The World Beyond Your Head

The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew B. Crawford. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (ISBN: 9780374535919) 2016.

Summary: Argues that becoming an individual involves engaging with real physical environments and shared human practices.

Crawford, like many others, writes in this book of how we live distracted lives. However, he argues that the fault lies not in our screens but in ourselves. In particular, his contention that the rise of the autonomous self has made us vulnerable to distraction. The idea that we live “inside our heads” makes us vulnerable to all kinds of consumerist ploys, intensified through our digital economy. He offers one of the most chilling portrayals of this in how gambling has sought to be so frictionless that people will spend hours at a machine, urinating and defecating themselves rather than break away. He observes the irony that our quest for autonomy in the end results in a “mass solipsism” of “autistic monads.” We lose any real individuality.

Crawford believes to be human is to truly engage with our physical environment as well as other beings. He offers the examples of how the stick of a hockey player becomes an extension of one’s body, how the motorcycle an extension of the rider. He reminds us that the Latin root of “education” means “to lead out.” We are led out of our heads when we give focused attention to any skilled practice. Crawford offers examples of glass-blowing, learning Russian, playing music together with others. Drawing on Michael Polanyi, he observes the personal aspect of any form of true knowing, the relationship between knower and the object known.

Real individuality emerges in communities of practice in which we both perfect a skill and use it in a social context. Crawford uses his own trade as a motorcycle mechanic, showing how skilled work is recognized in the acceptance and payment of a labor bill. Likewise, real human relationships constantly bring us up against those not like us. This is so even in marriage. Knowing and bonding involves the practice of attention, the skill of negotiating those differences. Digital relationships seem easier, and more frictionless. And yet all this leads to boredom and the flattening of self.

Throughout, Crawford has held up the idea of skilled and embodied communities of practice. The final part of his book consists of just one chapter, “The Organ Makers Shop.” He introduces us to the pipe organ makers George Taylor and John Boody. He explores the lineage of organ-making from which they’ve come, the apprenticeships each underwent. The account walks through the renaissance in mechanical organs and the physicality of the workshop. For example, we learn how leather is a superior material for bellows rather than space age materials. Then there is the fine art of voicing organ pipes.

What most struck me in this account is how employees became master craftsmen. John Boody was asked out motivating employees to care about quality:

“They are absolutely the most vicious and greatest proponents of that,” he said. “The way to get people most disturbed here is to give them any sense that you are trying to cheapen things, or push them ahead. You think when you start out something like this that the hardest thing is going to be to teach people to care and value that aesthetic. But it happens, and you cannot convince them to do less.”

Behind the stories, there is some denser philosophy. By arguing that we need to get out of our heads, Crawford is not arguing that we stop thinking and just do. Rather, he invites us to use our minds to understand the ideas and practices that have misled and distracted us. Likewise, skillful work of any kind is mindful, attentive. But somehow, it must take us into the world of things and people.

The book led me to reflect on my own practice of reviewing. Reading books and writing about them can be a pretty “in your head” sort of thing. But I’m approaching the ten thousand hours of developing a skilled practice. I’ve written something like three thousand reviews. I’ve studied other reviewers. There is copyright law to observe. One needs to understand the vagaries of each platform. Then there is the back end technologies of websites, SEO, and more that go into every post. I also relate to a network of authors, publicists, publishing houses, booksellers, and devoted readers. My “hardware” includes reading glasses, pencils, computers, tablets, and smartphones.

And here I’d like to press Crawford. His examples focus on embodied practices, which I would certainly honor. But I think there is also skillful work one does as a “knowledge worker.” Crawford is his own best example of this. No doubt, doing other things besides “knowledge work” is good. My life has been enriched by everything from choral singing to painting, to maintaining and repairing my seventeen year old mower.

But the skillful practice of reviewing has changed me from simply being a reader to one who cares about what makes books good, who appreciates the labors of authors and wants to protect that from the intrusion and theft of AI. It has made me passionate about intellectual freedom and free speech and a free press. In sum, it has made me more fully who I am, even into my seventies. In Crawford’s terms, I think this is what it means to become an individual.