Changing Our Minds
Virtue Ethics for a Digital Age
Christine Neulieb
A friend’s twenty-one-year-old sister gave me a ride to the
train station the other day. She’s a student teacher in a thirdgrade classroom, and had just been complaining at dinner that
the eight-year-olds are addicted to their cell phones—what’s
the world coming to? Now, as she was driving the car with
one hand, she was texting with the other.
At least we’re beginning to notice the problem. Essays on
the topic of “How the Internet Is Messing Up Our Brains”
are practically becoming a genre (see “Overdose,” page 25).
Nicholas Carr writes in his recent book The Shallows (expanding on his 2008 essay in the Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us
Stupid?”) that as he uses his gadgets, he often gets an unsettling feeling that “someone, or something, has been tinkering
with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming
the memory.” That is, the Internet might be changing more
than just the trivial details of our daily routine. It might be
changing who we are, down to our very biology, as it rewires
our neural pathways at a frightening rate.
It should not be shocking that a habit like constant Internet
use might change us at a profound level, perhaps even ruining
the capacity for sustained, contemplative focus that we once
took for granted. The notion that actions create habits, which
in turn shape moral character, is the foundation of virtue
Christine Neulieb is Commonweal’s editorial assistant. Funding
for this article has been provided by a grant from the Henry Luce
Foundation.
ethics—as old as the ancient Greeks, and underpinning much
of Catholic moral theology as well. Every day, repeated actions
(bringing lunch to an elderly neighbor, embezzling company
funds, surfing the Web) form us into the sorts of people we
are (generous friends, untrustworthy scumbags, or distracted
dilettantes). These actions even rewire our brains. If you lie
constantly, your brain will adapt. It will become a liar’s brain,
complete with extra white matter in the prefrontal cortex to
support the hard brainwork of deception.
Virtue ethicists would argue, however, that this capacity
for change is as much a cause for hope as dismay. It is true
that crucial parts of character formation take place at the
level of neural rewiring, where we have no direct, conscious
control. One cannot wish to be a generous person and make
it so by a simple act of the will. Yet we can choose the actions that incrementally cause the rewiring. Bringing the
neighbor lunch, turning the computer on or off: these are
voluntary. The change may be painfully slow at times, but
it does happen.
So there is no reason why we have to sit helpless and passive as the Internet re-forms us in its own fractal, impersonal
image. Whether the Internet ruins our brains is in the end not
a scientific problem but a moral one: How will we choose to
use the technology? Will we create boundaries for its involvement in our lives, or let it shape us as it pleases? One can
ask whether the digital revolution will raise or lower human
intelligence, but a more interesting question is whether it will
make us better or worse people. And that is up to us.
Commonweal . December 17, 2010
I
t’s in vogue to ask what the Internet is
doing to our brains. Will constant exposure to technology destroy human
memory and attention span? Will it turn
us into machines who can take in massive
amounts of information over the course of a
day but never understand it with any depth?
Are college students really learning if they’re
taking notes on their laptops, but keeping
Facebook and e-mail windows open simultaneously, and also surreptitiously texting
on their cell phones?
Addictive technology
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Commonweal . December 17, 2010
16
How exactly to resist the scattering of attention, eroding
of memory, and countless other effects of daily bombardment
with terabytes of information—what sort of practice it will
require—is a much more difficult question. It’s important not
to trivialize the mind-numbing, will-weakening force that the
onslaught of digital stimuli can have. As Carr notes, human
beings, like Eve beneath the tree of knowledge, have a natural
“craving to be inundated by mental stimulation,” information,
and impressions. The Internet is the perfect instrument for
indulging this craving. And because the instrument is so new,
there are no preformulated moral precepts for how to use it
well, like the precepts we tend to fall back on in the case of
ethical dilemmas that have been with us longer. Developing
an ethical response to the age of information overload will
therefore require a lot of intellectual spadework.
While the history of ethics doesn’t offer a tailor-made solution to this problem, there are some concepts that with a
little imagination can be made useful, and I want to mention three of them here. First, curiositas, the vice that killed
the cat: a moral problem that was much discussed in the late
Greco-Roman period but has been neglected in more recent
history. Second, recollection, the virtue of inwardness: a favorite of the sixteenth-century Carmelite reformers. And finally, mindfulness, the Buddhist ideal of being fully present
to the moment.
