The Fracking of the Mind, The Problem of the Self, and the War For Our Attention: The Ezra Klein Show In Review

I was sent this Episode recently of the Exra Klein Show titled Your Mind Is Being Fracked, along with a strong recommendation to give it a listen.
Great episode. Highly worth a listen for anyone interested in the subject of attention, particularly as it relates to our present social media age.

There’s a natural progression to the conversation that brings up many worthwhile points to think about and ponder. Some of my own reflections:

They bring up the question of defining what attention is, nong a lack of clear defintion, especially when we look at the differences between functional attention (such as the idea of attention being the absence of distraction that allows us to do our jobs well) and emotional attention (such as relational engagement that requires being immersed, or attentive, in a given experience).

The question of a working defintion is attached to the question of when and why the notion of attention came into being as a recognizable, and therefore necessary idea and concept. One could argue that attention emerges as an idea because it became necessary in response to human (evolutionary), societal and cultural changes. Here then we get caught in another tension- is the interest in attention based on a positive (we need to understand and hone the concept of attention for the sake of a, b, and c. And further, does a, b and c reflect our central value system, and if so what is that value system).

Or is the interest rooted in the negative (a, b, and c robbed us of our attention, therefore we need to understand it and hone it for the sake of gaining back that which was lost for the sake of human flourishing).

What was interesting to me was the way the first part of the episode begins to root our interest in the concept of attention in the question of human flourishing. On some level, and it articulates this later on, understanding typically follows feeling. Meaning, we feel this or that to be true, and thus the need for understanding emerges when this feeling reflects a point of crisis. Understanding is never, however, purely functional. It is simultaneously revealing a value system. And this is crucial to our ability to say something about why education, or education about attention, matters.

What is interesting was the tension I then felt listening to the first part of this episode, as I found myself noting how much of the why of the matter (or why it matters) persistently kept coming back to this notion of human flourishing, and how human flourishing kept coming back to this notion of the self as the ultimate end. A self that even they note is an illusory idea at best, if a false one.

Further yet, I found it fascinating to consider that all of the ideas about attention it was fleshing out on an academic level were ideas that I had learned a long time ago through my years as a practicing Christian in the church. Here the host makes an interesting distinction between two prominent but arguably co-existing definitions of attention within academia- attention as action (bringing about or acting on known/revealed desire), and attention as waiting (allowing that unknown desire to emerge). This echos the very defintion of Hebrew and Greek faith or faithfulness as an embodied term rooted in spiritual practice.

Things get even more interesting when the host notes a world where religion has lost its narrative presence and force of influence and has been traded for market values. In some sense what is being reflected on here is a trading of the emotional or immersive form of attention for the functional. And what is expressed is a dissatisfaction with the value system (market) this binds us to. Not only do we seem to feel a loss of attention (or our ability to be attentive), our attention has been commodified and reapplied to modernitys obsession with a form of progress.

The guest inserts the possibility then of two other avenues that can do what religion does- education and the arts. But here is the issue. What religion does is it allows us to direct our attention to something other than ourselves, precisely because something other exists. Education doesn’t have the power to either be a transcendent value or an end (it is in fact a subservient activity), but in a world absent of religion it plays that role superficially and falsely. The arts on the other hand can only be an expression of our values. It points to that which drives our attention/convictions and which gives it value. What happens then when those values are inevitably held captive to the self? No matter how education and the arts attempt to replace religion, they inevitably come back to that same fundamental place- human flourishing. Or the capacity of the self to point to the will (or choice, or liberty). To point to desire. This is why attention is seen to be a concern. But these are all, by defintion, functional constructs. They are things that don’t actually have transcendent qualities, no matter how much our art attempts to treat them as such. This leaves this train of thought grappling with the notion of the world we are being attentive to being a necessarily false one.

Things get more complex when they begin to consider how it is we solve the question of the cycles or progression of history. As people we inevitably compare our present to the past, and we are prone to seeing either our present as superior in its progression or as futile in its descent (the world is getting worse). In some sense it appears to be a both-and, but that requires a measure and it also is held captive to how we tend to need to think in more hard and fast terms if we are to give our present interests/concerns validation, motivation and meaning (progress requires this). The present is always left thinking in terms of its particular concerns and vantage points. Complexities emerge when we bring in things like history and progress as reasoned faculties. The challenge here is that simple observation tells us we are still here, therefore the concerns of the previous generation didn’t lead to the worlds end, but in reality we can equally observe that the problems also didn’t go away, they simply changed and morphed according to the same cycles and patterns inherent in the whole of human progression. So, tackling the problem of attention might be relevant to the here and now in context, but the minute we step outside of ourselves it becomes apparent that we have little to no basis to think and believe that this will and does lead to a positive progression.

Which is perhaps what attention is really about. We can see the world as it is and feel that things are not right, especially as we experience change. But we also intuitively need to be attentive to what we call the unknown in order to function in this world. The question is, can we say that the unknown is true or false. Is it conception/construct or is it reality. Is it functional or transcendent? These things have massive implication for how it is we attend to the present and whether we can actually get past the self on our way to a defining value system that justifies our need to be attentive. To me, the podcast conversation tables this tension, but then kind of walks around it. It is nevertheless interesting though and thought provoking and highly worth a listen.