My favorite jeremiad about distracted readers was delivered nearly two centuries ago, in 1840, in the evangelical hotbed of Rochester, N.Y. Its audience was the membership of a local reform society, the Rochester Athenaeum and Mechanics’ Association, who had gathered to celebrate the opening of their new library. The invited guest speaker, a Presbyterian minister named J.H. McIlvaine, offered his best wishes for the library’s future. But McIlvaine also expressed some reservations. He saw a rapidly expanding supply of sensational, secular literature doing bad things to the country’s most impressionable minds:
Their attention veers from point to point, under these influences, as the weathercock obeys the varying wind. Nor do they seem to feel any sense of degradation in being compelled to follow whatever thus most powerfully solicits them, as if they were led by a chain.
McIlvaine imagined the effects of distraction with lurid vividness. He believed that guarding the population against manipulation by his era’s mass media required a careful selection of reading materials. It also called for a strong exercise of personal will. McIlvaine titled his remarks “A Discourse Upon the Power of Voluntary Attention.”
In the 19th century, as in our own time, new economic forces and technologies provoked widespread anxieties about distraction. The earlier situation was not identical to ours, of course. Nineteenth-century Americans were not expected to be available to their bosses 24 hours a day via digital communications, and no social-media algorithms ensnared them into constant loops of virtual interaction. But the industrial market economy that was taking shape around them did make new, accelerating demands on their attention — new work schedules, an expanding commodity marketplace, speculative booms and crashes. Along with ministers like McIlvaine, who sensed a far-reaching crisis of faith, many other observers began to suspect that industrial machinery and market capitalism were re-engineering people’s minds.
“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys,” as Henry David Thoreau put it in Walden, “which distract our attention from serious things.” And if we have been “desecrated” by allowing ourselves to become distracted, Thoreau explained in his essay “Life without Principle,” then “the remedy will be by wariness and devotion to reconsecrate ourselves.” The modern economy’s constant compulsion to produce and buy commodities for someone else’s profit made Thoreau uneasy; his famous retreat to Walden was, in part, an attempt to break those bad mental habits.
