On the challenge of deep political thinking
Or, why it's easier to form our opinions quickly and loosely
By now you know the horrific news out of Nashville, Tennessee, where a murderer killed three children and three adults after opening fire on what should have been the safest of places: a school.1 This is not the first mass shooting involving schoolchildren and their teachers, nor is it likely to be the last. That doesn’t diminish the tragedy, nor should it numb us to the evil of these all-too-common events.
Let us remember the victims, pray for their families, and mourn with their community:
Evelyn Dieckhaus (9)
William Kinney (9)
Hallie Scruggs (9)
Katherine Koonce (60)
Mike Hill (61)
Cynthia Peak (61)
Last week I finally got around to reading Nicholas Carr’s acclaimed book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.2 Carr explains how the Internet—following other technological innovations like counting systems, written alphabets, and the Gutenberg press—has fundamentally altered not just what we think about, but how we think. The Internet, he suggests, is nothing short of a revolution in human thinking and processing, the consequences of which we are just now beginning to understand.
These consequences, Carr argues, are largely negative. As the book’s title suggests, the mechanisms of the Internet reward a kind of thinking that is jumpy and scattered, going from link to link and post to post. The Internet encourages shallower and shallower thinking, emphasizing speed and access over deep reflection. Moreover, the Internet is not simply refocusing our attention; it is actually rewiring our brain’s chemistry and structure. If you’ve noticed it is getting harder to focus on reading anything of length, then you understand what Carr is writing about.
But one of Carr’s paragraphs especially stood out to me, as a political scientist, American, and Christian concerned with the future of our experiment in self-governance. Jump in with me at the end of Chapter Seven:
On the evening of April 18, 1775, Samuel Johnson accompanied his friends James Boswell and Joshua Reynolds on a visit to Richard Owen Cambridges’s grand villa on the banks of the Thames river outside London. They were shown into the library, where Cambridge was waiting to meet them, and after a brief greeting Johnson darted to the shelves and began silently reading the spines of the volumes arrayed there.
After being questioned as to why he would be looking at the backs of books rather than in the books themselves, Johnson replied, “The reason is very plain. Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.”
Carr then concludes the chapter:
The Net grants us instant access to a library of information unprecedented in its size and scope, and it makes it easy for us to sort through that library—to find, if not exactly what we were looking for, at least something sufficient from our immediate purposes. What the Net diminishes is Johnson’s primary kind of knowledge: the ability to know, in depth, a subject for ourselves, to construct without our own minds the rich and idiosyncratic set of connections that give rise to a singular intelligence.
The ability for people in the Year of Our Lord 2023 to acquire information has never been greater. We have, at our fingertips, more information than at any time in the history of our species. The Internet can be a tremendous blessing for gaining knowledge, compiling information, learning skills, and holding the powerful accountable. The wealthiest king of antiquity is an informational pauper compared to the average American with a smartphone.
But with this blessing comes a curse. Our capacity for knowledge does not automatically translate to knowledge itself. An abundance of information does not mean we are prone to access it usefully. The democratization of information via the Internet does lower barriers and improve access to the world around us, but it also makes it increasingly difficult to discern fact from fiction. This, combined with our innate tendencies to affirm what we believe to be true, means we are prone to bias when encountering and discovering information. All this translates to increasing access—or potential—for knowledge, but a declining capacity to really know anything at all.
All this has major implications for how we, as citizens of representative democracy, form the opinions by which we evaluate and either reward or punish our elected officials. In an ideal world we would learn how our representatives vote, research how these votes affect us and our communities, consider whether these effects are consistent with a flourishing and good way of life, and utilize our votes accordingly.
Reality, though, looks different. The frenetic pace of contemporary politics, exacerbated by constant news coverage and social media fixation, does not reward taking time to evaluate and process things slowly and meaningfully. Instead, we are invited and encouraged to jump from one thing to the next, focusing on whatever has captured the popular imagination for a moment before predictably moving on to the latest story.
As a result, our opinions and perceptions about political phenomena are often not as deeply rooted as they should be. It’s not that we are trying to be flighty in our political ideas; it’s that the systems and tools by which we process and form these ideas do not provide the capacity for necessary rumination. And as Carr shows in his book, as a result of our increasing use of the Internet our brains are making it increasingly difficult for us to do the reflection necessary for sufficiently grounded and knowledgeable political opinions.
For thoughtful citizens concerned with the wellbeing and flourishing of our neighbors, communities, and nation, solving this problem means an active and conscious rejection of the status quo. This does not mean becoming luddites, swearing off the Internet and related technology for the sake of informational purity. We can remain active Internet users and combat its worst tendencies.
What does this mean in practice? It means committing to use this technology better, and for better purposes. It means resisting the temptation to move from one thing to another in rapid fire succession, as online platforms too often encourage. It means questioning what we read and encounter online, interrogating information with a critical eye and heart for truth, not convenience and confirmation of our prior assumptions and biases. And it means approaching the political world in humility, being open to the notion that, upon encountering new or different information, we may actually be wrong about something.
This is easier said than done. Carr cites study after study showing how quickly our brains become rewired after encountering a technology and medium like the Internet. But the malleability of our brains could also be our redemption: If the Internet can alter the ways our brains work in such short order, we also have the capacity to undo these changes and to reclaim our brains for better purposes.
For Christians called to love God with our minds while living in a complicated society, this is work very much worth doing.
The Covenant School is a private Christian school affiliated with my denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America.
I’m embarrassed it took me so long to get to this one, given how many folks I respect have raved about it. C’est la vie.