David Egan Philosophy

Several newsletters ago, I invited readers to suggest possible topics for future newsletters. I received a number of good suggestions—and welcome others!—and in this newsletter I’ll make my first foray into responding to a reader request. Martin asked me about the relevance of French existentialism to our contemporary political and technological situation. He asks, “What does freedom mean in the era of big tech and addictive algorithms that seek to bypass personal choice and reduce autonomous agency?”

During the Second World War, France endured national humiliation and occupation at the hands of Nazi Germany. A generation of French men and women faced difficult choices about resistance, collaboration, or just keeping your head down and avoiding trouble as best you could.

During and after the war, thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Gabriel Marcel grappled intellectually with these stark choices. What emerged was a mode of thinking that, on one hand, addresses universal themes of human nature and freedom and, on the other hand, responds to the very particular challenges of mid-twentieth century France. (I don’t have space here for a thorough treatment of French existentialism but if you’re interested, I wrote a five–part primer on existentialism on my blog a couple years ago.)

The struggle against Nazism is about as close as you’ll come to a straightforward good-versus-evil conflict in modern history. You might expect anti-Nazi intellectuals to come out with forceful arguments drawing on moral absolutes. Curiously, then, a central feature of existentialist thought is the denial of moral absolutes altogether. Your task, according to Sartre, is not to identify an objective source of right and wrong and conform yourself to it in your conduct. Your task is to define your own standard of right and wrong through your conduct.

Nevertheless, French existentialists had two reasons for rejecting Nazism. The first draws on their embrace of radical freedom. The rejection of moral absolutes is part of a deeper lesson: nothing in either the structure of the world or the structure of the human person can tell you what you ought to do with your life. Every choice you make is ineluctably your own. Even when you seem to have no choice—say when a Gestapo officer has a gun pointed at your head demanding that you name names—you can still choose: betray your friends or take a bullet. Even in the worst of circumstances you’re still free.

This existential freedom applies no matter the circumstances but you can understand why philosophers who place such an emphasis on personal freedom might also value political freedom. If our freedom to define ourselves through our choices is the signature feature of human existence, it’s preferable to have more freedom of choice.

The other reason Sartre and others opposed the Nazis is their contempt for French collaborators. The Nazis relied on a combination of opportunism and cowardice among the French population. Some people sense which way the winds are blowing and get on the side of power. Other people go along to get along, doing their best to stay out of trouble. “I’m just following orders” became a tired excuse for complicity with evil.

The Nazis drew strength not simply from the free choices of free fascists but from cowed obedience. Too many people acted as if they weren’t free, insisting that they did as they did because they didn’t have a choice. In that sense, occupied France was awash with what Sartre called bad faith: the denial of one’s freedom as a way of justifying one’s free choices.

You don’t need to look far to find examples of political oppression today. But these political developments are accompanied—and in some cases abetted—by technological innovations that would have struck a rive gauche intellectual as novel. Our primary sources of news and information are digital and our access to them are mediated by tech platforms whose business model is based on the monetization of attention.

The attention economy has existed at least as long as television and radio. The business model of broadcast media is to sell viewers and listeners to advertisers. Put on a show that attracts a lot of attention and advertisers will pay the TV or radio station for a thirty-second share of that attention.

Social media has made three main innovations on this model. The first is to dispense with the expense of making shows. Instead, they set up a platform in which the viewers create their own content. Why pay TV producers to create content when people will create their own content for free?

The second innovation is the much more focused nature of advertising. The target of an online ad isn’t a broad statistical category like “man between ages 25 and 40.” It’s you, specifically you, with your very particular habits of viewing and clicking and posting and commenting. The more you engage with social media, the more these companies know about you. And by accepting cookies (the default), these companies can track you across multiple platforms and websites.

The third innovation, related to this second one, is a fiendishly sophisticated set of tools and algorithms for seizing and holding attention. Television shows sometimes end an episode with a cliffhanger to make sure viewers tune in the next week. Social media drops constant cliffhangers that compel you to tune in the next second, and the next, and the next. Notoriously, outrage is a particularly potent tool for attention-grabbing and so the online world has become a cesspit of rage and political polarization.

What does freedom look like in the attention economy? And how is it different from the freedom championed three quarters of a century ago by French existentialists?

The French existentialists were principally concerned with choice. Collaboration or resistance: which do you choose? What the options were wasn’t the question. The question was simply which options you choose.

Things look different when attention becomes the central battleground for human freedom. Attention isn’t principally about choice but about salience.

An example from Carol Gilligan’s landmark work of feminist psychology, In a Different Voice, illustrates the difference between choice and salience. She compares the responses of two children, Jake and Amy, to the “Heinz dilemma” first formulated by Lawrence Kohlberg. Heinz’s wife is critically ill and the only medicine that can save her is sold by a druggist at a price that’s twice what Heinz and his wife can afford. What should Heinz do?

Jake reasons that, in these circumstances, it would be right for Heinz to steal the drug. Stealing is wrong and illegal, Jake grants, but this case is a rare exception, since allowing a person to die would be worse than stealing. Amy is less certain that stealing is the right solution. She wonders if Heinz should try talking it out with the druggist. Surely if he could see that Heinz’s wife’s life is on the line, he might be willing to sell the drug at a discount, or let Heinz pay the full amount later.

Jake and Amy exemplify two different ways of thinking about ethics. Jake sees the problem in terms of a choice—steal or don’t steal—where the ethical question is which of two difficult choices to make. He treats ethics as a decision procedure, where the choices are given and the ethical task is to decide which choice to make.

