Man's Search for Distraction

Give in.  That slice of pie in the refrigerator.  The TV remote within arm’s reach when I’m trying to get into a good book.  The latest electronic chachki in the circular in the Sunday paper.  The shiny new car in the neighbor’s driveway.  That pair of shoes, or new cell phone.

Give in.  All the while, we’re tuning out of life.  Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist, working with patients who wanted to be happy but were not.  That he died in 1997 surprised me.  His Man’s Search for Meaning dealt with his life in Auschwitz, and that seems to me a long time ago.  But he lived long enough – just long enough to write his last book, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning – and refer to pornography as the overwhelming example of giving in, of relieving tension.  We give in and for the time that we are eating the pie or flipping through the channels or fiddling with the new gadget or smelling the new car smell or looking at those new shoes on our feet or the feel of the new phone in our hand, we’re distracted.  The tension that we felt not having that pie or that cell phone is gone.  For a few moments, we are blissfully preoccupied.

Frankl refers repeatedly to Arthur Schnitzler’s three human virtues – objectivity, courage, and responsibility.  If we look at reality, at the world, as it is, at people, at conditions of life, our hearts will be moved, and a meaningful tension will be created in us, a tension which we must relieve by responding.  Perhaps that is why Frankl speaks so certainly about the harm of pornography.  It turns people into objects.  Rather than calling us to virtue and lives of meaning, it provides us with a too-often compelling source of giving in to distraction.