The Age of Spectacle, Part 12
Chapter 3. Underturtle II: Our Lost Origin Stories at the End of Modernity, part 4
The Raspberry Patch is again posting a bit early, Wednesday instead of Friday, because we are soon off for Kenosha, Wisconsin to attend this year’s Braver Angels national meeting. As promised, this post constitutes the fourth and final section of Chapter 3. Chapter 4 may begin posting on Friday, July 5, or it may wait until July 12—depending on whether I think I’ve had the time to refine the existing text to my satisfaction before setting it in front of you.
The only other introductory remark we need today is for me to note that the personal purpose of rolling out my working Age of Spectacle manuscript seems to be working as planned. It’s worth describing the process, I think, if only for the sake of book readers who are or who may one day become book writers. Those folks should know that, at least for some of us, this is not easy; struggle and self-doubt are part of the process. I do know a few people who have got the craft of non-fiction book writing down to a near science. These are people who do not need to think so much on paper, so that when they start writing the road ahead is pretty straight and fair-weathered for them, whereas my road has usually been speckled with curves, detours, potholes, rock falls, and flooded out bridges. We all play the hand we’re dealt best we can, so I’m not envious--usually.
The manuscript is getting better as I go through, over and over, in the process of posting on Substack. In some cases it’s getting much better, as latent connections have finally entered my consciousness and buzzed at me annoyingly in the middle of the night until I managed to wrestle them down in writing. Am I comparing my self to Jacob in his nightlong tussle with an angel? No.
The manuscript has also changed, again, structurally. If you look at the Table of Contents at the end of this post, and compare it to the ones come before, you will notice a rearrangement and a slight renaming of chapter titles. We now have an introduction followed by six chapters in each of two parts.
This happened for two reasons: (1) the material on the mythic consciousness and revenant magic, introduced earlier in Chapter 3, needed for reasons both practical and logical to be collected, consolidated, and given its own chapter—new Chapter 7; and (2) the epilogue needed to become a chapter both to preserve structural symmetry and because the text there pushed the definition of an epilogue beyond its understood limits.
I adjusted some of the chapter titles to more clearly indicate the stubbornly cloying effect of the recursive and cross-causal nature of the argument which, as I indicated earlier, does not readily surrender to simple linear expression. So, for example, Chapter 5 is now identified as a kind of thematic continuation of Chapter 2, but one that would not have made sense to a reader without Chapters 3 and 4 coming in between. Same with the renaming of Chapter 6: I wanted to make clearer that it represents a synthesis of all the underturtles gone before it. Similarly, the need for Chapter 7 arose because the fairly brief discussion of the mythic consciousness and revenant magic in Chapter 3 needed a intervening description and analysis of other matters before an elaboration was likely to make sense to the reader. And that, in turn, is what forced me finally to recognize that the dispersion of that material in Part II of the book was an unsatisfactory way of presenting it.
Know also that Raspberry Patch posts for the Introduction and Chapters 1-3 have since been further refined, and these refinements have not been integrated into previous Substack posts. Thus the archive now contains essays that are at least to a limited extent OBE. Sorry; that just happens when an iterative process iterates.
But it’s a good thing, or in any event in my case a necessary thing, and perhaps even a hopeful thing. Why? Because I just this morning got word from my friend Brink Lindsey that his excellent Substack-rolled-out book The Permanent Problem has been accepted for publication by Oxford University Press. Of course he will have to revise further and probably add new material. Nevertheless, it is nice to know that things sometimes do roll this way, from Substack to a contract for publication. I might one day be as fortunate; who can say?
OK, here we go with the end of Chapter 3:
….. Progress as Dirty Word, History as Nightmare, Equality as Godhead
So much for the denouement of individualism and secularism, properly understood and practiced. Now for the third of the three parts of the modern: the Whig idea of progress. Fairly clearly, I think, it has almost totally faded from sight in the cultural West. Indeed, in the “new age”/Esalen way of thinking the two parts of the equation that used to walk hand in hand—the moral and the material—have now become mortal enemies.
Again, maybe this is right, some of it anyway. It has been logical to think that material means could have major moral consequences: alleviating acute mass poverty, reducing the incentives for aggressive war, saving lives through the sciences behind modern agriculture and major medical advances, and much more. But once a society, or whole civilization, reaches satiety, has essentially conquered the problem of material scarcity, perhaps a re-set is necessary lest a tipping point be reached wherein the engines of material progress left to lurch toward the singularity generate on the whole more damage than benefit. Possibly much more damage even to the point of existential threat.
