By Charles C. W. Cooke
Thursday, June 11, 2015
In the foreword to his classic book Amusing Ourselves to
Death, the cultural critic Neil Postman proposed that it was Aldous Huxley, and
not George Orwell, who had more accurately foreseen the tribulations of the
future. “Orwell,” Postman reflected, “feared those who would deprive us of
information.” Huxley, by contrast, “feared those who would give us so much that
we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.” The likely consequences of these
prognostications were, necessarily, divergent. “Orwell feared that the truth
would be concealed from us,” Postman submitted. But “Huxley feared the truth
would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.” In the early years of the 21st
century, it is tough to mount a solid counterargument against Huxley’s
supposition. 1984 may be often cited by critics of linguistic corruption and
security theater, but it ultimately forecast a landscape that is ascetic and
austere and, in truth, wholly unfamiliar to us. In fact, our present
arrangement is quite the inverse of that imagined by Orwell. In 2015,
stimulation is quotidian and ubiquitous. Information is cheap. Choice is the
happy norm. And the truth is a luxury not of the well connected, but of the
astute.
Were men invariably predisposed to patience and to
reason, this would be of little concern. In the abstract at least, the notion
that an average member of the electorate may possess the sum of human knowledge
inside the pockets of his jeans is a salutary one. But, as Huxley anticipated,
man is flawed, his appetite for distraction is infinite, and his interest in
discernment is limited by his lust for feeling. “An unexciting truth,” Huxley
noted in Brave New World Revisited, “may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood,”
especially in such circumstances as that truth’s being disseminated across a
medium that is “concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but
with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant.” When we speak warmly of
the Web and its consequences, we imagine that rationality will inevitably
prevail. Often, we imagine in vain. Have we been liberated? Or have we been
drowned?
It is said that the chief virtue of the Internet age is
that anybody may express himself and be heard — regardless of his relationship
with the gatekeepers. But it is also fair to say that the chief vice of the
Internet age is that . . . anybody may express himself and be heard —
regardless of his relationship with the gatekeepers. Should one wish to, one
can find online the complete Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers, as well as
the works of Karl Marx and Immanuel Kant; one can pull up the unabridged works
of Adam Smith and Frédéric Bastiat and John Maynard Keynes; one can read the
Lincoln–Douglas debates in their entirety, find the constitution of the
Confederacy, and study the output of Ida B. Wells — and, ceteris paribus, one
can do all of these things gratis. The days in which the many were indebted to
the largesse of an Andrew Carnegie or a John Passmore Edwards are, happily,
over. And yet, encumbering these delights like ivy on a crumbling Tuscan villa
is a whole lot of untrammeled nonsense. Contrived and mistranscribed quotes
abound, along with historical and legal and scientific offerings that simply do
not pass muster. For the laymen in any field, it can be difficult to detect
which is which. And understandably so. The Web is where we are supposed to go
to find the truth — a virtual Library of Alexandria for the modern era — and
yet there are no red flags to indicate the impostors. Imagine, if you will,
what might happen if your local athenaeum replaced a good portion of its books
with parodic or mendacious equivalents, and then interspersed the perfidious
volumes with the genuine articles. That’s the Internet.
There is an elementary reason that the Web’s many
miscreants spend so much time photoshopping photographs, fabricating
quotations, and manufacturing downright falsehoods, the better to fool the
masses: It works. Because such a small premium is placed on verisimilitude, the
likes of Mark Twain, George Washington, Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, and
Oscar Wilde have all had attributed to them a series of sentiments that they
never even contemplated but that are now broadly regarded as their own.
Contemporary figures are no safer from the game. Thanks to aggressive online
republishing, Sarah Palin is believed to have claimed that she could see Russia
from her house (87 percent of Obama’s voters in 2008 believed that she had said
this); Dr. Ben Carson is supposed to regard Obama’s presidency as a greater
blow to blacks than was slavery (as is now the way, this meme came with a fake
date-stamp and citation); and Barack Obama is widely understood to have been
sworn into office on a Koran. By the time that next year’s presidential
elections are over, the biographies of many of our public figures will have
been altered considerably.
The consequences of this deceit are manifold. These days,
political campaigns are spending an increasing amount of their time rebutting
explicit lies that, because the “retweet” and “share” and “send” buttons are so
easily accessible, can go from concept to international fruition in the blink
of an eye. Political debates, meanwhile, are becoming decreasingly useful: When
people obtain so much of their information from snazzy memes and selective
snark, why would anyone bother staging Firing Line? In fact, even ostensibly
august institutions are falling afoul of the silliness. Having encountered a
specious meme that was initially promulgated by a wildly anti-Semitic Facebook
user, NPR’s Diane Rehm yesterday stated as a stone-cold matter of certainty
that Democratic presidential aspirant Bernie Sanders was an Israeli citizen. In
her prompt mea culpa, Rehm conceded her mistake. “I had read [it] in a comment
on Facebook,” she acknowledged. “I stated it as fact.”
Naturally.
If the Internet is to be our guide, both Mark Twain and
Winston Churchill observed that “a lie gets halfway around the world before the
truth has a chance to get its pants on.” Whichever one of them actually said
it, however, it seems clear that the maxim is twice as true in the age of
Twitter and Snapchat as it was a century ago. Today, the ready availability of
interconnected publishing tools has enabled almost anybody to plot a grand hoax
and to get away with it. Just as Stalin “knew” deep down that the Kulaks were
undermining his glorious social experiment and thus felt comfortable
improvising the necessary proof, so do our modern show-trialers consider it
tolerable to provide false evidence in order to secure their readers’
affections. In certain circles, it is simply taken for granted that George W.
Bush is a moron who could not be trusted to sit the right way on a horse. In
consequence, it is deemed acceptable to invent hysterical instances of
stupidity that never in fact occurred. In alternatively polarized quarters, it
is taken as a given that Hillary Clinton’s time at the State Department was an
unmitigated and inchoate disaster. As a result, hanging fraudulent quotations
around her neck is fair game. Gun controllers, “rape culture” advocates, Obama
“birthers,” 9/11 “truthers,” instant deforestation experts — all of these
groups now have a means by which to fill the holes in their theories and to
convince the public of the truth that they know is out there somewhere but that
they cannot substantiate using the normal means. To have a modem and a laptop
nowadays is to have a magic wand, with which you can bend the world to your
preconceptions and make history better. Believe that your least favorite
Republican is the sort of monster who would praise incest? There’s a meme for
that.
In the late 19th century, Oscar Wilde is reported to have
responded to a witty comment issued by the painter James Whistler by remarking,
“I wish I had said that.” Whistler, who was convinced that Wilde was noting his
anecdotes and jokes and employing them in his public addresses, did not miss a
beat before retorting caustically, “Never mind, Oscar, you will have said it.”
How little did he know.
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