It is now more unlikely than ever before that you will read this review in one sitting (if, that is, you read it at all). The subway conductor is announcing a delay, your cell phone is buzzing, a television is flickering; focusing, for a page, for a paragraph, has never been harder.
We are living through, says Matthew Crawford, a “crisis of attention,” and while he is not the first to comment upon it, his new book, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction, is among the most thorough, wide-ranging, and deeply considered analyses of this aspect of our cultural moment.
Crawford is a product of the University of Chicago’s prestigious Committee on Social Thought who forsook the Ivory Tower for the mechanic’s garage (he currently operates a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond, Virginia, and, for propriety’s sake, is also a fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for the Advanced Study of Culture). In 2009 he published the much-feted Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, which contested the entrenched distinction between “doing” and “thinking,” arguing that the devaluation of skilled manual labor had cut off from our pursuit an entire form of human flourishing—and impoverished philosophy in the process.
The World Beyond Your Head follows from the questions asked in Shop Classand ultimately deepens and broadens its thesis (though one need not have read the latter to appreciate the former).
