"Like everyone else, I am losing the attention war," writes columnist David Brooks in today's New York Times. He goes on to cite a study reporting that 66 percent of American workers are unable to focus on one thing.
Is there any way to confront this growing epidemic of distraction and distractedness? Brooks points to the ideas of child psychologist Adam Phillips, who believes that we should encourage children to develop their innate capacity for obsession, in the best sense. And for that to happen, Phillips argues, children must feel they are in a safe environment:
“There’s something deeply important about the early experience of being in the presence of somebody without being impinged upon by their demands, and without them needing you to make a demand on them. And that this creates a space internally into which one can be absorbed. In order to be absorbed one has to feel sufficiently safe, as though there is some shield, or somebody guarding you against dangers such that you can ‘forget yourself’ and absorb yourself, in a book, say.”
Phillips' ideas resonate strongly with the arguments that will be presented in the upcoming summer issue of The Hedgehog Review. The five essays that make up this issue's theme—"Minding Our Minds"—take on many of the key questions associated with the current attention crisis: Have we lost our ability to focus? What do we mean by attention? Is there a breaking point in the seemingly ceaseless deluge of data, tweets, texts, and emails? Is there any connection between America's epidemic of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and our deepest cultural assumptions and expectations, notably a relentless emphasis on performance in all aspects of life? How is this deeper deficit affecting our humanity? Are there antidotes, cures, solutions—or are we simply in the middle of adjusting to technological upgrades, a transition masquerading as a problem? If drowning in information overload is indeed a problem, as nefarious as pollution, should we consider regulating it—and how?
To grapple with these questions, we have invited several scholars, including Matthew Crawford, Mark Edmundson, and Thomas Pfau, to examine aspects of our attention disorder that seldom receive careful consideration. As they show in various ways, attention may be far less a technological or neurobiological problem than a cultural, ethical, and philosophical one, bound up with our deepest ideas about the human person and the goals or purposes of our lives.