So much of the political discourse recently has centred on immigration. Amid increasing reports of violence and social dissolution, everyone seems to have an opinion about whom we should allow within our borders of our countries. Too few people give comparable attention to what they allow across the borders of their phones and television screens.

Reclaiming our polity is important. But while we seek to do so, we should not surrender our minds to distraction. We should also seek to reclaim our imaginations, which are so often populated by images and sensations that do us no favours in the pursuit of holiness.

As rational animals, we are responsible for deliberating before we act. Even our habits are therefore subject to examination. We must resist the urge simply to follow our desires wherever they lead, especially in our pursuit of knowledge.

What we permit into the imagination shapes our thoughts. If I repeatedly fill my mind with a certain kind of image, story, spectacle or temptation, I become the kind of person who thinks about such things. Our thoughts, in turn, affect our choices, and our choices gradually form our character.

People often speak of free inquiry as a human right. Yet, like every right, it is connected to duties. We have a duty to know certain things: what belongs to our state of life, our occupation, our responsibilities and our growth in holiness. We are free to pursue knowledge, but freedom does not mean indulging every desire to see, hear or know. Real intellectual freedom consists in desiring the right knowledge, in the right measure, at the right time and for the right end.

St Thomas Aquinas called the disordered desire for knowledge the vice of curiosity. Curiosity is not the same as intellectual interest. It is the desire to know without proper order: knowledge sought for vain stimulation, distraction, pride, sin or at the expense of what we ought to be doing.

Screens are now a particular problem because they place every kind of distraction immediately at hand. Curiosity can lead us into danger, leaving us easy prey to lust, greed and, in the case of social media, wrath, envy or despair.

If we are to overcome curiosity, we must cultivate the corresponding virtue. Aquinas calls this virtue studiousness (studiositas): the habit that directs the desire for knowledge towards what we ought to learn, as good students of creation. We need this virtue more than ever because most of us carry a constant temptation to curiosity in our pockets.

Like food, moderation does not mean consuming precisely what we need and nothing more. There is room for innocent enjoyment and diversion without abandoning studiousness. But two things must be avoided.

First, we should do everything possible to avoid explicit or vicious material. Do not click the titillating thumbnail. Check a parental review before watching a film. No one has a claim on knowledge that corrupts him. We should also avoid media that exposes our neighbour's sins without charity or turns another person's failure into entertainment. Where appropriate, it may be wise to install software that limits temptation.

Second, we should avoid simply indulging in banal diversion. We can do without much of the brain rot. Endless scrolling has made even occasional diversions difficult to enjoy in moderation. Rarely does someone intend to watch only one or two short videos and then stop.

This does not mean that every leisure activity must serve one's occupation or accomplish some obvious practical purpose. Just as moderation leaves room for cake and potato chips, studiousness leaves room for YouTube videos and Netflix. But most of us are inclined to treat that permission as a licence to overindulge. We need to begin using these resources deliberately rather than passively.

As a governing principle, wherever possible, we should give our imaginations what is genuinely good, true and beautiful. If we took the same care in furnishing our imagination as we take in furnishing our living room, our media habits might look quite different. What we choose to attend to begins to inhabit our thoughts and eventually becomes part of the furniture of the heart.

Perhaps our diversions need not always come from a screen. My wife and I have enjoyed reading Agatha Christie novels together. Perhaps the YouTube hand-tool woodworking rabbit hole should eventually become real tools and a proper project.

Our knowledge will always be limited, if not by memory then by our short lives on this good earth. We should therefore practise greater care over what we allow ourselves to know, see and dwell upon. Intelligence is a great gift. It would be an irony indeed if we wasted it mindlessly.

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