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.”

Essay
Aliens
Belief
Creed
Film & TV
1 min read

Who do you think Doctor Who is?

Why the Doctor is (and isn’t) like Jesus

Barnabas Aspray is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary’s Seminary and University.

Doctor Who and River Song converse
Doctor Who and River Song ponder metaphysics.

After two series with Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor, the future of Doctor Who is uncertain. It may be time for the world’s longest-running sci-fi show, with 892 episodes to date, to come to an end. Or it may not.  

Doctor Who is one of the few sci-fi shows with an appeal that reaches beyond typical sci-fi fans. It ranges across every conceivable genre – romance, horror, period drama, epic – to name but a few. The Doctor’s time-travels may take you to Elizabethan England or the year 400,000 C.E. on a planet made of diamond – you won’t know until you start watching. The secret to the show’s longevity is the Doctor’s ability to ‘regenerate’ whenever he (or she) dies, reappearing with a new body and personality. Gatwa was the fifteenth actor to play the Doctor since William Hartnell’s inaugural performance on 23rd November 1963. (However, I secretly suspect that C.S. Lewis was the ‘zeroth’ Doctor, since he died the day before the first episode was aired. Coincidence?) 

Science fiction has the unique capacity to do thought-experiments without limits. What if you could go back in time and kill Hitler before he rises to power? What if we could transfer our brains into machines that would enable us to live forever? What if one small act of violence was the only way to save the human race from destruction?  

This article draws attention to just one of the numerous metaphysical and ethical lessons that can be drawn from the show’s stories. I do not discuss the compatibility of its moral ideology with Christian morality, or the place it gives to religion in a world with a scientific explanation for everything. My focus is on a single feature: how the Doctor’s immeasurable power places him in a position like that of Jesus according to the Christian tradition. I shall point to three ways the Doctor reminds us of Jesus, and one way in which the Doctor does not look like Jesus, going down a path that Jesus was tempted to take, but refused. 

A bloke who puts everything right 

In ‘Twice Upon a Time’, Bill Potts asks the first Doctor why he first left his home planet, Gallifrey, to embark on his many adventures. After a few false starts, the Doctor responds like this:  

Doctor: “There is good and there is evil. I left Gallifrey to answer a question of my own. By any analysis evil should always win. Good is not a practical survival strategy. It requires loyalty, self-sacrifice, and love. And so why does good prevail? What keeps the balance between good and evil in this appalling universe? Is there some kind of logic, some mysterious force?” 

Bill Potts: “Perhaps there’s just a bloke.” 

Doctor: “A bloke?” 

Bill Potts: “Yeah. Perhaps there's just some bloke wandering around, putting everything right when it goes wrong.” 

Why does evil never get the upper hand? That is the Doctor’s fundamental question. Is there some logic, some mysterious force, or is there just a ‘bloke’ who keeps putting things right? All three, from a Christian point of view.  

The ultimate triumph of good over evil, according to the Christian story, is thanks to a ‘bloke’ named Jesus who conquered death and rose again so that we might rise again with him at the end of all time. But for Christians, Jesus is not only a ‘bloke’. The Gospel of John equates Jesus with the Logos, a Greek word (where the English word ‘logic’ comes from) to name the rational principle that orders and upholds the universe. The Apostle Paul, in the letter to the Corinthians, also describes Jesus as one ‘by whom all things were created’ and ‘in whom all things hold together’. A ‘mysterious force’ indeed! 

To answer the Doctor’s question, then: there is only one thing that stops evil from getting the upper hand. It can be called a logic, and it can be called a mysterious force. But the logic and the force are not impersonal. They are other names for a bloke named Jesus who wanders around putting everything right.  

A better way of living your life 

After an encounter with the Doctor, nobody is ever the same again. It is not primarily the thrill of adventure or the sight of things more wonderful than can be imagined that changes the Doctor’s companions. It is the example of someone who has devoted their life to save, to heal, to confront evil, and to sacrifice for others. 

These features are brought into sharp focus in a moment when Rose Tyler, one of the Doctor’s companions, believes she’s lost the Doctor forever. Her mother tries to comfort her, and this leads her to reflect on what had been so amazing about her time with him: 

 “It was a better life. And I don’t mean all the travelling and… seeing aliens and spaceships and things… that don’t matter. The Doctor showed me a better way of living your life. That you don’t just give up. You don’t just let things happen. You make a stand. You say no. You have the guts to do what’s right when everyone else just runs away.” 

Like his other companions, Rose saw something in the Doctor which challenged her to live up to a higher moral standard, a standard of courage, compassion, and self-sacrifice.  

Being with the Doctor puts you in extreme situations where your character is tested and refined. You are forced to face your fears and make crucial decisions about what kind of person you are going to be. Those extreme adventures are rarely the end, however. When his companions return to their lives on earth, they have to decide how to handle normality. Will they wistfully pine after the thrills of the past, seeing normal life as dull and boring, or will they use the wisdom and virtue gained from their adventures to bring peace and justice into the world amidst daily life. 

