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The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
A groundbreaking new book from the bestselling author of Shop Class as Soulcraft
In his bestselling book Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew B. Crawford explored the ethical and practical importance of manual competence, as expressed through mastery of our physical environment. In his brilliant follow-up, The World Beyond Your Head, Crawford investigates the challenge of mastering one's own mind.
We often complain about our fractured mental lives and feel beset by outside forces that destroy our focus and disrupt our peace of mind. Any defense against this, Crawford argues, requires that we reckon with the way attention sculpts the self.
Crawford investigates the intense focus of ice hockey players and short-order chefs, the quasi-autistic behavior of gambling addicts, the familiar hassles of daily life, and the deep, slow craft of building pipe organs. He shows that our current crisis of attention is only superficially the result of digital technology, and becomes more comprehensible when understood as the coming to fruition of certain assumptions at the root of Western culture that are profoundly at odds with human nature.
The World Beyond Your Head makes sense of an astonishing array of common experience, from the frustrations of airport security to the rise of the hipster. With implications for the way we raise our children, the design of public spaces, and democracy itself, this is a book of urgent relevance to contemporary life.
In his bestselling book Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew B. Crawford explored the ethical and practical importance of manual competence, as expressed through mastery of our physical environment. In his brilliant follow-up, The World Beyond Your Head, Crawford investigates the challenge of mastering one's own mind.
We often complain about our fractured mental lives and feel beset by outside forces that destroy our focus and disrupt our peace of mind. Any defense against this, Crawford argues, requires that we reckon with the way attention sculpts the self.
Crawford investigates the intense focus of ice hockey players and short-order chefs, the quasi-autistic behavior of gambling addicts, the familiar hassles of daily life, and the deep, slow craft of building pipe organs. He shows that our current crisis of attention is only superficially the result of digital technology, and becomes more comprehensible when understood as the coming to fruition of certain assumptions at the root of Western culture that are profoundly at odds with human nature.
The World Beyond Your Head makes sense of an astonishing array of common experience, from the frustrations of airport security to the rise of the hipster. With implications for the way we raise our children, the design of public spaces, and democracy itself, this is a book of urgent relevance to contemporary life.
257 pages, Hardcover
First published March 31, 2015
602 people are currently reading
10971 people want to read
About the author
Matthew B. Crawford
5 books303 followersMatthew B. Crawford is currently a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He also runs a (very) small business in Richmond, Virginia.
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April 5, 2016
“Genuine connection to others shows up in the vivid colors of defiance and forgiveness, reverence and rebellion, fighting and fucking: the real stuff.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head
I read Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work years ago and loved it. I was enamored of his story. His last book was about excellence, work, education, and engaging in a philosophy of work and empowering the type of education that enables students to have choices beyond the Ivory Tower.
In this his newest book, this PhD in political philosophy, motorcycle repairman, looks at our attention and how we can get beyond our own heads. He explores wow we can get past the active distractions that jockey for our attention through things (tools, interactions with the world) and people (real people, not their representations). He argues that the individual can't be viewed removed from her environment. Unlike Kant or Descartes, Crawford doesn't believe man can be moral or an individual without others, without in fact interacting with things and others.
Best parts of this book are the sections on virtual reality. I recently returned from a trip to MIT's Age Lab where I saw first-hand robotic seals used to treat patients with Parkinson's and Alzheimers. I drove MIT Agelab's AwareCar which they use to measure how different things make drivers distracted (think iWatch vs. iPhone). It was weird to think of the overlap between car's being manufactured to remove our need for attention (remote controlled breaking and paternalistic cameras) and studies being done to help us to make cars that at once are less distracting and at the same time allow us to distract ourselves more. It becomes a weird circle that ends in oblivion or a car wreck.
Another chapter I loved was the chapter on Vegas and gambling. How addictions and our attention interact and how big corporation feed off of that interaction. I loved the section he focused on David Foster Wallace, especially his books This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life and The Pale King. Books that looked at how we use our attention and the bliss we can achieve through boredom. I though his take on Wallace was certainly worth the price of admission on that section.
Finally, I loved the long pre-epilogue chapter on the Organ Maker's Shop. I have an uncle, or actually my wife has an uncle, who makes and repairs organs and this chapter seemed to be a good illustration and summary of his whole thesis. The shop was interesting and it served well to summarize his thesis and his solution to how to achieve individuality in this world of multiple, hard-core distractions.
So, in general, I liked this book. Unfortunately, I wanted to like it even more. If you are going to try to write a book that engages with a critique of Kant, Descartes, and the liberalism they created, you are going to need to bring your A-game. Crawford brought his B-game in my opinion. There were, however, moments of genius (or wicked genius), like this quote:
The basic design intention guiding Mercedes the last ten years seems to be that its cars should offer psychic blow jobs to the affluent. Just sit back, relax, and think something pleasing. The eyes take on a faraway glaze. As for the other drivers, there is a certain ...lack of mutuality.
So, despite the genius of sentences like this, I just wanted MORE from it. I wanted a bit more depth, a bit more precision, a bit more time. This pipe just seemed like it was blown too soon.
― Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head
I read Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work years ago and loved it. I was enamored of his story. His last book was about excellence, work, education, and engaging in a philosophy of work and empowering the type of education that enables students to have choices beyond the Ivory Tower.
In this his newest book, this PhD in political philosophy, motorcycle repairman, looks at our attention and how we can get beyond our own heads. He explores wow we can get past the active distractions that jockey for our attention through things (tools, interactions with the world) and people (real people, not their representations). He argues that the individual can't be viewed removed from her environment. Unlike Kant or Descartes, Crawford doesn't believe man can be moral or an individual without others, without in fact interacting with things and others.
Best parts of this book are the sections on virtual reality. I recently returned from a trip to MIT's Age Lab where I saw first-hand robotic seals used to treat patients with Parkinson's and Alzheimers. I drove MIT Agelab's AwareCar which they use to measure how different things make drivers distracted (think iWatch vs. iPhone). It was weird to think of the overlap between car's being manufactured to remove our need for attention (remote controlled breaking and paternalistic cameras) and studies being done to help us to make cars that at once are less distracting and at the same time allow us to distract ourselves more. It becomes a weird circle that ends in oblivion or a car wreck.
Another chapter I loved was the chapter on Vegas and gambling. How addictions and our attention interact and how big corporation feed off of that interaction. I loved the section he focused on David Foster Wallace, especially his books This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life and The Pale King. Books that looked at how we use our attention and the bliss we can achieve through boredom. I though his take on Wallace was certainly worth the price of admission on that section.
Finally, I loved the long pre-epilogue chapter on the Organ Maker's Shop. I have an uncle, or actually my wife has an uncle, who makes and repairs organs and this chapter seemed to be a good illustration and summary of his whole thesis. The shop was interesting and it served well to summarize his thesis and his solution to how to achieve individuality in this world of multiple, hard-core distractions.
So, in general, I liked this book. Unfortunately, I wanted to like it even more. If you are going to try to write a book that engages with a critique of Kant, Descartes, and the liberalism they created, you are going to need to bring your A-game. Crawford brought his B-game in my opinion. There were, however, moments of genius (or wicked genius), like this quote:
The basic design intention guiding Mercedes the last ten years seems to be that its cars should offer psychic blow jobs to the affluent. Just sit back, relax, and think something pleasing. The eyes take on a faraway glaze. As for the other drivers, there is a certain ...lack of mutuality.
So, despite the genius of sentences like this, I just wanted MORE from it. I wanted a bit more depth, a bit more precision, a bit more time. This pipe just seemed like it was blown too soon.
March 28, 2023
Initially, I was a bit put off by the subtitle: "on Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction", and the introduction also seemed to show features of a self-help book that trains you to stay more focused. But I was wrong: this book only pays indirect attention to that problem. Instead, Crawford (Institute of Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia) offers a surprising and, above all, refreshing view of nothing less than our interaction with reality, i.e. the relationship between the world outside and the one within us! Does that sound heavy? Yes indeed, and some chapters in this book certainly are not easy to follow and require careful reading, and perhaps also some notions of philosophy and psychology. Fortunately, the author illustrates the issues and propositions he makes with numerous well-developed examples.
What struck me most was his repeated outbursts against the Enlightenment, especially against Immanuel Kant. I began to think that Crawford belonged to the ranks of neo-conservative thinkers, such as Roger Scruton, Theodore Dalrymple, and others. But that's not quite right. Crawford aims his arrows mainly at the epistemology of the Enlightenment: in Crawford's words that presumes that reality can be fathomed through representation, a mental image that makes reality into something external, separate from yourself, and which you therefore are able to know and control. A consequence of that view is that knowledge of that reality should be relatively easy to transfer in the form of representations that are described (in language) and are simply stored within the recipient. On closer inspection, our entire education system appears to be permeated by that view.
Crawford demonstrates with numerous practical examples that this approach is incorrect, and even produces a distorted picture of reality. For instance, he extensively discusses the entire process with which a motorcyclist takes a bend: this does not just happen because the motorcyclist has seen how wide the bend is and knows the laws of physics; no, from an early age on he/she learned, literally by falling and getting up, how his/her body relates to the world around him/her and what forces are involved in certain actions. And it is that very slowly built up experiential knowledge, through his/her body, that enables him/her to (almost) perfectly “lie down” in the bend in order not to fly out. Our bodily experience seems to be of the utmost importance here. Crawford also cites learning a craft (such as building an organ): that too does not take place through a simple transfer of knowledge of techniques, but through the very time-consuming process of trial-and-error, in which the sedimented experience of teachers and, by extension, an entire tradition are crucial. In other words: our relating to reality isn’t just a rational process of representation, but a process that involves space (our body) and time (tradition).
I may be doing Crawford a little injustice here, because his book is much richer than this. It also contains numerous social analyses, with a very critical attitude towards market thinking, liberalism and capitalism in general. But I was particularly struck by his different view on perception and cognition. To be clear, Crawford is not making that up himself; he repeatedly cites thinkers such as Iris Murdoch, Merleau-Ponty, Simone Weil and especially Michael Polanyi. I earlier referred to neoconservative thinkers (whom he doesn't quote at all); the big difference is that they usually wallow in frustration and nostalgia and fall back unto reactionary views, while Crawford emphasizes the positive and shows a way out of our far too narrowly rational, modernist approach to reality. In that sense I find Crawford considerably more worthwhile than, for example, Robert Pirsig, the author of the cult book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values. Pirsig claims to have found a way out of the reductionist western view, through the notion of 'quality'. Crawford and Pirsig are partly on the same page, but Pirsig remains way more vague, and unlike Pirsig, Crawford puts much more emphasis on the immersive experience of and interaction with reality, both in space and in time, acknowledging the boundaries of all interaction with reality (whilst Pirsig swallows in a rather arrogant approach). This is not an easy read, Crawford regularly indulges in unnecessarily difficult phrases (hence my rating of 3.5 stars), but it does teach you to look at reality inside and outside yourself with different eyes. And that's no small feat!
