In my last post, I confess I may have foamed at the mouth a bit raging against "the chummy relationship between the media and the big-corpo-statists" who have created the disunity in our country. In response, my left-of-center friend asked me what political reforms could I offer to address the problem. Here was my response:
I am trying to get at the question you posed at the end of your
email, when you asked for my diagnosis and prescription for what I regard
as a media that has become altogether poisonous. For many years I have
had Christopher Lasch on my reading list, having seen his name mentioned
in various books or articles I'd come across. I happened finally to
read his Revolt of the Elites a few weeks ago. It was a
revelation. Apparently others have said the same following Trump's 2016
election. Lasch's thesis is that our media is not an aid to our public
discourse. To the contrary, our media seeks to put an end to public
discourse. Our media is simply an outgrowth of a modern condition in
which our elite class has become entirely insular, talking only to
themselves, with but an academic concern for the practical interests of
ordinary Americans.
At the time of the
Lincoln-Douglas debates, partisan newspapers were an outgrowth of public
discourse. Every person knew where to find opinions that suited their
own. (As I recall reading elsewhere, the debates themselves were often
misreported, to suit the editorial perspective of the particular paper.)
Around the turn of the century, with the civil service reforms
following government scandals, newspapers became more professionalized.
Lasch argues newspapers became more of a resource for legislative
research services. (The professionalization of legislatures, and the
extinction of the part-time, citizen-legislator, is a topic for another
time but is a related and serious problem.) The newspapers no longer
served as extensions of public debate. The public was excluded from the
process of seeking truth. Instead, it was replaced by journalists
seeking mere facts. And today, of course, the difference between "truth"
and "values," on the one hand, and "facts" on the other hand, is almost entirely obscured.
So
Lasch argues that the American public, having been excluded from the
public debate, no longer has any reason to become informed – the flood
of professionally produced, "fact-checked" information has the effect of
drowning debate rather than informing it: "Since the public no longer
participates in debates on national issues, it has no reason to inform
itself about civic affairs. It is the decay of public debate, not the
school system (bad as it is), that makes the public ill informed,
notwithstanding the wonders of the age of information. When debate
becomes a lost art, information, even though it may be readily
available, makes no impression."
"What
democracy requires," Lasch went on, "is vigorous public debate, not
information. Of course, it needs information too, but the kind of
information it needs can be generated only by debate. We do not know
what we need to know until we ask the right questions, and we can
identify the right questions only by subjecting our own ideas about the
world to the test of public controversy."
Neil Postman said something similar in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death,
where he agreed with Huxley over Orwell in diagnosing the modern
condition: "What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What
Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there
would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would
deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much
that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that
the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be
drowned in a sea of irrelevance." Eric Voegelin had seen this coming
some decades earlier from the trenches of the social sciences, whose
publishing profligacy was just beginning: "Since the ocean of facts is
infinite, a prodigious expansion of science in the sociological sense
becomes possible, giving employment to scientistic technicians and
leading to the fantastic accumulation of irrelevant knowledge."
As
Lasch points out, modern journalism takes its cue from Walter
Lippmann's elitist thesis that the public doesn't really care about
democracy per se: it just wants effective governance, and the generous
public goods it promises: “The public is interested in law, not in the
laws; in the method of law, not in the substance.” Trump proved Lasch's populism
right, and Lippmann's elitism wrong. The pre-Trump American government produced a
relatively stable, prosperous order. Yet it had become unresponsive. The
people could see in their government a highly professional, skilled,
and effective body of men and women, but what the people could not see
in their government was anything of themselves, or anyone who advocated
their interests. Without that, it was all for nothing. If you cannot see
yourself in your country, you will see yourself out, one way or
another.
Lasch did not see partisan
newspapers as an ideal. And I do not either. But they served a vital
need in a democracy. When that fell away, in its place for more than
half a century we had a professionalized state and a professionalized
media. It was not without its benefits. But we also got the CIA, who
eventually admitted propagandizing to US citizens through a
professionalized media. And then we got an NSA to spy on our government's enemies, who turn out to include its entire citizenry – and that mass Constitutional violation, too, with the complicity of a professionalized,
corporatized media.
So professionalization is no panacea either. At the
bottom of it all is the crooked timber of human nature. "I do not know
what is in the heart of a scoundrel," said Joseph de Maistre, "I know
what is in the heart of an honest man: it is terrible."
Before
I tell you my diagnosis, let me tell you I also tend to agree with you
about money's effect in politics. This is a topic on which my views in
the past likely were affected by partisan bias. Money is too big a topic
and I don't want to get distracted by it here. I always recall how
Larry Lessig tried to forge an alliance between the Occupy movement and the Tea Party movement.
