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peakwealth · 6 years

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The Will of the People (2)

The Public Against the Public Interest

“To the fool-king belongs the world.“

(Friedrich Schiller, 1759-1805)

January 20, 2017 in Washington, DC. Day one of the new age when reality turned liquid. (Screenshot)

Of all the canaries twittering away in the coal mine of Western dystopia, the one that chants about infant immunizations must be among the loudest. The other day I noticed a picture taken during a demo of people opposed to the compulsory immunization of their children. One of the so-called antivaxxers held up a printed sign that read

STIFLE

UNCOMFY

SCIENCE

The words have shock value for they capture the present revolt against reason and empiricism, against what is perceived by many as the unsettling, uncomfy nature of science -- as if it were a stained old IKEA sofa to be dragged onto the sidewalk and disposed of before dawn. The notion has taken hold that if science makes you feel bad, if it doesn't resonate with your inner self, or your religious faith, you can simply reject it. Opt for 'science' you are comfortable with, be it pseudoscience or complete bogus. Or no science at all.

There is of course nothing new about the discomfort caused by science or by any other sort of manifestly rational knowledge. The late German philosopher Norbert Elias (1) explains, as have countless others, how the human species, once it has domesticated the forces of nature, ends up feeling disenchanted. When the world is no longer revealed through religious myth but through reason, it turns out to be a thoroughly unsettling place. Existence itself, stripped of magic and fantasy, is a sobering affair. And the closer nature is examined, the less it shows any sign of making sense. It seems to lack the deeper logic that humans have always craved to give purpose to their short, insecure lives.

In other words, when reality does not match our hopes and dreams, many of us will reject it out of hand. But, says Elias, we have to grow up, we have to get over it: the universe is neither good nor bad, it is blind and doesn't care about us.

There we have it. In a blind universe, not only is there no god and no devil, there is no Santa either.

To make matters worse, observable reality isn't what it used to be. Ever since it came up with the story of Adam and Eve, authority has looked upon factual knowledge with suspicion. Knowledge was and still is equated with arrogance and transgression. For thousands of years, religions have ignored or contradicted rational thinking and have instead provided comfort to those terrified by the unknown as well as to those who revel in it.

But as science is not compatible with religious dogma, so empirical knowledge necessarily challenges ignorance. When science expands as rapidly as it does today, the world inevitably becomes a more disorienting place to people who are suspicious of the modern age and of all its complexity. Rather than bending their convictions to accommodate the evidence before them, they resent science for failing to provide the reassurance that will allow them to sleep at night.

Rational thinking can only go so far. Lacking transcendence and being a purely human enterprise, science is 'only' a process based on the best available evidence and therefore liable to change over time. It does not provide absolute answers and is therefore as powerless as ever against the rigid beliefs suggested by tradition and sanctioned by society.

The quest for unscientific answers never ends (Jehovah’s witness, 2016, Buffalo, NY, USA)

Again, such stubbornness is hardly new. Back in 1801, Friedrich Schiller wrote the famous line that "against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain" (in the somewhat less elegant German original: Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens). This leads me to surmise that today's problem is perhaps less with the discomfort produced by scientific relativism as with the word stifle, the aggressive readiness to sweep reality under the rug, to look the other way, claiming it is 'part of a vast cover-up'.

In this respect I may be behind the times. A few years ago I started hearing the argument that reason and science were evil ploys used by the elites to keep the people down. (Tellingly perhaps, the same was said about literacy or correct spelling as another tool of oppression).

Uninhibited anti-intellectualism like this has gained traction. It was adopted by right-wing extremists around the time when hooliganism morphed into political revolt, when the ultras, the heavies, les casseurs emerged from their soccer stadiums and moved into politics - identity politics.

But why? It is easy to point at the effects of capitalism or the intuitions of steamroller materialism (impulse shopping, binge watching, uncontrolled eating...) which in turn have given rise to impulse politics and gut-based decision making as exemplified by Donald Trump. I persist in thinking that at least some of today's populism finds its roots in trash culture, the unrelenting cult of celebrity, in computer games, spectator sports and so-called reality TV, all of which spread symbiotically in the late 20th century.

They ended up infantilizing a broad section of the population and unmooring them from evidence-based thinking. The resulting narcissism of the selfie generation and their lack of empathy then went on to infect the internet (2). Add the rising incidence of educational failure in 'advanced' societies and a new age of ignorance, superstition and triviality has emerged.

With his ample background in reality TV, Donald Trump quickly came to epitomize a post-political age where elections were popularity contests or open invitations to insurrection. The ballot box must look increasingly quaint in an age of web manipulation and click-farming where "influencers" gather vast constituencies of "followers" on Twitter or Instagram.