What struck me most was his repeated outbursts against the Enlightenment, especially against Immanuel Kant. I began to think that Crawford belonged to the ranks of neo-conservative thinkers, such as Roger Scruton, Theodore Dalrymple, and others. But that's not quite right. Crawford aims his arrows mainly at the epistemology of the Enlightenment: in Crawford's words that presumes that reality can be fathomed through representation, a mental image that makes reality into something external, separate from yourself, and which you therefore are able to know and control. A consequence of that view is that knowledge of that reality should be relatively easy to transfer in the form of representations that are described (in language) and are simply stored within the recipient. On closer inspection, our entire education system appears to be permeated by that view.
Crawford demonstrates with numerous practical examples that this approach is incorrect, and even produces a distorted picture of reality. For instance, he extensively discusses the entire process with which a motorcyclist takes a bend: this does not just happen because the motorcyclist has seen how wide the bend is and knows the laws of physics; no, from an early age on he/she learned, literally by falling and getting up, how his/her body relates to the world around him/her and what forces are involved in certain actions. And it is that very slowly built up experiential knowledge, through his/her body, that enables him/her to (almost) perfectly “lie down” in the bend in order not to fly out. Our bodily experience seems to be of the utmost importance here. Crawford also cites learning a craft (such as building an organ): that too does not take place through a simple transfer of knowledge of techniques, but through the very time-consuming process of trial-and-error, in which the sedimented experience of teachers and, by extension, an entire tradition are crucial. In other words: our relating to reality isn’t just a rational process of representation, but a process that involves space (our body) and time (tradition).
I may be doing Crawford a little injustice here, because his book is much richer than this. It also contains numerous social analyses, with a very critical attitude towards market thinking, liberalism and capitalism in general. But I was particularly struck by his different view on perception and cognition. To be clear, Crawford is not making that up himself; he repeatedly cites thinkers such as Iris Murdoch, Merleau-Ponty, Simone Weil and especially Michael Polanyi. I earlier referred to neoconservative thinkers (whom he doesn't quote at all); the big difference is that they usually wallow in frustration and nostalgia and fall back unto reactionary views, while Crawford emphasizes the positive and shows a way out of our far too narrowly rational, modernist approach to reality. In that sense I find Crawford considerably more worthwhile than, for example, Robert Pirsig, the author of the cult book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values. Pirsig claims to have found a way out of the reductionist western view, through the notion of 'quality'. Crawford and Pirsig are partly on the same page, but Pirsig remains way more vague, and unlike Pirsig, Crawford puts much more emphasis on the immersive experience of and interaction with reality, both in space and in time, acknowledging the boundaries of all interaction with reality (whilst Pirsig swallows in a rather arrogant approach). This is not an easy read, Crawford regularly indulges in unnecessarily difficult phrases (hence my rating of 3.5 stars), but it does teach you to look at reality inside and outside yourself with different eyes. And that's no small feat!
May 4, 2015
Oh dear! He's talking about me isn't he?
More tough going than The Case for Working With Your Hands, but still very rewarding. Basically Matthew B. Crawford is Ron Swanson with about 50 more IQ points and without the Libertarianism.
I am afraid to give a summary of this book because I know I will fail to give it justice, but here goes nothing.
In short this book is about the politics of distraction. Crawford makes a convincing case that our failure to give attention to the world and to instead rely on imperfect representations benefits corporate interests and hollows out our experience of life. Only by re-engaging with the world directly and safeguarding attention as common resource (like clean air or water) can we move forward successfully as a people and a society.
More tough going than The Case for Working With Your Hands, but still very rewarding. Basically Matthew B. Crawford is Ron Swanson with about 50 more IQ points and without the Libertarianism.
I am afraid to give a summary of this book because I know I will fail to give it justice, but here goes nothing.
In short this book is about the politics of distraction. Crawford makes a convincing case that our failure to give attention to the world and to instead rely on imperfect representations benefits corporate interests and hollows out our experience of life. Only by re-engaging with the world directly and safeguarding attention as common resource (like clean air or water) can we move forward successfully as a people and a society.
October 6, 2015
Reviewer Matthew Trevithick said, "This book is close to being quite good." I'd agree.
There was a lot more hard philosophy than I anticipated. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but it did lead me to start the book in the wrong frame of mind. Do I blame the cover copy? The title?
The section on gambling was interesting. The end section on restoring pipe organs nearly drove me out of my tiny mind.
The book didn't feel like a whole, but more like a series of connected themes, separated by reflections on Kantian ethics.
Overall I'd prefer someone else read the same material and rewrote the book in an engaging way.
Not a book I'd recommend. I'll happily own it's due to my own deficiencies.
There was a lot more hard philosophy than I anticipated. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but it did lead me to start the book in the wrong frame of mind. Do I blame the cover copy? The title?
The section on gambling was interesting. The end section on restoring pipe organs nearly drove me out of my tiny mind.
The book didn't feel like a whole, but more like a series of connected themes, separated by reflections on Kantian ethics.
Overall I'd prefer someone else read the same material and rewrote the book in an engaging way.
Not a book I'd recommend. I'll happily own it's due to my own deficiencies.
January 1, 2016
What's remarkable about this book is the lengths to which Matthew B. Crawford goes in order to draw conclusions that are fairly unremarkable.
What begins as a book about the demands placed on our depleted supply of attention actually turns out to be a book about freedom. Tim Keller has (quite accurately, I think) noticed that modern people value freedom more than goodness. But Crawford points out that our current definition of freedom is one that suggests the human will is the strongest force in the universe. We do not believe we ought to be limited by anything outside of our own heads. By the end, this book is more about the burden that comes from having too many choices in a world that can be both thrilling and frustrating, and the burden that comes from thinking we must abandon all ideas that come from other people. Crawford's recurring thesis is that when we value our own independent will too much, we actually are easy prey for advertisements that use the language of choice or sell us a world in which we have control over our environment, even if it is just control over boredom. We like this idea so much that we are entirely too susceptible to advertising's claims.
He organizes the book around two central ideas: our bodies matter in how we engage with the world, and other people matter as sources of community and insight. Both premises are selected in order to challenge ideas of the autonomous self inherited from Enlightenment thinkers. We do not operate merely as brains in buckets, but we are in an environment that offers us "affordances," especially for those skillful enough to use them. Also, we do not operate as if time began when we were born, but we are "situated" in a particular time and place in human tradition, and we are better off if we can learn to live within those traditions, benefitting from the wisdom of others rather than going it alone. Crawford draws examples from airport advertisements, hockey players, children's cartoons, and organ building, and each example helps support and sustain his argument. He is clearly attentive to the world around him, and this pays off in rich illustrations that support his points. His chapter on gambling addiction paints a particularly grim portrait of the heavy burden of choice.
His conclusions--that our bodies matter and we need other people --are actually my basic presuppositions. As a Christian, it was fascinating to watch Crawford reverse engineer the things of the world to discover that true freedom arises from "submitting" (his words!) to the "intractable ways" of real things--for example, in learning the forces at play when riding a motorcycle. He also notices from skilled craftsman that to be in "conversation with a tradition" is indeed a way of learning about the world that helps to get at the truth of things. We do not need to think for ourselves; we need to learn from our elders and peers. This vision of the self as dependent upon fellowship with fellow humans and inseparable from the created world is central to the Christian understanding of what humans are. Even though he sees the world as created by "vast impersonal forces," Crawford simply concludes by the end that "there is something benevolent in the disposition of things, relative to us" as if the world were created for our very use. Amen!
According to Crawford all this emphasis on our own freedom leaves modern people feeling isolated and insecure. We feel pressure to make our own decisons, but we also feel anxiety in making choices. No longer are we supposed to look to authority or to custom, so we become slaves to public opinion. Crawford points out that we increasingly look to social science surveys (and social media, I would add) for confirmation about what is normal. Crawford suggests that this has replaced religion, saying "the expert of normalcy becomes the new priest, salving our souls with the offer of statistical communion" (199).
He observes that in our hunger for freedom, we have actually only traded our fathers in for new masters who are profiting from our shallow and unquestioning desire for autonomy. We like to think of ourselves as free to choose, so companies are only all too willing to present their products as solutions that offer us choices. Crawford continually circles back to argue that we are seeking technology as a way of avoiding the frustrations of the "real" world and the level of skill it takes to appreciate and navigate the real world. We touch the world with a "data-glove" (I love that phrase!) and that makes us more eager to prefer "designed abstractions" that help make the world more intelligible and navigable.
By the end of the book, there is still no clear solution. He is concerned that we give too much of our attention away to the advertisers who makes bids for it, but many of his observations, though accurate, do not offer strong condemnation or obvious solutions. This book looks deeply into the underlying patterns of the world we live in and draws conclusions that any Christian can agree with, but for all of his concern about living in the realworld among real people, his conclusion is rather ethereal and impractical. Even though he has just spent a great deal of energy explaining how hard it is for the modern person to express firm opinions about beauty (he calls us agnostic about all kinds of value, unable to even assert preferences in music without consulting other people first), his final charge is simply to allow things of beauty to draw us out of our own heads. Throughout the book it seems Crawford has some very specific ideas about what we should and should not find beautiful, but by the end he leaves it up to (by his measurement!) the insecure and easily led reader. It's a long way to come to end up exactly where you started.
What begins as a book about the demands placed on our depleted supply of attention actually turns out to be a book about freedom. Tim Keller has (quite accurately, I think) noticed that modern people value freedom more than goodness. But Crawford points out that our current definition of freedom is one that suggests the human will is the strongest force in the universe. We do not believe we ought to be limited by anything outside of our own heads. By the end, this book is more about the burden that comes from having too many choices in a world that can be both thrilling and frustrating, and the burden that comes from thinking we must abandon all ideas that come from other people. Crawford's recurring thesis is that when we value our own independent will too much, we actually are easy prey for advertisements that use the language of choice or sell us a world in which we have control over our environment, even if it is just control over boredom. We like this idea so much that we are entirely too susceptible to advertising's claims.
He organizes the book around two central ideas: our bodies matter in how we engage with the world, and other people matter as sources of community and insight. Both premises are selected in order to challenge ideas of the autonomous self inherited from Enlightenment thinkers. We do not operate merely as brains in buckets, but we are in an environment that offers us "affordances," especially for those skillful enough to use them. Also, we do not operate as if time began when we were born, but we are "situated" in a particular time and place in human tradition, and we are better off if we can learn to live within those traditions, benefitting from the wisdom of others rather than going it alone. Crawford draws examples from airport advertisements, hockey players, children's cartoons, and organ building, and each example helps support and sustain his argument. He is clearly attentive to the world around him, and this pays off in rich illustrations that support his points. His chapter on gambling addiction paints a particularly grim portrait of the heavy burden of choice.
His conclusions--that our bodies matter and we need other people --are actually my basic presuppositions. As a Christian, it was fascinating to watch Crawford reverse engineer the things of the world to discover that true freedom arises from "submitting" (his words!) to the "intractable ways" of real things--for example, in learning the forces at play when riding a motorcycle. He also notices from skilled craftsman that to be in "conversation with a tradition" is indeed a way of learning about the world that helps to get at the truth of things. We do not need to think for ourselves; we need to learn from our elders and peers. This vision of the self as dependent upon fellowship with fellow humans and inseparable from the created world is central to the Christian understanding of what humans are. Even though he sees the world as created by "vast impersonal forces," Crawford simply concludes by the end that "there is something benevolent in the disposition of things, relative to us" as if the world were created for our very use. Amen!
