This week’s Raspberry Patch posting and next week’s will complete Chapter 5 and thus bring Part I to a close. You can see where we’ve been and where we’re going in the Age of Spectacle manuscript on the detailed outline at the end of this post, which I haven’t displayed in a while. It’s changed a bit since I last showed it to you.
As for last week, yeah, I saw and fixed two born-of-haste typos in two-letter words (“if” for “of” and “os” for “is”….oh….). Embarrassing but not hard. On the other hand, all of Chapter 5 has been hard work to make clearer, well-ordered, and just better because, of all the chapters in the book, this one is perhaps the most intellectually ambitious. It bears a higher proportion of “big think” substance to data and detail than the others, is at least as eclectically sourced, and perplexes attempts at simple presentation because—it seems to me, at least—its parts dance around each other in no simple linear order even more vigorously here than in other chapters. This chapter is where the promise of a unified field theory of American political dysfunction, set out in the Introduction, really begins to come together to establish the foundation for Part II because it interweaves and integrates our three foregoing underturtles and sets them together on an even deeper plinth.
I have benefitted much from the Substack-goaded work invested in Chapter 5, seeing old connections more clearly and new ones for the first time. It has been a struggle, but struggles are good for us, some of the time anyway.
Finally before digging into today’s material, two personal notes.
First, this post is appearing on Thursday morning instead of the usual Friday afternoon because we’re off tomorrow early—most of the family—headed to a nature area north of Bennington, Vermont for more stone-skipping revelry.
Second, last night my wife, daughter, and I drove to Planet Word in downtown Washington to see a presentation by Maryanne Wolf, someone I have been in intimate email contact with for more than a decade but had never met face-to-face. If you have been reading The Age of Spectacle in The Raspberry Patch you know of Maryanne’s path-breaking work, presented in Chapter 3 in the context of deep reading erosion. Words can barely express my joy in finally meeting her in person after all this time, and to do so amid an instant community of an audience all tuned in to the issues and challenges discussed in The Age of Spectacle under the rubric of our third underturtle. It was both exhilarating and frustrating to be among so many people I knew I could learn so much from, but couldn’t just somehow do it in the moment. But I took down some names and will be following up. In the meantime, my spirits have been elevated by the knowledge that many of us still grasp how deep literacy functions as a pathway to dimensional understanding, moral reasoning, empathy, beauty, and soulful awe, and what that in turn means to a liberal democratic demos at social and political scale. There is hope, and where there is hope noble deeds can flourish.
. . .Immaturity, Myth, and Magic
Plato’s description of fully democratized youth, thinking themselves both equally free as birds and equally wise as owls, elbowing and otherwise driving their parents and teachers from the stage fits the woke social-justice-warrior mindset very well indeed. The kids seem to know little actual history, only ideologized caricatures of it—Cliff Notes for Emotionalized Fanatics, so to speak—and cannot imagine that being a debility. The urge to the radical simplification or outright dismissal of history via ideology recalls Cicero’s remark that, “Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain always a child.” And indeed, there is something of the feel of a Children’s Crusade about the whole woke thing. Call it a “Forward Strategy for Perfection,” a forward strategy likely to be as desultory in it consequences as that other “forward strategy” that I got a close look at from the vantage point of the seventh floor of the Department of State. I mention it because it is worth reminding ourselves that supposedly mature adults can drink ideological Kool-Aid, too.
As already suggested in passing, the Arts & Crafts movement of the late 19th-century Anglosphere is rightly said to have been a romantic reaction against the brutalism and insecurities of the industrial revolution, so wokeism may be in part at least a romantic reaction against the marginalization of individual agency and respect triggered by digital gigantism’s net effect. Even the sexual anti-binary folderol of the moment can be seen as romantic whimsy: Chromosomes are so limiting, raising children is so difficult but deliberately avoiding having them is so nihilistic, working out how love, sex, fidelity, and fulfillment are related is so confusing and cloying—let’s just pretend none of that matters or even exists, and keep doing what feels right in the moment.
It is utterly romantic, if also dysfunctional, to substitute simple and clean happy-ending scripts as a way to sidestep the hard work necessary to comprehend a messy world where reality is neither simple nor right-angled. The slogan “silence is violence” is a perfect example of such a script, a bumper sticker size slogan substituting for a vastly complex sociological mash up of factors. This is no simple case of the best being the enemy of the better or the good enough for now; it is more a case of the impossibly perfect being the enemy of the even imaginably tolerable. It suggests a form of self-infantilization that beckons the simplicity of childhood back into one’s head, a backwards-facing headtrip even without the aid of recreational drugs; although we would be kidding ourselves if we dismiss altogether the more-than-occasional involvement of those aids.
