I recall back when I was in college in the early 1990s learning many interesting concepts. I learned, among other things, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, catastrophic Malthusian postulations, the Hegelian dialectic and the syllogism. One of the most significant takeaways from my formal education was that, although we tend to incline to the acceptance of singular reasons for things and the adoption of unicausal theories, by engaging in-depth historical analyses, we often see that a particular design, law, custom, practice, philosophy, approach, policy, or system (etc.) might function well – or even superbly – only in certain social and developmental (etc.) contexts, and the universal we’d like to have discovered just isn’t there.
But a general pro-“freedom” value seems to last through millennia.
Though a person can potentially continue himself or herself in an ugly and repressive existence through years, and even through an entire lifetime, we commonly believe that people are at their best when they are economically, politically and practically free. We wholeheartedly approve when people have the opportunity to freely choose the circumstances of their existence.
What’s not to like about freedom?
In the early 1970s an American scholar named Alvin Toffler published a book entitled Future Shock. Within those pages he asserted that the world was undergoing not just rapid change, but an increase in the pace of all sorts of change. And he speculated that at some point in the not-too-distant future people would find themselves discomfited and disoriented in their own society; consequent to the extremely rapid pace of technological and social developments, they would find themselves befuddled and freaked out, unable to cope.
In the election year 2016, Americans, as well as the rest of the whole world, witnessed that one of the major American political parties have nominated for president a radical. Chillingly, the world’s politically preeminent nation appears poised to consider a fractious, hostility-inspired political course.
Radicalism is always worrisome. But how did American history and politics arrive at such an unnerving juncture?
In the late 1990s, I well remember a visit to my brother’s home in northern New Jersey. We chatted idly for a short while in his living room, and then we decided to watch some television. The next two minutes of my life now stand out in my memory as a sort of epiphany.
Remote in hand, he flitted through the channels, and I, who then had no TV in my apartment and as someone who usually only had use for TV when my NFL team was playing or when I wanted to get in ten short minutes the globally important news of the day, was amazed at what I saw: there was a station devoted to making things out of wood; another station about fishing; another station was obviously trying to sell products to viewers, as a price and phone number appeared continually on the screen; still another was pretending to be a documentary about war, but was really directed at people interested in the destructive weapons of war, not an edifying historical analysis; another program was all about gardening; another show was about cooking food; another was a kind of boring pedant lecturing about “the ganglia;” still another was beach volleyball, and our interest there was obviously in seeing the nearly unclad, flesh-ostensible, pubescent females jump about, and excite our base libidos; incredibly, another was just two people talking as they nonchalantly hiked in a wilderness. And I recall saying to my brother, “You must have cable! You’ve gotta pay to get programming this bad!”
The reason it was all so startling and that I now reference those moments and affording me a kind of “epiphany” was that I was witnessing something at once delightfully refreshing and also, frankly, socially destructive.
When I was a teen in the late-1970s, there were only a small handful of channels available. For our TV news, we really had only three options, and these were, of course, the “major networks:” ABC, CBS and NBC. There wasn’t a realistic alternative to just those three.
With three major networks competing incessantly for market share, there was always the necessity for the news producers and journalists to guard against telling something was later proven untrue, biased or merely speculative: it was almost certain that such occurrences would be deleterious to overall credibility, and thus it would likely negatively impact company profits. They attended assiduously to their sources, always trying to verify everything, to double and triple check each story’s elements, and to being the first to deliver the news (with unimpeachable accuracy and impartiality), and to ever-elusive “truth” as it was valued by their American audience. “And that’s the way it is,” was the oft-repeated tagline of the age’s most famous and respected broadcast journalist. Accuracy and impartiality were the expected quotidian philosophical and procedural and professional requisites of TV broadcast news. It was what they constantly aimed for, and frequently achieved.
We took all this for granted. TV was just TV, and the news on TV was just showing us the truth from somewhere else on the planet. In that naïve and now extinct world, freedom worked; we chose when to turn on the news, chose the channel to watch, elected to give our arbitrary measure of attention, and we decided what moment and what second to stop watching.
But there were only those three. And they were pretty much looking at the same thing, and from virtually the same ideological and cultural perspective. Their “agenda” was to be more authentically accurate and timely than their two competitors were. Importantly, we all saw an approximation of truth.
What I saw in my brother’s home in the 1990s was representative of an extreme and continuing social transformation. It was indistinguishable from fragmentation. With so much freedom, and so many options to choose from, it was inevitable that Americans would tend toward their own individual, peculiar tastes, their own unique likes – cooking, nutrition, politics, history, philosophy, gardening, hunting, woodworking, medical sciences, religion, business enterprise and investing, nutrition, comedy, a specific sport, fiction literature, music, art and sculpture, human psychology, earth science, animals and zoology, astronomy, self-help dialogues and publications, etc., etc. – and that we would ultimately egoistically enterprise into an echo-chamber world where everywhere our wants and tastes were sated.
