Christianity

Information Overload and the Possibilities of Digital Asceticism

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

Sharon Begley’s Newsweek piece, “I Can’t Think,” tackles the problem of information overload with the help of some recent neurological studies.  Perhaps not surprisingly, “With too much information, ” according to one researcher, “people’s decisions make less and less sense.”  Most of us are all too familiar with the mounting sense of indecision and even anxiety the more information we collect regarding an important decision, so this won’t come as too much of a surprise.  Here is one interesting note, however, analogous to the observations noted a couple of days ago about memory and creativity:

“If you let things come at you all the time, you can’t use additional information to make a creative leap or a wise judgment,” says Cantor. “You need to pull back from the constant influx and take a break.” That allows the brain to subconsciously integrate new information with existing knowledge and thereby make novel connections and see hidden patterns. In contrast, a constant focus on the new makes it harder for information to percolate just below conscious awareness, where it can combine in ways that spark smart decisions.

On the same topic, Nicholas Carr has offered a helpful distinction in a recent blog post.  The problem with information used to be not having enough of it and designing good filters to find the relevant stuff.  This is no longer the issue.

Situational overload is the needle-in-the-haystack problem: You need a particular piece of information – in order to answer a question of one sort or another – and that piece of information is buried in a bunch of other pieces of information. The challenge is to pinpoint the required information, to extract the needle from the haystack, and to do it as quickly as possible. Filters have always been pretty effective at solving the problem of situational overload …

Situational overload is not the problem. When we complain about information overload, what we’re usually complaining about is ambient overload. This is an altogether different beast. Ambient overload doesn’t involve needles in haystacks. It involves haystack-sized piles of needles. We experience ambient overload when we’re surrounded by so much information that is of immediate interest to us that we feel overwhelmed by the never ending pressure of trying to keep up with it all.

As is often noted, given the choice between the problems attending information scarcity and those attending information over-abundance, better to opt for the latter.  It may ultimately be difficult to argue with this point.  But problems are problems and so we feel their force and long for solutions.  Given that this is Ash Wednesday, one is tempted to suggest that perhaps what is needed are new personal practices of digital asceticism informed by our (evolving) understanding of the conditions under which the human mind and body best function and flourish.  These are some of the possible choices that may inform such a set of practices, at least as they come to my mind:

  • Intentionally aim for the temperate use of digital media
  • Allow for periods of silence
  • Seek digitally unmediated interactions with others
  • Accept that we cannot keep up with all of it
  • Acknowledge the goodness of certain limitations associated with embodiment
  • Practice separation from devices that make you anxious by their absence

More suggestions welcome.

McLuhan, Chesterton, and the Pursuit of Joy

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

The ability to attract the attention, sustain the interest, and even earn the admiration of readers from diverse and even antithetical intellectual and moral traditions is surely suggestive of an impressive mind and a generous personality.    That G. K. Chesterton can count the radical, critical theorist Slavoj Zizek and the traditionalist Catholic Marshall McLuhan among those who have engaged his work with penetrating insight tells us a great deal about Chesterton, who also happens to be the source of this blog’s tag line.

After posting a link to Nicholas Carr’s review of Douglas Coupland’s new biography of McLuhan, I decided to pull out my copy of an older, well regarded biography by W. Terrence Gordon, Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding.  While rather aimlessly perusing through the biography I was struck by Chesterton’s significance for the development of McLuhan’s thought:

Nearly forty years later [from his time in Cambridge], McLuhan said: “I know every word of [Chesterton]: he’s responsible for bringing me into the church.  He writes by paradox — that makes him hard to read (or hard on the reader).”  Chesterton and St. Thomas Aquinas, he said, were his two biggest influences.  He loved Chesterton’s rhetorical flourishes, imbibed his playfulness, turned his impulse to try out new combinations of ideas into the hallmark of the McLuhan method.  (54)

No doubt many have said the same about McLuhan’s paradoxical and gnomic style as well as the relative (un)ease McLuhan presents for the reader.

The significance McLuhan gives to Aquinas parallels his estimation of Plato and Aristotle.  Speaking of an influential Cambridge professor, McLuhan wrote:

Lodge is a decided Platonist, and I learned [to think] that way as long as I was trying to interpret Christianity in terms of comparative religion.  Having perceived the sterility of that process, I now realize that Aristotle is the soundest basis for Christian doctrine. (53)

Aristotle, of course, is the philosopher whose thought Aquinas brought into synthesis with Christian doctrine, and among Chesterton’s expansive corpus is a short, insightful biography of Aquinas, Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox.