Remember Dylan’s remark about having to pay to get out of going through all these things twice? About two years before he recorded “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” Dylan wrote a song made popular, before 1968, by the Byrds called “My Back Pages.” Note these lyrics:
. . . “We’ll meet on edges soon,” said I, proud 'neath heated brow.
Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth, “rip down all hate,” I screamed.
Lies that life is black and white spoke from my skull, I dreamed.
Romantic facts of musketeers foundationed deep, somehow,
Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now. . .A self-ordained professor’s tongue too serious to fool,
Spouted out that liberty is just equality in school.
“Equality,” I spoke the word as if a wedding vow.
Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now. . .Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats too noble to neglect,
Deceived me into thinking I had something to protect.
Good and bad, I defined these terms, quite clear, no doubt, somehow.
Ah, but I was so much older then I’m younger than that now.
As The Who later put it electrically and more simply: “We don’t get fooled again.”
Except that yes the young do get fooled again, over and over again, it seems. This is the wage of the reversal of deference. The latest DEI-inflected Children’s Crusade comes to the nation more or less from the same folks who brought us the earlier #MeToo moral panic. Both display an unmistakably adolescent form of pique in the form of a Tocquevillian Paradox: the demand for total and absolute equality right now, as though no progress has been made on women’s rights and status, and none since the days of Bloody Kansas on the most hellishly difficult problem in American history and contemporary society.[1]
Nearly everything gets conflated, confused, and distorted inside moral panics. In the post-George Floyd micro-world, for example, police behavior gets conflated with racism, but the problem with the police (not a few of whom are black, of course) has many aspects, of which the racial element is just one. But if one insists on wallowing in self-loathing at societal scale—the jeremiadic face of the American Protestant inheritance—complexity is such a bother. Precisely that kind of wallowing, however, has become ever more engrained in the culture thanks to the reversal of deference and the banishing of history as anything other than secular passion-play script. As Brink Lindsay put it,
The closer one gets to the centers of intellectual and cultural influence, the more widely accepted is the view that America—and Western civilization more generally—is fundamentally rotten: a cesspool of irredeemable racism, misogyny, and transphobia, driven by runaway capitalist greed to burn and drown the world through climate change. And since we no longer like who we’ve become, we’ve lost interest in exploring our past and figuring out how we got to be this way. The only things worth learning from history are the names of the victims.[2]
Of course, punitive excess and disparaging history in favor of aspirational leaps of faith are parts of American culture and always has been. As suggested just above by passing reference to Jeremiah, it’s the Puritan way, after all, to manage somehow to be both grim and escapist at the same time. If to suffer is the definition of to be holy, one must not tolerate half measures, and guilt about all things racial has long since taken pride of place in America.
That sense of guilt is so deep and widespread that among the woke, and even the not-so-woke, it may alight on almost anything. It has been worsened in recent years by the militarization of the police after 9/11, and by the fact that in some places white police have little affection for the spirit of their jobs. Many have become police in places like Buffalo, Detroit, Toledo, Minneapolis, and other “rust belt” cities because the manufacturing jobs that used to be available to blue-collar whites have largely disappeared thanks to the twin phenomena of automation and offshoring.
But—again—the problem with the police is not just about race, as only an immature mind could conclude given the complexity of the job and the dicey environments in which it must be performed.[3] Moreover, abolishing or defunding the police is not an answer to wayward police behavior that is in the interest of most people of color. Law-abiding people of color, by far the vast majority, need the police to protect their communities and neighborhoods more than most white people do. Many stable Afro-American families just down the road from downtown Washington, D.C. in Prince Georges County, Maryland, anticipated where defund-the-police activism, championed by young white wokesters living in secure low-crime neighborhoods, would lead for them and many similar neighborhoods across the country and—to the extent that the activism did influence local public policy decisions on police budgets—it did. Data show that the number of Afro-American males killed by police in the year after May 25, 2020 dropped by at least 250 nationwide; but the number of Afro-American males murdered by other Afro-American males thanks to the withdrawal or underfunding of police presence increased more than ten times that number.[4]
Of course differences of motive do matter, at least in theory, but not so much to the families of the slain. The woke will falsely claim first that the research is bogus because cognitive dissonance and ideological thinking are close kin, but then they will protest that they did not anticipate this and that no one could have. Not so: If as Justice Brandeis once put it, “The irresistible is often only that which is not resisted,” then the unanticipated is usually only that which is not anticipated, usually because even trying might undermine faith in one’s convictions, or illusions—take your pick.
