The Age of Spectacle, No. 45 out of 45
Chapter 10: Spectacle and the American Future, part 5 of 5
As regular Raspberry Patch readers know, I sometimes publish elsewhere. Sometimes there is overlap between what appears here and what doesn’t, although never verbatim or simultaneous. Different readerships in different countries, and sometimes the same country, have different tastes and stamina levels for analytical material. It has been and will continue to be my standard modus operandi to let Raspberry Patch readers know of other venues of publication. So here is the latest: “NATO, R.I.P.: Implications for Asian Security,” RSIS Commentary 038/2025, 24 February 2025.
And now the final installment of The Age of Spectacle manuscript, number 45 of 45, number 1 having appeared back on April 5 of 2024. The process has done me much good, but the manuscript needs at the least one more major scrubbing, polishing, and buffing before I expose it to any would-be publisher. Before doing that, too, I look forward to synoptic critiques of my argument, for until I hear the best of these I cannot know how to adjust the manuscript to achieve my highest internal standards of excellence for it.
Otherwise, in the real micro-world of The Raspberry Patch things are looking up: We’ve had snowbells in the yard now for some weeks, the winter aconite just bloomed its golden glory, last season’s coreopsis detritus can now be cleared away into the compose barrel to make way for new growth, and the soil/compost pile near our sunroom can now be relocated, along with the saved bags of mulch from autumn, to where they belong. Oh joy.
Chapter 10: Spectacle and the American Future, part 5 of 5
. . . It also creates a real problem for Japan, South Korea, India, Singapore, the Philippines, and others in Asia--but differently so. The second Trump Administration is full of China hawks, in some cases—mainly in the military—irrationally so. New Schedule C hawks abound now, as well. But they do not sing in harmony with the older hawks, but rather make for cacophony. Against the general anti-Chinese hum a discordant note sounds: President Trump has made clear that the Administration will not defend Taiwan, and so virtually invites President Xi to attack it. After all, its main merit in past U.S. political iconography is its democratic standing, about which Trump and his minions care not in the least; otherwise it is a strategic liability because of its geographical vulnerability. Besides, in an idealized sphere-of-influence world Taiwan is in China’s sphere. Other fledging Administration hawks define China’s challenge as being mainly technological and economic, not geopolitical or military. Alas, what’s a military-minded anti-China hawk to do? No one knows how U.S. anti-Chinese hawkery will fledge, and with U.S. defense budgets for years ahead—so far as we know today—more likely to fall than rise, what Chinese leaders will make of whatever U.S. posture arises. In Beijing, however, as in any circle of realists, capacities will matter more than words.
Elsewhere in Asia U.S. allies will retain transactional value, but transactional value only—as will related basing and facility rights and export markets for U.S. arms they offer. Those facilities may become more important in American eyes, but at the same time become functionally less useful if the second Trump Administration lets the U.S. global basing footprint diminish and decay.
Asian associates of the United States are used to coldblooded realism in ways that Europeans, Germans in particular, have long since left behind. Hence the self-abnegation of the United States from the role of provider of common security goods will have softer and more delayed implications in Asia than it will in Europe.
Trump does not care about other peoples’ problems, domestic or foreign. Indeed, the existence of such problems strikes him as potential opportunities for predation. He neither understands nor cares about the WMD proliferation implications of U.S. strategic self-abnegation, not just for the security of others but also for U.S. security. There is not a chance he knows Shakespeare’s sage advice from Measure for Measure (Act II, Scene 2):
O, it is excellent
To have a giant’s strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.
And there is not a chance he knows Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue, or Machiavelli’s The Prince, but he nevertheless senses their gist: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” He and many others think this is the way the world is and must be, and because so many people think this way, they create a world after their wholly volitional image of it. Imaginatio facit casum, remember? Tragedy has no truer or more common formula.
The American sphere is the New World, which includes most—perhaps all—of both the Arctic and Antarctic. Trump has pledged new territorial expansion during his second term and has not ruled out using force to achieve it. The basic idea is that if the United States does not object to Russian and Chinese use of force in their spheres then they will not, had better not, object to our use of it in our sphere. Trump sees the world in terms of mafioso territorial zones in large American cities like New York. He relishes the brutality associated with it, too, and the violence, so long as it is of the punch-down variety whenever he is engaged in it. Back in 2016, before the November election of that year, Ted Cruz understood something most of his peers did not: “Trump has a consistent pattern of inciting violence.”[1] Trump may be the most deeply affected victim of the Mean World Syndrome ever born.
