The Decline of Attention

Almost fifty years ago Henry James, a novelist desperately in search of an audience, isolated, in the course of a letter of December 11, 1902, to William Dean Howells, one reason for commercial failure. He wrote (italics his): ``The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the general anglo-saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big, blatant Bayadère of Journalism, of the newspaper and picture (above all) magazine; who keeps screaming, `Look at me, I am the thing, and I only, the thing that will keep you in relation with me all the time without your having to attend one minute of the time.' ...Illustrations, loud simplifications and grossissements, ...the prose that is careful to be in the tone of, and with the distinction of a newspaper or bill-poster advertisement--these, and these only, meseems, `stand a chance.'''

The first thing that strikes one about this pronouncement is its extraordinary accuracy if considered as prophecy. All the evils of which poor James complained would seem to have intensified since his day. Yet James did not think of himself as prophetic; apparently the decline of attention in the reading public was already, in 1902, a salient phenomenon.

Let us move back another hundred years. We find Wordsworth writing, in the preface of the 1802 edition of the ``Lyrical Ballads'': ``For a multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies.''

It is interesting to note, first, that the decline of attention had been clearly spotted as far back as 1802, and, second, that some of its causes--nationalism and industrialism--were more philosophically identified in that early era than in James's time. What James took to be the sources of the decline of attention--the blatancies of journalism and particularly of pictorial journalism--are really secondary effects or symptoms. At most they lend a helping hand; they are aids to inattention.

Let us be clear as to what we mean by attention. The faculty of attention itself cannot disappear. But it may be paralyzed by various pressures; the pressure of the German torture chamber, of the Kremlin propaganda mill, of the sensational journalism of James's complaint. It may also be displaced as to its objects; that is, attention may be unwilling or unable to fasten on the matters James cared for--the world of art and thought--and quite willing and able to fasten on a quite different set of objects: the mechanisms of industrial production, of a baseball game, of war.

It seems fairly clear that in our time the attrition of one kind of attention--the ability to read prose and poetry of meaning and substance--is becoming more and more widespread; and that the faculty of attention in general is undergoing a wholesale displacement away from ideas and abstractions toward things and techniques. The movement toward displacement is the result of calculated policy in such police states as the Soviet Union. It is a natural phenomenon, by no means universal, in free countries such as our own. The final consequence of both the paralysis and the displacement may be glimpsed in the pages of those Utopias which begin with ``Erewhon,'' continue with ``Brave New World,'' and culminate in a crescendo of horror in George Orwell's ``Nineteen Eighty-four.''

I use the word horror, but I use it improperly because subjectively. When reflecting on these Utopias, it is important to remember that they were conceived by literary men, that is, by men belonging to the class most gravely menaced by the paralysis and displacement of attention. Such men--Wordsworth, James--are naturally the first to notice the phenomenon from which they have most to fear. But there is a larger class--technicians, generals, Mr. Burnham's admired ``managers,'' certain kinds of journalists, certain kinds of government and labor bureaucrats--which has much to gain from the same phenomenon; and there is a very large class indeed which simply feels more comfortable in a society that does not demand from it any considerable systematic effort of the mind.

Here is Cyril Connolly in a recent number of Horizon:

The great artists of the past, despite the love lavished on them by scholars and esthetics are becoming more and more remote and unfamiliar. They are not replaced by others because we are moving into a world of non-art. One has only to compare the world of the long sea voyage: sunsets--leisure--complete works of so-and-so--with the still mildly esthetic world of the train and then with completely incurious existence of the air-passenger with his few reassuring leaflets issued by the company, his meals wrapped up in cellophane in a cardboard box, his copy of Time in case the sleeping pill doesn't work. This unseeing, unreading traveler is a symbol of the new public. Poetry for this civilization may well cease to exists, for no one except a few professors will possess the necessary ear to follow its subtleties. Reading aloud is almost extinct and the poet who wrestles with his subtle tone-effects secures his victories for himself alone. The hopeless are the irresponsible, the irresponsible are the lazy: we must accustom ourselves to a reading public which both too slothful and too restless to read until a sense of values is restored to it.

