We here at The Raspberry Patch will get to installment No. 2 of The Age of Spectacle just below; first, however, some additional project context so that the shortcomings of the project in its current state may be laid honestly upon the table. And, as Damon Runyon used to say, a story or two goes with it. If you don’t want to read the stories, fine—it serves me as catharsis to write them out, and some personal friends enjoy them, or claim to—just skip down to the next major section break.
I’ve already spoken of my agent’s failure, owing to my stubborn insistence on not dumbing down my argument and evidence too much, to attract a commercial publishing contract. That effort began in the early summer of 2019, with the book’s tentative title then still Amerigeddon. Not an optimistic title, granted, but I liked it in part because at a Bethesda breakfast with Tom Friedman, shortly before embarking for a year in Singapore, Tom said he liked it a lot—and he’s a guy who has a way with words and so knows an attractive title when he hears one. I was chuffed, as the English say.
Finishing the book was to be a part of my fellowship work load in Singapore, along with writing shorter pieces for the sponsoring institution’s policy series RSIS Commentary, attending its seminars and conferences, guest lecturing for colleagues, and so forth, at the Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU)—so RSIS/NTU. I saw my main task for the year to help Americans better understand Singapore and to help Singaporeans better understand America. The book at that stage of its development, in order to fit into my Singapore fellowship obligations, projected a main concluding section about how American domestic culture and politics gone somewhat haywire—we were, after all, in the midst of the Trump Administration—would affect U.S. strategy and foreign policy with a special emphasis on Asia….Southeast Asia…..and, of course, Singapore.
To accomplish this part of the project I was encouraged to travel widely in the region, but after having accumulated half a dozen official invitations from assorted governments and universities with the aid of RSIS staff, COVID struck and the region froze up like most of the rest of the world. My wife and I made it to Cambodia, Indonesia and—for fun on our way, we thought, to Bali to mark my wife’s 70th birthday—to Western Australia, pretty much the only region of the country we had yet to visit in two previous trips.
We never made it to Bali. Truth to tell, we barely made it to Perth before the Australian government shut off international travel into the country, and then we, like many other would-be travelers, had to change plans and hustle back to Singapore before the government closed down Changi airport. To that end we repaired to the key travel agency in Perth, after which we hied off to the airport to make the necessary arrangements. Warning: Runyonesque story approaching.
When we got there, the line of supplicants waiting to revise itineraries, tickets, and boarding passes was pretty long, snaking out in a standard undulating arc formed by meter-high metal stands every ten feet or so linked by the usual thick ropes. I counted that we were about 25th in line, a line moving none too speedily. A fellow just behind us, clearly a Brit, caught as we all were in the COVID travel thicket, commiserated by saying that, well, not all that much of significance could happen in the half hour or so that it would likely take us to make our way at a creeping pace to the desk. I was in a slightly fictive mood, I suppose, just standing around without a whole lot to do, so I remonstrated, in a friendly way, that Arthur Dent probably had similar thoughts just as the Earth was about to be demolished to make way for a hyperspace by-pass, so, I concluded, one mustn’t be too sure about such things. To my shock, this fellow nodded sagely, dropped his bags, raised his arms, and began reciting from memory whole skeins of Vogon poetry. Now seriously, what were the chances of that? I searched the scene for any sign of an improbability drive, but found none.
When, back again in Singapore, my agent reminded me of his failed efforts to place my manuscript and tried to persuade me to streamline the project. I relented, some. Doing so forced me to zero in on the key value-added I thought my argument provided to the studious conversation at-large, and that’s when Age of Spectacle freshly adorned the title page. But having appended the new title and crested a new sleeker item for my agent to sell, I stalled out working hard on it partly because being now stuck in the Red Dot I could not complete the book as we had planned and agreed. I also awaited better news the second time around from a publisher or perhaps two. No such luck.
