Alain de Botton presented an interesting “Point of View “ on Radio 4 yesterday (Sunday) – a sort of “Thought for the Day” on wheels. The general gist of it was that, largely due to gadgets and modern technology, and a relentless obsession with news and current events, we have lost the ability to concentrate. Well, if concentration, as it no doubt is, is such a good thing, then let’s start by concentrating on what Alain has to say.

I don’t profess to be a philosopher, but some of his arguments seem questionable. To start with, his notion that the news occupies in the secular sphere much the same position of authority that the liturgical calendar has in the religious one. Is that really so? I’m a news junkie myself, but 24 hour news, while it may command attention, doesn’t have authority as such. Can a commodity which is so shifting and variable be said to occupy the niche filled by public worship in accordance with a prescribed form, which is what liturgy is? For religious believers there is no doubt as to what constitutes liturgy. Some news sources are regarded as more reliable than others, but what constitutes news is largely a matter of opinion and personal preference. News for the Sun reader is not news for the Guardian reader, and vice versa. Same goes for BBC World Service news and (say) Fox news. We freely pick and choose, which (whatever other virtues they may have) is not what the creyentes do.

Alain says that religious faith seldom has the need “to alter insights or harvest them incrementally through news bulletins. The great stable truths can be written down on vellum or carved into stone, rather than swirling malleably across hand-held screens.”

You don’t have to be a card-carrying humanist to wonder about these “great stable truths” which might be better described as grand categorical assertions, with plenty of potential to create interdenominational, inter-faith and indeed international conflict. Maybe the human project is better served by less in the way of dogma and more in the way of intellectual and moral independence, agnosticism, openness and fluidity. If the liberal view is right, and that you are best trying to figure philosophical stuff out for yourself , then Google and Wikipedia are probably going to be more of a help than recourse to the Bible, the Torah or the Koran.

Alain says that we pay a price for our promiscuous involvement with morality, whereas religion reminds us of the same old things – eternal quieter truths that we know about in theory, but don’t practise. There are two unwarrantable assumptions here – 1. That those who know about these allegedly eternal quieter truths necessarily practise them, and 2. that those who don’t have religious faith have no proper engagement with morality, and are deprived of access to such truths. It’s not entirely accidental, perhaps that Alain uses terms like guilt (“guilty for all that we’ve not yet read”) and “decadence” –from which the secular apparently need to be purged.

Give people enough rope and they will hang themselves, seems to be the thought. “How free secular society leaves us by contrast. It expects that we will spontaneously find our way to the ideas that matter to us... “ Like science, “it privileges discovery, it associates repetition with punitive shortage, presenting us with an incessant stream of novelty.” This is a scenario that’s difficult to recognize. Does the modern entertainment industry work in that way? On the contrary, most of what it produces, far from privileging discovery, seems to privilege fatuous repetition of tired formulae.

“We’re reluctant to admit that we’re simply swamped with information, and have lost the ability to make sense of it.”

Well, yes and no. There is certainly more information out there than any individual could possibly use, but Alain underestimates people’s ability to navigate their way around all that stuff and harvest information for their own purposes, thus making themselves potentially freer and better informed than any other generation in history. The internet is far from perfect (Wikipedia articles on 18^th century writers are all too often items pillaged directly from the 11^th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica) but it gets better all the time. What educated users of it do, almost by second nature, is to customize the thing – to bookmark their favourite sites, and fabricate their own hierarchy of values. This is what intelligent people have always done. Before the internet they were collecting their favourite books and organizing them in a certain way. For every sad soul that is lost and floundering in a fathomless sea of electronic information, I bet you there are ten whose understanding of real-life issues has been much enhanced, and whose contact with like-minded souls, has been greatly facilitated.

“Our minds, no less than our bodies, require periods of fasting”, says Alain. Not a bad idea, from time to time. But we don’t necessarily have to do that in a religious context - though it would be a mistake to take too narrow a view of religious contexts. It’s a long time since I visited in the cloisters of Rabelais’s Abbey of Thelema, but from what I recollect, it was a lot of fun. I admit, it wasn’t your conventional idea of a religious establishment.

Alain needs to cut down on Tolstoy and Chekhov, and cheer up a bit. The Rabelaisian abbey might do the trick. If not, he should just try and get out and about a bit more.