The Age of Spectacle, Part 10
Chapter 3: Underturtle II: Our Lost Origin Stories at the End of Modernity, part 2
Today The Raspberry Patch continues with the roll out of The Age of Spectacle manuscript, with part 10 of the project—that being the second part of Chapter 3. All too typically, it’s not in as polished a shape as I’d like. But it’s improving with every exertion. I hope.
Remember too please, we are still in Part I of the whole, called “Puzzle Pieces”; see the Table of Contents below the post to orient yourself if you wish or need to do so. Presenting our three underturtles is taking much time and language. It is necessary to the “everything bagel” understanding I seek to provide of contemporary American socio-cultural and political dysfunction because, in my view, only a comprehensive account of sources from the past can properly undergird a firm grasp of the present and serve as a basis for any remediation that may be possible. It is very, very hard to solve or even manage a problem set that is improperly or only partially understood.
Besides, as I’ve said before, it’s good for you. If you’re like a great many Americans these days—those younger than about 40, in particular—it will moderate your frenetic pace and help enable you to actually think, not just about this subject but about subjects in general. Not sort of think, which is what happens when you’re chronically rushed and habitually shortcutting every intellectual effort that confronts you, but really think to the level of which you are doubtless capable….but perhaps have yet to realize for being trapped in an artificial digitalized time warp. In a sense, I have somewhat short-shrifted[1] usually prudent principles of exclusion in the manuscript in part to help younger readers learn what a comprehensive analysis even looks like because, with pretty much everyone dashing madly about, the experience has become all too rare.
Just two further introductory notes before we get to part 2 of Chapter 3. First, I went into last week’s post to fix the footnote numbers and tidy up a few minor typos. The Substack template left off the footnotes when I inserted my text in the writing box, so I had to enter them manually. When I did that, it numbered every footnote with the number 1. Sometimes when I dump text into the Substack template its gets everything perfectly right, and sometimes--for reasons ever mysterious to me—it doesn’t. This last time it didn’t; what’ll happen this time? No idea. I’m not complaining, mind you. I’m grateful for the Substack program all around. Just sayin’…..
Second, this past Saturday, the day after the previous post, my family (at the moment consisting of myself, my wife, my daughter and son-in-law and their three daughters ages 10, 8, and 6….also two dogs, an aged firebelly newt and an even more aged cockatiel) hosted an impromptu lawn party. We were, including the children, thirteen people. One guest, an elementary-school art teacher, was actually invited over to the house by my daughter; the rest just showed up….something our society could do with more of these days.
We sat together for a few hours, and while we were talking about this and that at least three of our guests were episodically if not continuously looking down at their lap-situated smartphones. I don’t mean to say that they were self-alienated from the conversation—not at all. They were instead multitasking in a way that rendered them something like a hybrid public-private enterprise. Multitasking is just doing more than one thing within a given clot of time and doing it less well than would have been the case had attention been undivided. I know there is a widespread conceit which declaims that this is not so. But it is so. If you multiply any number by one you get the number; same with time: If you try to multiply one hour by itself thinking you’ll get two hours…well, you won’t.
These multitasking guests were all 40 or younger, and it is clear that doing this is not considered rude in their age cohort. I won’t belabor the etiquette issue here, which started many years ago with the phenomenon of call-waiting. Call-waiting encouraged people to stiff the other party in an ongoing conversation just for the prospect of one person commencing a different conversation. This was rude, but quickly became so common as not to be perceived as rude. It was yet another case of a mechanical extension of other people becoming master and the hapless individual on the other end of the line becoming either a slave, or at best an attendee, to the machine. Of course this happens all the time now, voicemail systems in almost every office in the country bearing witness.
Norbert Wiener warned about all this back in 1948 in his seminal book Cybernetics: On Control of Communication in the Animal and the Machine: “We are the slaves of our technical improvement. . . . We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves in order to exist in this new environment. We can no longer live in the old one. Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions. . . . The world of the future will be an even more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.”
