Weekend essay
Attention
Creed
Generosity
8 min read

Your attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity

Eighty years after her death, Simone Weil’s wisdom is a vital challenge to today’s attention economy. Justine Toh explores her life and thinking.

Justine Toh is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity in Sydney, Australia. 

A monotone street mural of a young woman looking fiercely at the viewer.
Street art image of Simone Weil, Berlin.

Your attention is a fragile thing.    

Trouble is, we only learn this after it’s been frayed – as realised by anyone who’s ever emerged, bleary-eyed and regretful, from watching one too many Instagram reels. Not that our inability to look away is entirely on us. In an attention economy, trillions of dollars are to be made through exploiting our attention. It’s why some, like social critic Matthew Crawford, call upon us to preserve the “attentional commons” by treating attention as a public good like fresh air and clean water. His point: let’s use the not-so-renewable resource of our attention wisely. Be careful about what you pay attention to.  

If you struggle with sustained focus – and, given corporate assaults upon it daily, how could you not – then it’s even more vital that you, well, attend to the life and work of Simone Weil (1909-1943).  

The French philosopher, labour activist, and not-quite-Catholic mystic wrote passionately about the importance of attention and even the “miracle” of its occurrence when directed, deeply and lovingly, towards another person. Reading Weil against the chronic distraction of our times – the real product flogged by that attention economy – makes clear that even eighty years after her death, Weil couldn’t be more relevant.

But for Weil, ideas needed to be lived and experienced. 

Weil’s life was short and difficult – often by choice. She grew up the younger sister of math prodigy André Weil in a comfortably middle-class, non-observant Jewish family in Paris. She had a first-rate education that set her up for a fairly cushy life as a teacher. But an encounter with then-classmate Simone de Beauvoir suggests a saint-in-waiting quality to the teenage Weil. Ever the idealist, she desired to feed the world’s starving millions. De Beauvoir, who recalls the exchange in her biography, was disinterested: finding the meaning of mankind’s existence was more important, she declared. “It’s easy to see you’ve never gone hungry,” retorted Weil. 

They weren’t empty words, either: Weil often did go hungry out of solidarity with suffering others. (Indeed, her refusal to eat more than her French compatriots under occupation likely hastened her death). But for Weil, ideas needed to be lived and experienced. Her determined attempt to identify deeply with the plight of working people meant she put herself forward for repetitive, fatiguing factory work or manual labour on farms, even though, sickly and clumsy, she often became a liability.  

There were other misadventures too: frustrated attempts to assist the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and, later, the French resistance during WWII. Few of these endeavours were fruitful but Weil was nothing if not committed to doing something, anything. Even if the outcome was uncertain and one wasn’t exactly fit for the task. 

For Weil, to attend well to other people meant making their welfare and wellbeing central to our concerns. 

It is in Weil’s writing about attention that we glimpse, perhaps, something of what drove her to put herself at the (frequently extreme) disposal of other people and causes she fervently believed in. In a now-famous essay on school studies, Weil makes a startling claim: the point of school is to teach us to pray – by which she meant: to attend, deeply, to whatever is before you.  

The idea was that students would apply themselves to an endeavour that wouldn’t reveal its secrets so easily. As Weil saw things, wrestling with algebra and trying to follow its impossible logic simultaneously flexed and trained, if you like, our attentional muscles. Even if the equation was still impenetrable after an hour, “this apparently barren effort,” Weil declared, would still bring “more light into the soul”. Teaching students to persist through difficulty, she believed, would pay off far beyond the mastery of any school subject. It would, in fact, prepare people for the real business of life: paying attention other people. Not least because, as we learn soon enough, they can be way more infuriating than maths. 

Even though Weil casts attention as prayer, God wasn’t to be the singular object of our attention. The plight of our neighbours was also to fill our gaze. For Weil, to attend well to other people meant making their welfare and wellbeing central to our concerns and bestowing on them the honour, love, and dignity they were due. It meant granting them the strange compliment of being real – or being a real person in the way we experience ourselves as real people – and then putting our own real selves at their disposal. This is why Weil called attention the “rarest and purest form of generosity”. It required the attentive person to, in a vivid phrase borrowed from Pope Francis, “remove our sandals before the sacred ground of the other”. 

