"Speed is Violence"

And other key causes of our inability to pay attention, from Johann Hari’s book Stolen Focus.

“Prayer is the discipline of attentiveness, of being here.”  -Henri Nouwen

“Speed is violence.” - Paul Virilio, Pure War

After a slight detour for All Saints Day (Paying Attention to our History), I’m returning to our exploration of why it’s so difficult for us at the present moment to pay attention. My guide in wrestling with this question is the journalist Johann Hari, and particularly his 2022 book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention and how to Think Deeply Again. (If you missed my introduction to this series, you can find it here.) Hari names and explores twelve broad-ranging causes for why it is so difficult for us to pay attention, and in this post, I will introduce the first three of these causes. (And I should emphasize, that what I’m offering here is a brief introduction. If the taste that I’m offering here piques your interest, I would encourage you to read the whole book!)   

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Before I jump into the causes, a brief word about Hari’s approach to this question. Stolen Focus is emphatically NOT a self-help book! Hari’s primary aim is not to shame readers for how poorly we pay attention and to help us recover the personal discipline we need to pay better attention. Following in the trajectory of his previous books – Chasing the Scream (on addiction) and Lost Connections (on depression and anxiety) – Hari is convinced that the root causes of our inability to pay attention are social, not personal. He writes in the book’s introduction:

I found strong evidence that our collapsing ability to pay attention is not primarily a personal failing on my part or your part or your kid’s part. This is being done to us all. It is being done by very powerful forces. Those forces include Big Tech, but they also go way beyond them. This is a systemic problem. The truth is that you are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day, and then you are told to blame yourself and to fiddle with your own habits while the world’s attention burns. I realized, when I learned all this, that there is a hole in all the existing books I had read about how to improve your focus. It was huge. They have on the whole, neglected to talk about the actual causes of our attention crisis – which lie mainly in these larger forces (12).

Hari’s reference in this passage, and throughout the book, to these forces intent on destroying us, was reminiscent of the biblical language of powers and principalities (e.g., in Ephesians 6:12 NRSVue – “for our struggle is not against blood and flesh but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”) With this biblical imagery in mind, it’s striking to read Stolen Focus, as a sort of case study in what it means to struggle against the powers of this present darkness: the sort of deep work that is required to name and unmask the particular forces that are aligned against our attention, and with them in mind, learn how to resist them personally and how their influence can be defeated in society. (For a theological backdrop on the biblical concept of powers, I recommend Walter Wink’s 3-volume work on the subject, as well as Marva Dawn’s poignant little book, Powers, Weakness, and the Tabernacling of God.)

Now to dive into the causes of our inability to pay attention… 

The first, and arguably most significant cause, that Hari identifies is one that resonates deeply with me: the breakneck speed and continuing acceleration of modern society. In 2014, John Pattison and I published a book entitled Slow Church that explored what it means for local congregations to be faithful to the way of Jesus amidst the rapid acceleration of our times. This book, while hardly a bestseller by the standards of the publishing industry, did find a sizable audience of church leaders that found it to ring true to their experience. In doing the research in order to write Slow Church, I became increasingly convinced that the societal speed that we were experiencing was not a recent phenomenon, but had been accelerating over the course of the last 500 years or so. As one with graduate training in history of science / technology, I sketched my own history of this acceleration as I was working on Slow Church, from Descartes onward and encompassing threads including colonialism, displacement, industrialization, transportation, and most recently the rise of computers, internet technologies, and the smartphone. 

Hartmut Rosa - Video Screen Cap

I didn’t have access to it as I was writing Slow Church, because it was just beginning to be published in English in the mid-2010’s, but the work of German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, particularly his book, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, has been immensely helpful in understanding the crisis of speed in which we are presently embroiled. (Here’s a helpful video introduction to Rosa’s concept of social acceleration.) In the book Social Acceleration, Rosa identifies three key forms of acceleration that interact with each to create our present situation: 1) Technical (or Technological) Acceleration, “including process of transportation, communication, and production” (72); 2) The Acceleration of Social Change – Rosa points to “the history of innovation diffusion”: radio took 38 years to reach 50 million listeners, television to 13 years to reach 50 million people, the internet took just 4 years to reach 50 million users; and 3) The Acceleration of the Pace of Life – people eat faster, sleep less, etc., which according to Rosa is “a result of the scarcity of time resources” (79).