But few remember Wiener’s warning and others like it, including one, for example, from B.F. Skinner in his otherwise odious 1971 book Beyond Freedom and Dignity that machines were capable, if put in the wrong hands, of being the key to “a system of slavery so well designed that that it does not breed revolt. . .” If he were still with us Skinner would probably admit that the wrong hands are doing well and that not even enlightened scientists in control of everything, having displaced what he described as the silly notions of human agency and moral reasoning, could wrest control from them.
Our obliviousness to the lure of technology can diminish our humanity if we let it. So pace current mores, it is rude to be nearly constantly glancing at a machine while in the engaged presence of other flesh-blood-and-soul human beings. It also belies addiction much of the time. It signals—please pardon the bluntness of my expression—public dopamine masturbation. How can this addiction be fought?
One way you personally can fight it is to declare for yourself a smartphone Sabbath once each week. Choose a 24-hour period to shut off your phone and put it away out of sight, for mere sight of it bears the power of distraction. Avoid checking email and social media messages on your computer, too. During those 24 hours be in nature—a garden is most useful for the purpose if a walk in the woods is not handy—and dwell directly, face-to-face with other people at least some of the time. If you obey a smartphone Sabbath for just two months without skipping a week, I promise that you will notice a benign difference in your temperament and capacity for mindfulness. You can slow your subjective sense of time down if you know how, and if you try.
This suggestion for a digital Sabbath comes later, toward the very end of The Age of Spectacle manuscript. You didn’t really think I had wandered far off point from The Age of Spectacle, did you? No; which brings us back around and serves as a on-ramp for part 2 of Chapter 3. This kind of observation is where we are ultimately headed, but I decided not to make you wait longer than necessary for this advice. The experience of this past Saturday, pleasant all around as it truly was despite its dulling patina of multitasking, persuaded me that it’s too urgent to countenance unnecessary delay.
And so now…..
……The American Story
American leaders on balance have been inheritors, keepers, and innovators within a political culture unique to history: the Enlightenment-based precepts of classical liberal democracy. The result of a rare confluence of historical trends—the budding Age of Reason entwined with the progressive shard of the then still new and energetic Protestant Reformation, all in the context of the post-Gutenberg explosion of mass literacy and education—gave rise to something that was indeed new under the sun: the revolutionary ideas of popular sovereignty joined to republican principles of equal dignity, opportunity, and standing before the law. Liberalism and democracy have different ontologies and histories, but they came together powerfully in the Anglo-American world of the 17th and 18th centuries. It was in guardianship of and service to those ideas and ideals that American leadership—and of course others in Britain and later much of western Europe and beyond—found its noblest vocation.
Because a large part of the DNA of classical liberal democracy resides in Protestantism (of which more in a moment) it was inevitable that thought about the historical arch of the American experiment would mimic Christian eschatological themes. Thus the universalism inherent to Protestantism, as to Christianity generally, led to an expectation among the more pious idealists of earlier times that the American Empire of Liberty, to use Jefferson’s phrase, would one day become universal best practice.
That evangelical-messianic Christological tinge to American principles of civic order remains perhaps most visible in American foreign policy thinking, and extrudes most frequently whenever military action is deemed necessary. Not for no reason did Julia Ward Howe write into “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” the words “As he died to make men holy let us die to make men free.” Not for no reason did General Eisenhower begin his eve of D-Day address by calling the forthcoming battle a crusade. Not for no reason did President George W. Bush use the same word in his first major speech after September 11, 2001.
A few remain self-aware of this religious connection and affirm it, but most are influenced by it without being able to name it. Bush evidently did not know the etymology of the word “crusade” when he was reproved publicly and otherwise for using it.[2] Of the former, one will not often get as clear an affirmation as that asserted by the late Mike Gerson: “It is a real mistake to try to secularize American political discourse. It removes one of the primary sources of visions of justice in American history.”[3]
Others have felt differently, ruing the intimation that Christian universalism sources the universal applicability of Western values. Here is how arguably the most creative political scientist of the 20th century put it: “[I]ndividual liberty, political democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and cultural freedom make Western civilization unique, and Western civilization is valuable not because it is universal but because it is unique.”[4]
Ironic, no? A particularist political culture generating a universalism presumed mistakenly to be the source of its own thinking? Ironic or not, the insistence on Western particularism limits excessive foreign policy idealism, which has gotten the United States into trouble many times. But whatever its source or historical soundness, high morale counts for something in a going civilizational concern; so the universalist bowsprit of American exceptionalism, as it has come to be understood,[5] bears benefits as well as dangers, not least as a bulwark against the kind of erosive pessimism currently stalking the land.