I was, however, plenty busy doing other things in the meantime, aside from having fun and learning a lot about Southeast Asia from a fairly low base. I wrote a series of essays for the magazine of which I had been founding editor—The American Interest. Eight long-form essays penned and published during the year were about Singapore; others were, I thought at the time and still do, some of the best long-form essays I ever wrote: Among them were “The Net Effect” (April 7, 2020), about the digital age’s inherent advantages to gigantism of all sorts; “The Present Madness” (June 15, 2020), speculations about the reasons for the waves of illiberal adolescent irrationalism polluting the American agora; and in TAI’s successor magazine American Purpose appeared “The Darkening Mind” (December 7, 2020), about the galloping return of the zero-sum mentality and the likely ensemble of reasons for it. In addition, I wrote “Disinformed” for Inference: An International Review of Science (Fall 2020) about GANs technology and the looming problem of deepfakes, and, probably most important, “The Erosion of Deep Literacy” in the Spring 2020 issue of National Affairs. I also wrote several essays for The Straits Times about American politics and foreign policy, and several more on a variety of American culture topics, including sex, for a Dubai-based institute called Al-Mesbar whose publications aimed primarily at an Arabic-speaking readership.
The point is that all this thinking, reading, and writing from a fresh perspective—twelve times zones away from Washington living amid an ethnic-Chinese majority society—led me to a far more precise and better integrated form of my book argument than I had managed to summon for Amerigeddon. I collected several essays written while in Singapore for a book called At History’s Hinge: The Swinging Gates of American and Global History in the Time of COVID, published by World Scientific in Singapore. Thanks to the graciousness and flexibility of the RSIS leadership, that fulfilled my book responsibility to RSIS-NTU. When we got back stateside in late July 2020 (we could have stayed longer, and Singapore was far safer during COVID than the United States, but some family members needed a hand coping…), there I was with a now unsatisfying, overtaken-by-newer-insights manuscript, with so much better material to add—but still not much prospect of a commercial publisher.
You will also appreciate that in late summer 2020 the presidential election was only a few months away, and I knew it would be impossible to finish anything before then. A great many of the verb tenses in the manuscript would need changing and, frankly, the scale of what lay before me induced a kind of activity schizophrenia. Whole weeks went by when I did no work at all on the manuscript; then I’d see a new connection or two and I’d work non-stop for three or four days. Meanwhile, the world kept pouring more luscious raw material in my direction. It seemed like just about every major news story and a lot of minor ones, too, fit beautifully as evidence in my work-in-progress. The combination of aiming at a fast-moving target with an “everything bagel” unified-field-theory kind of approach to American dysfunction, and my off-and-on work schedule, led to a highly interesting and suggestive high-energy…..mess.
That basic situation has now been accumulating for almost three years since we returned from abroad. In one sense the manuscript has been getting better and better, brimming with new connections and actual, I hope, original insights. But in another sense it has been getting worse and worse. Redundancies have crept in, for when I get an idea of something to add or improve, I need to figure out where it should go. Sometimes I don’t get that right, for it is difficult to keep so much material in my head at the same time. Worse, sometimes I realize that there are books I need to read or re-read after many years; that slows me down even though it aids the intellectual quality of the book-in-the-making. The stop-and-start stuttering of writing and editing also leaves first-draft material stranded in ungainly juxtaposition amid more polished language. All in all, in my estimation the thing taken as a whole is both stimulating and at the same time episodically cringe-worthy.
The best example of what a mess the manuscript is in right now is that the introduction ballooned to an impossible length and complexity. It wants to deliver the essence of the whole book, but introductions cannot, or at any rate should not try, to do that. If I had time right now I’d rip carefully through the introduction, put it on a starvation diet, and re-site the removed material either to the latter chapters of the manuscript or to the trashcan. But given the substack schedule to which I’ve now committed myself, I don’t have enough time (driving to Indiana to see the complete solar eclipse didn’t help, but a person’s gotta do what a person’s gotta do) to do that. So instead I have simply amputated most of the manuscript’s introduction and temporarily placed the excised text somewhere else for later reconsideration.
As I said last time, rolling out the manuscript here, piece by piece, even in the relative mess of a condition it’s in, is supposed to goad me into fixing it. It’s already starting to work. So now, with stories told and for what it may be worth, we pick up where we left off one week ago with…..
Back to the Text
. . .but the cyberlution has been designed and functions as substitution for aspects of human thought.
