{"id":10556,"date":"2015-12-22T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-12-22T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/attention-deficit"},"modified":"2020-09-26T14:04:25","modified_gmt":"2020-09-26T18:04:25","slug":"attention-deficit","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/attention-deficit","title":{"rendered":"Attention Deficit"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pay Attention! It\u2019s not easy, is it? And all the signs are that it is getting harder. In The World Beyond Your Head<\/a><\/i>, Matthew B. Crawford joins the chorus bewailing the \u201ccrisis of attention.\u201d While many cultural critics focus on the disintegrative effects of digital technology, Crawford, without at all denying those effects, searches for a more comprehensive explanation, finding it in the philosophic anthropology that undergirds modern science and technology. His description of the Enlightenment foundations of the atomized and even (in a sense) \u201cautistic\u201d self, while nicely done, is not entirely new either. What is original is the diagram he sketches of the complex gears and circuitry connecting the assumptions of Descartes, Locke, and Kant to the observable features of contemporary life. What is even more remarkable is his unfolding of an alternative, more satisfying way \u2014 still available though often overlooked \u2014 of engaging the world. That Matthew Crawford should write a fascinating, beautiful, and practical book should come as no surprise to those familiar with his earlier breakout bestseller Shop Class as Soulcraft<\/a><\/i> (2009). Both books deliver a rare experience: the sudden recognition of rightness, of attunement, of \u201cfit\u201d (a word Crawford favors) between thought and things.<\/p>\n

In the first of three parts, Crawford makes sense of an array of seemingly disparate, but uniformly grim, phenomena: such things as the fragile, flat, and depressive character of the modern self and the way in which this supposedly autonomous self falls ready prey to massification and manipulation by corporate entities that engineer a hyper-stimulating, hyper-palatable artificial environment. Lost in the virtual shuffle are solid goods like silence (a precondition for thinking), self-control (a precondition for coherent individuality), and true sociality.<\/p>\n

Crawford is particularly good at showing how forms of pseudo-reality are being deliberately manufactured, not in obedience to some inner dynamic of technological progress, but rather in accord with \u201cour modern identification of freedom with choice, where choice is understood as a pure flashing forth of the unconditioned will.\u201d Freedom, thus conceived, is essentially escapist; we seek to avoid any direct encounter with the tangible world outside our elaborately buffered me-bubble. I saw this impulse at work when our young son would flee from the pain of watching a game his Orioles seemed destined to lose, retreating to a video version of baseball in which he could basically rig a victory. He preferred an environment he could control to the psychic risk of real engagement. I thought we had done enough by setting strict time limits and restricting his gaming options to sports only. But it became obvious that the availability of this tyrannical refuge was an obstacle to his becoming a better lover of baseball (and, down the road, a better friend, husband, and father).<\/p>\n

One of Crawford\u2019s examples is the design of cars, about which he knows a lot, being himself a fabricator of custom motorcycle parts. To his disgust, the aim of auto design for some time now has been to break the connection between the driver and the road, by substituting mediated experience for felt experience. Here\u2019s how he describes it:<\/p>\n\n\n

More broadly, the design of automobiles has tended toward insulation, offering an ever less involving driving experience. The animating ideal seems to be that the driver should be a disembodied observer, moving through a world of objects that present themselves as though on a screen. We have throttle by wire, brake by wire, and electrical assist (versus hydraulic assist) brakes, as well as traction control and antilock brakes that modulate our driving inputs for us. What all this idiot-proofing and abstraction amounts to is a genuine poverty of information reaching the driver.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

When virtual reality assumes the status of a moral ideal, we become more distanced from our own embodiment and the centering that provides. As physical beings we are oriented by proximity and distance. The advent of a world in which mediated representations are pervasive threatens, quite literally, to dis-orient us.<\/p>\n\n\n

I can take a virtual tour of the Forbidden City in Beijing, or of the deepest underwater caverns, nearly as easily as I glance across the room…. But where am I? There doesn\u2019t seem to be any nonarbitrary basis on which I can draw a horizon around myself \u2014 a zone of relevance \u2014 by which I might take my bearings and get oriented. When the axis of closer-to-me and farther-from-me is collapsed, I can be anywhere, and find that I am rarely in any place in particular. 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. More broadly, to compose a coherent life on the principle of disembodied, ungrounded choice would seem to be a daunting task.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