Indeed, optimism is quintessentially American, or used to be. At our best, a pioneering spirit rhymes well with modernity’s face pointed toward the future. So whether Western ways are potentially universal or not, the West is unique in having achieved what may be described as the conquest of political Malthusianism.
As is well known, Thomas Robert Malthus described the original limits to growth by positing an immovable barrier to human material progress on account of the eternal limiting dialectic between population growth and food supply. Malthus achieved this in the early decades of the 19th century just in time to be proven wrong. A political version of more or less the same concept resided for millennia in the near-universal belief in the zero-sum nature of social life, rhapsodized famously in Jonathan Swift’s 1704 “A Tale of a Tub” where “knaves and fools” alone abide. The same theme was given brilliant voice in our time, in 1960 to be specific, in the lyrical cynicism of John Barth’s The Sotweed Factor. Set in Swift’s day, listen to part of a conversation between our naïve hero Ebenezer Cooke and his servant Bertrand:
[Bertrand] “There’s a lot goes on behind the scenes, if ye but knew it. More history’s made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills, and proclamations.”
[Ebenezer] “And are all human motives really so despicable?”
[Bertrand] “Aye, sir. Why do you ask?”
Canonized in Western non-fiction first by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan’s famous language of “the war of all against all,” and later by Herbert Spencer’s promiscuous misuse of Charles Darwin, the yet unnamed ancient belief in the survival of the fittest seems to have been common to humanity from time immemorial. Indeed, however diverse the human social and political forms that took shape on this planet were, they nevertheless manifested an intellectual near-unity in their resort to the zero-sum premise.
Near-unity only, however; islands of exception did arise. The Abrahamic exception depended on the discarding of the fatalist, recurring-cycle premise of antiquity; in that sense, Abraham was the first phenomenologist and Israel the developer of the first future-contingent, covenantal narrative. Some distance to the east Vyasa’s Bhagavad Gita urged readers to avoid the two-value oppositional presumption and to replace either-or with both-and. More examples could be cited, some even as descant from ancient Greece’s ur-fatalism. But it took the Enlightenment to formalize the concept in at least a partially non-religious locution, and from the cultural West eventually to bring it to near-global scale.
How Secularism Was Birthed in a Religious Age
Political origin narratives have usually been couched within a religious tradition that enables the articulation of civic virtue to borrow from and make use of the sacred. Throughout most of civilized human history political and religious authority were merged in a monadic form of political theology, as it has been usefully called.[6] What is most striking historically about the American case is that it, well beyond its few more timid predecessors in Europe, broke the monad and abided instead by the concept of secular authority twinned to popular sovereignty, with religious authority partly privatized and, more important, disestablished from political authority.
The idea of the secular, in the arts as well as in political life, is one of the three main ingredients of what modernity is all about--the other two being the elevation of individual over communal agency and the idea of progress composed of material and moral advance walking hand in hand into a better human future. America is the quintessential modern nation and modern state.
That does not mean that it was or is now perfect or that religion has played, and still plays, no major role in its culture and politics—quite the contrary as we shall soon see. It does not even mean that the separation of political authority from the godhead in a classically liberal culture is a done deal, that it is free from the strong temptation of monadic reunion. In the latter part of the 16th century Michel de Montaigne sensed the essence: “I have always observed a singular accord between supercelestial ideas and subterranean behavior.” Many years later in a world Montaigne would barely have recognized, in 1922 to be specific, a young and presumably still mostly decent Carl Schmitt put the same point more analytically:
. . . all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent god became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts.[7]
Indeed, human societies do seem to gravitate to a monadic moral order; alternatives thrive only insofar as they are diligently adumbrated, committed to writing, studied, practiced, and taught.
