Sometimes you read something that never lets you go.

Just three words: info-glut culture. I forget whether they were the headline or not, but they were in a front-page story in the Washington Post, and were James Billington’s, the Librarian of Congress, reflecting on the vision and history of the Library, “a library for the people.”

Founded with six thousand books of Thomas Jefferson’s, 200 years later their institutional challenge was to account for 20,000 new items each week, making these resources available to American citizens.  (I am sure the number has only increased with the years.) While he acknowledged the complexity of that task, he observed that the more difficult challenge was ours, as citizens, viz. “What will we do with all of this information?” And he pressed the point: “Are we becoming wiser as a people with access to so much information?”

So when my wife nudged me a few weeks ago, saying “There’s James Billington….” I looked over with interest at the distinguished man that he is, thinking how appropriate it was that he too was at the National Book Festival on the Capitol Mall. We were listening to the same author speak about her new book. When the break came I told him that for years I had drawn on an interview with him in the Post, where his observation that we are “an info-glut culture” had shaped years of my own thinking. Certain as I was then that his insight was critically important, I am even more sure that he saw into the future, naming the issues and ideas that still matter most.

What will we do with what we know? A perennial question running through every human heart, and every century and culture. As old as the first of all temptations, Father Adam and Mother Eve asked themselves that question, and answered it with tragic consequence. The disconnection of knowing from doing, of knowledge from responsibility, is at the heart of the Fall—and everything has been affected, everything has been radically distorted: marriage and family, vocations and occupations, politics and economics, the arts of all sorts and sizes, and education too.

For those of us whose calling is to a journey among students, there is a critical need to understand the far-reaching implications of Billington’s analysis, and to ask ourselves, “How do we help students see into the challenge of learning, and life, in an info-glut culture?”

Not so long after reading the interview I heard U2’s song,  “Numb,” for the first time, and quickly bought the MTV version, and played it all over the world. I was sure that Billington and Bono were seeing the same thing. If the one saw it as “info-glut,” the other saw the drip-drip-drip of a plugged-into-technology culture as “numbing.” We know, but we cannot do. We know, but we cannot be responsible. Why? Because there is just too much to take in, too much information, too much to know and therefore too much to be responsible to and for. And we are numb, unable to respond, unable to be responsible.

They were fingers to the wind, and I listened. They helped me to understand the profoundly prescient work of Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death, a book that I am sure is more relevant in 2010 than it was in 1984. Analyzing “who won?” between the futurologists George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, Postman argued that the threat of a Big Brother who would ban books was minimal compared to the threat of an “amusing ourselves to death” culture where no one would want to read books.

The 20^th has become the 21^st-century now, and others have done their best to understand the moral meaning of the information age, as it twitters its way forward. Two of the best are Thomas de Zengotita in Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It, and Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Both books grew out of cover stories that made their own mark: “The Numbing of the American Mind” in Harper’s became Mediated, and “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in the Atlantic became The Shallows. Neither are cheap readings; neither author is a Luddite, romanticizing about the world that once-was and ought-still-to-be. They are moderns, insightfully, probingly asking all of us the same questions that Billington did 20 years ago, viz. “What are we going to do with all of this knowledge?”

The question matters to serious Christians. At the heart of the biblical vision of life and the world is an epistemological commitment with a moral thrust. God knows and he loves, at the same time—and he expects the same for those who belong to him, who “image” him in the world. In the Hebrew worldview it is something like this: if you know, you are responsible, and then you care. But if you don’t care, then you don’t know. Knowledge has weight, it has meaning, because it has to be worked out in life. What are the prophets if not lament upon lament that Israel refused to care about the things that God cared about, to do justice and love mercy. They “knew” but would not do.

The gospels are “good news” precisely because they teach that the Word became flesh, so that justice is made flesh, mercy is made flesh, wisdom is made flesh; yes, knowledge is made love. As J.I. Packer put it, “In Christ God knows the worst about us and still chooses to love us.” To put it simply, the incarnation is great grace because in it we see that it is possible to know the world, and love the world—at the very same time.

As I watch students, that seems the most difficult of all tasks. How are they to make sense of who they are and how they are to live in a world where knowledge is numbing? Where rather than the Enlightenment promise that “knowledge is power,” we feel that cynicism or stoicism are the only honest responses to knowing what we know. In “Numb” the Edge drones on in a levitical litany, “Don’t suggest… don’t connect…. don’t try to make sense….” while the rest of the band sings, “I feel numb…. I feel numb…. I feel numb”—and from beginning to end the Edge is plugged-in to a television-centered view of reality. The artists do get there first.

Good books could be written about this, but I will simply say this. If we are to guide students into vocations that honor God and serve the world we will have to help them understand more fully the cultural context of learning to learn amidst the challenge of info-glut.

Simone Weil, the great French philosopher who wrestled very deeply with the wounds of the world, wrote these words on the last night of her life; in fact they are the final words in her journal. “The most important task of teaching is to teach what it means to know.” The words were not abstractions for her; she had suffered, and she had lived her life among sufferers. She knew.

After Eve, and before Billington and Bono, Weil had eyes to see. In her essay, “On the Right Use of School Studies With a View to the Love of God,” she argued that the central calling of a student is to learn to pay attention, to see truthfully what ideas mean, what numbers mean, what words mean– and that when we learn like that we are beginning to learn sacramentally, because we are beginning to see the ways that heaven is touching earth. For her, “paying attention” to the world meant understanding the truth of the human condition and history because we understand the truth about God—even through a glass darkly –and that that is the heart of true learning, for everyone everywhere.

If our work is to come alongside students and help them develop “eyes that see”—which to me is about as good as it gets in articulating what campus ministry and university teaching is finally all about –then as these students find their ways into callings that embody the possibility that we can know the world and still love it, we will have done that which is ours to do.

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Steven Garber is the Director of The Washington Institute.  He can be reached at sgarber@washingtoninst.org.

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