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

by Matthew B. Crawford

his authentic self, and therefore unavailable for rational scrutiny. The fact that these preferences are the object of billion-dollar, scientifically informed efforts of manipulation doesn’t square with the picture of the choosing self assumed in the idea of a “free market.” It is a fact without a noisy partisan, so our attention is easily diverted from it. Further, by keeping his gaze away from such facts, the liberal/libertarian keeps his own soul pure, lest he commit the sin of recommending to others some substantive ideal, one that will necessarily be controversial. But outside his garden wall there are wolves preying on the townspeople. In our current historical circumstances, his liberal purity amounts to a lack of public-spiritedness.

Our founding republican spirit of “No taxation without representation” and “Don’t tread on me” is laudable, but must be directed to the proper offshore entity. Libertarians are confused because, unlike King James I, Verizon doesn’t make a straightforward assertion of sovereignty. Instead, it wraps you up in the embrace of rational-looking bureaucratic irrationality. While in this embrace (“Your call is important to us”), one catches a distinct odor of bad faith and begins to suspect that the irrationality one is battling is not due to a system error, but part of the business plan. Perhaps the time one spends on hold is not due to “unusually heavy call volume,” but is rather calibrated to persuade a certain percentage of callers not to persist. Those who do persist are subject to recorded advertisements for other Verizon services, for a period equally well calibrated, to keep the caller just this side of the threshold beyond which he decides to go Unabomber.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF FREEDOM

For the founding generation, the thing we needed to be free from was clear: the arbitrary exercise of coercive power by the political sovereign, who lived in England.

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. • The positive idea that emerges, by subtraction, is that freedom amounts to radical self-responsibility. This is both a political principle and an epistemic one. • We achieve this, ultimately, by relocating the standards for truth from outside to inside ourselves. Reality is not self-revealing; we can know it only by constructing representations of it. • Attention is thus demoted. Attention is the faculty through which we encounter the world directly. If such an encounter isn’t possible, then attention has no official role to play.

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. That is why the term “liberalism” is useful for characterizing the big metaphysical and anthropological picture that was established in these revolutionary centuries.

To see our way through our current predicament, we need a good account of how attention works. And to get that, we first need to become more self-conscious about this intellectual inheritance, and hold it up to scrutiny.

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.

We noted the prominence of a design philosophy that severs the bonds between action and perception, as in contemporary automobiles that insulate us from the sensorimotor contingencies by which an embodied being normally grasps reality.

The case of machine gambling gave us a heightened example of this kind of abstraction, and made clear how such a design philosophy can be turned to especially disturbing purposes in the darker precincts of “affective capitalism,” where our experiences are manufactured for us. We saw that the point of these experiences is often to provide a quasi-autistic escape from the frustrations of life, and that they are especially attractive in a world that lacks a basic intelligibility because it seems to be ordered by “vast impersonal forces” that are difficult to bring within view on a first-person, human scale. I argued that all of this tends to sculpt a certain kind of contemporary self, a ...

from a menu of options replaces the kind of adult agency that grapples with things in an unfiltered way. Finally, I argued that such a choosy self is especially pliable to the “choice architectures” that get installed on our ...

Locke’s theory of legitimate authority founded on consent describes not the normal course of things but a hypothetical moment of political founding. It is not the founding moment of any actual

revolution, but of a fable in which there is no already existing society and the land is unclaimed. At the foundation of our political anthropology is a creature who comes into existence in a moment of free deliberation (shall I consent to this arrangement?) that occurs in a present unconditioned by the past. The freedom of the liberal self is the freedom of newness and isolation. 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.

The project for political freedom thus shades into something more expansive: We should aspire to a kind of epistemic self-responsibility. I myself should be the source of all my knowledge; otherwise it is not knowledge. Such self-responsibility is the positive image of freedom that emerges by subtraction, when you pursue far enough the negative goal of being free from authority.

How do we know some evil genius hasn’t deceived us? Even our own senses lead us astray, for example in optical illusions. Descartes takes the very existence of an external world as a legitimate problem for philosophy to worry about. In his search for certainty—for a foundation for knowledge that would be impervious to skeptical challenge—it occurs to him that the experience of thinking (“I am thinking”) is beyond doubt. If I am thinking, I must exist. This is the secure beginning point that must serve as the foundation for knowledge altogether. What we need, then, are rules for the conduct of the mind, which we can follow from this secure beginning to build up certain knowledge. It is not the content of our thinking that matters now, but how we arrive at that content. To repeat Locke’s formula, “The floating of other Mens Opinions in our brains makes us not a jot more knowing, though they happen to be true.” This entails a new conception of what it means to be rational. The standard for rationality is no longer substantive, but procedural, as Taylor points out. And this means that the standard for truth is relocated: it is no longer found out in the world, but inside our own head; it is a function of our mental procedures.

Attention is therefore demoted. Or rather, it is redirected. Not by fastening on objects in the world does it help us grasp reality, but by being directed to our own

processes of thinking, and making them the object of scrutiny.

What it means to know now is not to encounter the world directly (thinking that you have done so is always subject to skeptical challenge), but to construct a mental representation of the world. Another early modern thinker, Giambattista Vico,...

One way to state the conviction that all of these Enlightenment figures shared is that reality is not self-revealing. The way it shows up in ordinary experience is not to be taken seriously. For example, we see a blue dress, but “blue” isn’t in the dress; it is a mental state. Descartes and Locke both insisted on a distinction between “primary qualities,” which are properties of things themselves, and “secondary qualities,” which are a function of our own perceptual apparatus.