In a similar way, Jesus called his disciples to a higher moral standard, one that prioritises humble, loving service and self-sacrifice. Life with Jesus can be an exhilarating adventure, such as when he calls someone to move and live in a foreign land or to embrace poverty as a lifestyle. But many Christians feel called to follow Jesus in ordinary ways that do not draw attention, and to put his teaching to practice in ordinary everyday life in a way that slowly transforms the world.  

The ultimate sacrifice for the least important 

The Doctor not only calls his companions to live this way – he leads by example. When Wilfred, the grandfather of one of the Doctor’s companions, gets trapped in a control room about to be flooded by radiation, the Doctor realises that there is only one way to save him. He must replace Wilfred in the control room and be exposed to the radiation instead. Wilfred protests that the Doctor should let him die instead of sacrificing himself to save him, and the Doctor responds with frustration:  

Wilfred: “No really, just leave me. I’m an old man, Doctor. I've had my time.” 

Doctor: “Well, exactly. Look at you. Not remotely important. But me? I could do so much more. So much more!” 

Wilfred is not a national President, a scientist about to make a breakthrough in cancer research, or a famous artist whose paintings will enchant the world. The Doctor complains that Wilfred is not worth saving – not by a logic that looks at the worldly ‘importance’ of an individual. Why, then, should his life be spared, especially in exchange for the life of someone far more powerful and ‘important’? 

The Doctor’s frustrated words reveal the moral battle within him. But it does not last long. He knows his duty: to give his life for anyone, no matter how small or unimportant. Every life is worth saving simply because it is a life. He enters the control booth, enabling Wilfred to go free. 

This story combines two features central to Christianity. First, it shows the principle that every human life has equal value. God does not measure people by their ‘importance’, their ‘potential’, or their ‘talent’. There is only one measure for a life: the fact that it is created in God’s image and is therefore loved by God. Every life matters, from the greatest down to the very least.  

Secondly, this story shows the Doctor giving his life in exchange for another. Christians believe that this is what Jesus did for every human being on the cross. Many wise Christians over the centuries have said that Jesus died for each of us as if there were only one of us. As the Doctor did for Wilfred, so Jesus made the ultimate sacrifice on our behalf. 

The temptations of unlimited power 

Doctor Who often raises the question ‘how should good people wield power?’ The Doctor’s time machine gives him the ability to prevent all catastrophe and evil from ever occurring, yet often he refrains from doing so. At times his companions get angry with him for not using his almost limitless power to save, cure and free everyone throughout history. Once, a companion tries to coerce him into going back in time to prevent the death of her boyfriend. He frequently tries to explain that “some things have to happen this way.” There are fixed points in time that cannot be changed. 

That may sound like a cheap explanation – an escape clause for the script writers. But sometimes the show goes deeper, and then we find out what happens when the Doctor gives in to the temptation to fix everything by force. In one episode, compelled by the desperate need of his closest friends, the Doctor for the first time engages in warfare. After a violent and bloody battle, he saves his friends, but it becomes clear that he has done so at the price of his innocence. When River Song arrives at the end, she accuses him of compromising his moral values to save his friends. He responds defensively: 

Doctor: You think I wanted this? I didn’t do this. This… this wasn’t me! 

River: This was exactly you. All of it. You make them so afraid. When you began, all those years ago, sailing off to see the universe, did you ever think you’d become this? The man who can turn an army around at the mention of his name? Doctor? The word for healer and wise man, throughout the universe. We get that word from you, you know. But if you carry on the way you are, what might that word come to mean? To the people of the Gamma Forests, the word “Doctor” means mighty warrior. How far you’ve come! 

This powerful speech reveals two important things. First, using violence against evil is a path that leads to ever-increasing violence. Eventually the once innocent, pacifist Doctor has become a tyrant, imposing his will on the universe. In a similar way, the Gospel of Matthew describes how Jesus, after fasting for forty days in the desert, was visited by the Devil who tempted to use coercive power to establish his kingdom of justice and righteousness: 

The devil took Jesus to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour; and he said to him, ‘All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.’  

Where the Doctor gave in to temptation, Jesus resisted. He refused to impose his kingdom of peace by violence, because to do this is ultimately to worship a principle and force in direct opposition to God’s will and his ways. Instead of raising an army and conquering the world to save those he loves, Jesus chose the way of the cross. The path of self-sacrifice is painful and slow. But it is the only way to bring about an everlasting kingdom built, not on coercion, but on free and loving submission. 

Secondly, River Song’s speech shows that the Doctor’s actions change the very meaning of his name. Will that name come to mean ‘mighty warrior’ instead of ‘healer’ or ‘wise teacher’? Likewise, those who bear the name ‘Christian’ have the power to determine what that name means to the world. The actions of Christians shape the meaning of the name ‘Christ’ to those around them. Christians do not always live in such a way as to make the name of Jesus mean what Jesus would have wanted. What does Jesus want his name to mean? 

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