The Age of Spectacle, Part 9

Chapter 3: America’s Lost Stories at the End of Modernity, part 1

I hope some readers enjoyed last week’s poem, “Storm, in White.” Sorry again for the interruption for those eagerly awaiting more of The Age of Spectacle in The Raspberry Patch. But it just was not ready. Now I think it is ready enough, though hardly as polished as I would like and as, I believe, it will eventually become. This exercise is, again, integral to that becoming.

As before, the whole table of contents is reposted at the end so everyone who needs to can see where we are in the entirety of the project.

My best estimate is that it will take three, possibly four, posts to complete the chapter. Today we launch part 1, and so, with no further delay, here it is:

“Borgen,” a Danish television series from about a dozen years ago, featured a politically correct and highly earnest, yet still very likable, politician named Birgitte Nyborg who ends up improbably becoming Prime Minister. In one episode she travels to Greenland for what she supposes will be a pro forma, pass-through meeting with Greenland’s premier—who is, of course, an Inuit. The meeting goes badly. Nyborg tries to be vaguely friendly but the premier, who is even more earnest than she, tongue lashes her after she blurts out in a defensive tic that 40 percent of Greenland’s youngsters drop out of high school, and that, given Greenland’s wide local autonomy from Denmark, the fault cannot lie with the motherland or its government. The gist of his ensuing criticism is that the Prime Minister cares so little about Greenland that she isn’t even willing to stay long enough to meet any ordinary citizens and learn about their problems.

Stung by this truth telling, the Prime Minister extends her trip and tries to make amends. She soon learns, for example, that as many as 20 percent of all young Greenlanders attempt suicide, and nearly the whole adult population is devastated by alcoholism. Why? Because, she is told, first colonization, and then an unbidden but insistent modernization pressing in around them, have destroyed their culture. The people have “lost their stories,” the ones that tie the present to the past, lean toward the future, and thus create meaning.

In between episodes of “Borgen” I happened to be reading Marc Lewis’s then-recently published book The Biology of Desire (2015). Lewis, a neurophysiologist, showed why the popular belief in “addiction as a brain disease,” however tactically useful for addiction counselors and insurance companies, is bad science. Addicts conquer their problems, which he called not “recovery” but rather “personality development beyond addiction,” when they become able to project a storyline outward that gives them a vision of themselves in a better future. Trying to merely suppress cravings doesn’t work; it leads to a personal doom-loop of ego fatigue, inner demobilization, and relapse.

The gist here is that entire cultures, or parts of them, can become incubators of addiction if they lose the stories that connect families, and through them individuals, to the traditions and social rituals that nurture collective pride and personal worth, and that, very importantly, socialize children so that they know the difference between right and wrong, honor and shame, credit and blame. Lewis could have been talking about Greenland, or about shards of less-affluent America that Robert Putnam discussed in Our Kids (also published in 2015), or about families in affluent American zip codes whose alpha parents fail to pay sufficient emotional attention to their over-privileged teenagers. [1] Could he also have been predicting something about American culture as a whole, whose politics the very next year elected Donald Trump President of the United States? Yes, very much so.

Two valid and mutually reinforcing ways off laying out our second underturtle exist, and taken together they show how summed with fragile affluence and the erosion of deep literacy the loss of our stories undergirds the Age of Spectacle. The stories that saw us through triumph and trouble have been switched out, much as a cowbird hen invades and tosses out the eggs of other birds to make room for her own.

The first way of going at this subject is best termed big-scope history while the second leans more on the insights of cultural anthropology. The vocabulary of an historical approach differs from that of a cultural anthropology approach, but combined the two produce an explanation of the variance that exceeds the sum of the two parts. That is what this chapter endeavors to present as it sets out and examines in sequence basically three questions: (1) What is the ontological nature and function of a story that a culture tells about itself?; (2) Where did the basic origin story that we Americans have told ourselves about our culture come from and what did it portend for the politics that extruded from it?; and (3) Why and how has this American story been pluralized, banalized, and, in recent times especially, been in roughly equal parts forgotten, distorted, loathed, and essentially replaced with stories whose underlying premises are antithetical to those critical to the origin and evolution of the republic?

