people as clusters of attention

Leave a reply

Attention is endangered. It is what Silicon Valley has learned to capture and commoditize. It is what LLMs pretend to offer by speaking in the first-person singular, often in a sycophantic voice. It is what my iPhone takes from me. It is what Donald Trump constantly demands.

To understand why our attention should be valuable to us, we need a satisfactory theory of it. We should not depend on the idea that we have a private, inner self that creates or determines its own attention and owns it like a plot of property. Yet our attention does not belong to Google and Meta or to Donald Trump, and we are worse off when they determine it. Here is an effort at an explanation.

1. The belief in a willing self

It feels as if we decide to do certain things. The reason they occur is that we will them. Other things happen to us, or just happen. For instance, I stand up because I decide to do so, but I fall down because someone pushes me or the leg of my chair breaks.

What am I? I am the thing that wills my own actions.

Sometimes we hear that this theory is “Western” or “modern,” but classical Indian Buddhist thinkers–who disagreed with the theory–nevertheless argued that all sentient beings believe it until they achieve enlightenment. The intended reader of a classical Buddhist text was neither Western nor modern yet believed in a self that willed its own actions. Classical Buddhist authors defined themselves as opponents of other Asian authors who explicitly endorsed this theory, including foundational Hindu texts.

I presume that most or all people believe in a willing self because it makes sense of experience. We are so constituted that we feel that we decide and choose some things, while other things happen to us.

This theory also supports significant and appropriate moral distinctions. We hold ourselves and other people accountable for choices, not for accidents. And just as we value and care for our self–which we credit with making choices–so we value and care for other selves.

When we begin by believing in our own willing selves, we naturally pose questions about other wills. Presumably, other human beings are just like us; to assume otherwise is solipsistic and maybe even psychopathic. But from there, the answers become trickier. Do other animals have selves, and if so, which animals? (My dog seems to, but it’s hard to believe that a bacterium does.) Can a group of human beings or a human institution have a will? How about a computer?

2. Drawbacks of the theory

The theory of a willing self has advantages but also limitations that many people recognize, in principle, even as our experiences keep convincing us that it is true.

For one thing, we have no direct knowledge of the self. It can seem like a magical exception in a universe otherwise determined by the causes that are known to science.

The theory of a self implies a sharp distinction between choices and accidents, even though many–possibly all–intentional behavior seems to be a mix of both. I assume that I have freely decided to stand up, but that behavior resulted from a series of neurological events that were affected, in part, by other people and objects.

Although the theory suggests a binary, the world seems to be shaded in grey. My dog Luca has a similar psychology to mine but not completely the same; a lizard is like Luca but also different from him; and an ant is further along the same continuum. A crowd of humans can have a kind of will, but not exactly like mine. A Large Language Model (LLM) exhibits will-like behavior but isn’t a person.

Finally, the notion of a freely choosing self violates important moral intuitions. It is incompatible with Moral Luck, the idea that we can be better or worse as a result of things that happen without our choosing them. For example, I didn’t choose to be an American citizen led by President Trump, but I am. It is wrong to distance myself from that fact on the ground that I didn’t will it. The theory can also encourage us to care too much about our own selves and to regard our freedom and survival as paramount while making us too judgmental about other people. In Buddhism, an enlightened person has shed the belief in itself.

But it is also problematic to deny the existence of selves in such a way that it no longer seems to matter whether we and other people have agency–or even whether we or they survive. A person is a thing of inestimable value even it’s not quite right to understand it as a self that has a will. And a dog is a being of great value even if it’s not on a par with a human person. Somehow, it must make sense to complain when a person’s private space has been violated.

3. Attention, not self

Here is an alternative. I am inspired by Jonardon Ganeri’s book Attention, Not Self (Oxford 2017), which is primarily an interpretation of Buddhaghosa’s The Path of Purification (written around 450 CE) and other works by this classical Theravada thinker, who (in turn) claimed to be faithfully interpreting the words of the Buddha as recorded in the Pali Canon. Indeed, Buddhaghosa claims that his whole Path of Purification, which is 853 pages long in the English translation by Bhikkhu Nanamoli, is a commentary on the second stanza of Linked Discourses 1.23 (which I have loosely translated here.)

It would be a thorny matter to decide whether I am interpreting Ganeri reasonably well, whether he offers an accurate reading of Buddhaghosa, whether Buddhaghosa is a reliable interpreter of the Pali Canon, and whether the Canon reflects the ideas of the actual Buddha. Instead, I will simply sketch a view that I’ve formed while reading Ganeri.

