Two ways to escape our self-built panopticon.
Two ways to escape our self-built panopticon.
D erek Thompson’s podcast Plain English recently featured the philosophy professor Agnes Callard and explored her theory that communications technologies and our culture have conspired to produce a “uni-context.”
Previously, people looked around themselves locally to discover social norms, whether in their home, their religious congregation, or via an event or institution. Now, we increasingly act and think of ourselves as existing in one universally present context. For Callard, our techno-cultural moment, one that has been crystalizing for more than a century, produces a world in which there is little or no “elsewhere.” Instead, everything you say or do can be recalled and judged in one flattened, total context. This discourages expression, because utterances are exposed to all possible publics at once, including those that are hostile or uncomprehending.
As a writer who puts an absolutely ludicrous number of words into publication on the internet, I’m obviously predisposed to this theory. Every day, one utterance I make in a social post on X will be taken by a hostile reader and juxtaposed against something I wrote a decade earlier, often in a ham-fisted way to create an impression of inconsistency. Just yesterday, I described my own political views as Buchananite. A reader sent me a screenshot of a 2015 column in which I speculated that the Republican establishment, fearing Ted Cruz and Donald Trump nearly equally, might turn back to Jeb Bush. He was trying to give the impression that at some point I was pro-Bush and that by doing so, he could subtly discourage me from returning to dispassionate analysis.
In a way, Callard’s uni-context explains cancel culture — which often ripped quotations out of a specific context, such as a thought experiment in a classroom, a piece of satire, or a private conversation — and instead exposed them to a universal context that was hostile.
What strikes me about Callard’s uni-context is that it describes, at the level of sociology (speech norms), a predicament that the priest-philosopher Romano Guardini tried to render in theological and anthropological terms in his book The End of the Modern World. For Callard, the uni-context erases differentiated places of speech. For Guardini, modern man has been rendered “homeless man” and lacks a real or symbolic place in reality, finding that the world no longer guarantees him a place in the total scheme of existence. Both Callard and Guardini point to technology that runs faster and beyond the reach of human virtue needed to govern it, making the world seemingly more hostile to the human person.
Both thinkers view modern culture as denuded. In the uni-context, Callard sees one public gaze overwhelming the local conditions that used to govern speech. Guardini writes about a “non-cultural culture” which no longer forms people but seeks to manipulate them for other ends.
Callard’s world is the one of a universal archive, stripped of the mercies, tenderness, and understanding that is encouraged and expected in a family home, a dinner among friends, or an academic seminar. Guardini finds something similar but at a deeper register. For him, modernity is the loss of a “place in being,” in which humans cease to inhabit a universe ordered by God and instead stand before a field of power relations in which nothing is intrinsically sheltered or consecrated. Callard’s uni-context seems to call for the reassertion of institutions that can enforce norms by re-localizing discourse and speech. For Guardini, “homeless man” is merely a stage in the life of the West, one that will lead individuals either to burn off the last traces of sentimentalized Christianity in favor of a more candid unbelief, or to a renewed commitment to God through repentance and contemplation. Guardini argues that man can only rebuild his home once he understands his relationship to the divine again — as a responsible moral subject — to be judged by a personal, but thankfully merciful God.