Did you know this about the IW Knights of Columbus?
The following article is published in the KofC Columbia magazine although originally published in the Southern Nebraska Register, the newspaper of the Diocese of Lincoln, NE (http://www.kofc.org/en/columbia/detail/the-age-of-noise.html).
“More than 70 years ago, the English satirist Aldous Huxley wrote that modernity is the ‘age of noise’. He was writing about the radio, whose noise he said ‘penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions – news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis.
If Huxley had lived into the 21st century, he would have seen the age of noise redoubled and amplified beyond the radio – first to our televisions and then to our tablets and mobile devices, machines which bring distraction and ‘doses of drama’ with us wherever we go. We are, today, awash in information, assaulted, often, with tweets and pundits analyzing the latest crisis in Washington, or difficulty in the Church, or serious social, political or environmental issue. It can become, for many people, overwhelming.
To be sure, we have a responsibility as faithful Catholics to be aware of the world and its challenges, and to be engaged in the cultural and political affairs of our communities. We cannot shirk or opt out from that responsibility. But we are living at a moment of constant urgencies and crises, the ‘tyranny of the immediate,’ where reactions to the latest news unfold at a breakneck pace, often before much thought, reflection or consideration. We are living at a moment where argument precedes analysis, and outrage, or feigned outrage, has become an ordinary kind of virtue signaling – a way of conveying the ‘right’ responses to social issues in order to boost our social standing.
The 2016 U.S. presidential election was a two-year slog of platitudinous and superficial argument, and now that the election is over, that argument seems interminable. No person can sustain the kind of noise – polemical, shrill and reactive – which has become a substitute for conversation in contemporary culture. Nor should any person try. The ‘age of noise’ diminishes virtue, and charity, and imagination, replacing them with anxiety, and worry, and exhaustion.
The Lord didn’t make us for this kind of noise. He made us for conversation, for exchange and communion. And our political community depends upon real deliberation: serious debate and activism over serious subjects. But the Lord also made us for silence. For contemplation. For quietude. And without these things anchoring our lives and our hearts, the age of noise transforms us, fostering in our hearts reactive and uncharitable intemperance that characterizes the media and social media spaces which shape our culture.
The age of noise is grinding away at our souls…”
The remainder of the article can be found at the link posted at: facebook.com/IWknights9981 or www.IWKnights.com
We would like to talk with you about becoming an IW Knight. Please visit us on-line at our web site: www.IWknights.com/aboutus. Or, call Rob at: (314) 973-2373.
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Please shop our book and CD Rack-in-the-Back. Suggested Donation for the CD’s is $3.00/title – books on the top shelf and the booklets Rack are FREE.