‘DEUS OMNIA VIDET’: from an all-knowing god to an all-seeing internet. (London,UK, 2018)

The internet has thrown everything wide open. Without reliable gatekeepers to police the discourse or to catch post-factual nonsense, it has given free rein to people who distrust reason and dislike complexity. It also suggests that, just as there is convenient and inconvenient science, there is a good truth and a bad truth, and that one is free to choose between them.

Before the internet became universal, factual reality was better shielded from manifest unreason or scientific deviancy. All kinds of people held all manner of wild ideas, as ever, but there was a cordon sanitaire around them that kept them at a distance. In order to publish scientific findings, for instance, you needed academic credentials and peer reviews. Getting any book published was a big deal. Access to the old media, far fewer in number and therefore more influential, was similarly restricted, ring-fenced, filtered by professionals whose job it was to check and double-check information. Such a system of checks and balances may have been perceived as censorship or elitism by some, but it kept the madmen out of the room.

Not any more. The unmediated democratization of access has meant that anyone with an easy onscreen manner, no matter their lack of qualifications, can build up a following of millions. What works for make-up tutorials on YouTube can also do wonders to subvert the political process.

Liberated from restraint and social control, it wasn’t long before the web turned toxic. It was overwhelmed by conspiratorial fantasies, doublespeak and torrents of resentment.

Conspiracy thinking derives from paranoid disbelief, the haha! suspicion that things are not what they appear to be, and seems to be as intuitive as belief itself. It can be argued that one is indistinguishable from the other.

Belief in alternative medicine, in magic and miracles has been around for ages, as have religious practices such as the refusal to accept life-saving blood transfusions. Sometimes reason and paranoia actually intersect as in the perfectly rational distrust of big pharma. Generally, though, amalgamation is central to conspiracy thinking, as is the malicious disregard for observable reality.

The world changed two days after Donald Trump's was sworn in as president of the United States when photographs showed that the crowds along Washington's National Mall were much smaller than those at Barack Obama's inauguration. Not so, said Kellyanne Conway, a member of Trump's inner circle, they had 'alternative facts'. The photographs were not to be believed, your eyes deceived you. It was a historic moment. Trump's assault on reason, irrefutable facts and the media who report them hasn't stopped since that day.

Needless to say, post-truthism or postmodern disinformation didn't start with Donald Trump. Born-again George W. Bush was famously disconnected from reality, perhaps never more so than when he mistakenly declared war on Saddam Hussein in 2003 or when, standing on the deck of an American aircraft carrier only a few weeks later, he declared 'mission accomplished'.

But Donald Trump has created a matrix of all-out lies, disinformation and utter incoherence that is unprecedented and stands in the way of meaningful governance. Trump declares white to be black, only to reverse himself two minutes later and when confronted with the evidence of what he just said, turns around and says it's fake news. And his political constituency doesn't seem to mind.

Defactualization and magical thinking are now around every corner. Farcical as it may seem, some people continue to embrace the belief that mass shootings in the US are inside jobs staged by actors, that 9/11 was an obvious fabrication or, more insidiously perhaps, that European Union bureaucrats in Brussels are to blame for anaemic vacuum cleaners or dim light bulbs forced upon the United Kingdom.

Facilitated by social media, regression has corrupted politics and fed an us-against-them narrative. After moving into the mainstream with Donald Trump, it was embraced by populist imitators such as Italy's Movimento 5 Stelle (Five-star movement). They swept the elections in Italy's underprivileged, undereducated Mezzogiorno earlier this year. As a result, conspiracy theorists are now part of the ruling coalition in Rome and the incidence of measles is on the rise as unvaccinated children spread the disease. Politics in Poland and Hungary have similarly been upended by paranoia, anti-establishment rhetoric and outright anti-Semitism.

Wave after wave of primitivism and voter rage are destabilizing Western societies. Some of that anger has been a long time coming. Politics has lacked credibility for decades. Europe's leadership has been weak and often asleep at the wheel. In failing to assert its historical legitimacy, the gilded bureaucracy in Brussels has become an easy target of popular fury, no matter how uninformed or ill-advised.

The big, ugly question has become this: what to do, in representative democracies with universal franchise, when the will of the people is increasingly at variance with the public interest?

How can governments be expected to govern when hostile voters support irrational, counterproductive governance? How does the British government go about implementing Brexit, a decision imposed by a belligerent electorate against the country's manifest interest? How can the European Union continue when so many members of its own parliament oppose the very idea of a united Europe?

The Roman empire took centuries to unravel. We live in speedier times.

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(1) Norbert Elias (1897-1990): Humana conditio (1985)

(2) ‘They Laughed at Berlusconi’ http://peakwealth.tumblr.com/post/146399295392