MAY I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? A sermon preached by Galen Guengerich All Souls Unitarian Church, New York City April 19, 2015 James Kwak teaches at the University of Connecticut Law School and has coauthored two bestselling books about the financial crisis, 13 Bankers and White House Burning. A couple weeks ago, he wrote a column for Bull Market, an online writing collective about finance and business. The column is titled, How I Achieved Peace by Crippling My Phone. When the smartphone was invented, Kwak says, it was sold as a productivity tool, but the increase in productivity has mostly turned out to be an illusion. He continues, What we ve done is take the Internet s immense potential for distraction once confined to a computer with a network connection and package it in a form that is always less than three seconds away. Kwak concedes that the smartphone is an incredibly powerful tool. But, he says, I know that its enormous powers of distraction also make me lose focus at work, tune out in meetings, stay up too late at night, and, worst of all, ignore people in the same room with me. While he thought about going back to a dumbphone, Kwak a parent with two young children likes having a high-quality camera always at hand, so he decided to keep his smartphone. Instead of giving it up, he decided to cripple it: he removed everything on it that could be distracting. In his case, that meant deleting or disabling email apps, Twitter, Facebook, the full suite of Google apps, Kindle, YouTube, and most importantly, both web browsers. As the co-founder of a software company, Kwak makes clear that he really likes technology. When I m working, he says, I m all in favor of being connected and having information available at my fingertips. But when I m not working, I want to be able to focus on the people and things around me. Every moment counts, as a wise person said. I found that, for me, that means I can t have the accumulated knowledge of the world three seconds away all the time. On the one hand, carrying around a smartphone to make calls and take photos is like chopping the wings and engines off of an airliner and hitching it to a pickup truck to use as a school bus. To his credit, Kwak concedes that he has kept the apps he needs to tune his cello, track his bike rides, navigate roads, listen to music, pay for drinks at Dunkin Donuts, and so on. Even so, he has a valid point about a smartphone s enormous powers of distraction. The word distract derives from a Latin word meaning to drag away. It suggests that we should be attending to something that s in front of us, but something else is ~ 1 ~
dragging us away. If we spend most of our hours and days being dragged away from where we are, we will never actually focus on what we ought to focus on. In the interest of full disclosure, I should admit that I am not immune to the problem of being distracted by portable technology, which is probably why I m preaching this sermon. As the saying goes, preachers tend to preach the sermons they themselves most need to hear. I too like technology, and I would probably be classified as an early adopter. This is good news in some ways, since my professional commitments as a minister require me to keep abreast of what s going on in our congregation and in the world. Like many of you, I keep the accumulated knowledge of the world at my fingertips. We seem to think this is a good thing. In this sense, the smartphone may be the talisman of the 21 st century. Or maybe it s the string of worry beads. In either case, it can certainly be distracting. And I worry about what it s distracting us from. Alan Jacobs is a distinguished professor of humanities at Baylor, a technology columnist for The Atlantic, and author of The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, among many other books. He recently wrote a column on what it means to live in a world increasingly constituted by technology. The column is titled 79 Theses on Technology for Disputation. It appears to be modeled on Martin Luther s Ninety- Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, a list of complaints against the church Luther posted on the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, Germany in 1517, thereby launching what came to be known as the Protestant Reformation. Like Luther with the church, Jacobs has a lover s quarrel with technology. For example, thesis number 38 states, To work against the grain of a technology is painful to us and perhaps destructive to the technology, but occasionally necessary to our humanity. At times with Jacobs, the quarrel predominates. Thesis 62 states, The chief purpose of technology under capitalism is to make commonplace actions one had long done painlessly seem intolerable. What stopped me dead in my tracks, however, is where Jacobs starts. Here are the first four theses: 1. Everything begins with attention. 2. It is vital to ask, What must I pay attention to? 3. It is vital to ask, What may I pay attention to? 4. It is vital to ask, What must I refuse attention to? By beginning in this way, Jacobs indicates that the principal issue posed by technology is not how productive we are, nor how much knowledge we have at hand, nor how fully we can be entertained, nor how efficiently we can complete the tasks before us. Rather, he says, we need to confront how technology influences and perhaps even takes charge of our attention. In his view, everything in our lives can be put into one of three categories: things we must pay attention to, things we may pay attention to if we choose, and things we should not pay attention to. ~ 2 ~