What about most of the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa? They will be the subject of great power deal-making without their participation. Some parts, maybe Gaza, seem candidates for postmodern re-colonization, ethnic cleaning, and real-estate “urban renewal.” Presidents don’t change once entered into the Oval Office; they just think the same only larger. Trump has been a real estate developer, and so he remains. He knows no other model for thinking about large organizations other than that of a for-profit business, of which he is CEO. (Elon Musk, he thinks, is CFO.) He has achieved a hostile takeover of the U.S. Government; he and his associates are now busy cutting costs in anticipation of striping the “business” of what is left for their own money-making purposes. Hence the wild notion of replacing the Internal Revenue Service with an External Revenue Service based on tariff revenue, and other inanities that reflect Trump’s complete failure to grasp what a government is, and what a democratic one is supposed to do.
And the parts of the world not suitable? “Shithole countries,” to quote the President from his first term, so who cares?
Toward a New Enlightenment
Just in case what now passes for normal abnormal politics in the United States doesn’t improve soon, we need a plan B that starts from a very different premise than that of conventional politics: bottom up, not top down. If government as it is cannot fix the problems, then We the People must fix the problems and by so doing eventually fix the government. It will get worse before it gets better; it will probably have to get a lot worse before a real alternative rising as a social movement will change much of anything. Said the Prince of Condé in the mid-16th century: “We should have perished, had we not been so near to perishing.”[2] His is a disturbing yet still hopeful remark worth taking to heart.
Politics is an emanation of society, and of culture amid society. Culture shapes politics, so if something is awry in the culture it will show up in one way or others in politics. It produces a kind of New England problem: Can’t get there from here, can’t fix culture from politics; it has ultimately to be the other way around, fixing politics from a renewed, refreshed culture. So what government cannot do to solve America’s problems Americans must do for themselves, with governmental reform as an outcome rather than a premise to be achieved by some unknown, because nonexistent, deus ex machina.
Thomas Carlyle wrote nearly two centuries ago that, “All reform except a moral one will prove unavailing.”[3] In other words, We the People, one by one from the bottom up, summing to a social movement influential enough to affect democratic politics, must address the “why” questions of governance; merely addressing the “how” questions will never prove adequate to make a difference. That means that the moral questions intrinsic to politics must be asked, honestly and openly debated, and resolved by the best available compromise. But for that to happen individuals must come to the agora with their own moral compass straight in their heads. It won’t help to put our heads together if our heads are mostly addled from cyberaddiction, shorn of patience, prone to adolescent incivility, incapable of moral reasoning, and selfish beyond repair.
John Adams in particular, most of the Founders with him, would not have hesitated in the slightest over the question of where people’s moral center was to be found: within the faith communities that shaped American society from the get-go, and so made limited and self-limiting government possible. Only a self-disciplined people could construct a genuine federalism based on maximum feasible subsidiarity that would be something other than a formula for bigoted localized-majoritarian authoritarianism.
So a bottom-up approach to political reform must identify the source of moral probity that can unite enough of us to make a cultural tipping-point possible, now in the absence of the cultural sway of those traditional faith communities that turned the trick in the late 18th century. If the source isn’t, or can’t be any longer, one of extrinsic revelation defined by a more or less tolerant christological culture, then what can it be?
Maybe better to start by stipulating what it cannot be. Whatever turns out to be our elixir of restored sanity, it cannot be compatible with the nature of affluence we enjoy, or abuse, today. I meant affirmatively in Chapter 1 the quote from John Adams and the one from Plato about luxury being incompatible with moderation and self-discipline. But it’s not affluence meant as a static noun, or invoked unclothed by its present sociological garb. It’s a form of affluence now characterized by plutocratic gigantism both public and private, as if that distinction still matters as much as we suppose. That kind of affluence renders it morally berserk not least because it is environmentally irresponsible. The fact that younger cohorts have not earned and so do not understand or appreciate where their affluence comes from makes them, in a way, mini-heirheads who are likely to squander what they, indeed what we, have. It is by no means clear that the next several American generations will be able to generate the kind of real wealth achieved by their forebears. Decadence is not economically efficient. The only thing worse for moral sanity than affluence is the fear of losing affluence.