Although Johann Hari does not reference Rosa’s work, he explores a couple of recent studies that seem to support Rosa’s theory of social acceleration. One study that Hari describes mined Google Books and other digital texts to track the rise of phrases, how long they were in use, and how long it took for them to fall out of use (a particular linguistic case study, it seems, of what Rosa would call the acceleration of social change). In Hari’s words, this study found that: “With each passing decade, for more than 130 years, topics have come and gone faster and faster” (31).

So, society is accelerating, but what effects does this acceleration have on our ability to pay attention? The French cultural theorist Paul Virilio once noted that speed is violence, and this violence it seems is manifested not only in the occasional dramatic crash of a vehicle, but in the damage to our humanity along the way, including to our capacity to pay attention, and central facet of our being human and of all the goodness that being human entails. To grapple with this question, Hari turns to research around speed-reading. “Can you make humans read things really, really fast?” he asks, “[Scientists] found that you can – but it always comes at a cost” (34). The cost is our retention;  there appear to be stark limits on “how quickly humans can absorb information.” Hari also notes that “The scientists investigating [speed reading] also discovered that if you make people read quickly, they are much less likely to grapple with complex or challenging material. They start to prefer simplistic statements” (35). And of course, this inclination to avoid difficult material only serves to further erode our capacity to focus and reflect. This research on speed reading is an especially illuminating example of the violence that speed does to our ability to pay attention, and to be human.

Two of the neurological effects of an accelerating world, Hari explains, are switching and filtering– both of which we have to do much more of and much quicker in our present state of affairs. We find ourselves having to switch from one thing to another faster and faster. After all, our brains are actually not very good at multitasking; they work best when focused on one thing at a time. And every time we have to switch our focus, there is a cost of time and mental resources to get re-oriented to the new object of focus. Similarly, amidst the increasing deluge of information in which we exist, our brains have to filter out irrelevant information, but as we move faster and the deluge increases, our ability to filter struggles to keep up. In short, the faster the world moves around us, the more we struggle to keep up, and one of the greatest casualties is our ability to pay attention. 

Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - Cover Detail

In a similar vein, the second cause of our inability to pay attention is the “crippling of our flow states.” In exploring this cause, Hari draws upon the work of the noted psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced, according to Hari, cheek-sent-me-high-ee), renowned for his work on flow states. (Watch an introductory video here). A flow state is “when you are so absorbed in what you are doing that you lose all sense of yourself, and time seems to fall away, and you are flowing into the experience itself” (55). The capacity to enter a flow state is an important antidote to distraction. Hari writes:

In our normal lives, many of us try to seek relief from distraction simply by crashing – we try to recover from a day of overload by collapsing in front of the TV. But if you only break away from distraction into rest – if you don’t replace it with a positive goal you are striving toward – you will always be pulled back to distraction sooner or later. The more powerful path out of distraction is to find your flow (59, emphasis added).

The world is moving faster, and we increasingly find difficulty in trying to establish flow states. In the midst of this situation, we encounter the third cause that Hari identifies, the rise of physical and mental exhaustion. Hari here explores the neuroscience research that has revealed that the more tired we are, the more likely our attention is to lapse – even if only for brief moments. And whenever our attention lapses, we have to pay the switching cost (so to speak) of regaining our attention. Hari also notes how ineffective chemical solutions – like caffeine and melatonin – are in helping us to retain our attention when we are exhausted. They certainly can keep us awake, but often just by helping our bodies ignore the biochemical signs that we are tired, and thus are of little help to stimulate our capacity for attention. 

As Hari arrives at the conclusion of the book’s third chapter (which is on the topic of exhaustion), he makes the keen observation:

I realized that we live in an apparent paradox. Many of the things we need to do are so obvious that they are banal: slow down, do one thing at a time, sleep more. But even though at some level, we all know them to be true, we are in fact moving in the opposite direction: toward more speed, more switching, less sleep. We live in a gap between what we know we should do and what we feel we can do. The key questions, then, are: What’s causing that gap? Why can’t we do the obvious things that would improve our attention? What forces are stopping us?  (77-78, emphasis added)

These questions are the ones that will give shape to the remaining chapters in Stolen Focus… (stay tuned!)