The Lotus Eaters: Remembrance and Coherence in a World of Addiction and Distraction

By Philip Shepherd

Guest Writer for Wake Up World

In chapter nine of Homer’s epic The Odyssey, a strange event is described: Odysseus arrived with his crew in the country of the Lotus Eaters, and chose three scouts to reconnoitre. On encountering the local inhabitants, the scouts were offered not hostility but food: a type of honey-sweet lotus fruit, which they devoured readily. But the more they ate, the more forgetful they became – forgetful of returning to Odysseus, forgetful even of their desire to return home. So deep was their craving for more of the fruit that when Odysseus and his men found them, they had to be carried forcibly back to the ships where, still weeping, they were tied beneath the rowing benches.

The story of the Lotus Eaters has a special relevance for us, for we too are driven by cravings. What really strikes home for me, though, isn’t so much the addictive longing the fruit creates, as the forgetfulness it induces. And more specifically, the fact that those eating the fruit seemed unaware of its power to induce forgetfulness.

I see that same story playing itself out in my own life, I I particularly when I find myself staring at a little screen. The longer I stare, the more forgetful I become of my breath and the unfelt, living world around me. As the spell of my private screen draws me deeper into forgetfulness, I suffer a further loss that I seem almost to be anaesthetized to: the coherence of my being – that clear, alert attunement to self and world – clouds over and deteriorates into white noise. In the absence of that coherence – an absence that endures long after I have stepped away from the screen – I have the sense of drifting through the hours that follow. That sense of drifting is a sure sign that I am under the spell of a mythic Lotus.

To wrest free of this oblivion, I think it’s crucial to identify the fruit that lures us. It’s not the screen itself – the screen is just the enabler. But what does it enable that is so deeply seductive? I think the answer is that it gives us access to a particular kind of information that is appealing in its promise of certainty and value, forgiving in that it’s easily digestible and asks very little of us, and as transitory as a ceaseless consumer could ask for. I call this kind of information digital information, because like digital music it breaks the whole into discrete bits that profess to add up to a whole, but which are always riddled with gaps.

We are addicted to gathering such facts about the world the way a hoarder piles up stuff. We want to know about bargains, new products, the latest political scandal, miracle diets, cute kittens, the latest fads, celebrity romances and the economy. We crave expert advice on our health, the environment, career choices, fashion choices and relationship choices. We gather such ideas insatiably, because of a tacit promise our culture communicates: Knowledge Will Save Us. Armed with our broken facts – facts that stand independent of the world they purport to represent – we hope to wield the knowledge they empower us with and make things better. We hope to fix our own lives and we even hope to gain enough knowledge to fix the world.

That is the promise, anyway, but it is an empty one. Exposing its frailty is as simple as asking, “But if knowledge could save us, wouldn’t we and our planet be much better off now than we were, say, three hundred years ago?” Coral reefs dying, antibiotics rendered ineffective, pollinators perishing, WMDs stockpiled, income gaps expanding – we have inherited a world of unintended consequences, and it bears witness to the ways in which objective knowledge becomes lethal when it is not counterbalanced by an equal measure of self-knowledge. Like the Lotus Eaters, though, we have fallen so deeply under the spell of the promise that we barely remember what it means to come home to ourselves, and are confused about how to go about it. There is no Odysseus in the wings, ready to drag us away from the source of our forgetfulness, kicking and screaming, until we come to our senses. And so we find ourselves drifting, distracted and anxious.