One of my favourite philosophers is a French woman by the name of Simone Weil. Born in 1909 to a Jewish family in Paris, Weil became a great thinker and a political activist who influenced many writers including Albert Camus, Iris Murdoch, and Flannery O’Connor. She died in 1943 at the age of 34. One powerful statement of Weil’s which is so pertinent to our very distracted world today is: ‘Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.’

Mr Greg Lozelle – the librarian at Mount Carmel – gave me a recently published book to read a few weeks ago, entitled Stolen Focus. Written by the award-winning British journalist and playwright, Johann Hari, Stolen Focus is a fascinating exploration of the breakdown of our ability to pay attention. Stephen Fry commented after reading this book ‘I can’t remember reading a book which made me shout out “Yes! That’s it!” quite so many times.’ I have to admit that I had exactly the same response.

For some of us, reading a book is the deepest form of focus we experience. We can get lost in books for long stretches of time and these encounters allow us to travel, to dream, to challenge, to imagine, to remember, and to speculate. Hari reflects on a time when he travelled further in a deckchair by the sea, reading books, than he had in the previous five years of shuttling frantically around the world: ‘I went from fighting on the battlefields of the Napoleonic wars, to being an enslaved person in the Deep South, to being an Israeli mother trying to avoid hearing the news that her son has been killed.’ This experience is now in jeopardy today.

Hari asserts that the way we are reading seems to be changing due to the impact of technology. Reading from screens trains us to read in a different way – a manic skip and jump from one thing to another. He quotes Professor Anne Mangen, who states: ‘We’re more likely to scan and skim when we read on screens. We run our eyes rapidly over the information to extract what we need.’ This undoubtedly creates a different relationship to texts. Hari claims reading stops being a pleasurable immersion in another world and becomes more like ‘dashing around a busy supermarket to grab what you need and then get out again.’

An unfortunate consequence of this change in reading is that we are losing both our capacity to read long texts and our ‘cognitive patience … the stamina and the ability to deal with cognitively-challenging texts.’ What happens to a world where this form of deep focus shrinks so far and so fast? What happens when the deepest layer of thinking becomes available to fewer and fewer people? George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-Four captures this phenomenon by depicting a powerful Inner Party – making up less than 2 percent of the population – who control all aspects of society. Similarly, Aldous Huxley’s message in his novel Brave New World warns of a population fed on ‘bread and circuses’ becoming disempowered and devoid of humanity. What are the ‘bread and circuses’ we are so readily consuming today? And what are the ‘bread and circuses’ we are feeding our young people?