Our struggle to concentrate is nothing new

Our ruined attention spans seem to be the consequence of a recent fall from grace. Big Tech was our tempter. Having tasted its dopamine, we got hooked on its likes and notifications.

But while the digital attention economy is new, the struggle to concentrate is not. Caleb Smith’s elegant anthology of American anxieties over attention begins with the perplexities of Henry David Thoreau in early19th-century England. Believing that the ‘mind can be permanently profaned by attending to trivial things’ and that a commercial age allowed ‘no sabbath’ for our thoughts, Thoreau fled Boston for a shack on the quiet borders of Walden Pond. But he found distraction lurking even there: the fish in its depths were disturbed by the rumble of passing trains.

Because a physical escape from modernity was impossible, it was vital to rise above its harmful buzz. Alongside Thoreau, Smith introduces us to a host of his contemporaries, both famous (Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass and Emily Dickinson) and obscure, who were united by a fear of losing their minds. In crisp but plangent meditations on brief passages from their writings, he shows how they tried to still the clamour of the world by attending to it in calmer and more disciplined ways.

These anxious souls seem to resemble us in their yearning to live in the moment, even if they never had to hide a Twitter password or shut up smartphones in a drawer. Yet these appearances are deceptive. This ‘genealogy of distraction’ is instructive precisely because its figures had different, perhaps deeper, worries than ours.

Smith, whose upbringing in evangelical Arkansas acquainted him with the strange joys and baleful power of American Protestantism, is wonderfully sensitive to its social and psychic hold over 19th-century life.