But what meaning would this tirade hold for a publisher of comic books or a seller of big-magazine advertising space: men who are quite as good citizens as is Mr. Connolly and possess souls quite as immortal as his? To them all the things of which Mr. Connolly complains seem good, not bad; inability to read poetry is for them a sign of decency and inner happiness. No cheap irony is here intended; I wish merely to suggest that the decline in the ability to read is distressing only from a certain traditional--indeed, one might say reactionary--point of view. In a larger perspective it may seem merely an inevitable change in man's mental outlook as he moves into a new phase of culture--or anti-culture. The poet will view this change differently from the anthropologist, who will view it differently from the grand masters of pictorial journalism, who will view it differently form the straphanging reader of a tabloid newspaper.

Let us try, then, to consider the decline of attention, not as lobbyists for the mind, but as objectively as possible. The first thing to make clear is that excellent books are being consistently produced and eagerly read. The question to ask, however, is this: do such books, read by a minority, make a connection with the center of our culture in the same sense that the latest issue of a picture-magazine or the latest product from Hollywood does make such a connection? Our anthropologist would be forced to answer in the negative. I think he would have to admit that the success of such a book as Toynbee's ``A study of History,'' is an eccentric rather than a normal phenomenon.

I believe, furthermore, examination would reveal that such books are the consolation of the few (still fairly numerous--possibly a million in all) whose faculty of attention has been neither paralyzed nor displaced, but who fearfully sense such paralysis and displacement all about them. Quite literally such books give aid and comfort to the enemy--that is, the enemy of ``progress,'' of the probable future. The cults of Faulkner, James, Eliot, Kafka; the excitement over the often admirable ``new criticism''; the multiplication of little magazines with littler and littler circulation; the flowering of ``difficult'' poetry; the modest success of such an uncompromising publishing house as New Directions, or such a vanguard magazine as Partisan Review; the limited but definite triumphs of the Great Books movement; the attention given to such educational ``experiments'' as St. John's College and such traditional pronouncements as those by educators like Hutchins and Conant--all these apparently disparate phenomena are really symptoms, not of the numerical growth of those who cultivate the faculty of attention, but rather of the growth of the intensity of their need for some mental pabulum other than that supplied by the central culture-purveyors of our time.

We may put it another way. From the time of the Greeks and early Hebrews up to the triumph of the nationalistic spirit, and the industrial revolution, the ``highbrow''--Moses, Socrates, Thomas Aquinas, Voltaire--was instinctively regarded, however vaguely, as a leader of the human race. He fought, even if unsuccessfully, a vanguard action. Today the ``highbrow''--Schweitzer, Hutchins, Einstein, Freud, Sir Richard Livingstone--is instinctively regarded, even when accorded a certain mechanical respect, as contrary to the trend of the times. He is attacked regularly, not by obscurantists, which is to be expected, but in the columns of the most thoughtful and responsible newspapers and periodicals. He fights a rear-guard action.

If we limit our attention to literature alone, the fact that this action is rear-guard manifests itself in dozens of ways. For instance, in a nation of 140,000,000 we have only two serious monthly magazines of general appeal--Harper's and The Atlantic Monthly. As we should expect (for they satisfy the intense thirst of a cultural out-group) their circulation is faithful, but it is also limited, and does not keep pace either with the growth of the general population, or with that of the specifically ``literate.'' These and a few other serious magazines--including your own Saturday Review--make valiant efforts to print material that demands a real effort of the attention.

But it is needless to point out that the magazines that really talk to the heart of country are not these, but the others--the digest, the pulps, the picture magazine, the weekly news catalogues, the smooth-paper monthly mammoths. These vary widely in literary finish and ``sophistication''--but they have in common this: they make no rigorous demand on the faculty of attention.

