I ended the precursor blog with this paragraph:

That brings me to the lip of the next topic, which is how to reduce the cost of “paying” attention.  It will require a distinction between attending to and attending for.  The latter is the heart of my solution to the problem.

I am really glad I did because I had a vague intention of coming back and finishing the thoughts I had just introduced; then I forgot what I must have had in mind.  This is it: “to” and “for.”  First, I want to establish the two experiences, then establish the same two as intentions.  Then I would like to argue that they do what I say they do and that it is reasonable to expect them to do that.

Let’s take listening to music as the first example.  You can listen to the Sinfony of Handel’s Messiah and say how beautiful some parts of it are.  Or you can listen just for the string bass part.  It isn’t that you don’t hear the rest of the music; it is, rather, that the rest of the music forms a natural and appropriate background to what you are listening for.  How does that happen? 

It is questions like that that help me keep listening to and listening for separate from each other.  I have regular access to a lot more news sources than I can really pay attention to.  And if reducing the cost—how much I have to pay—is the goal, then I can listen for the things I think are most important–the string bass part is an example– and leave the rest to be there as background.

Maybe a political example.  I pay attention to Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a polling and interpretation service located at the University of Virginia.  When I go to his site, I am looking for demographic and political changes I have learned to care about.  Because I am looking “for,” I skip over everything else.

In his most recent report, he talked about the return toward the left wing of Asians and Hispanics who had moved unexpectedly to the right in 2024.  That is something I care about.  I am willing to invest the time to pay attention to it; it is something I am reading for.  Attending “to” the Chrystal Ball is very inexpensive.  It is well within the limits of what I can pay and it is rich in what I am attending “for.”

I pay attention as much as do partly because I have role to play.  It is a little more than that.  Not quite a commitment, but more than an expectation.  I have been an ardent reader of news since 1960 and a professor of political science and associated disciplines since 1966. So, for the last 60 years. I could reasonably be expected to know some things and, if asked, to give accurate information and plausible explanations.

Part of the definition of what I attend for comes from that social setting.  I did a lot of attending to as a public school teacher, when I was expected to know “what was going on.”  At the national and international levels, mostly.  It was the years of doing that that sharpened my sense of what I wanted to read for and made me willing to scan before I read.

Graduate study sharpened the distinction by requiring me to be familiar with much more than I could attend to.  It is in a setting like that that you learn to look quickly over the introduction, the conclusions, and the methodology.  Then you know whether you want to attend for meaning.  Otherwise, attending to is plenty.

Parenthetically, I once pushed this methodology pretty hard to a class of doctoral students I had in a course called “Institutions.”  Some ate it up; some resisted.  But the woman who stays in my mind, resisted initially, then slowly saw the logic [1] and acquired the skills.  She stands out in my mind because I saw her at an alumni gathering several decades later and she told me how much trouble she had had in getting her son to do any meaningful reading.  She gave him the same stern lecture I had given her, and by her account, it worked like a charm.

When, in grad school, I chose political psychology as the focus of my work, the distance between attending to and attending for became both clearer and greater.  I am often inclined to look at the psychological justification of a public action before I look at the policy effects.  But I can also look at a lot of policy effects before I find a justification that interests me.

And then, politics being the kind of practice it is, I will need to attend to all the justifications looking “for” the one that seems to me to have explanatory power.  I want to spend my time on that one, but I can’t find that one with attending to a lot of other things.

“Politics” was defined very broadly at Oregon when I was there. I have since learned that the definition of the field expands and contracts fairly regularly.  It was expanding when I was there and “politics” was sometimes taken to be “authoritative allocation of goods.” [2]. So we had “the politics of the family” and the “politics of the pub” and other fragments.

Attending for the political meaning of politics so broadly defined provides some unusual looks at what is going on and provides you with unexpected allies and opponents. So, among the people I regularly talk to, I am expected to talk about these unusual looks.  It is an honor to recognize that expectation and a challenge to meet it.

To meet it, I have to attend to a lot of material, always attending for what I will need.  Or as one of my students said, “Thank you, Mother Hubbard”

[1] For that group, the metaphor I used was that each assignment required them to go to the cupboard (the available disciplinary reading) and get the particular question they were dealing with.  Get that, shut the cupboard door and go home.  Do not make a survey of everything in the cupboard.  You will still be there at the next class session and you will not have learned what you were assigned to learn.  Take it and go.

[2]. David Easton was always cited in association with that formula, but I am sure he had colleagues who attached themselves to it in the same way he did.  And then the same way we did.