World Beyond Your Head

Subjectivism leaves people isolated. Moral and aesthetic judgments have the same status as mere sensations, such as an itch—they are entirely one’s own.

The dogmatic inarticulacy of subjectivism—perhaps we should call it moral autism—leaves people bereft of any public language in which to express their intuitions about the better and worse, the noble and shameful, the beautiful and ugly, and assert them as valid.

The normative center of gravity now resides in the middle of a distribution, rather than coming from a religious interdiction or parental guidance, on the one hand, or from a cultivated, proudly antinomian sense of oneself as a pervert and sinner, on the other

As the inhabitant of a family, religion, or locale, a gay person was likely to stay in the closet. With the rise of identity politics, one jumped out of the closet and into the box.

Now we are fascinated with “the wisdom of crowds” and “the hive mind.” We are told that there is a superior global intelligence arising in the Web itself. This collective mind is more meta, more synoptic and synthetic, than any one of us, and aren’t these the defining features of intelligence? Of course all this crowd-loving lines up pretty well with Silicon Valley’s distaste for the concept of intellectual property, and with the fact that there is a lot more money to be made as an aggregator of “content” than as a producer of it. (It is the aggregator who controls advertisers’ access to consumers’ eyeballs.)

In the musical world as elsewhere, there seems to have been a sense of techno-inevitability, a readiness to regard technology as a force with its own magical imperatives, rather than as an instrument of human intentions.

The saying “Electricity is here to stay” suggested that the growing prevalence of electricity was due to the working out of some rational necessity, and to deny this was to reveal oneself as “out of touch with reality.”

As we have seen, the dialectic between tradition and innovation allows the organ maker to understand his own inventiveness as a going further in a trajectory he has inherited. This is very different from the modern concept of creativity, which seems to be a crypto-theological concept: creation ex nihilo. For us the self plays the role of God, and every eruption of creativity is understood to be like a miniature Big Bang, coming out of nowhere. This way of understanding inventiveness cannot connect us to others, or to the past. It also falsifies the experience to which we give the name “creativity” by conceiving it to be something irrational, incommunicable, unteachable.

The point isn’t to replicate the conclusions of tradition (here, the use of oak), but rather to enter into the same problems as the ancients and make them one’s own. That is how a tradition remains alive.

For the most part, this Enlightenment understanding views tradition as a darkness that grips men’s minds and a habit of inflexibility to be rooted out. But this view gets a lot wrong. As we saw also in the case of scientific apprenticeship, in the development of any real competence we don’t judge everything for ourselves, starting from scratch each morning. Rather, we have to begin by taking a lot on faith, submitting to the authority of our teachers, who learned from their teachers. The individualist conceit that we do otherwise, and the corresponding discredit that falls on tradition, makes people feel isolated. As we learned from Tocqueville, this isolation brings with it a certain anxiety, which we try to relieve by looking around to see what others—our contemporaries—are thinking and feeling. The rugged individualist becomes the statistical self. The statistical self is the kind that is knowable in bulk, a suitable subject around which to design manufactured experiences. We increasingly encounter the world through representations, produced according to the economies of scale of mass culture. In the worst cases, such as machine gambling, they are guided by a design intention that is inimical to our aspiration to autonomy, even while relying on that aspiration as a psychic hook: manufactured experiences promise to save us from confrontations with a world that resists our will. The workers at Taylor and Boody are not isolated in this way. They understand the long story of organ making as their own, and find for themselves a place in it. In this highly situated self-understanding, the excellence they reach for in their work expresses their individuality: an earned independence of judgment, a deepened understanding that is the fruit of their own labors. Some critics will say that these craftspeople have “retreated from the modern world.” I think nearly the opposite. We have come to accept a condition of retreat from the world as normal. The point of the organ shop example is to help us see what it would look like to inhabit an ecology of attention that puts one squarely in the world.