Fear Diversions

Americans need to be far more suspicious of mindless diversions. There are a great many differences between Pascal and Thoreau, but they agree about the danger of filling our lives with meaningless activity, of failing to hold still and reflect. And although they come from different worldviews, both men believe that the primary danger of diversions is that they prevent us from living the good life.

I was thrilled to recently read another philosopher who agrees. In A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart, Josef Pieper argues strongly against spending our time in a "fraudulent world" of time-wasting diversions:

"If, therefore, a fraudulent world of this kind threatens to overrun and conceal the world of reality, then the cultivation of the natural desire to see assumes the character of a measure of self-preservation and self-defense. And then studiositas (diligence) means especially this: that a person resists the nearly inescapable temptation to indiscipline with all the power of selfless self-protection, that he radically closes off the inner space of his life against the pressingly unruly pseudoreality of empty sights and sounds--in order that, through and only through this asceticism of perception, he might safeguard or recoup that which truly constitutes man's living existence: to perceive the reality of God and of creation and to shape himself and the world by the truth that discloses itself only in silence."

Is there any message, short of the gospel, that Americans need more? Pascal bemoaned men wasting their time on gambling and the hunt; imagine how discouraged he would be to find how modern men have multiplied their methods for avoiding serious reflection: video games, surfing the internet, watching TV, etc.

Neil Postman was right: there's no need for a tyrant to impose his will on a subjugated citizenry a la 1984; it's far easier to enslave citizens with their permission, via mindless entertainment. Let's hope that Americans read Pieper and Postman and take off their shackles.