Our theme for March is “The Life of the Mind” and this on account of two of the books we review this month: Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus and Zena Hitz’s Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. In different ways both books deal with the “life of the mind”. Hari in his Stolen Focus seeks to warn his readers of the extent to which the web and the new media platforms in particular are designed to maximise the time we spend, and waste, in front of screens. Simply, as Tim O’Sullivan writes: “The social media companies benefit financially when we maximise screen time.” To this end they seek to morph us into the kind of creatures who will willingly spend hours locked onto our little screens. And so the new media platforms tend, as O’Sullivan continues, “to work against the effort involved in reading and to favour superficiality. Thus, Twitter seems to imply that the world can be interpreted and confidently understood very quickly and what matters most is whether people agree with, and applaud, one’s short, simple and speedy statements. Facebook conveys the impression that your life exists to be displayed to other people and you should be aiming every day to show your friends edited highlights of your life.”
The American philosophy lecturer Zena Hitz comes at similar ideas from a different angle. In her book Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life, (reviewed by Dr Jaime Nubiola of the university of Navarre) Hitz speaks of the importance of higher delights (higher that is than the lobotomised delight of life lived online), but in a particular way the delight of learning. She writes:
“Learning is a profession…. But it begins in hiding: in the inward thoughts of children and adults, in the quiet life of bookworms, in the secret glances at the morning sky on the way to work, or the casual study of birds from the deck chair. The hidden life of learning is its core, what matters about it. If computers were to collect and organise everything called knowledge – never mind whether it really is knowledge or not – such a collection would be pointless if it did not culminate in someone’s personal understanding, if it did not help someone to think about things, to work something out, to reflect…. There are other ways to nurture the inner life: playing music, or helping the weak and vulnerable, or spending time in nature or prayer – but learning is a crucial one”.
This is very reminiscent of Pope Benedict’s concept of what he terms in his Encyclical Deus Caritas Est, “the pedagogy of desire”, whereby we “discover or rediscover the taste of the authentic joy of life”, for the inauthentic joys leave only emptiness in their train but not so the authentic joys. This pedagogy is of particular relevance to the young, in whom it is important to instil “from a young age the taste for true joy, in every area of life – family, friendship, solidarity with those who suffer, self-renunciation for the sake of the other, love of knowledge, art, the beauty of nature…”. Such a pedagogy would serve to inoculate them against what he terms today’s widespread “trivialisation and the dulling” – or what we might call, to coin a phrase from Allan Bloom, a “flattening of the soul”.
Steven Pinker is an example of an intellectual of a different stripe. While Pinker, as Margaret Hickey points out in her review of his latest work Rationality, successfully “deconstructs familiar types of fallacious argument that circulate across both mainstream and social media, as well as political and judicial platforms”, at the same time “he has all the rather irritating low self awareness and smugness of the liberal elite, once he steps outside his models and tables”. His facile tendency to equate all mainstream Christians with “bible-thumpers” unfortunately does manage to sway those with scant awareness of the intellectual rigour and grandeur of two millennia of Christian thought.
The tragic events unfolding now in Ukraine have many of us all thinking of the events which led up to both the world wars of the last century, and wondering whether we are once again sleep walking into the unthinkable. Philip Zelikow’s The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War, 1916-1917, reviewed here by Niall Buckley, shows how hard it is to put the genie of war back in the lamp once it has escaped since that genie comes accompanied by the unleashing of furious passions. We can only hope and pray that the sad history of 1914 and 1939 is not repeating itself in 2022.
This month we’re inaugurating a new section with Position Papers, our “Short Reviews” of one page book reviews. We hope through these to be able to at least notify you of the existence of certain note-worthy books. This month we carry reviews of Rodolfo Valdes’ To Live in Christ (a collection of articles which are to be found on the Opus Dei website) and Nathan Law’s Freedom (concerning China’s forceful takeover of Hong Kong).
Last month James Bradshaw examined the work of famous English writer George Orwell, and this month he continues in the same vein with his examination of the Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. Incidentally James Bradshaw has just launched a blog containing his own writing. You can visit it at www.jamesbradshawblog.com.
Finally Bishop Robert Barron’s review of the recent film The Power of the Dog (which received no less than twelve Oscar nominations) shows that concepts trickle down from the heady heights of academia, through our popular media, into the minds of the man on the street. In this case that concept is that of power. This in many ways the underlying theme of this excellent film is our modern-day obsession with power and its concomitant victimhood. For Barron, it is the “baleful influence of Nietzsche and especially Michel Foucault”, which have engendered this obsession of ours. It is certainly interesting to trace the genesis of ideas and attitudes which saturate our minds back to the obscure writings of tortured academics decades in the past. A good example of the truth of Richard M. Weaver’s adage that “ideas have consequences”.
As I write Vladimir Putin’s terrible military offensive against Ukraine is unfolding. Our thoughts and prayers are especially with the people of Ukraine, and we make our own Pope Francis’ 23rd February plea for peace and his reminder to us that: “Jesus taught us that the diabolical senselessness of violence is answered with God’s weapons, with prayer and fasting…. May the Queen of Peace preserve the world from the madness of war.”