According to Crawford all this emphasis on our own freedom leaves modern people feeling isolated and insecure. We feel pressure to make our own decisons, but we also feel anxiety in making choices. No longer are we supposed to look to authority or to custom, so we become slaves to public opinion. Crawford points out that we increasingly look to social science surveys (and social media, I would add) for confirmation about what is normal. Crawford suggests that this has replaced religion, saying "the expert of normalcy becomes the new priest, salving our souls with the offer of statistical communion" (199).
He observes that in our hunger for freedom, we have actually only traded our fathers in for new masters who are profiting from our shallow and unquestioning desire for autonomy. We like to think of ourselves as free to choose, so companies are only all too willing to present their products as solutions that offer us choices. Crawford continually circles back to argue that we are seeking technology as a way of avoiding the frustrations of the "real" world and the level of skill it takes to appreciate and navigate the real world. We touch the world with a "data-glove" (I love that phrase!) and that makes us more eager to prefer "designed abstractions" that help make the world more intelligible and navigable.
By the end of the book, there is still no clear solution. He is concerned that we give too much of our attention away to the advertisers who makes bids for it, but many of his observations, though accurate, do not offer strong condemnation or obvious solutions. This book looks deeply into the underlying patterns of the world we live in and draws conclusions that any Christian can agree with, but for all of his concern about living in the realworld among real people, his conclusion is rather ethereal and impractical. Even though he has just spent a great deal of energy explaining how hard it is for the modern person to express firm opinions about beauty (he calls us agnostic about all kinds of value, unable to even assert preferences in music without consulting other people first), his final charge is simply to allow things of beauty to draw us out of our own heads. Throughout the book it seems Crawford has some very specific ideas about what we should and should not find beautiful, but by the end he leaves it up to (by his measurement!) the insecure and easily led reader. It's a long way to come to end up exactly where you started.
April 12, 2015
3.5 stars. Like the other comments say, this book is close to being quite good, but clearly needed a tougher editor - the guiding idea (which is generally that our attention is the most precious resource we have, but it's increasing exploited - not exactly a breakthrough, but his observations on fixing this are interesting) is a strong one, but it's watered down whenever the book loses focus, which happens quite a bit. The book does get off to a very strong start, but as I continued reading, the likelihood that I would recommend it to anyone decreased substantially (as did my highlighting of interesting concepts). Also, a few oddly placed swears ruined the flow for me - I've never seen a sentence regarding Kantian ethics include 'fuck' (nor did it seem necessary), which was the first and only time it was used in the book (which again makes me think about a first draft + editor issue). And we get that the author loves motorcycles. Good. God.
December 26, 2016
You'll see some one-star reviews claiming boredom or two-star reviews claiming too much "hard philosophy." This book is neither.
What it rather is, is a series of almost interesting conclusions that are brilliantly ran away from lest the author gets too close to actually making a hard point. Perhaps most supportive of this observation is Crawford's "Epilogue" in which he admits that his treatment is only partial and seems to think that since philosophy is really just a method of figuring things out, it's okay to be partial.
It may be okay not to have a complete answer and needing to write to understand, as Cecil Day Lewis might say; however, Crawford is so slipshod with his work that this book is not a partial answer. It is an incomplete tome replete with inadequate arguments. This is not hard philosophy. This is haughty language masquerading as profundity.
This is mostly due to the fact that Crawford simply refuses to actually unpack any of his observations, situate them within the larger conversation, and link that larger conversation to that argument. This ends up being a misapplication or misunderstanding of psychological concepts, misapplication or misunderstanding of economic concepts, a misapplication or misunderstanding of philosophical concepts, and delirious and simplistic non sequiturs that somehow get more treatment than the broad strokes he uses for complex ideas. His situation of the 'nudge' school of economy is woeful and seems to be equivocation (he ends up bringing in virtue and character into an empirical economic discussion, where it does not fully belong), and he does not make it apparent exactly how an empirically researched idea is "wrong," though he claims so. His understanding of Wallace's "This is Water" commencement speech borders college freshman logic and ventures deeply into the land of the straw man. I was shouting at my car stereo while listening to this audio book, pleading with Crawford to see his own contradictions or his insufficient analysis.
Many times Crawford relies on some weird speculation, which, hopefully at the time of his writing he considered to be rhetorically advantageous, ends up sounding more like a conspiracy theorist than a philosopher (e.g., the muzak at your gym is deliberately chosen by a board room of individuals bent on attacking your individuation...or something of that nature). Crawford downright refuses to cite any credible or scholarly sources when there are more than adequate ones (which Gladwell was able to do for The Tipping Point and Kaheman did in Thinking Fast and Slow). It indicates an author more concerned with setting his own head straight than giving anything meaningful to readers (which, again, he readily admits). [This is not to say that this writing isn't useful to you...but it sure as hell isn't entertaining or useful for your readers.]
The worst of this armchair philosophy is that Crawford hides his pseudo-philosophy behind the elevated language of philosophy, which I can only guess is an attempt to obscure the fact that he simply does not give a full treatment to his arguments and ideas (which he has a good one or two, namely Attentional Commons) or the fact that he doesn't quite grasp other concepts well. Essayists are taught to give the illusion of following rabbit holes. What that means is that you might wind around and go up and down but that the path always seems to lead somewhere worthwhile and in a non-jarring way. Crawford is not a writer of rabbit holes. He is a writer who is sitting at a minefield throwing detritus into the field, setting off random chain reactions that seem to start something promising only to prematurely end.
The subtitle of the book seems truly obfuscated throughout. Crawford spends more time detailing the making of organs towards the end of the book than on complex subjects on which there is plenty of evidence and graspable arguments readily available. I mean, dear god, how does someone cherry pick William James without at least accidentally finding the pragmatists (who probably could have answered most of Crawford's questions without bringing this book into the world). Perhaps Crawford actually wanted to write an essay on organs and organists, but someone unfortunately convinced him otherwise.
I gave this book two stars instead of one because I hated it so much, I had to finish it just to do the review a bit of justice. That stoking of passion is admirable, I suppose. Please avoid this book. Please avoid Crawford's ventures into indignant old-man attitudes and pessimism. Please read the aforementioned titles or Charles Peirce and the American pragmatists or actually take a class on existentialism and phenomenology. Or watch some Youtube videos and TED Talks. You will get more out of life doing any of that than subjecting yourself to this argument salad.
What it rather is, is a series of almost interesting conclusions that are brilliantly ran away from lest the author gets too close to actually making a hard point. Perhaps most supportive of this observation is Crawford's "Epilogue" in which he admits that his treatment is only partial and seems to think that since philosophy is really just a method of figuring things out, it's okay to be partial.
It may be okay not to have a complete answer and needing to write to understand, as Cecil Day Lewis might say; however, Crawford is so slipshod with his work that this book is not a partial answer. It is an incomplete tome replete with inadequate arguments. This is not hard philosophy. This is haughty language masquerading as profundity.
This is mostly due to the fact that Crawford simply refuses to actually unpack any of his observations, situate them within the larger conversation, and link that larger conversation to that argument. This ends up being a misapplication or misunderstanding of psychological concepts, misapplication or misunderstanding of economic concepts, a misapplication or misunderstanding of philosophical concepts, and delirious and simplistic non sequiturs that somehow get more treatment than the broad strokes he uses for complex ideas. His situation of the 'nudge' school of economy is woeful and seems to be equivocation (he ends up bringing in virtue and character into an empirical economic discussion, where it does not fully belong), and he does not make it apparent exactly how an empirically researched idea is "wrong," though he claims so. His understanding of Wallace's "This is Water" commencement speech borders college freshman logic and ventures deeply into the land of the straw man. I was shouting at my car stereo while listening to this audio book, pleading with Crawford to see his own contradictions or his insufficient analysis.
Many times Crawford relies on some weird speculation, which, hopefully at the time of his writing he considered to be rhetorically advantageous, ends up sounding more like a conspiracy theorist than a philosopher (e.g., the muzak at your gym is deliberately chosen by a board room of individuals bent on attacking your individuation...or something of that nature). Crawford downright refuses to cite any credible or scholarly sources when there are more than adequate ones (which Gladwell was able to do for The Tipping Point and Kaheman did in Thinking Fast and Slow). It indicates an author more concerned with setting his own head straight than giving anything meaningful to readers (which, again, he readily admits). [This is not to say that this writing isn't useful to you...but it sure as hell isn't entertaining or useful for your readers.]
The worst of this armchair philosophy is that Crawford hides his pseudo-philosophy behind the elevated language of philosophy, which I can only guess is an attempt to obscure the fact that he simply does not give a full treatment to his arguments and ideas (which he has a good one or two, namely Attentional Commons) or the fact that he doesn't quite grasp other concepts well. Essayists are taught to give the illusion of following rabbit holes. What that means is that you might wind around and go up and down but that the path always seems to lead somewhere worthwhile and in a non-jarring way. Crawford is not a writer of rabbit holes. He is a writer who is sitting at a minefield throwing detritus into the field, setting off random chain reactions that seem to start something promising only to prematurely end.
The subtitle of the book seems truly obfuscated throughout. Crawford spends more time detailing the making of organs towards the end of the book than on complex subjects on which there is plenty of evidence and graspable arguments readily available. I mean, dear god, how does someone cherry pick William James without at least accidentally finding the pragmatists (who probably could have answered most of Crawford's questions without bringing this book into the world). Perhaps Crawford actually wanted to write an essay on organs and organists, but someone unfortunately convinced him otherwise.
I gave this book two stars instead of one because I hated it so much, I had to finish it just to do the review a bit of justice. That stoking of passion is admirable, I suppose. Please avoid this book. Please avoid Crawford's ventures into indignant old-man attitudes and pessimism. Please read the aforementioned titles or Charles Peirce and the American pragmatists or actually take a class on existentialism and phenomenology. Or watch some Youtube videos and TED Talks. You will get more out of life doing any of that than subjecting yourself to this argument salad.
November 14, 2019
Attacks on digital technology for destroying our capacity for attention are a dime a dozen. Despite its title, Matthew Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head is not such an attack. It is far more ambitious. Somewhat to my surprise, it is a direct assault on the Enlightenment for ruining the habits of mind and practice that lead to human flourishing. Crawford says modern man is subject to delusions, birthed by the Enlightenment, that diffuse our perception of the world in a fog of unreality. He therefore sets himself up in as the paladin of reality, a champion badly needed by our times, offering a return to the solidity of the real, through excellence as developed in skilled practices.
Crawford is well known for his classic work, Shop Class as Soulcraft, which has a similar, but less philosophical, focus on the real, with an emphasis on the value of manual work. Other recent books, such as Alexander Langlands’s Craeft, also discuss the concrete works of the hand as essential to re-confer lost critical elements of a good society. The World Beyond Your Head offers a complete argument for what is wrong with how we view the world, and how we should view it instead. Yes, perhaps we should largely quit the digital world, but that is not really a matter with which Crawford concerns himself, and is not the root of the problem, rather a symptom.
