Read Online The World Beyond Your Head On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction Matthew B Crawford 9780374535919 Books

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Product details Paperback 320 pages Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Reprint edition (April 5, 2016) Language English ISBN-10 9780374535919 ISBN-13 978-0374535919 ASIN 0374535914

The World Beyond Your Head On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction Matthew B Crawford 9780374535919 Books Reviews

• The World Beyond Your Head On Becoming An Individual In An Age of Distraction
  by Matthew B. Crawford
  
  This is an age where mental lives become more fragmented. Can one maintain a coherent self when attention, which is so fundamental to our mental lives, is increasingly distracted? In today’s world, a lot of human experience has become highly engineered and manipulated.
  
  Crawford writes that human flourishing takes complete immersion in a particular situation (e.g. short order cook who lines up the ingredients to make the order, motorcycle racing/repair, building a pipe organ to last hundreds of years.) Skilled practices like these “serve as an anchor to the world beyond ones own head”. He envisions a “triangulation” with objects and other people and in doing so one can achieve something like individuality.
  
  Crawford’s description of the cultural reality of distraction could be anyone’s experience in this digital world. He describes the loss of “public space” required for some form of sociability, even if it’s just eye contact. Recently a group of 9th graders talked with me about their own sad sense of non-connectedness because everyone was engaged in their own digital world and they barely talk to each other.
  
  Crawford, who himself dropped out of a Ph.D. program at Stanford to form a motorcycle repair shop, refers to a psychological study where children were told they could have one marshmellow now or two in 15 minutes if they delayed the impulse. Crawford describes today’s well-engineered marshmellows such as ads on the ATM or the gasoline screen slyly designed to break through any weakness the ordinary consumer might have. Resistance may require freakish self-control. (My wife just came in to ask if I wanted to hear President Obama on TV as he presented Medals of Freedom to 21 famous Americans. Freakishly I declined—but we’ll watch the tape later.)
  
  Are our choices/decisions about important matters “free-will” or based on non-rational “chatter” (emotions)? Crawford wants to go beyond that limited choice to included the environment especially in this age with the “ads, jigs and nudges”. Without an anchor strengthened by skilled practice, the individual is at the mercy of a distracting world with commercial impetus.
  
  I particularly enjoyed Crawford’s assessment of David Foster Wallace’s essay “This Is Water”, Wallace’s famous commencement address at Kenyon College. Wallace also talked about what you pay attention to and choosing how to think, that if you really pay attention you can find other options. Crawford would emphasize that, like the “successful” child marshmellow eaters who distracted themselves using their imagination, a shift in attention works better than Wallace’s recommendation to
  “decide what has meaning and what doesn’t”.
  
  Crawford’s book is a corrective to the current cultural crisis of attention/distraction. I think he would have us learn by doing as in cooking a meal, woodworking or repairing motors, holding that the very “doing-ness” helps to develop the attentional mental muscles and a sense of real agency and individualism.
  
  Initially, I thought this book was too heavily weighed in a philosophical discussion of Enlightenment thinkers, getting through that chapter was more rewarding and I recommend it to anyone interested in the cultural distractions we all face and how to manage one's own response.
• A much needed book for those living in Western culture. For years, I have always had disconnected misgivings about my experiences in culture from a personal perspective and from an observational perspective as a high school teacher of 9 years. This is my first introduction to Matthew Crawford's work. And it's only been in the last couple years I have purposely sought to find clarity and focus on my misgivings.
  
  For example, I have no trouble relating to Crawford's description of the effects of noisy attention feats from entities. This was made plain to me when I visited my wife's family in the Philippines. Compared to staying in a condo village in Manila, my stay with her parents who live in a barrio of Manila is a complete drain and wear on my mind and body. Staying in the barrios, by 8 pm I would be drained of energy and most often with a headache. Why? So much of my attention was being asked to perform. Look at this, look at that.
  
  In my teaching, I recall reading an article written about a new problem Kindergarten students were having. They were falling out of their chair. The cause? The lack of time outside kept them from developing the physical ability to maneuver properly.
  
  So, Crawford points to personal and observational experiences I know well. And I am thankful that he gave time to share his thoughts on what he things started it all, what it is doing, and how to fix it.
  
  This book is definitely not light reading. I know that I'll be reading it again. But it has definitely been beneficial. He's given me much to think about.
• I was first exposed to the concept of a cultural jig in the 2016 winter issue of the Comment magazine. I'm not entirely sure I completely grasped the concept until I heard James K. A. Smith speak alongside Senator Ben Sasse, commenting on a recently published book by the latter. Smith explained the concept of a cultural jig much more clearly and I found myself rounding up that issue of Comment to try to read more about this idea. All of which lead me to actually acquiring Crawford's book.


