The word context derives from the Latin contextus ("a joining together" or "connected sequence"), which is the past participle of contexere. This verb is a combination of con- ("together") and texere ("to weave" or "to construct"). Therefore, its literal, etymological meaning is "weaving together".
Historically, the word, context, emerged in the 15th century to describe the weaving together of words or the entire text of a written composition. Over time, its meaning broadened to encompass the "woven" environment of circumstances, facts, or settings that surround and clarify a specific event, statement, or idea.
Let’s start with the word context. A context is a set of circumstances that tell you how you should act.
No. A boss or a mentor or the director of the play in which you are an actor, tells you how you should act. Whether you comply depends on what you consider to be in your own interest or what your preferences, or impulses, cause you to do.
Contexts are useful for interpreting, understanding and predicting behaviour. They are not 'action guiding' in themselves.
For most of human history, contexts were local and multiple.
That is still the case. Even if everybody on the planet reads your tweet, the fact is nobody outside the Solar System gives a fart.
If you wanted to know how you should act,
you are likely to be concussed or under the influence of a psychotomimetic substance
you would look around. Am I in a field? Am I inside my home? Am I in the church? Am I in a bar? You would immediately get guidance by looking both at your physical environment and at the people around you and how they were acting.
If you are the sort of person who routinely drops your trousers and takes a dump on your boss's armchair in the mistaken belief that his office is actually a toilet cubicle, then you might think Callard is a freakin' genius. Otherwise, you have to ask how fucking retarded she actually is.
The uni-context is a scenario in which the ways you should act become the same across all different contexts.
It doesn't exist. You really should do something different when sitting on the toilet as opposed to when sitting at the dinner table.
There’s just one set of norms you should follow all times, irrespective of context.
This has never been the case and can never be the case.
Thompson: Is the uni-context a purely technological phenomenon?
It does not exist.
I just wrote an article about what America was like in 1926,
Racist as fuck
based on a social science survey called Recent Social Trends, published in 1933.
Ogburn, the main author, showed there was a lag between material culture and non-material culture. The fact that a lot of Americans had radios and went to the Cinema didn't mean they had internalized the norms and cultural values underlying these technological advances.
The authors claim that the radio was destroying individuality, because it took people who used to be settled in rooms and it exploded their brains to become present all over the world simultaneously.
Nonsense! Radio ownership had gone up a lot but it was obvious that differences of culture, language, region, class etc. had not been erased. Indeed, Radio reinforced differences in language and dialect.
Hoover & Ogburn saw the radio as something positive. The hope was that the President's 'fireside chats' would restore public confidence and put an end to the Depression. Nobody was pretending that radiowaves caused brains to explode.
Radio was demolishing the idea of a local individual, because suddenly we all became global citizens.
Radio, like the 'Talkies', was reversing 'globalization' based on the grampaphone record & the silent movies.
So one story you could tell is that the last 150 years of telecommunications technology have taken “local” individuals, who occupy one room at a time, and made us into global beings who are simultaneously in every room, at once.
This is Alan Moore's Dr. Manhattan- a comicbook character. Derek thinks he has similar super-powers. That's sweet.
Is the uni-context just technology or is it technology plus something else?
Callard: It’s technology plus something else. What the techno-determinism angle misses is: Why did these technologies catch on in the first place?
They delivered goods or services more cheaply or conveniently.
Why was radio popular?
It only became popular after broadcasters used radio to deliver services- e.g. entertainment, news, music etc.- more cheaply or in a more convenient form. The existence of substantial scale and scope economies meant that radios became better and more affordable over the course of the Nineteen Twenties.
Why did we come up with new things—television, smartphones—and why did they catch on, too?
If you don't know the answer to this, you probably do need Callard to explain to you that you should shit while sitting on the toilet. You should abstain from shitting when sitting at the dinner table.
Not every technology people have invented has caught on the way these forms have. They caught on in large part because of this impulse people have to live in a uni-context.
There is no such impulse. That is why radio or TV ownership increased more rapidly where there were many channels or stations. Even where the Government restricted private broadcasting, it was obvious that different programs appealled to different age groups.
Thompson: Does the uni-context flow out of this adventurousness in the human spirit to become bigger than ourselves, to be everywhere, and to know everything?
Becoming bigger means more contexts are applicable. One may say 'But, if we become God allmighty, then we would have only one context- viz. Creation itself..' The problem here is that an omniscient & omnipotent is not constrained to have one rather than many contexts.
Callard: Yeah, it absolutely does.
Callard did indeed succeed in becoming a bigger turd than her own shithead. This was on the basis of conversations she had with her smartphone.
There’s a conversational relationship between these technologies
No. They supplant each other. 'Video killed the Radio Star' as the Buggles announced back when I were a lad.
and a human impulse that interacts with them.
That human impulse depends on content. Generally speaking, porn is the killer app. The telephone only took off coz Alexander Graham Bell would talk dirty to Queen Victoria.
They facilitate the expression of an impulse; if they didn’t, they would flop as technologies.
No. Technologies succeed when they raise productivity. As for impulses, our species has risen only by controlling, suppressing, or wholly sublimating them.
We need to explain why they were popular;
There is no need for us to do any such thing. No doubt, there are experts who earn good money advising business enterprises how to make their products more popular.
why they became the subject of obsessive use; and what their popularity reveals, as a humans’ impatience with being trapped in a small world that presents itself as all of reality but you know it isn’t.