When we talk about curiosity, we generally mean a positive character trait: a lively interest in one’s surroundings, in
culture and ideas; a readiness to learn. Digital information,
far from always being a curse, can help satisfy this healthy
desire to learn about the world. The point of Augustine and
other ancient philosophers in identifying curiositas, or excessive curiosity, as a vice was that like any desire, the desire to
know can get out of hand and become a controlling lust. In
fact, Augustine classifies it under “lust of the eyes,” following
1 John 2:16 in picking out lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes,
and pride of life as the three roots of vice. We’re accustomed
to hearing the word “lust” in an exclusively sexual context,
but the lust of the eyes, writes Augustine, has nothing to do
with ogling your neighbor’s wife: that goes under lust of the
flesh. Lust of the eyes refers instead to excessive desire for information and sensory input of all kinds—an unbridled pursuit of knowledge and experience. In other words, exactly
that “craving to be inundated by mental stimulation” that
Carr describes.
Curiositas, then, means losing the ability to control one’s consumption of information and sensory input. In practical terms:
letting hours be swallowed up in reading news, watching video
clips, googling obscure facts, trolling Wikipedia, jumping from
link to link, checking for the latest minutiae on friends’ socialnetworking pages. All in all, we take in much more information than we need in order to be well-informed citizens, and
much more information than we can possibly integrate into a
functional mental life. It’s as if a feast is set out on a table, and
we just can’t resist eating the chocolate mousse and the pecan
shortbread and the red velvet cake. Scientific studies proving
that the unrestrained consumption of information leaves our
brains in an unfortunate state should come as no surprise. We
already know what happens when we overeat.
F
leeing to the opposite extreme, however, is not the
answer. At least for most people, becoming Luddites
holed up in cabins off the grid is neither a possible nor
a helpful solution. There has to be a balance between consuming an overload of information, on the one hand, and
teetotaling on the other. It’s impossible to define in abstract
terms exactly where this mean lies. For starters, individuals
differ significantly as to how much information they can digest
without attenuating their attention spans, just as they differ
in how many calories they can consume without becoming
overweight. Finding a personal balance is accordingly a long
process that isn’t the same for everyone. Like all moral growth,
it requires willingness to experiment, interior honesty, and
probably also the advice and good example of friends who
have a knack for keeping their heads above water amid the
torrent of information.
One name for the end result of this process—for the virtue
whose endangered-species status so alarms Carr and his ilk—is
recollection. Recollection is the habit of dwelling on things
that matter, rather than spending all our time caught up in
trivialities. Not that there isn’t a place in life for trivial things,
too; but the steady habit of returning to what’s meaningful
between mental vacations keeps peripheral concerns from
absorbing the whole person. Recollection also creates the
ability to concentrate one’s mental and spiritual powers at
will. With a recollected mind, one perceives the world like a
skilled photographer with a manual camera, easily controlling
depth and breadth of field, deciding what’s in the foreground
and what’s in the background and how the picture is to be
framed—rather than like a casual tourist with a point-andshoot, whose camera mechanically decides all this for him.
The twentieth-century Catholic phenomenologist Dietrich
von Hildebrand devoted a pithy chapter to this virtue in
Transformation in Christ. Recollection, he writes there, is the
opposite of distraction. The distracted mind is “dragged along
from one object to another, never touching any of them but
superficially”; when distracted, we are “at the mercy of our
[brain’s] mechanism of associations.” That is, if we don’t choose
to direct our minds to something, they have a mechanical,
automatic way of filling themselves with random associations.
Electronic gadgetry, because it’s so bright and shiny, so easy
to access and so full of noisy information, easily becomes an
extension of this particular neural mechanism, which is why
it strengthens the natural human tendency to dwell in the
shallows. Habitual overeating stretches out the stomach and
gives it a greater capacity for overeating; habitual oversurfing stretches out the brain and gives it a greater capacity
for distraction. By contrast, writes Hildebrand, recollection
“means an awakening to the essential, a recourse to the absolute which never ceases to be all-important and in whose
light alone everything else discloses its true meaning.” We
So many books—so much confusion!
All around us an ocean of print
And most of it covered in froth.
However, Carr goes on to argue that even the poor-quality
thrillers of that time—the “froth”—“helped spread the book’s
ethic of deep, attentive reading,” to the extent that “whether a
person is immersed in a bodice-ripper or a Psalter, the synaptic
effects are the same.” I think Teresa would disagree. A young
noblewoman with a lot of free time on her hands, she used
to spend days at a time immersed in cheap thrillers, the sort
of clichéd, romantic-adventure stories that Cervantes would
parody in Don Quixote. Her later regrets about this habit are
not just laments for lost time; she specifically criticizes the
superficial mental life that her way of reading encouraged. She
describes this surface state of mind as addictive and damaging,
so much so that if you substitute “surfing the net” for “reading
novels” in her confessional Life, you have a description very
similar to Carr’s diagnosis of Internet addiction.
