Back in 2008, when I was still early in my writing career, I published an essay on my blog that posed a provocative question: Would Lincoln Have Been President if He Had Email? This was one of my early attempts to grapple with problems like digital distraction and focus that would eventually evolve into my books Deep Work and A World Without Email. And at its core was a troubling notion that occurred to me in response to watching a documentary about our sixteenth president:
If the Internet is robbing us of our ability to sit and concentrate, without distraction, in a Lincoln log cabin style of intense focus, we must ask the obvious question: Are we doomed to be a generation bereft of big ideas?
If Lincoln had access to the internet, in other words, would he have been too distracted to become the self-made man who ended up transforming our fledgling Republic?
In this early essay, I leaned toward the answer of “yes.” But in the years since, I’ve become a bit of a Lincoln obsessive, having read more than half a dozen biographies. This has led me to believe that my original instincts were flawed.
Lincoln, of course, didn’t have to contend with digital devices. Still, the rough frontier towns in Indiana and Illinois, where he spent much of his formative years, offered their own analog version of the same general things we fear about the modern internet.
They featured a relentless push toward numbing distraction, most notably in the form of alcohol. “Incredible quantities of whiskey were consumed,” wrote William Lee Miller in Lincoln’s Virtues, “the custom was for every man to drink it, on all occasions that offered.”
There was also the threat of “cancellation” embodied in actual violent mobs, and no shortage of efforts to radicalize or spread hate, such as the antipathy toward Native Americans, which Miller described as a “ubiquitous western presence” at the time.
And yet, Lincoln somehow avoided these traps and rose well above his initial station. There are many factors at play in this narrative, but one, in particular, is hard to ignore: he sharpened his mind with books.
Here are various quotes about young Lincoln, offered by his stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln, who encouraged this interest:
- “Abe read all the books he could lay his hands on.”
- “I induced my husband to permit Abe to read and study at home, as well as at school…we took particular care when he was reading not to disturb him–we would let him read on till he quit of his own accord.”
- “While other boys were out hooking watermelons and trifling away their time, he was studying his books–thinking and reflecting.”
Lincoln used books to develop his brain in ways that opened his world, and enabled him to see new opportunities and imagine more meaningful futures–providing a compelling alternative to the forces conspiring to keep him down
Lurking in here is advice for our current moment. To move beyond the distracted darkness of the online world, we might, in a literal sense, take a page from Lincoln and work toward growing our minds instead of pacifying them.
