The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

by Matthew B. Crawford

offense: a positive account of action in its full human context, in which the actor is in touch with the world and other people, in comparison with which the autistic pseudo-autonomy of manufactured experiences is revealed as a pale substitute. My hope is that the accounts I offer in this book of ordinary activities such as that of the short-order cook, the hockey player, and the motorcycle rider (and soon the glassmaker and the organ maker), will help to provide some concrete images that can serve this role.

To clear the way further for this positive account of attention, we need to understand better the anthropology of the autonomous self.

When we talk about freedom, what we are keen to be free from is a moving target. Today’s conservatives, if they have an intellectual bent, often refer to themselves as “classical liberals.” The term is apt; the view of freedom that they generally cherish is one that was articulated at the founding of modern liberalism by John Locke and others. If you visit Thomas Jefferson’s home at Monticello, you will see a prominent portrait of Locke in the parlor,

libertarians have an outdated view of where the threats to freedom lie.

We are enjoined to be free from authority—both the kind that is nakedly coercive and the kind that operates through claims to knowledge. If we are to get free of the latter, we cannot rely on the testimony of others.

Let’s step back for a moment. In this book I am picking out a few topographical features of modern culture, and suggesting that we see them as part of a larger landscape. Like trees in the foreground, we have various polemics about our novel digital landscape; the larger forest consists of a set of assumptions about how our minds work that we have inherited from the Enlightenment. Of course, these were not originally assumptions, but well-articulated assertions. As such, they were addressed to somebody; they were part of a conversation. In recovering this historical context, we see that the conversation didn’t start out as a serene inquiry into how our minds work. It began as a quarrel about politics.

The quarrel was “won,” as a historical fact, by the party that was directed by a single master principle: to liberate—whether from the ancien régime, ecclesiastical authority, or Aristotelian metaphysics.

Doing so will help us see an underlying unity in the features of contemporary life we have examined thus far. We have considered the problem of mental fragmentation and arbitrariness that results when our contact with the world is mediated by representations: representations collapse the basic axis of proximity and distance by which an embodied being orients in the world and draws a horizon of relevance around itself.

Finally, I argued that such a choosy self is especially pliable to the “choice architectures” that get installed on our behalf by various functionaries of psychological adjustment.

The point isn’t to reach bedrock—some foundational, ahistorical self—but rather to do like a geologist and get a clear sectional view of the strata. If we could accomplish this, I think it would help us see the topography of current experience a little differently.

THE COUNTERFACTUAL ORIGINS OF LIBERALISM

Locke’s strategy, however sincere (and scholars disagree on this), is to offer a theological argument of his own: God is so much greater than man, the difference is so unfathomable, that this relation mocks any attempt by one man to claim godlike coercive power over another.1 We are all equal in our smallness before God. Therefore our natural estate is one of freedom in relation to one another.

We may allow ourselves to wonder, when does this all-important act of consent happen? I was born into a society that was already up and running, and isn’t this the case for almost all of us?

Locke’s state-of-nature thought experiment is explicitly counterfactual. Its premise is that “you can understand man and his moral and practical endowments only in isolation from the settings in which he might realize those endowments or, much less, be endowed with them in the first place,” as Matt Feeney puts it.2 The liberal self is not situated.

An intransigent stance against the testimony

Giambattista Vico, summed up this view very succinctly: We know only what we make.

Vico’s motto captures pretty well the revolution in science carried out by Galileo and Newton. Natural science became for the first time mathematical, relying on mental representations based on idealizations such as the perfect vacuum, the frictionless surface, the point mass, and the perfectly elastic collision.

Let us pause for a moment to let the weirdness of all this sink in. Notice that we have moved from an argument about the illegitimacy of particular political authorities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the illegitimacy of the authority of other people in general, to the illegitimacy of the authority of our own experience.

In telling the story of the Enlightenment in this sequence, I want to suggest that the last stage, the somewhat anxious preoccupation with epistemology, grows out of the enlighteners’ political project of liberation.

is that, as I have just demonstrated, the origins of modern epistemology are intimately bound up with the origins of our moral-political order.

The word “education” comes from a Latin root that means “to lead out.” To be educated is to be led out of oneself, perhaps.

Our fixation on autonomy clouds our understanding of such development because the skills one exercises in any impressive human performance are built up through submission—to “authoritative structures,” to use Murdoch’s phrase.

that there is a tension between the ideal of autonomy and education.

EMPOWERMENT THROUGH SUBMISSION

The musician’s power of expression is founded upon a prior obedience. To what? To her teacher, perhaps, but this isn’t the main thing—there is such a thing as the self-taught musician. Her obedience rather is to the mechanical realities of her instrument, which in turn answer to certain natural necessities of music that can be expressed mathematically. For example, halving the length of a string under a given tension raises its pitch by an octave. These facts do not arise from the human will, and there is no altering them. The education of the musician sheds light on the basic character of human agency, namely that it arises only within concrete limits.

someone had to invent the mixolydian scale.

Once, while listening to the bluegrass guitarist Tony Rice in concert, I had the thought He can do whatever he wants. Such was his complete command of his instrument. Yet “freedom” doesn’t seem quite the right concept to capture this expressive power, if by that term we mean an untutored exercise of the will. His freedom, if that’s what it was, was artistically compelling because of the musical ideas it was in the service of. These ideas were his own, but not simply his own. His expressive power was born of artistic formation.

One must be alert, opportunistic. As in ecology, that is how new forms arise.

think this is obvious. Yet to emphasize community in this way is to stand athwart one of the main veins of the American creed, our individualism.