The Enlightenment, as we described it in Part I, was composed of a twinning of a religious movement and the rise of paradigm-shifting new knowledge of the world. Protestantism’s modernist shard and the Age of Reason formed a cultural marriage made here on earth that birthed new ideas of liberalism and democracy both--and eventually paired them in one political house. The same kind of twinning needs to happen again, to create a New Enlightenment, now that our old forms appear to be exhausted. As we scan the scene, it seems that the most promising combination could be a spiritualized concern for the preservation of the natural world--whether expressed in formal churched ways or in other ways--joined to new knowledge of human nature afforded by neuroscience. Both parts of that twinning exist; they merely need to grow and merge. That combination may in turn redefine what we understand by the nobility of work, for it will take a lot of work to bring forth and make resonant a New Enlightenment.
Note just one example of a mental reformation the culture needs to generate a democratic political revival. In the argument over immigration, legal as well as illegal, many argue that we need immigrants from poor countries to do the scut jobs Americans will not deign to do. This argument annoys me for two reasons. First, there much better reasons exist for favoring legal immigration so long as the economy and society can benefit from it economically and without pressing too hard against social comity. Second, more important, if home-born Americans are too decadent to do scut work, even if the incentives for doing it are leveled up to living-wage worthy, then we all have to get our heads straightened. All honest work is noble and should be rewarded as such. There is no good reason to think that Americans will not do that kind of work if the decadent stigma of disrespect for it is removed and they are paid something approaching the true social value, rather than the narrow labor market value, of their labor. These were, remember, among the jobs we often called “essential” during the COVID pandemic. That should tell us something we need to remember, namely: Yes, inequality of income, wealth, and status is an inevitable result of a functional balance in a liberal democracy, but that balance needs to be adjusted to make room for honorable Americans to perform honest and necessary work.[4]
Similarly, we must rededicate ourselves to Jefferson’s ideal of an educated citizenry. American K-12 education is increasingly a disgrace and a disappointment, and one of the reasons is that we as a society treat the professionals who teach our children worse than we treat scullery maids. We deny them the freedom to do their jobs as they best know how to do with perhaps well-intentioned but nevertheless bureaucratized idiocies like “No Child Left Behind,” and we both under-pay and under-respect them. If American society fails to restore the path to deep reading and engagement with nature to their proper elevated places in elementary education, and lets the epidemic of screen overexposure, addiction, and related mental misanthropies grow even worse with AI on our portal, then the hope that future generations will solve tomorrow what we cannot solve today will be in vain.
This is not just a practical matter; it is very much also a moral one. We want Americans living and yet to be born to live in an environment, physical and cultural, where they have the freedom and resources to thrive. That is what a devotion to human dignity demands, and that must start with a collective moral determination, not a technical exercise, to educate our children—and ongoingly educate ourselves through life—to the task. That obligation is not and cannot always be entertaining, and moral reasoning cannot always be reduced to a game. We cannot as a culture continue on playing hide-and-go-seek with each other. We, each of us, need to get back safely to base, and then do something serious for a change.
The re-moralization of American culture will never come top-down from American elites as they now exist, anymore than, as Carlyle said, the re-moralization of British society could in the 19th century. It will only come family by family, and it will only come with at-scale re-engagement with nature, honest labor, and the de-isolation of everyday social life from the press of our cyber-gadgets. It will only come after the formation of a new consensus concerning what a good society is in the 21st century that we will have a chance to shape a political economy conducive to it. As things stand today, a political economy shaped by forces but barely understood and beyond the influence of politics-as-usual is creating what amounts to a predetermined downstream moral framework for American society—and that is precisely backwards from how a liberal democratic order is supposed to work. We the People are supposed to be sovereign, but a populace as spectacle dazzled and dizzy as we are can no longer even define the term, or care to try.
