What’s Destroying Our Culture?
I’m generally an optimist about history; the world gets much better over time. But at this particular moment, it really seems as if America’s intellectual culture is falling apart. I don’t remember ever seeing such a bitterly divided society in my lifetime. It’s not just that people have strong disagreements. It’s that they have disagreements between completely unreasonable on their face positions. It’s also the level of anger and contempt that you see expressed. It’s also the new trend of abandoning discourse entirely in favor of literal personal attacks – attacks on those with whom one disagrees as people, in their personal lives.
I remember some attacks on free speech when I was in college, but they weren’t anything like as furious, or as hair-triggered, as today. Today you can get fired for stating platitudes, such as “everyone’s life matters”. (https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/dean-of-massachusetts-nursing-school-fired-after-saying-everyones-life-matters) Today, a milquetoast letter of support for open dialogue provokes outrage. (https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/506846-public-letter-in-harpers-sparks-furor)
What happened?
I think the internet and social media have something to do with it. I think the democratization of information is endangering actual democracy.
Let’s back up for a second and talk about the masses and the elites in a democratic society. Naively, you might be tempted to assume that the masses love democracy, since it lets “the people rule”, and the people, surely, want to rule. You might assume, then, that the elites are the main threat to democracy. Maybe rich business and political leaders, or perhaps intellectual elites, are conspiring behind the scenes to figure out how to undermine democracy in order to give themselves control. Then they would implement policies for their own benefit, at the expense of the masses. Muhahaha.
That’s what undergraduates are inclined to think, from the start of their thinking about politics. Many still think that decades later. It is, however, pretty much the exact opposite of reality.
The reality is that it is the masses who harbor anti-democratic attitudes. Democratic values are the province of the elites. It is the elites who must protect those values from the masses, and so they have been doing, more or less, since the country was founded. And here, by “democratic values”, I mean to include things we associate with liberal democracies that are not strictly part of the definition of “democracy” – things like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, due process rights, constitutional restraints, and other limitations on executive power.
The masses in America would say they value freedom and democracy (because they’re supposed to say those things). And they benefit enormously from those things. But they don’t actually believe in them – at least, not nearly as much as the elites do. The masses like a “strong leader” who sweeps aside annoying obstructions, such as objections from the legislature, or the other party, or some stodgy rules written on some 200-year-old parchment. They don’t really get the problem with a leader who just does whatever “needs to be done”. If you support a policy, why wouldn’t you support any means of bringing it about? They don’t get the idea of finding value in people saying false, bad things, either. If you don’t like what someone is saying, why wouldn’t you try to shut them up? If you support a political leader, why wouldn’t you support giving him absolute power? I suspect a lot of people don’t really grasp the idea of leaders having to obey laws; to them, “laws” are the will of the leaders. As President Nixon said, “When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
If it was put up to a vote, I bet the Bill of Rights would be voted down, as would most of the Constitutional constraints on government, especially on the President. (Not if these things were labelled “the Bill of Rights” or “the Constitution” on the ballot, of course – they’d have to be described without those labels.)
It’s not that the elites are all shining examples of civil libertarians. It’s just that they are, by and large, less authoritarian than the masses and more likely to understand the point of democratic values. (It may seem that I am portraying the average voter as extremely foolish and simple-minded. That is correct; I am.)
Back during the Watergate scandal, the Republicans in Congress initially took Nixon’s side (as did Republican voters). That was because they assumed that he was innocent. They assumed that, because they were naive and biased. That sounds bad, but that was way better than what we have today. Because it meant that when they came to know that Nixon was in fact guilty – when they heard tapes of Nixon talking about bribing people to keep quiet, for instance – they didn’t support him anymore. So he was forced to resign. That’s an example of what I mean about the elites protecting democracy. I’m not sure the average Republican voter would have voted to convict Nixon, even when there was conclusive proof of guilt. But it wouldn’t really have occurred to the elites to openly thumb their noses at the facts. Today, the masses have gained greater power, which is why they have their kind of guy in the White House. The Republican elites are afraid to cross him because they are afraid of the masses. If the Republican base of ordinary people didn’t support Trump, the Republican elites would have kicked him out of office in a second.
Anyway, back to my narrative. What has changed?
With the advent of the internet and social media, we have a great democratization of information. It used to be a small class of media elites controlling the information and ideas that people heard, and it was basically a one-way transmission of information from the elites to the masses.
Today, any schmuck with a computer and an internet connection can participate in the distribution of information and ideas in our society. That has some good aspects (there is a lot more information available, and you can learn about stories that the media elites wouldn’t have covered). But it also results in a lot more content expressing thoughts and values that are more typical of the masses than of the elite. And that means a lot more terrible ideas. The people with authoritarian values and irrational, conspiratorial ways of thinking were always out there; now they have platforms.
It’s not just the schmucks like me with their private computers, though. Media corporations have devolved into a lot more pandering to the unwashed masses than they used to do. I think this is an outcome of the internet business model. You have to capture attention so you can sell advertising space, but you’re in competition with millions of other sites, where almost everything imaginable is out there, and people have very short attention spans. To make it, the media companies have to sensationalize even more than they used to, oversimplify, and – of particular import – stimulate our emotional centers. Today’s internet content providers are largely about provoking outrage, fear, or hate, because it’s those powerful emotions that are going to get readers to share their stories -- and thus enable the company to rack up more page views. (Maybe provoking love would also work, but it’s a lot harder to do that. However, cat photos can work.) That works because the masses like having their emotions stimulated, and they like hating “the other side”. Increasing polarization and hostility is a side effect of that.
Truth be told, most of the elites like those things too! But elite culture used to be more refined and restrained. It is hard to maintain restraint when everyone, both the refined and the vulgar, is thrown together into a big pool. Now that the masses are participating in content-generation and -distribution too, they’re bringing everyone down to their level.
That’s my read on why America is collapsing. What to do about it? My only plan so far is to keep trying to engage in reasoned discourse and keep defending broadly democratic values. Be a good elite. Maybe some other people will follow suit.
If not, well, democracy had a good run.