The Raspberry Patch has brought you parts 1 and 2 of Chapter 1—see the end of this post for the table of contents wherein, again, where we are is indicated by bold italic type—covering four of seven theories of American dysfunction: meritocracy awry, populism, polarization, and institutional decay. Herewith in part 3 the remaining three of the seven are laid out: social trust depletion; plutocracy’s industrial folklore; and what I call technovelty.
The astute will note that some of the seven categories have generated a lot more literature and attention than others. You may never even have heard the phrase “industrial folklore” before now. But just because a line of research and logic is not well known does not mean that it is not insightful and even powerful as an explanatory factor. This is a case in point.
The astute will also recall the muddle we spoke of earlier: Our categories invariable overlap, bump into and presume one another in bewildering patterns. Social trust depletion is not fully intelligible as a sociological phenomenon without reference to technovelty at an earlier stage, and it clearly bears implications for populism, polarization, and economics generally. Similarly, industrial folklore depends on technological change for its basis but also depends on observations about changes in family stability and structure over time—a sociological domain of a different kind.
A major part of the challenge in The Age of Spectacle is to sort all this out, get the multitude of dots connected correctly, then carefully glean the implications, and finally discern which implications likely have practical policy significance. The premise here is that the concept of spectacle—shock entertainment is another way to express it—is the most promising way to bring all the pieces together. I hope the results redeem the premise. So far, so good, I think.
Two final remarks before returning to the manuscript text of The Age of Spectacle, and finishing Chapter 1.
First, I was looking ahead to how to present Chapter 2 and beyond, and I ran into trouble. Chapter 2, “Fragile Affluence and Postmodern Decadence,” was much too long. I saw three options: shorten it before showing it on The Raspberry Patch; shorten it afterwards as a result of struggling with how to show it on The Raspberry Patch; or hive off part of it and make a new chapter, thus altering the table of contents. I chose option three. See the table of contents at the end of this post, compare it with earlier versions, and you’ll see the difference. I hope option 3, like door number 3 on a once popular iconic TV show brilliantly parodied in a Steve Goodman song, does the trick.
Second, let me again apologize in advance for the typos and other infelicities you may find in the text. It’s not finished and it’s hard to proofread one’s own writing. I don’t have a lot of help with that right now, and I can’t really afford to pay for it, yet. (Now, if a bunch of you free subscribers out there would pony up some dollars that might change. Just sayin’….) I don’t apologize for the occasional neologism you may encounter. Sometimes we need to push the language ahead just a little, and none of the neologisms below are difficult to figure out, or I wouldn’t have used them. It just seems to me that to write something that tries to go beyond extant understanding a certain liberty with vocabulary is necessary; if the language already contains everything you want to present, then you probably don’t have as much new to say as you suppose.
Anyway, now to pick up the thread……..
5. Social trust depletion: Many observers, from Robert Putnam’s 1995 Bowling Alone book to date, have argued that the real problem we have is that Americans don’t trust each other as they once did. The leaking away of both bonding and bridging social trust has affected all our institutions and made it harder to solve problems, especially at the national/Federal level where trust has never been at a premium in American history save during wartime and protracted crises.
Causes of the erosion? Theories abound, and empirical evidence supports some of them, notably too much and too diverse immigration too fast to assimilate in a society whose sense of civic self-worth is not what it once was. Putnam himself, good Harvard liberal that he is, resisted this argument for years until the evidence was simply too persuasive to deny.[1]
Technology has also atomized us in many ways, leaving us with much more de facto class segregation than used to be the case as recently as the 1980s. In American history class and race are hopelessly intermingled, which probably explains a lot about this particular aspect of trust erosion.
Is there, however, a firm analytical consensus as to why there has been so much and so rapid social trust erosion in America? No. But one datum accepted as important by most observers concerns the stability of the nuclear family, notably as a setting for the raising of emotionally stable and self-confident children. Marriage and family life has obviously been strained by changes in the political economy, which is turn has been driven in part by technological innovation in service to profit without much thought to broader social effects and costs. That’s always been the American way. The result, broadly stated, has been less marriage, more divorce, and more children either split between divorced parents, growing up in emotional limbo with a step-parent with children from an earlier marriage, or being raised by a single parent, usually the mother.