So the prior problem before looking at policy programmatics is to get our individual and then our collective heads straight. And that means finding the golden mean between making best use of humanity’s ingenuity on the one hand and controlling its products so as not to derange our now-revealed fragile human nature on the other. From cyberaddicion all the way to the dangers posed by runaway, uncontrolled artificial intelligence, we have put ourselves at neuro-cognitive risk of losing our ability to analyze and respond purposefully to the post-evolutionary artificial world we have somewhat absentmindedly brought into being. As a culture we are addicted to distraction by whatever spectacular shiny object intrudes next upon our field of vision. We all need to look away from the avalanche of counterfeit mediated images, take a deep breath, and live more in the natural dimensions of the world as it truly is. “The internet, as we all know, is real life now. . .” chimed The Bulwark on February 28, 2025, a matter-of-fact and metaphorically accurate piece of wit of a kind we have grown used to lately. Wit is fun and glibness has its uses; but this is deadly serious business, so we would be wise not to overdo “Root Beer Syndrome”-style throw-it-all-away sarcasm. The real world is plenty spectacular if only we take the time and adapt our focus to see and appreciate it. This is what religious souls from all venerable faith communities have called the experience of radical awe, and that experience is as real as we become genuinely appreciative of our lives.
This is not easy to do these days, admittedly, especially for those fully immersed in right-angled, primary-colored man-made environments. It takes willpower and willpower takes focus—and the capacity for sustained focus is exactly what screen addictions deprive us of, so in a sense the problem gets locked in for many people proportional to the addictions they burden themselves. As one consequence among several, what many used to appreciate as solitude now manifests in a pathologically impatient social world as loneliness; not seeing that the difference between the two is a confusion potentially inside each of us. As Dr. Cytowic reminds us, solitude has what loneliness needs, namely an inner anchor, a centering of identity; loneliness wants what solitude has, namely the ability to feel comfortable in one’s own skin.
Another, deeper explanation for the power of distraction, now supercharged by technology, is also worth considering despite its being essentially immune to research and hence unprovable. Humans have always sought distractions. A distraction from working on a necessary task is another way of describing downtime, and downtime is good for mental health. We cannot always be “on” in beta or gamma, we do need to get to sleep of an evening, and so alpha tending toward theta is normal and functional for us. But philosophers have pondered distractions in a more fundamental sense as ways to avoid contemplating mortality, especially one’s own. The French philosopher Luc Ferry has put the matter simply (indeed, too simply): Religions, he reasons, are ways of dealing with the existential terror that comes of recognizing one’s own mortality with God, and philosophies are means for doing the same thing without God, or an idea of god.
Ferry’s formulation under-represents both what religion is and what philosophy can do; neither is justifiably reduced to a mortality crutch. But never mind: It is probably true that in an increasingly post-religious West—post-religious here meaning post-Abrahamic or post-traditional, where at least outside the United States only a minority still believe in or hope for some kind of traditionally defined afterlife of consciousness—the appeal of distractions may be far more intense than it once was. If people have become deeply averse to being alone with their own thoughts, this may be the deepest underlying source for it, deeper even than using distractions to avoid thinking about various lesser fears and dangers—and in a zero-sum world with no internalized rules there is plenty to choose from. So perhaps the technology merely affords us a means to achieve a generous supply of distractions, and in that sense represents the supply side of the mortality-escapism phenomenon. But mortality angst may now indeed dominate the complementary demand side.
We must not channel Ned Ludd, nor cosplay as a romantic narodnik. Rousseauean primitivism as an ideal is plainly counterproductive—just ask your doctor if you don’t believe me.[5] Nor will adopting traditional religious views save most people from whatever it is they think they need saving from, though that can and does help some. You could smash your magic rectangle and do yourself a favor, but you might instead consider trading it in for an audio-only device; my eldest son, and several other ADHD-diagnosed people I know, abjure smartphones for old-fashioned screenless flip-phones. Some do it because they understand the nexus between digital technology and human neurology, others do it from inspired instinct.
Some might benefit, too, from hearing a writer’s prophecy of the internet world from more than thirty years ago:
The devil no longer moves about on cloven hooves, reeking of brimstone. He is an affable, efficient fellow. He claims to want to help us all along to a brighter, easier future, and his sales pitch is very smooth. I was, as the old song goes, almost persuaded. I saw what it could be like, our toil and misery replaced by a vivid pleasant dream. . . . Gone the rock in the field, the broken hoe, the grueling distances. “History,” said Stephen Daedelus, “is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” This may be the awakening, but it feels curiously like fantasies that circulate through our sleep. From deep in my heart I hear the voice that says, “Refuse it.”[6]
So, then, what to do? First, a 24-hour per week sabbath from magic rectangle use is a healthy restorative practice. But at fuller social scale no one will get anywhere trying to persuade the majority of contemporary, mostly affluent Americans that they need to abandon modern technology and return to an impoverished hard-scrabble life of primitive agriculture and pastoral wandering. Not even the Amish do that anymore. There is, in any case, no inherent virtue in abject poverty, needless disease, and the authoritarian hierarchies that have been common features of societies experiencing acute privation and existential scarcity.
