By Jonah Goldberg
Saturday, August 01, 2015
Forgive me readers, it’s been three weeks since my last
“news”letter.
So, as Bill Clinton hopes to say to a new crop of White
House interns in 2017, be gentle with me, I’m rusty.
I don’t mean to make light of the confessional, but I
have been thinking lately (“That must be a new sensation for you,” — The
Couch).
It seems to me that the Internet is taking the place of
God for a lot of people.
I always liked the old line, “Character is what you do
when only God is watching.” The alternate version, “Character is what you do
when no one is watching,” is actually theologically and philosophically a very
different statement. But both have their relevance in the age of the Digital
Panopticon.
Gossip-Talking Man
For most of human history, to borrow a phrase from social
science, people got all up in everybody else’s business. For most of prehistory
we lived in small bands, with minimal clothing and communal shelter. Not a lot
of room for privacy there.
Gossip mattered less when everybody was pretty much in
plain view of everybody else all day long. But as bands grew to tribes and
clans, gossip took on ever greater importance as the social sinew of
reputation. Boiled down, reputation is what people say about you when you’re
not around to hear it.
For my next book, I’ve been reading a lot on human
evolution, and it appears that one of the things that let us open an earthen
bowl of whup-ass on the Neanderthals just might have been our ability to
gossip. Chin-wagging about who Xeroxed his ass at the office Christmas party (I
couldn’t say, but I hear it rhymes with Shmevin Billiamson) is fun, but
gossiping is actually a crucial asset when it comes to determining who can be
trusted and who cannot. If you know Aruk is going to soil his loincloth the
moment he hears a saber-toothed tiger growl, that’s useful 411 that might cause
you to change tactics (“Let’s tie Aruk to a rock and use him as bait!”). The
growth of gossip is tied closely to development of language and clan size.
Anyway, in these types of early societies, the rule of
law was a lot like a unicorn that craps iPhones: a really great idea that has
very little bearing on real life. Social pressure is what kept people in line.
And the main enforcing mechanism of social pressure was gossip. Actually,
that’s not quite right. The enforcing mechanisms of social pressure were pointy
sticks, big rocks, swords, pikes, pitchforks, etc. (Withholding of food, sex,
and time in the Moon Bounce no doubt played a role, too.) But the process for
deciding who should be on the receiving end of pointy sticks and Moon
Bounce–timeouts was inextricably bound up in gossip. We are homo rumoris.
Death to Morality, Long Live the New Morality
In modern societies — and by modern I mean after the
agricultural revolution — reputation and gossip never really lost their
potency. How many duels — how many wars? — were started over questions of
individual honor? (As Julien Benda notes, with the rise of nationalism comes the
rise of “national honor” which had long been an issue for which the Monarch,
not the people, decided what was required. But that’s a “news”letter for
another day.) You don’t hear much about honor these days, but that’s not
because it has gone away; we just define it differently.
Indeed, there’s a tendency on the right to bemoan the
fact that traditional morality is breaking down — and that’s obviously true.
But the conclusion many take from it is that nothing is taking traditional
morality’s place. I’ve been writing for years that this isn’t true. Society,
like nature, abhors a vacuum; if you remove one moral dogma, another will rush
in to take its place. That’s what much of political correctness is — an attempt
to replace one system of customs, mores, values, and ethics with another. The
idea that the tweedy Torquemadas who make lists of “trigger warnings” are moral
libertarians —or libertines —is resplendently asinine in its manifest ignorance
of how the world actually operates.
God & the Twitter Mob
In other words, gossip, like everything else we do, is
informed by the moral ecosystem we live in. Change the ecosystem and you change
the gossip. “Henrietta won’t churn butter” sounds like World War II code or a
campus euphemism for something dirty that prudish Henrietta refuses to do. But
for all I know, 300 years ago it would have counted for vicious gossip. And,
“Henrietta worships Satan,” or for that matter “Henrietta doesn’t wear knickers
to church,” would have counted for the kind of “news” that warranted getting a
good mob up and running.
In The Seven Deadly Virtues, Jonathan Last made the point
that when Donald Sterling was driven from the public square and forced to sell
his basketball team, it was because the mob had gone bat-guano crazy about his
private racial views; no one objected to the fact that he was sharing his
racism with his mistress, whom he escorted around town openly. (Jonathan
doesn’t mention this part, but I always thought it was odd that Sterling had no
problem with his mistress having sex with black dudes, he just didn’t want her
to take pictures with them at basketball games or something. That’s some weird
stuff right there.) In short, there was little change in the amount of
judgmentalism, it’s just the flavor of judgmentalism changed. “The scarlet ‘A’
doesn’t exist anymore,” Last writes, “but the scarlet ‘R’ is very real indeed.”
The Scarlet Hack
On the other hand, that’s not entirely true. Adultery is
more socially acceptable than it’s ever been since the last time it was
socially acceptable. (It’s been a while.) But it’s still embarrassing. And
there’s still one constituency that can generally be relied upon not to endorse
adultery: the loyal spouses of the adulterers (as well as their children). Even
Hillary would likely have preferred that Bill not be so Aesopian about his
urges.
