Against Information

At no other time in history has man been more viciously assailed by information; some useful, but most of the unnecessary and even pernicious kind. Social media, international news headlines, odd facts of nature, politics, entertainment, sexual provocation, these things have fast become ubiquitous in Western life, flinging their chaotic forms in front of our eyes, desperate for our attention, our money, and our desire. A man does not have the capacity to keep each of these in his mind, nor should he entertain half of them, for if they do not cause him to sin, they are of a material and impermanent character. 

Perhaps an immediate response is that we have need of these faculties, to be aware of the world, engaging with it, so as to be in accordance with a civic or moral duty. This response neglects something rather essential: that we, as humans, were not designed for such ends—if they could be called ends at all. The modern man has become bulimic in his education, his spirituality, his attention, consuming things just as quickly as he spits them out again. For our stomachs—or in this case, our minds—could never contain all of the foods that we might wish to digest. This, in turn, produces a vicious cycle where information dissipates from memory as quickly as meaning itself. Tragedies are quickly forgotten, books remain unfinished, and what was eaten yesterday eludes the stomach today.

True, scholarly mastery and the pursuit of divine knowledge are in accordance with our nature, but less spoken of is the peril of the learned man. For a man who has acquired knowledge of a new tool has also a greater method of wounding himself. This is the teleological peril of any tool: that it can replace the one who wields it. The scholar, feeling adjudicated by the arduousness of his studies, grows to rely upon his own wisdom, rather than upon the wellspring of all knowledge. The man’s formation, ironically enough, may become his limitation. This is why Christ remarks that man cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven unless he is as a child. A child trusts in his parents, while a man trusts in himself. Though our intellect bears a minute resemblance to the image of God, it is still the mind of man. This does not, however, suggest that one ought not participate in civil affairs, nor does it give praise to the wider road of ignorance. Instead, I warn that the modern man has far exceeded himself across all of these domains, so far that he has lost sight of himself. 

Born of this contemporary morass is one whom I could describe as a sandman. The sandman is generally a younger person seeking grounding in life and in their own spirituality. He seeks things that ring true, but cannot sit among truths long enough for them to be true. His temperament, because of his access, is feeble. A podcast insists that he ought to remove the plastics from his food, while another tells him that all foods are hitherto corrupted. A story tells him he ought to support an orphanage, while another describes their exploitation of children. He will not remember either of these in six months. Truths are not always plainly discerned, as most will agree, but they make for a poorer discernment if they are quickly lost. As the sandman ascends with greater purpose, seeking greater answers, his upper heights are swept by the winds of constant cultural distraction. The sandman reads but never understands; he might pray, but he never discerns; all of these shortcomings amount to a form that can never rise beyond the swell. 

In the same breath that one often decries the advent of artificial intelligence as it encroaches upon the domain of the working, so too must we acknowledge the effects of information saturation on the domain of the thinking. An emphasis must be placed upon this culture, or rather a reminder—that we once did not need such information to live, and should therefore employ it sparingly. We must rebuke the institutions that suggest to every man that to participate in society is to be an everyman. The greater the noise of our culture, the thinner our signal with the transcendent. We have forgotten the way of the simple man, the man of one book, and it is to our spiritual and intellectual detriment.