Mount Saint Mary College welcomed Joshua Hochschild, a professor of Philosophy at Mount St. Mary’s University, for his presentation “Friendship, Truth, and the Spiritual Challenges of Digital Distraction” on Monday, October 20.
Sponsored by the Catholic and Dominican Institute (CDI) and held as part of the college’s annual Founders Day celebration, the talk addressed the significant impact of modern technology on attention, community, and personal peace.
Hochschild, co-author of A Mind at Peace: Reclaiming an Ordered Soul in the Age of Distraction, discussed the benefits of applying classical philosophical and theological wisdom to navigate the challenges of the digital age.
“The digital revolution is a grand social experiment, the results of which we don’t know yet,” he noted, pointing out that even with increased connectivity afforded to us by the internet, many of us are experiencing increased levels of loneliness and alienation. Constant access to unlimited stimuli is reshaping human habits and requiring a more intentional approach to personal development, he said.
Hochschild emphasized that the challenge here is not technological, but spiritual and behavioral.
“Our brains weren’t intended for that environment, but now we’ve created one where anything, all the time, can demand our attention,” he said. “We have to work harder to cultivate basic virtues of self-control, of consciousness, of ordering our actions toward the common good. We have to be more intentional about forming relationships because they don’t happen naturally anymore.”
The philosopher stressed that overcoming digital distraction requires intentional, communal discipline, citing successful examples of groups that have established cultural practices to encourage face-to-face interaction, such as colleges that ask students to not use their phones during meals with each other.
“Once the cultural practice is there and you experience the goods of that, you look forward to it and you don’t resist it,” said Hochschild. “I think college campuses are a great place for that to happen.”
The event was sponsored by the Catholic and Dominican Institute, which promotes the Mount’s Dominican heritage and provides a forum for discussion of contemporary ethical issues.
Hochschild is an accomplished scholar who has published extensively on the history of logic, metaphysics, and ethics, and is a past president of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.