Look Here! Attention and the Law 

Editors’ Note: A version of this paper was presented at the Fourth Annual Spring Symposium of the Center for Law and the Human Person at the Catholic University of America, Columbus Law School.  

Good civic law is conducive to man’s flourishing—that is, to his growth in virtue. This relationship between law and virtue has long been recognized. But just what does it mean for a law to be conducive to virtue? Philosophical research on the nature of attention helps us understand how law can be conducive to virtue. The law turns out to have a privileged capacity to direct and protect the attention of its citizens to growth in virtue. 

The Attention Economy 

Attention is a quality of the intellect. Attention is where our intellect is pointed—ad- + tendere, “to tend to” or “to stretch toward.” Such directionality of the intellect is metaphorical when it comes to immaterial objects like justice or squareness, for in such cases I tend to something which is, strictly speaking, nowhere. But the directionality is literal when it comes to objects in the material world, as when I pay attention to a friend in front of me.  

Attention is something mostly in one’s control. Commands or requests for one’s attention—e.g. “Pay attention!”—would make little sense if this was otherwise. Still, the reality of “stolen” attention attests to some level of involuntary attention. Attention is also scalar. I can choose to focus my intellect on an object with greater or lesser intensity. I can learn more about a person, place, or thing simply by paying more attention to it. 

Attention is a finite resource—pointing my intellect in one direction entails that I cannot point it in another. Reality is too vast and complex to be received all at once by the intellect of a creature. And here it is crucial to note the goodness of attention. All human persons desire to receive attention, at least from one person or another. Children want their parents to watch them play. Athletes want an audience. Millions of men and women go to great lengths to achieve online “views.” The desire for attention should come as no surprise. Our attention, where our intellect is “pointed,” is normally the result of our deliberate choice and is therefore, in some sense, an act of love.  

Given the scarcity and goodness of attention, it follows that the flux of attention in a community forms an attention economy, a system of giving and receiving attention. Our attention never occurs in a vacuum; it is conditioned and affected by the attention of others. We need only walk by a crowd of people diligently attending to some object—a celebrity, something in the sky, a street performer—to confirm the social nature of attention. We are drawn to pay attention to what others are attending to because they are attending to it.  

Like today’s monetary economy, the attention economy is fierce. Social media platforms exemplify this fact. A social media platform is expensive to create and maintain, and yet is offered as a “free” service. Why? Because the online platforms are exchanged for something tremendously valuable—the user’s attention. This attention can then be sold to the highest bidder. Thus Yves Citton remarks “if a product is free, then the real product is you. More precisely: your attention,” and to further quip, “To look is to labor.” 

For all these reasons, the city, which is arguably charged with making men virtuous, has every reason to legislate and judge in a way mindful of attention and its relation to man’s final end.  

Nuisance and Protecting Attention in Law 

Attention already has some inchoate legal protection in nuisance case law and positive statutory law. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court case Anderson v. Guerrein Sky-Way Amusement Co. exemplifies the protection of attention in case law. In Anderson, the court affirmed the closing of an open-air movie theater because the sounds emitted from the theater were considered to be a nuisance to certain residents. The court’s description of the theatre’s offenses is worth noting; the theater 

carried to the homes of the plaintiffs in such manner as to disturb their rest, interfere with their ordinary conversation, distract them from reading and working, make necessary the closing of windows on hot summer nights and keep them awake even with the windows closed … and on occasions compel some of them to leave their homes entirely for the evening in order to escape from the intolerable noises (emphasis added).  

Thus, in addition to the physical disturbances (heat, lack of rest) the court found interference with conversation and distraction from reading to be constitutive of a nuisance claim. These infractions are a matter of attention, of having one’s intellect pulled in an unwanted direction. 

Similarly, in the Maryland court case Corbi v. Hendrickson, the court found that a rock and roll venue caused such a disturbance that appellees “found themselves unable to sleep, concentrate on work or study, or practice the piano.” Notice the attentional language. The appellees had a complaint precisely because their attention was stolen away from worthwhile objects by unwanted stimuli. Cases like Anderson and Corbi give grounds to believe that the law recognizes and values attention, even if the language of attention does not feature explicitly in the rulings.  