Some of the obvious characteristics of this journalism are: brevity, superficiality, simplification, the emphasis on timeliness (with its corollary, the conscious neglect or unconscious ignorance of the past), planned non-literary English, the avoidance of abstract ideas, the compartmentalization of life (this compartmentalization, as in the news magazine, is the verbal analogue of mass production's division of labor), the emphasis on ``personalities'' as well as the avoidance of personality, the exploitation of the ``column'' as against the discursive essay, the preference of the wisecrack to wit, the featuring of headlines (here, as elsewhere, modern journalism reveals its kinship, quite proper and natural, with advertising), the often remarkable ingenuity displayed in ``packaging,'' an almost religious veneration for the ``fact'' (to be ``well informed'' is our substitute for the capacity to reflect), the rapid alternation of appeals (known as ``balances,'' or something for everybody), and the careful exploitation of certain not highly cerebral interests, mainly in the areas of vicarious sex, criminality, violence, ``inspiration,'' gadget-worship, and the idolization of contemporary gods, such as cinema stars, sports heroes, and clean-faced high-school girl graduates.

In general, a successful, technically admirable attempt is made to attract the attention without actually engaging it; to entertain rather than challenge, or, to use the editors' quite legitimate phrase, to be ``readable''--that is, to present material which can be read easily and forgotten quickly.

(The reader is reminded that the above description is not intended to be pejorative or scornful. No reflection is here cast on the editors or publishers of these magazines. The appeal to inattention is as natural a development of our culture as is the mass-produced washing machine. There is nothing Machiavellian--with a few exceptions--about those who manipulate this appeal. To be indignant at them is equivalent to not loving our fates, and Spengler has told us how stupid that is.)

Pater thought the goal of all the arts was to approach the condition of music. It would seem that today the goal of the word is to approach the condition of the picture. The great triumphs of modern journalism have been accomplished not with the typewriter but with the camera; the lens is mightier than the sword. This is natural enough; the photograph (I am not referring here, of course, to the occasional production of a great camera-artist, such as a Steichen or a Gjon Mili) makes less demand on the attention than even the simplest sentence. It attracts at once; it induces an immediate stimulus, and it is forgotten directly. It is the ideal medium of communication without real connection, so ideal as to make it inevitable that the two great communications inventions of our time-the radio and the movie-should somehow copulate and engender television.

It was advertising that did most of the pioneering for modern journalism, that discovered the value of the pictorial and the visible. Advertising led the assault on the solid page of prose, led it so successfully that nowadays even the editors of serious magazines worry about ``breaking up'' the page, introducing ``white space,'' and similar problems. Visibility is the thing: the comic strip represents its outstanding triumph, and skywriting its enthronement in heaven. (It is a curious fact that, when it is really genuinely desired that the reader should think, a throwback is made to the old-fashioned ``solid page.'' This is true whatever the content of the message--be it an advertisement for world government or one of the highly interesting arguments advanced by McGraw-Hill.)

The victory of the visible is closely associated with another victory--that of the clock. The long piece, the discursive essay, the attempt to at a complete view of anything--these find publication only with difficulty. When The New Yorker devoted an entire issue to John Hersey's ``Hiroshima,'' admiration for the narrative's qualities was far less intense than astonishment (shock is really the word) at the mere fact that so long a piece of prose should be presented to the magazine reader for a single reading. The shortened paragraph, the carefully measured column, the ``punchy'' sentence are, of course, minor by-products of our clock-worship which began, as Mumford has brilliantly demonstrated, in the late Middle Ages with the advent of the commercial spirit, and underwent a vast development with the triumph of industry and technique. We modern readers want to ``understand'' a piece of prose as quickly as, let us say, we can understand the dashboard of our new cars. In both cases we wish to increase the sense of our ``efficiency'' by subordinating ourselves to the errorless perfection of a machine.

Hence the digest; hence the remarkable Quick (unaccountably so spelled instead of Kwik), which is a new digest of news digests. I find Quick, by the way, wholly admirable; it persuades me absolutely that there is no need to read a newspaper. (Yet, of course, the newspaper must be produced so that it may in turn produce Quick.) This superdigest not only makes little demand on one's physical or muscular attention. It fatigues neither the brain nor the eye. My only objection to it is that it seems to prove the needlessness of reading the news at all. One can easily imagine a digest of Quick (Quicker) and finally one of Quicker (Quickest). From Quickest to the non-reading of the news seems a logical next step, and one which we should contemplate with horror. We already know the possible consequence of such a habit: Thoreau's ``Walden.''

