Hi Friends,
It’s book report time!
I’ve been touting a book by Matthew Crawford called The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. ((I just searched and lo behold he has a Substack too, called
.) I’ve finished the book and I feel a desire to give a response because I did really love nearly all the elements of this book, and also . . . I can see a couple places where Mr. Crawford’s work could really use extension and even correction. It’s, of course, very OK to agree with some or most of what an author says and then disagree with other elements. But my reaction actually took me by surprise, so I thought I’d share.The book is an exploration and critique of Western philosophy, which may make it sound boring. However, Mr. Crawford’s writing has a gift for bringing in real world experience and setting that alongside what would otherwise feel like very abstract or even irrelevant philosophical positions and enlivening them. He is exploring certain areas of “human doing”, some that are representative for Mr. Crawford as worthy of admiration and study, and others that are pathological. So, for example, he spends time describing the ways a skilled short order cook can manage so many things simultaneously and produce delicious dishes that all come out ready for delivery at the same time. Prior to this chapter, Mr. Crawford has a truly inspired exposition about the idea of the “jig”. A jig is any technology that a human being, doing something manually, uses to make elements of her work more controlled, reduce degrees of freedom, and improve quality. So, the short order cook for Crawford is an example of someone using any number of “jigs,” little things they do that make it so that they don’t have to keep too many elements in working memory at the same time, but can be assured that all the parts of the meal being juggled will move along well.
Following the short order cook study, Crawford dives into a revealing look at the gambling industry and gambling addicts. While not by any means confined to the gambling industry, but perhaps most obviously on display there, the design of so many of our entertainment and media enterprises is to get people to “play to extinction.” Yes, this is actually the phrase that the gambling industry uses to talk about its goals with regard to its customers. This chapter is simultaneously fascinating, very sad (when he shares some of the interviews given by addicts) and also a damning exposé of the predatory nature of the gambling world, entirely and intentionally designed to keep one’s attention in thrall. While Mr. Crawford doesn’t make the connection explicitly to smartphones and social media, it’s obvious to me that the tactics are exactly the same. And so, if you have any doubt that the designed purpose of smart phones is solely to keep you using your phone, and to use it increasingly, “to extinction,” read this chapter. Your doubts will be gone. And you’ll have to do something about that box stuck to your hand. . .!
On we move through the book, meanwhile being exposed to the ideas of Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Hegel, Toqueville, Nietzsche and quite a few others. He is building a strong refutation or correction of the work of Descartes, Kant and all of its subsidiary outgrowths, a worldview in which the “outside world” is nothing more than a series of representations that are real only to the isolated individual who “thinks, therefore she is.” This is what attracted me to the book in the first place, as Rudolf Steiner, himself a student of Goethe (and a friend of Nietzsche in his later life), also spent his life assiduously striving to show people the serious problems with the Kantian outlook.
This is a place where Crawford shines, exposing the unspoken and largely unquestioned assumptions of Western philosophy and therefore of our world. Through the examples mentioned above, plus some further meditations on things like hockey players, motorcycle racers, and infant development, Crawford deconstructs the Kantian notion of the isolated thinker as limited and limiting. He ushers in an understanding that we are situated beings, and that our very reality, from our first moments on this earth, is co-created through relational activities that connect us to the physical and natural world, and other human beings. In other words, we don’t meaningfully exist except in relationship to the world and other humans. Our individuality cannot be found in our abstract notion of ourselves as an isolated being, because that is a fundamentally flawed concept. However, Mr. Crawford believes that true individuality can still be found, within a situated and relational personhood.
Mr. Crawford introduces some really useful language drawing on psychologists who study attention. I’ve mentioned that it was the focus on attention that drew me to the book in the first place. The concept of affordances (a word Crawford takes from the psychologist James J. Gibson) is a particularly strong one for me. So, when one rides a motorcycle, or becomes adept at the use of a hockey stick, or uses chopsticks, one is actually extending one’s being beyond one’s body to new tools, new areas of competence, and thereby new real knowledge of the outside world. This extended new world of knowledge and experiences are called affordances.
There are many, many parts of this book that I enjoy thoroughly. Here is a passage in which Crawford challenges the word “freedom” as one that doesn’t help much any more when thinking about ideals for humans to strive for.
What I want to do instead is simply drop “freedom” as a term of approbation. The word is strained by being made to do too much cultural work; it has become a linguistic reflex that affirms our image of ourselves as autonomous. . .
Autonomy talk stems from Enlightenment epistemology and moral theory, which did important polemical work in their day against various forms of coercion. Times have changed. The philosophical project of this book is to reclaim the real, as against representations. This is why the central term of approbation in these pages is not “freedom” but “agency”. For it is when we are engaged in a skilled practice that the world shows up for us as having a reality of its own, independent of the self.
There’s yet another excellent chapter in which Crawford thinks about a famous speech by the author and philosopher David Foster Wallace entitled “This is Water”. This is a speech that I have admired and even used in my teaching as recently as last year. But, Crawford effectively points out that even this speech misses the mark in terms of actually showing people how they can train their attention to something real. Check this chapter out if you like that speech like I do! It’s a great corrective.
Crawford even takes a deep swipe at libertarians and their flawed project of “human freedom from coercion of the state” that I must say, I enjoyed heartily. 🙂
So . . . the book is really steaming away, breaking up Kant and Descartes, and introducing a situational and relational human being who is not by any means an isolated actor in a world of appearances that can’t be certified. The final stop along the tour of human activities is a deep dive into an organ maker’s shop, or more correctly an organ restoration shop, called Taylor and Boody in the Shenandoah Valley. Crawford spends a lot of time vividly describing the various kinds of work, and the workers, in this shop. His intention is to show the elements that make the work that they do rise to a level of true, situated, relational individualism, that is a counter to the false Kantian individualism so many of us take for granted today. Here is a concluding passage from that section:
As we have seen, the dialectic between tradition and innovation allows the organ maker to understand his own inventiveness as a going further in a trajectory he has inherited. This is very different from the modern concept of creativity, which seems to be a crypto-theological concept: creation ex nihilo. For us, the self plays the role of God, and every eruption of creativity is understood to be like a miniature Big Bang, coming out of nowhere. This way of understanding inventiveness cannot connect to others, or to the past. It also falsifies the experience to which we give the name “creativity” by conceiving it to be something irrational, incommunicable, unteachable.
