In 1968 in his book Faith and Violence, Thomas Merton wrote about the news as a stimulant,an indulgence bordering on addiction. What would he make of the News Channels and the pervasive news chatter of the cyber world?
I have watched TV twice in my life. I am frankly not terribly interested in TV anyway. Certainly I do not pretend that by simply refusing to keep up with the latest news I am therefore unaffected by what goes on, or free of it all. Certainly events happen and they affect me as they do other people. It is important for me to know about them too: but I refrain from trying to know them in their fresh condition as “news.” When they reach me they have become slightly stale. I eat the same tragedies as others, but in the form of tasteless crusts. The news reaches me in the long run through books and magazines, and no longer as a stimulant. Living without news is like living without cigarettes (another peculiarity of the monastic life). The need for this habitual indulgence quickly disappears. So, when you hear news without the “need” to hear it, it treats you differently. And you treat it differently too.
One of the marks of a prophet is prescience, knowing before it happens where events, trends and cultural habits will lead. Merton was deeply suspicious of media generated information, interpretation and opinions clothed with spurious authority. He worried about distortions of perspective by the sheer volume of news; he feared that historical consciousness was threatened with death by bloating; and he was never the naive monk cloistered in secluded ignorance of the world:
" in addition to the sheer volume of information there is the even more portentous fact of falsification and misinformation by which those in power are often completely intent not only on misleading others but even on convincing themselves that their own lies are 'historical truth'".
And all that before the computer, the worldwide web, the mobile phone, Ipad, tablet and all other forms of connectivity which now contribute to the deluge of information that flows over and around us, denying time and space and unclaimed energy for analysis, critical distance, ethical and political reflection and considered thought and judgement.
"Where is the life we have lost in living", Eliot asked. Another poet complained, "What is this life if full of care, we have not time to stand and stare"….. and wonder, and think, and dream, and remember, and be grateful, and begin to own the experience that is our life. When Jesus said, citing an older translation, "Come ye apart and rest awhile", he said it to people who were in danger of coming apart, to troubled spirits, torn apart by conflicting loyalties, minds and emotions over-stimulated and under nourished.
May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude has the important observation that one of the great frustrations of human contentment is 'unassimilated experience', when so much happens, and so quickly, we have no time to process it, understand it, adjust to it. So we spend our lives wrongfooted by the remorseless flow of a frantic world diluting our own experience, watering down the rich potential of an inner life that is responsive to and nourished by something other than external stimuli, mostly uninvited.
I got the Merton quotations from the smallest book in my library, my wee Pocket Merton, 7cmx11x1.5 cm of wisdom from a man who died 55 years ago.
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