That said, Western scientists, once the avatars of progress, now more often bear tidings of determinism, the prudential principle taken to paralyzing extremes, and forms of environmental hysteria that actually harm efforts to address very real environmental challenges. Not even American and other scientists are immune to overdoing it, and to lapsing into performative mode. Why should they be?—they’re only human amid the lures, professional obligations, and Kuhnian sociology redefined by the attention economy. But more, their social status is in free fall in a postmodernist miasma. The only way for them to retain status and keep some of the public’s ear is to bend to the trends.
A larger aspect of the same point about the idea of progress concerns the philosophy and uses of history. Here, too, stories have been switched out. As recently as half a century ago, most Westerners and certainly most Americans saw history generally as a travelogue of progress. Some, like Hegel, liked the capital letter version of the word to indicate confidence in a teleology not too far afield from the Whiggish jointure of the material and the moral. One magnificent expression of this cultural meme is the 1792 Tiepolo ceiling at the palace of the Schoenbrun prince-bishops in Wurzburg, called “The Ascent of Man.” (It must be seen to be appreciated or even believed; two-dimensional photos just cannot capture it.)
Yes, Hegel also called history “a butcher’s block,” and no educated person in that day entertained any doubts about the misanthropies of the past and the fragilities of the future. Still, very few late-19th and early 20th century denizens would have traded their lot for the conditions of, say, the 15th century. Even those ignorant of so much as a single detail of the germ theory of disease knew of its benign manifestations. As a strong rule, these people thought history had a direction, they believed they knew at least vaguely what it was, and they were riding that train to earthly glory in pursuit.
That is no longer the case, certainly for the woke crowd but also for far less ideological souls. The “invited guests” of modernization are all around in their material-environmental and social-cultural forms; they are often pesky, frightening, and seemingly irredeemable these days. Over time the words of Karl Marx, from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, have become the operative anthem of history as a tale of misanthropy at cosmic scale: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” That meme calls to mind James Joyce’s latter line, channeled though his literary alter ego Stephen Daedalus, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” a sentiment in his case probably inspired by the horrors of the World War, if not also the ensuing Spanish Influenza pandemic.
In the still young 21st century the history-as-nightmare trope has far overtaken the history-as-record-of-progress trope in the West. Not so in Asia, where this third aspect of modernity is as healthy as it ever was in the West. But why is this so in the West? What has changed?
Part of the reason has to do with the speed of cultural optics. Progress is usually slow and easy to overlook, and it requires a conscious dot-connecting exercise to chart it. That in turn requires at least some cognitive patience, which is precisely what the technological environment at present militates against for most people. But, as the Arab proverb has it, “everything starts small except calamity.” Terror attacks, wars gone telegenically wrong, major industrial accident like the Dali hitting the Key Bridge in Baltimore, economic swoons that arrive near or just after Minsky moments, pandemics, and civil rioting are big things that happen more or less suddenly. They are shocking. They get our attention. They ransack normality. As Anthony Daniels put the point, “hell is much more easily imagined that heaven--and more enjoyable to imagine, too.”[1] Dante, no doubt, would agree.
Progress tends also to be easily taken for granted. Once the new wonder drug is introduced, people quickly forget what life was like before it. Once the microwave, the personal computer, and the streaming video arrive, few bother to recall how things were beforehand. Implicitly history is progress in this sense, but it is not usually conscious history. Partly as a result, progress as a taken-for-granted emolument lacks much utility for political entrepreneurs. As argued in Chapter 2, in an age of material abundance, people are more easily mobilized politically on the basis of resentments concerning status and dignity. That can include status anxiety based on demographic forebodings concerning ethnicity or “race” (really allele clusters, of course).
Real and Unreal Inequality
But that does not mean that real material resentments are absent; on the contrary. Western political economies, the American one in particular for reasons laid out in Chapter 2 and to be elaborated in Chapter 5, have been prodigious relative inequality generators of late. We need be careful here, however: Understanding the relevant data on inequality is tricky and, by way of reminder from Chapter 2, it does not help that arguments are often politicized for partisan purposes. Ideological language is rife these days; it is so common that a lot of people mistake it for careful thought and analysis.