This is not a polemical or a political book. It is dense and as a result rewards close attention and re-reading of passages. But its purpose, the recentering of our humanity, is clear from the very first, since the book’s epigraph is a quote from Vincent van Gogh, “The great thing is to gather new vigor in reality.” Such vigor has been destroyed by “the coming to fruition of a picture of the human being that was offered some centuries ago.” That picture, at root, is of man as able to be wholly autonomous and to interact with the world through subjective representations of the world, rather than directly with the world as it really is. This method of viewing reality is a basic error that harms the individual and society as a whole. But there is a solution: willed attention to concrete practices that require skill.
The key present manifestation of the problem, Crawford begins by saying, is the enormous number of demands on our attention, from being bombarded by advertisements at all times, especially when we are a captive audience, to email and text communication. Silence is no longer golden. A perfect example I can offer, though not covered in this 2015 book, is how Netflix now, when browsing selections, if you rest for more than a second on any possible choice in the menu, auto-plays a huge, blaring, jumpy trailer—which you cannot turn off. That is, you cannot browse and consider any choice, reading a summary at your own pace, without continual slamming, booming demands to watch right now (which also give away the plot of the show offered). As Crawford says, everywhere silence has become a luxury good, available, for example, only to wealthy people in public places like airports, when it is available at all.
His objection is not merely the chaos. True, we face the paradox of choice, that too much choice itself makes it difficult and frustrating to choose. And he is concerned that we have lost the ability, among the noise, to choose what to value. But his real objection is deeper—that each of us has lost the ability to have our choices “answered for us by settled forms of social life.” We have been liberated; we are all autonomous individuals, and so “we often find ourselves isolated in a fog of choices,” with no basis to choose, even if we cut through or ignore the noise. Into the gap steps “massification” (shades of José Ortega y Gasset), commodified and commercialized, “ironically, under the banner of individual choice.” This choice, regardless of whether it should be exalted, is not, contrary to what we are told, a “welling-up of our authentic self,” but the result of massive social engineering designed to profit from us. This combination of atomized choice with being led around by the nose, leads to “hassle,” not to joy, and this, our living in the “age of distraction,” with “a partial view of the human person,” is a major reason modern life, as so lived, is the opposite of flourishing, instead subject to innumerable pathologies.
Thus, some of Crawford’s objection is to the mass consumerism that characterizes our society, the bastard child of the Enlightenment and corporate neoliberalism. We are encouraged to buy, buy, buy, and to free ourselves from any part in the web of society. So, for example, I have noticed a recent extremely aggressive trend to encourage women to buy for themselves expensive items such as jewelry, traditionally bought for them as gifts by men who are their husbands or boyfriends. No doubt our corporate overlords have noticed that the massive numbers of women whom they in past decades encouraged to choose an assertive corporate career are now, as a direct result, single, childless, and lonely, but also have plenty of money to desperately spend on this fresh fantasy of siloed self-completeness. The dissolution of all unchosen bonds, the result of Enlightenment philosophy filtered through the modern Left and allied with worship of the market, leads inevitably to this pathos, examples of which could be multiplied all day long. It feels like individual choice, but it really a dank prison of the soul.
The answer, Crawford says, or part of the answer, is for each person to fight back, to create a “coherent,” “situated” self through skilled practices. This is education in opposition to massification, and allows us to control and guide our mental environment, rather than living as a rat in a maze. Skilled practices, hemmed in by reality, allow focus and individual growth. We resist this because “the experience of attending to something isn’t easily made sense of within the prevailing Western anthropology that takes autonomy as the central human good.” The opposite of autonomy, heteronomy, being ruled by something outside your own head, is a threat to this Enlightenment anthropology. If there is a simple summation of this book, it is that autonomy, our brazen idol since John Stuart Mill, should and must yield to and be balanced with heteronomy.
It is no wonder we worship autonomy—it is flattering to us. But it is false. The world constrains us, whether we admit it or not, and through proper disciplined attention to those constraints, the “framing conditions” of our life, we can become fully human. This is, really, simply the “ordered freedom” of the pre-Enlightenment philosophers; Crawford prefers to drop the term “freedom” as carrying too much baggage, and focus on “agency,” rightly-ordered human action, through which we “reclaim the real.” But either way, the point is the same.
That’s all at the start of the book. The rest is exposition and expansion. We start with jigs. Given that we have only so much mental capacity, in order to accomplish, we have to find ways to streamline mental activity. For someone undertaking a skilled practice, this is done by a jig—a term taken from woodworking and metalworking, but applicable more broadly, to any method of constraining mental choice in order to better accomplish a goal. For example, how a short order cook arranges instruments and ingredients is a jig. This is different from Cass Sunstein’s “nudge” (for which Crawford has thinly-veiled contempt), because it is executed by the practitioner in coordination with the reality of his tools, his goal, and his environment, including that of other people, not something imposed by an outsider divorced from the matter at hand. The only reason nudges from the administrative state exist is because they replace “cultural jigs,” that is, the embedded social practices that used to guide our lives, which we destroyed by the idolization of the autonomous self. And because of that destruction, we are nudged continuously by the consumer state, more so than even by the administrative state. We seek total freedom, and we instead are corralled. And this results in even more damaging effects on those sections of society that are not wealthy and lack the capacity for self-regulation; the dismantling of the “marital jig” in the name of personal autonomy has been enormously destructive of the lower orders of society.
Next we turn to perception, of the world beyond your head. Crawford’s complaint is that in the modern world we are told that perception is representational, subjective to the individual. But this is false. Perceptions, properly viewed, are actually wholly embodied in the world outside your head, and as you become more skilled, your perceptions are more accurate, meaning more in tune with reality. If you are a motorcycle racer, denying this is obviously catastrophic. It is also catastrophic for others, just less visibly so. If we soften the boundary between ourselves and the world, by using representations to filter and diffuse reality, we distort our sense of agency, placing ourselves at the center of a false view of the world. Crawford cleverly contrasts old Mickey Mouse cartoons, which show children the heteronomy of the natural world and how the cartoon characters react to it and overcome it by their own agency, with the modern Mickey Mouse Clubhouse television show, where all problems are solved for children by chanting “Oh Tootles!”, causing the Handy Dandy machine to appear, offering a menu of godlike solutions from which the child chooses and which are executed by machines without the child’s needing to be involved in any way except observing. No problem cannot be solved; the child’s autonomy from the world is always preserved through superior separation from it. Here Crawford is openly contemptuous of this taught gelatinous narcissism. “To pursue the fantasy of escaping heteronomy through abstraction is to give up on skill, and therefore to substitute technology-as-magic for the possibility of real agency.”
For all this, stepping back, Crawford formally blames the Enlightenment project of autonomy, culminating for these purposes in Immanuel Kant, who “put the freedom of the will on a new footing, where it will float free of all natural necessities.” Unfettered choice, unconstrained even by reality, seems attractive, but it is a snare, and we become passive recipients of the representations of the world, the false “manufactured experiences” offered by consumer capitalism; “those who present choices to us appear as handmaidens to our own freedom.” It is a false freedom; as with today’s Mouseketeers, “The fantasy of autonomy comes at the price of impotence.”
The extreme end of this is modern machine gambling. In a fascinating chapter, Crawford describes how the “gaming” experience is manipulated to offer the illusion of agency and choice, but instead drives the frequent player to desire not winning, but a nihilistic state of losing everything, becoming wholly spent, while merging with the machine, all the while offering a false vision of acquired skill. They call this “player-centric design.” It is horrifying. Through this example, Crawford attacks the libertarian Enlightenment falsehood that individuals are “radically responsible for themselves” as a destructive myth that gives those who wish to profit from us power over us. We have absorbed the idea that we should not impose our values on others; thinking so “gives us a pleasant feeling: we have succeeded in not being paternalistic or presumptuous.” This leads to less autonomy, as we are led around by the nose, and “neutralizes our critical energies.” Crawford never comes right out and says it, but it’s pretty obvious he regards the entire Enlightenment project of autonomy as an unmitigated disaster. “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.” Take that, John Stuart Mill!
The problem here is not gambling as such. Low-level vice of this type will always exist; the trick for a well-run society is to limit it, both in its overall scope and, to the extent possible, to that segment of society that is least damaged by it. The pre-1980 American system, where gambling was possible only in a few places, or abroad, and no lotteries were allowed, was of this type. Gambling one could not afford was strongly discouraged by the government and stigmatized by polite society, a sound approach that disappeared under the twin hammers of politicians’ lust for voluntary self-taxation and cries for more autonomy, framed as non-judgmentalism. When Foundationalism is in charge, we’re returning to the old system.
Anyway, most of the rest of the book is detailed descriptions of several “ecologies of attention and action” that demonstrate embedded reality (“embedded” is one of Crawford’s favorite words), intertwined with philosophical ruminations tied to the subject matter. The effect is somewhat rambling, but well worth the read. Before he gets there, in “A Brief History of Freedom,” Crawford machine-guns John Locke for failing to see that his program for political freedom was destructive when taken beyond a narrow context, and rejects the idea that reality is not self-revealing, but mediated through subjective representations. This idea is so seductive, and so bound up with our own exalted view of ourselves and our supposedly advanced society, that it is difficult to argue against. But that is Crawford’s project. And while taking about the ecologies on which he focuses, Crawford weaves in René Descartes, Iris Murdoch, David Foster Wallace, G. W. F. Hegel, and Johann Fichte. Also lots of Tocqueville, not only from Democracy in America but more from The Old Regime and the Revolution. And we get Friedrich Nietzsche, for the proposition that “the great moments in the struggle of individuals form a chain, [and] in them the high points of humanity are linked throughout millennia.” Apparently the Bronze Age Mindset is alive and well among short-order cooks, motorcycle racers, and organ makers, the embedded realities on which Crawford focuses.
Ecologies of attention are skills that are developed . . . . [Review completes as first comment.]
Crawford is well known for his classic work, Shop Class as Soulcraft, which has a similar, but less philosophical, focus on the real, with an emphasis on the value of manual work. Other recent books, such as Alexander Langlands’s Craeft, also discuss the concrete works of the hand as essential to re-confer lost critical elements of a good society. The World Beyond Your Head offers a complete argument for what is wrong with how we view the world, and how we should view it instead. Yes, perhaps we should largely quit the digital world, but that is not really a matter with which Crawford concerns himself, and is not the root of the problem, rather a symptom.
This is not a polemical or a political book. It is dense and as a result rewards close attention and re-reading of passages. But its purpose, the recentering of our humanity, is clear from the very first, since the book’s epigraph is a quote from Vincent van Gogh, “The great thing is to gather new vigor in reality.” Such vigor has been destroyed by “the coming to fruition of a picture of the human being that was offered some centuries ago.” That picture, at root, is of man as able to be wholly autonomous and to interact with the world through subjective representations of the world, rather than directly with the world as it really is. This method of viewing reality is a basic error that harms the individual and society as a whole. But there is a solution: willed attention to concrete practices that require skill.
The key present manifestation of the problem, Crawford begins by saying, is the enormous number of demands on our attention, from being bombarded by advertisements at all times, especially when we are a captive audience, to email and text communication. Silence is no longer golden. A perfect example I can offer, though not covered in this 2015 book, is how Netflix now, when browsing selections, if you rest for more than a second on any possible choice in the menu, auto-plays a huge, blaring, jumpy trailer—which you cannot turn off. That is, you cannot browse and consider any choice, reading a summary at your own pace, without continual slamming, booming demands to watch right now (which also give away the plot of the show offered). As Crawford says, everywhere silence has become a luxury good, available, for example, only to wealthy people in public places like airports, when it is available at all.