Aristotle’s Picture Album

What is the core of a culture made up of? Aristotle, Plato’s erstwhile younger associate and debate partner from the mid-4th century BCE, wrote in De Anima that, “The soul cannot think without a picture.” When most Western contemporaries hear the word “soul,” or “sin” or “virtue,” they tend to become ataxic and tune out. Don’t: Aristotle had hands on a powerful idea, prefigured by the Latin phrase imaginatio facit casum, which has to be one of the earliest, if not the earliest, statements of basic phenomenology.[2] If we translate Aristotle’s remark into more modern parlance as “a symbol-using level of human consciousness cannot operate without a visual metaphor,” we easily grasp what he meant as an epistemological first principle. He tells us, in essence, what the cognitive architecture of a story is and how it moves from mind to manifestation.

Working by dint of inspired intuition, Aristotle could not have known that evidence exists for a neurological relationship between visual creativity and language, first oral and then both oral and written. Visual creativity is also related to the cognitive process involved in tool-making and using: the raw materials from which humans shape their own environment and, dialectically, themselves. This is what Churchill meant, defining a building broadly, when he said, “First we shape our buildings and then our buildings shape us.” So tool-making and language, as well as aesthetics generally, share a basis in the human capacity for complex creative activity. Put another way, the principle of embodied cognition has played a core role in human cognitive evolution; cranial size seems to have increased in part to be able to house the recursively entwined neural pathways that bind together speaking, tool-making and environment shaping, and art.[3]

With these observations in mind, let us look to a particular implication of what Aristotle and, over time, many others, have come to understand. Animals lack articulate symbolic speech, but many, certainly all mammals, have effective working and long-term memories. They remember beyond sheer instinct by categorizing visual, aural, olfactory, and tactile sensory inputs into hierarchical patterns that are stored in their brains, to be evoked and applied to associated future stimuli. In other words, they think—even reason is not too strong a term—using what amount to rules, but rules based on images instead of word symbols. They do this by generating glial cells and myelin sheaths that together form an organic circuitry among their neurons through which energy passes back and forth at speeds characteristic to the species.

Human bodies do the same thing, except that through a still not fully understood process of symbolization unique to humans we adumbrate these basic images in our frontal cortex, linking “animal” image symbols to symbolic language.[4] Language development tracked closely with larger hominid brain sizes over stretches of time. Moving from Australopithicus to homo erectus to homo sapien brain size grew from, respectively, 450-90 cc to 1,000 cc to 1,500 cc. According to the scientific literature on such matters, a brain size of about 750 cc is needed for prelinguistic communication, 1000 cc for naming and pointing. Thanks to the advent of human neoteny, which enables the brain to keep developing long after birth, articulate speech kicks in at about 1,250 cc. Much, much later in human evolution came the epochal epigenetic innovation of written language, of literacy, which has recursively contributed to the evolution of still larger brain capacities in humans via an epigenetic form of cultural selection. Creative and cooperative human social groups fared better in the survival sweepstakes, in other words, and a higher proportion of larger-brain survivors is the contemporary result.

With articulate language and later written language humans acquired a capacity for something very important that non-human animals lack: an increasingly granular sense of time enabled by the symbolic reification of the otherwise seamless flow of experience. Animals employ instinct to account for changing conditions; squirrels gather nutmeat in the temperate zone autumn and bury it hither and yon for later use not because they know how to plan, but because instinct leads them to do so. Larger-brained animals doubtless sense the rolling of day after night and day again, but without a concept of time fixed through symbolization they cannot anticipate a particular dawn, say, 72 hours into the future. A finer sense of time enables humans to order sensation via thought about it, and thus to construct sequences of actions past and putatively future. From this ability comes the capacity to create narratives—in pictorial art as well as in oral and later written language—in which people, the narrator with them on occasion, move and interact with one another.