Demonstrating early on his characteristically wide-ranging and, in Gordon’s words, “synthesizing impulses,” McLuhan links Platonism with Protestantism:

Plato was, of course, a Puritan in his artistic views, and his philosophy when fully developed as by the 15th century Augustinian monks (of whom Luther was one) leads definitely to the Calvinist position. (51)

And while Aristotle, Thomas, and Chesterton receive high marks from McLuhan, Protestants get a lashing:

Catholic culture produced Don Quixote and St. Francis and Rabelais . . . Everything that is especially hateful and devilish and inhuman about the conditions and strains of modern industrial society is not only Protestant in origin, but it is their boast (!) to have originated it.  (55)

These insights and formulations from McLuhan give us a sense that in his religious thought and cultural criticism he is after something we might simply call joy.  The link between his cultural criticism and religious thought is explicit and centered on Chesterton:

He opened my eyes to European culture and encouraged me to know it more closely.  He taught me the reasons for all that in me was blind anger and misery . . . . (56)

He goes on to write,

You see my ‘religion-hunting’ began with a rather priggish ‘culture-hunting.’ I simply couldn’t believe that men had to live in the mean, mechanical, joyless, rootless fashion that I saw in Winnipeg . . . . It was a long time before I finally perceived that the character of every society, its food, clothing, arts, and amusements are ultimately determined by its religion — It was longer still before I could believe that religion was as great and joyful as these things which it creates — or destroys.  (56)

His criticisms of Protestantism and its consequences also circle around the affective sensibilities he perceives it to engender.  In a letter McLuhan writes of “the dull dead daylight of Protestant rationalism which ruinously bathes every object from a beer parlour to a gasoline station . . . ” (56)

In all of this, the appeal of Chesterton who appears continuously mesmerized by the sheer gratuity and giftedness of existence becomes apparent.  Borrowing Chesterton’s own words and re-applying them to Chesterton himself, McLuhan noted that he “had somehow made a giant stride from babyhood to manhood, and missed that crisis in youth when most of us grow old.” (59)  Likewise, Gordon is correct in reapplying McLuhan’s words regarding Chesterton to McLuhan himself,

There is no hue of meaning amidst the dizziest crags of thought that is safe from his swift, darting pursuit. (60)

And ultimately, it appears that it was the pursuit of joy.

McLuhan’s Catholicism

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

Just passing along a link to Nick Carr’s brief review in The New Republic of Douglas Coupland’s new biography of Marshall McLuhan, Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!.  In the review, Carr makes the following observation:

Neither his fans nor his foes saw him clearly. The central fact of McLuhan’s life, as Coupland makes clear, was his conversion, at the age of twenty-five, to Catholicism, and his subsequent devotion to the religion’s rituals and tenets. Though he never discussed it, his faith forms the moral and intellectual backdrop to all his mature work. What lay in store, McLuhan believed, was the timelessness of eternity. The earthly conceptions of past, present, and future were, by comparison, of little consequence. His role as a thinker was not to celebrate or denigrate the world but simply to understand it, to recognize the patterns that would unlock history’s secrets and thus provide hints of God’s design. His job was not dissimilar, as he saw it, from that of the artist.

Below is a clip of the exchange between McLuhan and Norman Mailer that Carr references in his review:

One of my favorite YouTube videos is a clip from a Canadian television show in 1968 featuring a debate between Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan. The two men, both heroes of the ’60s, could hardly be more different. Leaning forward in his chair, Mailer is pugnacious, animated, engaged. McLuhan, abstracted and smiling wanly, seems to be on autopilot. He speaks in canned riddles. “The planet is no longer nature,” he declares, to Mailer’s uncomprehending stare; “it’s now the content of an art work.”

After watching the clip, I’ve got to agree with Carr; ten minutes well spent.

________________________________________________

*See also Marx, Freud, and … McLuhan.

“Monastic Reading” — Reading with the Body

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

“Monastic Reading,” the third chapter in Ivan Illich’s In the Vineyard of the Text, gives us a window into a form of reading that involved the body along with the mind.  Illich is attentive to the physicality of reading and modes of remembering that (figuratively) engrave the text onto the body so that the body and mind work in tandem to remember and recall what has been read and learned.  Very interesting material given my recent fascination with embodied knowledge.