The virtual world is smaller than the real world- indeed, it is a proper subset of it. The way to escape this small planet is by dying. Callard, sadly, doesn't seem impatient at all to do so.
There is a drive to be bigger than yourself.
Yet, everywhere you look, people are paying for liposuction.
It leads people to adventure, but adventure just takes you to a different place.
Adventure doesn't make you bigger. It makes your experiences more varied.
The uni-context takes you to a different set of norms, a much more radical change, a push to live in something like a fully open reality.
Narcissism isn't an 'open reality'. It is merely a personality disorder of a type which might actually be less obnoxious than being a fucking bleeding heart.
Thompson: I want to get into some implications of the uni-context. If I put on the goggles of the uni-context, what makes sense that previously did not? One of those things is the rise of negativity bias. When you go online, there’s so much emphasis on people posting about what is bad.
Gossip works that way. There's a theory that our species is hard-wired for gossip. I reject this view. But don't get me started about all the other elderly Hindutva fanatics on Twitter. I heard that a certain prominent Modi supporter secretly wears hijab so as to go to Batla House and gorge on beef biryani! No. It isn't the lady you are thinking of. It is her Dad!
Why would this theory explain a world in which people are more focused on bad things than good things?
For the same reason that sodomization by pixies explains all sorts of imaginary shite.
Callard: In general, goodness is more context-dependent than badness.
Since they are antonymns, such can't be the case.
There isn’t really anything that’s good all the time for everyone independent of context.
Nor is there anything that's bad all the time.
Happiness depends on your context and who you are.
We don't know that.
There isn’t anything that will always make a person happy.
Or sad.
But there are reliable ways to make people unhappy.
No. They may kick our heads in first.
There’s a set of evils that are close to universal: death, pain, illness, violence.
Which can put an end to any unhappiness you seek to subject anyone else to.
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.
No. Some people want to die. Others prefer pain and illness to death. Violence is something some people actively seek to experience.
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.
No. You want to be of interest to some people, not others. This is called a 'dis-coordination' game or 'separating equilibrium'. Preference intensity can be a 'costly signal'. For academic philosophers seeking a wider audience, this involves pretending to be as stupid and as ignorant as fuck. Better yet is to actually be utterly mad.
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.
No. There are pooling equilibria involving becoming a 'follower' of someone nice- like Jesus Christ.
Thompson: It’s almost like you’re saying the audience for the bad tends to be more global than the audience for the good.
Which isn't true. What is bad is of merely local interest- e.g. higher risk of cancer because of pollution from a nearby factory. What is good is of universal interest- e.g. a cure for a whole class of cancers.
Take food. If I think chicken enchiladas are really delicious, that might be interesting to my wife or my neighbor in the context of our home. But the fact that I think chicken enchiladas are delicious is incredibly boring for posting on Twitter, a place that cuts across contexts.
If you have a video of how to make tastier chicken enchiladas people all over the world will find it interesting.
It’s more interesting for me to say white Americans who eat chicken enchiladas are racist against Mexican culture,
It really isn't.
because the concept of racism clicks into a global norm of badness.
Nobody gives a fuck. The may pretend otherwise because that is required of them by their employer, but they don't actually care at all about 'cultural appropriation' or the fact that many White peeps have dicks even thought dicks cause rape.
So when people go online, when it’s suddenly one to a million, there is an inclination to make those posts negative. Condemnation spreads further because it cuts across all these contexts. Is that a fair way of recapitulating how the uni-context would predict that modern communication would be more fixated on criticism and badness?
This is a description of a discoordination game of very limited appeal.
Callard: That seems right. Let me make one corrective and add a point. You might say your chicken enchilada thing just isn’t that important or good. But let’s say something really good happened. Someone in Iran wrote an amazing poem.
It could go viral. The thing could easily be translated and set to music. However, a cure for cancer would get even more traction.
Even then, well, they wrote it in a language a lot of us don’t speak, and we need time to evaluate and culturally assimilate it.
Omar Khayyam was from Iran. So was Rumi. Apparently, he is a best seller in the US.
So even pretty significant goods are going to be throttled in their ability to reach a substantial audience. From chicken enchiladas to great works of art, we’ve got the same problem.
Thankfully, we have nothing worthwhile to coommunicate and thus face no pressing problem in that regard.
Thompson: When we spoke on the phone about the uni-context, you told me a story about being a professor that seems like a great example of this principle. Can you tell that story?
Callard: One way I illustrate the norms that are distinctively uni-contextual, and contrast them with our older multi-contextual norms, is to think about ways I might correct a student. Suppose they come late to class, or interrupt another student, or raise their hand to say something that has nothing to do with what the previous person just said. Those are all ways I can correct a student in my capacity as teacher. The other students cannot make those corrections.
Sure they can. The class monitors can kick the shit out of disruptive students. Indeed, where what is being imparted is of value, students soon evolve ways of getting disruptive students- as well as teachers with a tendency to go off topic- to mend their ways.
But now imagine that a student makes a sexist or racist comment.
Other students can kick the cunt's head in. That is an effective sanction. A worthless teacher who lacks good stabbing skills won't be able to get the student to desist from a potentially very harmful type of behaviour.
I can correct that too, but so can another student in the class. The other students are in a totally parallel position to me when it comes to the uni-contextual norms.
