Talking Tuesday: The World Beyond Your Head

At last we come to a discussion of Matthew B. Crawford's excellent book, The World Beyond Your Head.  I've talked previously about the broad strokes of the book, so I'll just dive into the nitty gritty and hope for the best.  I keep poking away at this, and I think I just need to post it and move on--I'm reading so much these days that dovetails with Crawford, that I'm never going to be able to incorporate it all.

Let us begin then, with the shape of things.  The premodern Western world thought about time and space as intertwined three-dimensional space.  I wrote my master's thesis on these ideas, and you can find an abstract of them here.  Basically, the idea is that all time is contained within a sphere, and everything that was, that is, or that will be is contained within that sphere.  We do experience time in a more or less linear (but not progressive) fashion, with one event following another, from birth to death, but the linear experience is still encapsulated in the larger sphere.  God exists outside that sphere in what best be termed the Eternal NOW.  For God, all time is happening all at once.  He is Eternally Present for all of humanity's existence.

If we start from this premise, and proceed to the idea that man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever whilst pursuing theosis (or complete communion with God by purifying oneself of passions and coming back to a Christ-like mindset and habitation), then the world is an objective, knowable truth.  It is something to be discovered outside one's self, as part of the salvation journey.  In the premodern world, everyone was a pilgrim on a journey to a concrete destination.  We learn from those who walked the Way before us, gain solace from their struggles, joy in their triumphs as we work through our own within the larger community.

In the premodern mind, the world is corporeal; Christ was resurrected bodily, not just in spirit.  The Resurrection is an historical event, anchored in a particular place in time, but is also continuing its work in the world, as part of the Eternal NOW.  The worship of the premodern Church was physical, involving prostrations, crossing oneself, smelling the incense, seeing the icons (and in the westernmost part of Europe, the statuary), all while dealing with the weaknesses and passions of the physical body.  There was a whole-hearted belief in the spiritual dimension--in the world we cannot necessarily see with our eyes or feel with our senses, but inhabits our world, and has a direct effect on it.  God made the world and everything in it, and remains actively at work in His ongoing Creation.

(If this sounds a lot like Orthodox Christianity, it is!  The Orthodox Church was largely unaffected by Enlightenment thought).

The ideal of the premodern world is sanctity through intimate knowledge of God, obtained through fasting, prayer, and the sacraments of the Church.  Sanctity is something to actively pursue because heaven and hell are real places, and one's place in the afterlife is of utmost importance.  This life is built on the foundation of centuries of lived experience, custom, and corporate wisdom (what some call Tradition)

The art of the premodern world invites one in, to discover the truth of what is out there; it is what Charles Taylor calls "memesis" (A Secular Age).  Icons in particular are called windows to the soul, as they depict reality beyond themselves, and invite the worshipper to enter into them.

Writes Crawford: "We live in a world that has already been named by our predecessors, and was saturated with meaning before we arrived.  We find ourselves "thrown" into this world midstream, and for the most part take over from others the meanings that things already have." (The World Beyond Your Head [hereafter referred to as WBYH], pg 145)

The premodern world, with its objective truth, layered reality, involved Creator, and rich historical foundation, produced robust people who created some of the most stunning architecture, discovered and developed new technology (cf. Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel, by Joseph and Frances Gies) and created art that remains unsurpassed.  Status derived from acquiring the skills and knowledge of the elders instead of from one's own "gumptions and mental capabilities" (WBYH, 162). They were able to attend to the world around them with sensitivity and purpose that was unhampered "by radical personal responsibility and instead rested secure in a knowledge and trust in the processes/wisdom that had come before.  There was no need for perform for the world" (WBYH, 162).  They were untroubled by questions of individual sovereignty or existential crisis.  Meaning and truth were all around them, waiting to be discovered.

We can now contrast the pre-modern world with the modern world--shaped by the so-called "Enlightenment."  I would rather call it The Great Flattening.  The round, multi-layered cosmos inhabited by premodern man has been made flat and one-dimensional in our modern age.