The easiest way to recognize instances of embodied knowledge is to take note of athletes and dancers who “know” how to do a great deal of things that they may have a very hard time putting into words.  Or, if you can type, ask yourself, where is the letter “L” on the keyboard?  How did you think of the answer?  If you are like most people in that situation you moved your fingers around to remember.

I’m most interested in how embodied knowledge — which is also picked up through the habits and rituals, religious and otherwise, that make up our cultural milieu — plays a significant role in shaping our dispositions, attention, inclinations.

Illich, who is drawing on the work of anthropologist Marcel Jousse, gives us some more instances of embodied knowledge, this time in the service of recalling articulated speech.

Previous posts:  Introduction, chapter one, chapter two.

  • Quoting Hugh of Saint Victor:  “Meditation is sustained thought along planned lines . . . . Meditation takes its start from reading, but is bound by none of the rules or precepts of reading.  Meditation delights to range along open ground, where it fixes its free gaze upon the contemplation of truth, drawing together now these, now those causes of things, or now penetrating into profundities, leaving nothing doubtful, nothing obscure.  The beginning of learning thus lies in reading but its consummation lies in meditation.” (52)
  • “Meditative reading can sometimes be difficult, a chore which must be faced with courage, fortitudo.  But the reader, sustained by the ‘zeal to inquire,’ will derive joy from his application.  Eagerness comes with practice.  To foster his zeal, the student needs encouraging example rather than instruction.”  (53)
  • “Hugh’s meditation is an intensive reading activity and not some passive quietist plunge into feelings.  This activity is described by analogy to body movements:  striding from line to line, or flapping one’s wings while surveying the already well-known page.  Reading is experienced by Hugh as a bodily motor activity.
  • In a tradition of one and a half millennia, the sounding pages are echoed by the resonance  of the moving lips and tongue.  The reader’s ears pay attention, and strain to catch what the reader’s mouth gives forth.  In this manner the sequence of letters translates directly into body movements and patterns nerve impulses.  the lines are a sound track picked up by the mouth and voiced by the reader for his own ear.  By reading, the page is literally embodied, incorporated.
  • The modern reader conceives of the page as a plate that inks the mind, and of the mind as a screen onto which the page is projected and from which, at a flip, it can fade.  For the monastic reader, whom Hugh addresses, reading is a much less phantasmagoric and much more carnal activity:  the reader understands the lines by moving to their beat, remembers them by recapturing their rhythm, and thinks of them in terms of putting them into his mouth and chewing.  No wonder that pre-university monasteries are described to us in various sources as the dwelling places of mumblers and munchers.” (54)
  • “For Hugh, who uses Latin, the act of reading with the eyes implies an activity not unlike a search for firewood:  his eyes must pick up the letters of the alphabet and bundle these into syllables.  The eyes are at the service of the lungs, the throat, the tongue, and the lips that do not usually utter single letters but words.”  (58)
  • “. . . for the monk, reading is not one activity but a way of life . . . . Reading impregnates his days and nights.”  (58-59)
  • “The process by which the written text of Scripture becomes part of each monk’s biography is typically Jewish rather than Greek.  Antiquity had no one book that could be swallowed.  Neither Greeks nor Romans were people of a book.  No one book was — or could be — at the center of the classical way of life, as it is for Jews, Christians, and Muslims.  For the first Christian millennium, memorization of this one book was performed by a process which stands in stark contrast to the building of memory palaces.  The book was swallowed and digested through the careful attention paid to the psychomotor nerve impulses which accompany the sentences being learned. Even today, pupils in Koranic and Jewish schools sit on the floor with the book open on their knees.  Each one chants his lines in a singsong, often a dozen pupils simultaneously, each a different line.  While they read, their bodies sway from the hips up or their trunks gently rock back and forth.  The swinging and the recitation continue as if the student is in a trance, even when he closes his eyes or looks down the aisle of the mosque.  The body movements re-evoke those of the speech organs that have been associated with them.  In a ritual manner these students use their whole bodies to embody the lines.
  • Marcel Jousse has studied these psychomotor techniques of fixing a spoken sequence in the flesh.  He has shown that for many people, remembrance means the triggering of a well-established sequence of muscular patterns to which the utterances are tied.  When the child is rocked during a cradle song, when the reapers bow to the rhythm of a harvest song, when the rabbi shakes his head while he prays or searches for the right answer, or when the proverb comes to mind only upon tapping for a while — according to Jousse, these are just a few examples of a widespread linkage of utterance and gesture.  Each culture has given its own form to this bilateral, dissymmetric complementarity by which sayings are graven right and left, forward and backward into trunk and limbs, rather than just into the ear and the eye.  Monastic existence can be viewed as a carefully patterned framework for the practice of such techniques.”  (pages 60-61)
  • “It is, however, not a social technique incorporated in the rule which makes the monk, but rather the attitude with which he approaches the book as the center of his life.  In the short chapter on meditation, Hugh refers to the spirit in which this life of reading ought to be lived.  He uses the word vacare, which says all but just cannot be translated into English . . . . Vacare means ‘to have been set or become free.’  When Christian authors use the term the stress is not on the release a person gets, but on the freedom he takes of his own volition.  The term stresses ‘the desire to be engaged ‘ in a new way of life rather than a release or flight from one’s old habits of bondage and lifestyle.  The verb is also used in classical Latin . . . . With generosity, [Seneca] urges, one should choose what to be free for.  True leisure can be found only by those who give themselves to wisdom (sapientiae vacant).”  (61-62)
  • “Lectio is forever a beginning, meditatio a consummatio, and both integral to studium . . . For Hugh, there is only one kind of reading that is worthwhile, lectio divina.  This place him at the end of one thousand years during which lectio and otio vacare had defined each other.”  (63-64)
  • “The new way of reading the newly laid-out page calls for a new setting within the city:  colleges that engender the university, with its academic rather than monastic rituals.  The studium legendi ceases to be a way of life for the great majority of disciplined readers, and is viewed as one particular ascetical practice now called ‘spiritual reading.’  On the other hand, ‘study’ increasingly refers to the acquisition of knowledge.  Lectio divides into prayer and study.”  (64-65)

