Death of the Liberal Class (36 page)
Read Death of the Liberal Class Online
Authors: Chris Hedges
Tags: #Political Culture, #Political Ideologies, #General, #Conservatism & Liberalism, #Political Science, #Liberalism
When in April 1945 the dissident Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was taken from his cell in a Nazi prison to the gallows, his last words were: “This is for me the end, but also the beginning.”
9
Bonhoeffer knew that most of the citizens in Germany were complicit through their collaboration or silence in a vast enterprise of death. But however hopeless it appeared in the moment, he affirmed what we all must affirm. He did not avoid death. He did not, as a distinct individual, survive. But he understood that his resistance and even his death were acts that nurtured life. He gave, even to those who did not join him, another narrative. His defiance and his execution condemned his executioners.
9
Bonhoeffer knew that most of the citizens in Germany were complicit through their collaboration or silence in a vast enterprise of death. But however hopeless it appeared in the moment, he affirmed what we all must affirm. He did not avoid death. He did not, as a distinct individual, survive. But he understood that his resistance and even his death were acts that nurtured life. He gave, even to those who did not join him, another narrative. His defiance and his execution condemned his executioners.
Significant structural change will not occur in our lifetime. This makes resistance harder. It shifts resistance from the tangible, the immediate, and the practical, to the amorphous and the indeterminate. But to stop resisting is spiritual and intellectual death. It is to surrender to the dehumanizing ideology of totalitarian capitalism. Acts of resistance keep alive another way of being. They sustain our integrity and empower others, whom we may never meet, to stand up and carry the flame we pass to them. No act of resistance is useless, whether it is refusing to pay taxes, fighting for a Tobin tax, working to shift the neoclassical economics paradigm, revoking a corporate charter, holding global Internet votes, or using Twitter to catalyze a chain reaction of refusal against the neoliberal order. We must resist and trust that resistance is worthwhile. Our communities will sustain us, emotionally and materially. They will be the key to a life of defiance.
Those who resist, who continue to practice moral autonomy, will become members of the underclass. The remnants of traditional liberal institutions, including the media, labor, the church, the universities, the arts, and political parties will merge with the instruments of corporate oppression. As long as they collaborate with the power elite, liberal institutions will continue to offer a few collaborators positions of comfort and privilege. But all those who seek to work as artists, journalists, professors, labor organizers, dissident politicians, or clergy will increasingly struggle without adequate health insurance or reliable incomes. They will be unable to send their children to elite colleges. Their mortgages will be foreclosed. They will be denied credit cards. Their salaries, if they get any, will be miserable. They will no longer be members of the liberal class.
The death of the liberal class has been accompanied by a shift from a print-based culture to an image-based culture. The demise of newspapers—along with that of book publishing—coupled with the degradation of our educational system for all but the elites, has created a culture in which verifiable fact, which is rooted in the complexity and discipline of print, no longer forms the basis of public discourse or our collective memory. It has been supplanted by the blogosphere, the social media universe, and cable television. Print-based culture, in which fact and assertion could be traced and distinguished, has ceded to a culture of emotionally driven narratives where facts and opinions are interchangeable. This is a decline and a degeneration that has crippled the reality-based culture, in which fact was the foundation for opinion and debate, and ushered in a culture in which facts, opinions, lies, and fantasy are interchangeable. This shift has denied many citizens the intellectual tools for critical thought and civic dialogue—the discourse that creates informed citizens. Images and words defy the complex structures of print when isolated from context.
Language, as the cultural critic Neil Postman pointed out, “makes sense only when it is presented as a sequence of propositions. Meaning is distorted when a word or sentence is, as we say, taken out of context; when a reader or a listener is deprived of what was said before and after.” Images, while giving the appearance of reality, distort it. The image dismembers reality. It “recreates the world in a series of idiosyncratic events.” And it will be difficult to communicate with those within a culture that are fed hefty doses of emotionally charged images and words taken out of context.
10
Reality, once it is disconnected from print, is no longer placed in context. This will leave dissidents speaking in a language that will often be unintelligible to the wider society.
10
Reality, once it is disconnected from print, is no longer placed in context. This will leave dissidents speaking in a language that will often be unintelligible to the wider society.