Now, the notion of a mentality, or of the French original mentalité, has a musky and somewhat ignoble air about it these days, and rightly so. In its older, pre-20th century forms the idea of a mentality speculated overconfidently on ethno-racial and ethnolinguistic hierarchies, and none too rarely elided as well on supposedly heritable class differences in he same society—it was all about “breeding,” as the English aristocrats used to put it. The same basic idea but little refined frequently bore a 20th-century echo in sub-disciplines such as developmental psychology.1
In those days relatively little was known about how human sensory experience connected the brain and the endocrine system, how what neuroscience could tell us related to culture and the relatively recent field of epigenetics, or about how technological changes of many sorts, not least in communication, have always changed how people relate to one another and so factored into the reshaping of attitudes and ultimately institutions. When we use the term mentality here we assuredly mean not its pre-20th century connotations but specifically how man-made environments affect how people interact, and how those environments affect conceptualizations of both public and private life.
When we speak of differences in mentality we may speak vertically of changes over time in a given culture, or horizontally about how different cultures organize reality conceptually at any given time. The argument made here is vertical: In the present American case, shifts in culture over time have altered the conceptual framing of social life in ways that no longer align well with the political institutions devised at the Founding, and that were then adapted more or less successfully throughout the 19th and into the 20th centuries. The current general mentality in American culture—with strong echoes in Europe and elsewhere—is one increasingly focused on entertainment, and a form of entertainment inflected by fantasy and manic rhythms that, taken together, go far to defining spectacle as the zenith of entertainment, its brass ring, as it were. We as a mass society almost certainly produce today more dopamine flows per capita than any civilization in history.
How did we get here from there? Well, by way of shorthand, intermediate between the American womb-world of late 18th-century Enlightenment values and the present dominant entertainment mentality were two other arguably identifiable mentalities: the developmentalism that issued from the industrial revolution paired with continental expansion; and the 20th-century focus on personal/professional achievement as the means to happiness, and a novel focus on youthfulness as an ideal in all forms.
The argument here, then, is that the accelerating advent of spectacle as the dominant cognitive mode or mentality among increasing numbers of Americans has by now displaced almost entirely the older Whiggish/Protestant mentality of twinned material and moral progress. This displacement explains better than any alternative account why the nation had lunged toward a dysfunctional performative surrealism in its politics. The human mind is promiscuously associational, ensuring that shadow effects from one province of consciousness may and likely will spread over other provinces if the frameworks are culturally prominent enough. It is thus impossible that a deepening immersion in spectacalized entertainment will not ultimately affect political culture, for all politics is a projection of culture in one way or another.
We have not yet reached a full-blown “Lord of the Flies” tipping point in the United States—as has happened in other countries historically with some regularity—although what happened at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and fresh snippets from urban crime files suggest that we are getting closer.2 Most Americans still reject extremist views and uncivil demeanor, but this current “silent majority” is the political equivalent of “fly-over America”; everyone knows the silent ones are down there, but they are countlessly bland and so do not count. That is thanks largely to the commercial media obsession with shockbar/clickbait newsfare that cameos unceasingly the sharp polarization among the politically active parts of the nation. That polarization, expressed not as alternative visions of building America forward but as visceral hatred that manages to be simultaneously personal and abstract, expresses itself within an entertainment-besotted culture that has fostered immoderation in all things, and rewards and thus incentivizes more of it. Imagining future scenarios of “red/blue” admixed with “white/black” civil violence is too easy to do. Imagining the de facto collapse of constitutional order and the quotidian rule of law with it is, as well.
American political culture continues to morph day by day into a distracted, entertainment-inflected spectocracy. Emotionalized image-suffused media depictions of real events have become ever more cognitively real and politically salient for many—between roughly a third and forty percent of the electorate judging from relevant recent polls—than the events themselves.3 In some increasingly prevalent brainwave states—core theta in particular, which is induced in viewers by flows of two-dimensional screen-based images detailed in chapter 7 below—life is increasingly interpreted as though it were scripted, already baked into reality Truman Show-like, and we are passing through fascinated by what already-determined events come next. This state of mind eviscerates both our sense of linear time, puts us ever in the onrushing now, and discounts our agency in thrall to the next act or scene in the script.