Good stuff, very good stuff.
I think this book is brilliant, and brilliantly put together. . . and yet when I finished it, I had a funny initial reaction. It was something like, “That’s it? Okay, now take it further!” Influenced no doubt by my reading and admiration of Wendell Berry and Rudolf Steiner, from my perspective I can see so clearly where Crawford could take his train of thought further down the track if he chose to. It’s probably not fair to him to expect him to, as I think it resides outside his areas of expertise, which seems to be Western philosophy and mechanical aptitudes of all kinds. (He’s also pretty clearly an atheist, which colors some of his language in the book). More about that after this:
I also had a second reaction that was surprisingly negative. There is a small vignette that Crawford uses at the beginning of the book and then returns to in the end that I found very jarring in an otherwise stimulating and coherent read. Not to be nit-picky, but I think that it is illustrative of what I see as a big blind spot. Crawford tells this story in the section about gambling:
Driving through the desert [outside Las Vegas], I stopped at a gas station/slot machine arcade/liquor store/fireworks emporium on an Indian reservation. A few hundred years ago, the fitness of Native Americans for the world they inhabited excited admiration in some European observers: here were natural aristocrats, disdainful of labor, dedicated to war. Unlike European peasants stooped to the grind of agriculture, anxiously accumulating grain against some future want, the Indian appeared free because confident of his ability to bear hardship, leisured because tough. . .
My impression, admittedly superficial, was that the inhabitants of this reservation were in a state of degradation that went beyond economic hardship–and that this little roadside emporium offered a glimpse into the future.
Crawford admits that his impression was “superficial,” and I wholeheartedly agree. It’s so curious to me, then, that he included this little superficial off-hand critique of current Native culture in his book at all. And, since the book is actually about the dominant Western culture, which, for example, created Las Vegas in all of its disgusting pathology, why does Crawford bring up Native Americans at all? Toward the very end of the book, he returns to it, and this little quotation is what really gave me a nasty bump:
But in the course of our investigations, a crucial difference between our situation and the historical experience of Native Americans has become apparent. They were subject to an invading foreign power, and rightly understood themselves to be at war for the survival of their way of life. (They lost.) Our troubles are native to the regime that we cherish as our own, the product of our greatest virtues as children of the Enlightenment.
This little paragraph was like an ignorant, racist kick in the shins in a book that otherwise captivated me. In particular, the two word sentence, in parentheses: “(They lost)”. Why did Mr. Crawford add that? How does he claim to know something like who the winner is in a cultural “war” that, if it is a war at all (I’d dispute that), is certainly not decided, and still ongoing? And, how is it that our troubles (who is us? Apparently he believes no Native Americans will read his books) are different from the troubles of Native Americans, since we all live here together and have been doing so now for nigh on 400 years? When will we come to terms with the fact that we are living in one world, on one land, together? And why are Enlightenment ideas “the product of our greatest virtues”? Couldn’t there be other virtues that didn’t come through the Enlightenment, for instance the virtues of Native American thought and ways of living?
Mr. Crawford, for all of his brilliance, seems to have found his way to the doorstep of Wendell Berry and Robin Wall Kimmerer and yet doesn’t seem to realize it. Stuck as he in in a world of us vs them, a clear ignorance of Native thought and culture (but a willingness to pass superficial judgment anyway), and a perception of a Western culture that has “won” an imagined war, it’s odd to me that he has nevertheless constructed a book which, using only Western thinkers, is “rediscovering” the ideas that, among other places, exist in Native American language and thought, as demonstrated for example in the book Braiding Sweetgrass.
The other obvious blind spot for Mr. Crawford is that he thinks of the organ maker’s shop as epitomizing the best of attentional humanism. What he never talks about, of course, is farming or gardening or naturalism in the living world. I assume this is just right out of his experience and his comfort zone. So, after he reads Braiding Sweetgrass, I’d love for him to pick up some Sand County Almanac and then a bunch of Wendell Berry’s work. Being an atheist and a mechanical fetishist, if Mr. Crawford could develop the same admiration for the farmer as he does for the organ maker; as much admiration for the miraculousness of God and nature as he has for motorcycles, in my opinion, he’d be really getting somewhere. He could find new affordances that took him out of the dead mechanical universe that he nevertheless thinks is so rich and rewarding and real, and out into an even bigger, and real-er world that includes living beings.
I think he’d find that he had found his way to the threshold of these other thinkers, and now needed to expand his experience to see that dominant Western thought doesn’t, in fact, provide the only pathway to attention. Being human does. Or, in his words, in the last sentence of his book: “Only beautiful things lead us out to join the world beyond our heads.”
Photo by Gabriele Strasky on Unsplash
Having read Kimmerer, Berry, Leopold, and more recently Sam Harris, Thich Naht Hanh, Ram Dass, Alan Watts, James Low and others well-versed in Eastern philosophy, I believe you’re onto something, Brian, in your critique of Mr. Crawford. I’ve started listening to the audiobook of The World Beyond Your Head on Libby, and am about three-quarters through reading Shop Class as Soulcraft. I find myself waiting for him to connect his idea of attention and cognition through manual work to the experience of flow, meditation, and the dropping off of the self. He never arrives.