I might have mentioned to you before, or maybe not, that I see a nexus
between Tucker Carlson's anti-corporatism and Elizabeth Warren's (though
Warren has tempered her views since becoming a politician). So I see
our cronyist corporatist government as having become deeply corrupt. And
it really bothered me to hear the sanctimony of Senatepersons and
Congresspersons talk about January 6 as a violation of the "citadel of
democracy" and a "threat to our way of life." I have already condemned
what those unarmed slapdash vandals did there, but the contempt these
lawmakers show toward their constituents on a daily basis is a worse
violation of our democracy, in my view, than mere trespassing in the
cradle of that contempt, and the burning and looting of people's
livelihoods this past summer was a greater threat to our way of life
than a few broken windows at the Capitol, which did not prevent the loss
even of a single day's work. (On the score of lives lost, this
summer's riots were far deadlier, too, than January 6.)
So
having got that out of my system, here is my diagnosis for our media
problem. And you are not going to like hearing this, but here is my
opinion:
It's the Nietzsche, stupid.
By
which I mean, what we are witnessing here is the scrambling of mortals
to fill the void left behind when modern man "killed God." On this, too, I
find Lasch was here before me when he observed that modern man's quest
for certainty is fundamentally a religious quest. The world's great
religions teach humility of belief – but the man who will take no
religion has no schoolmaster by which he might receive that lesson: "For
those who take religion seriously, belief is a burden, not a
self-righteous claim to some privileged moral status.
Self-righteousness, indeed, may well be more prevalent among skeptics
than among believers. The spiritual discipline against
self-righteousness is the very essence of religion."
The
Abrahamic religions teach of the folly of seeking to reach the
perfection of heaven in the story of God scuttling the project of Babel.
Those religions, at least the Christian religion, teach Give all that thou hast to the poor and follow me, if thou wouldst be perfect.
But the modern man has not yet heard of this lesson against seeking
perfection in earthly works. As Dostoyevsky said, "socialism is not
merely the labor question, it is before all things the atheistic
question, the question of the form taken by atheism today, the question
of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from
earth but to set up heaven on earth."
The
Abrahamic religions teach the story of the great flood, by which God
purged wickedness from the earth. But the act grieved God so terribly
that he vowed never to do it again. I have been enriched by reading the
Old Testament because it teaches that justice is a thing so terrible
that no one ought ever pray for it, and indeed to pray that God may stay his hand. ("Indeed I tremble for my country," said Jefferson, "when I reflect that God is just....") Indeed, it is why Paul says that the
law is meant as a schoolmaster to bring people to the gospel: once one
realizes that no one can stand to the measure of justice, one will beg
for mercy. And in Christ, God freely gives it.
But
the Nietzschean man, the super-man, the over-man, has not yet learned
this – if ever he can. The rains of the elites' deluge are starting
to fall on our heads as they seek to purge what they see as wickedness
from the earth. As Lasch goes on, a secular society has not yet grasped
the need for a discipline of belief, the need of any epistemic humility, and so
"it misunderstands the nature of religion: to console but, first of all,
to challenge and confront." Our purely secular society wants justice –
ancient, tribal, bloody justice, from which there is neither escape nor
forgiveness, only punishment.
Another
way to express my diagnosis might be that we have an addiction to
certainty. Too many Americans today believe that there is right, and
there is wrong, and that every contest between them may be settled
scientifically. By acquiring moral judgment man was cast out of the
garden, but by shedding moral judgment and substituting science in its
place, the idea seems to be, we might attain paradise. But not only may we have
scientific certainty of every conflict of values, but also do we insist
on judgment: the right must be rewarded, the wrong punished, and in this
lifetime. If we are to have unity, we must search our souls for any
trace of certainty, which is the father of disunity, and cast it out. And replace it with the spirit that
says we all of us must work out our own salvation in fear and
trembling, that there but for the grace of God go I into perdition, and
to seek truth, and to do good, but never to be certain that we are
right, and to pray in earnest that our neighbor will be saved.
But
you will tell me: Tim, you are talking about religion when I asked you
for policy. And you will be right. In all these things I have my eyes on
something beyond this world. But there is no other way to reorder a
polity that has gone wrong than to return to its foundations, to its
purpose. The purpose of the American polity was to have a space where we
each could serve our neighbors, our families, and our God. To be quite
clear, what I am saying is: America is a Christian nation, in its best
and broadest sense of allowing every American the freedom and
opportunity to serve God, or at a minimum not to interfere with their
neighbors' freedom and opportunity to serve God. No other answer to
great political schisms may be given than to return to God. A people
must serve something higher than themselves, for there is no surer way
to wreck our world than to put it under our own feet. The pedestal of
Shelley's Ozymandias, the 13th century Ramses II, the earthly
king of all earthly kings, said, "Look on My Works, Ye Mighty, and
Despair." And all had been laid waste.