This does not mean that all Americans are thus affected; you, dear reader, who are clearly deep literate if you have made it this far in today’s essay, are not likely to be among the modal type we are discussing. Nor does it mean that as a nation we are now stupider or more delusional than we ever were. But, first, rather too many of us are differently delusional thanks to the multilayered decadence inspired by undreamed of affluence, the conceit of undifferentiated egalitarianism amid flattened social authority structures near and far, the internet age’s wiring of virtual affinity groups, and the abdication of media professionalism in the face of perverse business models imposed by that same digital tsunami. And second, both willful stupidity and delusion have increasingly impinged on American politics because political elites themselves have drunk the new-orality cool-aid and, perhaps more important, have failed to do their jobs very well.
We will detail what this means below, but for now understand that a representative democracy does not expect typical citizens to understand complex public policy issues, but only to use common sense to elect leaders who presumably do understand them and can cooperate well enough to effectively legislate and govern. So long as these elected elites do not screw up in major ways, democracy in a mass society like the United States benefits handsomely from what some social scientists have termed rational apathy. But the political elites have screwed up, massively and repeatedly now for many years, and thus formerly quiescent elements of the population have become politically mobilized in the face of a rash of what are to them real and pressing problems. Populism is, to put it in a nutshell, the mobilization of those parts of the population in a democratic order whose educational levels fall below the mean of deep literacy. Truth crowdsourcing in the culture has encouraged the idea that experts are vapid fools and that everyone is justified in having opinions even on matters they know nothing about. And so in November 2016 a surge of populism put into the White House for the first time ever a man who was not averse to telling everyone within earshot that he did not have nor did he desire to develop a reading habit.
All the causal elements giving rise to a spectacle mentality interpenetrate one another, but none is as powerful a cultural change factor as the obsession with fantasy screen-based “industrial folklore” entertainment and its ersatz, myth-regurgitated storylines. Just as technological change affects what and how we remember things—moving from direct observation to early black-and-white or sepia photography to color and on to video and now augmented reality images4—it also affects the templates to hand we use to construct our interpretive frameworks concerning everything from how we imagine causality to how we imagine our own personalities.
Indeed, as noted already, Americans increasingly chose frameworks in which they see themselves as though they are embedded in some sort of made-for-television drama, and they seem to generally prefer that state of surreality to their actual lives. As a consequence, many cannot imagine levels of explanatory complexity any deeper than that characteristic of a simple, dumbed-down fictive adventure or superhero script. Our culture generally, nearly all commercial broadcast media, and hence our politics are now avidly imitating what amounts to bad art. Even the most serious political issues get packaged and delivered to the public in styles and with language suitable, at best, for adolescent fiction. Serious discourse on public policy issues is in ever-shorter supply for the typical attentive citizen despite the fact that more thoughtful material is probably being written than ever before, albeit in non-curated forms that educated seekers must discover on their own.
The sources of the new Age of Spectacle are several and their timelines variable, as has already been suggested. The argument here, however, is that all of these sources have been overlaid and rendered more integrated in recent years with a novelty that is neuro-cognitive in nature. The series of rapid-fire cyber-technological innovations has had obvious downstream effects on markets and labor profiles, family stability and social trust reservoirs, media business models and educational institutions, the nation’s religious life and related capacity for moral reasoning, entertainment subcultures and political institutions themselves. All that is, or ought to be fairly obvious.
What is not yet as well recognized is that the technological tsunami we are experiencing is reshaping our brain-wiring, too—so to speak: It is daily shrinking at full social scale what has always been, institutionally speaking, a writing-based political culture and substituting in its place a new orality whose premises profoundly ill-suit America’s liberal democratic, Enlightenment-born inheritance. The rule of law is written down; the rule of men is not. Moving away from a written-word form of cultural authority cannot but cause attitudinal decay in respect for the rule of law in favor of the rule of charismatic characters or, in our particular case, fabricated and projected caricatures or affectations of self—a stunning reversal of Max Weber’s justly famous historio-evolutionary flow of social authority from charismatic to traditional to formal.