His objection is not merely the chaos. True, we face the paradox of choice, that too much choice itself makes it difficult and frustrating to choose. And he is concerned that we have lost the ability, among the noise, to choose what to value. But his real objection is deeper—that each of us has lost the ability to have our choices “answered for us by settled forms of social life.” We have been liberated; we are all autonomous individuals, and so “we often find ourselves isolated in a fog of choices,” with no basis to choose, even if we cut through or ignore the noise. Into the gap steps “massification” (shades of José Ortega y Gasset), commodified and commercialized, “ironically, under the banner of individual choice.” This choice, regardless of whether it should be exalted, is not, contrary to what we are told, a “welling-up of our authentic self,” but the result of massive social engineering designed to profit from us. This combination of atomized choice with being led around by the nose, leads to “hassle,” not to joy, and this, our living in the “age of distraction,” with “a partial view of the human person,” is a major reason modern life, as so lived, is the opposite of flourishing, instead subject to innumerable pathologies.
Thus, some of Crawford’s objection is to the mass consumerism that characterizes our society, the bastard child of the Enlightenment and corporate neoliberalism. We are encouraged to buy, buy, buy, and to free ourselves from any part in the web of society. So, for example, I have noticed a recent extremely aggressive trend to encourage women to buy for themselves expensive items such as jewelry, traditionally bought for them as gifts by men who are their husbands or boyfriends. No doubt our corporate overlords have noticed that the massive numbers of women whom they in past decades encouraged to choose an assertive corporate career are now, as a direct result, single, childless, and lonely, but also have plenty of money to desperately spend on this fresh fantasy of siloed self-completeness. The dissolution of all unchosen bonds, the result of Enlightenment philosophy filtered through the modern Left and allied with worship of the market, leads inevitably to this pathos, examples of which could be multiplied all day long. It feels like individual choice, but it really a dank prison of the soul.
The answer, Crawford says, or part of the answer, is for each person to fight back, to create a “coherent,” “situated” self through skilled practices. This is education in opposition to massification, and allows us to control and guide our mental environment, rather than living as a rat in a maze. Skilled practices, hemmed in by reality, allow focus and individual growth. We resist this because “the experience of attending to something isn’t easily made sense of within the prevailing Western anthropology that takes autonomy as the central human good.” The opposite of autonomy, heteronomy, being ruled by something outside your own head, is a threat to this Enlightenment anthropology. If there is a simple summation of this book, it is that autonomy, our brazen idol since John Stuart Mill, should and must yield to and be balanced with heteronomy.
It is no wonder we worship autonomy—it is flattering to us. But it is false. The world constrains us, whether we admit it or not, and through proper disciplined attention to those constraints, the “framing conditions” of our life, we can become fully human. This is, really, simply the “ordered freedom” of the pre-Enlightenment philosophers; Crawford prefers to drop the term “freedom” as carrying too much baggage, and focus on “agency,” rightly-ordered human action, through which we “reclaim the real.” But either way, the point is the same.
That’s all at the start of the book. The rest is exposition and expansion. We start with jigs. Given that we have only so much mental capacity, in order to accomplish, we have to find ways to streamline mental activity. For someone undertaking a skilled practice, this is done by a jig—a term taken from woodworking and metalworking, but applicable more broadly, to any method of constraining mental choice in order to better accomplish a goal. For example, how a short order cook arranges instruments and ingredients is a jig. This is different from Cass Sunstein’s “nudge” (for which Crawford has thinly-veiled contempt), because it is executed by the practitioner in coordination with the reality of his tools, his goal, and his environment, including that of other people, not something imposed by an outsider divorced from the matter at hand. The only reason nudges from the administrative state exist is because they replace “cultural jigs,” that is, the embedded social practices that used to guide our lives, which we destroyed by the idolization of the autonomous self. And because of that destruction, we are nudged continuously by the consumer state, more so than even by the administrative state. We seek total freedom, and we instead are corralled. And this results in even more damaging effects on those sections of society that are not wealthy and lack the capacity for self-regulation; the dismantling of the “marital jig” in the name of personal autonomy has been enormously destructive of the lower orders of society.
Next we turn to perception, of the world beyond your head. Crawford’s complaint is that in the modern world we are told that perception is representational, subjective to the individual. But this is false. Perceptions, properly viewed, are actually wholly embodied in the world outside your head, and as you become more skilled, your perceptions are more accurate, meaning more in tune with reality. If you are a motorcycle racer, denying this is obviously catastrophic. It is also catastrophic for others, just less visibly so. If we soften the boundary between ourselves and the world, by using representations to filter and diffuse reality, we distort our sense of agency, placing ourselves at the center of a false view of the world. Crawford cleverly contrasts old Mickey Mouse cartoons, which show children the heteronomy of the natural world and how the cartoon characters react to it and overcome it by their own agency, with the modern Mickey Mouse Clubhouse television show, where all problems are solved for children by chanting “Oh Tootles!”, causing the Handy Dandy machine to appear, offering a menu of godlike solutions from which the child chooses and which are executed by machines without the child’s needing to be involved in any way except observing. No problem cannot be solved; the child’s autonomy from the world is always preserved through superior separation from it. Here Crawford is openly contemptuous of this taught gelatinous narcissism. “To pursue the fantasy of escaping heteronomy through abstraction is to give up on skill, and therefore to substitute technology-as-magic for the possibility of real agency.”
For all this, stepping back, Crawford formally blames the Enlightenment project of autonomy, culminating for these purposes in Immanuel Kant, who “put the freedom of the will on a new footing, where it will float free of all natural necessities.” Unfettered choice, unconstrained even by reality, seems attractive, but it is a snare, and we become passive recipients of the representations of the world, the false “manufactured experiences” offered by consumer capitalism; “those who present choices to us appear as handmaidens to our own freedom.” It is a false freedom; as with today’s Mouseketeers, “The fantasy of autonomy comes at the price of impotence.”
The extreme end of this is modern machine gambling. In a fascinating chapter, Crawford describes how the “gaming” experience is manipulated to offer the illusion of agency and choice, but instead drives the frequent player to desire not winning, but a nihilistic state of losing everything, becoming wholly spent, while merging with the machine, all the while offering a false vision of acquired skill. They call this “player-centric design.” It is horrifying. Through this example, Crawford attacks the libertarian Enlightenment falsehood that individuals are “radically responsible for themselves” as a destructive myth that gives those who wish to profit from us power over us. We have absorbed the idea that we should not impose our values on others; thinking so “gives us a pleasant feeling: we have succeeded in not being paternalistic or presumptuous.” This leads to less autonomy, as we are led around by the nose, and “neutralizes our critical energies.” Crawford never comes right out and says it, but it’s pretty obvious he regards the entire Enlightenment project of autonomy as an unmitigated disaster. “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.” Take that, John Stuart Mill!
The problem here is not gambling as such. Low-level vice of this type will always exist; the trick for a well-run society is to limit it, both in its overall scope and, to the extent possible, to that segment of society that is least damaged by it. The pre-1980 American system, where gambling was possible only in a few places, or abroad, and no lotteries were allowed, was of this type. Gambling one could not afford was strongly discouraged by the government and stigmatized by polite society, a sound approach that disappeared under the twin hammers of politicians’ lust for voluntary self-taxation and cries for more autonomy, framed as non-judgmentalism. When Foundationalism is in charge, we’re returning to the old system.
Anyway, most of the rest of the book is detailed descriptions of several “ecologies of attention and action” that demonstrate embedded reality (“embedded” is one of Crawford’s favorite words), intertwined with philosophical ruminations tied to the subject matter. The effect is somewhat rambling, but well worth the read. Before he gets there, in “A Brief History of Freedom,” Crawford machine-guns John Locke for failing to see that his program for political freedom was destructive when taken beyond a narrow context, and rejects the idea that reality is not self-revealing, but mediated through subjective representations. This idea is so seductive, and so bound up with our own exalted view of ourselves and our supposedly advanced society, that it is difficult to argue against. But that is Crawford’s project. And while taking about the ecologies on which he focuses, Crawford weaves in René Descartes, Iris Murdoch, David Foster Wallace, G. W. F. Hegel, and Johann Fichte. Also lots of Tocqueville, not only from Democracy in America but more from The Old Regime and the Revolution. And we get Friedrich Nietzsche, for the proposition that “the great moments in the struggle of individuals form a chain, [and] in them the high points of humanity are linked throughout millennia.” Apparently the Bronze Age Mindset is alive and well among short-order cooks, motorcycle racers, and organ makers, the embedded realities on which Crawford focuses.
Ecologies of attention are skills that are developed . . . . [Review completes as first comment.]
May 5, 2015
For me, a millennial and highly prone to intuition, this book was therapeutic. Crawford lays out through a history of ideas and practices how we have lost our attention to the world. And his prescription is a heavy dose of tradition and work that forces extension of our agency and genius in the physical world.
December 1, 2022
The synthesis for the book seemed to be: Our attention and ability to pay attention is being corrupted in many ways (e.g. advertising everywhere, gambling games that are designed to addict us) and we have allowed this to happen because of our collective desire to preserve individual autonomy. This desire for autonomy stems from our enlightenment past, but is flimsy and should be scrutinized because we make tradeoffs when autonomy is the goal that we solve for. Left to our own devices, we will be worse off and will end up more depressed, with shorter attention spans, and will pursue less virtuous activities that would otherwise lead us to better, more fulfilling lives.
This almost immediately reminded me of two of my favorite videos that make adjacent points to Crawford’s:
This Is Water - David Foster Wallace The author actually includes excerpts of his speech in one section of the book (but takes issue with DFW’s solution for how to deal with the mundane-ness of everyday life)
The Modern Struggle - Naval Ravikant
What I liked about the book: Crawford introduced a number of new frameworks and concepts that were new to me, including:
- Orienting response (i.e. why we are drawn to certain actions/movements – e.g. CNN in the airport lounge)
- The notion of an “autonomous self” including philosophical history and its numerous shortcomings
- Attentional commons and how they are being corrupted by private interests (e.g. advertisements everywhere we look)
- The history of gambling and how it has been purposefully engineered to addict us and quickly separate a gambler from their money
I also thought he gave a strong introduction that provided a clear synthesis and framework that helped set the stage for the reader
What I didn’t like about the book:
- I found parts of the book far too academic and philosophical. Being that the subject matter is so practical (lack of attention is an issue that ALL of us deal with), it felt like there was an opportunity to streamline his argument in a way that would have reduced the enormous cognitive load it required to read the book and in so doing maintain a larger potential audience.
- It felt like there was an opportunity to elaborate on 1) the actual harm that our poor attention spans cause us individually (he calls out a bit of the collective impact – though I’m not sure that opportunity for erotic experience is reason enough for me to put away my phone in the airport security line) and 2) what we can do about it – from both a societal/policy and personal standpoint (i.e. how each of us can individually cope with the fact that we are inundated by advertisements/media so frequently). I recognize that this is not at all the purpose of the book, and Crawford is an academic whose background is rooted in philosophy. Still, he seemed well-positioned to offer up at least a few thoughts on how to actually deal with and improve some of the issues he writes about.