For example, it is simply not true that absolute living standards have fallen over the past twenty or forty years for most American below the 50th income percentile; that’s a myth based on a sometimes deliberate misreading of the data.[2] It is true, as some claim, that vast numbers of people have fallen out of the middle class over the past three-to-four decades, but most have fallen up, not down. This is completely normal if you simply remind yourself that as people age their average income fluctuates with typical life phases, starting low, gradually rising, leveling off, and then declining. People circulate out of the middle class and others circulate in as time passes. Those circulating in in recent years include many immigrants and first-generation Americans whose lower-middle class status is a major improvement over what they experienced before.
Hence, to properly compare how the middle class is doing is therefore a highly variable moving target, these days more than most former days. We first need to define the boundaries and then keep then constant, adjusting numbers only on account of inflation. We need to state whether we are talking about income or wealth, to take the two most common metrics for the purpose. And then we need to specify whether we are following a particular age cohort or comparing different cohorts separated by a specified period. If an ideologue scoundrel violates any of these requirements, he or she can get the raw data to say almost anything--and very few savvy consumers of these lines of talk know enough social science statistics to justify their own intuitive skepticism.
Just to be clear: The germane measure of the ebb and flow of middle-class status is not acquired through a static snapshot that assumes no change in the population pyramid over time and ignores every other sociological filter for the raw economic data available. A proper formulation of the middle class question would be this: Is the American middle class larger or smaller today than it was at some specified time in the past as a total of population? If 25 years ago, or 40 years ago, is the base year and the definitions of middle class—whether defined by income, wealth, life expectancy or best, a weighted basket of the three—are held constant (numbers adjusted for inflation, of course), the answer turns out to fairly negligible change. (We could do the math here but few readers would enjoy it…..)
What is true and not negligible, to come back to the base argument from Chapter 2, is that that wildly inflated incomes for hedge-fund operators, commercial real estate moguls, sports and entertainment celebrities, and some others skew the entire data set.[3] This is what the entrepreneurs of envy do not tell you: Between the 15th and 85th percentiles of income, and also of wealth to some extent (again, not the same things), inequality in the United States is not that great. If we include cash and in-kind government transfer payments and benefits to the poor (as, for example, the much-adulated Thomas Piketty does not), it is not that great even between the 5th and 95th percentiles.
On the other hand--and here we tread on some serious political causality—what inequality there is in the dense middle of the U.S. income scale has grown since 2000 and especially since the 2007-8 Great Recession. Why? Two main reasons.
Income inequality has grown because of the shift in the labor profile away from manufacturing and toward services and government. Well-paying and stable trade union jobs have declined massively, and manufacturing has benign multiplier effects in the economy that service and government jobs tend not to have. The only significant multiplier effect of increased numbers of government workers benefits lawyers and accountants, and unfortunately it benefits many of them too handsomely. This shift was caused partly by technology-enabled automation but mainly by the offshoring of U.S. investment capital enabled by the freer flow of money after the Cold War. Other contributing factors have been the higher costs of environmental regulation affecting manufacturing and the lower status of physical labor jobs in a population with a higher percentage of college-educated people.
Wealth inequality has grown because of the massive real estate equity decline thanks to the housing market bubble that popped in 2007-08. Most middle-class Americans, those with mainly salary income and little if any investment income, had most of their equity in their homes. When the bottom fell out of that asset, class divisions grew. As banks and investment firms were behind the offshoring of good blue-collar jobs, so they were responsible for the bubble, as well—and, to repeat, both were given a major boost by the market-fundamentalist attitudes of the Clinton Administration Treasury Department.
Post-COVID trends are, fortunately and unfortunately both, re-inflating the bubble and, in combination with other causes, generating a housing crisis in the United States. Only unfortunately, high interest rates for mortgages associated with the effort to rein in inflation—a good bit of which was unnecessary, having been caused by excessively generous, politically motivated free-money handouts in 2021 and 2022—are making first-time home purchases more difficult, locking more people than ever in the rental trap, a trap that, in turn, has become more painful as major commercial property owners in urban areas use big-data analyses to collude to fix rents above market levels.