Humans came to be able to do this in waking moments as well as in dreams, which may be where narrative sequencing originated. Without a sense of time there can be no summonable memory, hence no stories or any sense of a granular future. Again, articulate language is not strictly necessary for a sense of time to operate this way; the human mind can construct sequenced flows of sounds and images without words, for otherwise there could be no music or plastic arts. But only with articulate language, with symbols, can stories develop real texture in reference to the material world and become a functionally intersubjective form of communication among what are, after all, social animals.

Having now dispensed with how human stories of any kind developed, we can shift to some common sense evidence of the process at work. Anyone who is a parent or who has spent a lot of focused time with children sees the shift from seamless sensory input to articulate language come about as infants learn to distinguish phonemes, then attach meaning to them, then to devise categories of general meanings, then become able to understand complex thoughts and to speak full sentences, and ultimately learn to read and write. Reading itself develops in phases, of course: First a child learns to associate reading and oral language through being read to; then a child learns letter symbols and how to combine them into morphologies that represent words. For a while all reading must be spoken out loud, first by a reader and then by the child. At a certain point a child will typically achieve the ability to read silently, but in between there is usually a phase where lips are moving even without sound emerging. One also sometimes sees this intermediate step in the process of adult literacy education.

As a child develops a theory of mind through this process, ornate imaginative play (solo and with others, so alone and socially) develops along with the development of language, but well before literacy becomes possible. The organization of the sensed world by dint of images based on pictures and sounds precedes and enables language. Humans “think” metaphorically before they are able to think in literal-material terms, and that infuses thought with an underpinning of magical causality before it can become rational-objective causality. For this reason magical causality persists abundantly in ordinary speech in all human cultures. For example, we say that “a big wave rocked the boat” as if the wave had agency or intentionality. We adults who have been reared in scientifically literate cultures know this isn’t so, but we speak in that manner quite naturally, rarely reflecting on the substrata metaphorical basis of our own reasoning.

This is natural and harmless, but now note that politics is a domain where the metaphorical and the objective-material merge. Political and social life obviously has a material basis but it is not limited to that basis. This is why thinking of it as socially constructed is accurate, as Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann coined the phrase in 1967 in the classic The Social Construction of Reality, but why thinking of it as only socially constructed—as is the postmodernist predicate—is, to put not too fine a point on it, wrong. And it has come to matter than it is wrong.

Amid the symbolic human world we need to factor in major influences that flow from but also recursively affect culture, such as technological innovation. Beyond that, this ongoing process has a history, the variable perception of which shapes the ensemble as it rolls along in what we perceive as the present tense. In other words, we need to consider not just the picture before us but also the camera that takes the picture: us, as a national community. This is as simple as recalling Kant’s couplet of noumena and phenomena, and it is also as complex as what phenomenologists have done with that couplet ever since. So it’s complicated, but not impenetrable. And it is necessary to keep both picture and camera simultaneously in mind; let just one example of failing to do so illustrate the reason.

In the March 28, 2024 New York Times’s daily email shot German Lopez, writing his “This Morning” column, made mention of the low approval ratings of most current democratic leaders, pointing out that while President Biden’s ratings were low, they were higher than most other leaders’ ratings. Why?

Lopez mentions five factors: inflation, immigration, inequality, incumbency, and insecurity. These are factors overwhelmingly about the picture, about what’s out there. These factors are not wrong, but they do not differ dramatically from similarly arrayed factors from years before, yet no tightly comparable dive in leaders’ approval ratings accompanied them. Despite this logical frailty in his analysis, Lopez offers not a word about the camera as opposed to the picture as translated through the current pulse of technovelty: the effect of media disintermediation and hyperconnectivity on the ability of political elites control information flows about them; the flattening of social authority and hence the presumption that all opinions are valid, no matter their basis in knowledge or experience—the democratization of adolescent snark, in short, is what it has come down to—is bound to influence polling data; the foreshortened half-life of political celebrity in entertainment-saturated cultures; and particularly the pandemic of impatience that leads people to suppose that the rapid quotidian efficiency of their smartphones is the default standard against which the rest of reality is justifiably measured. Not one word about any of this or several other “camera”-based factors one can identify contributing to the current disadvantages of incumbency.

