Do you ever feel that you have access to too much information? Do you ever feel overwhelmed by opinions, statistics, arguments, and facts? Night and day, we are assaulted by emails, headlines, blog posts, text messages, podcasts, phone calls, radio broadcasts, YouTube videos, TV announcements. Our life is lived out to the rhythm of the blings and vibrations of our phones.
We inhabit an environment with a great deal of noise—both the literal noise of radio, TV, and internet media but also the figurative noise of an excess of information streaming at us like water from a broken fire hydrant. Never in human history has so much knowledge been available to so many. Assuredly, this is in many ways a blessing. But in other ways it isn’t.
I stand by the old-fashioned notion that we have a stable, unchanging human nature. And that human nature has certain natural limits to it. There’s a limit to how fast we can run, how high we can jump, how far we can see. And I think there’s also a limit to how quickly we can meaningfully ingest information. To truly understand something takes time. We’re not made to operate like supercomputers, executing millions of computations every second. We’re meant for more quality and less quantity in our thoughts. Deep study has never been a matter of speed or efficiency, but a matter of careful contemplation.
Sometimes, too much information too readily available can actually hinder this contemplative act by which we come to understand things as they are. In How to Read a Book, Mortimer J. Adler and Charles van Doren observe:
Perhaps we know more about the world than we used to, and insofar as knowledge is prerequisite to understanding, that is all to the good. But … we do not have to know everything about something in order to understand it; too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few. There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding.
Adler and van Doren acknowledge the benefits of modern media. But they maintain that modern media cannot replace the act of careful, slow reading and contemplation. “It may be seriously questioned whether the advent of modern communications media has much enhanced our understanding of the world in which we live.” This statement may come as a shock to some readers; it certainly caught my eye. Don’t we live in the Information Age, after all? Don’t we know far more than past generations?
That all depends on what we mean by “know.” There are facts and raw knowledge on one hand—and then there is wisdom and understanding on the other. These are not the same ways of knowing. If we do not achieve wisdom, our knowing is in vain. As St. Thomas Aquinas taught, following Aristotle, wisdom is the knowledge of the highest causes of things. The knowledge of that highest cause sheds light on everything else. Aquinas explains, “By means of that cause we are able to form a most certain judgment about other causes, and according thereto all things should be set in order.” Without it, we miss the big picture. The higher the cause—the more primary and original it is—the more it holds the key to understanding all the effects that flow from it. And, of course, in Aristotelian terms, a cause is not only what produces an effect but also the goal or end for which something exists, its final cause or purpose (among other things). To know, then, the origin and purpose of something (efficient and final cause) is to truly understand it, and to know the origin and purpose of all things would be the highest wisdom.
But the mere accumulation of facts does not necessarily lead to this wisdom—this understanding of first causes, highest principles, and the nature of things. Sometimes facts can actually confuse or obscure understanding if we don’t have the key causes with which to make sense of those facts. A great example of this occurs in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, in which an authoritarian schoolmaster demands one of his pupils define what a horse is. The boy, Bitzer, replies: “Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.” Meanwhile, there is a girl in the class who has actually grown up around horses, known them, loved them. She has a much deeper knowledge of the origin, purpose, and nature of a horse, yet she is considered by the schoolmaster to be ignorant of what a horse is since she cannot regurgitate the scientific definition.
All that Bitzer has given is facts about horses. But he is none the wiser as to what a horse actually is, the mystery of its existence. In fact, “the facts” have only muddied the water. They are information overload.
The tendency of too many facts to inhibit wisdom becomes especially clear when those facts are presented within a prepackaged worldview. Adler and van Doren assert:
One of the reasons for this situation is that the very media we have mentioned are so designed as to make thinking seem unnecessary. … The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements–all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics–to make it easy for him to ‘make up his own mind’ with the minimum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind.
We see this problem all the time in education. Which student is truly educated: the one who can give you the right answer to the math problem, or the one who understands the principle, the mathematical cause, behind that answer? We all know that it is the latter. Yet too often educators settle for the former. Why? Because it’s easier. We can train Bitzer to do the math problem by blindly following the steps laid out, just as citizens can be trained to swallow and regurgitate the propaganda of a ruling class. But to get Bitzer to understand why those steps are needed in the math problem is another matter. That will require him to think for himself. That will require him to gain some wisdom. And wisdom is not won easily.
French Catholic philosopher and writer A.D. Sertillanges echoes Adler and van Doren, asserting that too much indiscriminate reading can hinder intellectual work. In his book about how to be an effective thinker and scholar, The Intellectual Life, he writes:
The first rule is to read little. … What we are proscribing is the passion for reading, the uncontrolled habit, the poisoning of the mind by excess of mental food, the laziness in disguise which prefers easy familiarity with others’ thought to personal effort. … The mind is dulled, not fed, by inordinate reading, it is made gradually incapable of reflection and concentration.
As a writer who dabbles in a number of genres, I try to stay somewhat informed on the news, especially the culture wars. I’m always looking for the spark that will light up my imagination and become another article. But sometimes I ask myself, am I trying to consume too much information, like a man drinking more water than his body can handle, until he drowns?
Perhaps I, and all of us, ought to follow the advice of Adler, van Doren, and Sertillanges and shut off the pipeline of information and just rest in the quiet—at least once in a while.