Let us move on to Decartes.  "Decartes began his inquiries by putting aside all supposed knowledge received from "example or custom" in order to "reform my own thoughts and to build upon a foundation which is completely my own." (WBYH, 130).  Basically, this is the sort of tabula rasa mentality that is so pervasive in education and modern culture today.  Rather than discovering the cosmos outside oneself, and to find the objective truth of God working in Creation, we moderns think of ourselves as existing in the vacuum of our minds, born blank and pure, with no connection to what has gone before or will come after, no sense of the fallen condition of mankind.  The ideal then becomes the proverbial brain in a jar.  As such, the modern self has no interest in learning about or from the outside world.  Indeed, the outside world becomes a threat to one's own autonomy.  We've become obsessed with "authenticity" as Charles Taylor notes in A Secular Age.  "To live authentically, Norman Mailer would write a century later, one has to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self" (WBYH, 130).

The ideal life that is presented to us by a pre-packaged medium is the solitary person, standing on a vista somewhere, existing without ties or bonds to keep him in place.  Any threat against individual autonomy ("identity" would perhaps be an appropriate stand-in for autonomy) must be rooted out and destroyed.  Anything that takes our attention outside ourselves and joins it to the physical world must be regarded with suspicion (WBYH, 131).

In short, the thinkers of the Great Flattening have given us our intellectual inheritance and cultural mandate:

• "We are enjoined to be free from authority--both the kind that is nakedly coercive and the kind that operates through claims of knowledge.  If we are to get free of the latter, we cannot rely on the testimony of others.

• The positive idea that emerges, by subtraction, is that freedom amounts to radical self-responsibility.  This is both a political principle and an epistemic one.  

• We achieve this, ultimately by relocating the standards for truth from outside to inside ourselves.  Reality is no self-revealing; we can know it only by constructing representations of it.

• Attention is thus demoted.  Attention is the faculty through which we encounter the world directly.  If such an encounter isn't possible, then attention has no role to play." (WBYH, 116)

Consider how these principles inform our sense of things: man's chief end is no longer to glorify God and to pursue theosis, which is something that naturally must occur in the embodied world, that is, in God's creation.  Man's chief end in modern terms is to glorify himself and seek knowledge and understanding only within himself, a disembodied being, apart from the corporeal world.  Worship becomes less corporeal and more of a spectator event, "mediated by representations" (WBYH, 170)

Crawford gives a  number of examples of how our attention and ability to attend to things in the embodied world has fractured and been given over to abstractions.  Modern cars are built to be incomprehensible to all but a computer expert; machines provide manufactured experiences, somethings to the point that we perceive them as "better" than the real thing.  (Taking a photograph of a magnificent sunrise, and adding a filter to "enhance" the image is a good example of this).  Images themselves become a kind of mediated reality--we're all quite familiar with the phenomenon of the social media constructed self.  (The recent Pokemon GO mania is another good example of mediated or constructed reality).  Crawford points out that we've ceded a lot of power and agency to the corporations who manufacture these experiences for us, and that the subsequent feelings of alienation and loneliness that are the hallmarks of our modern age are natural results of this loss of agency.  "For such a self-choosing from a menu of options replaces the kind of adult agency that grapples with things in an unfiltered way" (WBYH, 117).  

The irony of all this radical atomization and mediated reality is that individuality is actually in decline.  We are unable to attend to things that are less engaging than the menu of options presented to us, and "[w]hen we inhabit a highly engineered environment, the natural world begins to seem bland and tasteless,  like broccoli compared to Cheetos.  Stimulation begets a need for more stimulation; without it, one feels antsy, unsettled, hungry almost" (WBYH, 17).