That the sources of the spectacle mentality are recursively intertwined and sprawling in their effects makes it hard to parse, order, and weigh them all. Looking back we can see the development and intertwining of several of these sources in the culture, some decades in the making. For just one key example simply note what the illiberal fringes of American politics have done with history. Following on from the more infantile ideological derangements of the 1960s, both illiberal Right and illiberal Left have moved, as Irving Louis Horowitz noted at the time in interpreting the thinking of Georges Sorel, “from objective to subjective history, from history as an unconscious objective process to history as a pliable, plastic agent of the imagination.”5 To that one development we will add a score more in due course. The point, however, is that no one foresaw the socio-political state change that has resulted from the near-simultaneous union of the sources of the spectacle mentality coincident with a boost-phase digital accelerant, sometime during the 2010s, in which their impact now far exceeds the mere sum of the parts.
That state change aligns with and advances further the brain rewiring that is making most Americans (and others in similarly “wired” environments) less adept at handling abstract concepts, planning and problem solving, and less patient, respectful, and tolerant. It is also debasing language’s capacity to make and communicate distinctions. And for many who have little capacity for or experience with deep reading it is discounting normal rules of evidence in daily life and putting out a welcome mat that is normalizing a range of revenant magical reasoning, mostly utopian fantasies on the Left, mostly dark and bizarre conspiracy theories on the Right.
The invocation of magical reasoning is not meant as mere metaphor, it hopefully being understood that political life itself proceeds largely by dint of metaphors held in common.6 Rather, the invocation of magic is critical to the argument of the book as a whole. It invites into the ambit of analysis the work of cultural anthropologists, developmental psychologists, selected philosophers and others over many decades, work that is critical for understanding what spectacle is and how it manifests in our hyper-technified postmodern era.
As we will examine carefully below, in the mythic mindset magic works according to two psycho-cognitive laws: the law of consanguinity and the law of metamorphosis. For now let us be satisfied with very brief definitions.
The law of consanguinity holds that mythical thought is a world suffused with emotion, not reason. It is a world that conflates experience, not analyses that reduce it into elements or pieces. It is a world of maximum feasible sensory unity and subjective immersion. The law of metamorphosis is that anything can change into anything else, and change back or change in some other way.7
The two laws taken together characterizes, if one wants a familiar template, the world of the Greek myths where gods, demigods and mortals flit about unrestrained by the limiting laws of the hard sciences as we know them.8 In a mytho-magical world the sense of linear time is weak; no solid before and after exists. Mythic consciousness is less a wide-awake than an intermediate zone of consciousness between the life-world—the lebenswelt in common phenomenological language—and the world of dreams. It is also a non- or preliterate world in which language exists only in oral form. The implications and importance of this observation will become clearer below.
In our own time revenant magic has acquired a surprising respectability. Postmodernist shamans tell adepts that subjective perception is as real or more so than any objective reality which, they claim, does not exist anyway. This faux philosophy, which takes the sound premise of phenomenology to an absurd extreme, has oozed its way into political thought as an adolescent-level zero-sum premise, to wit: There is no such thing as progress and no such thing as moral reasoning, both supposedly being mere masks for the exercise of power by those who hold it. Politics thus fuses with an oddly subjective form of millenarianism into a world of eternal cyclical conflict between groups whose only resolution, or redemption, is salvation through a mystical journey to utopian perfection. Disagreement about what constitutes perfection means that one person’s utopia may be another’s dystopia, and vice versa. Only deeply felt extremes can exist as ideals, such that the real world as it invariably exists—“Our paradise is the imperfect,” Wallace Stevens wrote—can supply only the disappointments of half measures.
Let just a few summary examples of revenant magic in contemporary American politics seal the point. On the postmodern Right, among the MAGA extremists who have seized control of the formerly reality-based Republican Party, we have recently heard proposals to “expunge” Donald Trump’s two impeachment trials from the record. No such concept exists in law, constitutional or otherwise, or common sense. It is akin to abolishing last week. It is would-be magic.