Statute law condemns those who engage “in such conduct as to constitute a breach of the peace or disorderly conduct” and those who make “unreasonable noise” if it is with “intent to cause public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm, or recklessly creating a risk thereof.” The language of “annoyance” and “peace” in these laws suggests that, in addition to procuring a physically safe environment, legislators aim to grant reasonable protection to one’s attention as well. 

Holidays and Directing Attention in Law 

It is not enough merely to protect attention in society. Attention must also be directed to virtuous ends. U.S. legislators have already understood this necessity. Every year, once a year, many American citizens turn their attention to fallen American soldiers, even if for a mere moment, precisely because the law has enshrined Memorial Day as a federal holiday.  

The last Monday of May is unlike other Mondays. Many businesses are closed. Laborers stay home from work and kids stay home from school. Disruption to the status quo is sufficient to draw one’s attention to the cause of such disruption. Memorial Day, therefore, draws the attention of the worker, parent, or student to the U.S. military and to those who gave their life for our country. Self-reflection (“Would I die for my country?”), family conversations (“Did grandad serve in the war?”), and even personal decisions (visiting a national cemetery) may follow from this attentional shift. 

I do not naively suggest that all American citizens undertake life-altering actions because of Memorial Day—many will not give it more than a single thought—but I do posit that Memorial Day causes greater change in the population than National First Responders Day, precisely because of the former’s greater legal recognition.  

While the impact Memorial Day, or any other legally recognized holiday, has on any particular family may be negligible, the cumulative effect of a holiday on millions of families should not be dismissed. Holidays are not the only way the law directs our attention, but they do act as privileged forces in the attention economy and thus serve as prime examples of how the law directs the attention of millions. 

Attention-Conscious Law 

Attention is thus already protected and directed by U.S. law in some helpful ways, but there is still room for improvement. Today our attention must be protected against the overreach of consumerism in all its forms. Consumerism preys on what Citton calls “environmental attention gaps.” In these gaps—such as airport concourses—one’s attention is generally free. Citton notes, though, that these places have been saturated with televisions, which steal our attention. Matthew Crawford takes up this notion and laments: 

Taking a flight recently to Chicago, I pulled down the tray from the seat back in front of me and discovered that the entire tray top was devoted to an advertisement for Droid, the multimedia smartphone. At O’Hare International Airport, the moving handrail on the escalator was covered with an endlessly recurring message from the Lincoln Financial Group: You’re in Charge.® When I got to my hotel, I was handed a key card that was printed on one side with an advertisement for Benihana, the restaurant. Somehow, the fact that such a key card presents about five square inches for inevitable eyeballing had gone unnoticed, or rather unmonetized, until recently. 

Human beings were not meant to live in an environment where invasive advertisements make a perpetual cry for attention. Such an environment leaves no room for contemplation, recollection, and the mental space requisite for a healthy interior life

Attentional protection from consumeristic forces is especially needed online. Pope Leo XIV recently warned us not to underestimate the  

subtler forms of addiction linked to the “digital attention economy”  since platforms and services are often designed to capture users’ time and attention, exploiting their vulnerabilities and weakening their inner freedom. 

An ideal government would recognize that the damage this overreach inflicts on the common good demands legal protection.  

In addition to providing such protection, an ideal government would also better direct our attention to virtuous ends. Legislators would do well to carefully recognize holidays to fine-tune the attention of citizens. While prudence would determine exactly which and how many holidays should be legally recognized, general principles dictate that holidays that promote true religion and virtue should take precedence. Joseph Pieper testifies to what true holiday implementation could do to transform society. 

For Pieper, holidays—or rather, festivals—pierce the atmosphere of the workaday world and lead to an affirmation of the whole of reality. A true festival therefore terminates in and is informed by the praise and worship of God, who wonderfully creates and more wonderfully redeems. To celebrate a festival is to do something for its own sake, for the goodness inherent in the action itself. Festivals, thus properly celebrated, transport one to another world and situate mankind in the cosmos. Whether or not a given population can actually enjoy such festivals, the law can secure some of the conditions for the possibility of such festivals to be celebrated. 

In all these matters, the law has the capacity to say in a loud voice, “Look here!” And we should not underestimate this power of the law, for what steals our attention shapes our lives. 

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.