The late Christopher Hitchens called conspiracy theories the "exhaust fumes of democracy", and I'm only now beginning to understand just how much that's true. The political landscape is today largely fragmented by special interest groups, and the phenomenal emergence of "fright-wing" politics is only going to gain momentum in the future. It appeals to the masses because it presents an oversimplified view of the world, and thanks to the internet it's possible for somebody to post the most ludicrous story imaginable and have it accepted by thousands of unquestioning 'true-believers'. Social media has been reduced to a confirmation bias supporting mechanism, where religious and conspiracy fanatics can all find reassurance for their own particular worldview, regardless of its objective truth.
Welcome to Huxley's Brave New World. Huxley got it right and Orwell got it wrong:
http://i.imgur.com/LUX24r7.gif
Indeed Huxley would not have been the slightest bit surprised by all of this, in fact he well predicted it. He believed that it is far more likely that the Western democracies will dance and dream themselves into oblivion than march into it, single file and manacled. Huxley grasped that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and drunk by technological diversions. Look around, how many 'zombies' do you see walking the malls today, gadget in hand and busily texting their own self-importance? A clear descent into a Huxleyan world of technological narcotics.
People these days are so certain of their beliefs and opinions about what is truth and what is right. It is then no wonder that popular political discourse on the internet is dominated by conspiracy theory and serious religious debate by threatened certainty or pointless mockery. What ever happened to healthy skepticism and healthy religious debate?
In the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, there appears a remarkable quotation attributed to Michael Welfare, one of the founders of a religious sect known as the Dunkers and a longtime acquaintance of Franklin. The statement had its origins in Welfare's complaint to Franklin that zealots of other religious persuasions were spreading lies about the Dunkers, accusing them of abominable principles to which, in fact, they were utter strangers. Franklin suggested that such abuse might be diminished if the Dunkers published the articles of their belief and the rules of their discipline. Welfare replied that this course of action had been discussed among his co-religionists but had been rejected. He then explained their reasoning in the following words:
"When we were first drawn together as a society, it had pleased God to enlighten our minds so far as to see that some doctrines, which we once esteemed truths, were errors, and that others, which we had esteemed errors, were real truths. From time to time He has been pleased to afford us farther light, and our principles have been improving, and our errors diminishing. Now we are not sure that we are arrived at the end of this progression, and at the perfection of spiritual or theological knowledge; and we fear that, if we should feel ourselves as if bound and confined by it, and perhaps be unwilling to receive further improvement, and our successors still more so, as conceiving what we their elders and founders had done, to be something sacred, never to be departed from."
Franklin describes this sentiment as a singular instance in the history of mankind of modesty in a sect. Modesty is certainly the word for it, but the statement is extraordinary for other reasons too. We have here a self-criticism and a self-examination worthy of Plato, but how rare such instances are in history, particularly today. The Dunkers came close here to formulating a commandment about all religious and political discourse: Thou shalt not write down thy principles, still less print them, lest thou shall be entrapped by them for all time. Yet we may add another principle (and this I feel is of paramount importance): Thou shalt not forget the past.
In the 'Age of Show Business', image politics, and personal certainty, political discourse is emptied not only of ideological content but of historical content, as well. Czeslaw Milosz, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, remarked in his acceptance speech in Stockholm that our age is characterized by a "refusal to remember"; he cited, among other things, the shattering fact that there are now more than one hundred books in print that deny that the Holocaust ever took place. The historian Carl Schorske has, in my opinion, circled closer to the truth by noting that the modern mind has grown indifferent to history because history has become useless to it; in other words, it is not ignorance but a sense of irrelevance that leads to the diminution of history. Television's Bill Moyers inches still even closer when he says, "I worry that my own business . . . helps to make this an anxious age of agitated amnesiacs .... We Americans seem to know everything about the last twenty-four hours but very little of the last sixty centuries or the last sixty years."
By using media whose structure is biased toward furnishing images and fragments, we are deprived of access to an historical perspective. Terence Moran, Professor of media culture, remarked that in the absence of continuity and context, "bits of information cannot be integrated into an intelligent and consistent whole." So what we are left with is a vacuum filled rapidly with opinions. The larger the vacuum the more certain the opinions will be and the more absurdly their certainty will be expressed.
There is no conspiracy here. No malicious power set us this way. We do not refuse to remember; neither do we find it exactly useless to remember. Rather, we are being rendered unfit to remember. The politics of image, instantaneous news and easy social media provides no necessary context, and is in fact, hampered by attempts to provide any. A mirror records only what you are wearing today. It is silent about yesterday. So too the automatic reaction towards a conspiratorial interpretation of the world which seemingly erupted on the internet over the last decade is symptomatic of not only a forgetfulness (while pretending to remember) but an obvious internal emptiness. When history is forgotten or little understood the self has little option but to invent it.
No one needs to be reminded that our world is now marred by many prison-cultures whose structure Orwell described accurately in his parables. If one were to read both 1984 and Animal Farm, and then for good measure, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, one would have a fairly precise blueprint of the machinery of thought-control as it currently operates in scores of countries and on millions of people. Of course, Orwell was not the first to teach us about the spiritual devastations of tyranny. What is irreplaceable about his work is his
insistence that it makes little difference if our wardens are inspired by right- or left-wing ideologies. The gates of the prison are equally impenetrable, surveillance equally rigorous, icon-worship equally pervasive.
Yet Huxley's vision is far more terrifying and far more plausible on a world scale. What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and education an act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.
An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan. Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us. We take arms against such a sea of troubles, buttressed by the spirit of Milton, Bacon, Voltaire, and Goethe. But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter? What is the turn-back point to a people drowning in absurd conspiracy theories? The real issues are there but people seem largely to have stopped remembering, or to be looking only through a filter of empty paranoia, an anger totally misplaced and which readily plays apologetics to the most barbarous crimes when such may disturb an opinionated world-view.
What I suggest here as a solution is what Aldous Huxley suggested, as well. And I can do no better than he. He believed with H. G. Wells that we are in a race between education and disaster, and he wrote continuously about the necessity of our understanding the politics and epistemology of media in our time. For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in his visionary Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.
To the preachers of today's world - both religious and political - I have a simple message: Make certain that your 'truth' is not the gullible excrement of a dying culture but instead offer your listener a path filled with such beauty that embarking on it will be natural, fulfilling and self-awakening. Make sure that your preaching is not merely the nauseatingly fearful and repetitious paranoia of the fanatic but that your 'way' is crowned with a radiance of Love, Life, Light and Liberty.
Until you are able to do that and you have proven yourself self-aware and self-critical, then I strongly recommend that you shut the fuck up and get the fuck out of the way.
Let's go shopping...
"O
my Son, how wonderful is the Wisdom of this Law of Love! How vast are
the Oceans of uncharted Joy that lie before the Keel of thy Ship! Yet
know this, that every Opposition is in its Nature named Sorrow, and the
Joy lieth in the Destruction of the Dyad. Therefore must thou seek ever
those Things which are to thee poisonous, and that in the highest
Degree, and make them thine by Love. That which repels, that which
disgusts, must thou assimilate in this Way of Wholeness. Yet rest not in
the Joy of Destruction of every Complex in thy Nature, but press on to
that ultimate Marriage with the Universe whose Consummation shall
destroy thee utterly, leaving only that Nothingness which was before the
Beginning. So then the Life of Non-action is not for thee; the
Withdrawal from Activity is not the Way of the Tao." - Aleister Crowley