A populace entranced by these fragments, images, and spectacles, a populace that can no longer find the words to articulate what is happening to it, is cut off from rational discourse. It expresses reality through the use of selected and isolated facts, half-truths or lies, that do not make sense. Illusion becomes true. Artifacts from the print-based culture, such as newspapers, books, or classical drama—artifacts rooted in the complexity of print—attempt to present, examine and explain reality as something intimately related to the past. These print-based artifacts are based on the assumption that we cannot understand the present if we do not understand the past. Images and facts used to fuel a frenzy of chatter and melodrama speak in a different form. This visual language engenders confusion. It offers an endless whirlwind of emotion and cant. It fosters historical amnesia. As the culture has shifted from print to image, the old artifacts grounded in print have become as obtuse and unintelligible as hieroglyphics. Those who resist will be able to do so only as long as they wall off the new forms of communication and remain wedded to the complexity of print. But this will also result in rebels becoming foreigners in their own land.
The Internet, held out by many as a new panacea, is accelerating this cultural decline, as Matthew Hindman illustrates in his book
The Myth of Digital Democracy
. Internet traffic is dominated by a few principal corporate sites, Yahoo, Bing and Google, which aggregate and reproduce existing journalism and creative work. The goal, of course, is profit. The Web efficiently disseminates content, but it does not protect intellectual property rights. And this means financial ruin for journalists, academics, musicians, and artists. Creative work is released for free to Web providers who use it as bait for corporate advertising. And those who create reap little or nothing.
The Myth of Digital Democracy
. Internet traffic is dominated by a few principal corporate sites, Yahoo, Bing and Google, which aggregate and reproduce existing journalism and creative work. The goal, of course, is profit. The Web efficiently disseminates content, but it does not protect intellectual property rights. And this means financial ruin for journalists, academics, musicians, and artists. Creative work is released for free to Web providers who use it as bait for corporate advertising. And those who create reap little or nothing.
The great promise of the Internet—to open up dialogue, break down cultural barriers, promote democracy, and unleash innovation and creativity—is yet another utopian dream. The Internet is only accelerating our division into antagonistic clans, where we are sucked into virtual tribal groups that chant the same slogans and hate the same enemies. The Web, like the cable news outlets, forms anonymous crowds to vent collective rage, intolerance, and bigotry. These virtual slums do not seek communication or dialogue. They speak in the new absurdist language. They do not enrich our culture. They create a herd mentality in which those who express empathy for some perceived “enemy”—whether left or right—are denounced by their fellow travelers for their impurity. And the liberal class has become as corrupted by the Web as the right wing. Racism toward Muslims is as evil as anti-Semitism, but try to express this simple truth on a partisan Palestinian or Israeli Web site. These kinds of truths, that acknowledge human complexity, are what the liberal class once sought to protect. Social scientists have a name for this retreat into ideologically pure and intolerant ghettos: cyberbalkanization.
I spoke with Jaron Lanier, the father of virtual-reality technology. He warns of this frightening new collectivism in
You Are Not a Gadget
. He notes that the habits fostered by the Internet have further reconfigured how we relate to one another. He writes that the philosophy behind terms of art such as
Web 2.0
,
open culture
,
free software
, and the
long tail
have become enablers of this new collectivism. He sites Wikipedia, which consciously erases individual voices, and Google Wave, which permits users to edit what someone else has said in a conversation, as well as watch others as they input, as technologies that accelerate mass collective thought and mass emotions. Privacy, honesty, and self-reflection are obliterated in favor of image.
You Are Not a Gadget
. He notes that the habits fostered by the Internet have further reconfigured how we relate to one another. He writes that the philosophy behind terms of art such as
Web 2.0
,
open culture
,
free software
, and the
long tail
have become enablers of this new collectivism. He sites Wikipedia, which consciously erases individual voices, and Google Wave, which permits users to edit what someone else has said in a conversation, as well as watch others as they input, as technologies that accelerate mass collective thought and mass emotions. Privacy, honesty, and self-reflection are obliterated in favor of image.
On the Internet, as in the wider society, the value and status of tastes and information are determined by the crowd, in what Lanier calls the “hive mentality.” Music, books, journalism, commercials, bits of television shows and movies, along with inane YouTube videos, are thrust onto our screens and into the national consciousness based on their level of Internet traffic. Lanier says that one of the biggest mistakes he and other early computer scientists made while developing the Internet was allowing those whose works are displayed on the Internet to go unpaid. He says this decision has made it more difficult for those who create intellectual or artistic works to make a living or receive credit for their work. It has furthered the cultural rout against individual expression.
