Possibility junkies

Yesterday a friend told me her college sophomore son bought an Adderal (apparently an ADD medication) to help him study. Hmm. Ken Myers draws attention to college professor Mark Edmundson's observation that young people today are voracious consumers of experience. Excerpt from Myers's essay:

[H]e portrays his students as energetic anti-slackers, eager "to study, travel, make friends, make more friends, read everything (superfast), take in all the movies, listen to every hot band, keep up with everyone they've ever known. . . . They live to multiply possibilities. They're enemies of closure. For as much as they want to do and actually manage to do, they always strive to keep their options open, never to shut possibilities down before they have to."

Edmundson believes that this voracious omnitasking makes the lives of his students both highly promising and radically vulnerable to living lives that leave no room for reflection and self-knowledge. "Our students rarely get a chance to stop. They're always in motion, always spitting out what comes first to mind, never challenging, checking, revising." In Edmundson's view, the tyrants most responsible for this condition are not rigorous professors or even parents with unrealistic expectations. The tyranny is exercised in a mood of possibility enabled by web browsers and cell phones. These technologies are less about communication and more about enlarging desire. "Skate fast over the surfaces of life and cover all the extended space you can, says the new ethos," which is why the drugs of choice on campuses are increasingly ADD pharmaceuticals, which are "on sale in every dorm at prices that rise exponentially as the week of final exams approaches."

Edmundson's article explores the ways in which this pattern of velocity is evident in sports, music, and sexual habits of students. Underlying the entire essay is Edmundson's conviction that "life is more than spontaneity and whim," and that a college classroom is one of the best places to learn how to stop, think, and reflect on the task of living deliberately.

Myers suggests that rather than urging their followers to "engage the culture," thoughtful Christian leaders ought to urge them rather to disengage from the culture, and not in a defensive, fortress-mentality way, but rather for the sake of actually being able to reflect rather than merely react. For the sake of going deeper into things rather than skating along on the surface. For the sake of living according to a method that encourages authentic human flourishing. Myers, on what that could mean practically:

Reading and re-reading books, slowly, keeping personal and private journals (not public blogs) which invite true introspection without the distraction of self-presentation, face-to-face conversations that linger and dwell, conversations that achieve some contrapuntal pleasure, attentive listening to musical works that require us to slow down and perceive subtle resonances and formal nuance: these are monotasking practices of closure, commitment, and contemplation. Their loss is one of the ways our contemporaries are becoming figurative widows and orphans (see James 1:27).

He's right about the blog thing, for sure. It -- and the online experience in general -- trains one in a skittish habit of mind by its very nature. I've complained before about all the deep, thoughtful, reflective work that I might do, but that's not getting done, because I keep this blog, which I love doing, but which is hurting my growth as a thinker.

Anyway, this is only the latest technologically-driven development in the unfolding of modernity, which is driving us further away not only from our roots, but from what it means to be human. The phenomenon Myers and Edmundson describe is an intellectual life lived only at the sensate level, one that by nature makes it difficult to plumb the depths of any particular idea or subject, because it assumes, or seems to assume, that there is nothing really to be plumbed, only information to be consumed for the sake of diversion and entertainment. This didn't come from nowhere. I am reminded of Richard Weaver, writing in the 1940s, about where all this was leading:

There is no term proper to describe the condition in which [modern man] is now left unless it be "abysmality." He is in the deep and dark abysm, and he has nothing with which to raise himself. His life is practice without theory. As problems crowded upon him, he deepens confusion by meeting them with ad hoc policies. Secretly he hungers for truth but consoles himself with the thought that life should be experimental. He sees his institutions crumbling and rationalizes with talk of emancipation. Wars have to be fought, seemingly with increased frequency; therefore he revives the old ideals-ideals which his present assumptions actually render meaningless-and, by the machinery of state, forces them again to do service. He struggles with the paradox that total immersion in matter unfits him to deal with the problems of matter.

His decline can be represented as a long series of abdications. He has found less and less ground for authority at the same time he thought he was setting himself up as the center of authority in the universe; indeed, there seems to exist here a dialectic process which takes away his power in proportion as he demonstrates that his independence entitles him to power.

What Myers is getting at, I think, is this paradox: we now have more information available to us than any persons in the history of human experience, but we are less fit to know what to do with it. We think we've been empowered by all this information, but in fact we're slaves to it, because we have lost faith in the possibility of finding deeper meaning in it all, and have lost the method -- chiefly the self-discipline, and the ability to reflect -- by which we can investigate the deeper meaning. Knowledge is ubiquitous; wisdom scarce. As Weaver put it, secretly we hunger for truth, but console ourselves with the thought that life should be experimental.

Here's the Edmundson piece, which is well worth reading.

Discuss