Free, do you call yourself? Then I would hear your ruling thought, and not merely that you have escaped from a yoke.
— Nietzsche
The World Beyond Your Head begins with a terrific introduction, “Attention as a Cultural Problem.” The concern isn’t just the technological appendages like computers or iPhones that we’ve come to depend on; it’s that we can’t control our own responses to them. “Our distractibility indicates that we are agnostic on the question of what is worth paying attention to — that is, what to value,” Crawford writes. Everywhere we go, we are assaulted by commercial forces that make claims on our mental space, so that “silence is now offered as a luxury good.”
That isn’t just inconvenient. It destroys independence of thought and feeling: “Without the ability to direct our attention where we will, we become more receptive to those who would direct our attention where they will.” And they have gotten very good at manipulating our environment so that we are turned in the directions that can be monetized. But it’s really bad for us. “Distractibility,” Crawford tells us, “might be regarded as the mental equivalent of obesity.”
We have become more vulnerable to this regime of manipulated attention, he argues, because we have only individualism as a defense. The Enlightenment quest for autonomy leaves us powerless against those who mount noisy appeals to our personal preferences, in service of manipulating us. Against this tendency, Crawford argues for a situated self, one that is always linked to (not independent of) the environment, including other people.
Thinkers who prioritise meaning and authenticity often have an uneasy attitude to liberty, and Crawford is no exception. There is some psychological truth here: the more constrained our situation is (short of actual imprisonment), the more we seem to enjoy what we have, while near-limitless freedom often brings anxiety and a loss of joy and value. Being able to do what we like robs our actions of their weight. As Philip Roth observed in the 1970s of communist Czechoslovakia, in the unfree world “nothing goes and everything matters”, while in the west “everything goes and nothing matters”. Communism has (almost) gone now, but in the techno-utopia promised by Google and Facebook, we continue to suffer the curse of existential weightlessness.
Personally, I think we should try for it all. I do want to spend idle moments picking up fascinating facts from Twitter, dropping in on absent friends, and sharing photos, and I cannot accept that this inevitably leads to my meaningful existence disappearing in a mist. Can there be no way of enjoying our liberties while still ploughing a disciplined furrow in the world? Can we not prize our Enlightenment freedoms and have an authentic connection to the real?
I haven’t read anything by Crawford before, but he sounds interesting. The point about distractibility and value-agnosticism echoes one I’ve made here many times — feeling a lack of direction or control in your life might be an indication that you simply can’t decide what you really want, and rather than own up to that indecisiveness, you retreat to comforting stories about how your agency was stripped from you. And the paradox of choice has been a preoccupation of mine for a long time. But “distractibility as mental obesity” is what really leaped off the page and grabbed me here. That’s such a perfect way of putting it — an excess of temptations combined with a lack of discipline or purposeful mission leads to a lot of impulsive, aimless consumption of whatever is conveniently available. But talk like that tends to make us mostly-liberal folk leery. Sounds a little too conservative to focus on “discipline”, “purpose”, “meaning”, “mission” or “values”, doesn’t it?
There’s an interesting question here over what constitutes human flourishing. The classical liberal view is concerned primarily with maximizing personal choice and minimizing the restraints, pressures and compulsions of family, community, nation and religion. The conservative view, which I’m guessing is what Crawford is emphasizing (like I said, I’m only going by these two reviews), finds it absurd to talk as if the ideal of a neutral, yet rationally self-aware subject could ever exist. Long before we ever begin clumsily shaping our own character and inclinations, it is being shaped in countless ways by our genetics, our home environment, our peers, and our culture. A truly well-rounded character can’t be understood apart from the context in which it was formed. (Of course, the stark differences here are more rhetorical than actual. In practice, most people understand to different degrees that neither the individual nor the collective can meaningfully exist without the other.) At some stages in an individual’s life, then, a narrowing of perspective and a restricting of options might be more beneficial to one’s ultimate well-being.
