My podcast partner Kale Zelden and I recorded tonight a terrific interview with a young woman who wishes to be known only by her first name, Helena. She is the author of a long and powerful Substack essay about what drew her into transgender culture as an anxious teenager, what it was like living on testosterone, and how she finally broke the spell and returned to her biological sex. This young woman was so articulate, insightful, and self-assured that it’s hard to believe she’s only 23. We’ll post the podcast as soon as it has been processed by the editor.

We could have talked to her for hours. One thing that lingers with me about the interview — and you get a lot of this in her piece — is Helena’s discussion about how Tumblr and fan fiction culture was a refuge from reality. Eventually, these girls (she’s talking mostly about girls) got so caught up in the made-up world that they decided to take control of their bodies and try to force their bodies to conform to their fantasies. In Helena’s account, though, the power of narrative, combined with peer pressure, was so great that she lost control of the process.

Listening to her explain this, I kept thinking about the philosopher Matt Crawford’s great 2016 book The World Beyond Your Head. In it, Crawford talks about how we end up imprisoned inside our heads, and lose touch with actual reality. In our podcast interview, Helena talked about how hard it is to live today with so much information coming at you constantly. If you go down the rabbit trail of online culture, you eventually become swept away by the maelstrom, and lose all direction of your life.

Crawford gets it. Below is an excerpt from my subscription-only Substack blog, Rod Dreher’s Diary, where I talked the other day about Crawford’s book — this, as part of my research into the idea of re-enchantment. Crawford writes:

The moralist and the sociologist are both right. The question of what to attend to is a question of what to value, and this question is no longer answered for us by settled forms of social life. We have liberated ourselves from all that. The downside is that as autonomous individuals, we often find ourselves isolated in a fog of choices. Our mental lives become shapeless, and more susceptible to whatever presents itself out of the ether.

But of course these presentations are highly orchestrated; commercial forces step into the void of cultural authority and assume a growing role in shaping our evaluative outlook on the world. Because of the scale on which these forces operate, our mental lives converge in a great massification— ironically, under the banner of individual choice.

Crawford says that in contemporary life, we have torn down all the structures that used to teach us how to direct our attention. Attention is the bridge between ourselves and the world beyond our heads. He writes:

One element of our predicament is that we engage less than we once did in everyday activities that structure our attention. Rituals do this, for example. They answer for us the question “What is to be done next?” and thereby relieve us of the burden of choice and reflection, as when we recite a liturgy.

But I want to focus on another sort of activity, one that is neither rote like ritual, nor simply a matter of personal choice. The activities I have in mind are skilled practices.

More on this in a second. Crawford says that today, we live in a culture that fetishizes individual autonomy, and that construes “freedom” as the absence of obstacles to the exercise, through free choice, of that autonomy. Politically, both left and right found a way to reconcile themselves with the autonomous self. Whether we are shopping for goods, sexual partners, experiences, etc., what matters is that We Get To Choose. He writes:

Understood literally, autonomy means giving a law to oneself. The opposite of autonomy thus understood is heteronomy: being ruled by something alien to oneself. In a culture predicated on this opposition (autonomy good, heteronomy bad), it is difficult to think clearly about attention—the faculty that joins us to the world— because everything located beyond your head is regarded as a potential source of heteronomy, and therefore a threat to the self.

The paradox is that the ideal of autonomy seems to work against the development and flourishing of any rich ecology of attention—the sort in which minds may become powerful and achieve genuine independence.

More:

Autonomy talk is a flattering mode of speech. It suggests that freedom is something we are entitled to, and it consists in liberation from constraints imposed by one’s circumstances. For several hundred years now, the ideal self of the West has been striving to secure its freedom by rendering the external world fully pliable to its will. For the originators of modern thought, this was to be accomplished by treating objects as projections of the mind; we make contact with them only through our representations of them.

Early in the twenty-first century, our daily lives are saturated with representations; we have come to resemble the human person as posited in Enlightenment thought. Such is the power and ubiquity of these representations that we find ourselves living a highly mediated existence.

The thing is, in this style of existence we ourselves have been rendered pliable—to whoever has the power to craft the most bewitching representations or to control the portals of public space through which we must pass to conduct the business of life.

Autonomy talk stems from Enlightenment epistemology and moral theory, which did important polemical work in their day against various forms of coercion. Times have changed. The philosophical project of this book is to reclaim the real, as against representations. That is why the central term of approbation in these pages is not “freedom” but “agency.” For it is when we are engaged in a skilled practice that the world shows up for us as having a reality of its own, independent of the self.

Crawford says that we are pulled out of ourselves by giving our attention to objects outside of our own heads. This is the only way we can create anything: through the tension that arises when we connect with something outside our heads (my notes say that this reminds me of Iain McGilchrist’s insight that the tension that arises from asymmetry is how creation happens).

