Finding Cognitive Liberty*

When the Internet Feels Like a Full-Time Job

The other day I was perusing articles on the internet, as one does, and I came across a post in which the writer was insisting that the events of January 6th were a government coup, in a way similar to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Mmmmk. My immediate reaction, I confess, was one of fatigue.

As I read that writer’s claims, I realized that I had no personal insight, at all, regarding the government’s involvement in either event. If I was ever to responsibly credit this writer’s assertions, I was going to have to redirect my own cognitive pursuits into a tedious and tiresome effort to assess the evidence for his claims.

This is what happens when institutions are corrupted. The loss of trust in institutions comes at a cost to cognitive liberty. That’s because trustworthy institutions serve to magnify our collective cognitive capacity by letting us outsource and parallelize a lot of the mental and investigative work we would otherwise have to do for ourselves. If the institutional media had not largely squandered its credibility over the last 20ish years, I could simply compare my internet writer’s claims against factual information provided by a credible institution. But lacking such trustworthy media and government institutions, I am left with the investigative and cognitive burden myself.

We all saw this phenomenon during Covid when, instead of pursuing other worthwhile interests, the manifestly crackpot pronouncements of public health authorities left us all burdened with the need to assess for ourselves the credibility of the claims they were making about masks, vaccines, case fatality rates, hospitalizations, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, the merits of intubation, etc. etc. ad nauseum. To this day, self-proclaimed thought-leaders, who were totally taken in by the politicized claims of public health officials, have never owned up to their own very public gullibility.

The unavoidable reality is that, as individuals, we simply cannot be experts on every issue we come across in breathless posts and angry tweets on the internet. If we try, instead of pursuing our own lives and interests, we will end up living the life of cats in a room full of laser pointers. Which is to say, our cognitive capacity and time will have been coopted by forces who are interested, not in our flourishing, but in monopolizing our attention.

So what are we to do when untrustworthy institutions collide with our need for reliable information? Unfortunately, this very thing is happening just when the need for such information is accelerating. I’m sure I don’t know much, but what follows are some top-of-mind thoughts I have as I ponder how to distinguish between what truly matters and all those other things which clamor for my attention, but don’t actually matter at all.

First, I must accept my own cognitive finitude. I must concede that there are just some things I can’t or won’t know. The words “I don’t know” should come out of my mouth and off my keyboard more often. There are only so many hours in the day and it is just inescapably the case that I must choose what to attend to and what to ignore. This invariably means being less reactive to provocations that show up in my inbox and on my news feed.

Second, I must learn to recognize when the thing I am being nudged toward attending to has nothing to do with my actual life, or is something over which I have no actual control or influence.

The problems in the Middle East are dire, to be sure. But they have always been dire. There is little-to-nothing that most of us can do about them. Likewise, I myself am in no position to affect the Iowa caucuses taking place today. Should I feverishly devote myself to unpacking all the complexities of foreign policy and electoral politics? Or should I instead do something within my actual reach, like apply myself to building something practically useful for my family or a friend? Should I spend my day sparring with anonymous users over plagiarism in the Ivy League, or spend it learning more about the beneficial uses of linear algebra, or making progress on constructing a go-kart with my grandsons?

And third, I think we should unreservedly lean into “creaturely pursuits”, making them the bellwether which guides our assessment of those clamoring digital diversions. Let me try to explain what I mean by “creaturely pursuits”.

There is a haunting exchange that takes place in C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, the context for which bears a little unpacking.

Two of the main characters, in that third installment of Lewis’ Space Trilogy, are a married couple by the names of Mark and Jane Studdock. They have a thoroughly modern marriage, and one senses more than a whiff of mockery in the way Lewis describes it. Mark, the modern husband, is characteristically clueless and indifferent regarding his husbandly obligations to hearth and home. His wife, Jane, is correspondingly cool and resistant to the possibilities that attend her wifely station. She and he are in a continual struggle to each maintain a firm grip on their respective individualistic prerogatives - their own self-oriented identities and interests. Jane wants to be the center of her husband’s attention, but without sacrificing any of her own professional aspirations. That she has had to make some sacrifices to accommodate her husband’s career is a source of lingering resentment for her. Whatever their differing respective ideas are regarding each of their roles in the marriage, they do share a common modern understanding, which is that marriage can be comfortably decoupled from any purposeful intention to create new life. Like many moderns, their concept of marriage revolves around their own psycho-sexual fulfillment and satisfaction, and has no real correspondence to the larger questions that attend their lives as created beings. They themselves are each the centers of their own respective worlds.

