The Age of Spectacle, Part 14
Chapter 4. Underturtle III: From Deep Literacy to Cyber-Orality, part 2
A lot has happened since the previous post on July 13, nearly all of it bad. I’m not going to discuss it directly in The Raspberry Patch, at least not now. I’m just going to continue with part 2 of Chapter 4, and if you cannot see the relevance of this discussion—especially at the end of the post—for what has been happening, well, I would be surprised.
. . . . Mostly, however, the extremes are not allowed even to touch anymore. So we have Rachel Maddox droning on to the one side and, until fairly recently, Tucker Carlson ranting in spectacolor on the other. Things are now more zero-sum, more polarizing, and more insularity producing than “Crossfire” ever was. Once again the novelist Naomi Alderman found the right words to describe it, pretending to describe the future even as she was describing the already present:
The internet of Medlar and Fantail and Anvil was designed to cut away the middle. There were no clicks or eyeballs in the sensible, reasoned middle ground, and all the money in the world in encouraging users to rush to treat the extremes as if they were the center.[1]
Meanwhile Steward’s own show, The Daily Show, became the most popular of several that deliberately fuzzed the boundary between comedy, satire, and news. It’s is hard to see how the genre itself, which now includes Jimmy Kimmel of earlier “Man Show” fame, helps viewers distinguish reality from various entertaining imitations. Indeed, the colonization of American political discourse by advertising language and technique turned to the needs of entertainment has been vaulted to meteoric heights thanks to the cyberlution. We now behold what a zero-sum mentality pressed through the prism of technologized spectacle produces: cognitive gluttony, impatience, and other expressions of immaturity lurking within otherwise adult bodies.
First Fake News, Now Fake Fakers—the Chat Claptrap
Older Americans still rely mainly on television and younger age cohorts mainly on social media feeds, but in terms of quality content there is not much difference. This means, to put not too fine a point on it, that anyone who does not read has no chance of understanding any policy-relevant issue beyond bumper-sticker depth.
They may, however, suppose they do, and that’s a problem: It can spoil a family Thanksgiving gathering, for example. More than that, it feeds a pretense of earned egalitarianism where all opinions are deemed valid no matter if the opinion-giver knows shit from Shinola about the topic to hand.[12] It is one-thing to crowd-source matters of taste, another to subject reality to ignorant mass whimsy. We will return later to the all-too-common error, pointed out some time ago by both Plato and Aristotle, of presuming that because people are considered equal in some things they are therefore presumed equal in all things.
Now for the really bad news about the news, the newest deep literacy erosion news that looks to matter most: ChatGPT. Huge numbers of undergraduate college students rushed at first opportunity like starving chickens after a broadcast of soldier fly grubs to use ChatGPT to write their term papers a year or so ago. Their professors knew this but were then helpless from any practical perspective to put a stop to it.
Some students professed to see a major moral difference—those who still knew what the word meant—between feeding one’s own notes to ChatGPT before hitting the button and asking the machine to make up the paper on its own pretty much from scratch. That may be so: One recent report indicates that in a significant percentage of recent juried journal essays, the sort of thing the program could not come up with entirely on its own, telltale signs of ChatGPT use were inadvertently left in the final published texts.[13] But there is no difference between sort-of cheating and totally cheating in the implications for education in the essential cessation of most expository writing: It’s bad, very bad.
It’s not just writing that may becoming an endangered species of human skill sets, as cursive penmanship already is. We can ask ChatGPT, and far more sophisticated GLLMMs too if we have the technical set-up to run them, for advice about nearly everything—and the program will hallucinate an answer for us. The only question remaining is why any students would seek out lowest-common-denominator mediocrity and then willingly put their names on it. Has the laziness of affluence, and the longing for credentials above actual knowledge, really progressed that far? You have to ask?
Things have already reached the point where we need not go find AI products already marketed; they now find us. On May 30, 2024 for the first time I saw the following offer atop my gmail queue:
Try the best of Google AI at no charge
Use "help me write" in Gmail and Docs to quickly draft and refine content, or use Gemini Advanced to research and brainstorm using our most capable AI models
Try at no cost Dismiss
“Try at no cost” was in blue text. Subtle, huh? I hit “Dismiss.”
