why we are, and whether we might not act in ways kinder to the future inhabitants of God's green earth.

Man's penchant for distraction and avoidance-of-thought (the thought which Aristotle believed our main purpose as a species) is ancient news.

Socrates noticed it long ago, the Buddha and Pythagoras before him, Plato and Aristotle afterward, and Seneca and Jesus and Paul and a long history of lively saints—including the English Samuel Johnson and America's own Thoreau.

Distractions will always abound among the scatterbrained, they realized, because some degenerating slackitude in ourselves would rather fritter than ponder anything difficult, rather be spectators than seers.

Never mind that this avoidance of collected thought—man's very purpose—makes people depressed. As the philosopher Pascal noticed, one just turns to more distractions to ignore that depression. It becomes a self-perpetuating cycle—and now, the American lifestyle.

The average office worker in the U.S. today, researchers report, finds no more than three minutes at a time at the desk without some electronic disruption.

Each year, researchers publish studies on the effects of this fragmentation—electronics-addictions, distractedness, acquired attention-deficit, depression, the surreal stress of constant connectivity. We read them and nod with resigned dismay.

But nowhere, in 35-football-field-loads of new gizmos or time-savers will we find any solution to this problem. None of the wall-sized, high-definition face-recognizing monitors will ever show us who we really are.

Only stepping away from constant surface stimuli, noise, input and distraction can provide that kind of low-tech link to the universe and the soul.

Again, this is ancient news. And since it is not for sale and nobody can make the next billion by marketing it, few Americans will recognize it as an option, much less find any training or encouragement in cultivating such quiet time or reflection.

Albert Schweitzer, over 50 years ago, saw this dearth as the leading cause of civilization's demise (which he noticed had already begun). Nothing he or anyone could say would change the course of humanity's collective degeneration, he realized; people had to get quiet enough to understand the situation themselves.

But when? Even after the workday, Schweitzer realized, when former generations might have looked at the stars or into a fire, doing hand-work and reflecting on the day, the contemporary person was too frazzled, brain-fried and dumbed-down from meaningless work, to think.

“The slave of over-long hours, he feels more and more then need of external distractions. To spend the time left to him for leisure in self-cultivation or serious dialogue with his fellows or with books, requires a mental collectedness and a self-control which he finds very difficult.

“Complete idleness, forgetfulness and diversion from his usual activities are a physical necessity. He does not want to think and seeks not self-improvement but entertainment, that kind of entertainment, moreover, which makes least demand upon his spiritual faculties.”

He added: “The spirit produced in such a society of never-concentrated minds is rising among us as an ever growing force, and it results in a lowered conception of what man should be.”

Recollecting who-we-are is imperative to man's survival, he said. This requires some sort of fast from who-we-aren't.

Liza Field can be reached at wcfiell@wcc.vccs.edu.