Reclaiming recollection is necessary for a peaceful daily
existence, says Teresa, but much more so as a foundation for
any kind of prayer: the habit of recollecting oneself at various
points during the day, in order to pray even briefly, prevents
“the soul from going astray and the faculties from becoming
restless.” She knew recollection could be difficult for those
who weren’t used to it: “I beg you to test it, even at the cost
of a little trouble, which always results when we try to form
a new habit.” With a little time, the trouble disappears: “You
will have the great comfort of finding it unnecessary to tire
yourselves with seeking this holy Father to whom you pray,
for you will discover him within you.” The whole spirituality of the Carmelite order, founded as it is on contemplative
prayer, is the exact antithesis to the shallows—which gives it
a special relevance for the church in the digital age.
T
he virtue of recollection also has something in common with the Buddhist practice of right mindfulness
(sammá sati), whose contemporary popularity might be
explained, at least in part, by the digital age’s void of attention.
Mindfulness, like recollection, is a complex concept, impos-
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Commonweal . December 17, 2010
can’t always be thinking about the absolute, but it can always
be present as a background, a horizon that keeps everything
else in perspective.
Teresa of Ávila bemoaned her society’s distractedness long
before computers were imagined, although she did live in
an era that, like our own, faced a sudden increase in access
to information. She was born just seventy-five years after
the invention of the printing press—years during which the
number of books in circulation increased exponentially—and
the distraction that widely available printed fiction caused
in her youth left a deep impression on her. In fact, when
Nicholas Carr discusses the early days of print, he quotes a
countryman and near-contemporary of Teresa’s, the dramatist
Lope de Vega:
17
Commonweal . December 17, 2010
sible to summarize in a few paragraphs. Its essential element
is awareness of what is going on in the present moment: the
processes of one’s body, emotions, and mind, and the objects
that appear to them. When you walk you can simply walk,
with an active but not necessarily discursive awareness of the
physical movements and the mental qualities that are present
in the walking. You acquire the discipline of attending to what
is going on within you, what is commanding your attention
on all levels, and then you are able to penetrate more deeply
into what is present, rather than skimming its surface. The
senses attentively sense what they are sensing, as the mind
also sees what it is seeing, is fully aware of what it sees, and
makes adjustments as necessary, keeping all things that claim
attention in perspective.
“Be mindful” thus expresses something like the old Latin
proverb age quod agis (“Do what you are doing”) or St. Benedict’s rule habitare secum (“To dwell with oneself”), and it prepares the mind for contemplation. Buddhist contemplation,
of course, differs from the Judaeo-Christian variety in that it
does not tend toward the individual’s encounter with a transcendent Other, but is instead a full and complete awakening
to an undifferentiated state of pure being, the germ of which
is already present in all things. For the Buddhist contemplative, the practice of mindfulness tends not toward solidifying the core of the human personality and then grounding
that core in the divine, but toward the realization that one’s
18
transient states of mind have no substantial self behind them
at all. The individual ego, for Buddhism, is an illusion that
mature awareness can see through. So ultimately the Buddhist practice of mindfulness and the Christian practice of
recollection part ways as they move toward their different
ends; but in the early stages, the descriptions of awareness in
the two traditions can complement each other. Even in the
Christian tradition, recollection of the temporal sort is an essential preamble to contemplative prayer, and for those who
are familiar only with Western descriptions of recollection,
Buddhist writings can offer a new set of insights and valuable comparisons.
The findings of science as to the effect of Internet use on
the human brain should impel us to dust off some of these neglected ideas and see what they have to say about the problem,
and maybe come up with some new ideas of our own in the
process. As Lisa Fullam noted in these pages (“Thou Shalt,”
April 24, 2009), long years of treating morality as a laundry
list of mostly sexual shalt-nots has crippled authentic moral
thinking, and moral thinking is exactly what is needed to navigate the dramatic transformations of the digital revolution
without damaging our very selfhood. We need to identify and
describe not only the shalt-nots of the age, but also the shalts:
recollection, mindfulness, interiority, awareness. Whatever
you prefer to call it, it’s what’s needed to keep Google from
making us stupid. Not brain surgery, but virtue. n
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