Crawford descends into the most repulsive depths of this flattened existence in the culminating chapter of the book\u2019s first part. He explores the nefarious design principles of machine gambling, showing how an illusion of agency is constructed. Since the 1980s, with the invention of \u201cvirtual reel mapping,\u201d there has been a distorted connection between the display reel (what the gambler sees and believes) and the \u201cvirtual reels (where the odds are really being played out).\u201d Not surprisingly, the odds are dramatically worse than they appear to be. Further techniques, such as clustering the stops near the jackpot symbols, give slots players a false sense of frequent near misses, heightening the compulsion to continue playing.<\/p>\n\n\n

Always on the verge of winning, he is led to believe that he is developing an arcane skill, an intuitive connection to the machine\u2019s obscure workings. He is not. The frequency with which he almost wins can be made to increase over the course of his play in a single session, and because players are tracked, it can be made to increase from one session to the next as well, leading to a feeling of growing mastery.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

This deceit in favor of the house allowed casinos to add immensely popular mega-jackpots \u2014 a proven lure for new players. While neophytes pursue elusive wins, the hardened players move beyond the quest for success into \u201cthe zone\u201d \u2014 a trance-like, immersive state where they will play, and even desire to play, \u201cto extinction\u201d (not a nickel left). Every aspect of the industry is geared to draw players into this passive zone of sustained repetitive automaticity. At the extreme of \u201cdesubjectification,\u201d a player \u201cexperiences himself as part of the machine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Interestingly, the gaming industry was quite pleased that the psychiatric profession declared \u201cpathological gambling\u201d a disorder, since that designation narrows the problem to a small class of individuals who suffer from a medical condition, thus obscuring the fact, which Crawford highlights, that the \u201caddictive quality of the machines … arises from an interaction between our (normal) psychological makeup and the dark arts of attentional design. The plasticity of our neural pathways is such that repetition coupled with random reinforcement issues in addiction. This is the foundation of the business model.\u201d<\/p>\n

H<\/span>ow should we respond to the ready availability of corrosive activities, whether slots in convenience stores or Internet pornography or just the constant, unwanted, commercialized intrusions on our attention? For Crawford, the dominant libertarian response \u2014 live and let live \u2014 is inadequate. Because the libertarians assume a world of autonomous individuals and fail to understand the situated character of human life, they don\u2019t comprehend the nature of these new threats to the pursuit of a good life; in sum, they have \u201can outdated view of where the threats to freedom lie.\u201d<\/p>\n

In response to the manifold ways that meaningful action is being degraded, Crawford does not recommend any specific prohibitionist legislation, although that doesn\u2019t mean he wouldn\u2019t support sensible restrictions, especially those based on his idea of an \u201cattentional commons\u201d in need of protection (Pull the plug on the Muzak!). Instead, he devotes Parts 2 and 3 of The World Beyond Your Head <\/i>to elaborating a counter-anthropology, \u201ca positive account of action in its full human context.\u201d In place of the solipsistic self, he offers the attentive self. Attention, properly understood, is \u201cthe faculty that joins us to the world\u201d \u2014 the real world of real things, things with heft and resistance (or perhaps the opposite: delicacy and pliability) that require art to handle and craft. Crawford presents case studies of \u201cskilled practices\u201d: hockey players, short-order cooks, and glass blowers. He shows how subordinating oneself to the authority of the object (the intransigent demands of that particular form of matter) generates \u201chighly structured patterns of attention\u201d that, in turn, lead to the acquisition of such rewarding qualities as excellence, judgment, and individuality. This is not a consumerist version of the pursuit of happiness, but a craft or guild version. The \u201cachieved individuality\u201d he describes is richer and more variegated, because rooted in highly distinct \u201cecologies of attention\u201d and acculturated communities united, essentially, by knowledge and beauty.<\/p>\n

Part 3 is entirely devoted to one such fraternity: the makers of pipe organs. While necessarily delving into the arcana (the nodes and antinodes of the pipes, chiff, nicking the languids, leathering and nibbling), the chapter is a sustained reflection on the meaning of apprenticeship and the \u201cdialectic of reverence and rebellion\u201d it invites one to join. It must be stressed that Crawford\u2019s book is not a nostalgic paean to a bygone era. Although he is cutting against the grain of contemporary culture, his presentation of what it means to be fully in the world \u2014 the world beyond your head \u2014 is forward-looking. He is interested in the \u201cprogressive possibilities of tradition.\u201d This is an uplifting book, soaring and swelling like a pipe organ blasting Bach\u2019s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. His aim is to \u201creinterpret what are often taken to be encumbrances to the personal will in the modern tradition \u2014 sources of unfreedom \u2014 and identify them rather as the framing conditions for any worthwhile human performance.\u201d<\/p>\n