No. Students remain students so long as the 'context' remains the classroom or lecture-hall. This is not to say that a student may not correct a teacher who makes a mistake nor that one student may not give a better answer to another student than the teacher can do. It just means that the teacher is the dude who gets paid for turning up. The students may have to pay to attend.
Those are not role-dependent.
Roles are irrelevant because a student can teach the teacher. Status- and who gets paid at the end of the day- is a different matter. In the Classroom, either you are an employee or are in statu pupillari.
Let me add something about the idea that the audience is global. I want to distinguish between a situation in which a lot of people from a lot of cultures are accessing the same information and one in which people are accessing it from a lot of different contexts.
The former is a proper subset of the latter. They are not distinct.
Imagine it was just New Yorkers on the internet. Those New Yorkers would be accessing the internet from different places, in different moods, at different times of day. One might be at a bar, while another might be talking to their kids. Is there something good for all New Yorkers all the time, irrespective of their age, wherever they are, and at whatever time of day it is?
Yes. Not being nuked is good for all New Yorker. So is the cessation of some extreme weather event or the lifting of a lockdown thanks to high vaccine coverage.
You may say 'some New Yorkers may want such outcomes' but it is easy to 'factorize' the 'good' such that there is a 'lowest common factor' for all existing (as opposed to hypothetical) New Yorkers. Alternatively, we could redefine New Yorkers as those who want what is good for the city.
No. The same point holds. They are going to focus on the negative as well.
Focus on the negative so as to avoid bad outcomes.
Thompson: Another implication is the way the uni-context makes identity more important than character. Can you explain how, and why?
Callard: First, let’s define what character is.
It is the inner ethos of a person as expressed in observable traits such as honesty, thrift, cheerfulness etc.
The fact that I have to tell you is itself telling;
There is no such fact. Callard doesn't know the meaning of the word character. She can't tell us shit.
that word is less familiar to us. Everyone knows what identity is,
Identity is essentially contested because it is epistemic.
but we might not be sure what character is anymore.
We may be wrong about what constitutes good character.
Character refers to a set of dispositions that shape how you navigate your emotional life across a variety of circumstances.
For Aristotle, ethos (character) is founded on prohairesis (deliberate moral choices) which, becoming habitual, are 'second nature'.
A courageous person navigates their emotional life in relation to fear.
This does not follow. Some people may be courageous because they are incapable of fear. Others may so continually war against fear that their behaviour is courageous. It would be wiser to trust the former more than the latter just as a guy who never liked drugs and alcohol can be relied on not to use either substance more than an equally sober fellow who, however, is aware that he can relapse at any moment.
You could be anger-prone, or generous. Your character is a set of dispositions that determine how you respond to a big variety of circumstances.
Ethos is just a word. It isn't some magical force. We may say 'what determines how a person responds to different circumstances is based, ceteris paribus, on training and motivation.' That is why paideia can be 'character building' in the sense of instilling superior training and motivation such that superior outcomes are achieved.
The thing about character is that it shows up differently in different circumstances.
As does everything which evolved by natural selection.
Say I’m irascible, easily provoked to anger. Even an irascible person isn’t angry all the time. There might be circumstances where everybody gets angry, and so you can’t see my irascibility, because even though I’m angry, so is everybody else. Grasping character requires a lot of context. To understand someone’s character, you need to know them well and to have experienced them in a variety of contexts before you can generalize.
No. You can judge a person's character by looking at what they have achieved and by asking people who know them well. It is common, when hiring a person, to seek testimonials as to their character from their past employers or teachers.
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.
No. A person may be classed as a woman in some places or for some purposes but not others. The same is true of disability, homosexuality, Nationality etc. The case of Judaism is particularly interesting. Some people whom the Nazis did not classify as Jews were nevertheless treated as such under the Law of Return (e.g. Karaites) while others who were classified as Jews by Hitler were denied it (e.g.Oswald Rufeisen) thought they were granted naturalization.
There is no circumstance in which I stop being a woman.
Unless you get a Gender recognition certificate establishing yourself as a man for legal purposes.
Identity is a hat you never take off.
Yet people change their identity all the time.
So identity is well suited to a uni-contextual world.
No. Indviduation would be impossible & thus Identity would be unknowable. In a Parmenidean block universe we have to embrace something like Vedanta. Individual identity would be an illusion. Only if there are mutliple contexts can we 'tell the dancer from the dance'- e.g. the context where the dancer stops dancing and takes a dump.
Thompson: This reminds me of political discourse on the left and the right, which tends to focus on identity rather than characters. You have these debates about identities are good, which identities are powerful and oppressive, which identities are powerless and oppressed, which have protection, which have too much protection. It’s not that those categories aren’t important. They are. But I’m reflecting now on the gap between how frequently we talk about identity and how infrequently we talk about character in the national discourse.
Idle chatter doesn't matter at all. Nor does idle chatter about idle chatter.
Callard: Yes, in two ways.
What goes along with the identity logic of the uni-context is a specific form of ethics that dictates how we talk about identity, and it covers who’s powerful and who needs protecting, namely the ethics of inclusion.
How many people should you invite into the marital bed? If the figure is less 8 billion, you aren't really being inclusive.
Our fundamental concern in relation to identity is that there are identities that might be excluded.
