An interesting observation by Agnes Callard

I am grateful to more than one correspondent who has drawn my attention to a recent article on Derek Thompson’s Substack here:

It is a record of a conversation he had with Agnes Callard, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago.

In it, she describes a phenomenon she calls the ‘uni-context’. What each of my correspondents saw was that what she is describing is clearly an aspect of the left-hemisphere dominated world. I believe this is correct, and it is good to see a confluence of our thinking. But beyond that, she makes some interesting reflections – in particular, on the prevalence of bad news – which are worth exploring.

An important consequence of left hemisphere domination is that all our experience is, and consequently all our attempts to understand the world are, decontextualised. This is one of the most obvious features of left hemisphere attention to the world: it isolates, fragments and decontextualises whatever it latches onto. Since context changes everything, and, more than that, makes any one thing what it is, this leads to a far-reaching failure to make sense of the world. All this will be familiar to those who know my work.

Callard takes this into the realm of moral action. Clearly the context in which we find ourselves dictates to a considerable extent how we feel we should act. Nowadays, she argues, all contexts have been flattened, as if we all lived in one large room. All local contexts particular to a time and place, that would have guided the way we think and behave, have been dismissed.

Partly this is a consequence of technological advance over the last century or more, bringing us all into the same virtual world through public media and finally through the internet, but I agree with her that this is as much a symptom as a cause. She sees it as part of the modern lust to know everything; but since, as Bacon famously put it, knowledge is power, I would see this as part of the insatiable left hemisphere-motivated drive to have control over everything.

So far, so familiar. What I hadn’t really thought about was how this played out in terms of bad news. There is, Callard argues, and I think rightly, a tendency to focus on what we resent at the expense of what we might celebrate. Her point is thought-provoking:

In general, goodness is more context-dependent than badness. There isn’t really anything that’s good all the time for everyone independent of context. Happiness depends on your context and who you are. There isn’t anything that will always make a person happy. But there are reliable ways to make people unhappy. There’s a set of evils that are close to universal: death, pain, illness, violence. Even if someone’s in very different circumstances from yours, if you see they’re being subjected to one of those, you can interpret it as suffering and understand it.

So we should predict that what we see on the internet, insofar as people are trying to be legible to large groups, is that they focus their attention on things that show up to everyone. Take two strangers on the internet trying to talk to each other. What are they going to coordinate on as a topic they can both care about? It’s likely going to be something bad.

There is a further point, I think. Once context is lost, those things that we have chosen to consider universal and absolute truths tend to dominate. Now, you might object that we live in an age of relativism, one in which even murder is sometimes thought to be excusable, with the result that there are no universal and absolute truths these days. But relativism turns out to be only relative in its application. Anything that might conceivably be construed as, say, sexist, racist or whatever, becomes absolute. I am not arguing that these issues are not important – of course they are; it is just a matter of observation that while a murder may be judged differently according to context, this does not apply to certain topics. Those topics therefore become what can be agreed upon in a fragmented society that has no sense-making contexts, and there is a marked sense of solidarity – that important sense, so critical for human flourishing, which the left hemisphere world of the ‘uni-context’ has abolished – to be found in coming together with others in resounding condemnation.

Callard carries on to reflect on the way ‘identity’ has taken over from character in judgments on individuals. ‘To understand someone’s character’, she writes, ‘you need to know them well and to have experienced them in a variety of contexts before you can generalize’. By contrast, ‘with identity categories like woman, disabled, gay, Jewish, or American, the striking thing is that you are a member of those categories in every circumstance. There is no circumstance in which I stop being a woman. Identity is a hat you never take off. So identity is well suited to a uni-contextual world.’

Another way of looking at this is that the move from character to identity betokens the substitution of simplistic labels, categories and abstractions for all the complexity of living, embodied individuals. And it leads to quick-and-dirty, universal, judgments.

Here she also draws attention to the unusual prominence of the idea of ‘inclusivity’. The whole concept of ‘inclusivity’ is a quite new way of thinking about a society, one that is an inevitable consequence of the ‘uni-context’. (Social anthropologists are familiar with the idea that any cohesive society is defined as much by what it excludes as by what it includes.)

In the ‘uni-context’, all the fences that used to separate and define real, living communities have been demolished, so that there is just one wide-open prairie. Once all the local contexts have been destroyed, there suddenly appear to be a lot of choices, all on a level. In order to make such choices, each thing must be compared with, in principle, everything else. This, perhaps contrary to our initial assumptions, leads not to variety but to sameness. Once you’ve decided that X, whatever it might be, is the important quality to go for, the question simply becomes which of the things you are comparing has more of X about it.

The common abstraction of value is, of course, money, which is shorn of all the characteristics that any real existing thing of value would have. Callard comments on the historical transition from comparison of value to some already existing thing of manifest value in itself, to comparison against an abstract token, and this is what money in essence is. (For those interested, I go into the importance of this in the chapter entitled ‘The Ancient World’ in The Master and his Emissary. Also of interest here is Richard Seaford’s book Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, CUP, 2004.)

Callard further comments on attention and distractibility, features of the left hemisphere-dominated world: in a fundamentally disordered world, there are of course more distractions than in a known and ordered world, and hence we are constantly subject in the ‘uni-context’ to new demands on our attention, which are not the results of unconscious monitoring so much as what she calls ‘the top-down management of attention’, ie, the wilful self-conscious direction of attention to a desired target. And that target will usually come from the world of abstraction. She quotes Robert Musil, writing before World War II:

The probability of learning something unusual from a newspaper is far greater than that of experiencing it; in other words, it is in the realm of the abstract that the more important things happen in these times, and it is the unimportant that happens in real life.

Thus it is, I would say, that we become ever more estranged from actuality and helplessly immersed in an abstract realm that has no points of reference, no values and no meaning.

Given this, it is of some interest that Callard refuses to pass judgment on the ‘uni-context’. ‘We can’t judge it’, she pleads, ‘because we are its products. It is us. The idea that we can separate ourselves and stand in some relation to it and say this is good or bad is a bit of an illusion …’

She has a point – up to a point – but the ‘it is us’ argument was never before successfully used to prevent people passing judgment on a state of affairs in society that they had inherited, and from which they wished to diverge, otherwise there would be no history of societal reform. Perhaps she feels that the step change here is greater than any earlier societal change. But a) it is hard to accept that, say, the Industrial Revolution was a less significant change, and it gave rise to a great deal of social, political and philosophical commentary, not all of which was by any means misguided; and b) a step change still allows that we can recall, understand or imagine different ways of living and being, and make a reasonable judgment on ‘the way we live now’.

Perhaps, as she puts it, ‘the first thing we need to do is get our bearings before we start judging, because the uni-context is a super judgey place’. But again, that some people that you disagree with and mistrust can be rashly or simplistically judgmental is not, in my view, a reason for refraining from all, especially well-grounded, judgment yourself.

To some extent, of course, refusing to pass judgment is a professional handicap of philosophers, and while there’s part of me that respects it, I do feel that, when we clearly describe negative consequences of a phenomenon, without being able to demonstrate any obvious positive ones, we have a responsibility to come off the fence. On the other hand, perhaps we don’t need people explicitly to corroborate what they have just made implicitly plain.

In any case, the piece is interesting and worth-reading, and I have to admit that, while there are probably a number of reasons why public discussion is relentlessly focussed on bad news, I found Callard’s particular take on the matter original and convincing.