So back to Aristotle’s seminal insight: The human narrative reasoning that starts with pictures that are categorized in rule-like, hierarchical ways seem to be somewhat fractal-like in structure, like tree roots and lightening. Indeed, the term decision-tree is a popular way to describe such a structure—again, metaphorically. One result seems to be that every major culture, associated with a particular language family, thinks intersubjectively about social and political reality on the basis of a dominant metaphor, an Aristotelian picture. This metaphor, embodied in a very simple (usually) moving picture, is the outermost sentry whose function is to act as a prism, separating, sifting, categorizing, and storing incoming symbolic/abstractive “bits” into some coherent framework. Think of it, perhaps, as the search engine design of Kant’s “unity in the manifold.” Or think of it as akin to how track switches work to send trains down this or that intended line at the railroad station, later to be recombined and sent back out to some useful purpose.

More than that, since, as David Hume showed, no one can derive a moral ought from an empirical is, these metaphorical little moving picture conceptions, and the narratives in articulate speech enabled to flow from them are, ontologically speaking, mythopoetic in character rather than empirical. The stories built from the metaphors make emotional and social sense, not empirical sense. The raw vocabulary invokes abstractions—love, hope, humanity, compassion, society, truth, honesty, loyalty, patriotism, and so on—rather than physical things like rocks, chairs, or potatoes.

These metaphorical conceptions and mythopoetic narratives of course do change over time, but they tend to be more or less stable for long periods; if they weren’t, they couldn’t serve their function as devices for intersubjective communication and hence social cohesion. That is partly because of how they are adopted. The human brain, capacious as it is in some respects, is of modest capacity in other respects. Its capacity to store and use a mythopoetic template has limits such that we basically can manage only one meta-creedal template at a time. We typically first adopt one in the context of family socialization and peer reinforcement, usually sacralized within a faith community. Most people satisfice with respect to the task: We adopt the first mythopoetic template that works well enough within the social context in which we find ourselves.

We then don’t abandon that first-learned template easily; it becomes quite sticky. It usually takes a good bit more than mere awareness of an attractive alternative to make us do it. It can happen if the original template is perceived to fail in serving our quotidian interpretive needs to interpret change, and when that happens it can happen suddenly, in a fit of cognitive desperation, so change becomes a flip. That failure may be prompted by major disruption, either personal—a traumatizing early death of a parent or sibling, for example—or social, as a trauma widely shared in society by dint of war, famine, or plague. In the latter case, whole templates can collapse, spawning irrational rearguard reactions, the embrace of new faiths, and triggering fierce competition between the two. Mayhem typically follows until a new equipoise emerges. In the case of the Protestant Reformation it took many decades for that to happen. It took even longer in the see-sawing struggle between Hinduism and Buddhism in Southeast Asia, as the wall carving narratives on display at Angkor Wat show.

But sometimes mythopoetical templates erode slowly and socially, mostly unconsciously, when the social ecology of its origins changes so as to knock the knees out from under an aged template. The gradual inanition of a mythopoetical template makes it vulnerable to replacement. This matters because every civilization devises stories of origin and destiny, and tells stories of credit and blame consistent with them.[5] This is how children learn the oughts and ought-nots, the moral code of the society, its hierarchy of values. It is how they learn about the dilemmas of choice and sacrifice when they hear and discuss these stories at whose core are the little moving pictures definitive of the cultural prism.

This is also why shrewd cultural historians have long collected and studied folklore—“fairly tales” when folklore coincides with stories designed with children in mind—because, especially in preliterate cultures, those are the repositories of deep truth about how the world works and how we might navigate our way in it. This is how George Washington gets from crossing the Delaware, which he actually did, to confessing to chopping down a cherry tree, which he “did” only mythopoetically in Mason Locke Weems’s popular 1806 biography. The two kinds of deeds fuse nicely and necessarily in what we may broadly call an operating civic culture; that’s just how these things work, with few sharp lines separating what was, what might have been and even what should have been. Cognitive consistency rules the mythopoetical roost.