A friend of mine once explained her decision to send her granddaughter to a Catholic school (despite her antipathy toward organized religion, having been raised Catholic herself) by saying that “If you don’t believe in something, you’ll fall for anything.” Her view was that it’s fine, indeed, even necessary, to outgrow the identity with which you were raised, but it would be negligent to take a laissez-faire approach and start a child with nothing but a generic, default concept of identity in a neoliberal consumer society. As she put it, people like that are the ones who end up joining whacko cults once they grow up just to have something to believe in besides earning more money and buying new toys.
I think she overstated her case. Personally, I think shallow, pathetic twits like this woman, rather than cultists, are the more typical result of a culture in which people have no depth to their values. Still, I understand her basic point. People tend not to appreciate things they haven’t had to work or sacrifice for. The wisdom you’ve accumulated through trial and error is not cumulative. Your children will have to learn all those same lessons through their own experiences; you can’t give them a cheat sheet. A flourishing life needs to develop along a certain trajectory. A life of little struggle faced with an ever-expanding smorgasbord of available options will only inspire ennui and possibly self-destruction.
I was raised in middle-class comfort. My mom was a lapsed Catholic-turned-spiritual-not-religious-New Ager. My dad was culturally Protestant and very classically liberal (in modern terms, libertarian). There was a definite emphasis on personal freedom from compulsion, is what I’m saying. Even my otherwise conservative parents bowed to the zeitgeist and went out of their way to avoid tyrannically imposing their own values on their kids. “We just want you to be happy in whatever you do” and “we just want to do what we can to make sure you have more options in life” were two common themes I heard growing up. Well, I’m going to suggest to you that when life is pretty nice and comfortable in general, it’s difficult to have any strong idea of what exactly makes you “happy”. I had absorbed from the cultural atmosphere that it was a good thing to “think for yourself” and not let anyone else tell you what to do, and I had a dim idea that “passion” was somehow important in deciding what to do with your life. But no one had taught me how to think effectively, and I spent a long time waiting for one of the many generally pleasant aspects of life to seize me with the sense of purpose I was waiting for, becoming increasingly anxious as none of them did.
As it happened, music and a philosophy 101 course taken on a whim turned out to give me sufficient passion and direction in my life, and my solitary nature kept me from falling under any malign influences during those confused, impressionable years. I’m perfectly content with how things have gone for me personally. But as a general rule, as a utilitarian standard for society as a whole? I’m not sure I’d recommend it. I suspect that many people who suffer from the strange modern inability to find contentment in the midst of plenty would have benefitted from a stronger influence during their formative years, someone willing to impose a “ruling thought”, more or less.
April 16, 2015 @ 1:42 am
One thing I found a little cognitively dissonant was characterizing Crawford's ideas as conservative. It's usually liberals who emphasize the collective, the social determinants of the "subject," etc. Crawford seems more aligned in this respect with liberal pragmatists like Rorty. His critique of Kant's autonomy-of-the-individual aligns with Marxist critiques of the Enlightenment. Roth places him in a lineage going back to pre-Raphaelite socialism (Morris) as well as the Tory radicalism of Ruskin. Crawford's point of view doesn't fit easily into any broad category, ideological or philosophical. That's part of what makes him sound so interesting to me.
April 16, 2015 @ 1:50 am
You're right. I'm using that framework primarily on the assumption that his emphasis on community, apprenticeship, and tradition will "code" as conservative to a casual reader, and his references to participation in a cultural "conversation" are pretty much vintage Oakeshott. But yes, as always, labels confuse as much as they illuminate.
April 16, 2015 @ 8:53 pm
"Conservative" mostly just means putting tradition above reason, and claiming to have superior values for stubbornly evading responsibility to do better. "Discipline", "purpose", "meaning", "mission", and "values" sound more liberal than conservative to me. We're not the one's telling the poor that the way the world is is their fault. You forgot "duty". I grew up in the most liberal environment you could hope to find in Texas 50 years ago, and I was taught that it is my duty to be the best person I can be and to help others as much as I can.
April 16, 2015 @ 8:53 pm
"It destroys independence of thought and feeling…" Whose?
Look, there will always be sheep, and wolves, and jesters among us. The sheep will be shorn, the wolves will be lonely, and we jesters will shed a tear for them both. Personally, I feel utterly amazed and grateful at my good fortune to have been born in such a wealthy society that I can get along so comfortably, mostly doing whatever I want. Ignoring chatter is a small price to pay. And as far as "believing in something" even if it is wrong? How is that different from "falling for anything"? Get a grip, people. Seek contentment, joy, and beauty. Avoid pain and ugliness. What's wrong with that (obvious) advice?
