The Global Palantir

 If you go into the cultural/religious/public square by way of social media, which is probably the most accessible way to do it nowadays, you find a superfluity not only of dumb comments, but also of very acute, well-informed, perceptive commentary by people who have spent a lifetime studying their specific niche and writing about it.  Then there is that middle ground of the people who have strong opinions and can communicate fairly well, but are idiosyncratic and controversial.    There is, of course, everything in between as well.  

There is no way a person could read and thoroughly digest everything that comes through, let alone comment on it wisely.    But on the other hand, if you don't try, how do you know you aren't missing the next crucially important thing?   

My working solution is to stay out of the foamy edge of the wave, most of the time.   By that I mean I don't read about things as they are happening unless they are likely to affect me directly, or unless I particularly like the commentator's style and regularly follow his or her writing.   

 Yesterday I mentioned Traditionis Custodes.   Back in 2021, that was something that was going to affect me and people I knew, plus bringing out all sorts of issues of great philosophical and religious importance.   And by reading about it I found all kinds of very interesting writers and learned a lot.   

Currently it is an election year, and a rather dramatic one, so I'm actually checking X, which I usually ignore, on a daily basis.  

Normally, for things that seem important, religiously or politically, I catch up after the moment, when the commentary has matured a bit.    If they are important, they are not going to go away after a few days or a week or a month.      I read more old things than new things.   I tend to mostly focus on writers who have background wisdom and don't just hammer on a party line.  And so on.  

It's interesting to reflect on how much I would actually know about the political and religious controversies if there was no internet.    In a given day I live a fairly cenobitic existence, if I can call it that when I am a lay christifidelis with a family.    We have a regular routine, punctuated by planned but occasional outings to grocery shop, visit friends, check in with doctors, etc.    Most of the family members living with us have remote jobs -- if there was no internet I suppose it would be equivalent to living in a house of writers or artists or something like that.  

We would probably subscribe to newspapers and periodicals, as we used to before the internet days, and check books out of the library.   We would pore over book catalogs and buy as many as we could afford of the kind we were interested in.   In other words, we would still know enough about contemporary things to be Catholic "civi" or "fideles".

In other words, we would be something like the hobbits in the pre-Sauron Shire, or maybe a shade more citified than that.   Everything would be filtered through plenty of time and space and come to us as more or less distant rumors.   Plus, we would have some time and space in our own lives to round out the partial and distorted news picture with study and thought on the issues, and also real life experiences that tend to develop perspective and common sense that are not generally a strong feature of the news cycle. 

Well, it's not like that anymore.   Through X I found a blog post by Steve Skojec in which he comments about the world of current affairs through his recent experiences as a DoorDash driver.   He made a comparison of social media to the Palantir which drove Denethor crazy.   This is a very apt analogy, in my opinion.   The Palantir gave you a look at things far away in time and place, but if you weren't strong of mind it could destroy you.    

A major theme of palantír usage is that while the stones show real objects or events, those using the stones had to "possess great strength of will and of mind" to direct the stone's gaze to its full capability.[T 2] The stones were an unreliable guide to action, since what was not shown could be more important than what was selectively presented. A risk lay in the fact that users with sufficient power could choose what to show and what to conceal to other stones: in The Lord of the Rings, a palantír has fallen into the Enemy's hands, making the usefulness of all other existing stones questionable.

The virtue of Hobbitry in this regard, as far as relative immunity to the palantir's power, is in accepting that they are not inherently strong of will or mind.   In a kind of realistic and positive humility, in fact.  And in trusting Gandalf when he said this and other things, though their trust and compliance has nothing of servility or abasement of common sense.    There is more that I would like to say about that aspect of it, and how it relates to cenobitic life : ) but it will have to wait for another day.  

Here I just want to dwell on the reality that though it's interesting to think about the alternate universe where the internet doesn't exist, that is not this world, but that we do have a choice about how long and intently and obsessively we look at the Palantir.    Or I should say, I have a choice.    It gives you sight, but at a cost which should be factored in with its benefits.