The reason we need to get things into the correct categories appears in the next thesis: 5. To pay attention is not a metaphor: Attending to something is an economic exercise, an exchange with uncertain returns. And shortly thereafter follows this thesis: 7. We should evaluate our investments of attention at least as carefully and critically as our investments of money. For me at least, this approach represents a remarkably different way of thinking about how I spend my hours and my days. To ask how I spend my time focuses mainly on me, as though I am independent of the people and world around me. To ask how I invest my attention, on the other hand, focuses on how I engage with the people and world around me. On these terms, the issue isn t so much what I m doing as it is what I m paying attention to and what I m getting back in return. It may take me 15 minutes to walk to work, but what am I paying attention to during that time? I may spend 45 minutes on the treadmill, but what am I paying attention to during that time? I may spend 30 minutes at the dinner table with my family, but what am I paying attention to during that time? When we ask ourselves these questions, we realize two things: most of us aren t very good at paying attention, and we re certainly not good at paying attention to what we re paying attention to or noticing what we re not paying attention to. Maybe someone should send us an attention statement each month, along the lines of the bank s monthly cash statement, so we could see how we had invested our attention during the month. And then we could decide whether we had invested our attention wisely and whether the returns met our expectations. Two years ago, a study found that smartphone users look at their devices 150 times per day, or about once every six minutes. Because many people thought this finding preposterous, a different organization repeated the study last year. The updated answer was 220 times per day, or about once every four minutes. An article in Friday s New York Times cites research showing that young people today spend so much time looking into screens that they are losing the ability to read nonverbal communications and learn other skills necessary for one-on-one interactions. When Jacobs says that paying attention is not a metaphor, he means that paying attention is like spending money: there is a cost to it, both a direct cost and an opportunity cost. We ask, May I have your attention? as though we re asking if we can have the one remaining cookie no one seems to want. In fact, we are asking something far more significant: Will you invest your attention in me? If your answer is yes, then you are giving up the opportunity to invest your attention in anyone or anything else, at least for now that s the opportunity cost. What are we missing out on when we invest attention in our portable devices check email, or headlines on Twitter, or the latest posts on Facebook, BuzzFeed, or Pinterest? And what do we get back in return for the attention we do invest? ~ 3 ~
The practice of mindfulness, which originated with Buddhist tradition, teaches us to pay attention to what we are paying attention to. But that s only the first step in the process. The underlying question isn t what we happen to be paying attention to at a given time; it s what we ought to be paying attention to. One way to answer this question is to assess what we get back in return for our investment of attention. For my part, I ve begun to think about trying to invest my attention in ways that yield what the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once called, in a slightly different form, the first fruits of civilization: truth, beauty, justice, adventure, and peace. If I invest my attention in a particular way, will it yield a more reliable experience of the truth? Will I feel more connected to what s true about the world, both the best and the worst? Will my investment of attention yield a fuller experience of beauty? Will I feel more inspired by the extravagance of creation and more urgently reminded that the ugliness in our world needs to be transformed? Will my investment of attention yield a more urgent experience of justice? Will I feel more directly called to respond to those whose lives have been devastated by structural violence or by human wickedness? Will my investment of attention yield a more intense experience of adventure? Will I feel more inspired to learn, and to grow, and to explore? And will my investment of attention yield a deeper experience of peace? Will I feel more contented in my own heart and become a more serene presence for those around me? We have attention to invest. What we want back in return is an increase in our experience of truth, beauty, justice, adventure, and peace both for ourselves and our world. Taken together, these experiences usher us into what Whitehead calls the life of the divine. As I often say, the experience of God intimately and extensively connects us to everything all that is present in our lives and our world, as well as all that is past and all that is possible. Unless we pay attention to these things, we will miss almost everything of value in life. The contemporary American poet Mary Oliver once watched a grasshopper hop in the grass, feed on some sugar, clean its face, then float away. Was this a good way to spend a summer day, she wonders? She answers her own question: I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn t everything die at last, and too soon? ~ 4 ~
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? I do know how to pay attention, Mary Oliver says, because I have learned how to savor this wildly improbable and infinitely precious gift we call life. It s all there for you and me as well, awaiting our attention, which we mostly cannot pay if we check our smartphones 220 times a day. Every moment counts. Pay attention to what s around you, especially the people. It s what we ought to do with our one wild and precious life. ~ 5 ~