April 16, 2015 @ 9:26 pm
Personally, I agree with you. But in this case, I'm trying to look at it from a wider perspective than my own. Here, let me put it in an extreme devil's advocate form for the sake of hopeful clarity:
"What the hell is the matter with you? Open your eyes and look around! Do most people look happy to you? Of course not! They're broken, failing and miserable from being forced to think and choose for themselves! They're gobbling billions of dollars' worth of medication for anxiety and depression every year because they suffer from freedom! Yeah, yeah, some autistic dipshit German philosopher two centuries ago said that our individual moral autonomy was the most sacred thing in the universe, and that abdicating your responsibility to it was the worst sin you could commit against reason. Well, maybe if that fucking egghead had paused in his meticulously-scheduled daily walk long enough to lift his head and glance around at the world outside his academic study, he would have noticed the screaming obvious: Most people don't want to be free. Most people have no idea what to do with their lives and why, because what makes them content is a sense of belonging, feeling safe and secure in a group. Oh, sure, they might be delighted in being allowed to choose between five different brands of corn chips, but when it comes to all the serious decisions in life, what they want, what would actually make them happy, is to find an authority figure they can trust and let him tell them what to do and when to do it. You people are like those PeTA nuts who think they're "liberating" laboratory animals by dumping them in the woods, even though they don't have the first clue about how to survive and flourish in those conditions. 'But hey, you're free! Now go think and choose for yourself!' If you actually cared about their happiness, you'd stop insisting that they should all think and act like you and realize that the best thing you can do for them is nudge them toward one of the more benevolent delusions, like mainstream Christianity, which will make them feel safe and keep them mostly out of trouble!"
Crawford, as far as I can see, isn't saying anything nearly so harsh, but he does seem to be trying to address a blind spot of life in a modern neoliberal consumer society. An alarming number of people are alienated from their work and existentially adrift with no idea what to do about it, and not only are they not getting any help from the wider culture, they're learning to feel embarrassed and ashamed for not being able to think and choose wisely for themselves.
April 16, 2015 @ 9:35 pm
And as far as "believing in something" even if it is wrong? How is that different from "falling for anything"?
Not all delusions are equally destructive. Yes, belief in a soul or an afterlife is factually erroneous. But so what? Aside from obvious examples like refusing to use modern medicine, most religious beliefs do not in any way interfere with your ability to hold a job, raise a family, balance a household budget, and operate heavy machinery. All of us are wrong or deluded about some things. Very few of those things have significant negative impacts on our lives.
Seek contentment, joy, and beauty. Avoid pain and ugliness. What's wrong with that (obvious) advice?
The same thing that's always been wrong with utilitarian conceptions of pain and pleasure: they're not always so clear-cut.
April 17, 2015 @ 1:32 pm
I don't disagree with most of what you and Crawford are saying. But "too many choices" is such a "first world problem." I've lived with people who had no money, lacked every kind of security, and whose children were dying of malaria.
I think most people, liberal and conservative, are largely guided by intuition, sometimes even the same ones. (For example, both believe in charity: one public, the other private.) Saying conservatives do not honor tradition more simply flies in the face of facts. Conservatives explicitly claim tradition as a thing they honor, and castigate liberals for failing to do so. But I guess there might be something to what he's saying.
April 17, 2015 @ 2:06 pm
"Believing" without evidence and "falling for anything" seem pretty close to me.
I'm not a naive utilitarian; I do not think it is easy to know what the most beneficial choices are, and I completely agree that ugliness and discomfort may often be among them. However, they are not things to be sought; beauty, joy, and contentment, for myself and others, are.
April 17, 2015 @ 11:45 am
"Conservative" mostly just means putting tradition above reason, and claiming to have superior values for stubbornly evading responsibility to do better.