This proposal, the brainchild of Marjorie Taylor Greene—one referred to by former Republican Senator Ben Sasse as “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs”—is an almost pure example of the magical law of metamorphosis, repeated over and over through the MAGA default stratagem of projecting onto enemies, without the existence of or apparently any need for evidence, the evils they themselves have plotted and sometimes tried to carry out. This is how a violent insurrection became in their minds a peaceful patriotic protest; how a hammer attack on Paul Pelosi became a fake cover for a homosexual encounter; how Trump’s admission on tape that he purloined and showed top-secret documents to people with no security clearance turned into just locker-room bravado; how an exploding Bentley at the U.S.-Canada Rainbow Bridge border crossing on November 22, 2023 became a terrorist attack complete with immigrants and Muslims; and how the Key Bridge disaster in Baltimore harbor on March 26 became all about illegal immigration and DEI.9 The list of shameless projectile lies, the kind of things nine-year old boys engaged in a fart contest are liable to think up after watching the latest dumb-downed television adventure offering, goes down for fathoms all the way to hell.
These are not always simple lies, unbelieved by the tellers. These are sometimes surrealistic truths uttered in a parallel quasi-reality—in other words, mendacious political operatives behaving exactly as scriptwriters engrossed with the task of creating dumb-downed fare for a television show. They have in common the certain guilt and perfidy of the cultic-approved monadic enemy, lately that would be the Marxist-socialist-communist-traitor-whore-criminal “crooked” Joe Biden. The guilt first, crime second pattern is reminiscent of the Queen of Hearts’s “sentence first, verdict afterwards” in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. It is the twisted inverted logic on which all forms of macabre bigoted reasoning rest, and it sums to aspirational stupidity when applied in comparison to any reasonable assessment of reality.
On the woke Left postmodern side a great many example of revenant magic exist, as well. Let us again describe briefly only one—but not a trivial one—for the time being. The emergence of the bizarre ideological tic of anti-binary sexuality, which seems to have popped into prominence almost overnight as these things go, insists that male and female are only social constructions that do not exist because biology, at least as scientists understand the term, supposedly has no bearing on gender. So with some hormones and wishful thinking a boy can readily become a girl and a girl can become a boy, and then revert back again if so desired. Change your outfit, change your gender—no big deal. This nonsense is in some cases being pushed on children as young as six and seven years old. Anatomical and, even more determinative, chromosomal reality can simply be ignored because, supposedly, it isn’t as real as subjective experience. How this can be asserted as true for humans as mammals but not for other mammals, or any primates, is another cause of wide-mouthed wonder. It can be thus because it is magical thinking par excellance, which would be merely a curiosity worthy of wonder were it not too often aimed at children often against the will of their own parents.
We have entered a time in the postmodern Age of Spectacle in which the laws of consanguinity and metamorphosis define the zenith of spectacle. Postmodernism begins to look a whole lot like pre-modernism, only, as Woody Allen might say, “with an explanation”—and what is asserted by way of explanation as theory begins to look a whole lot like lightweight ideology.10
Differences between pre- and postmodernism do exist, but the current mania is ecumenical about them: If something—anything really, whether a film, an artistic concept, an academic theory, a political cult, any given conspiracy theory a cult hatches, and far more besides, not to exclude sexual exhibitionism—exudes these two laws then that thing will be given highest perceptual priority qua spectacle, rapt clickbait media attention, and frequently highest honor because of its perceptual priority.
Thus, to return for a moment to the non-binary tic, transsexuals have been around in small numbers throughout the existence of modern anatomical humans these past roughly 250,000 years. They deserve respect, compassion, legal protection from abuse and discrimination, and medicine, if desired, insofar as it may prove ameliorative of their circumstances. (Whether they seek or deserve special celebration every March 31 is a matter, perhaps, of either taste or discretion.) There is nothing magical about any of that. They may be only a fraction of 1 percent of the population—0.4 percent seems the highest credible estimate—but out of a population of 335 million Americans that comes to around 1.34 million people, and of that probably at least 30,000 are pre-pubescent school-age children. Those are not such tiny numbers that they should be ignored. But neither are they such huge numbers that they should dominate the nation’s political consciousness over a whole range of policy issues.