Children can’t help but be afraid to trust people and institutions in general when those who claim to love them and care about them the most betray them through their absence. Of course these things are complicated, and children cannot be expected to understand those complications. But what matters is that they suffer from them, and are injured by them emotionally, whether they understand them or not. And the wound does not necessarily heal as they grow up. On the contrary, emotional trauma often enough creates scar tissue, just as physical trauma does. It often does so in the form of self-fulfilling disappointments serving as allergies to emotional commitment.
Research shows unmistakably that children of divorced parents are more likely to shun marriage, and if they do marry to not want children, and if they marry to divorce more frequently than those who came of age in a more stable family environment. If we project an individualist analysis onto society in general, it is hard to escape the conclusion that a less-married, more-divorced society is going to be less trustful of others and, by dint of an associational shadow effect, of institutions generally. Such people, it seems reasonable to suspect, will also incline to fall into zero-sum modes of thinking more readily than those who have not had their trust reservoirs ransacked at an early age.
When back in the late 1960s Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to analyze the disadvantages under which poor people in general, and Afro-Americans in particular, labored, he focused on family instability as a key factor. The data Moynihan amassed to describe Afro-American family life back them now applies as well or more so to broad strata of Caucasian families in the United States. The decay of American family stability has metastasized over the past half century, and anyone who thinks this could not possibly have broader, and even political, implications is not a very good dot connector.
Despite all this, the illiberal “woke” Left generally applauds the disintegration of family stability, claiming that it is at the root of hated patriarchy, misogyny, and class and race hierarchies. They want, many admit, to burn anything that smacks of the status quo down; by demonizing the traditional family unit they have brilliantly chosen the perfect target.
The final factor worth noting, at least in passing, concerns not so much education in the conventional sense but orientation to education. Trust erosion does not apply to the American population evenly. It tends to concentrate in regions and subcultures and sometimes families that are not particularly well educated, not because the people are stupid necessarily, but because respect for education is weak for a mash-up of cultural and other reasons. I was blessed at birth with fifteen blood-relative aunts and uncles and they all married, making for a nice round number of thirty--not a single one of whom graduated from a college or university. These first-generation Americans were not stupid people; they were uneducated people through no fault of their own, and there is a difference. They respected education but did not have much of it, and it showed in the difficulty they had articulating their often-serious thoughts orally and especially in written form. So a person’s orientation to education, not their raw intelligence, is what matters most in the majority of cases.
The result? What people do not know about, no matter why they don’t know about it, they tend to fear or at least display ambivalence toward. Poorly educated people are usually aware of their own deficits in the face of others who are well educated, and a level of bravado masking defensiveness is common in such encounters. This is why, by the way, I suspect that in line with the counter-humiliation themes that resonate with them, they tend to enjoy what has become known as cringe humor. Seeing others being embarrassed and humiliated when the fictive plotline collapses into resolution somehow makes them feel better. It seems to work as catharsis; emotional misery loves company, perhaps? (For the same reason celebrity culture mongers love to find fault in the high and mighty, the rich and famous—makes them feel better, or so I am told.) The rest of the population, maybe not so much. I despise cringe humor; I leave the room when it persists; I feel emotional pain when even fictional others are embarrassed publicly, even if the public is fictional. So much for my ability to keep the fictional at a complete distance from my footing in reality—it just works like that, physiologically, for everyone. If someone in a 19th century English novel is riding a horse, dashing through a meadow somewhere in Sussex, our heartbeat increases. Really, it’s true; Maryanne Wolf says so.
The basic upshot here is that not knowing about the world outside one’s own commons, and not wanting to know for how it might affect one’s most cherished hearth relationships, leads to a kind of default xenophobia. It usually lies silent until something triggers it, but once triggered it becomes unmistakable.
At the MAGA extremes, it shows vividly clear whenever someone notes that America is in fact not number one in this or that international comparison—science and math skills, infant mortality, and so on. Patriotism with blinders can’t abide negative evidence.