Coincidentally, I just happened across this:
"Tradition knows more than reason can articulate. The problem with modern conservatism, however, is that “it has become a defense not of tradition against reason, but rather of intuition against reason.” And we cannot found a civilization on intuition. Intuition was built for survival in small, primitive societies riven by “blood feuds, tribal warfare, [and] periodic famine” and these are the societies that we will revert to when reason does not override intuition with second thoughts."
April 17, 2015 @ 11:09 pm
But "too many choices" is such a "first world problem." I've lived with people who had no money, lacked every kind of security, and whose children were dying of malaria.
Yeah, temperamentally, I'd agree with you. I've read enough history books to feel consciously, effusively grateful to live in a place and time where we don't have to worry about enemy soldiers marching through the neighborhood, murderous dictators, or recurring famines. But still, most people, for one reason or another, don't have that perspective. You can insist they should, but they don't. A lot of people make it to adulthood with no real "life skills", and no big-picture perspective to help them make sense of the world. What should be done, then?
April 18, 2015 @ 6:51 pm
Of course you're right – the very popularity of religion is the proof and result. But people haven't changed much over the millennia, so part of what I've been trying to say here is that it's just how it is – I foresee no big social engineering effort to change it. One might think teachers have the opportunity and responsibility to try, but you can imagine how what I have to say about how one should live one's life is received by teenagers. (There are a few who come to think I'm cool and come at lunch to talk about life, and their interest in anime or something, and I'm just full of good advice for them.)
April 18, 2015 @ 8:34 pm
My idea of social engineering would be to make philosophy class mandatory in high school (and by contrast, this is possibly, pound for pound, the absolute stupidest thing I've ever seen written online). Just to acquaint people with learning to think in a big-picture way. But yeah, other than that, some people are always going to be left behind.
As it happens, my local library had copies of Crawford's books, so I'll try to read those in the next few weeks. Glancing at the one that I've got here on the end table, I'm guessing that his emphasis on working with your hands is related to an idea that I've heard here and there over the years — modern society has an overabundance of tasks that are either too easy to achieve or too complex and difficult, and thus unrewarding. The trick then is to find something that rewards effort, skill and patience to keep oneself engaged and interested rather than frustrated and demoralized. But most people's work is pointless, their hobbies are passive, and they have no meaning to their lives, so they stay permanently unfulfilled.
April 19, 2015 @ 6:24 pm
My parents taught me to appreciate art and nature and to enjoy learning; I wish it was easier to get others to see that these interests offer never ending satisfaction. And I agree with the "working with your hands" concept. I like cooking and gardening, and an occasional carpentry project – built a gazebo in the back yard.
The philosophy teacher at my high school was a Tea Party type. I'm afraid it's as bad as you might think. We had a friendly relationship and I chatted with him and debated with him fairly often. He was very smart, but I hate to think what he taught the kids. He once told me students would be justified shooting teachers or cops if they felt they were being oppressed. I just stopped talking to him after that; I guess he probably doesn't even know why, because I didn't even respond when he said it; I just walked out of his room and never went back. (He retired last year.) So I'm afraid of what kind of philosophy might become mandatory.
April 21, 2015 @ 2:04 am
Well, that's bizarre. I would hope he was able to keep his personal opinions out of class. My prof never gave any hint of her opinions or preferences regarding any of the subjects we studied. She just gave us the basic info and let the students argue about it.
April 21, 2015 @ 2:42 pm
Crawford reminds me of Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance).
I think my crazy libertarian friend probably intended to keep his personal beliefs out of the curriculum, but it's pretty hard to do that when students start asking about real world issues; I mean, you want to engage and encourage them. And if they ask you what you think, there is no law against answering. I think there is a lot more chance for such interactions in high school than college. We're as much baby-sitters as teachers.
April 21, 2015 @ 11:21 am
Here's an article on Crawford that gives more context.
April 22, 2015 @ 1:17 am
Yeah, my prof referred to Pirsig's book constantly. We didn't actually cover it in class, but we had a question on our final exam where we were supposed to define Quality after reading an excerpt from the book. My curiosity was piqued enough to go read it after that semester. Coincidentally enough, his follow up book, Lila, came out a few months later.
April 22, 2015 @ 2:10 pm
In Zen, Pirsig claims he went insane trying to do that (in his pre-amnesia persona), so it seems your professor was having a bit of fun with you.