Even maximum feasible subsidiarity must have strict limits, far more constraining than anything imaginable in the 19th and early 20th century. Governance scale, at whatever level—state, national, international, and perhaps even transnational at some point—must encompass control of technologies and their related socio-economic functions that cannot be adequately managed in more local ways. We can push all sorts of functions toward local first-users and first-responders, but we cannot dispense with larger structures to deal with a highly technologized national security function. We in America cannot control our borders or order commerce or banking on anything smaller than a national level. We would be unwise to forgo public health preparation, medical research, and major infrastructure elements on a national scale. Even investment in science and technology for the future cannot avoid aspects of the Net Effect; some activities require large-scale investment if not also operation to be efficient, even if on occasion only in order to find ways to de-scale advanced systems (like replacing fossil-fuel powered electricity grids with small underground nuclear power generators) for right-sized deployment.
We are social animals. Life is with people. This is why solitary confinement is the worst punishment penologists have even been able to devise. We know intuitively as well as social-scientifically that our face-to-face relationships within and beyond our families build trust, enrich our lives, create secure and cooperative community, and knit our larger national society together in common purpose. These relationships define identity and purpose for people, and form an internalized and shared architecture for positive-sum attitudes and behaviors. They also provide, ironically as may seem to some, the basis for genuine, as opposed to superficial, individuality. The idea that everyone can be or per force must be an individual in social thin air is absurd Randian nonsense, for it childishly confuses what are inherently complements with opposites.
By forfeiting too much responsibility for our own bespoke quotidian existence to mass markets and the state we have reamed out the social texture of our lives. We have fractured ourselves as we have anonymized so many of our daily responsibilities, and as a consequence we have lost the sense we once had of common purpose, responsibility, and future direction.[7] We need to reknit that social fabric on a human scale to enable maximum feasible human flourishing. Many people have realized this to one degree of focus or another. The movement in the United States called intentional communities, now more than three decades old, speaks to that fact, as do similar efforts elsewhere.[8] But we cannot reknit our social fabric at scale in the United States if we are constantly mesmerized by spectacle and dead set on engaging in the nonstop dopamine masturbation enabled by our cybergadgets.
Who Will Create the Garden?
In my “boomer” brain I find iconic song lyrics from the increasingly distant past repeatedly coming back to me when I try to envision a better future for America, and with it the world at large. One such lyric, however embarrassing to recall it may be to some, is Joni Mitchell’s chorus-closing line from the 1970 song “Woodstock.” Whatever exactly she meant, she sang: “And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” But songless poetry there is, as well. Composed soon a century ago, thus Robinson Jeffers’s opening lines of Return:
A little too abstract, a little too wise,
It is time for us to kiss the earth again.
But it’s the tongue-in-cheek chorus to John Prine’s characteristically wistful 1971 song “Spanish Pipedream” that, with updating and a few minor substitutions to suit particular religious tastes, fills in directive details missing from both Ms. Mitchell’s and Mr. Jeffers’s urgings:
Blow up your TV, throw away your paper,
Move to the country, build you a home.
Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches,
Try an’ find Jesus, on your own.
That’s exactly right, more so now than fifty-some years ago: We must reverse our technology-abetted alienation from the natural world, not by rejecting technology but by re-humanizing it. Example: I hope for a mostly post-plastic world, but not an entirely post-plastic one since some uses of plastic can replace metal and be lighter, more energy efficient, and safer (as in automobiles); space-age ceramics still holds unrealized promise. Not to re-humanize technology is unhealthy physically but just as unhealthy mentally.[9]
Anyone who senses the perils of just going with the flow of the cybernetic sewer knows that this is what we need to do. Better for some to do it in a New Pioneer Zone—look at my Winter 2017 National Affairs essay for details—cutting-edge community, but it can be done in many ways on various terms. The way to redeem America is to first redeem ourselves, our families, and our friends, because unless ordinary people do some extraordinary things pushing in a similar direction, it’s a sure thing the U.S. government will not do anything to help. Eventually, perhaps, our brain-dead, idea-free political elite will have no choice but to get in step. But more likely and hopefully, others who believe in a new way forward will need to democratically displace them as new horizons for American self-correction and progress come into view.
