Tuesday, April 17, 2018

It's Not Even Past #18 - The Crisis of What is Art - Part 2 - Propaganda - A Little More

(Roger Cohen clip, up to 21:53)

That was Roger Cohen of the New York Times speaking, I needn't clarify about what except to say that it was a lecture on Isaiah Berlin in the Age of Trump, our age, potentially defined by a thinker whose thoughts apply to every age. If this podcast keeps going indefinitely, then Isaiah Berlin will be mentioned again and again and again.

We ended the last broadcast at an arbitrary point, simply because the subject of this series of podcasts is too large to be summed up in any one half-hour. Then I got horribly sick and had to skip a week, but the arbitrary point on which we ended was with my mentioning of mediocre distractions, and in case you hadn't noticed, mediocre distractions are the nub of where we are today, the spoke around which it all turns, the essence of what makes the Age of Trump the Age of Trump, when our attention spans have so atrophied that we can't put together coherent thoughts that connect one day of our lives to the next and we therefore move from whatever captures our attention one day to whatever captures it the next (the irony of basing this podcast on almost exactly that idea is duly noted...).

Any meaningful achievement in the world that gives true satisfaction can't be a fleeting success that is bestowed from one day's work... to say an obvious truth that should not have to bare repeating but obviously needs to in this day and age. Meaningful, lasting satisfaction requires a span greater than we can focus on at any given moment, the ability to be frustrated by it, the ability to fall back in love with it, the ability for the dimensions of the relationship to broaden, deepen, widen, and also sometimes contract. It requires the ability to delay gratification and to focus on greater goals than can be achieved in any one given day, or perhaps any thirty given years. This is what it means to have a career, to be in a marriage, to raise a family, to build an organization. These are the things of which lasting satisfaction is made, and it doesn't seem as though the majority of Americans have enough ability these days to see those satisfactions through. There is sadly never a guarantee of joy at the end of an agonizing journey, but there is an unfair guarantee of joy's absence if we never embark on such a journey.

And it's for that reason that propaganda, like cant itself, like newspeak or bullshit or whatever else you want to call that megaphone of political indifference to truth and lies, is self-perpetuating. Propaganda, like advertising, depends on the lie that happiness is just over the next hill. It's message is not unlike advertising, but the materialism of advertising is relatively benign. Advertising is made to seem so evil by socialism, and tells you the obvious lie that you can fill the eternal hole in your life with a new soap or soft drink or car, nobody ever believes the lie, and everybody knows that they can only be satiated by the product for five minutes before a mix of salt and sugar makes us crave another soft drink. But the materialism of advertising is pretty benign next to propaganda.

The lies of propaganda are so dangerous because their truth seems so plausible. Perhaps there is an invisible mechanism that keeps the poor poor, the oppressed oppressed, and perhaps the choices of individual human beings within the existing system have so little power that there is no recourse except to overthrow it.  Or perhaps the choices of human beings have so much power that only people who succeed are those who are deserving of success, and therefore, any change to create a more equitable system only serves to reward people who are undeserving. In both cases, once you view the world through that structure, everything becomes filtered through its worldview. Who's to say which worldview, if either, is right? But whether either worldview is correct, there are two gigantic apparatus at either end of the political spectrum designed to make sure that a hundred million politically active people see nothing in the world except through the worldview that people want you to see who stand to benefit enormously from your myopia.

On the Right, does one really need to say what's there? Fox News, Drudge Report, Breitbart..., they're all facts of our lives. They're infotainment designed to give their viewers just enough correct information to make them righteously angry about the state of the world without the proper context as to why it's true - and those are on the days when the information they distribute is correct.  It is not socialism to point out that a free society depends on the news being distributed as a public good, not a business. These are propaganda outlets that also double as money generators for vulture capitalists. Spend five minutes on Fox News, they are statistically measured the highest network in all cable television for commercial clutter - 16 minutes 52 seconds per hour. And what are those ads? Cashcall.com - which sells loans at interest rates that can go up to 335%. Ads for reverse mortgages that are supposed to save money yet lead to rates of required payment 25% higher than a conventional mortgage. Ads for goldline.com, Gold investment that tells prospective investors the price of gold only ever goes up. Surely, you might reason, the viewers are not dumb enough to fall for these schemes. Well, they're certainly dumb enough to fall for Fox News. Furthermore, by airing so many of these commercials on Fox News, Fox lends its prestige and credibility, such as it is, to these shysters. The presence of shysters is not incidental to Fox News, the shysters are the fabric of the Fox News business model, which depends on a self-perpetuating cycle of viewers conditioned to be credulous enough to believe false political statements, and therefore willing to be consumers credulous enough to buy bad products, and therefore attracting advertisers to the network with as few moral scruples as the network executives and talent themselves.