The experience of suffering and misfortune seems to exile someone from the rest of humanity, to undo them in some essential way that strips them of their humanness. 

But the power of this attentive gaze goes still further. It has the power to rehumanise the dehumanised. As Weil writes: 

The love of our neighbour in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: “What are you going through?” It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labelled “unfortunate,” but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction. 

The experience of suffering and misfortune seems to exile someone from the rest of humanity, to undo them in some essential way that strips them of their humanness. Weil would go on to describe such a state as one of affliction – one she experienced, firsthand, as a factory worker. In a letter known as Spiritual Autobiography, she writes of the exhausting and gruelling nature of the work:  

“There I received for ever the mark of a slave, like the branding of the red-hot iron which the Romans put on the foreheads of their most despised slaves.” 

Affliction, then, is the person reduced to a “thing” by the experience of suffering and oppression. But here is the transformative power of attention: it is precisely what enables someone to recognise that the afflicted other is a person “exactly like us”.  

Take, for instance, Weil’s reading of Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, a tale perhaps broadly familiar to some. It describes an act of unexpected and radical compassion by a Samaritan, a social and ethnic outsider to a Jewish man robbed and left for dead.  

Christian commentators often pay close attention to the attentive care the Samaritan shows to the beaten man: for them, the true test of the Samaritan’s neighbourliness. But Weil has a different focus. For her, the critical moral act was the fact that the Samaritan paid attention. He stopped and looked at the man who had become less of man and, nonetheless, gave “his attention all the same to this humanity which is absent”. 

Weil calls this an act of “creative attention… [that gives] our attention to what does not exist.” Everything that then follows – the Samaritan pouring oil on the man’s wounds, taking him to a place where he will be cared for, and paying in advance for his keep – is almost beside the point, because it all depended on this first act. To be a neighbour, suggests Weil, is first of all to see. 

Perhaps this is why Weil writes that paying attention to the suffering of another “is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle.” Attention, then, enacts a kind of a resurrection because it can bring the almost dead back to life.  

The power of paying attention is that it can transform a lump of anonymous, misshapen flesh lying by the side of the road into the other person who is “exactly like us”, the other person who is as real as we are. The person who requires, from us, all the compassion we would wish to be shown if we were set upon by robbers on a lonely road. 

Our entire attention economy is organised around helping us avoid the demands of other people. How many of us have retreated to the comfort of our screens to soothe our social anxiety 

We’ve travelled a long way from where we started: with our difficulty focusing in an age of distraction and the all-too-familiar experience of giving our attention – which, as Weil has taught us, also means giving ourselves – to things that don’t always deserve it. But our own travails with attention have much to learn from Weil’s account of the moral, political, and spiritual charge of attention. 

For one, she illuminates for us the determined inattention of our time. Our entire attention economy is organised around helping us avoid the demands of other people. How many of us have retreated to the comfort of our screens to soothe our social anxiety, or to numb the guilt we feel at failing to show up for people? It turns out that the loss of our focus and ability to concentrate is just the tip of the attentional iceberg. Also at stake is our ability to be present to the people we love, and even to be present to ourselves – and our pain.  

Beyond that, there are many contemporary equivalents of the man of Jesus’ parable, first afflicted by suffering and then afflicted by the ease with which that suffering can be ignored. I write from Australia, in the recent aftermath of a defeated referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament: an invitation, issued from the nation’s first peoples to their fellow citizens, to see their unique circumstances and grant them representation over policy matters directly affecting them. Lives are in the balance: the life outcomes of Aboriginal people are drastically worse than other Australian citizens. Now, to the loss of language, culture, country, and pride, comes a further blow: they will not be listened to, either.  

They are not the only people we struggle to see. The lady with Alzheimer’s Disease, the illegal immigrant, the victim of family violence, the modern-day child slaves forced to mine cobalt to power our smartphones. It is profoundly difficult – and costly – for us to see them and recognise their claims upon us. To love others, as Jesus once enjoined his followers, as we love ourselves. 