The larger point is that infantile reactions to complex problems do not solve those problems. Children are notoriously bad at keeping their clothes in order, often leaving them strewn across the floor of their bedrooms if given the chance, because little kids are present-oriented. They have not yet internalized causal sequencing knowledge which teaches them that decisions taken in the moment have downstream consequences they may regret—like not being able to find that shirt or pair of shoes one desperately, oh yes very desperately, needs before leaving the house for a play date. It is easy to forgive a ten-year old girl for doing things like that in the knowledge that she will eventually, and pretty soon, figure this particular issue out. And it doesn’t really matter which shoes she ends up wearing. It’s a lot harder to forgive twenty- and thirty-somethings graduated from expensive colleges and universities who do pretty much the same things, not with clothing, but with much weightier if also more abstract issues.
The impact of cognitive infantalization shows, too, at a different level in the behavior of the right-facing side of American political extremism. If the MAGAts can’t “burn it all down” right away, can’t exterminate the hated but willfully misunderstood administrative state that, in their view, channels liberal meliorist condescension into every pore of American life, they do what many adolescents specialize in: They indulge their anger by directing obscenity-laced hatred toward those they believe are responsible for humiliating them, ticking all the boxes of attention economy requirements as they slash and burn. The number of f-bomb highway signs sprawled on overpass bridges and flags accusing Joe Biden of every sin under the sun has now reached countless levels. The conspiratorial paranoia and increasingly strident vulgarity of much rightwing populism in the United States testifies vividly to the adolescent character of the phenomenon.[5] It is as though a cognitive framework good for playing fantasy video games works is believed to work fine, too, for navigating reality.
Those more toward the spectacle edge of reality conflate all irritations into one monstrous demon by dint of conspiracy theories, and that is nearly as true of the illiberal Left as it is of the illiberal Right. If the woke brigades can’t immediately achieve egalitarian perfection, now called “equity” rather than equality, they do what other adolescents have long specialized in: They find some very large and sinister anonymous “they” to blame and throw a temper tantrum. From time to time, as with the “George Floyd” protests, they break things just to show how serious they are….but which actually shows how serious they aren’t.
The Wages of Fantasy
We are not quite yet done with contemporary American immaturity. As we have seen, unearned and so unappreciated affluence, the end of modernity on account of failed myth maintenance by the elites or “guardians” of the polis, and the arrival of the “evil twins” have produced a media-propelled spectacle mentality that evinces explosive examples of both the “reason of unreason” mainly on the Right, and revenants of mythical thinking mainly on the woke Left.[6] Both display pre-literate mental habits, the sort of emotionalized reasoning capabilities of a typical ten-year old. And that, at a deeper level than the cumulative effects of hovering parents and technology-induced social isolation, is what accounts for the immaturity of so many Americans’ theory of mind these days. Those who do not deep read shift their mental activity away from their frontal cortex and toward their brainstem. That is how the rush of now overwhelms any recall of then, anger displaces empathy, and reason gives way to emotionalized impatience. This resembles aspects of the mythic consciousness discussed above in Chapter 2.
The energies of the woke cultural Left do very much call to mind pre-modern mythic frameworks organized around primal conditions and subjective experiences. Of these three seem to be key: the presumed boundless fluidity of sex and gender roles despite the biological fundaments of at least the former; fantasy storylines privileging utopian “superpower” themes; and a simplified and obsessive focus on obvious allele-distribution differences defining group identities that are presumed to swamp the primacy of individual agency if not free will altogether.
Because they are trans-empirical in nature, forms of adolescent thinking generously discount facticity and normal rules of evidence in favor of para-religious thinking in which its logical syntax of expression is qualitatively different.[7] Natural to spectacle, usually more manifest on the Right than on the Left, are consequences that include characteristics of adolescent personalities in thrall to what Herbert A. Simon called “the attention economy”: performative dramas that tease real, extant polarization to extremes; calculated incivility of “Jerry Springer Show” mien; and the shameless subversion and inversion of well-established testimonial truth. The point is to grab as much attention as possible and then sustain it long enough to take it to the bank, either literally or figuratively speaking—or in the case of Donald Trump and his group of intimate conflict entrepreneurs, both. The attention economy, magnified by the technological dazzle now available to nearly everyone with the easy cash to play in it, has become in effect the spectacle economy. And the spectacalized economy is the underpinning template of what has become a spectacalized politics that displays with particular vividness during campaign periods.