This mid-range inequality matters politically because most people, being now overwhelmingly other-directed in Lonely Crowd parlance, reckon their economic status in relative terms, not absolute ones. Your having, say, a 25 percent higher living standard than your parents did at the same age is less important than your having a 5 percent lower standard of living than your brother-in-law.[4] As important if not more so, equality conflationally defined has become a new normative godhead: Equality is increasingly understood as a natural social condition, so not having it means to many that some sinister forces are knowingly preventing it. It is as if J.-J. Rousseau has come out on top after all, when what is really going on turns on a confusion. Yes, plutocratic gigantism is real, and it generates inequality and more besides; but that doesn’t mean that “the natural aristocracy of talent and virtue” is no more.
Moreover, solid empirical evidence shows that people care more about losing what they have than about gaining an equal amount more of what they don’t have. That puts the spotlight of history on the phenomenon of the social déclassé. Downwardly mobile people and families, sideswiped by rapidly changing macroeconomic conditions they could not reasonably have foreseen or taken action to avoid, hear the word progress these days and think bad joke. We have plenty of downward mobility these days, largely caused by the great divide between college educated and non-college educated Americans, and we are right to fear its social and political implications.[5] People who worry about losing what really matters to them are much easier to mobilize on the basis of a negative narrative than people doing well who are looking forward to buying a better car, taking a destination vacation, or installing a swimming pool in their capacious backyard.
Presenting history-as-nightmare works so much better for this purpose, because it conjures and then suggests an apostolic succession of evildoers that aroused people can focus against. Resentment is a powerful emotion, especially when it is embedded socially. It can seethe for a long time, while exhilaration over acquiring some neat new thing or achieving some new feat in career or family life tends to be evanescent. This is why Donald Trump’s absurd “carnage” language in his January 2017 Inaugural rant worked to the extent it did. It is also why anti-Semitic rants in European history after about the 9th century worked so well. It is very hard to sustain a sunny disposition toward future progress when so much political hay can be made from pessimism, blame-casting, rage-venting, and the false heroism of sullen moodiness.
As always, balance matters in achieving a mature sense of history. Too optimistic a view, too much Whiggery of the old style, can thicken the skin when it comes to the losers and left-outs, and there are always some of both. But too pessimistic a view can warp one’s appreciation of longitudinal reality, play into the hands of demagogues and madmen, and breed more impatience than can be constructively deployed at scale in a political going concern. The longing for total revolution is, for some, a powerful temptation, but it is invariably a gratuitous destructive force when allowed full sway.[6]
One way to get a feel for this last point is to recall via the testimonies available to us—if we have any reading discipline—the meteoric enthusiasm and events of the French Revolution. What, after all was said and done, did the mayhem, the terror, and the ensuing wars achieve? Not nothing, but much less than typically imagined. Burke could not have guessed it exactly in the moment in his Reflections, but the monarchy was restored post-Napoleon in a neo-Bourbon form, and the literature of the 1830s suggests that basic social structure and mores in France had not changed very much; nor had the institutions of the ancient regime, notably the Church, been harmed decisively. Spending some slow time with Honoré de Balzac’s 1834 novel Pere Goriot, a book set fictionally in 1819, reveals the point in subtle but telling artfulness. The French in the 1830s were still identifiably the French of the 1730s; mainly what differed as an urban bourgeoisie and proletariat rose in importance with the Industrial Revolution hitting its stride, was the presence of a thick new coating of cynicism to go with the uniquely French version of the serviceable hypocrisy all civilizations require.
Far short of full sway, the point is that the idea of progress cannot hold cultural pride of place when so many Americans believe, for false reasons as well as some real ones, that there has been no progress in a material sense now for several generations. It’s not true, but it feels true to those on the wrong end of change. It doesn’t help, either, as we will see in Chapter 5, that so many believe that the U.S. economy has been mired in a productivity increase slump when it may actually not be, or is thus mired for reasons very different from those commonly postulated. “Paranoia can destroy ya,” true; but congenital pessimism isn’t healthy either. Bye, bye modernity, indeed.
Attitudes and Institutions Misaligned
As already noted, the three Enlightenment-based ideas that together formed the modern paradigm—individual agency, secularism, and progress—also form the attitudinal underpinning of every American political institution and the whole body of law that operates them as a coherent constitutional unit. If these ideas are for whatever reasons in disrepute in the culture, and if no one in a position of authority will defend them against new would-be orthodoxies, then the institutions they support cannot long remain viable. This is, or used to be, Sociology 101 stuff: the concordance of attitudes and institutions.
