I love it when cul­tur­al essay­ists redis­cov­er a core Quak­er obser­va­tion about plain­ness and human nature and find­ing it up with a new name. A few that’s ago, “norm­core” became a thing. 

Now we have “uni-context,” the idea that our online social lives bleed into all of our dif­fer­ent net­works (think: friends, work col­leagues, roman­tic inter­ests) so much that the net­works have been flat­tened. Where once we could show dif­fer­ent faces to dif­fer­ent audi­ences, now every­one sees all. 

First off, I’m not sure I real­ly buy it from a cul­tur­al tech per­spec­tive. The orig­i­nal Face­book ide­al of wide social graphs and pub­lic accounts feels like a dinosaur. Gen Z is most­ly absent and usu­al­ly keeps pret­ty locked down accounts. Tik­Tok is pub­lic but every pop­u­lar account there is high­ly performative. 

But grant­i­ng the “uni-context” con­ceit for argu­ment, this is a big post of Quak­er plain­ness. Yes there were most­ly unwrit­ten rules but if you open up an old copy of one of the *Books of Dis­ci­pline* and turn to the plain­ness sec­tion, you’ll find that it focus­es on inten­tion. My favorite query asks if you dress in a way “cal­cu­lat­ed to please a vain and wan­ton mind.”

It is the Quak­er con­cept of *intregri­ty* at play. Going back to root mean­ings, some­thing that is inte­gral can­not be bro­ken into pieces with­out los­ing its iden­ti­ty. We should act and present our­selves in the same way in all con­text. Who we are should be who we are, whether at work, play, church, etc. Sim­i­lar­ly our *yeas* should be *yeas* and our *nays* *nays* in all con­text so that we don’t need a spe­cial incan­ta­tion of swear­ing to tell the absolute truth. 

Of course our lives are com­plex. I’m a run­ner and I put on run­ning gear when I go out, espe­cial­ly in the August heat. But I’m not doing that for a cal­cu­lat­ed rea­son but a prac­ti­cal one. And I often have a pre-run run­ning shirt on when I log into a work Zoom call. 

Any­way it’s sort of sad that so many Friends have con­signed old Quak­er prac­tices to the dust heap. The ethics, if not the details, might be some­thing philoso­phers are seek­ing today. 

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

Once you learn what the “uni-context” is, you won’t stop see­ing it everywhere

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