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Tuesday
I’m only just now examining the title of The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, by MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes. He couldn’t have chosen a better literary allusion.
Sirens’ Call is an important contribution to our understanding of the modern world. Here’s the description on its website:
We all feel it—the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they’re us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the buzz in our pocket. Something has changed utterly: for most of human history, the boundary between public and private has been clear, at least in theory. Now, as Chris Hayes writes, “With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade.”
Hayes goes on to argue that our attention has become “a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated.” Nor is that all. As Hayes sees it, our very humanity is at stake. As he puts it:
Now our deepest neurological structures, human evolutionary inheritances, and social impulses are in a habitat designed to prey upon, to cultivate, distort, or destroy that which most fundamentally makes us human.
Here’s the poem’s version of the allure and the resulting destruction. Does it describe anyone you know?
If anyone goes near them
in ignorance, and listens to their voices,
that man will never travel to his home
and never make his wife and children happy
to have him back with them again. The Sirens
who sit there in their meadow will seduce him
with piercing songs. Around them lie
great heaps of men, flesh rotting from their bones
their skin all shriveled up.
Hayes is playing the role of Circe, whose warning this is. While I haven’t read Hayes’s book, I expect his advice is similar to hers: while we shouldn’t close our ears to what’s going on, we must find ways to stay true to our purpose. In Odysseus’s case, this involves having his men bind him to the mast of his ship. It’s a necessary precaution since the sirens’ call is impossible to resist.
For some reason, I remembered the sirens’ temptations as sexual, but when I returned to the poem, I discovered that they were instead promising information. They understand their man well given that Odysseus is the wisest—or at any rate, the most cunning—of the Greeks:
Odysseus! Come here! You are well known
from many stories! Glory of the Greeks!
Now stop your ship and listen to our voices.
All those who pass this way hear honeyed song,
poured from our mouths. The music brings them joy,
and they go on their way with greater knowledge
since we know everything the Greeks and Trojans
suffered in Troy, by the gods’ will; and we know
what happens anywhere on earth. (Trans. Emily Wilson)
One can imagine Hayes himself struggling against the ropes, given that he too is brilliant, able to marshal and synthesize a vast array of political facts at a moment’s notice. Social media and the internet, of course, aid him in his work, which is why he wrote this book for himself as much as for the rest of us. He understands only too well the sirens’ call.
Even though it’s doubtful whether the sirens themselves can actually deliver on their promise, the internet can. Never before have we had instant access to “what happens anywhere on earth.” Odysseus struggling in his ropes is like a teenager who has been deprived of his phone:
Their song was so melodious, I longed to
listen more. I told my men to free me.
I scowled at them, but they kept rowing on.
Actually I owe teenagers an apology here. Many adults feel just as deprived when the power goes out, rendering their phones, laptops and MacBooks useless.
Some have offered, as solutions, various versions of the “wax in ears” treatment that Odysseus administers to his men, but that’s ultimately not realistic. Better to find ways to find a balance between self-restraint and openness, as Odysseus does. Hayes’s book helps us remain self-aware as we guard against being devoured.