As already pointed out, we must beware of assuming that the prime causes of the decline of attention are to be found in such symptoms as Quick, advertising, the radio, television, the gossip column, the picture magazine, the soap opera, the mass-newspaper, the comic book, the pulps, the mammary-glandular ``historical'' works of fiction, the inspirational best seller, the cinema, the juke-box, the monosyllabic novel. They aid in the relaxation of attention, but they do not cause it. They are merely carriers of the germ.

Similarly, it is both ungenerous and superficial to blame our educational system. That, too, is a carrier, not a cause. It is true, as educators such as Bernard Iddings Bell have pointed out, that on the whole our primary schools no longer really teach the child certain basic skills (how to read, write, speak, listen, and figure) the non-possession of which works against the development of attention. It is true, as Bell says, that many of our primary schools, through the system of mass-promotion (``Everybody has won,'' said the Dodo, ``and all must have prizes'') place a premium on mental laziness. It is true also that many of our high schools proceed on the make-the-work-interesting-to-the-student theory--which hardly conduces to the development of the intellect. Finally, it is true that the college, therefore, is forced to neglect its true function--which is to produce mentally mature leaders--in favor of performing, belatedly and therefore inefficiently, the elementary education duties that are properly the province of the primary and secondary schools.

The school is an instrument of our society; it cannot be that and at the same time an agent of intellectual revolution. It cannot teach the virtues of attentiveness if the society of which it is a part indoctrinates the child hourly with the virtues of inattentiveness, or, rather, with the virtues of attentiveness to things, techniques, machines, spectator sports, and mass amusement, as against the virtues of attentiveness to knowledge, wisdom, and the works of the creative imagination.

The school--there are, of course, notable exceptions--has in general become a kind of asylum or refuge rather than an educational institution. In his noble jeremiad ``Crisis in Education,'' Dr. Bell quotes a high-school principal as saying: ``My real business is to keep adolescent boys and girls, regardless of educational aptitude and desire or the lack of them, from running the streets, getting into trouble, and becoming an intolerable nuisance in the community. The easiest way to keep them willing to submit to the school's control and so, incidentally, to hold my job, is to provide for them a vast amount of amusement and a minimum of work to do.''

This seems a fair statement. All it means is that if our culture desires to produce, not rational men, but producers and consumers, the school becomes a useful place in which to quarter and divert the youthful citizen until he is old enough to produce and consume. The point is well put, entirely without irony, by Professors Russel and Judd, of the University of Chicago, in ``The American Educational System'': ``Most young people today are not able to enter industry or other types of gainful employment before age eighteen; in many cases not before age twenty. The best method of occupying the time of such young people is an important problem, and the solution of this problem by requiring an extended educational period, regardless of the immediate value of the education as such, may be socially wise.'' Dr. Bell further quotes them as saying that American education may have to depart from the usual academic and vocational disciplines if it is to be ``made of sufficient interest to appeal to most young people in this country.''

It is clear that this conception of the school is not at all eccentric or cynical. It is realistic. It simply tunes in on the wave-band of our society in general. However, it is also clear that it will hardly be apt to produce men and women capable of paying attention to a reasonably complex story or exposition, much less capable of reacting to the highest types of literature, such as poetry, tragic drama, philosophy, or religious reflection.

The phrase quoted above, ``of sufficient interest to appeal,'' is the crux of the matter. The future citizen is made the criterion; you must ``appeal'' to him, or be lost. Thus the reading public becomes a ``consuming public'' that must be sold words and thoughts. In consequence the writer tends more and more to obey the doctrine of cultural Jacobinism--to wit, that he is equal to his audience, but not superior to it. He must ``please,'' and the quickest way of pleasing involves simplification, overemphasis, and all the other ingenious techniques of modern communication.

