Mining Big Think essays

There are a lot of essays that appear in journals like The Atlantic and sometimes in more academic venues that I find intriguing but frustrating. If the writer bends over backwards to sound non-partisan, the reader is left with a feeling that there is some important point about understanding a political moment but it's not quite obvious what it is.

If she wants to talk about something as grand and interesting as the Zeitgiest, using a lot of statistics would spoil the mood; but then the audience is stuck wondering if the grand generalizations about the Meta-Mood actually make sense.

And if he tries to jam too many clever historical observations together in a big agglomeration, the reader can feel a little like being lost in a cave like in a thousand thriller shows.

I still like to read such Big Think essays, despite the almost inevitable disappointment and the novelty of their insights.

Marilynne Robinson and unhappyAmerica 2020

The New York Review of Books is a specialist in Big Think essays. And I'm a big fan of NYR. I quote it all the time on this blog, including this post. Marilynne Robinson writes a Big Think take on What Kind of Country Do We Want?, "we" being Americans (O6/11/2020 issue).

She starts off in the Meta-Mood mode, which always gives me a bit of the feeling of being a college freshman wondering if I'll ever be able to grasp, much less imitate, such penetrating cultural insights. After decades of experience, I'm reconciled to the fact that the answer is, "No." But she does make an observation about the dominant neoliberal outlook inn the US and much of the world that is indeed well-founded:

Much American unhappiness has arisen from the cordoning-off of low-income workers from the reasonable hope that they and their children will be fairly compensated for their work, their contribution to the vast wealth that is rather inexactly associated with this country, as if everyone had a share in it. Their earnings should be sufficient to allow them to be adequate providers and to shape some part of their lives around their interests. Yet workers’ real wages have fallen for decades in America. This is rationalized by the notion that their wages are a burden on the economy, a burden in our supposed competition with China, which was previously our competition with Japan. The latter country has gone into economic and demographic eclipse, and more or less the same anxieties that drove American opinion were then transferred to China, and with good reason, because there was also a transfer of American investment to China.

The terrible joke is that American workers have been competing against expatriated American capital, a flow that has influenced, and has been influenced by, the supposed deficiencies of American labor. New factories are always more efficient than those they displace, and new factories tend to be built elsewhere. And as the former presidential candidate Mitt Romney remarked, workers in China sleep in factory dormitories. Employing them in preference to American workers would sidestep the old expectation that a working man or woman would be able to rent a house or buy a car. The message being communicated to our workers is that we need poverty in order to compete with countries for whom poverty is a major competitive asset. The global economic order has meant that the poor will remain poor. There will be enough flashy architecture and middle-class affluence to appear to justify the word “developing” in other parts of the world, a designation that suggests that the tide of modernization and industrialization is lifting all boats, as they did in Europe after World War II. [my emphasis]

In the American Democratic Party, the conservatives (aka, corporate Democrats) have developed a liberal "identity" rhetoric that valorizes and even actually supports measures to establish formal equality for minorites and women. But at the same time stigmatizes not just "socialist" but any serious pro-labor policy analysis that emphasizes the far-reaching importance of those economic trends. Yes, the "intersectionality" of personal identities can be very complicated. And there are various kind of social pathologies that intersect with each other in contradictory ways. None of which means we have to bury our heads in the sand and just accept that "the best we can do" is to have something slightly better than the politics of a sociopathic and incompentent Orange Clown and of the party that made him President and supports him idolatrously.

Then she drifts back into Big Think, explaining that in American education "a narrative has emerged over time that capitalism is the single defining trait of American civilization," one based on a "quaint adherence to Marxian categories." Karl Marx as the godfather of Anglo-American neoliberalism? Whatever his shortcomings, the old guy doesn't deserve to have that criticism hung around his neck!

Jennifer Mercieca on the "outrage Presidency" of Trump

An academic article by Jennifer Mercieca offers some observations from her forthcoming book on Trump's brand of demagoguery, The Emergence of the Outrage Presidency NCA Spectra March 2020. This particular Big Think piece thankfully didn't give me uncomfortable freshman flashbacks, but a much more pleasant feeling of, hey, this gives me a new way to think about something that's important. In this case, she analyzes the evolution of political communication in the digital age at the Presidential level. And in the article, she keeps her eye on the ball, i.e., "Trump has continued in the tradition of rightwing media figures such as Rush Limbaugh, Drudge, and Fox News commentators."

That continuity is a key element in the continuing radicalization of the Republican Party that the corporate media and way too many Democrats find it convenient to overlook. The media are addicted to the dogma of Both Sides Do It. And the Democrats have gotten so use to chasing the fantasy of "persuadable" Republican voters that they continually rewrite political history to make previous Republicans Administrations responsible and respectable. She refers to earlier work:

In 2007, Stephen Hartnett and I described in Presidential Studies Quarterly the “post-rhetorical presidency” of George W. Bush. We thought that Bush’s presidential communication was characterized less by the rhetorical presidency’s model of “eloquence, logic, pathos, or narrative storytelling,” and more by the public relations techniques of “ubiquitous public chatter, waves of disinformation, and cascades of confusion-causing misdirection.”

The Cheney-Bush version of what Steve Bannon famously described as "flood the zone with s**t," in other words.

I'm curious to read her new book, which probably provides better context on one point that strikes me about the article, which is that it gives the impression that polarization is in itself a bad thing. But one of the most dysfunctional aspects of today's American political system is the asymmetric partisan polarization of the two major parties, in which the Republicans become more fanatically rightwing while the Democrats try more and more to sound like some milder version of Republicans. I'm still a big fan of the Madisonian classical liberal concept that politics is about conflict among various interests. (Federalist #10) Which of course has more recent elaborations from theorists like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe.

