I saw a thought-provoking meme the other day. It was a picture of former President Jimmy Carter with the following quote: “According to Gandhi, the seven sins are: wealth without works, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, and politics without principle.”
I found the sentiments compelling, but because I don’t trust anything on the internet anymore, I googled whether Carter actually uttered those words and learned that he did — at the funeral of former Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey in 1978 — but that the quote wasn’t from Mahatma Gandhi. It was from a sermon given in the 1920s by an Englishman named Frederick Lewis Donaldson. Gandhi published Donaldson’s words in a pamphlet and then ended up getting credit for being their author. Poor ol’ Frederick.
Of course, the whole point of the post was to contrast those seven sins, no matter their original source, with the behavior of some current politicians you can name, most of whom would scoff at the meme (and Jimmy Carter) and urge the immediate deportation of anyone named Gandhi. But I digress …
Here’s another quote I read this week: “When we adapt to a new cultural phenomenon, including the use of a new medium, we end up with a different brain. … Our online habits continue to reverberate in the workings of our brain cells even when we’re not at a computer. We’re exercising the neural circuits devoted to skimming and multi-tasking while ignoring those used for reading and thinking deeply.”
It’s from a book by Nicholas Carr called The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. The book is a dozen years old now, but Carr’s thesis — that using the internet all day instead of reading books and doing traditional long-form research has changed the way we humans process knowledge — still seems legit. We do seem to be losing our ability — and the patience — to concentrate on a singular task … Oh wait, brb.
Okay, it was a text from CVS Pharmacy. They really value me and would love to learn more about my recent experience with them and would like me to fill out a short survey. I’ll do it later, but for the record, the toilet paper has been excellent so far and so was the Kit Kat bar.
So where was I? Oh yeah, Carr has a point. I spend my workdays on the internet, and I’ve been writing columns for various publications for more than 40 years. It used to take me much longer to finish them, because if I needed to cite a quote or look up the population of Kansas City or figure out how to spell “onomatopoeia,” I’d have to turn to the shelves of reference books I kept in my office. I had Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, Roget’s Thesaurus, Webster’s New Abridged Dictionary, a World Atlas, Encyclopedia Britannica, and a bunch more that I can’t remember now, because I put them all in boxes a few years ago. Wait, let me google “reference books” … Oh yeah, I also had Robert’s Rules of Order, Who’s Who in America, and a lot of others I won’t bore you with. … Ooh, I see there’s a new post from Heather Cox Richardson. Need to check that out …
Anyway, as I was saying, now all the research material I need is a couple of keystrokes away, so there’s a flip-side to Carr’s thesis: While it once might have taken me several hours to craft a 750-word column like this one, it was mostly because I had no choice but to spend much of that time searching through reference books and doing “long-form research.” Who knows, for example, how long it would have taken me to find out if the quote cited above was by Jimmy Carter, and whether those words were indeed Gandhi’s? What book would have that information?
We weren’t spending all that time on a single task because we liked it. We did it because we had no alternative. Now, with the world’s collective knowledge a click away, I can finish my column in … Oh, wait, someone on Nextdoor just found a dog at McLean and Oliver. Cute pup …
Sorry. Sigh. I’m wondering if this column is actually an example of “knowledge without character”? Am I a sinner? Or just shallow? I should probably research that.