The Anglo-American approach to a partially non-monadic moral order has worked well enough in that past that American political authorities and communal leaders were able to tell stories relevant to the challenges and opportunities of the moment that made sense to most people most of the time. Those stories provided through thick and thin, indeed even through a civil war, the three connected and irreducible pillars of social stability: identity, community, and purpose. In other words, the stories objectified the moral principles tethered to the cosmic order but revealed through reason—hence an adjusted form of political theology substituting natural law for divine revelation—for the benefit of the political order. When most people have a common sense of those three pillars, the society has at least a chance to survive political challenges, and even to reknit itself into a single political community after a breakdown. To grasp this requires a more granular telling of the American story, for the fuller set of implications have been and remain capacious.
How more precisely did the idea of the secular emerge from the disputations of a religious age, creating the modern hybrid approach to moral authority characteristic of American civic culture? We must start with the recognition that the creators of the Enlightenment, in its several variations across Protestant Europe, were Christians living in a still-religious age. Indeed, the once-popular idea that the Enlightenment represented a wholesale renunciation of Christianity in its embrace of scientific-rationalism is quite wrong.[8] Clearly, the Christians who gave the Enlightenment birth did not explicitly throw off their fealty to the concept of original sin or become untethered optimists, let alone utopians. Indeed, had the progenitors of the new dispensation been untethered optimists they would have been, in our language, proto-anarchists rather than republicans. They would have recognized no need to be careful and patient architects of a new order, for to an anarchist order must be informal, spontaneous, and organic or it soon becomes tyrannical.
The task as seen then was to synthesize the new and the old, not to alienate or oppose one to the other, something especially vivid in the popular sermons of the great Irish philosopher-prelate George Berkeley. The separation we perceive today between religious thought and scientific/rationalist thought was barely imaginable at the outset of modernity.
But original sin or no, optimists of a kind they were because they distilled something remarkable out of the Enlightenment broth that newly nourished them: That social and political institutions could be formed in such a way as to tame and even transform the zero-sum predicate into variable- and positive sum outcomes through careful institutional design. The shaping of legal institutions, thence of markets, and of political arrangements long on bloodless procedure and short on heat-producing abstract convictions, were the keys.
Whether through the aforementioned concepts such as the “invisible hand” in economics, the “separation of powers” in explicitly political arrangements, E Pluribus Unum and secularism in public-social relations, they intuitively marshaled their own generative Aristotelian picture for thought. Using that “picture” they conceived a new social and political order—liberalism, in a word—that marked a radical departure from past European thinking and practice. The old order favored hierarchy over an egalitarian premise, political controls over political equilibria, and the unity of orthodox religion with temporal authority instead of their separation. In the Novus Ordo Seclorum all that would change.
At the heart of it all was the breakthrough Enlightenment recognition that human nature was not only competitive and conflictual, but also cooperative and constructive. The latter they realized as an extension of both family and community, which mark out concentric circles of organic social cooperation. Another contributor to the recognition of the cooperative aspect of human social nature came through trade and industry: The more sophisticated manufacturing techniques became, the more interdependent tradesmen and merchants became. Say some early 18th-century craftsman worked as a clockmaker. He would need parts acquired from others, and those others would depend on still others. Say he needed some precisely manufactured springs. He was not about to mine his own metal ores and refine them to make the raw material needed to fabricate springs. He would depend on someone else for those parts, so the development of supply chains, even before the mature advent of the interdependence-forcing industrial revolution, must have showed anyone who looked carefully enough how cooperation worked beyond the narrow confines of family and immediate community.
The application of such insights to social and political life was strongly reinforced as well through the Protestant insistence on individual responsibility and agency, in the religious sense being the focus on scripture and the individual’s obligation to understand it without aid of a priesthood as an intercessory necessity to salvation. Hence, all the Enlightenment founders—Scottish, English, French, German, and Dutch alike—came to see through secular experience and religious reasoning alike that the individual’s capacity for reason and its collective social expression were the twin fonts of mutually beneficial partnerships that formed the organic, voluntary social order beneath and necessary for limited and self-limiting government.[9] The only political order that made sense to them was one in which the religious dictates of conscience had social space to function freely.