Authority in America is not defending these ideas very well these days, such effective authority that is left in our ever-flattening overdoing of radical egalitarian pretense. We have dis-internalized the wisdom of Enlightenment liberalism, not least as regards the nature of discourse in an open society. Where respect for facts, reasoned debate, humility, and law erodes, the safety net against excess and extremism is shredded by ego, greed, and the lusts of the will to power—all magnified to ear-splitting volume by big-tech-abetted social media.[7] When ideologically polluted and mostly unfiltered ad platforms carry most people’s “news,” such as it is in its current incarnation of industrial folklore, no form of rational democratic self-government is possible. We thus tread upon the portal of plutocratized government in thrall to corporate algorithms, and inflected by the mass magical madness of the electorate. That combination, if left to long persist, is not going to end well for liberal democratic practice.
Even worse, the re-rooting of the zero-sum mentality has transformed American politics into a font of ceaseless histrionic existentialist cant from both end-arcs of the political horseshoe, and it has thus summoned into being an attitude of stereo damage limitation in which political views are defined not by positive plans to build forward but by who people hate in any particular moment. The hatred spotlight can suddenly focus on anyone, even Taylor Swift for a recent example, depending on how much attention the political entrepreneurs think the hatred can draw. Rage sells. It self-convinces cognitive dissonance-style, and so amounts to an investment, or doubling down, in one’s own biases.
It follows that political opponents are no longer seen as those forming a loyal opposition with whom compromise and building forward can happen. Opposition is rather to be destroyed, lest one be its victim, with all the sophistication of a video game—except that the “game” now ransacking the real world lacks a reset button to clear reality for the next game. How else do we explain a former President saying that a high military officer in his service who had the temerity to defend truth be executed? Clearly, the consequences have been devastating to anything remotely resembling healthy civic virtue and, alas, it is either disingenuous or a collective case of wishful thinking to categorize all this as mere incivility.
To be clear: It was never necessary for the exercise of liberal democracy in America, or anywhere else, that majorities mastered the rudiments of Enlightenment political philosophy. The Jeffersonian ideal of a well-educated mass electorate based, in his lovely but wondrously confabulated Tidewater mind, on gentlemen farmers was always just that—an ideal. But some minimum required deep-literate minority has been necessary: leaders, in other words, who understood the concept of leadership as public service in a popular sovereignty framework, embraced it as both a social good and a civic necessity, and worked at it as a form of higher craft, have been necessary. Plato cited this general necessity by reference to a group of guardians. Others have employed diverse terms to express the same basic concept: Arnold Toynbee, for example, referred to leaders in culture more broadly than politics as a “creative minority.” His shortcomings notwithstanding, that is a worthy shorthand for a democratic function that every civilization of that disposition has displayed over time.
Alas, that function has become a wasting asset as the zero-sum eclipses the relatively sophisticated Enlightenment-informed variable- and positive-sum attitude toward the institutional order of American public life. Our leaders, in one party in particular, now more often advance the attack on liberalism as defend against it. In times past the American leadership class always had enough level-headed and well-educated members to keep American politics within its liberal guardrails; the collapse into civil war was, it seems, the tragic exception that proved the rule, but even then the argument was not over classic liberal principles—neither side nor any significant political party disavowed them. The argument was over how to apply them in a socially heterogeneous Federal system that had expanded territorially in such a way as to generate a vastly reshaped national political agenda.
Even more than that, the wiser heads of the time had for years come to agree with Henry Clay, who died too soon in June 1852, that slavery needed to be abolished, but gradually and so hopefully peacefully. But the key to success was a process of buying out slave-owners who had acquired their property within the law, so they could invest in new mechanical substitutes for human labor. This was a plan roughly similar to that of the British Empire when it banned slavery in 1833, and which served as a general model for American reformers like Clay and some others—just as America’s abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in 1808, during the final year of the Jefferson Administration, followed Britain’s by one year.
Alas, thanks to Andrew Jackson, there was no national bank, no rough U.S. equivalent of the Bank of England, so the financial wherewithal to do that stumped the elite. Before they could figure out a way around that obstacle on behalf of what was a majority view of the political and intellectual classes, extremist hotheads on both sides dragged the nation into a tragic civil war. What might have been headed off in 1853 or even 1856, had there been a national bank and wiser leadership, could not have been stopped in 1859-60.
