The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

There’s something incongruous about the thought of Matthew Crawford watching the Disney Junior Channel’s animated preschool series Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. Crawford has a good deal more machismo than your average intellectual: his first book, the bestselling Shop Class as Soulcraft, lamented the devaluation of skilled manual labor, and in addition to being a senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, he works as a motorcycle mechanic. But he evidently logged some time in front of the animated show, because he eviscerates it in his fiercely intelligent new book, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction.

Where Shop Class focused on our hands, the follow-up is more about our minds, specifically what Crawford calls our current “crisis of attention.” It’s easy to imagine the blame for such a crisis being laid at the feet of technology, and indeed, Crawford scatters the text with riffs on how various digital devices foster disengagement. That’s, to cite one example, where Mickey Mouse comes in. Disney cartoons from the old days, the author observes, created slapstick humor out of the characters’ frustrating collisions with their physical environments. But there is no frustration (and, for that matter, no humor) in the bland new iteration, which presents problems for the characters and young viewers to solve with the help of a “Handy Dandy machine.” Like most television for young children these days, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse is more interested in being edifying than entertaining, but instead of focusing on the development of skills, the show’s story lines, Crawford writes, “substitute technology-as-magic for the possibility of real agency.”

But Crawford is more interested in our heads than in the smartphones and earbuds sprouting from them; he focuses less on the technology that he sees as exploiting our distraction and more on the intellectual history that he implicates in its cause. Doing so makes The World Beyond Your Head at once more demanding and more profound. Invoking thinkers from John Locke to Immanuel Kant, Crawford argues that while individualism and autonomy are cherished Enlightenment ideals, they grew out of a political project of liberation from tyrannical authority and thus “may no longer be well suited to our circumstances.” He regards knowledge as social in nature (he laments the decline of apprenticeships) and sees an overemphasis on autonomy as working against the development of skills that force deep focus, concentration, and learning. The absence of these skills, not incidentally, makes us more vulnerable to the corporate forces competing to appropriate our attention.

As in Shop Class, Crawford points readers toward solutions, presenting aspirational examples of what he calls “well-ordered ecologies of attention and action, the sort that can support some low-to-the-ground, perfectly attainable moments of human flourishing.” These are not what most people would consider everyday activities. He spends time with a trio of glassmakers, and he devotes nearly forty pages to an organ makers’ shop in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley; both of these crafts require cooperation among highly skilled participants. He writes of hockey players and motorcycle riders who find themselves “in the zone,” less through explicit thinking than through a type of concentration that demands almost intuitive engagement with one’s fast-changing surroundings and circumstances.

It must be noted that there are scarcely any women to be found in these profiles. Here, as in Shop Class, Crawford romanticizes men who work with their hands (when you pick up your Mercedes from the mechanic, he advises his, uh, Mercedes-owning readers, “be quiet when you write that check, because you are in the presence of genius”). At other points, though, he takes a wider view. The book concludes with an impassioned plea for the creation of an “attentional commons,” shared space that isn’t ceded to commercial interests, where silence is granted protections similar to those given water and air: “Please don’t install speakers in every single corner of a shopping mall, even its outdoor spaces. Please don’t fill up every moment between innings in a lazy college baseball game with thundering excitement. Please give me a way to turn off the monitor in the backseat of a taxi. Please let there be one corner of the bar where the flickering delivery system for Bud Lite commercials is deemed unnecessary, because I am already at the bar.” Attention, it turns out, is a resource whose preservation would benefit hockey players, motorcycle-riding mechanics, and the rest of us, too.