The thing is, the more we prize individual autonomy, and the more we deny the authority of unchosen institutions, creeds, and practices, the more we become a prisoner to those entities with the power to manipulate our attention. Reading this in Crawford, I thought about totalitarianism, and how it works by eliminating any mediating institution between the individual and the all-powerful state.

Here is a passage that is deeply McGilchristian:

According to a school of thought that has been gaining traction in the last fifteen years, these facts—our embodiment, and the possibility of movement that our bodies provide—are no mere accessory to perception, but rather constitutive of the way we perceive. As one researcher puts it, “Perceiving is a way of acting. Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us. It is something we do.”

We think through the body. The fundamental contribution of this school of psychological research is that it puts the mind back in the world, where it belongs, after several centuries of being locked within our heads. The boundary of our cognitive processes cannot be cleanly drawn at the outer surface of our skulls, or indeed of our bodies more generally. They are, in a sense, distributed in the world that we act in.

That said, the more our culture drives us to retreat into our heads, via “virtual reality” and suchlike, the less agency we have, and the less freedom. Put another way, if we conceive of the material world as nothing but “stuff” that we can manipulate to impose our will and ease our anxieties, we will lose touch with reality itself.

This is what we are doing. The overarching liturgy of our culture is towards denying any reality that is not chosen by the individual to suit their preferences. Crawford illustrates this by talking about the Mickey Mouse cartoons of the past, versus the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse today. The old ones, he says, built comic routines around Mickey, Goofy, and the other characters interacting with exaggerated representations of the physical world that did not do what they wanted (e.g., the Murphy bed that wouldn’t stay locked into the wall). The humor has to do with the limitations of the characters and their inability to master the world beyond their heads.

But today, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse sends a different message to young viewers:

The current episodes are all oriented not around frustration but around solving a problem. One does this by saying, “Oh Tootles!” This makes the Handy Highlight Dandy machine appear, a computerlike thing that condenses out of the Cloud and presents a menu of four “Mouseke-tools” on a screen, by the use of which the viewer is encouraged to be a “Mouseke-doer.”

There are four problems per episode, and each can be solved using one of the four tools. This assurance is baked into the initial setup of the episode; no moment of helplessness is allowed to arise. There is never an insoluble problem, that is, a deep conflict between the will and the world. I suspect that is one reason these episodes are not just unfunny, but somehow the opposite of funny. Like most children’s television these days, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse is doggedly devoted not to capturing experience, that is, to psychological truth, but to psychological adjustment. It is not a depiction so much as an intervention—on behalf of parents, teachers, and others who must manage children.

The well-adjusted child doesn’t give in to frustration; he asks for help (“Oh Tootles!”) and avails himself of the ready-made solutions that are presented to him. To be a Mouseke-doer is to abstract from material reality as depicted in those early Disney cartoons, where we see the flip side of affordances. Perhaps we should call unwanted projectiles, demonic springs, and all such hazards “negative affordances.” The thing is, you can’t have the positive without the negative; they are two sides of the same coin. The world in which we acquire skill as embodied agents is precisely that world in which we are subject to the heteronomy of things; the hazards of material reality. To pursue the fantasy of escaping heteronomy through abstraction is to give up on skill, and therefore to substitute technology-as-magic for the possibility of real agency.

Ah ha! This is the very point that John the Savage makes to Mustapha Mond, the World Controller for Europe, in their showdown in Huxley’s Brave New World. Here’s a link to Chapter 17, where the showdown takes place. It’s an amazing exchange! Mond lectures the Savage that there is no need for God anymore, because all things are taken care of by the State, and all anxieties are managed by therapeutic use of soma, the feelgood drug (“Christianity without tears,” is how Mond characterizes soma). Here is Mond reading a passage from Cardinal Newman to the Savage, to show him what kind of mentality has been conquered by the Brave New World:

He opened the book at the place marked by a slip of paper and began to read. ‘”We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters. We are God’s property. Is it not our happiness thus to view the matter? Is it any happiness or any comfort, to consider that we are our own? It may be thought so by the young and prosperous. These may think it a great thing to have everything, as they suppose, their own way—to depend on no one—to have to think of nothing out of sight, to be without the irksomeness of continual acknowledgment, continual prayer, continual reference of what they do to the will of another. But as time goes on, they, as all men, will find that independence was not made for man—that it is an unnatural state—will do for a while, but will not carry us on safely to the end …’”

That world is banished to the past now, says Mond. Man now lives with the illusion of independence, because all his needs are taken care of. Even the need for a sense of danger is artificially induced. Everything is managed by expertise and technology. All things unpleasant have been banished. But that means, the Savage understands, that man has been abolished. A world in which there is no friction, no asymmetries, a world where everything is easy, is a world that is inhuman.

Crawford:

But when dumb nature is understood to be threatening to our freedom as rational beings, it becomes attractive to construct a virtual reality that will be less so, a benignly nice Mickey Mouse Clubhouse where there is no conflict between self and world; no contingency that hasn’t been anticipated by the Handy Dandy machine.

