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Who Cares About Indifference?


Human beings can only care about so many things, and they should not care about everything. However, the modern, Western world insists upon strong opinions about everything. Distant things such as wars on the other side of the world, the latest presidential policy, a new viral video, or even the food you buy, and that company’s political affiliation, are all (apparently) extremely important. Despite what is constantly communicated, a man does not need an opinion about everything and everyone, even though everyone and everything has an opinion about him. Therefore, it is extremely important to cultivate in oneself (or in one’s students) calculated, conscious, and intentional indifference toward many things.

 Indifference is the intentional disregard for something due to its lack of worth or disproportionate claim on your time, attention, or affection. Being indifferent toward something means diminishing its claim on your attention. Politics are not totally unimportant, but they are not as important as raising children, or you could say raising children is a kind of politics. A car is necessary (and therefore important in the 21st century), but it is not as important as reading. Indifference, therefore, is often an intentional reordering of a claim upon one’s time and affections.

In his biography of J.R.R. Tolkien, Humphrey Carpenter provides a brief example of Tolkien’s calculated indifference. Carpenter writes that, “During breakfast, Tolkien glances at the newspaper, but only in a most cursory fashion. He, like his friend C.S. Lewis, regards ‘news’ as on the whole trivial and fit to be ignored, and they both argue (to the annoyance of many of their friends) that the only ‘truth’ is to be found in literature.” This intentional indifference shared by Lewis and Tolkien, which seems to be the minority view based on Carpenter’s prose, is based on a previously held conviction of the triviality of ever-changing headlines and press. Tolkien and Lewis and many other serious Christians have intentionally been indifferent toward daily headlines. The oxymoron of intentional indifference is important. In fact, we must intend to be indifferent, because everything is marketed as most important.

The God-given desire to love and cultivate the created world is regularly stretched beyond its natural limit. We often feel “thin, like butter scraped across too much toast.” Technology has done this most tiresomely. Even my own neighbors in my neighborhood, which I have lived in long enough, tend toward internationalism over localism. Things going on across the Atlantic or over the Mississippi are more important than the lonely widow across the street. By disordering our affections, even with good intentions, we do not love our neighbor as ourselves. We spend our God-given love poorly, wasting it, and we tire ourselves out simply trying to equally disperse our attention, empathy, anger against injustice, and love across the whole world when God designed it for our street, spouse, and local society.

So, what is the answer? It begins with the question: What is our God-given responsibility? What small collection of things should occupy an intense measure of our emotions, service, and honor? It begins with our neighbor, our home, our street, and our family. It does not end there. It requires us to spend less time on the internet because the internet inherently steals the affections intended for the locality where God has placed us, the people in front of us, not the screen. Attention is a mark of love. We should seek to cultivate godly attention to intentionally cultivate godly indifference.

Peter Kreeft, philosophy professor at Boston College University, met Mother Teresa several decades ago. It was in a large crowd at a local Catholic parish. Kreeft remarks that everyone who met her came away with the same conclusion. Mother Teresa shook hands with individuals in the crowd for a long time. Yet, every single person that was asked about the encounter said that she spoke to them, looked at them, and shook hands with them as if they were the only person there. A gracious, quiet, focused, loving attention was centered on the person before her. She cast her love on each set of eyes, each hand, each image of God. Her attention was devout and sacred. The love she had was given to that person fully for those few moments. Indeed, many stories of those who meet modern saints are full of this kind of godly attention. In a singular manner, the saints love people through their attention and in so doing, love God.

Attention, the opposite of indifference, is a product of God’s love and our love for God. Holiness begets attention; it is seeing God in the person before you. The call to attention is a call to love your neighbor as yourself. Attention is evidence of love, and attention costs something. It is self-forgetfulness, a healing thing to the soul. Attention is Christian, Christ-like, and forces a decision between a variety of options in any moment. It acknowledges honor, dignity, and value; it “takes them aside from the crowd,” as Christ did. It is the practice of blessed self-forgetfulness.

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