It also shows, very likely, in overseas travel experience, though I know of no hard data ever collected on the point. Those who identify as Democrats, independents, or “never Trump” Republicans—if any of the latter still remain self-avowed Republicans after what we’ve seen lately—are far more likely to have passports and to have used them than MAGAts. Excepting for military tours undertaken well-armed and closeted with other Americans in the same situation, my guess would be that MAGA-identifying folk have spent less than a fiftieth of the time traveling outside the country than the rest of the population. They are also likely to be dramatically less adept at speaking a second language, and more likely to tell you to your face that they have no interest in ever learning one. They remind me of a Texas Governor during World War I who reportedly opposed all foreign language instruction in Texan public schools by holding up a King James translation of the Bible and proclaiming: “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, then it’s good enough for the school children of Texas.” (I hope this is true, but if it isn’t it should be.)
Since they are also dramatically less likely to have attained deep reading literacy, their theories of mind have never developed beyond childlike levels. Fear and loathing of unfamiliar others tends to turn them, all else equal, into isolationists on the off chance they think about national security and foreign policy at all. These are some of the more common political wages of inbred distrust. There are plenty of others, too.
6. Plutocracy’s industrial folklore: A coinage of George Gerbner, a former communications professor at the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania, industrial folklore refers to the tacit moral content embedded in the cascade of language and imagery propagated by commercial advertising and programming, and delivered via screens of one kind or another. The first of these screens were those of analog television, which featured 24,000-volt cathode ray tubes aimed at peoples’ heads. These have given way to kinder, gentler television technology but also to streaming digital services and the rest of the internet, as well, using cybernetic-infused technologies the likes of which the pioneers of television could never have imagined.
This infospheric cascade is integral to the ginning up and sustaining of artificial aggregate demand in our wealthy, hyper-consumerist post-scarcity society. That artificial demand characterizes a political economy shaped by a dramatically transformed kind of financialized corporate market capitalism, one no longer much resembling not just the small-shopkeeper, highly distributed-market model of Adam Smith’s day, but also the post-industrial revolution large-corporate capitalism even of Al Smith’s day.
The point here is not just that these changes to what we flatly call capitalism most of the time, regardless of the myriad changes within it, have sired a different political economy. That is too obvious to belabor, or it should be. Since markets are where culture and social structure cross and change as a consequence, it means that once-traditional relations among civil society, state, and individual can no longer be assumed to be Smithian in nature. Capitalism and liberalism in truth have never been completely or automatically reinforcing of each other, pace the classical liberal political theology typically on offer. But that proposition, once arguably more true than not, now lies in the dusty void of a vacated reality.
In the past, the natural inequalities of capitalism both in terms of opportunities and outcomes were matched against the artificial but hardly insignificant political and legal equality of citizens. Tension between the two has always existed, but it was mitigated to some extent by the fact that while one’s political and legal equality was unlikely to deteriorate, one’s social-economic standing could fluctuate and, as history demonstrated, could decline. It was far more likely to fluctuate up than down, true, and the Great Depression was, for most, the exception that proved the rule—as the ensuing postwar boom seemed again to ratify. But most people fear losing what they have a lot more than they look forward to gaining the same amount on the upside. So if the general perception at any given time is that fluctuating down is more prevalent than fluctuating up, then the “bounce” in the democratic capitalist deal goes flat. Arguably, that has been the case with most Americans below the 50th quintile of income and wealth since 2008.
There is more. Personal and professional status depends on a nexus of expectations and trajectories. A male blue-collar worker with a high school education and a union job in 1955 had a certain status and certain expectations, and on the basis of them he could reasonable gauge what his responsibilities to family were and what his rewards would be for commuting those responsibilities. That same kind of man with similar skills and similar education in 2005, but no union job and maybe no blue-collar job available comparable to what the labor market offered fifty years earlier, was more likely to be “shit out of luck,” as he himself might very well have put it. The point is that changes in the web of relationships among the market, culture, and social structure affect the development and distribution of personality types in society, and the malleable status attributes attending each type.[2] It even shapes language, for all that implies about a culture’s self-awareness and how it sets about to “make” marriages and then educate and socialize children.