We can begin with attention. Although this word does not have a self-evident meaning, we use it successfully. Even a toddler can understand the phrase “Pay attention!” When I say my dog’s name, he attends to me, and when he barks, he wants to get my attention. In other words, Luca and I can play language-games involving attention even if he couldn’t learn the word. In this sense, “attention” is much more tractable than “consciousness.”

In its most general sense, attention is some kind of ordering of experience by an organism. An ant can attend to a leaf.

Ganeri argues that our attention has two general aspects: it functions like a window or aperture that removes most of what we could notice so that we are less distracted; and it directs or faces us toward certain phenomena within the window so that we can more deeply understand those things. When I stare at a tree, I am ignoring other objects in my peripheral vision and I am thinking about the tree. “I have reconstructed Pali Buddhist theory as consisting in the claim that the role of attention in experience consists in an exclusion-guided placing together with a directing towards, where there is no incompatibility between them” (Ganeri 117).

This is a general account of attention, at least for human beings. Ganeri further argues that “attention is disunified;” it comes in many forms.

Among the varieties of attention are focal and placed attention, retained attention, reflective attention, attention through language to the world beyond one’s horizons, attention to one’s own mind, attention to the minds of others through their poise and posture, and attention to one’s life in total. These varieties of attention are, as we will see, put to work to explain perception, memory, mindfulness, testimony, introspection, and empathy (Generi, 221).

Each person’s attention is differentiated from others’. For example, only I can remember my own past experiences, which is a particular way of attending. You can learn about my past and possibly even know facts about my past that I don’t know, but I alone can attend to my past as a memory. Likewise, only I can focus on my future as my own, which I do when I plan. I can attend to you in the way that we call empathy, which you cannot offer to yourself.

If you and I are sitting in a lecture, I may be paying attention while your mind is wondering (or vice-versa, of course). If there is a sudden loud noise, such as a thunderclap, both of us may have our attentions captured or “grabbed,” but this may feel different to each of us because I experienced an interrupted lecture while you experienced an interrupted daydream. Compare William James:

for what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it. Our feeling of the same objective thunder, coming in this way, is quite different from what it would be were the thunder a continuation of previous thunder. The thunder itself we believe to abolish and exclude the silence; but the feeling of the thunder is also a feeling of the silence as just gone; and it would be difficult to find in the actual concrete consciousness of man a feeling so limited to the present as not to have an inkling of anything that went before. (James, The Principles of Psychology, 1890, vol. 1, Chapter 9, p. 103.)

There is such a thing as voluntary or intended attention. We can tell by the fact that such attention requires effort. Maybe I am forcing myself to pay attention to the lecture while you are allowing yourself be distracted by someone else in the room, by a feeling of hunger, or by a memory.

James argues that “the question of free-will is insoluble on strictly psychologic grounds” yet there is a clear difference between trying to attend to something and doing so because we failed to try or because something else compelled our attention. The difference matters morally:

The question of fact in the free-will controversy is thus extremely simple. It relates solely to the amount of effort of attention or consent which we can at any time put forth. Are the duration and intensity of this effort fixed functions of the object, or are they not? Now, as I just said, it seems as if the effort were an independent variable, as if we might exert more or less of it in any given case. When a man has let his thoughts go for days and weeks until at last they culminate in some particularly dirty or cowardly or cruel act, it is hard to persuade him, in the midst of his remorse, that he might not have reined them in…. But, on the other hand, there is the certainty that all his effortless volitions are resultants of interests and associations whose strength and sequence are mechanically determined by the structure of that physical mass, his brain; and the general continuity of things and the monistic conception of the world may lead one irresistibly to postulate that a little fact like effort can form no real exception to the overwhelming reign of deterministic law (James, vol; 2, chap 35, p. 497).

Ganeri posits that “Attention is the active organization of experience and action into centred arenas, and Buddhist anatta [the doctrine of no-self] is the claim that there is no room for something real at the centre doing or observing the ordering” (p. 26).

4. Consequences and applications

This theory has the advantage of explaining why each person’s attention is different from others’ without positing a self behind the curtain. It allows us to care whether a given person, including me or you, remains alive and free. A person is a unique cluster or concentration of attention that can attend to its past and future in a unique way. The world will be less when it is gone.

Yet there is also a continuum of qualities and degrees of attention, so that I am very similar to Luca and yet not completely like him. My attention while I write this post is not the same as your attention while you read it, but they connect to each other via the text and our shared experiences. When I am gone, some of what I attended to will be forgotten and some will still receive attention.