Kant concurs: Enlightenment is “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity … [This immaturity consists not in a] lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use [one’s own understanding] without the guidance of another.” Further, “laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large portion of men … remain immature for life.”3

Emerson wrote in his essay “Self-Reliance.”4 Walt Whitman’s democratic hero “walks at his ease through and out of that custom or precedent or authority that suits him not.” Whitman goes on: “You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead … nor feed on the specters in books.” To live authentically, Norman Mailer would write a century later, one has to “divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.”

From the Jacksonian to the Beat era, other people have often appeared to the American as a disfiguring source of heteronomy. In a culture predicated on this autonomy-heteronomy distinction, it is difficult to think clearly about attention—the faculty that joins us to the world—because everything located outside your head is regarded as a potential source of unfreedom, and therefore a threat to the self. This makes education a tricky matter.

I once watched a group of three glassmakers work together. Peter Houk is director of the MIT Glass Lab and one of the leading glassblowers in the United States.

Being experienced, they were able to anticipate the transformations of a cross section as it gets twisted and elongated. And, vice versa, they were able to work backward from a desired effect in the cane to a cross-sectional shape that would produce such an effect once twisted and elongated, in what mathematicians call a “screw transform.”

The glass has a certain urgency to it, but there was no hint of panic in this team. Indeed it was striking how calm they were as they moved around the shop in concert. Houk believes this kind of cooperation is “one of the key things our program is teaching students at MIT.” Being MIT students, they often want to reduce the process to a set of formulas describing heat transfer, viscosity, and the like.

“Different gaffers have different styles as far as how verbal they are in communicating their plan to their team before starting a project and during the making of a hot piece. Some gaffers, like the famous Venetian glassblower Lino Tagliapietra, barely say anything at all, even at the outset. Maybe just a few words about how the process will start out, and rarely any drawings of the finished product. I’ve watched him work many times,

“Improvising with glass is a tricky thing, though. If you get too unscripted, things can go badly wrong, and glass is not a very forgiving material. So it’s a delicate line … There are times when shit happens and the glass does something unexpected, and at those times it’s really interesting to see how different gaffers and teams deal with the unexpected. Some ride with it and some break down and throw the piece away. Lino once said to me, ‘It’s not so much what you can make that determines how good a glassblower you are—it’s what you can fix.’”

SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY AS PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE Michael Polanyi wrote, “An art which cannot be specified in detail cannot be transmitted by prescription, since no prescription for it exists. It can be passed on only by example from master to apprentice. This restricts the range of diffusion to that of personal contacts, and we find accordingly that craftsmanship tends to survive in closely circumscribed local traditions.”

His elaboration of “tacit knowledge” entailed a criticism of the then-prevailing ideas of how science proceeds, tied to wider claims about the nature of reason. The logical positivists conceived reason to be rulelike, whereas according to Polanyi, a scientist relies on a lot of knowledge that can’t be rendered explicit, and an inherent feature of this kind of knowledge is that it is “personal.” He explained:

The declared aim of modern science is to establish a strictly detached, objective knowledge. Any falling short of this ideal is accepted only as a temporary imperfection, which we must aim at eliminating. But suppose that tacit thought forms an indispensable part of all knowledge, then the ideal of eliminating all personal elements of knowledge would, in effect, aim at the destruction of all knowledge. The ideal of exact science would turn out to be fundamentally misleading and possibly a source of devastating fallacies.

He draws a parallel between science and craft that I take to be stronger than a mere analogy—rather, they are two expressions of the same mode of apprehending the world: by grappling with real things.

Through long immersion in a particular field of practice and inquiry, you become a connoisseur of a certain class of intellectual problems. You adopt the language of your subfield, but also a shared, usually inarticulate sense of what sort of problems are worth investigating: what to take seriously. In the course of this apprenticeship you make the characteristic mistakes of a novice, and suffer their humiliations before your teachers (who include the more advanced graduate students). Conversely, you experience elation at those moments when you feel a growing mastery—

Such a culture of scientific apprenticeship has not yet developed in China or the Persian Gulf oil states. They have plenty of money and pressing public purposes, but these countries would seem to occupy a position similar to that of the United States in the middle of the twentieth century, when we depended on émigré scientists to help guide such endeavors as the Manhattan Project.

But the culture of scientific apprenticeship that developed in Europe, and then later in America, did so without warrant from the official self-understanding of modern science. As Polanyi writes, “To learn by example is to submit to authority. You follow your master because you trust his manner of doing things even when you cannot analyze and account in detail for its effectiveness.”

a thorough rejection of the testimony and example of others. This rejection begins as a project for liberation—from manipulation by kings and priests—and blossoms into an ideal of epistemic self-responsibility.

This stance of suspicion amounts to a kind of honor ethic, or epistemic machismo.

If Polanyi is right about how scientists are formed, then the actual practice of science proceeds in spite of its foundational Enlightenment doctrines: it requires trust.

The idea that there is a method of scientific discovery, one that can be transmitted by mere prescription rather than by personal example, harmonizes with our political psychology, and this surely contributes to its appeal. The conceit latent in the term “method” is that one merely has to follow a procedure and, voilà, here comes the discovery.

Polanyi saw an alliance between this misapprehension of scientific practice and efforts to direct research according to some societal goal, for example a Soviet five-year plan of scheduled technological breakthroughs. After many forms of tradition and local knowledge were deliberately destroyed in China during the Cultural Revolution (a spasm of hyperenlightenment), one can imagine the frustration of the current Chinese regime as it now pours billions into its universities, hoping for discovery and innovation but instead producing rule followers.