The story tracks a series of events which find the couple’s paths diverging from each other. Mark is drawn into closer complicity with evil, while Jane is drawn into a warm and vibrant community which operates in service to the good. As Jane observes the lives of others within her new community of friends, she begins to realize that her ambient conception of herself as autonomous and self-contained may not map very well to reality. Eventually Lewis has this thought cross Jane’s mind:

“Supposing one were a thing after all--a thing designed and invented by Someone Else and valued for qualities quite different from what one had decided to regard as one's true self?”

This thought reveals Jane’s emerging recognition that the life and priorities of someone who understands themselves as having been created might really be quite different from one’s life and priorities under a modern, consciously self-gratifying set of assumptions. Jane, in other words, is beginning to wonder if, rather than only ever considering what she wants, she should instead be asking what she is for.

The haunting conversation, which I alluded to earlier, concerns this very aspect of Jane’s life, but it takes place between the leader of the small community Jane is a part of, and an alarmingly resurrected Merlin of Arthurian legend. Merlin has been awakened by angelic beings for the purpose of having him strike a blow against an evil that is rising in the world. He reemerges after hundreds of years asleep, not as the comical, emaciated, bearded magician found in modern cartoons, but as a large, robust, formidable, and prophetic agent of wrath.

Merlin sets his eyes on Jane, where she is gathered with her new associates, and initiates the following exchange with the community’s leader:

“Sir, you have in your house the falsest lady of any at this time alive.”

“Sir, you are mistaken. She is doubtless like all of us a sinner; but the woman is chaste.”

“Sir”, said Merlin, “know well that she has done in Logres a thing of which no less sorrow shall come than came of the stroke that Balinus struck. For sir, it was the purpose of God that she and her lord between them have begotten a child by whom the enemies should have been put out of Logres for a thousand years.”

“She is but lately married,” said Ransom. “The child may yet be born.”

“Sir”, said Merlin, “be assured that the child will never be born, for the hour of its begetting is passed. Of their own will they are barren: I did not know till now that the usages of Sulva were so common among you. For a hundred generations in two lines the begetting of this child was prepared; and unless God should rip up the work of time, such seed, and such an hour, in such a land, shall never be again.”

What I find haunting about this exchange is how Jane’s previously impoverished view of herself, which concentrated her focus solely on her own passing emotional needs, had blinded her to the reach and consequentiality of her actual life itself. Lewis is raising the possibility that our faithfulness toward living out our creaturely purpose may be impactful beyond all imagining. One is reminded of Mary, the mother of Jesus, or Elizabeth, the mother of John the baptizer. Or Jochebed the mother of Moses, whose defiant actions to keep her baby alive ultimately changed the world.

I don’t believe Lewis’ point here is merely fanciful. It is an imaginative illustration of an idea found repeatedly throughout the biblical text, that humble devotion to creaturely pursuits have an impact far beyond our limited field of vision.

This is why I think that one possible response, maybe the best response possible, to all of the internet clamoring for our cognitive attention, is to lean more sharply into creaturely pursuits. And what are those creaturely pursuits of which I speak? Why, growing things. Involvement with the natural world. The making and raising of children. Devotion to, and involvement with, embodied communities of faith. The worship of the Creator, who endowed us with our natures in the first place. Working hard and well. Developing essential skills that make us fit and capable providers. Imitating our creator by creating things ourselves which are also beautiful and good - thus contributing toward the flourishing of others around us.

Anything that pesters us for our attention, but which is inconsistent with our creaturely purpose, should almost certainly be avoided as a matter of principle.

By all means we should write and read and think. But we should distinguish between those writings and readings that equip, encourage, and ennoble our creaturely purpose, and those which draw us away from it. We should eschew the temptation to engage in meaningless disputations: we simply cannot afford the cognitive waste. But we should fight like Trojans for the things that really matter. And we should learn to make such distinctions well.

We should think twice, in other words, before trading the profound consequentiality of creaturely pursuits for the madness of tilting at every digital windmill which comes our way. Our very lives may depend upon it.

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* Credit to

Ruth Gaskovski

for being the first writer I came across who used the term “cognitive liberty”. Also, this post was provoked by some questions that both she and

Peco

raised polling their reader’s concerns in the coming year. One of mine was rightly distinguishing between concerns that are truly urgent, and concerns that the online community wants me to feel urgent about. This post is more or less the result of their provocation to think more cogently about this question. Any of the bad ideas contained herein are, by contrast, completely my own.