- I was unimpressed by the final chapter of the book. Instead of offering a conclusion, he instead veered into a long meandering story about a group of organ builders, which struck me as a non-sequitur given it isn’t immediately obvious how doing highly skilled labor helps any of us address all of the issues he laid out the book, so it is a poor example at best and felt a bit like he was trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Had he not included this section, the book would've been 4 stars for me.
Here is a video of a lecture that Crawford gives, where he effectively summarizes the salient points from the book in the first 45 minutes.
This almost immediately reminded me of two of my favorite videos that make adjacent points to Crawford’s:
This Is Water - David Foster Wallace The author actually includes excerpts of his speech in one section of the book (but takes issue with DFW’s solution for how to deal with the mundane-ness of everyday life)
The Modern Struggle - Naval Ravikant
What I liked about the book: Crawford introduced a number of new frameworks and concepts that were new to me, including:
- Orienting response (i.e. why we are drawn to certain actions/movements – e.g. CNN in the airport lounge)
- The notion of an “autonomous self” including philosophical history and its numerous shortcomings
- Attentional commons and how they are being corrupted by private interests (e.g. advertisements everywhere we look)
- The history of gambling and how it has been purposefully engineered to addict us and quickly separate a gambler from their money
I also thought he gave a strong introduction that provided a clear synthesis and framework that helped set the stage for the reader
What I didn’t like about the book:
- I found parts of the book far too academic and philosophical. Being that the subject matter is so practical (lack of attention is an issue that ALL of us deal with), it felt like there was an opportunity to streamline his argument in a way that would have reduced the enormous cognitive load it required to read the book and in so doing maintain a larger potential audience.
- It felt like there was an opportunity to elaborate on 1) the actual harm that our poor attention spans cause us individually (he calls out a bit of the collective impact – though I’m not sure that opportunity for erotic experience is reason enough for me to put away my phone in the airport security line) and 2) what we can do about it – from both a societal/policy and personal standpoint (i.e. how each of us can individually cope with the fact that we are inundated by advertisements/media so frequently). I recognize that this is not at all the purpose of the book, and Crawford is an academic whose background is rooted in philosophy. Still, he seemed well-positioned to offer up at least a few thoughts on how to actually deal with and improve some of the issues he writes about.
- I was unimpressed by the final chapter of the book. Instead of offering a conclusion, he instead veered into a long meandering story about a group of organ builders, which struck me as a non-sequitur given it isn’t immediately obvious how doing highly skilled labor helps any of us address all of the issues he laid out the book, so it is a poor example at best and felt a bit like he was trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Had he not included this section, the book would've been 4 stars for me.
Here is a video of a lecture that Crawford gives, where he effectively summarizes the salient points from the book in the first 45 minutes.
April 25, 2015
Do yourself a favor and just read the epilogue. I've read two of Crawford's books and finally have to say that he is one of the most obtuse writers I've ever read. Smart. Great ideas. But he manages to write in the most uninteresting way. It's such a plodding task to keep reading that he must have felt it, too. Every section ends with a recapitulation and you wonder, "Why didn't you just say that in the first place?"
August 31, 2022
2022:
I re-read this by mistake. (blushing crimson to the top of my ears) Someone referenced it, and I remembered how much I loved Crawford's book Shop Class as Soulcraft. But I forgot I had also read this title. Until my struggles prompted me to look it up on Goodreads and see what others thought. THEN read my own review! (finger on my cheek, shaking my head)
I haven't deviated from my response six years ago. I love reading books on attention; as Crawford says, we are in a crisis of attention. By we, I mean me. :: sigh ::
I liked his analogy of hyperpalatable mental stimuli. I've found myself surfing through the 60 second Reels on Facebook (I won't let myself get on Instagram or Twitter or TikTok) which qualifies as hyperpalatable. But time killers.
Again, I soaked up chapter 13 on the building of pipe organs. It seems so medieval to work on an instrument with the intention that it will still be used four hundred years from now.
2016:
Crawford's thoughts are at a higher altitude than mine. From time to time the clouds disappeared and I got a clear view of his point (and loved it); but there was a lot of mist and fog that obscured my ability to follow the argument. My problem, not his. I wonder (but not very long) if a second reading would yield more 'aha' moments.
I happily gleaned from several highly excellent chapters. My favorite, by far, was the chapter about pipe organ makers in Virginia. If you play the organ, love the organ, wish you could play the organ, get the book to read this chapter.
Crawford's comparison of old Mickey Mouse cartoons with Disney Jr. Mickey Mouse Clubhouse was enlightening. The old cartoon characters encounter material things that generate frustration; the new ones exude hyper congeniality and never experience helplessness. The old ones are funny...
Favorite of my copied quotes:
Consider that when you go deep into some particular skill or art, it trains your powers of concentration and perception. You become more discerning about the objects you are dealing with and, if all goes well, begin to care viscerally about quality, because you have been initiated into an ethic of caring about what you are doing.
Genuine connection to others shows up in the vivid colors of defiance and forgiveness, reverence and rebellion, fighting and f***ing: the real stuff.
Membership in a community is a prerequisite to creativity.
Distractibility might be regarded as the mental equivalent of obesity.
To be present with those I share a life with is then one option among many, and likely not the most amusing one at any given moment.
{Regarding business-class lounges}
Outside the lounge is the usual airport cacophony. Because we have allowed our attention to be monetized, if you want yours back you're going to have to pay for it.
I re-read this by mistake. (blushing crimson to the top of my ears) Someone referenced it, and I remembered how much I loved Crawford's book Shop Class as Soulcraft. But I forgot I had also read this title. Until my struggles prompted me to look it up on Goodreads and see what others thought. THEN read my own review! (finger on my cheek, shaking my head)
I haven't deviated from my response six years ago. I love reading books on attention; as Crawford says, we are in a crisis of attention. By we, I mean me. :: sigh ::
I liked his analogy of hyperpalatable mental stimuli. I've found myself surfing through the 60 second Reels on Facebook (I won't let myself get on Instagram or Twitter or TikTok) which qualifies as hyperpalatable. But time killers.
Again, I soaked up chapter 13 on the building of pipe organs. It seems so medieval to work on an instrument with the intention that it will still be used four hundred years from now.
2016:
Crawford's thoughts are at a higher altitude than mine. From time to time the clouds disappeared and I got a clear view of his point (and loved it); but there was a lot of mist and fog that obscured my ability to follow the argument. My problem, not his. I wonder (but not very long) if a second reading would yield more 'aha' moments.
I happily gleaned from several highly excellent chapters. My favorite, by far, was the chapter about pipe organ makers in Virginia. If you play the organ, love the organ, wish you could play the organ, get the book to read this chapter.
Crawford's comparison of old Mickey Mouse cartoons with Disney Jr. Mickey Mouse Clubhouse was enlightening. The old cartoon characters encounter material things that generate frustration; the new ones exude hyper congeniality and never experience helplessness. The old ones are funny...
Favorite of my copied quotes:
Consider that when you go deep into some particular skill or art, it trains your powers of concentration and perception. You become more discerning about the objects you are dealing with and, if all goes well, begin to care viscerally about quality, because you have been initiated into an ethic of caring about what you are doing.
Genuine connection to others shows up in the vivid colors of defiance and forgiveness, reverence and rebellion, fighting and f***ing: the real stuff.
Membership in a community is a prerequisite to creativity.
Distractibility might be regarded as the mental equivalent of obesity.
To be present with those I share a life with is then one option among many, and likely not the most amusing one at any given moment.
{Regarding business-class lounges}
Outside the lounge is the usual airport cacophony. Because we have allowed our attention to be monetized, if you want yours back you're going to have to pay for it.
July 31, 2017
The central idea of this book is that we are suffering from a set of concentrated assaults on "the attentional commons." Everywhere you look (or listen), there's a barrage of pseudo-information designed to claim your consciousness. While acknowledging the digital dimension of the assault, Crawford asserts convincingly that the problem is much broader and has deep roots in philosophy and political economy. When we conceive of ourselves and our freedom in terms of radical autonomy and repudiate all (recognized) authority, we reduce "freedom" to an ability to indulge our "choice" while opening our "will" to manipulation by corporate forces that devote themselves to telling us what we really want. Crawford approaches the problem from multiple angles. He does a nice job delving into the connection between Kant's philosophy, particularly the idea of rationality and autonomy, and the creeping abstraction of contemporary life. I loved his discussion of the changes in the Disney universe to a psychologically realistic world of tension and conflict and grace to one in which magical thinking replaces real agency. His chapter on organ builders recalls the emphasis on manual creativity from his previous book Shop Class As Soulcraft, advancing a vision of human fulfillment grounded in a creative relationship with tradition.
March 1, 2024
Really enjoyable, really good and engaging work about true freedom which comes from acknowledging oneself to be situated in (dependent on, obliged to, inseparable from) a world of things and others. Broadly a work of personalist anthropology dealing with attention and contemporary notions of the self, drawing on Polanyi, Taylor, Kierkegaard, and figures in the field of "embodied cognition". Written at a challenging but not-technical level. The argumentation was not always clear and I am not sure he gets Kant right (at least, he differs from Roger Scruton's idea of Kant which I read alongside this book) as his main antagonist. But truly the sort of work of philosophy that reveals one to oneself, invites the examination of tacit assumptions, and all from a contemporary lens. If you've wondered what the hell is going on when you find yourself drawn to the "news" ads on the gas pump TV...or if you just live in the 2020's and something feels off...I recommend it.
November 16, 2015
I don't give very many books 5-star ratings; my median rating for a book that I liked, is 3 stars. I don't give it more than that, unless it not only was enjoyable while I read it, but stuck with me for much longer afterwards than most books do. I don't give it 5 stars unless it appears to have made a permanent and lasting change in the way I think.
Of course, this is difficult to tell at the time. Nevertheless, Crawford's take "On Becoming An Individual In An Age of Distraction", is a book that succeeds, and in large part not because of the answers it gives, but because it asks the right questions.
I will not attempt to summarize, in a few paragraphs, all that Crawford attempts (and, for the most part, succeeds at) in several hundred pages. It is worth saying though, that he takes on questions like, why are we all increasingly distracted from everything, by everything? Why do people who suffer from an addiction to playing slot machines, do what they do? Why does our culture's focus on individuality, not seem to lead to an increase in individual satisfaction?
Why on earth would people, in this day and age, voluntarily seek out professions such as the hand-crafting of church organs? Why does our current economic theory have not only no coherent answer, but not even much interest in the question? What, basically, is wrong with our education system, and why does it lose out to the many distractions that compete with it?
It is the sort of book which is best read in not too much of a rush, so that each chapter has a bit of time to sink into the brain before you take on the next one. But believe it or not, Crawford actually delivers something like a thoughtful and productive answer to all these questions, and many other good ones besides.
Of course, this is difficult to tell at the time. Nevertheless, Crawford's take "On Becoming An Individual In An Age of Distraction", is a book that succeeds, and in large part not because of the answers it gives, but because it asks the right questions.