This was a passing fad. Now China is overtaking the West, DEI is dead in the water.
Depending on where you are politically, you have your sights on different identity categories, but everybody’s worried about that.
Not after Trump returned to the White House. Now the only identity which matters is xenophobic White heterosexual. Why? That's the majority. That's the swing vote. Moreover, now they have what they have always wanted most- viz. a Grievance to trump all other grievances.
That’s a fundamental form of ethics of the uni-context, because the one thing the uni-context has to be is a space for everybody.
That's a pooling equilibrium. Cheap talk constitutes it. But so does alethic information of a useful type.
It’s got to be inclusive in a way that earlier societies almost everywhere were not.
Nonsense! The Roman Empire became very inclusive. There was even a couple of Arab Emperors. Wilsonian Nation States were less inclusive than they multi-ethnic Empire they replaced.
That word, inclusion, wasn’t a thing people talked about.
Like 'diversity' it is what a lot of people blame for the West having turned to shit.
It comes along with the uni-context, and the way that ethics gets focused is through identity categories.
It would be unfair to say Kamala had only one plank to her platform- viz. that she was bleck & had a vagina- still, there's some truth to the charge that the DEI crowd were monomaniacs.
And then, there’s virtue. Think about Aristotle, because he’s my prime example of a virtue ethicist.
Aristotle was concerned with 'excellence' (arete) which he believed was connected to taking the middle path between excess and deficiency.
By its nature, virtue is a concept that privileges the good side rather than the bad.
Not Aristotelian arete which seeks a middle path (mesotes). Too much of a good thing is bad and too little of a bad thing isn't good. Cake is good. Shit is bad. But it is bad to eat too much cake or to shit too little.
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics tells you what it is to be courageous and wise and just and generous.
No. You already know. Aristotle has a theory of a teleological type such that every thing which exists has a 'natural' growth path. Steresis, or lack, drives this natural process. Sadly, Aristotle was completely wrong. In Physics, Galileo & Newton were right. In Biology, it was Darwin & Mendel.
There are corresponding discussions of how you might go wrong. But those are predicated on first understanding the positive value of certain kinds of behavior.
No. They are predicated on there being some 'natural' path which it were uttermost privation not to go down.
So virtue ethics naturally has a positivity bias that is precisely the opposite of the bias we have now.
No. It is based on privation- 'steresis'. We eat because we lack food in our bellies. We fuck because we feel we lack a sufficient number of progeny. Sadly, this theory is completely wrong.
Thompson: Tell me if this is a fair recapitulation of our conversation so far.
For most of human history, people judged norms based on local context.
Only local contexts- invented or otherwise- are knowable.
A home had its own rules, a cathedral its own rules, and a classroom or bar or funeral parlor had its own rules.
But some rules apply everywhere. You don't shit in the drawingroom of your house, nor in your pew at church. Even those with endowed Chairs in Philosophy are discouraged from shitting in them.
But now it is almost like we are constantly living in universal rooms,
Which is why Callard is so constipated. Like a bear, she can only shit in the woods.
and the universal room we occupy is assumed to have universal values and universal norms.
This was always the case. For specific purposes, a Hohfeldian immunity was created- e.g. soldiers being allowed to stab people on the battlefield. In traditional cultures, there would be specific rituals of purification (catharsis).
That has specific implications. First, rather than talk about what is good, which is context-dependent, we tend to focus about universal truths, and it’s easier to talk about universal bads than goods, so people focus on negativity.
A statement with greater generality has less information content but may have more imperative force. We may need to stop kids from eating their own shit. But we should be careful not to give kids the idea that shitting is bad. Otherwise they might die of constipation.
Still, there is a universal norm regarding the undesirability of giving gifts artfully sculpted out of your own turds.
Two, character is context-dependent,
No. Behaviour is context-dependent. Character is about intrinsic traits- even if they are never expressed.
so we talk less about character and more about its universalist equivalent, which is identity.
There is no connection between the two. Character mis epistemic. Its 'extension' changes as the knowledge base changes. Thus we may say 'X is of good character' but then discover that X has been stealing from us. We then say 'X appeared to be of good character. Actually, he was a clever sociopath.'
Anything epistemic won't have a stable extension and thus Liebniz's law of identity won't apply to it.
There’s a third implication that we should discuss. If everyone is on the same comparable plane, the same evaluative field, then comparison itself becomes a more inextricable part of life.
Not if the comparisons are so stupid they lead to a quick death.
Callard: Exactly.
Thompson: Tell me how the uni-context leads to a world of more comparison and competition.
Increased information is likely to increase the number of global comparators while reducing the number of local comparators.
Callard: Imagine two school districts with two high schools that do things slightly differently. If you’re in district A, you go to school A, and if you’re in district B, you go to school B. There might be a lot of information about what they do, but people treat it as: I’m in this district, so I go to this school.
If school A produces a lot of Merit Scholars while school B produces nothing but drug addicts, then people in district B will demand changes in the way the school is run.
Then they change the rule: You can go to either school no matter where you live. Suddenly there is motivation to compare.
No. That motivation always existed. People move to good school districts. This depresses property prices & hence property tax yield in districts with shitty schools.
You had the information before, but no motivation to compare, because the schools were not in the same space of choice, the same evaluative field.
There has been a lot of research on this. Some families do move to good school districts. They tend to create 'positive externalities'. Some families don't give a fuck about skool. They tend to create 'negative externalities'.