“Order, Memory, and History”

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

Excerpts from the second chapter of Ivan Illich’s In the Vineyard of the Text, “Order, Memory, and History.”  Previous posts:  Introduction and first chapter.

From the first few excerpts, one gets a feel for a mental world which had not yet divorced the sign from the signifier and still regarded the cosmos as inherently meaningful, like a book to be read.  Most of what follows centers on the fascinating history of memory techniques and Hugh’s attempt to revive these techniques as the foundation of the search for wisdom.  What we end up with then is an effort to microcosmically represent the macrocosmic order of things in the mind.  The mind symbolically captures the order of the cosmos.  I hope the excerpts below convey the gist of this ambitious project.

(Read here for an excellent recent essay delving into the history of memory techniques and books.)

  • “The passage from childlike searching to adult reading is governed by something that Hugh calls ordo.  In many instances Hugh stresses the importance that the reader advance with order, ordinate procedere debet, or that one ought to stride forward with a harmonious gait.  Hugh does not create, he follows, observes, searches the order of things.  “To order” is the interiorization of that cosmic and symbolic harmony which God has established in the act of creation.  “To order” means neither to organize and systematize knowledge according to preconceived subjects, nor to manage it.  The reader’s order is not imposed on the story, but the story puts the reader into its order.  The search for wisdom is a search for the symbols of order that we encounter on the page.”  (31)
  • Quoting Gerhart Ladner:  “It was one of the fundamental character traits of the early Christian and medieval mentalities that the signifying, symbolizing and allegorizing function was anything but arbitrary or subjective; symbols were believed to represent objectively and to express faithfully various aspects of a universe that was perceived as widely and deeply meaningful.”  (31)
  • In the “somethings never change” category:  “Hugh expresses dissatisfaction with the students of his day who, ‘whether from ignorance or from unwillingness, fail to hold to a fit method of study, and therefore we find many who study but few who are wise” . . . . Hugh looks for students who read so well that without leafing they instantly have details ready in their heart.  Memory training, for Hugh, is a precondition for reading, and something which he treats in a manual that readers of the Didascalicon are supposed to know.” (35)
  • “The child’s mind was trained to build the memory mazes, and to establish the habit to dart and retrieve in them.  Remembrance was not conceived as an act of mapping but of psychomotor, morally charged activity.  As a modern youth, from childhood on I was trained to the Baedeker [popular German travel guide].  As a mountain guide I learned to decipher maps and photographs before venturing into the rock.  Decades later, when I first arrived in Japan I purchased a map of Tokyo.  But I was not allowed to use it.  My host’s wife simply refused to let me map my way through the city’s mazes by looking at them, mentally, from above.  Day after day she led me around this, and then that corner, until I could navigate the labyrinth and reach my destinations without ever knowing abstractly where I was.  Reference work before the table of contents and the index must have been much more like this kind of mapless orientation for which our modern schools disqualify us.” (37)
  • “For more advanced readers, Hugh proposed a much more complex, three-dimensional ark — a space-time matrix built within the mind of the student and modeled on Noah’s ark . . . [a] three-dimensional multicolored monster memory scheme.  The man who has best studied Hugh’s writings on the moral and mystical ark has come to the following conclusion:  220 square feet of paper would be needed for a still readable blueprint of Hugh’s ark-model of historical interrelationships.  Twentieth-century medievalists, who in the great majority have never had any training in mnemotechnics, can perhaps imagine a blueprint of Hugh’s ark, but they cannot recapture the experience of having such an ark in their own mind, or ‘be thoroughly at home with this thought and way of imagining.'”  (37-38)

