A welcome focus for the restless modern mind
When was the last time you read a whole book? Or spent a train journey staring out of the window, sifting your thoughts? Are you giving me your full attention right now, or did your hand just twitch in the direction of your phone?
Far be it from me to judge. As
I sat listening to Are You Paying
Attention? – a five-part series on Radio 3 last week, by the author Madeleine Bunting – I became uneasily aware of the restlessness of my own mind. Ping! Oooh, an email, I’d better just check that. Ping! It’s the hubby on Whatsapp, linking to a Twitter meme of surprised cats.
This, says Bunting, is more than just a personal failing. It is a global “epidemic of distraction”. Capturing our attention, the better to sell us things, is the currency of the digital economy. Young American adults now spend more than a third of their waking hours staring at their phones. In the words of a former Google executive, quoted by Bunting: “There are a thousand people behind every screen, working out how to keep you hooked.”
The effect of having our attention tugged in all directions, she argues, is that humans are losing our capacity for deep concentration and creative daydreaming. The science, it must be said, seems a little thin. The evidence produced is mostly anecdotal: the woman Bunting observes walking along a towpath, too engrossed in her phone to make way for other people; or Bunting herself, who went on a distraction detox after finding that she could no longer read or write at any length.
Like all the programmes in Radio 3’s regular slot The Essay, Are You Paying Attention? was itself noticeably lacking in distractions: no background music, no sound effects, no interviews. The effect was sparse, calm and thoughtprovoking. Instinctively, one feels Bunting has identified something true; but the lack of measurable data leaves a hole in her polemic.
This week’s Analysis (Radio 4, Monday) was also concerned with our brains. In Town v Gown: New Tribes in Brexit Britain, Ed Stourton argued that the biggest social divide in this country is now educational. Education was a more significant factor in the Brexit vote than either age or income: 74 per cent of voters with no qualifications voted to leave, compared to just 24 per cent of university graduates. Every constituency in England and Wales voted for Brexit – with the sole exception of university towns.
Immediately, a new urban myth was born. Did you know that, the day after the referendum, the most-searched question on Google was “What is the EU?” Actually, it wasn’t. But the lie caught on because it chimed with what the Remainers already believed: that Leave voters were too ignorant to understand what they were voting for.
Of course, not having a degree doesn’t make you an idiot. Graham Gudgin – a Cambridge economist, and one of the “brainy Brits” trying to fight back against the stereotype of the stupid Brexiteer – points out that many staunch Remainers don’t actually seem to know much about the EU; whereas people who have experienced it at first hand, such as fishermen, tend to dislike it.
But the well-educated are certain they have virtue on their side. Some even argue, quite openly, that the uneducated are such a menace they should be at least partially disenfranchised. Stourton interviewed Jason Brennan, an American academic who believes in epistocracy: “the rule of the learned”. He proposes a system where everyone would get a vote – “including children, including the mentally infirm, whatever” – but each voter would be tested on their political knowledge. Using computer simulation, says Brennan, you could then work out what the same demos would want “if it was fully informed”.
Stourton – a presenter whose voice perfectly combines erudition with kindness – never makes a dud programme. This one was both enthralling and, in scrutinising the snobbery and arrogance of the intelligentsia, gently devastating.
If you missed it, I urge you to listen on the BBC iplayer.
Afterwards, to calm your jangling nerves, you might need an aural tonic. For that, I recommend Bells on
Sunday – perhaps the most Radio 4 thing on Radio 4. Every Sunday at 5.45am, a different Church gets its moment of glory (this week it was St Anne’s in Alderney) with a brief introduction to the bells and their ringers, followed by a minute and a half of pure, pealing nostalgia. It is the sound of village life, of maiden aunts and crustless sandwiches and the Book of Common Prayer. It is a beautiful sound, but a melancholy one – vanishing fast over the horizon of our collective memory.