The vulnerable have always risked being overlooked and ignored. But Weil gives us eyes to see all this – and asks that we do not look away. “Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world,” she writes, “but people capable of giving them their attention.”

Article
Belief
Creed
Education
7 min read

The myth of secular neutrality

Where academia went wrong.

Alex Stewart is a lawyer, trustee and photographer.  

A phrenology head is shown with its eyes closed.
David Matos on Unsplash.

In the recent horror-thriller Heretic, Hugh Grant plays Mr. Reed, a sharp-witted psychopath who imprisons two missionaries, subjecting them to ceaseless diatribes about the supposed irrationality of all religions.  Mr. Reed is also a terribly smug, self-righteous bore, a caricature of the fervent atheist who dismisses faith as mere superstition while assuming atheism is objective and neutral.  

This kind of assumption lies behind the criticisms directed by secularists at those who argue from a position of faith, as we saw recently with the debates on the Assisted Dying Bill. Yet, the notion of secular objectivity is itself a fallacy. Secularism, like any worldview, is a perspective, ironically one that is deeply indebted to Christianity, and humanity’s history of abandoning faith and its moral foundation has had disastrous consequences.  

Secularism is a bias, often grounded in an ethical vanity, whose supposedly universal principles have very Christian roots. Concepts like personal autonomy stem from a tradition that views life as sacred, based on the belief that humans are uniquely created in God's image. Appeals to compassion reflect Jesus’ teachings and Christian arguments for social justice throughout history. Claims that the Assisted Dying Bill was "progressive" rely on the Judaeo-Christian understanding of time as linear rather than cyclical. Even the separation of the secular and sacred is derived from Jesus’ teaching to “render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s”. Authors like Tom Holland in Dominion and Glen Scrivener in The Air We Breathe have shown how Western societies, though often disconnected from their Christian roots, still operate within frameworks shaped by centuries of Christianity.

The antidote to human pride and self-deception was to be found in the Almighty.  Ironically, it was this humility, rooted in a very theological concern about human cognitive fallibility, that gave birth to the scientific method. 

A political secularism began to emerge after the seventeenth century European religious wars but the supposed historical conflict between science and religion, in which the former triumphs over superstition and a hostile Church, is myth. Promoted in the eighteenth century by figures like John Draper and Andrew White, this ‘conflict thesis’ persists even though it has been comprehensively debunked by works such as David Hutchings and James C. Ungureanu’s Of Popes and Unicorns and Nicholas Spencer’s Magisteria. Historians now emphasize the complex, often collaborative relationship between faith and science. 

Far from opposing intellectual inquiry, faith was its foundation. Medieval Christian Europe birthed the great universities; this was not simply because the Church had power and wealth but because knowledge of God was viewed as the basis for all understanding. University mottos reflect this view: Oxford’s "Dominus illuminatio mea" (The Lord is my light), Yale’s "Lux et Veritas" (Light and Truth), and Harvard’s original "Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae" (Truth for Christ and the Church). This intertwining of faith and academia fuelled the Enlightenment, when scientists like Boyle, Newton, and Kepler approached the study of creation (what Calvin described as ‘the theatre of God’s glory”) as an affirmation of the divine order of a God who delighted in His creatures “thinking His thoughts after Him”.   

Their Christian beliefs not only provided an impetus for rigorous exploration but also instilled in them a humility about human intellect. Unlike modernity's view of the mind as a detached, all-seeing eye, they believed man’s cognitive faculties had been diminished, both morally and intellectually, by Adam’s fall, which made perfect knowledge unattainable. Blaise Pascal captures this struggle with uncertainty in his Pensées.  

“We desire truth, and find within ourselves only uncertainty....This desire is left to us, partly to punish us, partly to make us perceive from whence we have fallen.”  

For Pascal and his believing contemporaries, the antidote to human pride and self-deception was to be found in the Almighty.  Ironically, it was this humility, rooted in a very theological concern about human cognitive fallibility, that gave birth to the scientific method, the process of systematic experimentation based on empirical evidence, and which later became central to Enlightenment thinking. 