Typically, these changes do not rumble fast through a society absent some external shock like a war, a pandemic, a massive natural disaster, or something of that scale. But a dramatic change in the means and methods of social communication can significantly accelerate what is a natural but gradual social process. Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) captured the power and dangers of media concentration and outright manipulation. He had already showed in his famous October 30, 1938 radio script of H.G. Welles’s “War of the Worlds” the power of radio to spread rumor and raise mobs, an allusion to how fascist authoritarians during the interwar years had been using radio technology for mobilization and propaganda purposes. The downsides of radio technology had already stimulated government regulation of radio, in the United States via the Federal Communications Commission Act of 1934—just read the Preamble to learn what its creators were thinking. Next came the vast expansion of the Hollywood cinema, along with newsreels, that both shaped the cultural aspect and were shaped by the experience of Depression and World War II. Then, before anyone could catch his breath along came first black-and-white television and then the color variety. Television revolutionized everything from politics and diplomacy to entertainment and business via advertising. It also changed language fashion and much else besides—something we’ll come back to in detail in Chapter 8.
Clearly, whole libraries are filled with literature on the massive impact of these communications innovations. What stands out from our perspective is an irony: The enthusiasm with which each new innovation was greeted was matched only by a general cluelessness as to what the broader implications of the technology would be. And the implications were categorically vast: for politics, for business, for the arts, for education, for national security and diplomacy, for pretty much everything.
Knowing that from rolling lived experience, it is a mystery why anyone would think that the serial introduction of the personal computer, the internet, social media, and now CGI, GANs and AI technologies, to mention only the best known of the family of cyberlution manifestations, would have fundamentally different impacts. The difference, of course, is that the pace of innovation has quickened considerably to the point where people are now heard mumbling even during Superbowl commercials about “the singularity.”
Closer to the dawn of the commercial television age it was a considerable exaggeration as well as an epistemological error to claim, as Guy Debord did in 1967, that “capitalist society consists of creatures who are redesigned to live life as a representation of itself.” Capitalism is not itself a culture except for diehard material determinists. It’s a social-economic shard of a culture or cultures, but even if it were a culture junto itself all cultures recursively affect but do not alone determine mentalities—a term with which Debord, as a Frenchman, was very familiar and which he silently deployed in this statement.
Besides, all cultures beyond primitive preliterate ones operate in part through representations composed of symbols; capitalism differs in this respect only in the sense that the symbols are usually embedded in things people sell and buy. All that said, the current form of hyper-technologized and advertising-thick consumer capitalism does push in Debord’s direction.[3] The cumulative result over time seems to be, as David Riesman famously laid it out in The Lonely Crowd (1950) the transformation of what was in the main an inner-directed American culture shaped by Protestant habits focused on individual conscience as the arbiter of virtue and self-worth, which approximated roughly to what cultural anthropologists call an honor society, to what is increasingly an other-directed culture that approximates roughly to a shame society—to the extent that a potential for shame still exists in large numbers of Americans. This is, as they say, no accident, and it is no mere thing either.
Industrial folklore—or perhaps it is better to call it post-industrial folklore now—provides the lyrics, so to speak, for the musical hum of the cybernetic age. It is now telling the stories of credit and blame, worthiness and guilt, high status and unwonted humility on two-dimensional screens that parents and grandparents used to tell from personal memory and experience and read to children in books. Post-industrial folklore tells those stories in fictional scriptings, many with meliorative ideological biases appended. It tells them in advertisements that come in hundreds of forms, many now designed with the aid of targeting algorithms. It even norms them culturally through attention-arresting competitive auto insurance commercial series that have gotten weirder and wilder with every step, from Geico’s “cavemen” to Progressive’s dreamscapes.[4]
Industrial folklore gets further magnified these days via social media, so now anyone anywhere can tell stories to Americans in this way, even storytellers who have never set foot physically in North America. It is post-industrial folklore most of all in our man-made environment that continues to diffuse and disorganize America’s congealing and stabilizing stories of origins, of purpose, of credit and blame. It has pluralized and deconstructed our mythopoetical core, a concept we return to below in Chapter 3, to a point where reassembling anything like what we had before Bedford Falls turned many years ago into Pottersville is impossible.