… The fantasy of autonomy comes at the price of impotence. With this comes fragility—that of a self that can’t tolerate conflict and frustration. And this fragility, in turn, makes us more pliable to whoever can present the most enthralling representations that save us from a direct confrontation with the world. Being addressed to us, these representations allow us to remain comfortable in a little “me-world” of manufactured experience. If these representations make use of hyperpalatable mental stimuli, the world of regular old experience may come to seem not only frustrating but unbearably drab by comparison.

Isn’t that true? The fragility that has been engineered into a generation makes them easy to manipulate. Those who control the narrative of these young people, and who can provide them with a narrative that protects them from having to deal with facts and realities that frustrate them, can get these young people to do whatever they want them to. One thinks of the fragile students who demand that authority on campus protect them from unwanted thoughts and speech. This is going to become much worse once we begin experiencing the Metaverse.

“The design of things can facilitate embodied agency or diminish it in ways that lead us further into passivity and dependence,” writes Crawford. He goes on to talk about automobile design, and how it can either abstract us further from the physical world, or integrate us more fully into it. Crawford — who, recall, is a motorcycle mechanic — discusses how certain aspects of automotive engineering draw us into the physical reality of the phenomenon of driving. He writes:

This too is part of the time-locked stream of information, with varying time signatures, that makes our brains “bind” our various senses together and decide that this is not a dream or hallucination. There is indeed a “thing in itself” out there beyond our heads, revealed by coherent sensory patterns. But only if those patterns are preserved and conveyed to us.

My notes say, “Is this why the inquirers in our Orthodox parish say that Orthodoxy seems ‘real’ to them?” Orthodox Christianity is so sensual, meaning that it appeals not just to the mind but to the entire body, and it is heavily ritualized, meaning that one involves the body in worship to a degree I’ve never encountered in other forms of Christianity. For example, this week, the first full week of Orthodox Lent, worshipers who go to church each night for parts of the Canon of St. Andrew of Crete, will find themselves flat on their faces during parts of the liturgy, expressing with this physical gesture of extreme humility their sorrow for their sins. This gets you outside your head, for sure.

More Crawford:

Perhaps this is what is left to us, given the deep contradiction that we live in: on the one hand, we have the individualist ideal—one is tempted to say the autistic ideal—of the unencumbered self who acts in freedom, and on the other hand we feel beset by insecurities and obscurities that emanate from the collective world. These latter are often technological in nature. We therefore seek out other, personal technologies that can give us safe haven: “manufactured certainties,” as Schüll puts it, that help us “manage [our] affective states.”

That is what computer games seem to do for our quasi-autistic cohort of young men; it is what machine gambling does for those who have gone down that particular path. Perhaps such pursuits help us manage the anxiety and depression that come when experiences of genuine agency are scarce, and at the same time we live under a cultural imperative of being autonomous. Escape to the autistic zone, where there are no impediments between your will and its realization, is precisely the remedy that is wanted if your life resembles that of the passive kitten on the carousel of modern life, who is nonetheless exhorted at each rotation to “seize the day!”

As we have seen in the case of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, children are educated into this contradiction from an early age. The Handy Dandy machine presents manufactured certainties, the point of which is to reassure the child that every problem is solvable—if only we allow some other entity to leap in on our behalf (“Oh Tootles!”) and insulate us from the kind of contingencies that easily lead to frustration. As we saw in our treatment of embodied cognition, these are precisely the contingencies we have to learn and accommodate ourselves to if we are to achieve adult agency and join ourselves to the world, grasped as something independent of the self.

Reading this made me think of the explosion of transgenderism, especially among the young. If we find it difficult to face the world as males or females, well, we have now created a world in which the deployment of medical technology promises deliverance from that anxiety by remaking our very bodies to have them suit our inner desires. Deploy the technology, then use social techniques to change laws and customs to remake the world to suit ourselves. We think that this is normal, because the dominant cultural liturgies of our time have taught us that there are no obstacles to achieving our will. We manufacture certainties.

So far, this strategy seems to be working, because the ideology of freedom, autonomy, and therapeutic technology condition all of us to accept this model. It is a false remedy for a very real crisis. But reality — Nature — will always have the final word. Always. There is no place far enough inside your head to escape a hungry belly, an empty wallet, or the enemy’s missile.

[End of excerpt.]

I was struck, and am haunted, by Helena’s warning about how little parents know about what their kids are exposed to online. She said that few parents would let their kids go roam around to the houses of total strangers for hours on end. Most responsible parents would want to know something about the places their kids were going and the kind of people they were going to meet there. But parents today never think about where their kids are going when they spend six straight hours online. Well, we didn’t give our kids online access when they were little, but we did let them watch a lot of children’s TV. Never once did I stop to think about how shows like Mickey Mouse Clubhouse were formatting their minds and engineering their imaginations. Did you?

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