  
  I write that to lay out why I so closely align Crawford's book with James K. A. Smith's You Are What You Love The Spiritual Power of Habit. Though Smith does not actually quote Crawford in his book (which was published very shortly after Crawford's, indicating it was already in the publishing pipeline by the time Crawford's work landed in Smith's hands), he quickly adopted this specific concept of Crawford's as he has continued to develop the ideas he laid out in his book. I have become a bit of a follower of Smith's, and so I read this to help me better understand what I perceive to be a new but central concept for Smith.


  
  In that vein, one need only read the first two chapters of The World Beyond Your Head to understand the basics of Crawford's concept of a jig. The first chapter deals with attention, highlighting how our very attention has begun to be conscripted, every square inch maximized for advertisement and even aural space being occupied by Muzak and advertisements. Where can one go or look where one's attention is not being demanded or monopolized? For the purpose of his primary argument, Crawford also works through the concept of the situated self, beginning a book-long process of dismantling Kant's conception of the autonomous individual. Crawford is rather unforgiving in the insufficiencies of Kant's individualism and personal autonomy throughout his book (which I found refreshing).


  
  The second chapter builds on this concept, initially laying out the cultural jig concept, but also including the ideas of a nudge and an awareness of how one's surroundings contribute to and influence what one does. This latter reality is a solid contributor to how he weighs the experiential truth of the heteronomy one experiences in day to day living and doing, in quite a stark contrast to Kant's idealistic individual autonomy.
  
  

One aspect of Crawford's writing was his method of drawing the reader along a path of discovery. It was never clear as to whether or not he was re-working for the reader the same path he himself had trod to reach his conclusions (it seems doubtful), but it was an intentionally staged journey which built conceptually from one chapter to the next. Chapters switched from narration to reflection and analysis rather frequently, but seamlessly. I greatly enjoyed his methodology for deep reflection upon aspects of daily life and/or one's skilled work. In contrast to an anecdotal approach (wherein an author attempts to derive a universal principle or observation off a single story), he utilized the stories (some almost anecdotal) to reflect back upon philosophy and then explore how the reality of life oftentimes displayed something quite different than what some philosophers had anticipated or thought. 

  
  While the first two chapters cover the basics of the cultural jig, it is the following chapters which really challenge the reader to get out of his/her head and into the real. The philosophical journey is fascinating and illuminates many disturbing and modern trends which stem from philosophical roots tracing all the way back to the time before the American Revolution. In fact, through exploring Kant and Locke's work and their influence upon the foundational concepts of American society, he holds the modern epidemic of depression to be the inevitable outcome of these philosophies.
  
  

Crawford seems to be building off his previous work Shop Class as Soulcraft An Inquiry into the Value of Work, which I have not read and do not necessarily perceive to be a required pre-requisite for this work. Additionally, it was interesting reading Crawford as a Christian, whereas his worldview does not necessarily seem to be Christian. There was a minimal spattering of more 'coarse' language throughout, and a few spots where he indicated a less than favorable attitude towards Christianity in general. That said, I found much which he said to run parallel to (if not outright support) a Christian worldview. Without a greater end in mind, the point to his argument would seem to be to find or return to a truer state of being, for each of us to exist more and more in the real. And yet, in my mind, the point of such an existence, the point behind avoiding the virtual reality of the slot machine, is to experience life to a fuller, more truer sense. Situated outside of religious (specifically Christian, in my opinion) worldview, such an existence is ultimately pointless. Yes, the path he is ultimately arguing for people to take is a better, grander path, but it seems ultimately meaningless if this world is all there really is.

  
  
But I digress. I note this non-Christian worldview merely as a "heads up!" of sorts for Christians reading this book. The non-believer really won't care but will still find Crawford's concepts enlightening and engaging. I would challenge believers to read critically and reflect on the continuity with one's faith which Crawford's work displays (for it is there, and the implications are staggering in places).
  
  

I would recommend this book to all students of philosophy or people, young or old, who might enjoy digging into some deeper thoughts on the significance of the physical world (and our interactions therein) to who we are and how we think. Sometimes Crawford dives deep in his thoughts, but he utilizes a nice rhythm of deeper thoughts with more accessible ones and stories to make the book engaging and accessible, even for the philosophical amateur.