God, I think, is not dead--nor, just by the way, did Nietzsche mean that as is often (mis)understood. But the America of the Greatest Generation, if not already dead, is dying one elder funeral at a time. No one can make that America great again. Knowing that counsels spending time in assisted living communities, not because the residents need our help beyond what they get from the staffs. Rather it is because we need their assistance to help us remember where we’ve been, what we’ve come from as a society. We need their help to slow down the spinning in our heads, to get off the crazy treadmill for a few minutes, to inject some perspective in our distracted minds.
7. Technovelty: Here we finally come to the most powerful explanatory template in the mix. Technovelty (my coinage) refers, like Richard Danzig’s phrase “technology tsunami,” to the widespread but most unspecific concern that so much technological change coming so fast, particularly of the cyber type, is causing waves of disorientation and insecurities of a particularly cloying kind because few can accurately put their finger on what’s causing it. Some emphasize massive dislocations in the nation’s labor profile; others point to massive psycho-social disorientation, especially among younger age cohorts who lack the reading-heavy educations that provide protection from the distortions induced by the cyber-devices. In its more insistent form the technovelty thesis characterizes what the hell is wrong as hyper-technologized Tofflerian “future shock” that is moving so fast as to be present shock. Thus a nod to the singularity, brought down from the stratosphere to its earthly abode. And others, like Danzig, have taken a broader view of the cybershocks extant and to come.[5]
Many neuroscientists are concerned that immersion in the technology, common particularly among younger age cohorts, is reshaping brain circuitry not necessarily in a good way. This line of inquiry, together with the aforementioned note on industrial folklore, is the most direct on-ramp to where we are headed, but there are problems with most of the cyber-tsunami literature as it exists now: It is largely correct, as the other six theories rehearsed here are largely correct; but it lacks the necessary company to be the powerful analytical tool it needs to be to explain the variance. We will give it and the other worthy arguments just summarized the company they deserve—which, often enough, is each other.
But as important, we must dig deeper into the culture to create a more fitting context for these arguments brought together. In other words, we’re going to add a vertical axis to a more coherent multipartite horizontal axis of explanation. And let us not leave too much doubt about where all this leads, besides which is it the journey to the answer as much as the answer itself that is most enriching and useful.
Having digested the introduction, the reader will not be surprised by the essential answer to the “what the hell” question. The spectacle mentality, enabled by the three culture-based underturtles to come, is all about astounding complexes we deliver to each other and ourselves for the sake of virtually non-stop entertainment. We can do that because we are affluent, detached from the values that helped make us affluent and peaceable, and ignorant to a fare-thee-well because we have become too lazy to read anything serious and challenging to clue us in. We the People are drifting in clouds of aspirational amnesia, so to be free to enjoy ourselves without the slowing, deadening weight of pesky, full-reality consciousness.
The result is an ambient funhouse-mirror form of adolescent-level ideological thinking that infects everything in the culture, and politics as an extrusion of the culture. By a thumbnail estimate, about 35-40 percent of the chronologically adult population to the right of center, and about 10-15 percent of the chronologically adult population to the left of center, cannot summon a remotely accurate objective description of any public policy issue, even in sub-expert brief, because they are limited to narratives no more complex than a typical fictive television or movie script. These scripts are variously filled with politically correct stereotypical simplifications, conspiracy theories, revenant magic characteristic of preliterate, orality-dominated societies, and apocalyptical projections of insecurity and fear that blot out the political conception of time critical to the stability of liberal democratic orders. Everything political happens now, in the media-churned wow, is attuned to one shiny abstract object or another—environmental catastrophism or “replacement” theory, say—is limitless and fraught, and produces dopamine flows by the megagallons. Those in the throes of the spectacle mentality—probably by now half of the chronologically adult American population, weaned daily on a non-stop flow of screen-mediated two-dimensional images—are rarely bored and, at least by traditional standards, rarely altogether sane either. They have the same cognitive plumbing as the rest of us, about 86 billion neurons, roughly 16 billion of them in the frontal cortex. But even in the softest pinch they often seem unable to use them to locate the lebenswelt—the phenomenological term for the real world.
