“What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the evergrowing masses of our century.” Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism 📚
He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth;
he breaks the bow and shatters the spear;
he burns the chariots with fire.
“Be still, and know that I am God.
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth!”
-Psalm 46
Living in the Twin Cities, and feeling the need to monitor The Situation daily––not to mention keep abreast of our hyper-local neighborhood chat (~100 neighbors in an area of 16 city blocks)—which puts all personal rules about online news and smartphone usage in shambles, I’m having to be even more intentional in seeking out sources beyond the noise to try to make sense of things. Here’s what I’ve turned to in the last week or so:
-the Psalms (for obvious reasons)
-Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (the final section on the anatomy of totalitarianisms)
-MLK Jr’s Letter from Birmingham Jail (what is principled opposition to authority?)
-@ayjay’s writings on anarchism (what are the possibilities opened up by organizing with neighbors?)
-Zena Hitz’s Lost in Thought (what ultimate ends do politics enable anyway?)
“If intellectual life is not left to rest in its splendid uselessness, it will never bear its practical fruit. Likewise, the struggle for a just society is worthless if it costs us the fruit of justice.” Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought
Coleridge, on the function of poetry (specifically Wordsworth’s task in his contributions to Lyrical Ballads): “awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and wonders of the world before us.” Biographia Literaria, ch. 14
More from Lewis on attention: “For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.” (The Magician’s Nephew)
C.S. Lewis on Attention: “Now that she was left alone with the children, she took no notice of either of them. And that was like her too. In Charn she had taken no notice of Polly (till the very end) because Digory was the one she wanted to make use of. Now that she had Uncle Andrew, she took no notice of Digory. I expect most witches are like that. They are not interested in things or people unless they can use them; they are terribly practical.” (The Magician’s Nephew)
This utilitarian attention, that Lewis thought common to both sorcery (goetia) and modern science, is the opposite pole to the kind of attention that Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch describe: a “negative effort” (Weil) or “just and loving gaze” (Murdoch) that waits patiently for the other to reveal itself, rather than imposing its will. Presumably Lewis’s “old magic” (magia) involves Weil and Murdoch’s kind of attention, working “in and with the spiritual qualities of Nature, loving and reverencing them and knowing them from within.” (That Hideous Strength)
A passage from a letter from C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greaves (22 June 1930) that I had not come across before (h/t Michael Sacasas):
“Tolkien once remarked to me that the feeling about home must have been quite different in the days when a family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations, and that perhaps this was why they saw nymphs in the fountains and dryads in the woods – they were not mistaken for there was in a sense a real (not metaphorical) connection between them and the countryside. What had been earth and air & later corn, and later still bread, really was in them.
We of course who live on a standardised international diet (you may have had Canadian flour, English meat, Scotch oatmeal, African oranges, & Australian wine to day) are really artificial beings and have no connection (save in sentiment) with any place on earth. We are synthetic men, uprooted. The strength of the hills is not ours.”
What’s the best metaphor for attention? “If we construe the fundamental problem of the attention economy in terms of attentional labor–that as users we’re not getting sufficient value for our attentional labor, and the conditions of that labor are unacceptable–we could conceive of the necessary corrective as a sort of ‘labor union’ for the workers of the attention economy, which is to say, all of us. Or, we might construe our attentional expenditure as the payment of an ‘attentional tax,’ in which case we currently find ourselves subject to attentional taxation without representation.” James Williams, Stand Out of Our Light 📚
Mr. Beaver’s wise counsel for the age of LLMs: “But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that’s going to be Human and isn’t yet, or used to be Human once and isn’t now, or ought to be Human and isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.”