The trick, again, was to reshape inherited zero-sum attitudes into positive-sum ones by deliberate use of creative institutional design. They ultimately turned that trick, and in so doing they gave the world something fine, something with roots in both ancient Israel and Greece, but still quintessentially modern, to repeat because it is so central: a social order privileging individual over social agency; a separation of law, government, and art from monopoly religious institutional strictures; and for most an idea of material progress walking hand in hand with moral improvement into the future.[10] By transforming a new way of thinking into a genuinely new kind of social and political order, the centuries’ long dramatis personae of classical liberalism, as it developed from Giovanni Pico de Mirandola’s “Oration on the Dignity of Man” through Locke and Montesquieu, all the way to Jefferson’s final draft of the Declaration and George Mason’s of the Bill of Rights, did something else so extraordinary and unexpected that we typically lose sight of it: They transformed our assumptions about the agency of humanity itself.
From the medieval stasis of Church-based doctrine—Linneus’s “chain of being” representative of the static premise—-they recovered and refurbished for a different time the original insight of the Abrahamic revolution: the autogenic character of human nature, homo sapiens as the self-completing species. No fixed fate tied the hands of progress. Humanity, albeit divided by geography and culture, lived in open-ended partnerships with the Creator. The fatalistic Greek inheritance brought within Christianity, newly reaffirmed in the reactive Calvinist dispensation of the Reformation emphasizing predestination and grace, became sufficiently shrouded to allow Christianity’s Judaic roots to re-emerge at least in part in the Anglican/Lutheran focus on Scripture. The Hebrew Bible’s stories were about real people making hard decisions that bore unmistakable consequences as the narratives flowed forth. They were a far cry from the amoral mayhem created by Greek and Roman gods and demigods. Once people could read these stories for themselves, and started to regularly give themselves biblical names, their worldview shifted from fatalist and cyclical to hopeful and open-ended. This was, in scientific parlance, a really big deal.
It helped that Anglican Protestantism was notably flexible when it came to theology, a development much aided by the clerical tergiversations necessitated by the swirling winds of the English Civil War and subsequent monarchical restoration—a war not of but within the Reformation.[11] That flexibility enabled the cohabitation of the Christian belief in the “brokenness” of human nature with the conviction that humanity was nonetheless at least co-captain of its own ship. To put it a bit glibly, we might be broken on Sundays and holy days, but the rest of the time we could steer, we could discover, we could read and learn as well as err and regress.
In short, we were free as a species, which implied that we were also free individual souls armed with reason in league with our own conscience. We could “choose life,” as Scripture urged, and avoid a collective future inevitably marked by some final, fated tragedy. Our relationship with the Divine was neither hubristic nor fatalistic, the only two choices available in the pre-Abrahamic world, but covenantal. The only thing inevitable was our moral responsibility for the choices we made. So our choices mattered both morally and materially; indeed, they shaped our future and defined anew the human instinct of intergenerational responsibility. In the European mind exiting the High Medieval age, this was a new and shimmering thought. It was also, not the least bit incidentally, a mortal challenge to an existing European order based on dicta from authority and premised on a presumption of all-encompassing stasis.
Regression to the Zero-Sum Mean
Most of us take this perspective so much for granted that we forget how revolutionary it was in its time and, in global historical perspective, still is. But danger lurks in forgetting the origins of our origin stories, and in failing to teach them to rising generations. If we Americans lose sight of the historical-philosophical bases of our own quite unusual institutions we will be unable to appreciate why they are now coming unstuck. It is because we now face the end of modernity, the denouement of the ecology of freedom as it was intuited at the Founding. That ending has both contributed to and reflects the pluralization, dilution, distortion, and in some cases rejection and inversion/replacement of our American story of origin, and the edifice of moral reasoning associated with it. As Brink Lindsay puts it with reference to the decline of traditional organized religion, “Belief in the fantastic has escaped from its traditional repositories, where it served to bind us into communities founded on a shared sense of the sacred, and now exists as a disconnected jumble, accessible as a purely individual consumer choice to guide one’s personal search for meaning.”[12] It does not bind; it progressively isolates.