As a result of the war, the American story machine created a new chapter, and here, in blooded and highly emotional circumstances, the little picture that animated thinking was not the originalist dynamic equilibrium picture. It was instead the Christological little picture at a time when growing literacy fused with a democratizing form of Protestant revivalism, very much including the energies set loose by both the Second and the Third Great Awakenings. The basic outlines of the story are well known, prefigured by Julia Ward Howe’s lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”: Lincoln was Christ, who died to wash away the nation’s sins and to redeem the blood of the righteous crusade, and post-Civil War America was the New Covenant of American Manifest Destiny layered on top of the old. Thus the war was characterized as necessary to moral progress no less than Jesus’ death on the cross was necessary to redeem humanity from original and other forms of sin. Thus was all the suffering and death explained away in mythopoetical form, and that is why the actual contingent history of anti-slavery reform efforts, referenced briefly above, is simply unknown to well over 98 percent of adult Americans.
But what choice was there at the time, after April 1865? Admit that the war had been stupid and unnecessary? Admit that precious few had given any serious thought to what would happen to suddenly emancipated slaves who lacked all preparation for freedom as a stark minority, mostly amid a defeated, humiliated, and still-hostile Southern white population? And that doomed the Federal government’s first attempt at nation-building—called Reconstruction? Not a chance. That was no way to maintain the idea of progress.
As bad as all that was, and as desultory as the aftermath was—not least legal segregation that endured for another century—our situation today, through very different, is arguably worse. Even in the absence of a literal shooting civil war, of anything directly comparable to the days of Bloody Kansas and the canons’ first fire at Fort Sumter, we lack a comparable majority elite view on how to define and solve our problems. And above all, we as a political community no longer really believe in an arch of progress, Barack Obama’s soaring rhetoric to that effect notwithstanding. Sorry to say, those absences are of enormous significance.
The essential meaning of the present process of regression to the zero-sum, and to the underlying mythical and religious syntax of simpleminded ideological thinking, is clear: If American political culture now defaults to an older, pre-Enlightenment view of human and social nature—if we re-ratify Swift’s “knaves and fools alone”—a civil society founded on classical liberal principles aimed at balancing the competitive and cooperative aspects of social life becomes almost impossible to imagine, let alone to maintain.
Regrettably, taking in next the causal impact of our third underturtle does not make the matter the least bit softer. Rather to the contrary.
[1] Daniels writing, as he often has, as Theodore Dalrymple, “Against History-as-Nightmare,” Law & Liberty, August 11, 2020.
[2] See again Neil Gilbert, Never Enough, chapter 5 in particular. See also Dylan Matthews, “A new study says much of the rise in inequality is an illusion. Should you believe it?” Vox, January 10, 2018. Note, too, the new book coauthored by an economics Ph.D. also known as former Senator Phil Gramm, The Myth of American Inequality (Rowan & Littlefield, 2023). Alas, only some of it is a myth, as we are at pains here to distinguish.
[3] See again Cowen, “The Inequality that Matters.”
[4] See Robert Frank, Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class (Princeton University Press, 2007). I do not fully concur with Frank’s description of inequality in the United States, but his sociology of envy is undeniable.
[5] Note Thomas Edsall, “‘There Are Two Americans Now, One with a B.A. and One Without’,” New York Times, October 5, 2022.
[6] Note Bernard Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution (University of California Press, 1992). For an reflection on the changing social status of intellectuals in the Western and specifically American context, see Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (Knopf, 1965).
[7] Note how concentrated big tech has become; as Martin Gurri accurately put it a few years ago: “The Wild West days of the web are long behind it. The cyber frontier has been carved up among a handful of colossal corporations: Google (including YouTube) and Facebook (including Instagram and WhatsApp), with Twitter far behind, account for much of the content.” See https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/way-out-post-truth.
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. Underturtle I Revisited: The Net Effect
6. Underturtles Summed: The Cultural Contradictions of Liberal Democracy
PART II: Emerging Picture
7. We Do Believe in Magic
8. “Doing a Ripley”: Spectacle Defined and Illustrated
9. The Neuroscience of Spectacle: Shiny Electrons and the Novelty Bias
10. The Mad Dialectic of Nostalgia and Utopia in the Infotainment Era
11. Beyond Ripley: Spectacle and the American Future
12. What Our Politics Can Do, What We Must Do
Index