Now they are, so you find ways to compare them: graduation rates, what colleges people get into, how many AP classes they teach. And that affects the schools. Suppose one gets less popular because it doesn’t teach many AP classes. They were offering an individualized curriculum, but now everyone’s going to the other school, so they say, “We’ve got to teach AP classes too.”
There is no point trying to compete with a school which gets all the smart kids.
The process homogenizes the two schools, so they can compete. That’s not the only possible result. They could specialize, with one becoming the school for freshman and sophomore years, the other becoming the school for junior and senior years. But if they don’t recreate a normative barrier, you get homogenization from comparison.
Competition. Comparison by itself has no effect. Once Districts realize they have to compete as 'Tiebout models', they improve 'club goods' (e.g. Public Schools). This was a factor in the spread of the great American High School between 1911 and 1938.
As more things enter the same evaluative field, you make comparisons you never used to be able to make.
Or you ask someone with domain expertise.
Thompson: There are three pieces I’m trying to keep straight.
One, the upstream phenomenon of the uni-context.
which is like an 'open market' under perfect competition. It can't exist in reality for non-tradeables.
Two, the downstream phenomenon of more fields of comparison.
Only relevant fields matter. The accounting concept of 'materiality' determines what is relevant.
Three, the further downstream phenomenon of homogenization.
Only for tradeables. Some services- e.g. IT & R&D- turned out to be tradeable. An American company can set up campuses in low-wage India.
This is where the theory really starts to sing for me,
What theory. Callard, cretin that she is, is merely reinventing the wheel re. the theory of Perfect Competition.
because I think about sports.
she read some article by Malcolm Gladwell- a guy who doesn't know an eigenvalue from the Eiger Sanction.
As the analytics revolution came for baseball, you had all these teams in possession of the same statistics by which they could compare players. Previously, you had 30 teams using their own private scouts, so their analysis was more context-dependent.
No. It was more subjective. But the 'bias' of the scouts was one shared by the fans. Why? A Pareto law operates in Sport such that super-stars drive attendance. There may be a boring way to do bettter, but what fans pay for isn't boredom.
But when an easily calculable statistic like on-base percentage or WAR becomes the conventional way to evaluate whether a player is good, all the players become part of the same comparative set. You can rank them one-to-250 easily on a spreadsheet.
No- because of 'supermodularity' (i.e. complementarity- some players play better with other specific players).
But analytics didn’t just lead to more math, or more comparison. It led to more homogenization of strategy.
No. Callard is simply ignorant.
One of the great critiques of baseball has been that every team essentially does the exact same thing: it’s the same strategies for pitchers; the same strategies for hitters; the three true outcomes; all the batters swinging for the fences.
This is a feature not a big. Similarly, in boxing, both fighters try to punch each other- not themselves.
So you have the uni-context creating a comparative field, in this case analytics, which leads to homogenization.
No. You have competiton with the result that quality improves.
Callard: What you said reminded me that I have a theory of the inflection point for the uni-context.
The first truly global wars were fought in the eighteenth century. War is like baseball or boxing. Both sides try to get the better of their adversary. They don't spend their time chopping bits off their own bodies.
I don’t think it started five or ten years ago. The moment it really showed up was around 1910.
1905. Japan defeated Russia both at sea and on land.
One century ago, there were a bunch of people looking around at the world, thinking: What the hell is happening? Did culture break?
The Germans and other defeated powers may well have been thinking that. But the Japs & Indians & Chinese etc. were feeling pretty chuffed.
A lot of those people were novelists, and they wrote a new kind of novel called the modernist novel,
Few wrote in that manner. What sold like hotcakes was stories about gangsters or cowboys or Dukes who fell in love with shop-girls.
which is a novel about how to live in a world in which the uni-context is just coming into existence.
Since everybody alive already knew how to do so, there was no demand for any such thing. It isn't the case that people would go to see Sigmund Freud and say 'you gotta help me Doc! I don't know how to live in this world. I keep dying and getting resurrected in Ra's al Ghul's Lazarus pits.' Freud would answer- 'You must read Ulysses by James Joyce.' The patient would reply 'Couldn't I just settle for Dorothy Richardson?' 'Nein!' Freud angrily shouts, 'Dorothy got shit for brains. It is Joyce or nothing'.
Theorists of the time—such as Georg Simmel,
Sociologist- i.e. shithead
Max Weber,
Couldn't even fuck his own wife- utter shithead
and Martin Heidegger—
did fuck Hannah's Aunt. Nazi shithead.
they noticed something weird was going on.
They had shit for brains. What was weird was that they didn't predict that Germany would turn to shit. Smart people emigrated.
They tended to describe it in terms that sound almost like the opposite of the uni-context. They described it as the fragmentation of everything. All of a sudden, they said, everything is breaking apart.
Their Society broke apart. They lost millions of lives, a goodly parcel of land, & were pauperized by Hyperinflation. That was before the shit really hit the fan.
That was my first clue.
This woman is clueless.
The reason I thought of this is that you said everything is becoming homogenous,
Econ explains when you will have homogeneity (perfect competition & high barrier to entry oligopoly) and when there will be increasing product differentiation (monopolistic competition).
and I thought, “in a way, yes, but that’s a later effect.” The first thing that happens when a bunch of stuff is unified in a single evaluative field is that you feel overwhelmed by your choices.
