The World Beyond Your Head: Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction by Matthew B. Crawford Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: 2015My personal history is a graveyard of abandoned projects and broken promises to the self. In this I am not unusual. Our society seems to suffer from a nutritional deficiency in attentiveness and our commentators have noticed. Books addressing the problem come out every season. Usually they pin the blame on technology, so when I discovered that Matthew Crawford's new book is about how "attention has become an acute collective problem of modern life," I expected him to announce solidarity with the discontents of the digital era, the railers against social networking, the maligners of the cellphone. But he has something different in mind:

I do not wish to join the culture wars surrounding "technology" -- as being either an apocalyptic force or a saving one that heralds the arrival of a new global intelligence, etc. I want rather to tunnel beneath that intellectual cul-de-sac and trace the subterranean strata [...] of our age of distraction, the better to map our way out of it.

According to Crawford, we are distracted because we've bought into the myth of autonomy. We can recover our attentiveness by submitting to the authority of traditional skills. This prescription will sound familiar to anyone who has read Crawford's previous, extremely popular book, Shopclass As Soulcraft. But the real novelty of The World Beyond Your Head lies in its diagnosis, its critique of autonomy. Crawford ranges from machine gambling to early modern philosophy, from Disney cartoons to the new theory of embodied cognition. The most impressive thing Crawford does is to press-gang the objects of his magpie eclecticism into a coherent argument. His effort results in one of the more impressive pieces of social criticism I've read.According to Crawford, because we idealize personal freedom we treat preferences as sacred. We believe that by preserving and expanding the realm of preference we are opening up the possibility that each member of society can manufacture a bespoke happiness, can express their true self in lifestyle and consumer choices. "But in surveying contemporary life," writes Crawford, "it is hard not to notice that this catechism doesn't describe our situation very well." In particular, the idea that preferences reflect some true kernel of personality seems totally false:

Those preferences have become the object of social engineering, conducted not by government bureaucrats but by mind-bogglingly wealthy corporations armed with big data. To continue to insist that preferences express the sovereign self and are for that reason sacred -- unavailable for rational scrutiny -- is to put one's head in the sand.

The very emphasis upon personal freedom which leads to this situation has exposed us to the most insidious form of manipulation, the manipulation of desire. We've been exposed because the myth of autonomy has cut us off from what naturally shapes and sustains our desires: things, people, and history. In the liberal utopia we float free of interpersonal conflict in a beautiful virtual reality unconstrained by the demands of the past – and we become prey to the “choice architects” who want to shape our desires.In order to exemplify our increasing disconnection from things, Crawford spends a chapter comparing the frictionless, dangerously lulling experience of the modern luxury car to the hyper-awareness demanded for motorcycle racing. To exemplify our disconnection from other people, he examines the metamorphosis of Sesame Street from a show displaying the real frustration of interpersonal conflict to a show that displays conflict as rare and easy to resolve. The evolution of cars and kids' TV shows may be making our everyday experience nicer, but it is also isolating us from what could guide us when driving conditions get bad or people disagree. Moreover, in some cases, this kind of evolution can be forthrightly sinister. In a harrowing chapter on machine gambling, Crawford describes the way in which machines designed to cause addiction are given shelter from public scrutiny by the ideals that are supposed to guarantee our freedom. Because, at root, we are certain that overt protection from coercion secure autonomy, we assume that susceptibility to gambling addiction must be a medical, and not a political, problem.Movement in the direction of isolating us from things, people, and history connects to the myth of autonomy through what Crawford calls "agnosticism about the good life." A real thing, like a bumpy road, directs us to pursue certain goods -- like saving our skins -- while a cushioned, computer-interfaced world frees us to pursue our daydreams as we drive. Interpersonal conflict brings us face to face with other people's diverging beliefs about what the good life looks like and forces us to justify to them our own beliefs. History places us in traditions with firm commitments to specific goods. All of these militate against the purity of preference: so to enhance preference we must isolate ourselves from things, people, and history. Crawford moves from describing good life agnosticism to accounting for it historically:

It is a mind-set that was consciously cultivated as an antidote to the religious wars of centuries ago, when people slaughtered one another over ultimate differences. After World War II, revulsion with totalitarian regimes of the right and left made us redouble our liberal commitment to neutrality. But this stance is maladaptive in the context of twenty-first-century capitalism because, if you live in the West and aren't caught up in the battles between Sunnis and Shiites, for example, and if we also put aside the risk of extraordinary lethal events like terrorist attacks in Western countries, then the everyday threats to your well-being no longer come from an ideological rival or a theological threat to the liberal secular order. They are native to that order.