Naturally, a great many writers, members of the outgroup, reject this theory. They believe that if they do not know and feel more than their audience, there is no particular point in being a writer. They write, therefore, in accordance with outmoded standards--and to date have succeeded, as a general thing, in finding an audience of people more or less like themselves, relics, holdovers. This audience, particularly in free countries like our own, is still quite numerous. It supports many excellent publishers, several book clubs, a multitude of good bookstores. It welcomes eagerly such novelists as Graham Greene, Miss Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth Bowen--writers who are not ashamed, nay, are proud, to make stiff demands on the attention of the reader. But, whatever it may contribute to our culture, it does not appear to be solidly in the mainstream.

That mainstream is composed largely of men and women whose faculty of attention is in process either of decay or displacement. In decay it is incapable of grasping reasonably complex works of literature or speculation. In displacement it is highly capable of grasping the often formidable intricacies of business, machinery, technique, sports, and war. (War and sports seem to be particularly favored as the areas in which our faculty of attention deploys itself most efficiently; war--when not fought for a principle--and sports merge the maximum of movement with the minimum of reading.)

For the fundamental causes of the decline of attention, we shall have to go back to our quotation from Wordsworth. They lie deep in the history of the last 300 years and are almost surely connected with the rise of aggressive nationalism and the victory of the industrial revolution. At some point in the not very remote past a profound shift in our thinking took place. An interest in altering and vanquishing the environment by means of material accumulation began to oust our traditional interest in discovering the nature of man and expounding his relation to God. Nationalism set itself up against universal thought, substituting for it local and temporal dogma. Industrialism erected definite, easily understandable standards of values, quite at variance with the ethical, religious, and esthetic standards that had, at least in theory, prevailed before its time. These standards ``paid out''--that is, the man who lived by them found himself becoming ``successful'' or ``adjusted.''

It seemed more useful to fix the attention on a new system of double-entry bookkeeping or the mechanism of the internal-combustion engine than on ``Hamlet.'' It was more useful: it was also more enjoyable.

If the man who likes ``Hamlet'' finds himself a member of an outgroup, even a tolerated outgroup, sooner or later he may wonder if it's worthwhile to like ``Hamlet.'' If there are no, or few, social rewards accruing from the exercise of the faculty of attention, he may tend increasingly to permit its attrition. If the rational man is made more and more to look like a fool (and, in our time, let us confess it, he does look like a fool, even though he is not one) he may cease to prize his rationality. Very few like to be reactionary, setting themselves against the current of their time. Most of us want to be part of contemporary history, and if contemporary history does not demand of us any rigorous ordering of the faculty of attention, we will either allow it to decline or we will fix it upon those objects or processes in which the majority of our fellow-citizens seem to be genuinely interested.

The humanist will cry out against all this; but he forgets that humanism itself is no more than 3000 years old, a short parenthesis in history. At one time the mental habits of the caveman prevailed over the earth. There seems no absolute reason why the mental habits of George Orwell's robot man of 1984 should not come to prevail during the next few hundred years. Those reactionaries who believe that man is unchangeably a rational soul will have faith that Orwell's world too, will pass; and that man is bound to return to the pursuit of those goods Socrates and Jesus pointed out to him. But it is doubtful that this return will on a large scale come to pass in our own time. For the moment the humanist would seem constrained to bide his time and conserve the faculty of attention as the church conserved the riches of the classical tradition during what is unfairly called the Dark Ages.

There is a hope--not a great one--that he may enjoy a victory even in his own time. For, underneath all the triumph of the machine and aggressive nationalism and the closed police state, there seethes a vague unease which has nothing to with class or race or nation. It does not understand itself, it has been easily neutralized or harmlessly canalized. It may not come to the surface. But it may. If it does, it will find some of its leaders among those whose faculty of attention has not atrophied, among those who are now being made to feel a bit alien, a bit suspect--among philosophers, educators, scientists, humanists in general. Mind-man has not fought his last battle; nor has Thing-man quite won his first.