The woke impulse to insist on precisely that dominance is in some ways less than meets the eye. The real passion behind wishing to elevate this tiny minority via a utopian ideology to the status of a super-normal group of ideal human beings only occurs because transsexuality fits perfectly with the magical formula of the postmodern premise: consanguinity and metamorphosis. Transsexuals have acquired an aura of worship-worthy avatars of postmodern fungibility. Not surprisingly, a new term for gender/sexual fluidity is abrosexual—abro from the Greek meaning graceful or delicate.11 How sweet. Whether any of these usually troubled folks ever asked for this dubious honor is a question few of our postmodern sexual theologues stop to ponder in their haze of “luxury thinking,” as Glenn Loury has termed it.
None of this suggests any moral equivalence or equivalence of danger between the magic-addled Left and the magic-addled Right. At present the magic-addled Right is far more dangerous, near-term, to the country’s constitutional order; the magic-addled Left is probably more dangerous to the culture in the longer run, and has already ensconced itself as the default bi-coastal salon culture. It is to suggest that at both extremes we are witnessing not just different views but the same state of dreamlike escapism based on an ideological current gone philosophically berserk. Whatever the causes and context, the magical dispensation is spreading, rather like “the Nothing” in The Never Ending Story. As was the case in the film, we need to stop it before it’s too late. Where is Bastian Bux when we need him?
Now, finally for today, to summarize the path ahead by fleshing out a bit the Table of Contents provided in No. 1 last week. Part I of two parts plus an epilogical conclusion, called “Puzzle Pieces,” consists of five chapters.
Chapter 1, “Seven Theories of American Dysfunction,” lays out a typology of analyses of American dysfunction, and shows where, for all the considerable merits of the scholarship on offer, it falls short. One must begin with what is before proceeding to what ought to be.
Chapter 2, “Fragile Affluence and Postmodern Decadence,” discusses the first of three preconditions necessary for an Age of Spectacle to have arisen and set roots. It is about an old subject: the distortive individual and social psychology of wealth.
Chapter 3, “The End of Modernity,” is about the second precondition: the origin stories we no longer tell ourselves, and the substitutes from the realm of “industrial folklore” that have taken their place. The chapter charts the main reason for the malignant misalignment of attitudes and institutions in contemporary American political life.
Chapter 4, “From Deep Literacy to Cyberaddiction” discusses the third precondition: the “evil twins” of rapidly decaying written culture and the still-underappreciated impact of the digital tsunami on how American brains are being changed by self-immersion in technovelties of unprecedented power and impact.
Chapter 5, “The Cultural Contradictions of Liberal Democracy,” integrates the three preconditions of the Age of Spectacle and sets them in the broader historical and intellectual context of political thought. Some of that context includes some very old, but still relevant, “big fat” ancient Greek idea.
Part II, “Emerging Picture,” gets to the essence of what is meant by spectacle in the context of the book’s argument. It consists of four chapters.
Chapter 6, “Doing a Ripley: Spectacle Defined and Illustrated,” proffers a specific definition of how spectacle works in American culture and political life. It granularly describes the nuts and bolts of how both horseshoe extremes of American politics—Right and Left—transform reality into opportunistically, if still self-believed, scripted distortions of that reality.
Chapter 7, “The Neuroscience of Spectacle: Shiny Electrons and the Novelty Bias,” delves into the human brain and endocrine system. It shows how the political entrepreneurs of spectacle, as well as the giant corporations that have come to dominate the U.S. and much of the global economy, use neuroscience to manipulate humans as though we are merely moist robots—and sketches the conditions under which such manipulations are likely to work. The chapter shows how rapidly proliferating opportunities via our beloved digital gadgets to use intermittent reward structures to produce a luxuriant flow of mini-wows for ourselves virtually at will, 24/7 if need be, primes us to seek and to adulate the big-wows of spectacle-infused entertainment.