I will not attempt to summarize, in a few paragraphs, all that Crawford attempts (and, for the most part, succeeds at) in several hundred pages. It is worth saying though, that he takes on questions like, why are we all increasingly distracted from everything, by everything? Why do people who suffer from an addiction to playing slot machines, do what they do? Why does our culture's focus on individuality, not seem to lead to an increase in individual satisfaction?
Why on earth would people, in this day and age, voluntarily seek out professions such as the hand-crafting of church organs? Why does our current economic theory have not only no coherent answer, but not even much interest in the question? What, basically, is wrong with our education system, and why does it lose out to the many distractions that compete with it?
It is the sort of book which is best read in not too much of a rush, so that each chapter has a bit of time to sink into the brain before you take on the next one. But believe it or not, Crawford actually delivers something like a thoughtful and productive answer to all these questions, and many other good ones besides.
April 26, 2015
This was a challenging book to read. My husband asked me what it was about and I said I didn't know. And I was at that moment reading the last chapter of the book! But although I can't sum it up, I really did enjoy it.
I have a personal, deep hatred for CNN/TV news in airports (and other public places), so to read someone else addressing this and the ways in which our public spaces have been taken over with "noise" was really great.
I also really loved his dissection of Mickey Mouse cartoons, past and present. How depressing but fascinating to see how our view of the world has changed.
The book, I guess, is about attention and where we direct it. Something we all struggle with in the age of smart phones, the internet, TV, and all the other mindless escapist stuff we waste the majority of our attention on. I'm looking forward to going back to his first book and seeing what it has to offer.
I have a personal, deep hatred for CNN/TV news in airports (and other public places), so to read someone else addressing this and the ways in which our public spaces have been taken over with "noise" was really great.
I also really loved his dissection of Mickey Mouse cartoons, past and present. How depressing but fascinating to see how our view of the world has changed.
The book, I guess, is about attention and where we direct it. Something we all struggle with in the age of smart phones, the internet, TV, and all the other mindless escapist stuff we waste the majority of our attention on. I'm looking forward to going back to his first book and seeing what it has to offer.
May 29, 2017
I cannot say enough good things about this book. Loved it.
Re-reading it 2 years later... that's how much I enjoyed this book.
Re-reading it 2 years later... that's how much I enjoyed this book.
November 5, 2024
At one point I thought I might be catching a cold, but it was actually the joy of feeling one's powers expand!
August 11, 2018
A somewhat mixed bag. Every once in a while an interesting idea would pop out. I appreciate his critique of subjectivism. He also makes good points about the recent sanitization of children’s TV programs — it’s become about respecting an expression of personal feelings, rather than making observations about reality — an avoidance of conflict. The rant about pipe organs seemed to have no purpose.
Generally Crawford is too verbose, in a bad way -- prone to using 4 words where 2 will do. I suspect he was very good at padding his essays with BS in his undergrad days.
I am intrigued by Laura’s review here: Read Laura's 4-star review of The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction by Matthew B. Crawford
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Generally Crawford is too verbose, in a bad way -- prone to using 4 words where 2 will do. I suspect he was very good at padding his essays with BS in his undergrad days.
I am intrigued by Laura’s review here: Read Laura's 4-star review of The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction by Matthew B. Crawford
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
March 24, 2025
5 star ideas and analysis
4 stars for drowning in jargon and anecdotes
4 stars for drowning in jargon and anecdotes
September 4, 2015
I ended up not liking this book very much. It's a little tough to put my finger on exactly why. First, I got interested in it because of a "preview" article published by the author in the NYT (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/opi...), which, while dealing with issues that I find interesting and claiming that it was "adapted" from TWBYH, has virtually nothing to do with it. In fact, TWBYH seems like a return to Crawford's standard topic that it can be good to work with your hands. (I haven't read "Shop Class as Soulcraft", nor do I intend to at this point.) That's fine, as far as it goes. But something about the way Crawford presents his case rubs me the wrong way. Oddly enough, I was often reminded of Ayn Rand when I read this book. In Crawford's paean to the artisanal master-apprentice relationship, I see something of the same longing for an objective system for sorting people out from best to worst. Crawford often uses the phrase "earned independence of judgment," which rubs me the wrong way. He generalizes skill and hard work in one arena of life somehow to imply competence in other arenas (hello, Donald Trump), and the idea that independence of judgment is anything but the birthright of every person doesn't seem right to me. Although I no longer have the book with me to cite specific examples, I recall frequently encountering Dennettian "boom crutches" including surelys, rathering, and deepities, just to name a few.
The most interesting part of the book is his discussion of kinetic feedback in car design.
The most interesting part of the book is his discussion of kinetic feedback in car design.
February 5, 2017
If you get that sensation that something just isn't right with all the TVs blaring and music constantly bombarding you in the airport or coffee shop or bar, or the ads coming up on social media, or the displays you literally have to go around when you're in the supermarket.....then this book is for you.
My five star review is more subject than objective. I am just being more upfront about the matter with you.
This is my introduction to the works of Mr. Crawford, and it won't be my last. I will put his other books on my list to read.
First, this is NOT light reading. I will need to read the the paperback that I own. But, much can be gained from just taking away big ideas. He does a wonderful job at explaining broadly his argument and how it flows out into the different major supporting details the book delves into.
Then, at the end, he goes back over his thesis and major points.
Sounds cliche to say that "everyone should read this" so I won't.
If you get that sensation that something just isn't right with all the TVs blaring and music constantly bombarding you in the airport or coffee shop or bar, or the ads coming up on social media, or the displays you literally have to go around when you're in the supermarket.....then this book is for you.
My five star review is more subject than objective. I am just being more upfront about the matter with you.
This is my introduction to the works of Mr. Crawford, and it won't be my last. I will put his other books on my list to read.
First, this is NOT light reading. I will need to read the the paperback that I own. But, much can be gained from just taking away big ideas. He does a wonderful job at explaining broadly his argument and how it flows out into the different major supporting details the book delves into.
Then, at the end, he goes back over his thesis and major points.
Sounds cliche to say that "everyone should read this" so I won't.
If you get that sensation that something just isn't right with all the TVs blaring and music constantly bombarding you in the airport or coffee shop or bar, or the ads coming up on social media, or the displays you literally have to go around when you're in the supermarket.....then this book is for you.
May 18, 2023
I'll start out by saying I don't enjoy reading about philosophy and I made assumptions about what I thought the book would be about based solely on the title. I was expecting a work of popular psychology or sociology. Most of the book was lost on me and I had a hard time focusing on the content and making connections between the examples and the author's points. (The irony of this is not lost on me.) But the author's examples were so odd... I had to go back and re-read sections and still wondered what the point was. Take the example of the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. What in the actual hell? It's such a bazaar example and honestly I couldn't get past the description of the show. I came away from the book more lost than I was before reading it. I found the writing to be unnecessarily pompous. I guess I'm just not the intended audience? Too bad. Back to popular psychology I go :-)
January 8, 2015
This one was a bit of a slog. Crawford writes in very dense language, and suffers from trying to generalize too often, making sweeping statements where a simple conclusion will do. I was intrigued by his thoughts on carving out distraction-free zones in public areas, and his profile of an organ manufacturer at the end of the book is beautifully lyrical (and specific), but everything in between just sort of lost me. There are some very interesting ideas in here, and I left the book thoughtful and examining my attitudes on the subject, but I just couldn't get over the style.
May 17, 2020
Harder to read than it should be, the book tries to connect a lot together: attention, how attention is manipulated, how we learn, and how we operate in the world - physically and emotionally. Parts are really interesting, and the author brings in Iris Murdoch and David Foster Wallace in unexpected ways. But the payoff is just not great enough. To be fair, I have not read his first book: ‘Shop Class as Soulcraft,’ so I may read that next. Best quote: ‘Joy is the feeling of your power increasing’: Nietzsche.
October 18, 2025
I have tried for years to fathom where we are in our present-day location. As I look beyond the geopolitical commotions to the normal, day-in-and-day-out state of affairs, I find it alarming how easily distracted we’ve become, and the ways disruption has taken over our mental, visual, and audio space. Why is that, how did we get here, and is there a viable way forward? Matthew Crawford, a senior fellow at the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, fabricator of components for custom motorcycles and established author, addresses all of this and more in his recently published 320 page paperback, “The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction.”
The overall theme of “The World Beyond Your Head” has to do with seeking out authentic individuality in a social context and culture that is awash in a flattened-out democratic autonomy. The author describes the book’s aim in this way, “I hope to arrive at something like an ethics of attention for our time, grounded in a realistic account of the mind and a critical gaze at modern culture” (7). There is an urgency in this volume since the author sees that presently there “is a crisis of self-ownership: our attention isn’t simply ours to direct where we will, and we complain about it bitterly” (5). We have “allowed our attention to be monetized, if you want it back you’re going to have to pay for it” (12).
To map out the trajectory of how we got here, Crawford reaches back to the Enlightenment, looking at how Kant’s program underpins the American ideal of autonomy and freedom. This is a program that reaches out for a disembodied will that floats “free of all natural necessities” (74), where to be rational is not “to be situated in the world” (76). In other words, to become the autonomous self one must be “free to satisfy one’s preferences. Preferences themselves are beyond rational scrutiny; they express the authentic core of a self whose freedom is realized when there are no encumbrances to its preference-satisfying behavior” (17). The outworking of this Kantian “fantasy of autonomy” is that we become impotent (77), pliable to the architects of choice (117), succumbing to a fragility that can’t “tolerate conflict and frustration” and therefore is disposed to give ourselves and our cash to those who manufacture comfort and the best experience to “save us from a direct confrontation with the world” (77). It’s a rather chilling diagnosis that uses the gambling casino as a sample of these symptoms.
Next the author aims “The World Beyond Your Head” deeper into the present situation. Three of the most important trajectories of the Kantian “fantasy of autonomy” come through load and clear. In the structure of Kantian autonomy is the rise of the sovereign self that lives in the culture of performance “in which you have to constantly marshal your internal resources to be successful” (162); where the new ideal is no longer a settled identity but the “ideal of being flexible (. . .) of reinventing yourself at any time, like a good democratic Übermensch” (163). This leads to a “weariness with the vague and unending project of having to become one’s fullest self” (165).
A second arc is the playing out of subjectivism, where right-and-wrong comes from me, the subject, and only applies to me, the subject. Crawford rightly points out how subjectivism can’t make sense of the experience of achieving greater clarity in one’s ability to understand moral consequences, and it can’t adapt to the idea that there might actually be a real right-and-wrong out there that applies to us and originates outside of us instead of originating from our own sovereign-self idiosyncrasies. Crawford calls this inability “the dogmatic inarticulacy of subjectivism,” which he goes on to define as a “moral autism” (184).
The final direction of the Kantian program is “the ideal of autonomy” that “prepares the way for massification” (196). This is the trend to cast off our situatedness, history, and inherited traditions and to self-identify along the categorical lines mapped out by social sciences (200) and social surveys. By absorbing these social sciences categories as our identity we become the decontextualized citizens and the homogenized residents bowing at the idolatrous shrine of the legacy-rejecting present: “When the sovereignty of the self requires that the inheritance of the past be disqualified as a guide to action and meaning, we confine ourselves in an eternal present” (205).