No. You ask an expert. He asks you a couple of questions and gives you two or three options to choose from.
It feels like stuff is fragmented, because you don’t know how to compare these things, because you haven’t yet developed technologies of comparing them.
People can specialize in doing the comparisons for a small fee.
So, the early feeling of the uni-context was a feeling of the world being fragmented.
No. It was of the world being unified. The late Victorian English spinster who visited London once a year, met her stock-broker who got her to sell Canadian railway shares & Tzarist bonds & buy shares in a Clove plantation in Zanzibar. She went to the Army & Navy Department store to buy presents which would be sent to her nephew in Australia & her niece in Beunos Aires.
If you were a medieval peasant doing art, you were in art’s normative world.
No. You were a serf or a craftsman. You had to join a guild to be an artist. If what you did pleased the Prince or Pontiff, you were safe. There was no independent 'normative world' ruled by critics.
If you were in the church, you were in the church’s normative world.
All Christians were in it. Sadly so were some Jews or other infidels or heretics who might be put to death.
But in the 20th century, around World War I, you start to think: How do we reconcile the schoolteacher turned murderer, the soldier?
In the same way as the French did during the levee en masse or the Americans during the Civil War. Incidentally, a soldier has a Hohfeldian immunity to kill on the battlefield.
How do we think about the relationship between art and religion?
We think art serves to glorify God and express religious piety.
We’re suddenly trying to compare all these different values inside a single context, and the world feels dis-unified.
But everybody had always done so. Moreover, people always thought the secular realm was separate from the sacred realm.
Eventually we get technologies of commensurability.
Money is one such. Something like it has always existted.
What fragmentation really means—and that part was invisible to these writers—is that suddenly everything is part of the same evaluative field.
That is the opposite of fragmentation. Bertrand Russel has described the world he was born in as one where an English man could travel anywhere in the world without a passport, buying or selling anything he pleased.
That’s why you experience a multiplicity where you used to experience one thing at a time.
Nobody ever experienced only one thing at a time. You can listen to a song while having sex.
Thompson: I’m holding an essay by Georg Simmel you assigned me, The Metropolis and Mental Life. It was published in the early 1900s.
when the world was united in the manner Russell described.
Here’s a quote:
Money takes the place of all the manifoldness of things and expresses all qualitative distinctions between them in the distinction of how much.
Which is why Simmel could buy himself a Kaiser to clean his toilet.
To the extent that money can become a common denominator of all values, it becomes the frightful leveler.
The Kaiser was angry that his Uncle, the King-Emperor, was friends with his grocer- Sir Thomas Lipton.
All things rest on the same level and are distinguished only by their amounts.”
The Germans were poorer than the Anglo-Saxons. It was foolish of them to try to fight their richer cousins.
Simmel is putting his finger on the idea that in the modern world, local norms are melting, and what replaces them is the psychology of money, which I’ll reframe as the psychology of markets.
No. Simmel was talking paranoid bollocks. That is why no economist rates him.
What are markets very good at?
Matching buyers and sellers
Creating a single comparative field.
No. You need a separate grading agency or bunch of expert appraisers. But this also arises outside the market.
That’s how they coordinate prices, supply and demand.
No. The market is the solution to a coordination game. It doesn't coordinate anything. Economists say that the price vector, under certain rather artificial conditions, can optimally coordinate the actions of eomic agents. What Callard has said is garbled nonsense.
It’s one thing for there to be a market for carrots and eggs.
because you can legally buy and eat carrors and eggs.
But in the dating world now there’s a marketplace of single people.
No. That's why you can't legally buy and eat foxy chicks.
In sports, a marketplace of players who can be compared by specific analytics that homogenize and flatten strategy.
'Draft Slotting' is a 'restraint on trade' but may be considered to be in the public interest if there is collective bargaining (i.e. labour has 'countervailing' power). This has nothing to do with 'homogenization' because 'over-slotting' can occur. Strategy is a separate matter which has to do with the choice of team manager.
So there’s a way in which your theory of the uni-context is a way of saying the modern experience is the awareness that we are all participants in a global marketplace
Which was certainly the case in the mid-nineteenth century. Britain did not grow tea but drank a lot of it. India didn't make locomotives. It imported them from Britain. Indeed, Indians were also paying for British civil servants and Governors.
in which we previously were not.
When? For Indians or Jews or Greeks or Arabs or English people, true globalization arrived ove five centuries ago.
When I’m posting something on Twitter, I know a universe of people can see it,
No. You know that few will see it.
and I’m going to be voted up and down against other people posting in those marketplaces for attention.
Unless what you are doing is intrinsically valuable. Invent a better mouse-trap and the world beats a path to your door.
As we coexist in more marketplaces, it changes the way we think about ourselves and our values.
Only if that's how we make our money.
Is this market language pulling away from your theory?
Callard: There’s something intuitive about the way you’re putting it. But you have to bring in Simmel’s theory of money to understand that quote.
You have to know Econ to understand why Simmel's theory was shit.
Simmel has a book called The Philosophy of Money in which he explains what money really is, and the answer isn’t markets.
There is a market for every type of money.
That book defines money probably a hundred times, but I’ll pick one: Money is abstraction in the space of value.