Read here about a recent digital reconstruction of Hugh’s ark by Conrad Rudolph of the University of California and commissioned by the US National Gallery of Art.  Click on the image above for a more detailed representation.

  • “Some rudiments from the history of memory must be recalled to grasp Hugh’s unique place.  What anthropologists distinguish as ‘cultures’ the historian of mental spaces might distinguish as different ‘memories.’  The way to recall, to remember, has a history which is, to some degree, distinct from the history of the substance that is remembered.”  (39)
  • “We sometimes forget that words are creatures of the alphabet.” (39)
  • “In fact, the alphabet is an elegant technology for the visualization of sounds.  Its two dozen shapes trigger the memory of utterances that have been articulated by the mouth, the tongue, or the lips, and filter out what is said by gesture, mime, or the guts.  Unlike other writing systems, it records sounds, not ideas.”  (39)
  • “The one most common method used by the Greeks to achieve this purpose was the mental construction of a memory palace . . . . To become the student of a reputable teacher, the pupil had to prove that he was at home and at ease in some vast architecture that existed only in his mind, and within which he could move at an instant to the spot of his choice.”  (41)
  • “Early on it was found that the most effective way for locating and retrieving memories was that of randomly affixing to each one a mental label from a large set familiar to the student.  For example, to a goat or the sun, a branch or a knife, a sentence was attached for rote memorization.  The author who had thus equipped his palace for a speech or a dispute just moved to the appropriate imaginary room, took in at a glance the object placed on the labels, and had at his fingertips the memorized formulations that — for this particular occasion — he had associated with these emblems.”  (41-42)
  • “The art of memory as a symbolic labeling of memorized speech-acts was created in fourth-century Greece, taught by Sophists and used in politics.  In Rome, at least since Quintilian (35-100), its purpose and technique changed.  It was mainly used by lawyers.  Here memory training stresses the art of internalized reading.  The public speaker learned in late Roman antiquity how to ‘take notes’ in his mind and ‘read them off’ on the right occasion.”  (42)
  • “The rhetorical virtuoso was henceforth the one who could mentally register and label each sentence he intended to use, and promptly recover it from the appropriate architectonic feature in his own inner topology.  Today, in an age dazed by the feats of computers, this skill sounds like an impossible undertaking or freakish acrobatics for some academic circus.  But such memory training was part of the equipment expected by Hugh from the beginner.”  (42)
  • Reminding us that coping with information is not an entirely new challenge:  “By reviving ancient architectural memory training, Hugh hopes to prepare boys born around 1120 to read their way toward wisdom in an age in which the new collections could only too easily have scattered their brains and overwhelmed them.  He offers them a radically intimate technique of ordering this huge heritage in a personally created, inner spime [i.e., space time, taken from Einstein].” (45)
  • “Everything can make sense when it is related to this ordo of time; and noting is meaningful that is not placed by the reader into this ordo.  Hugh’s moral and spiritual Ark of Noah is more than a mnemotechnic palace with biblical features.  The Ark stands for a social entity, a process that begins with creation and continues to the end of time, what Hugh calls ‘the Church.’  The activity which Hugh calls ‘reading’ mediates between this macrocosmic Church and the microcosmos of the reader’s personal intimacy.  Each person, each place, each thing within this spatiotemporal cosmos must first be literally understood.  It then reveals itself as also something else:  as sign for something to come in the future, and as accomplishment of some other thing that, by analogy, has pointed toward its coming.”  (46-47)