Alan Jacobs shows how to resist the pull of the present by engaging ideas from the past.
It all begins with the ancient poet Horace and a room full of undergraduates. Alan Jacobs and his Baylor University Honors Program class are reading the Roman poet’s Epistles, letters written as poems that Horace dispatched from his home in the country. In moving away from the bustle of Rome, Horace sought to acquire “a tranquil mind.” Rome was the center of everything, of course, and the place where the present, the concerns of the now, mattered most. Horace left the city because he understood what Jacobs and his students come to understand too—that the pull of the present can be the enemy of the tranquil mind.
In this story, which introduces his latest book, Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind, Jacobs puts his finger squarely on a seemingly unshakeable problem of our moment: Most if not all of us find ourselves completely overwhelmed by how much information (and disinformation) there is to process and respond to in a given day. Jacobs writes of the reality of “information overload” and the unshakeable feeling of “social acceleration,” which necessitates a strategy, a way of deciding what is and is not worth our attention. Given these realties, most people turn to what Jacobs calls information triage, which is a way of quickly assessing the value of information and of dismissing what seems to be irrelevant or worthless.
The problem with this strategy is that for most people, there is an inherent bias toward seeing the present as the most important and salient thing. So the past is often dismissed outright because it is seen as completely irrelevant or objectively bad. But such easy dismissal of the past is a mistake, Jacobs argues, because ...
from Christianity Today Magazine https://ift.tt/30NgB06
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