Historian, former Republican senator, and former college president Ben Sasse is dying of pancreatic cancer.
In a recent and profoundly moving interview, Sasse, who recently turned 54, offered wisdom on maintaining personal autonomy in our digital age. Sasse argued that technological advances such as smartphones “allow our consciousness to leave the time and place where we actually live, the places where we break bread, the people who are living next door to us, the people that you can physically touch and hug, the small platoons of real community.”
Sasse predicts that as a consequence, even more “human addictions and distractions” are coming. His honesty about his own “misprioritization” helps provide space to confront our own “regrets” before the clock runs out.
Sasse is no Luddite, but he predicts that the future “grand divide” in society will not be by class but “about intentionality and what you do with your affections and these supertools.”
The divide he envisions is not between rich and poor, educated and uneducated, or left and right, but between those who govern their own attention and those who have surrendered it.
“Hell” on earth, he warns, will be experienced by those “who agree to outsource [their] attention and affections to somebody else’s algorithm.”
Sasse warned that our temptation to let these tools pull us into an “eternal now, now, now, now, now, now slot machine of dopamine hits is super dangerous.” Artificial intelligence (AI), he predicts, will be transformative for those who bring genuine intentionality to it and devastating for those who don’t.
Freedom is more than the absence of authoritarian edicts that conflict with individuals’ ability to pursue their own ends. Sasse argues that a free society requires “communitarian thickness” to provide the “self-restraints” necessary for us to use technology’s tools rather than be used by them. If we lose the capacity to govern our attention and our passions, we lose the capacity for self-governance.
In his Pensées, the seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal made one of the most profound single-sentence observations in history: “The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”
Today, for many, sitting quietly in a room alone is virtually impossible. When we are stripped of distractions, our internal dialogue often runs wild, and we seek an immediate escape from the noise, leading to our addictions. In the modern era, as Sasse and many others have pointed out, escape is always in our pockets.
In his “Moral Letter 7,” the Stoic philosopher Seneca argued that prolonged exposure to crowds degrades our moral character, even when we believe ourselves resistant to its influence. He wrote, “Do you ask what you should avoid more than anything else? A crowd. It is not yet safe for you to trust yourself to one.”
Seneca was writing from experience, including his service in Nero’s court:
I’ll freely admit my own weakness in this regard. Never do I return home with the character I had when I left; always there is something I had settled before that is now stirred up again, something I had gotten rid of that has returned.
Seneca was not a misanthrope, nor was he advocating withdrawing from the world. He was observing how the values and beliefs of those around us gradually reshape what seems normal to us.
At least Seneca could leave the crowd and go home. Too often, we allow the digital crowd to follow us home.
Philosopher Matthew B. Crawford and computer science professor Cal Newport have sounded Seneca’s alarm in today’s digital age.
In his book Digital Minimalism, Newport explores the erosion of autonomy caused by our use of technology. He explains that we have allowed technology and social media “to control more and more of how we spend our time, how we feel, and how we behave.”
Crawford observes in his book The World Beyond Your Head that “Without the ability to direct our attention where we will, we become more receptive to those who would direct our attention where they will.”
They can include social media companies, government agencies, and pharmaceutical and other companies that compete for our attention. Many of us may think we are beyond such influence, but Crawford warns that our “preferences” are not always “expressing a welling-up of the authentic self.” Satisfying our preferences may give us a false sense of assurance that our freedom is intact.
Crawford observes, “To attend to anything in a sustained way requires actively excluding all the other things that grab at our attention. It requires, if not ruthlessness toward oneself, a capacity for self-regulation.”
Let’s be clear about what’s at stake. Without the capacity for what Sasse calls “intentionality,” and what Crawford calls “self-regulation,” the individual becomes too weak to sustain liberty and too distracted to notice when it is being taken away.
When our attention is fragmented, we lose the capacity for what Newport calls “deep work.” Newport defines deep work as “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”
Cultivating this depth requires sustained attention and active resistance to the urge to seek easier, shallower work. Shallow efforts, such as compulsive email checking, create little new value and are easily replicated.
If you are concerned about losing your job to AI, the answer is deep work.
Newport advocates “a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else.” Newport doesn’t believe that “people who struggle with the online part of their lives are… weak-willed or stupid.” As a path to change, recognizing what our current habits cost us is more effective than relying on willpower.
Crawford argues that genuine agency arises:
not in the context of mere choices freely made (as in shopping) but rather, somewhat paradoxically, in the context of submission to things that have their own intractable ways, whether the thing be a musical instrument, a garden, or the building of a bridge.
A craftsman is constantly discovering what doesn’t work. A social media warrior is constantly proclaiming. In the digital world, people offer angry opinions without reckoning with the limits of their knowledge.
Newport argues, “The craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world.”
Crawford himself learned motorcycle repair. He understands that a craftsman’s discipline seems “to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth.” Crawford continues:
He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, who has no real effect in the world. But craftsmanship must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.
Our digital cries for validation are a poor substitute for the deep pride generated by handicraft or deep work.
As we shift our attention away from the noise of the digital world, Crawford argues, we experience “feelings of wonder and gratitude — in light of which manufactured realities are revealed as pale counterfeits, and lose some of their grip on us.”
Ben Sasse, facing the end of his life, genuinely knows this. The question is whether we will learn it in time to choose differently.
