filter feeders

Filter-feeders
Last night, sitting with friends around the TV, I found myself in a conversation the thrust of which was that Quakers are not simply a commercial organisation obsessed with oat-based cereal products. I know that this is not the case, because I attended a Quaker school at which there was remarkably little oat-oriented activity in evidence.

Whilst not a Quaker myself, I did develop an enduring admiration for at least one aspect of Quaker life: the Quaker meeting and more specifically the appreciation of silence. Quakers, you see, are fond of sitting in groups in silence. We used to sit for an hour in silence every Thursday morning - all three hundred of us. We would regularly attend similar meetings on a Sunday, and before every meal and morning assembly for a few quiet minutes.

The silence was not enforced - if you were 'moved' to stand up and say something you could. And people sometimes did. Quite often we would sit in a circle.
Sitting in contemplative silence in this way is something which very few people do these days, and something of which very few people are capable. I am confident that this is the case because I used to ask groups of psychology students to sit for twenty minutes in silence. Some described it as one of the most difficult experiences of their course - they would laugh, fidget, pull faces and eventually become angry and frustrated.

The point is, quite simply, that this kind of silence forces one to learn to live with oneself: to become aware of oneself and to enter into dialogue with oneself.
Every day I travel to and from work on the train, and this is perhaps the most noticeable feature - that people cannot endure themselves. Instead they are absorbed in a variety of distractions ranging through i-pods and blackberries to trashy novels and portable DVD players.

It was this observation that helped me unravel Baudrillard's rhetorical question: 'Will computers take us back to a material, inhuman form of intelligence?' - a question which I took initially to be nonsensical, but which I now interpret in the following light: technology, in providing us with a constant source of external stimulus makes us less self-aware, less self-conscious. In a real sense we become more animalistic - creatures caught in an endless series of stimulus-response loops of increasing complexity. Sitting at a series of screens responding to email messages may seem like higher order behaviour - but in fact leaves very little room for genuine reflection.

You might want to take a more forgiving stance and marvel instead at our capacity to process the vast amounts of information to which we are exposed - but it is a hollow boast, I think. I am not a television viewer so I found it strange that as I had the aforementioned conversation the television played loudly in the background. I kept missing out bits of what my friends were saying as my attention was drawn to the screen - or more accurately to the commentary.
And then I noticed that they suffered no such effects - they had developed the ability to allow this information simply to 'wash over' them. So I think it is most accurate to say that we are becoming a society of filter-feeders - like jellyfish mindlessly sifting through vast amounts of information for the odd tasty morsel. The only highly-developed capability here is that of taste - we 'lick' our way around the information superhighway. Something tasty and we post it on our blog. I think bees do this.

Which brings me back to oats. Did you know they do them in small pre-flavoured, microwaveable packets now?