Thus, early pre-literacy attempts to make logical sense of the world, though they would be considered way off line by contemporary lights, are not thereby well described as pre-rational or irrational. Rationality has more to do with intentions than outcomes, and is consistent with an approach to causality based on moral as opposed to empirical reason. Shamans and witchdoctors sought to bring order to and gain power over nature, the alternative being unremitting swirling chaos. So a regnant cultural metaphor cannot be judged on the basis of any empirical alignment with material reality, but rather on whether it works as an explanatory template in the mythopoetic mode.

As already suggested, all socio-political concepts need metaphors to be intersubjectively communicable since there is no literal head of state, no literal body politic, not even any literal society (a flat “fact” Margaret Thatcher famously, though perhaps deliberately, misunderstood) that can actually be seen or heard by human sensory apparata. All such abstractions familiar to Americans—democracy, liberalism, representative government, rule of law, and many others—work only by dint of metaphorical language, and indeed a political going concern as large as nation can exist only by dint of a shared metaphorical template; without a level of articulate language for the purpose, the size of a human political community would be limited to the number of individuals with whom any one member of the group has face-to-face contact and recognition—according to primatologists, about 200 individuals. As Michael Walzer once put it with regard to larger national units,

In a sense, the union of men can only be symbolized; it has no palpable shape or substance. The state is invisible; it must be personified before it can be seen, symbolized before it can be loved, imagined before it can be conceived.[6]

Here it is also worth pressing cultural historian Robert Darnton into service: “World views cannot be chronicled in the manner of political events, but they are no less ‘real.’ Politics could not take place without the preliminary mental ordering that goes into the common-sense notion of the real world.”[7] In Erving Goffman’s compatible language, politics is a lamination or a framing based on the lebenswelt but bracketed off from it by means of agreed conventions, and diplomacy among states is a lamination, a still more abstract re-keying, of the political lamination.

So politics domestic and interstate alike is redolent with affect-laden symbolic activity, which is why ideology is so common and so necessary to politics, for ideology is metaphorical in structure. As a metaphor is literally incorrect, as Walker Percy famously pointed out, asserting of one thing that it is another thing, so ideology—whether consciously or more often not—simplifies by analogizing as it stands in for a complex social reality.[8] The mythopoetical is thus necessary prologue to the political, and if the prologue decays and shifts dramatically enough, it can no longer sustain the dependent political order earlier erected upon it. That process of decay, or rather a switching out of our mythopoetical core, is part of what is happening to us over the past few decades, seeming to accelerate with each passing year.

Some examples of Aristotle’s “pictures” may help clarify the matter. The core Russian little picture, for example, is a plant seedling, sprouting, growing, flowering, fruiting, withering, dying, decaying, and then being reborn with the next springtime. It is relentless and unsentimental; but it is also mystical and beautiful. Nothing can transcend the earth spirit that mandates life, death, and rebirth, not even the most powerful Czar. The Christological Russian picture of “the third Rome” is an historical symbology later layered on top of this older organic picture. Neither picture much disturbs the other.

China? “All under heaven”—tianxia. The pictograph connotes order coming from the top down. There are no horizontal components; all under heaven is organized in accordance with an invariant hierarchical principle. China has long had meticulously adumbrated written rule by law, but not rule of law. This is why, despite the written character of the law, the reigning ideas of the given moment are not constitutions or social contracts but the “thought” of the Emperor—or whatever the leader in any given epoch is called. This concept obviously emits very audible contemporary echoes.

The Arab little picture is the simple non-iconographic shape that by itself is not especially interesting: the arabesque. But when that shape is thoughtfully put together with others like it the most beautiful displays can result, each one different from the others. Arabs sense themselves as metaphorical arabesques bound up in a kind of “electrified” social web, each person’s power and status a net result of all the connections, close and far, involving that person. Societies aligned with the arabesque metaphor are like coral organisms in a sense, not surprising for societies with a mainly tribal or latter-day patrimonial social structure.