How does this affect American politics? It’s simple but, alas, the theories on offer on the “what the hell question” don’t capture the tone of the moment or get the answer right even taken together: The other, sane half of the adult population, seeing the craziness close in on them from both illiberal horseshoe flanks, are forced to assess which flavor of political insanity is the most dangerous soonest. Some not unreasonably fear the anti-Constitutional zero-sum-inspired authoritarian, xenophobic madness on the Right, and so look to the Democrats, despite a perfectly logical lack of enthusiasm for Joe Biden, to save the republic from de facto extinction. Some not unreasonably fear the utopian para-religious madness of the woke children’s crusade, and so look to the Right, biting their lips all the way, to save us from that form of dizzy madness. Given the inherent bias of the Electoral College that favors the conservative and rural small-population states, more who fear the Right need to vote to save the day their way than would be the case if the political playing field were perfectly level.
Others refuse to lean toward one kind of madness to save the nation from the other kind, and so pronounce a plague on both mirror-bedecked funhouses. Some seek out some sort of off-mainstream-political-grid monastical alternative, whether a highly improbable third party cloistered in the United States, or a fuggedaboutit-inducing exile abroad. And polls show that more Americans than ever both currently live abroad and are contemplating do so if they can manage it—34 percent today compared to 17 percent in 1995 and 10 percent in 1974. That’s a problem too, because these are the people we need most to save us as the nation teeters on the precipice of recovery or chasm.
That folks, in a nutshell, is what the hell is going on in the United States on what it’s fair to call the ground floor of the political culture. Time now to crack the nut, excavate, and examine the meat within. Fasten your seatbelt as we head for our three underturtles.
The Age of Spectacle:
How a Confluence of Fragilized Affluence, the End of Modernity, and Shock Entertainment Technovelty Have Wrecked American Politics
Foreword [TKL]
Introduction: A Hypothesis Unfurled (2-14)
PART I: Puzzle Pieces
1. The Analytical Status Quo: Seven Theories of American Dysfunction (15-45)
2. Underturtle I: Fragile Affluence and Postmodern Decadence (46-60)
3. Underturtle II: Lost Origin Stories at the End of Modernity (61-109)
4. Underturtle III: From Deep Literacy to Cyber-Orality (110-154)
5. The Net Effect (155-179)
6. The Cultural Contradictions of Liberal Democracy (180-217)
PART II: Emerging Picture
7. “Doing a Ripley”: Spectacle Defined and Illustrated (218-250)
8. The Neuroscience of Spectacle: Shiny Electrons and the Novelty Bias (251-284)
9. The Mad Dialectic of Nostalgia and Utopia in the Infotainment Era (285-329)
10. Beyond Ripley: Spectacle and the American Future (330-354)
EPILOGUE
What Our Politics Can Do, What We Must Do (355-389)
Index (390-)
[1] Putnam may have been influenced by William A. Galston, Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to American Democracy (Brookings, 2018), which is refreshingly frank about the political role of large-scale immigration.
[2] Argued famously as long ago as 1950 in the The Lonely Crowd.
[3] Far better than Debord and newer than Riesman et al. is Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (1987).
[4] See the shrewd commentary by Rob Walker, “Pop-Culture Evolution,” New York Times, April 15, 2007.
[5] Here note David Susskind, Future Politics (Oxford University Press, 2020). Susskind focuses on the macrosocial and political implications of technology but, like many observers plowing this field, has little or nothing to say about the neuro-cognitive aspects of the problem on the human beings that compose the society. There is not a single listing for neuroscience, cognition, addiction, or any related topic in Susskind’s otherwise copious index. He has managed to describe a forest without examining the trees. He has done it fairly well, but still…..