opinion | What students need is a taste of the monk’s life
“On college campuses, these students think they’re all individuals, going out and being wild,” he said. But they’re in a box. I tell them, “You know you will be protected by campus police and lawyers. You have this whole device ready for you. You think you’re an individual, but look at your four friends: they all look just like you and sound like you. We exist in very strict structures that we like to pretend don’t exist.’” (It is worth noting that Dr. McDaniel describes his own politics as “philosophically anarchic”.) His course offers an opportunity to temporarily reinstate those unconscious structures. exchange for a series of deliberate, counter-cultural ones.
No one understands discipline better than the Benedictines, members of the monastic order who follow the rule written by Saint Benedict in the sixth century. Students at Belmont Abbey College outside Charlotte, NC, share their quadrangles, sidewalks — even their chess clubs — with Benedictine monks who live in an abbey right on campus. “For the past 1,500 years, Benedictines have been dealing with technology,” Placid Solari, the abbot there, told me. “For us, the question is, how do you use the tool so that it supports and enhances your purpose or mission, and you don’t get possessed by it.”
Mental distraction was a struggle, even for the ancient ascetics who didn’t have Snapchat. When the mind wanders and a monk wants to “tie it with the firmest purpose of the heart, as if with chains, while we try, it slips from the deepest recesses of the heart, swifter than a serpent,” John Cassian, a fourth-century monk, wrote. Many monasteries do not completely reject the latest technology, but they are aware of how they use it. Abbot Placid told me that for novices at his monastery, “part of the training is discipline to learn how to master the use of technology.” After this initial time of limited phone and TV “to wean them from over-reliance on technology and its stimulation”, they gain more access and mostly make their own choices.
Evan Lutz graduated from Belmont Abbey in May with a major in theology. He emphasized the special Catholic context of the monks living in Belmont; if you experiment with monastic practices without examining the whole worldview, it can become a superficial kind of mindfulness tourism. The monks of Belmont Abbey do more than model contemplation and focus. Their presence forces even non-Christians on campus to think seriously about vocation and the meaning of life. “Either what the monks are doing is valuable and based on something true, or it is completely ridiculous,” said Mr. Lutz. “In both cases, there’s something striking there and it asks people a question.”
Pondering ultimate questions and cultivating cognitive stamina shouldn’t be luxury goods. David Peña-Guzmán, who teaches philosophy at San Francisco State University, read about Dr. McDaniel and decided he wanted to create a similar course. He called it the reading experiment. A small group of humanities scholars met once every two weeks for five and a half hours in a seminar room with benches and a large round table. They read authors ranging from Jean-Paul Sartre to Frantz Fanon. “At the beginning of each lesson, I would ask students to turn off their phones and put them in ‘the Basket of Despair,’ which was a plastic bag,” he told me. “I had an extensive conversation with them about accessibility. It’s not about taking the phone away for its own sake, but about taking away our primary sources of distraction. The students were allowed to keep the phone if they needed it. But they all chose to get rid of their phones.”