Whatever the reasons or pretexts, widespreading use of ChatGPT and related tools will certainly demobilize brains to think through problems and challenges for themselves. The idea that using ChatGPT to do the scut work so as to free us up to do the more creative, higher-level thinking, is pure bosh and moonshine. “Education is what is left once one has forgotten all the details,” wrote John S. Vansittart.[14] He meant that the details are the pieces of the scaffolding that enable higher-level thought to be built up over time, after which the scaffolding can be disassembled. But that step cannot be skipped; one must work through and touch every brick before one can know how to build the building. As with reading and writing, so with neural pathways generally: Use them or ultimately lose them.[15] ChatGPT does not free anyone up to do “higher” things; it just tries to cheat the investments of experience, which is a bit like trying to fly unaided.
Why is this so, and why is reading erosion really the most important dimension of this self-willed regression? Henry Kissinger quoted me in the conclusion to his final book, pulling out of a long essay the essence of what deep reading really is: engaging with “an extended piece of writing in such way as to anticipate an author’s direction and meaning” by bringing to bear one’s own resources to the silent, and physically distanced, engagement that is the essence of deep reading.[16] It is, in other words, an inherently Socratic exercise, and like all such exercises it calls to mind my old graduate school dean Vartan Gregorian’s observation that “when a reader reads a book, he finishes the work started by the author.[17] Kissinger earlier observed that the discipline of wrapping one’s mind around an extended argument with evidence marshaled in support, characteristic of a book, is essential to developing one’s own capacity for critical analytical thought.[18] I am sure he would have agreed, in the dialectical spirit of Gregorian’s observation, that the same goes for the discipline required to write an extended argument with evidence marshaled in support.
So, then, what does it mean when the vast majority of the future elite of the nation—never mind the smartphone babblers on Nextdoor—never really learn to write? Not write well, a deepening deficiency long-suffering professors have noticed now for many years, but write coherently anything at all longer than 500 words? It pains me to recall that I used to advise students not to underline their reading materials with yellow highlighters but to make their own notes, for putting new material in one’s own words is the most reliable way to integrate it in into one’s reservoir of knowledge. That now seems almost impossibly quaint advice. The decay of writing, whether of essays or even one’s own reading notes, means at the least that today’s students will not be able to actually read and understand a book or even an long-form essay in a properly engaged manner, for they will have no roughly comparable resources of their own to bring to the table. Just as not reading harms one’s ability to write, not writing harms one’s ability to read.
We therefore now see another dialectic at work: a downward spiral of analytical competency among, presumably, our college-educated best and brightest. What will happen when current and future ChatCPT veterans populate the billets out in Langley, or in Foggy Bottom, or at the Pentagon? What if their political overseers also count as ChatGPT veterans? What will happen then to what it is fair to call the creative and practical aspects of policy competence?[19] That’s what I mean by “very bad.”
Zombie Vocabulary
Now combine the sharp decline in teaching standard English beyond that minimally required to “teach to the test”—exacerbated inadvertently by the Obama Administration’s Core Curriculum attempt to redeem the irredeemable “No Child Left Behind”[20]—with the substitution of orality in its many forms for engagement with written language, and you see that, as Clive James put it in Cultural Amnesia, as the pretense of egalitarianism spreads language use gets lazier.
One manifestation of this laziness is that vocabulary gets zombified. Key words have not changed in many cases, but their meanings have been gutted of substance and replaced with caricature. Thus when MAGAts assert that Democrats are Socialists, or even Communists and Marxists, they do not mean, cannot possibly mean, that Joe Biden and other Democrats want to nationalize the main sinews of the American economy, substitute command-economy diktats from commissar bureaucrats for markets, and build gulags and re-education camps for those who object. Not even most woke Democrats, at most only 10-12 percent of the party, want to do that. That is what those words mean, or at least what they meant until recently. Now MAGAts have zombified that vocabulary to mean anyone who supports any meliorist Federal social policy whatsoever, or any policy seeking to rectify market failures to produce social goods, of which there are many in a plutocratized political economy.