Chapter 8, “The Mad Dialectic of Nostalgia and Utopia in the Infotainment Era,” brings the analysis of chapter 7 into the specific world of American political discourse. It ranges across many examples that show inter alia how illiberal Left and illiberal Rights have far more in common than either extreme would imagine or admit. It shows how we have become stranded between nostalgia for a past America that never was and a yearning for a future American that can never be.
Chapter 9, “Beyond Ripley: Spectacle and the Future of American Politics,” projects the foregoing analysis in Part II into the future unless something happens to arrest and reverse recent cultural and political trajectories. It is not a pretty picture.
The Epilogue consists of Chapter 10: “What Politics Can Do, What We Must Do.” It follows that if culture is core and politics is epiphenomenal to it, there is a strict limit on what normal politics can do to alleviate the current dire dysfunction we suffer. But that limit isn’t nothing: Plenty of remedies are at hand, both fairly simple ones and much bolder ones, if only the political will can develop to take these ideas—spelled out in some detail—seriously. Political remediation can, possibly, buy time for the culture to redeem itself. But under the circumstances that redemption has to be a bottom-up, social movement process consisting of individuals who grasp the problems and, starting with their own and their families’ lives, determine to put things aright. There is hope.
For example, Heinz Werner, Comparative Psychology of Mental Development (International Universities Press, 1940, 1948.) This book, in print as recently as 1980, illustrates well the reigning bioessentialist intellectual constructs of the day, several of which are deeply embarrassing in contemporary light even should they turn out to be not entirely wrong.
For a vivid recent “Lord of the Flies” example see Keith L. Alexander, “Man fatally beaten in DC alley had struggled with mental illness for years,” Washington Post, April 7, 2024, p.1. The killers were 12- and 13-year old girls, one of whom was noticed sucking her thumb as she sat in court during her arraignment.
This is not a new idea; Daniel Boorstin suggested it in his 1961 book The Image at a time when the sway of technological influence over American society and politics was but a fraction of what it has since become.
Note Alison Winter’s brilliant, pathbreaking 2012 book Memory: Fragments of Modern History from the University of Chicago Press.
Irving Louis Horowitz, Radicalism and the Revolt Against Reason: The Social Theories of Georges Sorel (Southern Illinois University Press, 1968), p. 101.
Anyone unclear as to what is meant here might usefully consult Michael Walzer, “On the Role of Symbolism in Political Thought,” Political Science Quarterly, June 1967.
I here follow Ernst Cassirer’s famous second volume of his masterwork, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, published originally in German about a century ago.
We know the Greek myths thanks mainly to Ovid, whose fifteen-volume Latin masterpiece captured the tradition in epic poetry during the First Century BCE. Not coincidentally, Ovid titled his masterwork Metamorphoses.
For details of what MAGA entrepreneurs (a.k.a. liars) did with the exploding Bentley, see Charlie Sykes, “Anatomy of a Fake Attack,” Morning Shots (The Bulwark), November 27, 2023. For the Key Bridge-Dali incident, see Donie O’Sullivan, “How the Baltimore bridge collapse spawned a torrent of instant conspiracy theories,” CNN News, March 28, 2024.
If you detect a reference in passing here to Critical Race Theory (CRT) you are on point. We will return to this matter below, but for now I need to make one thing vividly clear: I do not need marxoid ideologues propounding risible zero-sum nonsense about human social nature to lecture me about the continued stickiness of slavery and segregation in American life. I grew up in segregation and my entire adult life has been suffused with the unfinished business still at hand in bringing American reality in line with American ideals at their best. I need to say this up front because the CRT ideological playbook ordains that anyone who criticizes CRT—which shape-shifts its essence as required in the moment—must be stigmatized as a racist. This is a scoundrel tactic par excellance, designed to avoid taking criticism seriously by name-calling the critic in the general fashion of newly pubescent adolescents. Warning: It doesn’t work on me, except of course in the case of those already thick into the CRT cult. Example? Anyone who thinks that “Uncovering the Impact: Examining the Real-Life Applications of Critical Race Theory,” authored by “staff” at thinkrubix.com, is a serious analysis.
See Helen Millar, “What to know about abrosexuality,” MedicalNewsToday.com, June 26, 2023. Neither genitalia nor chromosomes are mentioned in this article.