In “The World Beyond Your Head” Crawford also offers a remedy to the Kantian project: an antidote of embodiment and situatedness and a regimen of encountering things and other people. First the book the author brings out the value and virtue of being recognized as an individual which “seems to be possible only in the context of genuine connection with others, with whom one is locked into some web of norms – some cultural jig – that is binding, yet also rich enough to admit of individual interpretation” (160). Next, he illustrates situatedness and embodiment by picturing the short order cook who has come to inhabit the kitchen and the motorcyclist who experiences cognitive extension. Finally, he also spends a considerable amount of time and ink on the exemplary organ maker’s shop where “a readiness to rebel – against the self-satisfaction of the age – seems a prerequisite to discovering something you judge worthy of reverence. To affirm something in this way, freely and with discernment, is surely one element of what it means to be an individual” (225). It’s from within this “dynamic of reverence and rebellion” (236) one inhabits an inherited legacy, thrives in it, and becomes truly forward moving and progressive; “his own inventiveness as a going further in a trajectory he has inherited” (243).
In Crawford’s diagnostic and remedial blueprint, “The World Beyond Your Head,” we not only meet with Kant, but we also converse with Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Polanyi, as well as a few more modern thinkers. The discussion can, at times, get a bit heady, but in the end the author is able to hold the reader’s attention. Though Crawford simply wants to build a case for constructing “an attentional commons: a concern for justice in the sharing of our private yet public resource of attentions” (251), nevertheless the book will take readers into different places to reflect on other tangents that are worth their time and thoughtfulness: the gambling industry, craftsmanship, education, social surveys, Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey Reports, historical norms and tradition.
“The World Beyond Your Head” is quite the stimulating read that makes philosophy – especially political philosophy – and epistemology easily comprehendible to reflective, non-technical readers. It would make a worthy addition to any university or seminary library. The volume will also make for good discussion and interaction in classes on philosophy and worldview. But even for anyone not engaged in academia, this manuscript is a must read to equip one for more reasonable and discerning engagement with the current era. I highly recommend this book!
The overall theme of “The World Beyond Your Head” has to do with seeking out authentic individuality in a social context and culture that is awash in a flattened-out democratic autonomy. The author describes the book’s aim in this way, “I hope to arrive at something like an ethics of attention for our time, grounded in a realistic account of the mind and a critical gaze at modern culture” (7). There is an urgency in this volume since the author sees that presently there “is a crisis of self-ownership: our attention isn’t simply ours to direct where we will, and we complain about it bitterly” (5). We have “allowed our attention to be monetized, if you want it back you’re going to have to pay for it” (12).
To map out the trajectory of how we got here, Crawford reaches back to the Enlightenment, looking at how Kant’s program underpins the American ideal of autonomy and freedom. This is a program that reaches out for a disembodied will that floats “free of all natural necessities” (74), where to be rational is not “to be situated in the world” (76). In other words, to become the autonomous self one must be “free to satisfy one’s preferences. Preferences themselves are beyond rational scrutiny; they express the authentic core of a self whose freedom is realized when there are no encumbrances to its preference-satisfying behavior” (17). The outworking of this Kantian “fantasy of autonomy” is that we become impotent (77), pliable to the architects of choice (117), succumbing to a fragility that can’t “tolerate conflict and frustration” and therefore is disposed to give ourselves and our cash to those who manufacture comfort and the best experience to “save us from a direct confrontation with the world” (77). It’s a rather chilling diagnosis that uses the gambling casino as a sample of these symptoms.
Next the author aims “The World Beyond Your Head” deeper into the present situation. Three of the most important trajectories of the Kantian “fantasy of autonomy” come through load and clear. In the structure of Kantian autonomy is the rise of the sovereign self that lives in the culture of performance “in which you have to constantly marshal your internal resources to be successful” (162); where the new ideal is no longer a settled identity but the “ideal of being flexible (. . .) of reinventing yourself at any time, like a good democratic Übermensch” (163). This leads to a “weariness with the vague and unending project of having to become one’s fullest self” (165).
A second arc is the playing out of subjectivism, where right-and-wrong comes from me, the subject, and only applies to me, the subject. Crawford rightly points out how subjectivism can’t make sense of the experience of achieving greater clarity in one’s ability to understand moral consequences, and it can’t adapt to the idea that there might actually be a real right-and-wrong out there that applies to us and originates outside of us instead of originating from our own sovereign-self idiosyncrasies. Crawford calls this inability “the dogmatic inarticulacy of subjectivism,” which he goes on to define as a “moral autism” (184).
The final direction of the Kantian program is “the ideal of autonomy” that “prepares the way for massification” (196). This is the trend to cast off our situatedness, history, and inherited traditions and to self-identify along the categorical lines mapped out by social sciences (200) and social surveys. By absorbing these social sciences categories as our identity we become the decontextualized citizens and the homogenized residents bowing at the idolatrous shrine of the legacy-rejecting present: “When the sovereignty of the self requires that the inheritance of the past be disqualified as a guide to action and meaning, we confine ourselves in an eternal present” (205).
In “The World Beyond Your Head” Crawford also offers a remedy to the Kantian project: an antidote of embodiment and situatedness and a regimen of encountering things and other people. First the book the author brings out the value and virtue of being recognized as an individual which “seems to be possible only in the context of genuine connection with others, with whom one is locked into some web of norms – some cultural jig – that is binding, yet also rich enough to admit of individual interpretation” (160). Next, he illustrates situatedness and embodiment by picturing the short order cook who has come to inhabit the kitchen and the motorcyclist who experiences cognitive extension. Finally, he also spends a considerable amount of time and ink on the exemplary organ maker’s shop where “a readiness to rebel – against the self-satisfaction of the age – seems a prerequisite to discovering something you judge worthy of reverence. To affirm something in this way, freely and with discernment, is surely one element of what it means to be an individual” (225). It’s from within this “dynamic of reverence and rebellion” (236) one inhabits an inherited legacy, thrives in it, and becomes truly forward moving and progressive; “his own inventiveness as a going further in a trajectory he has inherited” (243).
In Crawford’s diagnostic and remedial blueprint, “The World Beyond Your Head,” we not only meet with Kant, but we also converse with Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Polanyi, as well as a few more modern thinkers. The discussion can, at times, get a bit heady, but in the end the author is able to hold the reader’s attention. Though Crawford simply wants to build a case for constructing “an attentional commons: a concern for justice in the sharing of our private yet public resource of attentions” (251), nevertheless the book will take readers into different places to reflect on other tangents that are worth their time and thoughtfulness: the gambling industry, craftsmanship, education, social surveys, Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey Reports, historical norms and tradition.
“The World Beyond Your Head” is quite the stimulating read that makes philosophy – especially political philosophy – and epistemology easily comprehendible to reflective, non-technical readers. It would make a worthy addition to any university or seminary library. The volume will also make for good discussion and interaction in classes on philosophy and worldview. But even for anyone not engaged in academia, this manuscript is a must read to equip one for more reasonable and discerning engagement with the current era. I highly recommend this book!
June 16, 2019
Matthew Crawford says at one point his book is about attention. In the final chapter he calls it political philosophy. In his "Introduction" he'd called it an attempt at philosophical anthropology and an ethics of attention in that his primary interest is in finding ways we can best express ourselves outside our cultural moment filled with such things as television, urban cacophony, and our digital technology. That it stresses the need for individuals to concentrate on their preferences away from big data makes it about acquiring freedom. Those who can focus on what most interests them find those things to be more worthy and that their acquiring that focus amounts to an education and a move away from excessive adherence to cultural norms developed into ritual.
In correcting our attentional focus saturated with technologies we rescue our mental lives from being seized by outside influence. It's an act of rebellion in our age, becoming an individual, moving away from the "wiki mentality" and the "wisdom of the crowd." By acquiring new objects of attention we experience joy in new sources of energy. Instead of striving toward a reality through a representation of what's expected we're more open to the beauty of being drawn outside of established molds.
In some ways this is an expansion of his book Shop Craft as Soulcraft in that it invites us to become more individual by developing an excellence and worthiness through craft and skill, therefore finding distinction through individuality and the difference between him and me.
Crawford's title and what I've written here sounds like a self-help book. It's not that but a discussion of our present cultural moment which seems so dangerously to be consuming individuals and chewing them into crowds, preventing us from seeing beyond our heads and finding advantageous paths. Whether he intends it or not, some of his dialogue is disheartening, such as his writing about gambling and other elements of our culture designed to addict. He seems to lack confidence in our ability to establish control.
In correcting our attentional focus saturated with technologies we rescue our mental lives from being seized by outside influence. It's an act of rebellion in our age, becoming an individual, moving away from the "wiki mentality" and the "wisdom of the crowd." By acquiring new objects of attention we experience joy in new sources of energy. Instead of striving toward a reality through a representation of what's expected we're more open to the beauty of being drawn outside of established molds.
In some ways this is an expansion of his book Shop Craft as Soulcraft in that it invites us to become more individual by developing an excellence and worthiness through craft and skill, therefore finding distinction through individuality and the difference between him and me.
Crawford's title and what I've written here sounds like a self-help book. It's not that but a discussion of our present cultural moment which seems so dangerously to be consuming individuals and chewing them into crowds, preventing us from seeing beyond our heads and finding advantageous paths. Whether he intends it or not, some of his dialogue is disheartening, such as his writing about gambling and other elements of our culture designed to addict. He seems to lack confidence in our ability to establish control.
August 17, 2018
Das Buch ist umfangreich und man sollte wirklich gewillt sein sich auf die Thematik und die Gedanken des Autors einzulassen, wenn man viel für sich mitnehmen möchte. Jedoch ist der Autor sehr bemüht, dieses wechselseitig abhängige Thema verständlich aufzubauen. Das passiert mit einer gewissen Leidenschaft und auf Grundlage fundierten Wissens, welches anhand von Theorie, aber auch mithilfe praktischer Situationen gut erläutert wird. Lässt man sich also darauf ein, dann ist das Buch in mancher Hinsicht weltbildverändernd, aber auch erholend. Ich würde sogar so weit gehen, zu sagen, dass ich mich wie bei einem aufwärmenden Tee zu Hause während eines kalten Monats fühlte, welcher wahrlich wohl bekommt, wenn man gerade aus der Kälte kam. Akzeptiert, verstanden und geborgen, im Begriff neue Energie zu tanken.
April 6, 2018
A complex perspective of the psychology of attention, distraction, individuality and individualism, and motivations to exceed in life.
I don't think my review will do it justice because I'll need to re-read it at some point. It was highly intellectual and thought invoking which at times lost me not because of the writing style, but because of the complexity of the concepts Crawford was explaining.
The conclusions are that humans need social cohesion and conflict to gain full meaning in life. It is only through integration with others that we can achieve individuality.
I don't think my review will do it justice because I'll need to re-read it at some point. It was highly intellectual and thought invoking which at times lost me not because of the writing style, but because of the complexity of the concepts Crawford was explaining.
The conclusions are that humans need social cohesion and conflict to gain full meaning in life. It is only through integration with others that we can achieve individuality.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 2, 2019
Crawford has been to a million interesting places inside and outside his head, he brings us along, and we get to see everything in fresh new ways.
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