One of the Substacks to which I subscribe is The Convivial Society by L.M. Sacasas – one of the most perceptive technology-and-human-life thinkers out there. It’s through him that I was introduced to Ivan Illich – discussed here in a post about the unintended (or not) consequences of medical institutionalization.
The Convivial Society is not explicitly spiritual, but it is hard to not see a spiritual subtext. The final question always seems to be something like: what is it we are really seeking in all of this?
Which is worth asking about everything we do.
Anyway, today’s edition focused on the question of attention – that is really the issue that the writer continually puts before us. It’s the anxiety so many of us have: What is all this technology and social media doing to my ability to concentrate and pay attention in a sustained way? Can I even read a whole book anymore, much less a single magazine article without checking my phone every other paragraph?
He makes the point that this has always been a tension in human life, but that this is a different sort of moment:
We should not, in other words, imagine that the ability to focus intently or to give one’s sustained attention to some matter was the ordinary state of affairs before the arrival of digital technologies or even television beforehand. But this does not mean that new technologies are of no consequence. Quite the contrary. It is one thing to have a proclivity, it is another to have a proclivity and inhabit a material culture that is designed to exploit your proclivity, and in a manner that is contrary to your self-interest and well-being.
The questions he posed today and the way he discussed the matter prompted me to think, you might not be surprised to hear, about liturgy.
Of course, I write about liturgy quite often here, and we have been up and down, all around the ins and outs of the liturgical movement past and present. We consider all the stated and unspoken goals of the popular and academic liturgical movement: deepening the engagement and understanding of the laity in the liturgy, connecting the liturgy to everyday life, accessibility, disposing of medieval “accretions” supposedly inappropriate and pointless for the New Spirituality of the New Man of the New Century, the conviction that whatever the “Early Church” did (or what we think it did) was most worthy of emulation, ecumenism, inculturation…and so on.
Got it.
The problem with reform movements of all kinds is that they can’t see themselves objectively, in the context of the big social and cultural picture. Of course none of us can because, as we say, hindsight is 20/20.
But that truth, it seems, should give us pause, always, as we begin our attempts to reform and reshape. Along with the passion and conviction must go the capacity for criticism and an awareness of the possibility that our actions and desires for reform are more closely embedded in our present cultural moment than we suspect.
So, too attentiveness. This is long, so be prepared. And as you read, think about liturgy. And remember – there is a difference between liturgy and a prayer service, a difference with Conciliar reforms have, at least on the ground and in terms of popular understanding, obliterated.
Any emphasis is mine.
Human beings have, of course, always lived in information rich environments. Step into the woods, and you’re surrounded by information and stimuli. But the nature of the information matters. Modern technological environments present us with an abundance of symbolically encoded information, which is often designed with a view to hijacking or soliciting our attention. Which is to say that our media environments aggressively beckon us in a way that an oak tree does not. The difference might be worth contemplating.
Natural, which is to say non-human environments, can suddenly demand our attention. At one point, Klein and Hari discuss a sudden thunder clap, which is one example of how this can happen. And I can remember once hearing the distinctive sound of a rattlesnake while hiking on a trail. In cases like these, the environment calls us decidedly to attention. It seems, though, that, ordinarily, non-human environments present themselves to us in a less demanding manner. They may beckon us, but they do not badger us or overwhelm our faculties in a manner that generates an experience of exhaustion or fatigue.
In a human-built environment rich with symbolically encoded information—a city block, for example, or a suburban strip mall—our attention is solicited in a more forceful manner. And the relevant technologies do not have to be very sophisticated to demand our attention in this way. Literate people are compelled to read texts when they appear before them. If you know how to read and an arrangement of letters appears before you, you can hardly help but read them if you notice them (and, of course, they can be designed so as to lure or assault your attention). By contrast, naturally encoded information, such as might be available to us when we attend to how a clump of trees has grown on a hillside or the shape a stream has cut in the landscape does not necessarily impress itself upon us as significant in the literal sense of the word, as having meaning or indicating something to us. From this perspective, attention is bound up with forms of literacy. I cannot be hailed by signs I cannot recognize as such, as meaning something to me. So then, we might say that our attention is more readily elicited by that which presents itself as being somehow “for me,” by that which, as Thomas de Zengotita has put it, flatters me by seeming to center the world on me.
If I may press into this distinction a bit further, the question of purpose or intent seems to matter a great deal, too. When I hike in the woods, there’s a relative parity between my capacity to direct my attention, on the one hand, and capacity of the world around me to suddenly demand it of me on the other. I am better able to direct my attention as I desire, and to direct it in accord with my purpose. I will seek out what I need to know based on what I have set out to do. If I know how to read the signs well, I will seek those features of the landscape that can help me navigate to my destination, for example. But in media-rich human-built environments, my capacity to direct my attention in keeping with my purposes is often at odds with features of the environment that want to command my attention in keeping with purposes that are not my own. It is the difference between feeling challenged to rise to an occasion that ultimately yields an experience of competence and satisfaction, and feeling assaulted by an environment explicitly designed to thwart and exploit me.
When I consider the ways that traditional Catholic and Orthodox liturgy evolved over the millennia, and how the Latin Rite Catholic liturgy has changed over the past decades, I sense a reflection of what Sacasas says here, and I can’t unsee it.
Even with the post-Conciliar anxiety about “participation,” I have always felt that one of the great strengths of the Catholic Mass has been the sense that we do, indeed, come as we are to this place, and that’s okay. We are joyful and mourning, curious, doubtful, restless, fearful and content. God has gathered us here, and we trust that in the liturgy, in this point in space and time, he will meet us where we are, as we are. The liturgy – in its objective nature, its traditional formality and even its silence – gives us all room to celebrate, to grieve, to wonder, to praise, to drift.
The common critique of the pre-Conciliar liturgy and motivation for reform was always that the congregation should be more directly engaged with exactly what was happening in the sanctuary, not approaching it as a stage play that the clergy were performing, unconnected from our bead-fingering in the pews.
And perhaps there was something to that.
But then, there is another truth – one that you still see embodied in Eastern Catholic and Orthodox liturgies, in which the people indeed do their thing, wandering in and out, standing and sitting, chanting and bowing, while the priests and other ministers do their thing, busy behind the glories of the iconostasis.
What is expressed there is a reflection of reality, as traditional Christianity has understood it: God created the world, and we live and breathe in it. It surrounds us, it is a given, we make our way through it, we give praise – and we grow in wisdom by paying attention.
Wisdom! Be Attentive!
It is just there, organic, being and happening, and here we are, invited.
Which is a contrast, as Sarcasas points out in this other context, to the modern world that doesn’t invite us to come and see, but demands that we make ourselves known, that we raise our voices, that we be in a space and interact with stimuli in the correct way, that we respond, no matter how we feel, in the way that the folks up front demand we respond.
I couldn’t hear you! Let’s try that again, Church!
“And with your spirit…..”
Charlotte was Both 