Kurt Anderson from 2017 on America as Fantasyland (and not in a good way!)

Kurt Andersen gives us a kind of greatest-hits rundown on the road to American mass delusion, or what he calls "our national lurch toward fantasy," in (the loo-ong) How America Lost Its Mind The Atlantic Sept 2017. Included are Stephen Colbert and truthiness, Karl Rove and the reality-based community, the Sixties as "a national nervous breakdown," the Enlightenment and American Christianity, UFOs and quack medicine, Puritans and hedonistic individualism, the Internet, American exceptionalism, Joseph Smith and Walt Disney, Ken Kesey and LSD, San Francisco and Big Sur, JFK assassination theories, well, you get the idea. "America has mutated into Fantasyland."

Anderson provides a pleasantly dizzy intellectual buzz. And it's fun to see largely forgotten one-time cultural icons like Charles Reich pop up. (He was the Greening of America guy, not to be confused with Wilhelm Reich, the sexual-revolution and orgone-energy guy). He makes some useful observations like, "Religion aside, America simply has many more fervid conspiracists on the right, as research about belief in particular conspiracies confirms again and again. Only the American right has had a large and organized faction based on paranoid conspiracism for the past six decades." Again an important factor in the political crisis of asymmetric partisan polarization in American politics.

This Big Think article, too, is taken from a book How America Went Haywire-A 500-Year History (2017), so there's surely some nuance lost in the shorter article version. And he offers some practical, everyday advice for navigating our ecosystem of mis- and dis-information:

It will require a struggle to make America reality-based again. Fight the good fight in your private life. You needn’t get into an argument with the stranger at Chipotle who claims that George Soros and Uber are plotting to make his muscle car illegal—but do not give acquaintances and friends and family members free passes. If you have children or grandchildren, teach them to distinguish between true and untrue as fiercely as you do between right and wrong and between wise and foolish.

We need to adopt new protocols for information-media hygiene. Would you feed your kids a half-eaten casserole a stranger handed you on the bus, or give them medicine you got from some lady at the gym?

And fight the good fight in the public sphere. One main task, of course, is to contain the worst tendencies of Trumpism, and cut off its political-economic fuel supply, so that fantasy and lies don’t turn it into something much worse than just nasty, oafish, reality-show pseudo-conservatism. Progress is not inevitable, but it’s not impossible, either.

This story has a video introduction, The Cultural Factors Driving America's Departure From Reality:

But after the article's blitz of pessimistic history of the popularity of what we now call Alternative Facts, his advice there on how to combat it seems like pretty weak tea, homespun wisdom as an antidote to a epistemological crisis affected a whole civilization. And I think part of what limits his search for solutions is what seems to be a positivist bias, which is popular among many scientists who also do an excellent job of debunking pseudoscience and popular delusions. He criticizes the conservative bogeyman of "relativism," naming several figures he regards as villains of this erroneous thinking: Peter Berger, Paul Feyerabend, Thomas Luckmann, Charles Tart, and, of course, Michel Foucault:

Even the social critic Paul Goodman, beloved by young leftists in the ’60s, was flabbergasted by his own students by 1969. “There was no knowledge,” he wrote, “only the sociology of knowledge. They had so well learned that … research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they did not believe there was such a thing as simple truth.”

Ever since, the American right has insistently decried the spread of relativism, the idea that nothing is any more correct or true than anything else. Conservatives hated how relativism undercut various venerable and comfortable ruling ideas - certain notions of entitlement (according to race and gender) and aesthetic beauty and metaphysical and moral certainty. Yet once the intellectual mainstream thoroughly accepted that there are many equally valid realities and truths, once the idea of gates and gatekeeping was discredited not just on campuses but throughout the culture, all American barbarians could have their claims taken seriously. Conservatives are correct that the anything-goes relativism of college campuses wasn’t sequestered there, but when it flowed out across America it helped enable extreme Christianities and lunacies on the right - gun-rights hysteria, black-helicopter conspiracism, climate-change denial, and more. The term useful idiot was originally deployed to accuse liberals of serving the interests of true believers further on the left. In this instance, however, postmodern intellectuals - post-positivists, poststructuralists, social constructivists, post-empiricists, epistemic relativists, cognitive relativists, descriptive relativists - turned out to be useful idiots most consequentially for the American right. “Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” Stephen Colbert once said, in character, mocking the beliefs-trump-facts impulse of today’s right. Neither side has noticed, but large factions of the elite left and the populist right have been on the same team. [my emphasis]

Having recently worked through Jürgen Habermas' account of how the Young Hegelians and the pragmatists built on the traditions of Kant's transcendentalism and Hegel's metaphysical construction of Reason to establish a materialist, social-theory-based explanation of how reason is established in human society, this strikes me as inadequate. Habermas himself has critiqued postmodernism at length in his The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985).

But he also has used the work of what is known as the "linguistic turn" in philosophy (Sprachphilosophie) identified with figures like Frege, Wittgenstein, John Austin, Donald Davidson and Robert Brandom, building on earlier ideas from John Locke, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, to look at the social processes in which knowledge is actually developed and communicated. A positivist notion of what-you-see-is-what-you-get empiricism is appealing. And focusing on empirical findings is extremely important in refuting pseudoscience and conspiracy theories. But it's not the whole story of how human knowledge functions.