Symptomatic of that development we cannot but recognize the trickling up into our politics from the substrata of culture a regressive shift back to zero-sum thinking. That regression, which inherently privileges the personal and private over the civic and the public, is everywhere visible around us. Its causes are debatable and several, complex and intertwined, including in radically abbreviated language:
(1) The Fourth Great Awakening in American history now upon us has insinuated a mostly de-churched form of religious syntax into the culture, and no more perfect petri dish for a two-valued, either-or mentality exists;
(2) We have been hemorrhaging social trust for decades for a cache of reasons, and the zero-sum thrives on ambient suspicion and the betrayed trust that comes from living amid so very many broken families;
(3) We live amid a meaner, more competitive, less stable, and supposedly more unequal economy with the collapse of much of our manufacturing sector and its replacement in the labor profile by service and government jobs;
(4) Our polarized politics, with the strident, uncivil language that now festoons public discourse, exudes the zero-sum, only-winners-and-losers mentality;
(5) The commercial broadcast media has become clickbait oriented, and nothing garners attention like their stark zero-sum bloodsport depictions of our polarized politics, and more besides;
(6) The increased popularity of illiberal political ideas on both the Randian Right and the postmodernist identity-politics Left of the American political spectrum, all of which insists that politics is only conflictual and never cooperative;
(7) The weaponization of race by both illiberal Left and Right, which has become particularly toxic to a positive-sum social disposition now that it has become standard practice to capitalize “Black” and “White” as if these words actually stood for opposing, mirror-imaged biological essentialisms instead of just lower-case lazy legacy language;
(8) Our culture has been militarized by many years of inconclusive but nasty small wars, and by the post-9/11 militarization of our police—military metaphors being inherently zero-sum; and
(9) Above all we behold the torrent of commercially lucrative high-graphic spectacalized screen-mediated entertainment whose adolescent-grade, simpleminded fare is almost entirely zero-sum by way of storyline.[13]
Our Pluralized Mythopoetical Core
We need say a bit more about this last-mentioned factor. Though our culture’s abiding obsession with escapist fantasy we have pluralized, possibly beyond hope of recovery, what some cultural anthropologists refer to as the mythopoetical core of our civilization—just a fancy way of labeling the key basic origin stories we tell about ourselves as a civilization. Such a core is necessary to any civilizational order and is itself, as earlier noted, not tightly bound to anything empirical, which is why it is poetical, not prosaic in nature. Collective imagination and storytelling as such is therefore not our problem. Our problem is that a supercharged cacophony of what George Gerbner called “industrial folklore”—the mainly corporate-infused advertising delivered by screens that has demoted the salience of, or replaced altogether in many cases, the stories parents and grandparents used to tell and read to their kids and grandkids—has polluted and pillaged the heretofore organic social process of telling children simple, if not entirely realistic, stories with profound messages.
Industrial folklore is image-based and screen-delivered, not language-based and self-delivered. It comes at you fast, not slow. It is geared to be entertaining and effortless to imbibe, not edifying as well as constructively engaging. Industrial folklore is thus not profound as narratives go; profundity doesn’t bribe products few really need into a consumer’s purchase order and a company's profit column. To simplify only a bit, profundity stimulates thought; industrial folklore stimulates material fetishism.
Americans now lack a canon of metaphorically based narratives common and known to all that tell our stories of origin, of virtue, of credit and blame. Even the most telegenic of Bible stories written in a book—take the Ten Plagues presaging the Exodus from Egypt, for example—cannot complete with “Star Wars” or even something as relatively anodyne, though still pretty violent if you do a gunshot-to-body count, as the recent Disneyfied “National Treasure” series delivered on a screen. And that is not to speak of the “Percy Jackson” series’ attention-grabbing bowdlerization of the Greek myths.
But of course: How large an audience could any mass-marketed entertainment offering acquire if it lacked obvious heroes and obvious villains? Mass-market spectacle entertainment works because it appeals to minds operating with a roughly teenage vocabulary and fictive imagination. Moreover, to sell massively, including in increasingly lucrative globalized export markets, plots have to be kept simple. Even dialogue must often give way to sound effects—of bullets flying and bombs exploding and loud generic whooshing noises most often—since the most expensive function in readying an entertainment product suitable for a foreign audience is the associated translation burden. There is no need to translate an explosion; no one need write “boom” into the crawl line.