Orwell was not alone in thinking that some ideas were so foolish that only intellectuals believed them. 

Although many of its leading lights were believers, the Enlightenment era hastened a shift away from God and towards man as the centre of understanding and ethics. Philosophers like David Hume marginalized or eliminated God altogether, paving the way for His later dismissal as a phantom of human projection (Freud) or as a tool of exploitation and oppression (Marx), while Rousseau popularised the appealing idea that rather than being inherently flawed, man was naturally good, only his environment made him do bad things.  

But it took the nihilist Nietzsche, the son of a Lutheran pastor, to predict the moral vacuum created by the death of God and its profound consequences. Ethical boundaries became unstable, allowing new ideologies to justify anything in pursuit of their utopian ends. Nietzsche’s prophesies about the rise of totalitarianism and competing ideologies that were to characterise the twentieth century were chillingly accurate. Germany universities provided the intellectual justification for Nazi atrocities against the Jews while the Marxist inspired revolutions and policies of the Soviet and Chinese Communist regimes led to appalling suffering and the deaths of between 80 and 100 million people. Devoid of divine accountability, these pseudo, human-centred religions amplified human malevolence and man’s destructive impulses.      

By the early 1990s, the Soviet Union had collapsed, leading Francis Fukuyama to opine from his ivory tower that secular liberal democracy was the natural end point in humanity's socio-political evolution and that history had ‘ended’. But his optimism was short lived. The events of 9/11 and the resurgence of a potent Islamism gave the lie that everyone wanted a western style secular liberal democracy, while back in the west a repackaged version of the old Marxist oppressor narrative began to appear on campuses, its deceitful utopian Siren song that man could be the author of his own salvation bewitching the academy. This time it came in the guise of divisive identity-based ideologies overlayed with post-modern power narratives that seemed to defy reality and confirm Chesterton’s view that when man ceased to believe in God he was capable of believing in anything.  

As universities promoted ideology over evidence and conformity over intellectual freedom, George Orwell’s critique of intellectual credulity and the dark fanaticism it often fosters, epitomized in 1984 where reality itself is manipulated through dogma, seemed more relevant than ever.  Orwell was not alone in thinking that some ideas were so foolish that only intellectuals believed them. Other commentators like Thomas Sowell are equally sceptical, critiquing the tenured academics whose lives are insulated from the suffering of those who have to live under their pet ideologies, and who prefer theories and sophistry to workable solutions. Intellect, he notes, is not the same thing as wisdom. More recently, American writer David Brooks, writing in The Atlantic, questions the point of having elite educational systems that overemphasize cognitive ability at the expense of other qualities, suggesting they tend to produce a narrow-minded ruling class who are blind to their own biases and false beliefs. 

It was intellectual over-confidence that led many institutions to abandon their faith-based origins. Harvard shortened its motto from "Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae" to plain "Veritas” and introduced a tellingly symbolic change to its shield. The original shield depicted three books: two open, symbolizing the Old and New Testaments, and one closed, representing a knowledge that required divine revelation. The modern shield shows all three books open, reflecting a human centred worldview that was done with God. 

However, secular confidence seems to be waning. Since the peak of New Atheism in the mid-2000s, there has been a growing dissatisfaction with worldviews limited to reason and materialism. Artists like Nick Cave have critiqued secularism’s inability to address concepts like forgiveness and mercy, while figures like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Russell Brand have publicly embraced Christianity. The longing for the transcendent and a world that is ‘re-enchanted’ seems to be widespread.  

Despite the Church’s struggles, the teaching and person of Christ, the One who claimed not to point towards the truth but to be the Truth, the original Veritas the puritan founders of Harvard had in mind, remains as compelling as ever.  The story of fall, forgiveness, cosmic belonging and His transforming love is the narrative that most closely maps to our deepest human longings and lived experience, whilst simultaneously offering us the hope of redemption and - with divine help – becoming better versions of ourselves, the kind of people that secularism thinks we already are.   

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