WASHINGTON — Please, Kim Kardashian, don’t go out with Pete Davidson.
We’ve already been distracted by the wonder of Ketanji Brown Jackson and the gaffe of Will Smith, the arrival of dreamy spring days and the return of dreaded mask lines.
If we get one more shiny object to think about, I fear that our support for Ukraine may waver. Do we have the attention span to stay focused on Russia’s descent into pure evil?
With cruel methods perfected in other conflicts, the Russians commit increasingly brutal atrocities; they rape and kill civilians. On Friday, they found fleeing civilians at a train station in eastern Ukraine, where a missile labeled psychopathic “For Our Children” killed at least 50 people and injured nearly 100.
“Why do they have to hit civilians with missiles? Why this cruelty?” Volodymyr Zelensky asked the Finnish parliament on Friday, adding: “Sometimes you think they are human at all.”
He begged, “Hate must lose.”
But do we go further? After all, going further is America’s favorite pastime. And technology has exacerbated our nervous consciousness and our sensational culture. We now live in a world of nothing but distraction, with a deluge of stimuli.
We have a way of turning everything into trends. Once upon a time there were causes. Now there are trends. “You’re trending” is the biggest compliment you can give someone — or the biggest alarm you can sound. When something is trending, no matter what, it commands the highest commercial respect.
But trends are by definition transient. American attention goes from passing to passing to passing. A life full of ephemera. We used to have opinion leaders; now we have influencers.
It’s a cognitive challenge, but can we find ways to keep our attention on the things that require our attention? Do we have any mental discipline at all?
Think about climate change. We can stay with our concerns if California and Colorado burn to a crux. But then the fires go out and we move on to the next, the next trend. Crises are not trends.
Look at energy independence. We pause to consider if the Saudi crown prince sends a team to dismember Jamal Khashoggi or if Vladimir Putin shows what a monster he is in Ukraine. But then the fickleness of our attention span kicks in. High gas prices? Make peace with the monsters. “Biden must make amends with Saudi Arabia or China will win,” the Wall Street Journal headline read by Karen Elliott House.
To add to the distraction, Putin is creating his own alternate reality in Russia, as Donald Trump is doing here, with those prone to his lies. The Russians denied an attack on the train station in eastern Ukraine. They claim that the Ukrainians blow themselves up.
I called Jaron Lanier, known as the father of virtual reality, to ask him about this.
“It takes a lot of energy to process a big lie compared to a small lie, and so the big lie has a greater chance of sailing through it,” he said from his home in Berkeley, California. meaning, only the degree of cruelty and evil is difficult for us to process.”
He shared his philosophy that, throughout history, when politics, culture and technology become too luxurious and theoretical, they tend to lose stamina and brutality breaks through.
“The Bolsheviks had this very sophisticated, beautiful rhetoric and all these complicated ideas,” Lanier said. “They were building their own socio-economy. What happened then was that Stalin came in and said, ‘No, it’s really just about violence and domination, and screw it all up.’
“I think the current wave of populism has that character,” Lanier added. “The ever finer degrees of thinking about things like gender and intersectionality and this theory and that theory, it’s so advanced that it requires a lot of patience. It’s too inbred to be robust. So this very rough thing comes in.
“There’s more and more sophisticated talk about how we’re going to do blockchain, non-replaceable tokens, and cryptocurrencies, with contracts built into the algorithms. Personally, I think this very fancy approach to technology goes in the same direction as cultures or politics that are too become luxurious and too full of oneself.
“Basically, the Russians came in and said, ‘Ruin all your ideas. We’re just going to boldly take this stuff and use it for power.’ Putin’s psychological agents looked at all the things we do on social media and said, ‘We’ll just step in and use that to weaken you. These ideas don’t interest us.’
“I think ideals are great, but idealists who get too involved in their own sense to get more sophisticated to perfect their schedules? I think it turns into brutality again.”
When he answered the phone, Lanier took an optimistic note about Trump, Putin and their ilk: “One of the great truths of history is that the great impostors also deceive themselves.”
We live in a world of easy deception and endless distractions. Solidarity with Ukraine is trending now, but will it last? True solidarity is not a trend. It’s a commitment. Can the Ukrainians count on us? Or are we going to disappoint them while our attention wanders?