The spectacle economy comes into focus when we recognize that the main way that the corporate and advertising masters of the attention economy now grab attention is by using faux-magic tricks of one kind or another. This is why the 2016 T-Mobile marketing campaign organized around the slogan “You’re unlimited” was so brilliant: By combining the hyper-individualism of the meritocratic sensibility with the siren of advertising that adorns the very crown of the attention economy, it ratified and so played off of that hyper-individualism, underwritten by the seemingly unbounded affluence responsible for generating the technology-embedded service being sold.
This form of subjectivity is magical not in a razzle-dazzle way but in a more specific, quieter sense: In line with the mythic consciousness laws of consanguinity and metamorphosis, it is all about feeling, and anything can become anything else. Both laws depend on an assumption of essential limitlessness, and its invocation tells the individual targets of the advertising that they can be anything they desire to be.[8] This is the commercial equivalent of clerics preaching to believers. And it works.
Unlimited is what most Millennials and GenXers believe, or want to believe, about their human nature. But it is at very much at odds with their reality, which may explain why they want so much to believe it. Indeed, the dialectic of fantasy and shock—whether from mass shootings, memories of terror attacks and pandemics, apocalyptical environmental fears, and more—seems to have deranged much of the Millennial generation. For example, a January 2018 Brookings Institute report by William H. Frey showed that a surprising number of millennials believe they will be rich at a relatively young age: One in five believes he or she will be a millionaire before turning 40 years old. This is despite unambiguous data showing that this cohort is not only doing worse financially at their age than the three to four previous generations, but also that its members are not saving enough for retirement, not holding enough steady jobs to ever receive a pension, and have taken on a huge amounts of student and credit card debt. Delusions of adequacy, let’s call them, are not so rare. But these delusions reflect an attitude natural to either a spoiled brat or merely naif yet unmugged by reality.
Even Plato could not have imagined a form of democratic wildlife that was not only arrogantly cocksure of its own virtue but pretty much out of its right mind much of the time, tripping on the latest shiny-object spectacle to come their way. It rarely enters the consciousness of the revelers that we Americans today live in society whose key and most cherished institutions were formed in a literate culture—a culture that does not renew itself automatically but must be transmissible through the communications modalities and institutional set-ups that enabled it in the first place. But how can that transmission happen when the elders have all but given up the attempt and the youth lack the facility for understanding what may from time to time be taught to them?
So a practical question, then: Who is socializing the post-toddler kids while both parents need to work full-time or near full-time jobs to make up the difference between their depressed salaries and rising prices, both caused largely by the giganticized oligarchies lording over both private and public sectors of the economy? Well, it might be Mr. Rogers’ sponsors or Sesame Street or Reading Rainbow; but it might be whatever industrial folklore is on television or the internet, sponsored by some corporation selling its wares, airing content featuring violence, salacity, calculated disrespect and vulgarity for its own shock-worthy clickbait sake. It might by the voices and images of the limitless scrollings on Instagram. Never mind what virtually limitless free internet porn is teaching teens, and even pre-teens, about the complex relationships among sex, love, marriage, and parenthood. Those talking at us from screens never made eye contact with us, do not know us, do not care about us, and never will. Yet by cognitive default we, many of us anyway, fully anthropomorphize them as though they do all of these things. This is not good either for individuals or for the nation as a whole if it is to remain a liberal democracy, or even any kind of democracy at all.
So it starts in fantasy and is often abetted by recreational drugs from Phenibut to Ecstasy; the shock-work of relocating sobriety and reality, alas, always comes later. When everything happens now, it is increasingly difficult to fathom what later really means. It is apparently possible, for some anyway, to crawl so far up one’s own narcissistic butt that reality never actually does impinge. To accomplish this, unearned affluence helps a whole lot; only in a situation where the fear of scarcity is simply not plausible to most people could such a radically deranging subjectivism set roots.