Many Fox News watchers will simply shrug and say that CNN and MSNBC simply have an unspoken liberal bias while Fox News is implicitly more honest because it wears its conservative bias on its sleeve. There are two problems with that logic. The first, easier to fight, problem with that is that CNN and MSNBC are statistically demonstrative to be more factual in their reporting. CNN and MSNBC are sadly not particularly impressive news outlets, but Fox News is much worse. Politifact, a non-partisan organization for accuracy in news unimpressively lists CNN as an 27% of their reporting being either mostly false, false, or their lowest rating: pants on fire. That's apparently the best reporting we get on American news. On MSNBC, it's much worse, a full 44% being at least mostly false. But on Fox News, 60% of their reporting is, at very least, mostly false, and 40% of their reporting is, at very least, completely false. Whatever news is, Fox News is demonstrably the opposite, it is a news organization specifically designed to spread false news, and to make lots of money for their investors from how they spread false news.

That's only the smaller problem. The larger problem with Fox News and the like is this. I could tell Fox News watchers that the organization from which they get their news is designed to be a cocktail of outrage generated by a factory of misinformation, and they would tell me that, because it came from a place that wishes ill on views like those spread by Fox News, the source is biased, and therefore false. In the sense that people who believe Fox News is fake news are biased against it, people who believe Fox News are absolutely right about those who hate the network - they are absolutely biased against Fox News. If a person is against falsehood, that person is, by definition, biased against falsehood, and that in itself is a bias. Therefore, if the only views you accept are those which are unbiased against your worldview, then you have become biased against the truth, and therefore are under the sway of the most blatant, dangerous breed of propaganda, and have surrendered your independence of thought to it.

But there is an emerging movement of the Left that is becoming no less dangerous.

Bernie Sanders 'only' got twelve-million voters, and let's be generous and take it on faith that a few million Bernie voters do not dream of a world without capitalism the way Christians once dreamt of a world without Jews; there are still millions of Bernie supporters who see capitalism as the problem and not the billions of flawed human beings who work within it yet still haven't come up with an economic system that works any better. The most informed of them probably comprise the 1.2 million individual hits of Jacobin magazine got last month, and at very least 2.7 million monthly pageviews. Much more importantly, there are also still the 40 million worldwide viewers of al-Jezeera, who get their news from a station that conditions them to reflexively view America as a monolithic imperial power incapable of acting ethically precisely because of its disproportionate power, a caricatured view of America as obviously simplistic of as Fox News conditions Americans to think of Arabs.





(more artfulness is put into propaganda today than into art)



We live an era when truth is no longer considered objective and measurable, and therefore even facts are considered relative to the eye of the beholder. For reasons many and various, this has been a long time coming, and in an era when truth has been considered relative for all kinds of mediocre philosophical reasons, we can't be surprised that this is where we've arrived.

(something here about Zizek, Derrida, Foucault, Butler)

I fear the world has quite a bit more spinning out of control, and spinning much more lethally, before it comes anywhere close to landing on its feet again.

Somehow, at the exact same time that college students learn that the truth is relative, the graduates who take their educations most seriously behave in such a way that makes the truths they believe so absolute as to be fanatical. When beliefs go too far to one side, they unwittingly embrace elements of the other side as compensation.

