About Connections: Love it or hate it, history is a map. Those who hate history think it irrelevant; many who love history think it escapism. In truth, history is the clearest road map to how we got here: America in the 21st century.
“Turning and turning in a widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer.”—W. B. Yeats
This month there is an article in The Atlantic by Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have been Uniquely Stupid.”
It is interesting that, in the opening sentences, Haidt compares the deconstructing of America to the Biblical story of Babel and its tower: “people unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension.” So it was, and so, Haidt opines, it is here and now.
If we feel that Red America and Blue America have decidedly different understandings of everything — economics, politics, our Constitution, our history, and our language — then the question is why. Or, more productively, the question is how did it happen.
At Babel, according to the Bible, “God was offended by the hubris of humanity and said: Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.”
Is Babel “the best metaphor” for America today, as Haidt suggests? If so, why did it happen here? Is the problem that we no longer understand one another because we have different languages, or do we speak different languages because we have vastly different beliefs? Whichever, we should dig and learn when, why, and how it happened because we have a fractured country, and if we want to heal it, we must begin at the beginning and mend the source of the break.
Haidt suggests it occurred in the last 10 years, 2010–2020. Suddenly something went radically wrong. The American people became disoriented, unable to recognize the truth. Cut off from one another, we became a depressed people in a fractured country.
Haidt maintains there was a “direction to history … toward cooperation.” Just as Martin Luther King Jr. said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Just as Robert Wright wrote in “Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny,” transitions create new problems but also new possibilities for mutually beneficial solutions. Perhaps King and Wright were correct once, but according to Haidt, that is not the way our recent history is bending — just the opposite.
Haidt blames the Internet, but not the original, pre-2010 incarnation, or the technology. “The early internet of the 1990s, with its chat rooms, message boards, and email, exemplified the Nonzero thesis, as did the first wave of social-media platforms, which launched around 2003.”
Originally, the Internet was seen as a boon and booster of democracy, and a hedge against any dictator who wished to keep truth from people. Haidt blames not the technology itself but the people who wielded power over it. Men like Mark Zuckerberg who, Haidt says, “did exactly what he said he would do. He did rewire the way we spread and consume information; he did transform our institutions.”
He calls 2011 “the year we built our Tower of Babel.” By 2013, social media had become a new game, with dynamics unlike those in 2008. If you were skillful or lucky, you might create a post that would “go viral” and make you “internet famous” for a few days. If you blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. Your posts rode to fame or ignominy based on the clicks of thousands of strangers, and you in turn contributed thousands of clicks to the game.
With Zuckerberg leading the way, our world became reliant on shock and awe, on clicks and likes. “This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics. One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the Retweet button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter “a nastier place.” As the engineer watched Twitter mobs form, he thought of the Retweet button as a weapon.
Three forces bind us together in a democracy: trust, strong institutions, and a shared story (common history). I write, and therefore, people comment. I am struck over and over again that they are not commenting on what I thought I was writing. My favorite haiku became:
“Yo se lo que he dado
No se lo que tu has recibido”
Babel is not a story about tribalism. It’s a story about the undoing of everything. Maybe because I had no TV until I was 12; maybe because I have no Facebook page (my children put one up for me); maybe because I don’t go on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook; maybe because of the subjects I studied, I heard Trump and his lackeys loud and clear from their first utterance. They were undoing everything that civilized people in a functional democracy rely upon. They were undermining trust, truth, expertise, honest reporting, real education, common beliefs, common enemies, common heroes. They were dedicated to what Haidt calls the “fragmentation of everything.” Dedicated to what Steve Bannon called a “firehose of shit.”
That is what we live amid. Distributed faster and more widely than ever before imaginable, we are wading in what Bannon promised. Since we are living it, we may as well try and understand it. We may as well read about it. Read the whole article by Haidt. Read about the tragedy of progress, and maybe, the hope for the new possibilities.