The 1960s and 1970s brought forth such extreme social, cultural, political and governmental developments and changes that the historical consequence of them can hardly be overstated. There was rock and roll, the American Civil Rights Movement, sexual liberation, stomach-turning assassinations, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the related and ongoing threats of the arms race and thermonuclear war, a venturing literally to the moon, mind-numbing tens of thousands of casualties in what seemed a never-ending, internecine struggle against repugnant and intolerable communism in Southeast Asia, millions of people starving in Africa and the images always familiar on TV!, the factual loss of the war in Vietnam, and a political scandal so severe that the president of the United States was himself ultimately implicated, and amidst that scandal resigned in disgrace. And there was the birth control pill, which has probably had the result of liberating females in a profounder way than any invention or singular development in the history of the world.
By the late 1970s, Americans were reeling at such transformations and upheavals occurring in such a short time. And, for Americans who had come to think they resided at the unequaled acme of civilization and envied modernity and puissance, the 1979 hostage crisis in Iran was… well, embarrassing. Let’s face it: the whole Iran thing with the hostages and the Ayatollah was a humiliation. By 1980, all that Americans were enduring seemed in many ways even more disorienting than the Great Depression, and in some ways even more confusing and confounding than World War Two. (Wars may be dramatic, but they are also simple, as the methods and intentions of barbarism are devoid of subtlety.) But Americans of the 1970s did not so much worry as they reeled in a quasi-entertained surprise and sought escape and awaited a societal reevaluation of things.
And disco music arrived in force in the late 1970s, and what was that but a kind of mindless and directionless pop?
The dialectic reveals that we can always expect a contrarian position, an “antithesis”, to arrive to challenge the status quo, no matter how well-considered and decency-respecting that status quo is; to really value anything at all, one must have one’s own fingerprints on it. We will always be dissatisfied, as dissatisfactions animate us to new pastures with new (figurative) milk.
Music is surely art; and “art”, it is said, “imitates life.” Art can equally reflect life. It is widely known by students of modern popular music that the highest excellence in that specific genre was attained around 1970-71. That was the time of the end of the Beatles and the beginning of Led Zeppelin. In 1971, Led Zeppelin released what is commonly regarded as perhaps the most creative and artistically excellent and estimable rock recording of all time: Stairway to Heaven. It was just over eight minutes long, so it was played on the radio with a sort of sigh, for sure; programming managers were constantly worried that people had very short attention spans and very narrow expectations about how long a song should be, and three minutes was standard.
Still, excellence is excellence, even if, as with the Louvre’s most famous portrait, the right side of the picture seems to the viewer the semblance of a smirk, and the whole then asymmetrical.
And, as the dialectic predicted, the counter to estimably creative art in music arrived a scant two years later, in 1973, and conspicuously with the following four words: “Jeremiah was a bullfrog.”
When “bullfrog” is right there in the opening line of the song, it is probable that the high and quintessential virtues of art, and critical introspection and cultural values and social interconnectedness and benefit have begun a decided retrogression.
There were the movies Uptown Saturday night, Saturday Night Fever, Star Wars and Rocky. And when your fascinations are Saturday, space and reminiscences upon the great old days where to be white was to be among the conquerors of the world, your immediate deserts are daydream-delusion and sociological torpor.
We expect the dialectic interplay of causes and effects. But what we cannot in any measure accurately predict are the results of the interactions – over time – of personalities, innovations, political movements, natural and environmental concerns, and our apparently constant want to remake the world.
Even after countless millions had access to the Internet from their comfortable homes, TV remained extremely popular and influential. Reading became rarer and rarer, less and less of a habit. Physical newspapers and magazines were becoming passé. Americans were still alarmingly uninformed! One study showed a horrific number of American adults either said they did not know what the Bill of Rights was or, claiming to know, were in favor of repealing it. Another showed that a majority of Americans could not easily locate a major country like Brazil on a world map. Eyes nearly fixated on the TV screen, Americans did not really know their world or their history.
Clandestine Conservatism
In the summer of 2005, when I was courting the lady that I’d marry the next year, my (future) wife and I would take long walks from the downtown area of Jersey City all the two miles or so to the waterfront on the Hudson. There we encountered a fabulous and romantic view of Manhattan right across the river. And there was this large luxury condo complex there. And as we strolled along and passed people, some of them, rather strangely said, “Good evening.” While that wasn’t an inappropriate or obscure thing to say, it was oddly stilted. On other walks in the same area, encountering the same thing, I came to realize that this odd greeting (Why did he not just say, “Hi”, like everybody else?) was a device to separate the “us” (who lived there in the upper-crusty condos) from the “them” who were common folk not worth talking to. I was immediately identified, the second “Hi” proceeded from my mouth.
As society has matured and grown disdainful of overt racism, people have not uniformly understood the philosophical and social-evolutionary rationales of openness, inclusion and equality. Most very learned people understood, but most poor and poorly educated persons did not. Accommodation, for many, was facade, mere tolerance, and routine conduct among the unenlightened and unlearned and unsophisticated nothing beyond day-to-day endurance of new social norms.