The little moving picture at the center of the Anglo-American political “head” is the dynamic equilibrium. It comes, as David Landes suggested in A Revolution in Time, from the early-modern fascination with clock escapements and orreries, mechanical marvels that not coincidentally cohabited the period of the emerging Age of Reason.[9] These models abstracted in the minds of the Founders and their early 18th-century precursors emphasized balance and harmony amid an array of moving parts.

Indeed, the escapements and orreries pointed to a grander shift in worldview. It cannot be emphasized too much how impactful the astronomical discoveries of early modernity were. Key discoveries played a role by showing educated people—and there were many more of them in Europe than ever thanks to Gutenberg and Protestant schools—how distinct heavenly bodies moved in regular relationships with each other. Motion was constant and none of it was random. It implied a creator and for many a teleology.

Changes in the state of scientific-technical knowledge can be quite stealthy politically. Creative minds engaged with one another and the world around them sire downstream effects even without intending them. There may still be no better illustration of this linkage than one from 1611 that showed the impact of new scientific discovery—the “new philosophy” below refers to Copernicus and Brahe—and both politics and social relations. Thus John Donne in his justly famous “Anatomy of a World”:

And new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out,
The sun is lost, and th’earth, and no man’s wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world’s spent,
When in the planets and the firmament
They seek so many new; they see that this
Is crumbled out again to his atomies.
‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,
All just supply, and all relation;
Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinks he hath got
To be a phoenix, and that then can be
None of that kind, of which he is, but he.

The Enlightened man and woman saw not gods raging and plotting against each other in the dome of heaven, as their forbears had done for generations untold, but a positive-sum whole made of separate parts guided to harmony by a benign Divine will. About a century and a half later the political-institutional result eventually shone before the eyes of the Founders’ generation: “checks and balances” flowing from the separation of powers within an integral system; the “invisible hand” in economics, E pluribus unum, the concept of free speech as summing and ratifying truth from open debate; and a good bit more besides.

[1] This introduction borrows from the beginning of an old and somewhat obscure essay of mine: “Development and U.S. Foreign Policy,” Horizon (Belgrade) (Fall 2015).

[2] This Latin phrase, of unknown authorship, is usually translated as “the imagination creates the event,” but that understates its profundity. It is better if more loosely translated as “the imagination creates reality after its images of it.”

[3] See Dietrich Stout, Nicholas Toth, Kathy Schick, and Thierry Chaminade, “Neural Correlates of Early Stone Age toolmaking: technology, language, and cognition in human evolution,” Philosophical Transactions B (Royal Society Publishing), No. 363, June 12, 2008, pp. 1939-49.

[4] The process of symbolization, the basic plinth of culture and what makes us human, intrigued the 20^th-century German-Jewish philosopher Ernst Cassirer; his three-volume masterwork was titled The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Though Cassirer wrote nearly a century ago, lacking a vast trove of empirical data on neurocognitive functions since discovered, he made a pretty good case for how the process seems to work.

[5] See Charles Tilly, “Memorials to Credit and Blame,” The American Interest III: 5 (Spring 2008).

[6]Walzer, “On the Role of Symbolism in Political Thought,” Political Science Quarterly, June 1967. See also Clifford Geertz, “Ideology as a Cultural System,” in David Apter, ed., Ideology and Discontent (Free Press, 1964). The literary equivalent of the same idea: “Any country would fall to scobs and flinders without paper. That’s all a nation is. Paper. Otherwise it’s all just land left to its own devices.” Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons (Random House, 2007), p. 344.

[7] Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (Basic Books, 2009), p. 7.

[8] Percy, “Metaphor as Mistake,” Sewanee Review (Winter 1958).

[9] On the importance of the physical models of the day for use as metaphors, the orreries and watch-works especially, see the brilliant classic by David Landes, A Revolution in Time (Harvard University Press, 2000). A stunning display of artistic automata can be seen in Vienna at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. If a superior collection and display exists, I do not know of it.

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