One garden can be a beautiful thing. Every child should have the benefit of one whether at home or at school, to teach patience and craft, to get hands in the soil planting and tending and harvesting, appreciating nature barefoot and sun-drenched as it was meant to be. There is no setting better for embodied cognition as the bellwether of learning than a garden. Gardens are also exceeding good at enabling us, and children as well, to do nothing—to just slow down and appreciate the silence that lets us hear something of our inner lives. Silence is an essential nutrient of spiritual life, just above ice cream it seems to me. Now more than ever, children need to be taught how not to become prisoners of the made-man environment their elders have wrought. A garden is the optimal classroom for that lesson.
Every child, too, should be asked to contemplate the great mystery of a seed—a simple little seed. A seed can stay dormant for years, decades in many cases, and not germinate until conditions are just right. One of those conditions is the amount of infra-red light a seed is exposed to, so that it will not germinate too deeply or not deeply enough in the soil. Is a seed alive all that time when it is dormant, even though no metabolism of any kind can be detected by the most sensitive instruments? If it isn’t alive, how can it suddenly become alive? Is a seed, then, a like a virus? These are questions that can captivate and motivate children to wonder and study perhaps like no others.
Many gardens can be more beautiful still, especially when their benefits and bounty are shared. This is happening already, pushed forth by the lockdowns of the COVID years. As George Ball, chairman of the W. Atlee Burpee company put it, the company’s annual survey of customers found for the first time in 2023 that, “most of our customers prioritized ethereal and emotional rewards . . . over tangible, down-to-earth reasons. . . .” American gardening, Ball concluded,
is undergoing a transformation, a horticultural tectonic shift. Gardeners are gardening primarily for peace of mind, meditative space, a sense of higher power and an antidote to anxiety. . . . Our core customers, numbering in the millions, have begun to dwell in both an inner and outer garden.
Ball even has an inkling of why this has been happening:
[R]ecent quantum leaps in personal telecommunications have spawned a wasteland of unsocial media and public-private fantasy worlds. By forcing us to focus on our own backyards, the pandemic lockdowns both rehabilitated those suffering from screen addiction by introducing them to a new world of nature and inspired existing gardens to expand. And voilà, 18.3 million new gardeners in 2022, and one year later, the inner garden makes its debut.[10]
Alas, the lockdowns did not rehabilitate everyone suffering from screen addictions; for some it created addictions or made existing ones worse. But the main point remains.
America reimagined as the interacting sum of many millions of gardens, tens of millions, accumulating to the largest and most beautiful garden in the history of the world, is a beautiful prospect. Its urban as well as suburban and rural dimensions displayed for the whole world to see and admire, America can again become a beacon—a new city on a hill—worthy of the admiration and respect of mankind. Imagine further joining with gardens in Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean to make North America the most productive, nurturing, and beautiful garden on Planet Earth. Imagine cities where sparrows and starlings do not have to raise the pitch of their calls to compensate for noise pollution. (They do as things stand now: Woodland sounds rarely surpass 40 decibels and are usually closer to 20-25 decibels, but city sounds typically exceed 65 decibels.)
Close your eyes and try to see America as a mega-garden.[11] Listen to the birds as you do. It will help you, and the more of us who try to see and listen anew, the more we will be ready and able to help each other build that garden. We will then, as a song in my head says, be able to joyously “bring our children down to the riverside.”
