Seeing and Hearing: A free-religious response to the information crisis
A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Gathering of Mindful Meditation, Music & Conversation
(Click on this link to hear a recorded version of the following piece)
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In a recent Guardian article, ‘How to survive the information crisis: “We once talked about fake news – now reality itself feels fake”’, the editor Katharine Viner confessed that, for her, ‘thinking and writing have become harder.’ She describes a feeling many of us share: ‘It’s as if the neurons in my brain don’t connect with each other in quite the same way. I go to check a fact and get instantly diverted by a hundred other distractions on my phone.’
Drawing on Naomi Alderman’s book, Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today, Viner argues that we are in an information crisis with few precedents. We live in a ‘tidal wave of data’ without the social structures to manage it. Our attention spans are degraded, and our thinking skills feel blunted.
I want to explore a solution to this crisis that Viner suggests—and it’s one we already promote in our free-religious community. To do this, I’ll begin with some famous words by T. S. Eliot from his 1934 play, The Rock. In this work, Eliot focused on the spiritual necessity of building churches—both as physical buildings and as communities of faith—within a modern, secular world. He wrote:
‘Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?’
These lines seem to speak directly to our current crisis, but a Japanese translation of Eliot’s work recently prompted me to reassess them. While sharing Eliot’s words with a Japanese friend, I found a 1967 translation by Ryuichi Tamura that offers a remarkably prescient rendering—one that reveals a nuance Eliot himself could perhaps not have fully anticipated. A literal English back-translation of Tamura’s version reads:
‘Within our knowledge [知識, chishiki], the wisdom [知慧, chie] we have utterly lost—where is it? Within our seeing-and-hearing [見聞, kenbun], the knowledge [知識, chishiki] we have utterly lost—where is it?’
「われらが知識のうちに失ってしまった知慧はどこか？われらが見聞のうちに失ってしまった知識はどこか？」—（『T・S・エリオット詩集』p.105）
Fascinatingly, I discovered that Tamura does not use the standard Japanese word for information, jōhō [情報]. This term, coined in the late nineteenth century, came to refer to information as reported facts, news, and clinical data. In the 1930s, when Eliot wrote these lines, he was worried about the volume of fragmented facts that flooded modern life—for example, perhaps, stock prices, political dispatches, and celebrity gossip. In his day, however, one could still reasonably assume that a newspaper photograph or a radio voice corresponded to reality in some meaningful fashion. The problem then was too much information, not—in the first instance, at least—fake information; although, of course, fake information has always been around. The point I wish to make is that trust in perception itself remained intact.
Yet, in a move that feels providential for our moment, as I have noted, Tamura doesn’t use jōhō [情報] for information, but kenbun [見聞]—this is a much older word meaning ‘things seen and heard’; that is to say, the raw material of direct perception. While his choice in 1967 was likely to have been literary, it provides us today with, I think, a vital diagnostic lens. It helps us see that the crisis Eliot identified has fundamentally shifted. We are no longer merely overwhelmed by quantity; we are assaulted by sensory falsehoods.
A deepfake video looks exactly like something we have actually seen, or could see (ken [見]); an AI-generated voice sounds exactly like something we have actually heard or could have heard (bun [聞]). Yet neither is truly real. Social media algorithms now hijack our eyes and ears with fabricated or decontextualised clips designed to trigger emotional responses and compel us toward actions that are as undesirable as they are destructive. Through Tamura’s translation, the word kenbun [見聞]—seeing and hearing—helps to reveal the very faculty under attack today, namely, our direct perception.
This helps us see that we are not just facing data overload, but something we can call an ‘epistemic collapse’—that is to say a total breakdown in our ability to know what is real. Jōhō [情報], with its abstract, data-centric flavour, feels too distant from the visceral experience of a convincing deepfake. Kenbun [見聞]—seeing and hearing—brings our attention back to our bodies and forces us to confront the reality that two of our primary channels of perception—our eyes and ears—have been weaponised.
This linguistic shift found in the Japanese helps reveal the hidden cost of our crisis. Viner’s feeling that her ‘neurons don’t connect’ may not just be a matter of digital distraction, but a consequence of subconscious exhaustion. If we can no longer intuitively trust our kenbun [見聞]—our seeing and hearing—our brains are forced to run a constant background process of reality-verification. We cannot concentrate because we are in a state of perpetual, low-level epistemic panic—a deep-seated uncertainty about the reality of the world around us. Deep thinking requires a sufficiently stable and shared floor of perceived reality; when that floor is captured and weaponised, our cognitive energy is inevitably diverted from thinking to the exhausting task of simply discerning what is.
I realise that this is a grim diagnosis, but Katharine Viner found a solution through the simple practice of conversing with people in the real world—an embodied act of meeting that we also employ here in our Sunday and Thursday gatherings, as we share meditation, music, and conversation.
For us, as I am sure is the case for Viner, this is more than mere socialising; it is a matter of unmediated presence—direct, face-to-face connection with people. Such conversation acts as an antidote to our uncertainty because it provides biological verification. In this room, our kenbun [見聞]—our seeing and hearing—is anchored in three-dimensional space, by the subtle sounds and smells of this beautiful building, and by the immediate, non-algorithmic feedback of living persons. This sensory data cannot yet be hijacked or curated. This is why Eliot’s ‘Rock’—namely, the church, both the buildings and the gathering of people—remains so vital. It is not merely a metaphor for faith, but an actual place for the reclamation of reality itself.
That is what makes a physical space like this church, and a service of mindful meditation, music and conversation, so profoundly important. When our digital world is compromised, we must seek out such sanctuaries of unmediated presence. Here, in the quiet of this building, we look at one another with our own eyes and listen with our own ears, and we engage in the slow work of rebuilding trust in direct, human perception.
By gathering in this free-religious community, we are building a structure—a ‘Rock’—that protects us, at least for a few hours a week, from the tsunami of data that is untethered, unverified, and—crucially—often unverifiable. Through sitting together in silence, through speaking to one another during this ‘thought for the day’, and through our conversation afterwards over coffee and tea, we anchor ourselves back in a shared reality. We reclaim from the algorithms our kenbun [見聞]—our seeing and hearing—creating a space where information might once again settle into knowledge, and where knowledge, just might, begin to ripen into wisdom.
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