Just bye the bye, it is therefore deeply ironic that the environmental generation, which has stunned itself into nightmares of earthly destruction because of global warming, is the generation most alienated from physical nature in human history. Such folks could use a month or two of serious wilderness training. That may be the only way they will ever escape from their surreal cognitive bouncy tent.[9]. . . .
[1] Claire Berlinski described the #MeToo moral panic in these words nearly five years ago: “Revolutions against real injustice have a tendency . . . to descend into paroxysms of vengeance that descend upon guilty and innocent alike. We’re getting too close. Hysteria is in the air. The over-broad definition of ‘sexual harassment’ is a well-known warning sign.” Switch out “sexual harassment” for “racism” and not a single other word need be changed. See Berlinski, “The Warlock Hunt,” The American Interest 13:4 (Winter 2017).
[2] Lindsay, “The Curse of Presentism,” The Permanent Problem, May 2, 2024.
[3] See Radley Balko, The Rise of the Warrior Cop (PublicAffairs, 2013), and, for short, “SWATted: The Militarization of the Police,” The American Interest, 9:2 (Fall 2013); and Richard Thompson Ford, “Criminal Injustice,” The American Interest, July 7, 2020.
[4] Omar Wasow, an assistant professor of political science at Berkeley, has done excellent research on the anticipated and unanticipated consequences of leftwing protests. Dr. Wasow and I have communicated at my initiation, since my 1995 book Telltale Hearts makes exactly “an argument of irony,” in that case about the consequences of Vietnam War protest movements. Dr. Wasow, both of whose parents were antiwar protestors at that time (more irony perhaps?), has become much unloved by the woke Left for engaging on honest terms with reality.
[5] See Benjamin Sasse, The Vanishing American Adult (St. Martin’s, 2017). As good as this book is, the basic idea is not original to Sasse. See the excellent short essay, published twenty years earlier, by Michiko Kakutani, “Adolesence Rules!” New York Times Magazine, May 11, 1997. Kakutani leaned hard and wisely on the observations of master child psychologist Robert Coles.
[6] The term “reason of unreason” is that of José Ortega y Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses (1929). It is a recurring theme in post-Enlightenment Western thought associated perhaps most closely with Georges Sorel. On mythical thought see Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume II “Mythical Thought.” As Cassirer was developing his ideas on myth he published a short version of what later became Volume II in Language and Myth (“Sprache und Mythos”). Cassirer is not the only thinker who focused on the development of human intellection from pre-literate to modern times, but differently from James George Frazier, Emile Durkheim, Claude Levi-Strauss, Paul Radin, Mircea Eliade, and many other cultural anthropologists and sociologists, Cassirer sought a deeper philosophical framework and so became known as a philosophical anthropologist. This is not the place to detail similarities and differences among these thinkers; for our purposes, similarities concerning the basis of mythical and magical thinking far outweigh the differences. If there is such a thing as non-quantitative “settled” social science, this exemplifies it.
[7] “Logical syntax of expression” is my phrase, so I am obliged to define it. Syntax refers to the order in which parts of speech are assembled in a given language to create intersubjectively functional narratives. Without it, words cannot mean much of anything. Syntax is different in German than it is in English, and different for Arabic and every other high- and low-density language as well. By logical syntax, I mean the order in which the parts of a concept or an abstract argument are assembled in a given cognitive domain or world. The order matters, and how we establish it is telling. We do not use the same logical syntax when discussing physics as we do when we are discussing poetry, any more than our expectations of proper behavior are the same for a wild party and a wake despite their occasionally superficial similarities. Every domain within culture has its own characteristic mode of articulation, and that mode does not merely reflect empirical characteristics but is constitutive of the domain itself. So, for example, religious language—and political language, too—depends far more on abstractive and metaphorical constructions to make meaning than, say, electrical engineering language. To understand what is meant by a cognitive domain or world one can go back to William James’s famous early phenomenological remark about worlds “real whilst attended to.” But better to study Erving Goffman’s definitions of keyings and laminations in Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Harper, 1974).
[8] Protean subjectivism aligns with a philosophical perspective called emotivism, associated with A.J. Ayer. It is the anthem of the woke despite the fact few if any of those who self-identify as woke have ever heard of Ayer, let alone tried to read him. Big philosophical ideas, sound and otherwise, have a way of trickling down in debased or distorted form into the general pool of available ideas, often at such a remove from their origins that contemporaries have no idea, or a wrong idea, of where they actually came from.