This is false. Money is something concrete whose value is decided on a market. Thus the German mark and the Tzarist Rouble concretely lost almost all their value. The British Pound & the French Franc did not. But it was the Dollar which was the big winner from the Great War.
Money is abstract value.
No. 'Value' is an abstraction. Money is concrete. How much value it has depends on the determinants of demand and supply of it.
Every other value concept is somehow tied concretely to objects.
There is no money in the abstract. There are Dollars and Roubles and Rupees.
There’s a gradual move, as Simmel understands it, toward the capacity to think more and more abstractly about value, that moves in the direction of money. But it doesn’t just move in the direction of money, it changes money.
Money has existed for thousands of years. Thinking about it doesn't change it at all.
In ancient societies, if something is worth a lot of money, it has to be represented by a large object representing the money.
Nonsense! In ancient South India, a small copper plate inscription could represent something worth a lot of money- e.g. revenue collection rights over 1000 villages.
I suppose Simmel thought that since 'pecuniary' derives from the Latin word for cow, guys going to market to buy stuff brought along their herd of cows. Such was not the case. Money is a unit of account and can be represented by a negotiable instrument.
Then you get fiat currency.
Which developed out of negotiable instruments. Simmel did know about fractional reserve banking but didn't get that all arbitrage relies upon the same statistical principle- viz. 'law of large numbers'.
There are all kinds of changes in money that correspond to this growth of the ability to abstract value.
Anyone can abstract anything whatsoever. This doesn't change the world in any way.
What Simmel would say is that the fundamental change is the rise of abstraction.
What's more abstract than God? But God has been around for thousands of years. As St. Anselm showed, we'd rather have a concrete God than an abstract one. But this doesn't prove God necessarily exists.
We live our lives so abstractly now.
Callard eats only abstract meals. That's why her shit don't stink.
If you want to say we’re in a marketplace, that’s fine as a metaphor for the idea that we are engaged in abstract value calculations that allow everything to be compared to everything else. We tend to use money and markets as a metaphor for that activity, but over the past hundred years even what money and markets are has been transformed by this process of abstraction. The deeper thread is that we live very abstractly. We manage ourselves and our experiences in very top-down ways.
No. Because of 'supermodularity', we go in for 'bottom up' Tardean mimetics- i.e. imitating stuff we see cooler people are doing. This then means buying into a life-style where there is high 'complementarity'. Reducing 'cognitive dissonance' drives this type of 'conformity' but it is rational for it to exist because of non-convexities (economies of scope and scale).
Thompson: Let’s go deeper on this idea that we manage ourselves in top-down ways.
For example, if you notice your hand is on fire, you order your hand to stop burning.
You think the uni-context explains our relationship to attention and distraction. Explain.
Callard: The norm for human beings is a bottom-up management of attention.
No. The norm is to pay attention to what is in your interest or of interest to you.
You pay attention to what’s salient in your environment,
No. You pay attention to what is important to you.
and the ability to be distracted from what you’re attending to is important in a creature that might at any moment face a snarling animal or a fire.
If you are reading this, you are unlikely to be such a creature.
So the default is that you pay attention to what demands your attention.
We have sophisticated ways of preventing our attention from being demanded by stuff that is not of interest to us.
What the uni-context brings is a newfound top-down management of attention, where we constantly feel that we have to make decisions about how to manage our attention.
If you have this constant feeling you may also feel that you have to make decisions about breathing in and then breathing out.
We feel constantly like we’re letting ourselves get distracted, which is another way of saying we are failing to manage our attention with an iron enough fist. We have products to help us fight against the very objects we purchase, like our phones. We’re in a war with ourselves. That war is the attempt to do top-down management on an aspect of our psychology that evolved to be more homeostatic, more responsive to an environment.
There may be some such people. But they are boring shitheads.
One illustration: There are a lot of 19th-century novels in which someone is reading a novel, like Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina. It’s always a woman.
They are 'Quixotic'- i.e. like Don Quixote who read too many novels of chivalry. Both should hav been thrifty while pushing their husbands to rise in their professions.
This woman has a turbulent emotional life, because her lover is being problematic, so she gets distracted from the novel and puts it down. But a thing that never happens is her saying to herself, “no, I need to get through another 20 pages.”
Because novels were a distraction from what was of interest to them or what was in their interest. George Eliot or George Sand would have finished the novel so as to get paid for writing a review of it.
That kind of attention management—thinking, “I’m reading this book and I need to focus on it!”—is just not a thing people did in the 19th century.
Sure they did- if that is what they were getting paid to do.
That shows you how different a creature the human of today is.
Plenty of people put down whatever trashy novel they are reading so as to get on with something important to them.
Thompson: The uni-context puts us in a universal room, where we become aware of more ideas, more people, more things that we could be paying attention to but are not.
I suppose, academics may have to pretend to be interested in all sorts of boring shite.
Our response to this is to develop a theory of attention that treats it as a resource to manage.
In which case this would be part of management theory. Sadly thing would be idiographic. The things a detective should pay attention to are things a diplomat should ignore.
We think, “I have to only focus on the perfect things!” And this makes us obsessed with, and fearful of, distraction in a way that is historically unique.
No. All through history, people have sought to focus on God by retreating to the desert or the mountain.
Callard: It is a mark of the top-down management of attention.