Most examples of attention have many causes, some of which can be located mostly inside the organism and others beyond it. There are no sharp boundaries between self and other or between freedom and necessity, but there is a difference between an intense, effortful, deliberated, and concentrated experience of attention versus a complete accident, such as a thunderclap that interrupts a lecture. There is also a difference between reading a novel or listening to a friend and being directed by an algorithm.

Moral responsibility waxes to the degree that we do–or could–expend effort on our own attention. Thus we can be blamed for focusing on bad things or for failing to attend to our responsibilities.

I think we can blame a dog for failing to attend, although much less censoriously than we would blame an adult human being; and we can blame an institution, like the Supreme Court, although we should excuse a dissenting minority.

Ganeri’s theory (to the extent that I have captured it here) is perennial, developed in dialogue with authors who lived in Asia more than 1,500 years ago. It is a theory about human beings, or perhaps about all sentient creatures. But it also feels timely and urgent because human attention is so badly threatened now.

I am currently on vacation in Penzance, Cornwall. I asked Google Gemini’s LLM whether it could summarize a long text for me, and it replied:

I would love to! Please go ahead and upload or paste the text.

Since I’m in Penzance, I’m ready to dive right into your document and pull out the key points, actionable items, or core arguments so you can get the information you need at a glance.

What would you like me to focus on?

Gemini is here in Penzance? That is just creepy. Nevertheless, I uploaded the poem from the Pali Canon that had absorbed Buddaghosa for 853 pages. Gemini “focused on it” and cheerfully gave me a summary in four bullet points. All that was lost was any possible advantage of my attending to that text.

You might think the same of this blog post. if you have read this far, you have devoted some time to my essay, whereas you could instead have read a bit of Ganeri’s book, or the 5th-century Buddhist classic that he interprets, or the original Pali Canon. The fact that I attended to my writing whereas Gemini automatically generated its summary does not make my text better for you.

Indeed, it would be better to read a classic than my blog, but it is also true that we have limited attention and cannot contemplate everything. Summaries are not intrinsically bad, so long as they allow us to focus seriously on other things. Even Gemini’s four-point summary of a poem attributed to the Buddha could enrich a person’s attention if that person then turned to other works.

If we are clusters or concentrations of attention, then each of us has the opportunity to improve their own cluster. What makes attention better is a matter for discussion, but I would nominate complexity, depth, distinctiveness, and service to other people as criteria that we can strive for. A technical tool, such as an LLM or an iPhone, can help, but it can surely erode each of those values if we are not vigilant about it.

See also: The Tangle (a translation of 1.23); AI as Satanic; what should we pay attention to?

is Black Studies Civic Studies?

Leave a reply

Hollis Robbins has a great article about the relationship between Black Studies and Civic Studies or Civic Thought. This is a timely question, because initiatives labeled as Civic Thought are growing rapidly.

Although legislation passed by conservative state legislatures has created many (not all) of these initiatives, they should not be stereotyped as simply conservative. Robbins uses a paper by Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey, Civic Thought: A Proposal for University-Level Civic Education (American Enterprise Institute, December 11, 2023) as her main source and notes that the Storeys cite my book, What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life (Oxford University Press, 2022), “as the canonical formulation.” Storey and Storey call “What should We Do? “‘the citizen’s question’ and the founding question of the field they call Civic Thought.”

I did not pose “the citizen’s question” from a conservative perspective, and the curriculum that I teach includes (among others) radical left thinkers.

In my opinion, Black Studies is Civic Studies. Black American thinkers have deeply explored the question “What Should We Do?” in diverse and innovative ways. For example, as Robbins notes,

Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” (1852), is the [Black] tradition’s most famous instance of asking what we should do when “we” is contested. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (Dial Press, 1963), poses the question as the central one for postwar America. Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (Crown, 2016), takes Levine’s question explicitly and answers it from inside the African American intellectual tradition.

I suppose that Black Studies could evade “the citizen’s question” if all the assigned texts addressed religious, spiritual, aesthetic, or private questions—as some African American authors have—or if all the assigned authors were deeply skeptical about collective action, and if their skepticism wasn’t countered by other assigned texts. But either of these would be an odd way to present the Black American tradition, which has been disproportionately concerned with how to act collectively.

Actual courses and curricula for Civic Thought vary, and I don’t want to overgeneralize. In the course that I regularly co-teach (labeled Civic Studies rather than Civic Thought), we read Douglass for precisely the reason that Robbins suggests, to ask what collective action should mean when the “we” is contested.

As a cautious generalization, I think that many newly required civics courses in conservative states include significant works by African American writers, which means that more undergraduates may be reading Douglass–and even Baldwin–than they would have otherwise.

