What It Costs To Pay Attention

This will be about attention spans. I'm going to try to keep it from being a rant. And, partly to help me avoid that, I am going to weave around a little.

Let's start with attention. The verb at the root of all this is tendere, "to stretch." With the prefix ad- = "toward," we get "to stretch toward." If you want to pause for a moment to recall the myth of Tantalus, now would be the time. The point here is that "stretching toward" is a lot of work and requires resources. This is captured in our expression "pay attention," in which the cost is presumed and the ability to pay it is, by teachers at least, also presumed.

If there were a systematic shorting of the resources we need to pay this cost, we would expect that a smaller and smaller proportion of the members of the society would be able to afford it. This would likely happen to poor people first, so "attention deficit" could join "nutritional deficit" and "security deficit" and "socialibility deficit" and all the other deficits that go with low or irregular access to resources. It could be argued that the U. S. is experiencing just this kind of thinning out of psychic resources and I think a good case could be made, but it isn't what I have in mind today.

Yesterday, I started on a shopping trip and picked up "Messiah" at the place where I had turned it off the day before. I didn't like it. All I wanted to do right then was turn it off and listen to a sports station. (There might be another post there, one day.) But then I remembered that this happens to me fairly frequently. The longer, more relaxed receptivity that I need to really hear "Messiah" isn't always right there for me. But I know what to do to get it, having done it many times before. First, I categorize the problem: I am running too fast to hear such music well. Second, I consciously intend to slow down. Third, I pay close attention to the music to help me slow down. Fourth, when I have achieved the right "speed" for listening to such music, I find that it sounds to me just as wonderful as I hoped it would.

One way to put that would that that "I" have accommodated myself to "it." "It" requires a certain "speed," a longer, more leisurely, more attentive "speed" and "it" will reward me for achieving it. Another way to put it is to say that I want a certain experience--leave aside for the moment that I really didn't want it at the moment I had to act to achieve it--and I did the things I needed to do--I slowed myself down--to achieve it and reaped the rewards of my self-knowledge, my musical appreciation, and my self-discipline. I would probably object if someone else used that first form, but I am completely comfortable using it myself because I know what I mean by it.

Not only did I have the resources to "pay attention," but I had the self-awareness to act in a way I did not really want to act at the moment, secure in the knowledge that very shortly, I would want to and that I would receive what I wanted. I don't think that's an uncommon experience for people of my class and generation. Many middle class people in their 70s have learned to appreciate slower and more subtle and richer experiences. Most of us learned it, I expect, by being bored to tears and learning how to cope with it. "Bored," we learned, is not a quality of the event, but the quality of the interaction between ourselves and the event.

When I began listening to "Messiah" yesterday, I had just a flash of another thought. It was that so many kids today--adults too, but I want to think about the kids--haven't learned to slow themselves down so as to make such experiences possible. Is it because they are resource-poor and can't afford to "pay" attention? I don't think so. I think it is because they reject the prospect of the experience and because they have moral objections to it in principle.

Here's the way I'm thinking of it. If "bored" is a horrific and untenable experience and if being bored means that you are attending to something that has the essential quality of "boringness," then you never discover that "bored" is, in fact, a transaction; a relationship of one thing to another. This is equivalent to discovering that there is a relationship between putting money in your checking account and drawing money out of your checking account. People who see the relationship say, "Hello! You have to make deposits!" People who don't see the relationship are just unaccountably poor.

The unacceptability of boredom coupled with the location of boringness in the event could take us in any number of directions. Here's where I want to go today. The rejection of boringness amounts to a demand for entertainment. "Entertainingness" is a quality of the event, just as "boringness" was, so there is no progress there, but being "entertained." is pleasurable--or at least it is supposed to be--where being "bored" is not.

That leads to the stance, "I should be being entertained." This is a very good criterion from an experiential standpoint because usually you know whether you are being entertained or not. It sorts events into "entertaining" and "not entertaining" and rejects the "not entertaining" events not only on grounds of the right of the individual, but on moral grounds as well. If events ought to be entertaining and this event is not entertaining, then it is not an adequate event. It is a failure and should be rejected. So attributing causal efficacy to the event ("it" has acted on me, "it and I" have not failed to find common ground) and rejecting failed events on the grounds that they have not met the moral criterion (have not entertained me) leaves us at a very bad place. It leaves where we are.

It is true that several generations now have been raised on "fast cut" TV. It is true that increasingly, the interactive media, respond to immediate experiences rather than extended ones. It is true that several generations of children have been taught that being bored rather than entertained is a moral affront, rather than just a part of living a life. And these transactions have been invented by people who made money on them and supported by people who had no other goal that making their children happy and satisfied. "Happy" and "satisfied" are not the same thing, by the way.

These children are now incapable of the experience I had with "Messiah." There is no need for self-reflection, therefore no occasion for realizing a desire I have which can not be contained in the moment of first reaction, therefore no occasion for changing myself so I can properly appreciate the event, therefore no ultimate pleasure in the event itself. They have been deprived of the kind of self-knowledge I acquired as a response to boredom and now hold as a crucial skill. And, given the moral affront of boredom, I don't see any way they can begin to move toward it.

OK, here's the yes but section. I know it is true that every generation learns, to some extent, the skills their times have required and, forgetting the relationship between the particular times and the particular skills, yearn to see the next generation learn the same skills. Yup. I know that. But as attention spans get shorter and shorter, the deficits start to play with how the brain is wired and how it responds to new stimuli. (There's another post waiting to happen.) At a certain point, it is not possible to turn this development around, no matter who wants to do it. It is, in that way, like global warming. An environmentalist wins the presidency and everyone breaths a sigh of relief because now the average global temperatures are going to start going down. Not really. And in four years, we are going to have our revenge on the environmentalist who promised "improvement" but didn't actually deliver it in his four years in office.

Even starting to want to deal with the situation--I'm back to attention now--is hard, but it may no longer be possible to actually deal with it for generations to come. For one thing, the misunderstanding of "boredom" needs to be addressed. Does that seem likely to you? And then the moral criterion, in which an immediate demanding experiential self is the ultimate judge of worth, has to be challenged. Does that seem likely to you.

Me either.