A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird

Here are some questions that I consider self-evidently compelling about the modern world: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?A week ago, I didn’t think these questions were related. I’m not sure I would have told you I had a good answer to most of them. And I certainly wouldn’t have made the audacious and borderline bonkers claim that one single theory could begin to explain all of them, at once. But then I had the pleasure of speaking to Agnes Callard, the University of Chicago professor, about her new theory called “the uni-context.” It’s easily one of them most interesting conversations I’ve had all year. And once you’ve heard or read it, I think you might find it hard to think about anything else.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. Here is our conversation, edited for clarity, brevity, and simplicity’s sake.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: It’s almost like you’re saying the audience for the bad tends to be more global than the audience for the good.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. It’s more interesting for me to say white Americans who eat chicken enchiladas are racist against Mexican culture, because the concept of racism clicks into a global norm of badness.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?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. 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. 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.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. But now imagine that a student makes a sexist or racist comment. 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. Those are not role-dependent. 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. 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? No. The same point holds. They are going to focus on the negative as well.

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.