How has that happened? Simple: Those who do not read usually cannot define abstract terms of any kind, not just Communism and Marxism but “civic virtue” and “liberal democracy” either. Similarly, sort of, when leftwing and even centrist types feared for the safety of democracy during the onset of the Trump Administration in 2017 they turned out in due course to be not so wrong, but they were nevertheless mistaken about what the initial and immediate threat was: not a threat to democracy but to liberalism.
Democracy worked fine in November 2016: Trump was elected fair and square, assuming that Russian disinformation bots did not in fact throw the election.[21] That happened because the usual “implied consent” in a mass-electoral democracy, which really means mass rational apathy or assumed obliviousness in normal times, did not work because times were not normal. Many Trump voters in 2016 had never voted or had not voted for many years, but populist passions sent them to the polls mobilized by some combination of anger, fear, and spectacular media-borne lies. We went from rational apathy to a form of para-rational mobilization in a trice, as these things go.
To reality-tethered “normies”—Democrats, independents and, at the time, many Republicans—the result was scary, to be sure. But it had nothing to do with a threat to diminish or overturn democracy; it rather manifested too much democracy, too much populist froth, in all the wrong places. The point is that those making the claim really did not understand what the word meant. Democracy is just the way leaders are elected in a popular sovereignty politico-legal framework. It is not some shiny political object we are supposed to revere but cannot define. Liberalism and democracy have separate histories and ontologies, illustrated by the fact that some electoral democracies are illiberal (today that includes Hungary and Turkey) and some non- or marquee-democratic party-state arrangements are liberal (Singapore is perhaps the best example).
Plato would have understood what happened here in both 2016 and 2020: The guardians screwed up and the rabble rose, fully empowered to make its own mistakes as, in his tragic, cyclical Hellenic view, all energetically mobilized democracies eventually do because they sacrifice other values that are also good to an excessively exuberant and imbalanced pursuit of just one. In due course Trump and his supporters did move on from anti-liberal to anti-democratic rhetoric and behavior, but that was mostly after Trump lost the November 2020 election, also fair and square. That is when the plotting to overturn the will of the majority for the sake of an artificial minoritarian regime really got going.
Plato can be shockingly prescient 2,400 years after the fact, but he’s not always so. He could not have imagined a non-plebiscitary democratic order with constitutional guardrails, or a liberal democratic order that could survive and become even more stable through episodes of testing and self-correction. The genius of the U.S. Federal system, however imperfect its representational formulae have been and still are, is that the key democratic part of it works like a homeostat. Sometimes the system exhibits too little democratic input, as when elites manage to manufacture implied consent to excess and so feel safe to self-deal and look down their noses at the hoi polloi. Sometimes the system bespeaks too much democratic input, as with populist risings such as have occurred in long waves throughout U.S. political history, usually corresponding to a socio-religious Great Awakening. Until now, anyway, bumps against the guardrails this way and that have eventually arced back to the mean. The current bump will probably do so as well; the question is how much damage will be done to the nation and the world during the many months and probably years it will take for the correction to work its way through.
This dynamic these days, in an Age of Spectacle, often shows up in contentious language, and we have recently seen many telltale competitions over the ownership of hallowed vocabulary. For example, MAGAts now claim that January 6, 2021 was a peaceful protest and hence represented not an insurrection, as any normal person could plainly see it was, but the constitutionally protected right to peaceful assembly and dissent. If any doubt existed at the time as to the real motive, Trump’s subsequent call to suspend the Constitution so that he could again take power, presumably via mob intimidation of lawful due political process, should have made it clear. And if even that didn’t work on the thicker of the thick, his call for more insurrectionary violence in mid-March 2023, when he thought he was about to be not only indicted but arrested, should have done the trick. (Hint: It didn’t.) In all of this words are thrown about like half-bricks, not as good for building anything substantial as whole bricks maybe, but as Robert Nisbet once quipped, twice as useful in service to verbal manipulation since they can be thrown about twice as far.