Twenty music tracks are downloaded illegally for every one bought online. It is a similar story for films and photographs. Pirated versions of newly released movies are available along with last week’s
New York Times
bestsellers. Journalists, once able to sell articles to publications overseas, now see their work flash around the globe without hope of compensation. We are starving our professional critics and artists. We are turning culture and art over to part-time amateurs. And as creative artists and journalists vanish, so do the editors and producers who distill and give focus to creative and journalistic expression. The only journalism and art that will endure will be that which draws advertising. Cultural and artistic expression will be replaced by the tawdry, banal, and often idiotic distractions that draw huge numbers of YouTube hits or public-relations-created propaganda. And any work that cannot gain corporate sponsorship or attract advertising dollars will be ignored.
New York Times
bestsellers. Journalists, once able to sell articles to publications overseas, now see their work flash around the globe without hope of compensation. We are starving our professional critics and artists. We are turning culture and art over to part-time amateurs. And as creative artists and journalists vanish, so do the editors and producers who distill and give focus to creative and journalistic expression. The only journalism and art that will endure will be that which draws advertising. Cultural and artistic expression will be replaced by the tawdry, banal, and often idiotic distractions that draw huge numbers of YouTube hits or public-relations-created propaganda. And any work that cannot gain corporate sponsorship or attract advertising dollars will be ignored.
While disregard of intellectual property rights denies those who create the capacity to make a living from their work, aggregators such as Google make profits by collecting and distributing content to lure advertisers. Original work on the Internet, as Lanier points out, is almost always cut and mutilated. It is “copied, mashed up, anonymized, analyzed, and turned into bricks in someone else’s fortress to support an advertising scheme.” Lanier warns that if this trend is not halted, it will create a “formula that leaves no way for our nation to earn a living in the long term.” The Internet has begun the final and perhaps the deadliest assault on the arts and intellectual inquiry.
“All of a sudden people have lost sight of the fact that people need to be paid for the work,” Mark Kurlansky, who is the author of
Cod, Salt
and
1968,
told me:
Cod, Salt
and
1968,
told me:
“I was doing a book signing in Boston for my book
The Food of a Younger Land
based on WPA food writing. I told the audience that this was the best of it, and I had discarded half of the stuff. This young guy came up to me afterwards and said, ‘Why don’t you take the stuff you discarded and post it on the Internet?’ I was thinking, There are a couple of obvious problems, and why doesn’t he see them?” First of all, if I discarded it, it was because I didn’t think it was any good. And second of all, to be crude, what’s in it for me? The public has this attitude that this is above money. It is not a coincidence that the only successful print medium left economically is financial journalism. It is a world that worships money. You pay your money, and you get your story.
Digital collectivism, Lanier warns, is destroying the dwindling vestiges of authentic journalism, creativity, and innovation that require time, investment, and self-reflection. The only income left for most of those who create is earned through self-promotion and the orchestration of celebrity. But, as Lanier points out, this turns all culture into a form of advertising. It fosters a social ethic in which the capacity for crowd manipulation, for the art of seduction, is valued more than truth, beauty, or intellect. Writers, musicians, artists, journalists, and filmmakers must transform themselves into celebrities to earn money, or vanish from public consciousness.
“Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one’s anus to one’s mouth,” Lanier says:
“The body starts consuming itself. That is what we are doing online. As more and more human activity is aggregated, people huddle around the last remaining oases of revenue. Musicians today might still be able to get paid to make music for video games, for instance, because games are still played in closed consoles and haven’t been collectivized as yet.
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Lanier is not opposed to the Internet. He is opposed to how it has evolved. He fears that if we fall into an economic tailspin, the Internet, like other innovative systems of mass communication such as television, will be used to exacerbate social enmity.
“The scenario I can see is America in some economic decline, which we seem determined to enter into because we are unable to make any adjustments, and a lot of unhappy people,” Lanier said:
The preponderance of them are [located in] rural areas and in the Red States, the former slave states. And they are all connected and get angrier and angrier. What exactly happens? Do they start converging on abortion clinics? Probably. Do they start converging on legislatures and take them over? I don’t know, maybe. I shouldn’t speak it. It is almost a curse to imagine these things. But any intelligent person can see the scenario I am afraid to see. There is a potential here for very bad stuff to happen.
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