This is the basic pattern Crawford tries to point out: a theory develops to combat a specific historical problem, but then it gets to be treated like an ahistorical truth and creates new problems of its own. He argues that the myth of autonomy itself has a history like that. But when he turns to intellectual history rather than concrete social criticism, Crawford's arguments suddenly become surprisingly bad.He tries to tell a story about the history of philosophy that will explain why we value autonomy so much. But in addition to the inherent unreliability of attributing to technical philosophy a causal rather than representative significance -- as if the secret springs of mass behavior were the specialized arguments of metaphysicians -- the story he tells looks extremely dubious to anyone with even a passing knowledge of the characters that feature in it.As Crawford tells it, the myth of autonomy can be traced to philosophers like John Locke who believed that "the main threat against which it was necessary to assert freedom was the arbitrary exercise of coercive power by the political sovereign." Rejecting the authority of kings went hand in hand with rejecting traditional sources of knowledge. Another early modern philosophy, Rene Descartes, "calls on us to be free from established custom and received opinion, indeed from other people altogether, taken as authorities." This in turn led to ideas like that of Giambattista Vico -- yet another early modern philosopher -- who argued that we can only really know the thing we have made. Finally, Immanuel Kant, Crawford's primary bete noir, epitomizes this whole trend in his moral philosophy by unduly emphasizing freedom.This bit of intellectual history is almost laughably tendentious. The ideas that political liberation motivated the birth of scientific reason, or that Vico's theory was a natural extension of Descartes's doubt do not bear scrutiny. In fact, Descartes was morally and political very conservative, even formally recommending (in his Discourse on Method) that scientific thinkers like himself should provisionally accept entire the prevailing moral and political views of their time. Also, Vico formally opposed Descartes's whole way of thinking and wrote his great work, The New Science, to provide an alternative. The casual genealogical linkages Crawford makes are improbable and -- I think -- unnecessary for his purposes.In the acknowledgments that follow his main text, Crawford describes how deciding to feature the philosopher Kant as his primary antagonist met with objections even among his immediate interlocutors:

The role that [Kant] subsequently came to play in the book -- the influence over our everyday psychology that I assign to him -- became a matter of some contention among us. Tal tried valiantly to disabuse me of my reading of Kant, without much success. This entailed some obstinacy on my part, as Tal was once a serious student of Kant, whereas I am not now nor have I ever been.

Crawford perhaps intends another comment he makes toward the end of his book to serve as an apology for his historical oversimplifications. "I take myself," he writes," to have been doing political philosophy. What I mean is that, like the early modern thinkers I have criticized, I have been doing philosophy in a political, that is to say polemical, mode, in response to a keenly felt irritant peculiar to a historical moment." But considering that he is accusing these philosophers of failing to acknowledge the historical relativity of their political positions, thereby leaving us with a skewed understanding of human nature and the good life, it's odd that he would justify his own book as an imitation of them.Fortunately, the historical portions of the book are quite small, overshadowed by the brilliance of the contemporary social criticism he offers.Crawford's book is not merely a diagnosis of the cultural disease that manifests as inattention. He also prescribes a cure. It will be familiar to anyone who has read Shopclass As Soulcraft. Investing oneself in what he calls an "ecology of attention" -- a pre-given cultural practice that requires submitting to teachers and historical examples, interacting with real things, and working with and against other people -- is the answer to our deficiency of attention. He thinks we must simply reverse the trend toward detached preference and submit ourselves to the suasions of both erotic and ascetic investment. The ability to finish things and maintain one's good intentions -- to be attentive -- requires both the attractions of real desire and the commitment to undergo privation, delay, the pain of practice, the lessons of failure. The perfect way to experience these things, as Crawford has always insisted, is to take up some kind of traditional skill, whether it's basket-weaving, choral-singing, or chess.Amidst the social criticism and philosophical history, one finds in this book Crawford's most attractive genre: the profile of a craft. He talks about motorcycle racing, glass-blowing, and organ-building. Why? Because Crawford believes that criticism needs to be supplemented by the presentation of attractive alternatives. He describes in loving detail the activities of short-order cooks and hockey players because "they are images of what I take to be well-ordered ecologies of attention and action, the sort that can support some low-to-the-ground, perfectly attainable moments of human flourishing."Crawford's book may inspire you to cultivate a new skill, or it may simply make you more aware of the choice architects who prey on your exposed pseudo-autonomous self through advertising and design. It offers an original account of a prominent social pathology, relocating it from a technological to a political problem and thereby stripping from it a veneer of inevitability. In place of the hyper-palatable pseudo-freedom that dooms us to choose between committee-made lifestyles, Crawford suggests we turn to the ascetic eroticism of genuine engagement with the world out there, beyond our heads.