C<\/span>onfirmation of Crawford\u2019s claims seems all around. A radio interview<\/a> I happened to hear with the legendary fisherman, fly tyer, and nature author Lefty Kreh stood out as an example of \u201cautotelic\u201d activity \u2014 activity pursued for its own sake. I also found myself trying to extend Crawford\u2019s argument, wondering whether his notion of skilled practices might shed new light on a craft he did not consider: statecraft. After reading Crawford, it makes perfect sense that our two greatest presidents, Washington and Lincoln, had the least formal education (and that they worked as land surveyors as young men), while our most academically credentialed presidents (Professor Wilson and Senior Lecturer Obama) were both dangerously out of touch with the world as it is.<\/p>\n

Admirable political figures (at least the ones I admire) seem to have experience in the kinds of activities that Crawford celebrates. Think of Winston Churchill building brick walls at Chartwell and, later in life, joyously taking up a paintbrush (see his colorful essay \u201cPainting as a Pastime<\/a>,\u201d which tells one almost as much about the art of generalship as about painting). In his autobiography My Early Life<\/a><\/i> (1930), Churchill lamented the artificiality and irrelevance of his classical education at Harrow:<\/p>\n\n\n

I would far rather have been apprenticed as a bricklayer\u2019s mate, or run errands as a messenger boy, or helped my father to dress the front windows of a grocer\u2019s shop. It would have been real; it would have been natural; it would have taught me more; and I should have done it much better.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

Abraham Lincoln too, who had no fondness for manual labor, having had enough of it on the hardscrabble farm of his father, nonetheless did have a great interest in the physical principles of nature and the construction of machinery, in regard to which he had extraordinary powers of observation. Biographer Fred Kaplan notes that<\/a> Lincoln had a \u201cfascination from an early age with the human, the mechanical, and the natural, how things work in this world.\u201d Lincoln\u2019s fascination reached its most mature, philosophic expression in his 1859 \u201cLecture on Discoveries and Inventions<\/a>.\u201d After satirizing the grasping hubris of \u201cYoung America\u201d (analogous to Crawford\u2019s critique of the independence-obsessed Enlightenment), Lincoln sketches an alternative approach to the world that begins from \u201ca habit<\/i> of observation.\u201d Like Crawford, Lincoln regarded science, art, and craft as communicative endeavors: \u201cWhat one observes, and would himself infer nothing from, he tells to another, and that other at once sees a valuable hint in it. A result is thus reached which neither alone <\/i>would have arrived at.\u201d The discoveries and inventions that contribute to human advancement are a hands-on, cognitive enterprise among fellow laborers, not only in the present but across generations. For Lincoln, the highest of these human arts, the architectonic art, was the art of self-government.<\/p>\n

A final historical figure who came powerfully to mind while reading Crawford was Booker T. Washington. Washington famously argued for an educational approach that fully integrated the hand and heart with the head. Crawford calls our current curriculum \u201cdisembodied,\u201d and he\u2019s right. He quotes from woodshop teacher Doug Stowe about the soul-killing effect on students: \u201cWithout the opportunity to learn through their hands, the world remains abstract, and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.\u201d It is time for a general revival of Washington\u2019s vision of Industrial Education \u2014 although probably not the term itself, since the adjective \u201cindustrial\u201d was always something of a misnomer. What Washington really called for was an education of the whole person, tapping into our natural longings for both beauty and usefulness. It must be emphasized that neither Crawford nor Washington is against book learning (after all, Washington, in close cooperation with financier Julius Rosenwald, was responsible for the construction of 4,977 schools throughout the South and Crawford has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago). What they seek is a larger, not a narrower, education. Washington\u2019s last autobiography is entitled My Larger Education<\/a><\/i> (1911); its first chapter: \u201cLearning from Men and Things.\u201d Of books themselves, Washington counseled his students at Tuskegee: \u201cI want you to bear in mind that your text books, with all their contents, are not an end, but a means to an end, a means to help us get the highest, the best, the purest and the most beautiful things out of life.\u201d Matthew Crawford\u2019s The World Beyond Your Head <\/i>makes my permanent list of books that help us do precisely that.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Diana Schaub reviews ‘The World Beyond Your Head,’ Matthew B. Crawford’s book about an increasingly limited resource<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16782,"template":"","article_type":[14],"noteworthy_people":[],"topics":[5042,5003],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10556"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10556\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"article_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article_type?post=10556"},{"taxonomy":"noteworthy_people","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/noteworthy_people?post=10556"},{"taxonomy":"topics","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topics?post=10556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}