One of the defining works of my generation (born circa 1955) and, certainly, at my college- St. Andrews University- was Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Now an author called Matthew Crawford seems to have come up with a Zen for a new, more complex, era. This is an excerpt of a longer review: it is well worth reading in full. Not much any more do book reviews make me want to go out and buy a new book. This one does (an except can be read here).
Crawford's new book is far more ambitious. In Shop Class, he asked, "What is good work"? In The World Beyond Your Head, he examines how it is we come to interact with, or flee from, the world around us in the first place, and how perception and the self prepare one for participation in a world of work. Having already noted that labor affords a certain form of perception, in his new book he digs into the range of "affordances" — modes of skillful perception. When a great chef looks around a kitchen, she or he sees things as potential tools (or obstacles) in ways that others don’t. With skills, our very comprehension of the world is enhanced. It’s philosophy as an intervention in issues of the day.
The World Beyond Your Head begins with a terrific introduction, "Attention as a Cultural Problem." The concern isn’t just the technological appendages like computers or iPhones that we’ve come to depend on; it’s that we can’t control our own responses to them. "Our distractibility indicates that we are agnostic on the question of what is worth paying attention to — that is, what to value," Crawford writes. Everywhere we go, we are assaulted by commercial forces that make claims on our mental space, so that "silence is now offered as a luxury good."
That isn’t just inconvenient. It destroys independence of thought and feeling: "Without the ability to direct our attention where we will, we become more receptive to those who would direct our attention where they will." And they have gotten very good at manipulating our environment so that we are turned in the directions that can be monetized. But it’s really bad for us. "Distractibility," Crawford tells us, "might be regarded as the mental equivalent of obesity."
We have become more vulnerable to this regime of manipulated attention, he argues, because we have only individualism as a defense. The Enlightenment quest for autonomy leaves us powerless against those who mount noisy appeals to our personal preferences, in service of manipulating us. Against this tendency, Crawford argues for a situated self, one that is always linked to (not independent of) the environment, including other people. We may not be in a bike-repair shop, but we are always somewhere.
Long sections of The World Beyond Your Head deal with encountering things and other people. There’s even an interlude on "a brief history of freedom." I told you this was an ambitious book!
Crawford first shows how highly skilled people learn to develop an intelligent use of space, filtering out what they can afford to ignore. Part of developing one’s skill is to know where to look, to "jig" the space to pay attention to what’s most important. And you learn what’s most important by paying attention to people whose skills are much more developed than your own...
Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March 2015), 320 pp. $26.
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