Why has identity become so important? Why do negative ideas get so much more traction than positive ones? Why are rankings and comparisons so much more important now? Why do we spend so much time thinking and talking about where to spend our attention? And why have institutions lost their ability to influence human behavior on a large scale?
Philosopher Agnes Callard of the University of Chicago has an idea that explains them all — and more. In a podcast with Derek Thompson, she laid out the idea of the “unicontext.” The unicontext is what has happened over the last 100 years as transportation and mass communication have allowed people to move beyond their very local environs. Before the unicontext, there were different contexts for different situations - home, village, church. Each situation came with a different set of behavioral norms. Now, those contexts have collapsed and we only have one, initially formed by the ability to travel physically and now to travel virtually over the whole world.
In the unicontext, there is one set of norms that governs behavior and evaluation. As a result, ideas that spread without context dominate. Identity (I’m a woman, gay, Black, etc.) is much more easily understood without context than individual behaviors that must be interpreted in the context of the situation. Criticism can stand on its own compared to compliments that need details behind them. Rankings are much more easily interpreted than trying to understand why one organization is better in some situations and not in others. Everything is available - so attention can be allocated anywhere; before the unicontext, attention was allocated only to what was in the immediate environment. And institutions no longer have the authority they once had just because of the context of who they are — people can choose whether to follow them or not based on all of the other available inputs.
It’s important to realize that it’s not just technology that produces the unicontext. Yes, it can’t happen without transportation, mass media, and the internet. But it also requires the basic human desire to have more recognition and more choices. When those two things are put together, the unicontext forms. And that’s why, for example, scientific authority and expertise have been diverging over the last 100 years. I discussed this part in an editorial in Science.
Talking to Agnes directly
After I saw Thompson’s podcast, I was excited to talk to Callard directly about the implications of the unicontext for science. I had interviewed Callard before because she and I are both autistic and have similar profiles and stories. You can read more about that in my book but also here in a sweeping New Yorker profile of Callard.
Here’s my full interview with Agnes:
I sent her my column about going to see Uta Frith who has called for shrinking the autism spectrum back to including only those with apparent and significant challenges in communication, even though Frith herself was partly responsible for expanding the spectrum in the first place to include those with less obvious impairment. In our discussion, Frith told me that she would have diagnosed me with Asperger’s in the 1990s but not today. And she was shocked that her comments started a public firestorm, because she had just written an article for a scientific journal discussing this.
Callard saw at least two ways in which the unicontext explained these events. First, the desire for more people to have the autism label stems partly from the fact that identity registers strongly in the unicontext. It makes much more impact to say “I’m autistic” than it does to explain individual autistic traits that require the context for interpretation, i.e., I have trouble making eye contact so when I was sitting with Uta Frith, I stared out the window most of the time. The autism label carries information through the unicontext in a way that descriptions of individual traits cannot. “The unicontext also seems to generate autistics,” Callard told me. “I suspect that ‘autistic’ is a classification that is itself very hospitable to the unicontext, and that’s why it exists and why it has a kind of power.”
Second, Frith’s notion that she could start an academic discussion about how the autism spectrum should be defined and not have it bleed into the public discussion was a pre-unicontext idea. It was inevitable that autistic people would read her article online and begin the firestorm.
Finally, Frith’s reason for wanting to shrink the spectrum is because she feels that autistic folks with lower support needs are taking attention away from those with much greater needs. Distributing attention is the primary job of the unicontext. “I think it’s really interesting that her thesis, just as you’ve explained it,” Callard said, “suggests that the category of autism ought to be an attention allocation mechanism, right? It’s gotta serve that job.”
What if authority doesn’t come back
When we got back to the divergence of scientific expertise and authority, I really wanted to know if the unicontext could recommend a plan for going forward. Callard used the analogy of a doctor to explain the situation. Before the unicontext took hold, a doctor would not just tell you what was wrong with you, but almost always told you what to do. Today, doctors tell you the percentages behind different choices you have about your health, use their expertise to explain these choices, but then stop short of making that choice for you. This is the unicontext at work - doctors had expertise and authority, now they just have expertise. You have the authority.
Given the fact that expertise and authority have been diverging for 100 years and that the forces driving them apart — technology and basic human desire — are unlikely to turn around soon, I asked Callard if there was hope they would ever be reunited.
First she explained that expertise is actually growing. “What we’re seeing is a gradual increase of expertise all around,” she told me. “We just get more and more expertise over time. Expertise just grows, but [there’s a] decline of authority.” This makes sense as we get more and more scientific papers and journal articles and trained students.
But as authority has waned, there is still a desire out there for authorities. Unfortunately, those authorities are not in an enviable place. “We have put authorities in an impossible position,” she said. “And we still want them and we also won’t accept them. And eventually we are all just gonna have to learn to live with the experts we have and stop pretending that they’re the authorities that they’re not.”
Callard thinks ultimately society will give up its need for authority and learn to live with experts who are not authoritative. It occurred to me that might be a long process. Her assessment: “hundreds of years.”
We’re going to need a plan for what to do in the interim. That may take more than philosophy to solve.
This argument reminds me of George Trow’s 1980 essay, “Within the Context of No Context.”