In today’s efficiency-obsessed economy, it’s possible to order a sandwich and have it at your door in minutes.

Fast food, AI overviews, on-demand streaming, and credit cards have habituated us to instant gratification. This habit, which we’ve acquired from modern conveniences and consumerism, provides one of the framing principles of the internet. But the medium of the internet is information, which means that when we seek instant answers, we are trying to apply the instant gratification model to the pursuit of wisdom and truth.

That’s a totally unfitting application.

Wisdom doesn’t come in sound bites. Truth isn’t available with same-day shipping. Wisdom and truth result from the gradual process of contemplatively digesting experience and study over the course of many years. There is no shortcut.

Speaking about the acquisition of prudence, a kind of wisdom, Aristotle wrote in the “Nicomachean Ethics,”

Whereas young people become accomplished in geometry and mathematics, and wise within these limits, prudent young people do not seem to be found. The reason is that prudence is concerned with particulars as well as universals, and particulars become known from experience, but a young person lacks experience, since some length of time is needed to produce it.

As Aristotle observes, wisdom is deeply tied to experience, and it takes time to have experiences in the first place and ruminate on them and extract principles of wisdom afterwards.

Today, we seem to act increasingly like those Aristotle describes: wise only within certain limits; street smart; adept at processing large amounts of information very quickly; digitally fluent; yet surprisingly devoid of substantive wisdom.

And surprisingly impatient.

Take Charlie Kirk’s murder, for example. Immediately after Kirk’s tragic death, the internet exploded with theories, accusations, and wild speculations, all proclaimed with astonishing, almost shameless levels of certainty and confidence. The online accusers considered the lack of clarification from federal agents and prosecutors as an intentional effort to hide evidence, to conceal a government plot. I’m not saying that no deception by authorities occurred (because I don’t know), but it’s incredible that online pundits seemed unaware that, during ongoing investigations, it’s standard procedure not to release too much information to the public too quickly. The integrity of the investigation depends on it. Tips must be verified. Leads must be followed to their conclusion. The dust needs to settle.

Arriving at the truth in a criminal case takes time. Now that the preliminaries of Tyler Robinson’s trial have officially begun, the public has received a lot more information than we had in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. But the intervening months were, apparently, just too long to wait for many of the terminally online. They thought federal agents ought to be able to download the truth immediately after the crime occurred, and viewed their failure to do so itself as another crime or even a coverup.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is not how the world works. Investigation takes time. Research takes time. Rumination takes time.

And for information to really matter – whether it’s about a murder case, a political debate, or anything else – it must seep deeply into the mind and heart, “aging” like a good wine. Truth is a reality to be quietly received and cherished, not some kind of intellectual candy. Truth is not for sale, and she will not yield herself to the impatient and the demanding.

Unfortunately, our information ecosystem is built around the opposite principle – truth as a commodity, truth on demand, to be bought and sold at a rapid pace in a marketplace where every voice vies for our attention.

Slogans, “hot takes,” and personal attacks are slung back and forth in a flurry of online chatter at an ever-increasing rate, with little reflection taking place. Because most online publications treat truth as a commodity, they must constantly churn out more “content” so the audience has something new to “consume.” Online “consumers” do not sit with ideas, nor do they ponder, penetrating ever deeper into a kernel of wisdom or patiently letting truth illuminate their mind. They’re looking for the next dopamine hit.

Truth and information are no longer the end; in the modern digital economy, information is the means to something else – namely, a dopamine rush. And as with any other drug addiction, over time the addict needs higher and more rapid doses in order to achieve the same effect. Hence the frenetic pace of online discourse today and the ever-more shocking headlines and video thumbnails.

In “How to Read a Book,” Mortimer J. Adler and Charles van Doren noted that too much information too fast can hinder our ability to know things. Even before the advent of the internet, they wrote,

Perhaps we know more about the world than we used to, and insofar as knowledge is prerequisite to understanding, that is all to the good. … We do not have to know everything about something in order to understand it; too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few. There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding.

They conclude with a devastating observation, “But it may be seriously questioned whether the advent of modern communications media has much enhanced our understanding of the world in which we live.” Chew on that for a while.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal, a project of 1819 News. 

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