So by mid-summer 2024 the Republican Party had become a “new Right” post-constitutional authoritarian party, and in some respects even a neo-fascist one. Indeed, it has started to use language the way Franz Neumann described in 1942 the origins of Nazideutsch.[22] And it works because those whom MAGA entrepreneurs enchant do not deep read, so do not really know the meanings of the words being zombified for propaganda purposes. As non-readers they are all but defenseless against this form of manipulation. Recalling Chapter 3, listen carefully to how Neumann described the Nazi approach:
Magic becomes the main concern of National Socialist culture. The world can be manipulated by techniques and formulas; in fact, if properly used these techniques and words automatically change things. . . . The emphasis on magic has even changed the language. The noun tends to supersede the verb. Things happen--they are not done.
Lord help us if re-empowered MAGAts ever start talking like that.
[1] Alderman, Future, p. 72.
[2] Kelly, "Our Hero,” The New Republic, December 2, 1996, p. 6.
[3] Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961).
[4] Last, “This is Why You’re Exhausted by Politics,” The Bulwark, June 18, 2024.
[5] A paraphrase from Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry (Doubleday, 2022), p. 150.
[6] Walther, “Rise of the Barstool Conservative,” This Week, February 1, 2021.
[7] See Jane Coaston, “The Debate Hugh Hefner Won and William F. Buckley Lost,” New York Times, March 14, 2023.
[8] So argues Gabriel Schoenfeld, I suspect correctly, in “Can AI Really Help Solve the Problem of Overclassification?” The Bulwark, February 27, 2023.
[9] from Lilla, “The Tea Party Jacobins,” New York Review of Books, May 27, 2010.
[10] There is the occasional humorous expression of this, such as when an elderly woman famously held up a sign at a populist, anti-big-government protest which read: “Hands off my Social Security!” Where she thought her monthly check came from remains a mystery.
[11] Last, “What If Trump Is Right About America?” The Bulwark, May 24, 2024.
[12] See the analysis in Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (Oxford University Press, 2017).
[13] See “Signs of undeclared ChatGPT use in papers mounting,” Retraction Watch at https://retractionwatch.com/2023/10/06/signs-of-undeclared-chatgpt-use-in-papers-mounting/.
[14] Vansittart, The Mist Procession (Hutchinson, 1958), p. 30-31.
[15] Note the lighthearted but instructive essay by Mae Paltry, “I Let AI Take Control of My Life. This is What It Told Me To Do,” Ha’aretz, July 16, 2023. The main flaw in this essay is that the author writes as though AI has already reached full capacity. That is not even close to being true.
[16] Kissinger, Leadership (Penguin, 2022), p. 405.
[17] Gregorian quoted in Claudia Dreifus, “It is Better to Give Than to Receive,” New York Times Magazine, December 14, 1997, p. 52.
[18] Kissinger quoted in Charles Hill, Grand Strategies (Yale, 2010), p. 298. Hill used Kisssinger’s remark as the conclusion to his book, a remark supplied directly to the author. The two men knew each other well from State Department times and for many years thereafter. I am privileged to have known them both, the late Charlie Hill in particular.
[19] See Philip Zelikow, “To Regain Policy Competence: The Software of American Public Policy Competence,” Texas National Security Review (September 2019). Full disclosure: I know and have worked in government with this author.
[20] Noted in Pamela Paul, drawing on Diane Ravitch’s 2018 analysis, “How to Get Kids to Hate English,” New York Times, March 9, 2023. See also Ravitch’s earlier criticism and predictions—all since come true—concerning “No Child Left Behind” in “No Bad Idea Left Behind,” The American Interest 5:5 (May-June 2010).
[21] Some still assert this, but it is impossible to prove. Gen. James R. Clapper, a former head of DIA and the DNI from 2010 to 2017, looked into the possibilities and the data more assiduously, and from a basis of his own then-contemporary experience, than anyone. He concluded that it was possible, but could not say for certain that it was so. See his book, written with Trey Brown, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence (Viking, 2018).
[22] Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944 (Oxford University Press, 1942), p. 439.