Crawford notes that it takes Herculean effort to resist the cultural pressure to conform, to become the late modern consumer self, presented through layers of filters, abstract from the real world.  Who wants to eat broccoli when piles of cake are sitting there, calling your name?  "What sort of outlier would you have to be, what sort of freak of self-control, to resist those well-engineered cultural marshmallows?" (WBYH, 17)

So where does that leave us?  We can't very well shove Pandora back into her box and return to a premodern world.  Our world is thoroughly disenchanted, as Jamie K. Smith notes in How (Not) to be Secular.  In order to reclaim our attention and agency, Crawford suggests submission to authority, two words that seem antithetical to the whole Western ideal of the fully autonomous individual (WBYH, 24).  If, in our modern Western mindset, autonomy (self-rule) is good, and heteronomy (rule outside the self) is bad, because is threatens the autonomous self (WBYH, 24), then we have to consider that autonomy might be antithetical to true human flourishing.  "To emphasize this (heteronomy) is to put oneself at odds with some pervasive cultural reflexes.  Any quick perusal of this self-help section of a bookstore teaches that the central character in our contemporary drama is a being who must choose what he is to be, and bring about his transformation through an effort of will.  It is a heroic project of open-ended, ultimately groundless self-making.  If the attentive self is in a relation of fit to a world it has apprehended, the autonomous self is in a relation of a creative mastery to a world it has projected" (WBYH).  This is very much in keeping with the idea of liquid modernity.  We are no longer pilgrims on The Way, but rather tourists, flitting about from one place to another, no particular destination in mind.

How do we reclaim our ability to attend to the embodied world, to submit to authority outside ourselves, to seek God in Creation as the chief end of our lives, and seek heaven as the destination of our embodied souls?

We must first resist the temptation to mechanize human behavior--to understand people in purely mechanical or technological terms.  Humans are not machines.  People are often unpredictable and react in ways that can't be reduced to an algorithm or steam engine metaphor.  The ways we talks about ourselves and our minds must be informed by this fact.  We need to stop deferring to machines and bowing down to the anonymous masters who made them.  Yes, machines make our lives easier and more convenient in many ways, but once a machine starts constructing reality for large numbers of people, it is a problem.

Let us train our minds to attend.  This means reading real books, putting aside screens for a specific period of time--the mind will resist such mental exercise, but it is ultimately good to retrain the mind to attend to longer-form reading and to be able to ruminate on it in a quiet environment.  We will need to prepare for discomfort during this process, as we retrain ourselves away from constant stimulation and entertainment toward quiet contemplation in order to attend to the state of our souls and our journey of theosis.  This will be hard, as we live in a highly processed post modern environment that goes to great lengths to prevent silence and stillness without mediated reality.

Let us celebrate art that explores the object truth in reality--art that looks to reveal that which might not be obvious by inviting the viewer in.  Let us gravitate toward art as memesis--what Taylor describes as reflecting what is already out there rather than fetishizing art as creation: originality with whatever subjective connection the mind projects.  

Let us inhabit our bodies, with their frailties and strengths, in order to learn to tame the passions of body and mind.  Let us not be disgusted by the work of the Creator in making us, and instead embrace physical reality, from birth to death.  It will be messy, unsanitary, and real.  Let us be present at the deathbed, and relearn the ways of preparing the body for death.  Let us stop running from and fearing death.

Let us leave our atomized selves behind and become familiar with our history, the physical landscape, and our place in it.  Let us work with our hands, learning within a longer tradition of making.  Let us be humble and acknowledge the wisdom of our elders.  Let us be prepared for the general messiness of real human interaction, and be willing to walk with people through trials and triumphs, despite whatever personal discomfort or inconvenience that may bring.  

While we may not inhabit an enchanted world, we can work to re-enchant ourselves, our communities by acknowledging the ongoing work of the Creator in the world, of training the spiritual eye of our hearts to see what the eye does not see, to be sensitive to the spiritual dimension.  

Let us journey on as pilgrims, together.

References:

Juliana Bibas, "The Orthodox Clock and the Map of the World." Road to Emmaus Journal, Vol XII, No. 1 (#44).

Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2015.

Rod Dreher, "Pilgrims Vs. Tourists", American Conservative Blog, September 8, 2016

Jamie K. Smith, How (Not) to be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor.  Michigan: Eerdmans, 2014.

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.