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: Hypothesis Unfurled
The Cyberlution
The Republic of Spectacle: A Pocket Chronology
The Spectocracy Is Risen
Why This Argument Is Different from All Other Arguments
Opening Acts and the Main Attraction
Obdurate Notes on Style and Tone
A Glossary of Neologisms
PART I: Puzzle Pieces
1. Fragilized Affluence and Postmodern Decadence: Underturtle I
Government as Entertainment
The Accidental Aristocracy
Deafness to Classical Liberalism
The Culture of Dematerialization
Affluence and 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
Segmented Economies and Perforated Moral Communities
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
Sex Magic
Word Magic
Business Magic
Progress as Sarcasm, 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
Chat Crap
4. Cyber-Orality Rising: 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
Foreshadowing a Shadow Effect
5. The Cultural Contradictions of Liberal Democracy: An Under-Underturtle
A Big, Fat, Ancient Greek Idea
The American Story Again, This Time with Feeling
Footnotes to Plato
Some For Instances
Jefferson à la Carte
Revering the Irreverent
The Deep Source of the American Meliorist State
The Great Morphing
Myth, Magic, and Immaturity
The Wages of Fantasy
Pull It Up By the Roots
The Crux
PART II: Emerging Picture
6. “Doing a Ripley”: Spectacle Defined and Illustrated
Astounding Complexes and Technical Events from TV to Smartphones
Tricks, Illusions, and Cons
Fakers, Frauds With Halos, and Magnificos
Projectionist Fraud as a Way of Life
Old Ripleys, New Ripleys
Fake News
Trump as Master of Contrafiction
Conspiracy Soup
Cognitive Illusions
Facticity Termites
Conditioning for Spectacle
To the Neuroscience
7. The Neuroscience of Spectacle: Research and Implications
Brain Power
Seeing the Light
Surfing Your Brainwaves
Suffer the Children
The Screen!
Easy Rider
The Graphic Revolution, Memory, and the Triumph of Appearances
McLuhan Was Wrong, and Right
Brain Shadows
No Need to Exaggerate
8. Cognitive Gluttony: Race and Gender
Cognitive Gluttony Racialized
Ripleys on the Left
More Sex
Abortion: Serious Issues, Specious Arguments, Sunken Roots
Beyond Feminism
I’m a Man, I Spell M-A-N
9. Saints and Cynics: Common Roots of Contemporary America Illiberalism
Different Birds, Same Feathers
The Touching of the Extremes
Left to Right and Back Again
Look Away Dixieland
Spectacle in Stereo
The Right’s Crazy SOB Competition
The Irony of Leveling
Human Nature
What November 5, 2024 Means
10. Spectacle and the American Future
You Are the Tube and the Tube Is You
The Normalization of Political Mystification
Bad Philosophy, Bad Consequences
Is Woke Really Broke?
Myth as Model
The AI Spectre
The Futility of Conventional Politics
A Few National Security Implications
Meanwhile…
Who Will Create the Garden?
A Short Epilogue
Acknowledgments
[1] Cruz in 2016 quoted in Matt Viser, “For Trump, calamity spurs sense of vindication,” Washington Post, January 11, 2021, p. A12.
[2] Quoted by Tocqueville in Recollections (Anchor, 1971), p. 179.
[3] “Corn-Law Rhymes,” Edinburgh Review, 1832.
[4] See my proposal for an Essential-Services Workers Union in
[5] Note Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (Oxford University Press, 1964) for an analysis of how counterproductive the excessive romanticization of nature can be.
[6] Of course I refer again to the prophet Sven Birkerts, in The Gutenberg Elegies, p. 229. Stephen Daedelus, for those who do not know, is James Joyce’s literary alter ego in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).
[7] One book with a clear sense of what has been going on is Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Harvard/Belknap, 2011).
[8] See the homepage of the Foundational for Intentional Community at ic.org for a way in to learn about these communities. Its headquarters are located at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in Rutledge, Missouri.
[9] It is hard to know what to think when the daily newspaper tells you about a serious scientific study, from the Max Planck Institute no less, that informs us that listening to birdsongs is good for one’s mental health. See Richard Sima, “Why listening to the birds is good for your mental health,” Washington Post, May 30, 2023, p. E1. Any normal person knows this from experience. The fact that this is news to many people just illustrates how alienated from nature our culture has become.
[10] George Ball “What motivates Americans to garden? Emotional benefits.” Sacramento Bee, September 7, 2023, p. 13A.
[11] I once wrote a deliberately rollicking essay about peppers and pickled peppers, and I ended it like this: “Plant a garden. Grow some peppers. Pickle the surplus you don’t eat fresh. Teach others, especially young people, how to plant, nurture, harvest, and pickle. The time you invest in peppers will likely be time you won’t spend staring at screens. On that basis alone your life will improve. It will become delicious.” “In a Pickle with a Peck of Pickled Peppers,” The American Interest, December 22, 2019.