However, in many of these courses, Black writers feature as critical contributors to an overall tradition that is named “American” and in which most of the authors are White. For instance, after students have read the Declaration of Independence and some Federalist Papers, they may read Douglass as a counterpoint. Perhaps after studying Lincoln, they may read Du Bois for an alternative narrative in which enslaved people achieved their own liberation.

Du Bois opens The Souls of Black Folk (1903) with the question, “How does it feel to be a problem?” I think often Black authors are introduced in courses on American history as if to answer that question.

As Robbins argues, Black American thought can be read in a different way, as “a continuous intellectual tradition that runs from David Walker’s 1829 Appeal through Anna Julia Cooper, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Dorothy Roberts, Cornel West, Manisha Sinha, Brandon Terry, and the historians’ brief filed in Trump v. Barbara in 2026.” This is not simply a series of critiques but a conversation of its own.

In fact, there are many traditions that address the citizen’s question (“What Should We Do?”) and that are accessible to someone like me. I can read Jefferson, Dewey, and Obama; or Walker, Du Bois, and Baldwin; or Rousseau, Proudhon, and Sartre; or Bhagavad Gita, Thoreau, Tolstoy, and Gandhi .

Some versions of Civic Thought presume that the proper focus should be the nation-state, the national republic. Although students should entertain critical perspectives, they should all study a common narrative. This is a premise of the Educating for American Democracy project, to which I am committed. One can endorse this view without being xenophobic or chauvinistic. The argument is that we must collectively govern the same republic, so we should debate the country’s canon.

However, my own premise is that we belong to multiple communities, local, cultural, national, and transnational. And we should be curious about communities to which we do not happen to belong. There is not one “we” to which we must direct our attention.

If all the students in a given state–or a specific university–are required to study the same material under the heading of “civics,” there may be pragmatic reasons to choose a version of the national tradition in which the majority group provides the majority of the texts. However, this approach is not self-evidently for the best. For one thing, it is not clear that everyone should study the same civics curriculum, even within a single institution. A course requirement has both pros and cons.

In sum: Black Studies is Civic Studies. There are other versions, too. Who should (or must) study which version is a harder question. But certainly, Americans of all races would benefit from studying the Black intellectual tradition to explore its diverse answers to the question, “What should we do?”.

The Tangle

Leave a reply

“Snarled, knotted—these neurons got as tangled
As the hair on top. The living are snagged
In their own matted mess, they are this thatch.
Who, I ask you, can fix such a tangle?”

“A person. Ethical. Concentrating. 
Insightful. Methodical yet ardent.
Someone who has fully accepted this task.
This person can unravel the tangle.

“Desire, hatred, and ignorance fade
While you pay attention to untangling.
Name and form fade, and the gap is gone
Between wish and fact. Then: no more tangle.”

This is a loose rendition of Linked Discourses 1.23 from the Pali Canon (a dialogue between a troubled demigod and the Buddha). Buddaghosa presents an entire book, The Path to Purification (probably 5th century CE), as a commentary on the second verse of this poem. See also: “Tangled Beauty,” The Fetter, etc.

federal spending and employment after a year of Trump

Leave a reply

It is common advice-and wise–to specify your own assumptions about the world, find data to test them, and update as necessary.

Thus, as we move through the second year of the second Trump administration, it’s worth noticing what you assume about recent trends and then checking those assumptions.

You might think that Donald Trump has slashed federal spending and fired much of the federal civilian workforce, or you might assume that nothing much has changed in Washington.

Your actual views are probably more nuanced than either of these caricatures. In any case, here is some data. I have chosen to begin the trends in 1970, to limit our attention to the era after the Great Society had expanded the federal government.

First, federal civilian employment is down notably–by about 17%. There was a decline of a similar magnitude under Bill Clinton (“Reinventing Government”), but this one is a steeper and more chaotic. There was no decline at all in the number of civilian federal employees under Reagan, either Bush, or Trump I. On the other hand, the layoffs during Trump II follow considerable growth. The number of federal employees (other than postal workers) was the same this spring as it was in 2009, but it had grown in between. (I think the spikes in the graph represent people hired to conduct the decennial census.)

Staff cuts have been concentrated in certain programs. For example, USAID is gone, its staff of about 16,000 people almost entirely laid off. Such changes have substantial impact on policies, but not so much on total personnel. USAID formerly employed about 0.08% of the federal workforce. In short, Trump’s staff cuts are highly uneven.

Second, total federal spending is up:

This graph is not adjusted for inflation. The spending increase in 2025 was 4.6%, and some of that growth was eaten up by 2.7% inflation. But real spending was up.

Much federal spending goes to defense or entitlement programs such as Social Security. Spending on domestic goods and services (excluding income transfers) fell by almost two percent in Trump’s first year.