Here's just a small example. Lately I've seen a series of internet memes, saying that only a white male could have friends who disagree with them politically, because the political issues at stake today are so important that only white males could never be personally affected by this. There's a little truth to this, who could deny it? But a little truth is the most dangerous thing in the world, because it uses its appearance of veracity to cover up the deeper truths, and therefore, this is very nearly most poisonous propaganda there is. It's not just toxic, it's very, very dangerous. The toxicity is in how it peer pressures everyone to give up those friends and family who are insufficiently radical, lest their more political friends give them up for not doing so. But it's precisely because so many people, people with so much more power than the marginalized, have poisonous beliefs that so personally affect so many others in ways they don't realize that they have to be watched very carefully at a very personal level; that they have to be evangelized to, shown courtesy and warmth, so that their bubble of abstractions becomes the very real problems of very real people. The only other option is to let their hatreds fester unchanged and unwatched, which will only grow over time, until the marginalized become such a threat in their imaginations to their way of life that they have to be eliminated. It amazes me that people can live in 2018 America and not already see how far we are into that process.

Go ahead and judge conservatives poorly. I certainly do, I'm not ashamed of it, and in spite of any protests to the contrary, the way they judge liberals like me and people well to my left, whom they usually perceive as indistinguishable from me, thunders so loudly that nobody with liberal beliefs could possibly hear anything else. There is no doubt in my mind that being a conservative in today's political climate says something deeply unflattering about a person's moral character, and I have no doubt that the vast majority of them believe the same about anybody who isn't a conservative. But to say that the moral depravity of their beliefs is anything even close to as egregious as committing acts of moral depravity: thievery, abuse, fraud, is ridiculous. There are so many variables that constitute the makeup of a person's moral character, so many mitigating reasons everybody behaves the way they do, so many potential paths to redemption and so many ways to morally fail, that the flaws of a person's beliefs have to be the most forgivable of mortal sins. Poisonous beliefs may be a gateway of entitlement that allows people to commit egregious acts, but until any person him or herself crosses the line into committing acts so egregious, nobody should be considered as culpable as the offender. Let he or she who is without sin cast the first stone, we have all, in our various ways, been guilty of excusing people who poison the well of human behavior.

I was very sick last week, so I spent it binge-watching an old favorite TV show, Parks and Recreation. The reason to bring it up is not to advocate for it as something immortal, though it was easily one of the best things on TV when it was on, but the true miracle of the show was that at the show's center was a friendship of mutual esteem and respect between Leslie Knope, a mid-century idealistic and optimistic American liberal who believes that government exists to solve problems, and her boss, Ron Swanson, a deeply pessimistic 90's libertarian who believes that his role is to minimize the damage government can do. The typical Parks and Rec plot involves Leslie coming up with a solution that is ridiculous, as Ron inevitably says it will be, which then results in a chastened Leslie incorporating Ron's realism into a solution that works. To see this on television in the early 2010s, when the country receded into unprecedently unbreakable party lines was a kind of miracle, and a kind of prayer that we all can cross these unbreakable lines in our own lives.


(why art is political and why it isn't - the point of consuming art is precisely because politics will not give us what we want - )

I'm a personal believer that the key to the world being a livable place is to adjust your expectations accordingly, because the only place where it's relatively safe to demand infinite expectations is art, and there only for the audience, not the creator. We live in an era when the solutions to our problems are, in fact, the problems. When everyone's truth is equally valid, how then do we prove the truth? We could, of course, make alternative facts illegal to share, and set a government standard, but what then happens if a potential authoritarian comes along who realizes he can increase his power exponentially if he makes only alternative facts legal ones - some would say this is Trump's aim. Even if it is, I doubt he has the competence to do anything like that, but a smarter person reading Trump's playbook, say, an American Putin, could do so very well, and many people say that that's precisely what Putin has done in Russia.

It really is extraordinary that, on the one hand, we live in this incredibly science and data based era, and because everything now has to be scientifically backed by data, there are a lot of assumptions, important assumptions that used keep the world afloat, that people refuse to take for granted. A traditional news source is unbiased? Show me the proof. A vaccine doesn't cause a disease? Show me the proof. And yet, even when you show them the proof, they show you proof they think as as real as your proof. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Senator from New York and the intellectual incarnation of the American center, used to say that 'people are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.' And yet, the more facts we have at our disposal, the more facts people fabricate.

(politics vs. technology)

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