Even more critically, us-versus-them zero-sum scriptings obviously work better for this purpose than more complicated and nuanced ways of portraying human relationships. With the shock-bar meter tilting upwards all the time, what investors and advertisers will risk money on a story with no sharp edges, that ends with conciliation, compromise, and roughly normal human life outcomes? Long gone are the days when television scripts like those from “Dobie Gillis,” “Father Knows Best,” or “Leave It to Beaver”—where the likes of Eddie Haskell was the quintessence of a disreputable character!—can compete with the violent, the salacious, and the zombie-spooky-weird junk that has become common entertainment fare. Face it: Eddie Haskell did not evoke the zero-sum in the soul of the contemporary viewer; Lord Voldemort, though vastly more fictive than Haskell ever could have been, does.
Now, we might have pushed back at least a little against the zero-sum tide had our schools taught civics consistently, properly, and seriously. But beyond having teachers who really believed in the value of the message, that would have required reading and study, for the Enlightenment origins of our political culture, which twinned religious and secular scripture into one ideational whole, are unimaginable except in a deep-literate context. But the advent of the new technologized orality (of which more in Chapter 4), along with the artificial constraints of the No-Child-Left-Behind teach-to-the-test disaster, has made that all but impossible. In other words, we have failed at myth maintenance, first deferred and eventually nearly given up for hopeless. For that kind of failure a price must always be paid. We are paying it already.
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
PART I: Puzzle Pieces
1. The Analytical Status Quo: Seven Theories of American Dysfunction
2. Underturtle I: Fragile Affluence and Postmodern Decadence
3. Underturtle II: Our Lost Origin Stories at the End of Modernity
4. Underturtle III: From Deep Literacy to Cyber-Orality
5. The Net Effect
6. The Cultural Contradictions of Liberal Democracy
PART II: Emerging Picture
7. “Doing a Ripley”: Spectacle Defined and Illustrated
8. The Neuroscience of Spectacle: Shiny Electrons and the Novelty Bias
9. The Mad Dialectic of Nostalgia and Utopia in the Infotainment Era
10. Beyond Ripley: Spectacle and the American Future
EPILOGUE
What Our Politics Can Do, What We Must Do
[1] I can too turn the idiom “short shrift” into a compound present-participle verb; I know because I just did it and you understood its meaning without so much as blinking.
[2] Note Peter Waldman and Hugh Pope, “’Crusade’ Reference Reinforces Fears War on Terrorism is Against Muslims,” Wall Street Journal, September 21, 2001.
[3] Gerson speaking during an NPR interview in 2006, quoted in Brian Murphy, “Post columnist wrote Bush speeches after 9/11,” Sacramento Bee, November 20, 2022, p. 8B.
[4] Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 311. The quote is reconstructed from Huntington’s own approving quotation of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
[5] How American exceptionalism has come to be understood is a far cry from its origins. See the eye-opening essay by Walter A. McDougall, “The Unlikely History of American Exceptionalism,” The American Interest VIII: 4 (March-April 2013).
[6] See Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West (Vintage, 2007).
[7] From Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty.
[8] The origins of this error seems to lie in the conceit of a secularist academic elite in the first half of the 20th century trying to justify its own life choices and make them consistent with what they honored in liberal politics. See the relevant discussion in Joshua Mitchell, Not By Reason Alone: Religion, History, and Identity in Early Modern Political Thought (University of Chicago Press, 1996).
[9] On this core observation see James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism (Princeton University Press, 2012), and Robert Ellickson, Order Before Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes (Harvard University Press, 1994).
[10] There are many sociological definitions of modernity that get beyond simple association with the contemporary, as in common parlance. This formulation follows that of Daniel Bell.
[11] No better illustration exists than the 18th-century song “The Vicar of Bray,” improbably elaborated into a British film in 1937. For ample detail on the general theme see Walter Russell Mead, God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World (Penguin, 2007).
[12] Lindsay, “The Loss of Faith,” The Permanent Problem, February 18, 2023.
[13] I explored these sources in detail in “The Darkening Mind,” American Purpose, December 7, 2020.