But federal transfer payments were up by 5 percent (not shown). Meanwhile, states and localities spent more:

As of late 2025, federal tax receipts had risen substantially (by almost 16 percent compared to 2024). In the spirit of checking one’s prior assumptions, I should disclose that I had assumed that federal tax receipts had fallen.

My goal is not to make any overall point or judgment, but to focus our attention on major trends. For example, it will be crucial to reconstitute USAID, and, ideally, to make it better than it was. But the next president will not have to create a whole federal civil service, because total federal civilian workforce is about the same size as when Obama took office. Nor will the next president have much room to expand federal spending, since that actually rose under Trump.

love of the world

Leave a reply

I have just completed one of my favorite teaching experiences ever, a semester of reading Hannah Arendt with about 20 students who were deeply committed to understanding her, debating her ideas critically, and living up to her expectations for integrity and rigor. On the first day, we watched a portion of her 1964 interview on German national television; and at the end of the semester, I think we agreed that she had cast a spell.

I have posted many short essays on Arendt here over the years.* For anyone who wants a taste of her distinctive thought, I could recommend this sentence from an article she published in The New Yorker on February 18, 1967:

The actual content of political life [is] the joy and the gratification that arise out of being in company with our peers, out of acting together and appearing in public, out of inserting ourselves into the world by word and deed, thus acquiring and sustaining our personal identity and beginning something entirely new.

This sentence contains several ideas that are characteristic of Arendt.

First, politics is intrinsically valuable. As she emphasizes a bit later in the paragraph, politics is not everything. However, it is a way of living well, of experiencing and earning joy and gratification. Almost everyone assumes that politics is a means to other ends–a necessary evil, or at least a necessary basis for justice, freedom, security, or other desirable goods. For Arendt, politics is a good.

But what is politics? Voting in a national election does not sound like what Arendt has in mind. For her, politics is being in company with peers–people who are equal and who can act together.

Arendt believes that individuals become peers when they can talk and act in a political forum whose rules and norms give them equal say. They need not have equal amounts of wealth, strength, or status to be equal in a fair political forum. My class debated this claim extensively, but it could be partly true, even if Arendt overstates it at times. Therefore, one reason that politics is good is that it enables equality. It makes us into peers.

Politics as acting-together also brings joy or gratification. This is because when we argue about what our group should do and commit to acting the way we have advocated, we make ourselves visible to others. And only by appearing before others and receiving a response do we know who we are as individuals. In this sense, appearing in public allows us to acquire a personal identity.

Bosses, dictators, and oligarchs fail to develop worthy identities because they never interact with peers. When they speak, everything they hear back from their subordinates is calculated and transactional. Only in the company of people who are free to agree or disagree do we learn what we are made of.

Finally, politics is about starting something new. A keyword for Arendt is “natality.” We are mortal creatures, which means not only that we must die–as many philosophers have emphasized–but also that we are born. Each human birth is a beginning of a story, and each new person changes the others’ stories.

About three weeks before Arendt published “Truth and Politics” in The New Yorker, I had turned one woman into a mother and one man into a father by being born. My story had just begun and had begun to change others’ stories. By acting together in this mortal world, we produce a legacy of “word and deed” that can outlast us.

For Arendt, “the world” is what people make by acting together. We are limited by nature, “by those things which men cannot change at will.” Failing to recognize stubborn facts prevents us from building a genuine world, within which “we are free to act and to change” (“Truth and Politics”). Science tells us what must be, and then politics allows us to make new things.

I suspect that Hannah Arendt’s ability to love the world was shaken by the Holocaust, from which she barely escaped. But the love came back. In 1955, she wrote to her former professor and lifelong friend Karl Jaspers, who was somewhat isolated at age 72, still living in German-speaking Europe as an anti-Nazi thinker with a Jewish wife. Arendt’s letter bubbles with enthusiasm for the books and ideas that she wants to share with him from her cosmopolitan life in New York. She writes:

Yes, I would like to bring the wide world to you this time. I’ve begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world that I shall be able to do that now. Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theories ‘Amor Mundi.’ I want to write the chapters on work this winter, as a lecture series for Chicago University, which has invited me there in April.

This book was actually published as The Human Condition, and it represents the most comprehensive statement of her thought. Apparently, Arendt believed that it could have been entitled Amor Mundi: love of the world.

Another statement of that core idea came in her essay on “The Crisis in Education” (1955), which concludes with these sentences:

Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.

Peter Levine

A Blog for Civic Renewal

people as clusters of attention

is Black Studies Civic Studies?

The Tangle

federal spending and employment after a year of Trump

love of the world