[9] The bouncy tent image comes courtesy of Brink Lindsay, “The Retreat from Reality,” The Permanent Problem, November 22, 2022.
The Age of Spectacle:
How a Confluence of Fragilized Affluence, the End of Modernity, Deep-Literacy Erosion, and Shock Entertainment Technovelty Has Wrecked American Politics
Foreword [TKL]
Introduction: A Hypothesis Unfurled
Cyberlution
The Republic of Spectacle: A Pocket Chronology
A Spectocracy, If We Can Keep It
Why This Argument Is Different from All Other Arguments
Opening Acts and the Main Attraction
The Path Forward
Obdurate Notes on Style and Tone
PART I: Puzzle Pieces
1. Fragilized Affluence and Postmodern Decadence: Underturtle I
Government as Entertainment
The Accidental Aristocracy
The Agora’s Deafness to Classical Liberalism
The Culture of Dematerialization
Affluence and the Changing Image of Leadership
Neurosis, Loneliness, and Despair
Wealth and Individualism
Hard Times Ain’t What They Used to Be
Affluence Fragilized
Real and Unreal Inequality
The Net Effect
Dysfunctional Wealth
Searching for the Next Capitalism
2. Our Lost Origin Stories at the End of Modernity: Underturtle II
What Is a Mythopoetical Core?
Aristotle’s Picture Album
Faith, Fiction, Metaphor, and Politics
The American Story, a First Telling
How Secularism Was Birthed in a Religious Age
Regression to the Zero-Sum
Industrial Folklore
Bye, Bye Modernity, Hello the New Mythos
Mythic Consciousness and Revenant Magic
Word Magic Redux
Progress as Dirty Word, History as Nightmare
Attitudes and Institutions Misaligned
3. Deep Literacy Erosion: Underturtle III
Trending Toward Oblivion
The Reading-Writing Dialectic
The Birth of Interiority
A Rabbinic Interlude
You Must Remember This
Dissent
The Catechized Literacy of the Woke Left
Reading Out Tyranny
Fakery Cubed: Chat Crap
4. The Rise of Cyber-Orality: Underturtle III Continued
The Second Twin
Structural Mimicry and Fantasized Time
Losing the Lebenswelt
Podcast Mania
The Political Fallout of Digital Decadence
Zombified Vocabulary
Democracy as Drama
Where Did the News Go?
Optimists No More
5. The Cultural Contradictions of Liberal Democracy
A Big, Fat, Ancient Greek Idea
The American Story Again, This Time with Feeling
Footnotes to Plato
Some For Instances
Revering the Irreverent
The Deep Source of the American Meliorist State
The Great Morphing
Myth, Magic, and Childishness
The Wages of Fantasy
Pull It Up By the Roots
PART II: Emerging Picture
6. “Doing a Ripley”: Spectacle Defined and Illustrated
Astounding Complexes and Technical Events
Tricks, Illusions, and Cons
Fakers and Frauds With Halos
The Magnificos
Projectionist Fraud as a Way of Life
Old Ripleys, New Ripleys
Trump: Master of Contrafiction
Conspiracy Soup
Facticity Termites
Conditioning for Spectacle
To the Neuroscience
7. The Neuroscience of Spectacle
Glancing
Seeing the Light
Eye-to-Eye
Surfing Your Brainwaves
McLuhan Was Wrong, and Right
The Graphic Revolution, Memory, and the Triumph of Appearances
Structural Shadows
Surfing a New Wave
Toward Some Informed Speculations
Suffer the Children
8. The Mad Dialectic of Nostalgia and Utopia in the Infotainment Era
Ripleys on the Left
From Left to Right and Back Again
The Root Commonalities of Illiberalism
Gratuitous Harm in Black and White
The Touching of the Extremes
Spectacle Gluttony
The Wrongness of the Right
The Root Beer Syndrome
And Now More Sex
Beyond Feminism
The Irony of Leveling
Abortion: Serious Issues, Specious Arguments, Sunken Roots
The Imperfect Perfect
Vive la Difference?
Human Nature
9. Spectacle and the American Future
Bad Philosophy, Bad Consequences
Astounding Complexes from TV to Smartphones
Up from the Television Age
The Crux
Cognitive Illusions
Another Shadow Effect
Myth as Model
The AI Specter
A Sobering Coda
10: Epilogue: What Our Politics Can Do, What We Must Do
Meanwhile…
Who Will Create the Garden?