Amy doesn’t accept the choices she’s given. She takes a more holistic approach to the situation, exploring the possibility of different choices becoming available if we reframe the problem.

Jake’s approach is the dominant one in modern ethics. Utilitarianism and deontology, the two main theoretical approaches to ethics, treat ethics as a decision procedure. An exhausting set of variations on the trolley problem look for different ways of framing a binary choice to tease out subtle ethical distinctions.

Sartre is far removed from these ethical theories but he retains the emphasis on choice. At a key moment in his essay, “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” Sartre presents the case of a young man choosing between caring for his mother and joining the resistance. The important point for Sartre is that there isn’t a “right” answer to this dilemma but rather that the choice the young man makes will define his identity. But still, it’s the choice that’s central.

Iris Murdoch saw enough similarity between Sartre and her British contemporaries who took a decision-theoretic approach to practical matters that she described the latter as “Anglo-Saxon versions” of existentialism. Against both she advocated an ethics of attention, drawing inspiration from Simone Weil—a philosopher who will be the subject of a future special request newsletter. Like Amy, Murdoch thinks the real ethical work comes before we face a decision. The key question is what we pay attention to, and how.

I’m inclined to see in Murdoch’s and Weil’s emphasis on attention a way of adapting Sartre to the challenges of the modern attention economy. What might Sartrean radical freedom look like if we think of it not as a freedom of choice but as a freedom of attention?

Recall that Sartre’s main target isn’t the person who makes the “wrong” choice—the true believer who collaborates enthusiastically with the Nazis—but with the person of bad faith who refuses to own up their choices—the collaborator who’s “just following orders” or going along with the prevailing situation. The attentional equivalent of bad faith is the person addicted to clickbait and doomscrolling, whose sense of what’s important is whatever the algorithms serve up as worthy of attention. Even if this person’s attention is drawn to worthwhile topics, that’s more through the luck of the algorithm than through any choice of their own.

If I embraced an existentialism of the attention, I would recognize that I am defined, to a large extent, by what I pay attention to. I take ownership over my attention by deciding for myself what’s worth paying attention to and directing my attention accordingly. Amy shows an attentional autonomy that Jake lacks because she insists on determining for herself what aspects of the situation require what kinds of attention.

How to accomplish this? As it happens, it’s part of a pitch I give to students in introductory classes in philosophy and the humanities. Among other things, philosophy, and the humanities more generally, provide a training for the attention. On a technical level, they teach the methods of close reading and argument analysis, which train people to stay with a question, to dig into it, not to get distracted or lose focus. On a philosophical or spiritual level, the questions this training invites us to stay with are questions about what matters and why. If we’re clear about what we value and why we value it, we’re less likely to get swept up in whatever close to hand is clamoring for our attention.

In short, it’s more important now than ever to be clear and deliberate about what we think is worth paying attention to. Because if we aren’t, there are others who will be more than happy to direct our attention for us. 

1. The first American federal refugee resettlement program was established to provide assistance for white French slaveholders fleeing the Haitian Revolution. (source)
2. In 1980, there were more journalists than PR agents. In 2015, there were five PR agents for every journalist. (source)
3. Rice seeds are able to sense the sound of rain and sprout faster when they sense raindrops. (source)
4. Alcohol is responsible for four times as many deaths worldwide as breast cancer. (source)
5. Cornhole is the most-played sport in America (according to data from 2022), ahead of bowling, swimming, and cycling. (source)
6. Tomatoes are more hydrating than watermelons (and have a number of other health benefits besides). (source)
7. Fluid flowing through the interstitial spaces in the body—the spaces between cells—is interconnected in ways that have led researchers recently to describe the interstitium as a third circulatory system, in addition to the cardiovascular and lymphatic systems. Curiously, features of the interstitium seem to align with features of traditional Chinese medicine. (source)
8. Saladin, the military and political leader who founded the Ayyubid dynasty and was the notorious scourge of the Crusader states in Palestine, was Kurdish. (source)
9. Calculating exactly what it would cost to end global poverty is actually quite tricky (how do you figure out who falls below the global poverty line and by how much?) but a high-ish estimate is that it would cost about $466 billion per year. That’s a third of what the world spends on alcohol each year and well below rich-world farm subsidies (and suppose the Trump administration had decided to wage a war against global poverty instead of Iran…). 60% of people in rich countries say they’d be willing to give up 0.5% of their income to end extreme poverty. So there’s a will and a way. (source)
10. Because of the disruptions it’s caused to the export of wheat and other foodstuffs, the war in Ukraine is estimated to have caused more deaths in the global south than in Ukraine and Russia. (source)
11. A case for preserving old growth: the biggest 1% of trees in a woodland area store about 50% of that area’s carbon. (source)
12. The first moon lander used spermaceti—the oil extracted from the head of a sperm whale—as a lubricant. (source)
13. The median dollar donated in a US election comes from a 66-year-old. (That is, as much money is donated by people 66 and older as by people 66 and younger.) (source)
14. Polls in the United Kingdom and the United States concerning common farming practices involving poultry and livestock—things like cramped living quarters, castration without anaesthetic, and the routine killing of newborn male chickens and dairy cows—generally record disapproval rates between 80% and 95%. Nonetheless, the proportion of meat eaters has remained constant and the rate of meat consumption has steadily increased. (source)
15. During his fifteen years as CEO of Apple, Tim Cook presided over an increase in shareholder value that averaged $850 million per day. (source)