- Why is the news media so interested in telling you how much the world sucks all the time?
- Why are so many of us obsessed with distraction and managing our attention?
- Why is it so hard to stop comparing ourselves to others?
- And why does everything in art and design seem the same these days?
One way to prepare your mind for Callard’s theory of the uni-context is to think about the better-known concept of “context collapse.” If you post something to social media, it will be simultaneously visible to your boss, your parents, your ex, and total strangers. So, while your offline life might be distinct with each of these groups—you might be differential to your boss, childish with your parents, and bawdy with your friends—all of those distinctions are flattened on the internet. That’s context collapse, and you can think of it as the answer to a question: How do informational norms change when we’re all living in the same universal room?
Callard takes the idea significantly further. She asks: How do all other norms—our morals, our ethics, our sense of what is good for us and for others—change when we continually imagine ourselves to be living in a universal room with everybody else? The connections that Callard makes are consistently surprising, often quite funny, and ultimately mind-exploding...
The Uni-Context, Explained
Derek Thompson: What is the uni-context?
Agnes Callard: Let’s start with the word context. A context is a set of circumstances that tell you how you should act. For most of human history, contexts were local and multiple. If you wanted to know how you should act, 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.
The uni-context is a scenario in which the ways you should act become the same across all different contexts. There’s just one set of norms you should follow all times, irrespective of context.
Thompson: Is the uni-context a purely technological phenomenon?
I just wrote an article about what America was like in 1926, based on a social science survey called Recent Social Trends, published in 1933. 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. Radio was demolishing the idea of a local individual, because suddenly we all became global citizens.
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. 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? Why was radio popular? Why did we come up with new things—television, smartphones—and why did they catch on, too? 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.
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?
Callard: Yeah, it absolutely does. There’s a conversational relationship between these technologies and a human impulse that interacts with them. They facilitate the expression of an impulse; if they didn’t, they would flop as technologies. We need to explain why they were 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.
There is a drive to be bigger than yourself. It leads people to adventure, but adventure just takes you to a different place. 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.
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. Why would this theory explain a world in which people are more focused on bad things than good things?
Callard: 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. [...]
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. The fact that I have to tell you is itself telling; that word is less familiar to us. Everyone knows what identity is, but we might not be sure what character is anymore. Character refers to a set of dispositions that shape how you navigate your emotional life across a variety of circumstances. A courageous person navigates their emotional life in relation to fear. 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.
The thing about character is that it shows up differently in different circumstances. 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.
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.
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.
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. Our fundamental concern in relation to identity is that there are identities that might be excluded. Depending on where you are politically, you have your sights on different identity categories, but everybody’s worried about that. 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. It’s got to be inclusive in a way that earlier societies almost everywhere were not. That word, inclusion, wasn’t a thing people talked about. It comes along with the uni-context, and the way that ethics gets focused is through identity categories.
And then, there’s virtue. Think about Aristotle, because he’s my prime example of a virtue ethicist. By its nature, virtue is a concept that privileges the good side rather than the bad. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics tells you what it is to be courageous and wise and just and generous. 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. So virtue ethics naturally has a positivity bias that is precisely the opposite of the bias we have now.
The Uni-Context Explains … Status Anxiety, Comparison, Moneyball, and the Marketization of Everything
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. A home had its own rules, a cathedral its own rules, and a classroom or bar or funeral parlor had its own rules. But now it is almost like we are constantly living in universal rooms, and the universal room we occupy is assumed to have universal values and universal norms. 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. Two, character is context-dependent, so we talk less about character and more about its universalist equivalent, which is identity.
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.
Callard: Exactly.
Thompson: Tell me how the uni-context leads to a world of more comparison and competition.
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. Then they change the rule: You can go to either school no matter where you live. Suddenly there is motivation to compare. 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.
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.” 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.
As more things enter the same evaluative field, you make comparisons you never used to be able to make. [...]
by Derek Thompson, Substack | Read more:
Image: Mike Hindle on Unsplash