Racism and bigotry went underground. People began to use code words (remember “Good evening?”). Conservative radio and TV began to use words like “illegal”, which was routinely attached to the word “immigrants”, and the combined phrase was devastating to the full understanding of a multicultural society and a “smaller world.” “Illegal”, used in such a context, brought forth in the mind of the hearer the closely related idea of criminality, and thus subliminally criminality became more and more closely associated with U.S. immigration (of non-whites) in the minds of tens of millions of white conservatives.
In 2008, the Southern Poverty Law Center won a case against a Ku Klux Klan organization in Kentucky, the hate group Imperial Klans of America. The verdict was only about $2.5 million, but it was enough to put a smallish and poorly funded organization out of business. The result: racists had to go further underground. And the use of code words became much more common.
This movement from above ground to a quasi-chthonian, wink-wink system became more widespread between 1990 and 2010.
It was inevitable that a clever businessperson would see this opportunity and exploit American ignorances with commercial profit motives. In 1996, Americans were introduced to a news station like none other, a “news” that would give the viewer not a sort of elitist college and PhD nonsense that was acceptable to only other elites, but a news for ordinary folk, people whose average educational attainment and understanding was about at the tenth grade: Fox News. It was designed from the outset to give political conservatism (generally) greater emphasis and importance.
Fox was an immediate success. Finally, people who believed the world was less than ten thousand years old, that their government was involved in and covering up many conspiracies (among them: a bogus moon landing in 1969), that “illegal immigrants” were undermining the august values of the republic, that criminal sanctions had become full of odious lenity, that “fetus” was just a made up word to justify “murder”, and that “liberals” and the error of “liberalism” were destroying the country had a media source to afford them all the corroboration they could ever want.
And it was in the context of this continued popularity of echo-chamber affirmation that the struggle against international terrorism took on completely new dimensions and urgency. The stars and stripes that flew so majestically above untold millions of lawns and houses in an umbrageous and outraged mid-September 2001 was also the ostensible flag that waved from the revisionist, isolationist, xenophobic, subtly racist, increasingly science-disdaining “news”.
Twenty years on, with many dozens of more TV channels to choose from, the growth of “social media” (especially Facebook, of course), where you join groups that coddle and comfort you in all you want to hear and “know”, the growth in computer and computer device (escapist) gaming, political entrenchment caused by the fact that history was not corroborating the orientation and interpretations of the “news”, and outsized concerns over international terrorism, “Islamic terrorism,” it was no wonder that Americans would eventually abandon the world of sane and rational politics for something much more outrageous and outraged, much more in-keeping with their self-assured reaction, with all its resistance to bewildering modernity.
The American experiment with democracy and freedom is in extreme trouble. And it is because many tens of millions will not and cannot dispassionately examine the unwholesome trajectory of their politics. They’ve come to believe, after a score of years in the chamber, that their country’s ills are rightly blamed on them. “Them” is not an intellectual or discrete term, but a general impression of all the ideas and values that predictably irk the unlearned and uninformed. And now these tens of millions are opinionatedly obstinate. The word “compromising” has joined “liberal” as a kind of pejorative. Division and divisiveness are no longer reprobate and shameful; they are seen as the bedrock of political courage and strength.
There is no way out of this mess. Political fragmentation and disunity will just get worse. There is no sound reason to believe it won’t. There is so much satisfaction in the minds of so many erstwhile “conservatives” that the problems the nation faces are out there and are wholly attributable to “them” (vaguely: “elites”, “liberals”, immigrants, minorities, evolutionists, internationalists, and those who believe strongly in inclusion) that the ideational satisfactions in this viewpoint have the effect of increasing one’s attitude that the problem is still more extreme and threatening. Inasmuch as the problem is conceived of as elsewhere – as it always is with them – feelings of resentment, revulsion and opposition have no real limit. What brought (obscure, footnote) history “freedom fries” so many years ago has now brought us an intensifying political fragmentation and atomism. And, because our politics have become so unruly, so ornery, disaffected, uncompromising and inimical, they are largely immune to any sort of self-examination and self-criticism. And the familiar assertion “I know I’m right” today says much more than it did in previous generations; it carries with it an implicit ignorance of the idea that the other can maintain in his or her contrasting viewpoint any truth at all.
Millions of Americans have used their freedom ethos in modern times to dwell more and more deeply in the dimly-lit corridors of self-serving, bigoted, illiberal association and cultural identity. Millions of Americans have taken a wild saltation from the dissatisfied and disillusioned ‘70s. Their views did not come to a fuller accommodation of modernity, globalism and inclusion, but a subtle and gradual retreat into a “good evening” underground of coded language. The echoing conservative TV “news” and radio, and the infinite comfort and reassurance of the social clique, over the span of a generation has ingrained and hardwired their hidebound worldview. Theirs is now a distrustful and illusion-filled mindset. Such people are sure they are completely right and the other completely wrong. They have identified the enemy, and are waiting with the most earnest self-righteousness to (figuratively) see “the whites of their eyes” – contrasting with a hue of otherness – and (not so figuratively) commence “fixing things.”
And these intolerably vile creatures with white flanking their irises? What are they?
If they were humans, the world would be in a whole lot of trouble!