No. It is a matter of 'acquired habitus'. Detective get special training. Diplomats get a different type of training. Sherlock Holmes notices that the type of cigar the German Ambassador is smoking. The Diplomat notices that he positioned himself on the opposite side of the room from the head of the American Banking Cartel. Holmes is able to deduce that the Ambassador was at the hotel room of the murdered courtesan. The Diplomat deduces that Germany is negotiating a dollar loan.
The question, "what should I pay attention to?” is not a function of anything about my local environment.
Some of it is.
I can’t use cues in my local environment to tell me what to attend to, because in pretty much every environment these days, there’s a screen. It’s there no matter what. It allows me to choose. It puts me in this giant evaluative field as to what I could attend to, the sufferings of people far away if I chose. So I stand in this choice relation to my attention.
Only because you chose to be a silly billy.
That was already starting to be true with radio and newspapers.
It has never been true of sensible people.
The Austrian writer Robert Musil,
who advocated an autonomous 'Essayistic Way of Life' such that people decide how and where and to what extent to contextualize themselves.
one of the prophets of the uni-context, wrote:
The opposite was the case. One need have no 'qualities' such that you were limited to a particular context.
The probability of learning something unusual from a newspaper
'man bites dog' is news precisely because generally it is dogs which bite men.
… 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,
I suppose the theories of Einstein & Bohr were abstract.
and it is the unimportant that happens in real life
Yet Einstein & Bohr were really alive.
That’s him saying we are in some way divorced from our local context.
No. He is saying our lives are pretty boring compared to stuff editors think it worthwhile to put into the newspapers.
It’s become irrelevant to us. We live in an abstract space that requires us to manage our attention.
Nothing abstract can be managed. You can get a job as a manager at McDonalds. You can't get a job managing non-Abelian anyons.
Thompson: Is the uni-context good or bad?
Is cats galoopific?
Callard: I don’t know. I recommended that Simmel essay for a specific reason, the way it ends, where he says the metropolitan mindset is a different mood of life than anything humans have known before,
He was wrong. Anyway, Berlin was provincial compared to New York.
but we can’t judge it, because we are its products.
We can judge Mummy & Daddy easily enough. They are great & deserving of kisses & hugs. However, they should stop nagging me to get a fucking job you lazy piece of shit.
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.
Yet we pay good money to Judges to do just that.
That’s one way of thinking about this, that it’s not obvious we’re in a position to judge it. My own thought is I don’t feel ready to judge it. What the uni-context is, as I understand it, is an answer to the question, where are we? For the past bunch of years I’ve been looking around and seeing, everything is going crazy,
Occam's razor suggests that it is you who has gone crazy.
where am I such that all this crazy stuff is happening? The uni-context is a way of answering that. It makes sense that this would be happening if that’s where I am. I thought I was in Chicago, sitting at my desk at the university. No, the whole time I was in the uni-context. The first thing we need to do is get our bearings before we start judging, because the uni-context is a super judgey place. There’s a universal moralism applicable to every situation, and getting pulled into that takes you away from trying to understand where you are.
Not really. We get that our species evolved by natural selection and the context of all contexts has to do with our survival. If we are smart there's sciencey stuff we should be doing. If we aren't smart, we can atleast keep out of the way of smart people.
So What? (Or: The Abiding Hunger For ‘World Openness’)
Thompson: I want to know what we should do about this.
A simple answer might be: When you’re having dinner with your family, you can be present with your family, or you can be on your phone, which is a universal room that makes you everywhere at once.
No. You can only be on one website at a time.
So put away the phone. But that feels like a cheap and predictable answer. Do you have something prescriptive that isn’t just “put away the phone at family dinner?”
No.
Callard: The question of whether the uni-context is good or bad is
like the question 'why cats galloopsciate?'
loaded, because the uni-context struggles to see good things.
People used to complain that murders and rapes and earthquakes are news but stories about how I almost forgot to buy bread tend not to get banner headlines in the Tabloids.
It’s better at seeing bad things. Pretty much everyone who hears me talk about the uni-context immediately responds that it’s bad.
If it existed, it would be. A context is like something woven- e.g. the underwear you have on. You wouldn't want everybody in the world to fit into your underwear alongside you. Even if such a garment could be woven, nobody would want it to be used.
I’ve never had anyone say, “The uni-context sounds great!”But the thing is that this supposedly bad thing is a thing we’re creating.
We really aren't.
We’re choosing it over and over again. Even me talking to you from far away about an abstract thing [is the uni-context.]
No. The context is stupidity. Callard exists only to be laughed at.
The uni-context is a space of unruliness. It’s a space in which a certain thing about humanity gets expressed, namely our deep aversion to “world closure.”
Nobody has any great objection to the notion that the Universe is closed rather than flat or open.
For almost all of human history, we have lived in closed little worlds,
We lived on the surface of a spatially connected planet. The sources of our DNA come from places thousands of miles apart.
and those worlds presented themselves as the only world.
No. All cultures known to us have had a concept of foreigners living very different types of lives.
A series of contexts presented the person with direction—here’s what you should do.
No context presents anything to anyone.
What we are moving toward is a “world openness” that we hunger after, where I’m not just going to do things a certain way because that’s how we do things or where I was born.
Migrants do many things the way they are done in the place where they have settled. However, they may keep up some traditions from the place they, or their parents, or more distant ancestors, were born.
America moved to that type of world centuries ago. It is very largely populated by migrants who arrived there in the previous five centuries.
