Distraction

Distraction

"All the unhappiness of men arises from one simple fact: that they cannot sit quietly in their chamber."                               Blaise Pascal

"Don’t just do something. Sit there!"                  Old Japanese saying

T.S. Eliot once wrote somewhere that “we moderns are distracted from distraction by distraction”. Distraction is now the presiding or the defining idea of (post) modern existence, especially after the volcanic rise and plaguey spread of digital technologies and what is now called social media. With the arrival and cultural entrenchment of Instagram, TikTok and “streaming” Netflix, the term distraction has acquired new levels and depths of meaning. Once it was terms like anomie and alienation; now, distraction is THE zeitgeist.  They are of course related in a variety of ways-----the conditions of anomie and alienation cannot prevail unless the subject is distracted in one way or another---- but it seems that both the scale and intensity of these forces of fragmentation, debasement and dehumanization in man require new ways of understanding and analyses.

Distraction is about attention, or to be precise, about its lack or absence. To distract means to disturb, divert and distort attention, to take it away, to steal it. Attention is the new capital or, the new source of capital generation now, as many contemporary cultural critics have argued (see The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff and The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu). The most successful entrepreneurs----the attention merchants----are people who know how to identify and “harvest” attention and turn it into gold.  Mostly Silly-con artists of The Valley, this new breed of captains of dog-eat-dog casino capitalism can now make and train algorithms, the entrails or vital organs of software and applications on digital devices that are now the main attention grabbers, which can easily distract us from almost anything.

Once you are distracted, the algorithms will take control and do all the work for you. In fact, the designers and developers of algorithms know this very well: without distraction and disorientation of the target audience, the algorithms cannot work effectively. The users have to be thoroughly bombarded, bamboozled, rendered incapable of using their uniquely human discriminating intellectual and especially moral faculties before any gains from the algorithms can be realized. It is crucial that the subject be unmoored from the ground of traditional ethical, spiritual worldview and turned into flotsam---turned into the wreckage of his or her former rooted and integral self---for the algorithms to achieve their goals.

Traditional beings live at the intersection of the two planes of existence: horizontal and vertical. Traditional man, or Pontifical man, is always passive, or contemplative, vertically and active horizontally.  In other words, traditional man, in Islam especially, is servant of God (abd Allah) horizontally, and vicegerent or deputy of God (khalifa Allah) vertically.  On the latter plane, we remain aware of our true, primordial nature, or fitrah, and therefore remain intact and whole as we engage with the world on the former, horizontal plane, that contingent dimension that extends into time and space. Worldly forces of distraction, especially now in the form of new digital “tricknologies” (Dick Greogory’s term) invert this traditional ontological, epistemological/ethical configuration which is the source of equilibrium (mizan) in man and in the world---the microcosm and the macrocosm. They do so by making us obedient and passive horizontally---vis-à-vis the world, the duniya---and forgetful (alnisyan), heedless (ghafil) vertically. We then become the Promethean man. These centrifugal forces render man slave to worldly demigods as they completely make him forgetful of his real Master, Creator and Lord. To protect oneself and resist one’s uprooting, debasement and, ultimately, destruction, one needs to resist this Satanic inversion. 

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