That’s what’s so significant about the hacking of
AshleyMadison.com. For those of you who don’t know (and those of you who are
pretending not to know because your wife is reading over your shoulder), it’s a
website that helps married people cheat on their spouses with other married
people. It does it all in secret, which is another of vice’s tributes to
virtue. Well, AshleyMadison was hacked and 37 million personal profiles were
stolen. Hilariously, the hackers were motivated by a desire to scold
AshleyMadison for not respecting privacy as much as they claimed.
I particularly liked this line from Gizmodo:
It goes without saying that this is about the worst data leak imaginable — not only does it have the usual problems of identity fraud, but if the full list of AshleyMadison’s users hits the internet, that’s a lot of adulterers outed.
There’s so much to unpack here. First of all, on the
heels of Wikileaks, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden, and, most recently, the
OPM hack, it’s a remarkable thing to write, “It goes without saying that this
is about the worst data leak imaginable.”
But it’s also intriguing that in an era where every day another “hot
take” liberal or feminist writer is celebrating polyamory and adultery, the
actual users of AshleyMadison still don’t want to be “outed.”
For a while, gay activists would “out” gay conservatives
to prove right-wing hypocrisy and to work on removing the stigma against
homosexuality. Well, if adultery is an acceptable lifestyle choice, shouldn’t
someone be celebrating the outing of these hypocrites?
The most powerful lesson from this story, however, is
that even when all of the parties to AshleyMadison have a deep interest in
keeping their secrets, you can’t count on the secrets staying secret. The only
way to guarantee you don’t get “outed” as an adulterer is not to commit
adultery in the first place. Behave as if God is watching you and you won’t
much care who else is watching you.
The Village Returns
Ian Tuttle had a thoughtful meditation Thursday on Cecil
the lion and the cultural perils of Internet outrage titled, coincidentally
enough, “Cecil the Lion and the Cultural Perils of Internet Outrage.” He quotes
Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death:
The information, the content, or, if you will, the “stuff” that makes up what is called “the news of the day” did not exist — could not exist — in a world that lacked the media to give it expression. I do not mean that things like fires, wars, murders and love affairs did not, ever and always, happen in places all over the world. I mean that lacking a technology to advertise them, people could not attend to them, could not include them in their daily business.
Ian adds, “Now they can. Postman was referring to the
cultural sea-change represented by television. The same effect is compounded
beyond measure by the Internet, which has, in essence, made everything ‘news.’”
Well, yes. But this is less new than it is a regression
to the norm of human history. Every little thing about us used to be “news” on
the Village Well Network. What the Internet does is recreate a facsimile of the
vicious system of gossip that once upheld the moral order.
What is dismaying is not that society is, via Hayekian
spontaneous order, creating mechanisms to enforce morality; that’s actually
kind of awesome and reassuring.
(Indeed, it exposes why all of the hand-wringing over
proposed changes to the Voting Rights Act is so overdone. Does anyone honestly
think any state government could long survive the tsunami of obloquy that would
arise in response to any real attempt to restore Jim Crow? And that’s assuming
there are any states interested in doing such a thing in the first place.)
What is dismaying is that the content of this new
morality is often so ridiculous. I have no problem with the creation of a
Scarlet ‘R’ for racism, but I do have a big problem with its promiscuous
overuse by people who see it as a censorious tool for their will-to-power or
mere amusement.
I certainly don’t mind shaming jack-wads like the guy who
killed Cecil the Lion (more about that to come), though I think we’ve moved
beyond shaming to moral panic and bullying hysteria.
But here’s my point (“I was wondering if you’d ever get
to it” — The Couch). In days of old, we worried about our reputation at the
retail, interpersonal level. For a brief period — not much more than a few
generations really — we were able to enjoy unprecedented anonymity. Contrary to
a lot of the hand-wringing about the anonymity of comment-section trolls and
Twitter shmucks, the reality is that the Internet and the Digital Panopticon
—by which I mean everything from Wikipedia to metadata, GPS records, credit
history, Facebook, Twitter, etc. — are making anonymity ever more rare. In
fourth grade, my kid started getting lessons at school about how the permanent
record of the Internet is vastly more real and permanent than the “permanent
record” I was taught to worry about at her age.
The body-cameras-on-cops stories are just the beginning
of the body-cameras-on-the-body-politic stories. Within the next ten years, I
wouldn’t be surprised if virtually all public spaces end up being monitored by
drones taking pictures of everything we do. In the not too distant future, our
cars will increasingly be driven by computers that will record all of our
comings and goings. It won’t really matter, until you do something you
shouldn’t do. The challenge will be, how should we define doing something “you
shouldn’t do”?
The phrase “Character is what you do when no one is
watching,” is really a way to get you to imagine that someone is watching you.
We are relearning that someone is watching us, but we aren’t being taught that
that someone is God.
We’ll see how that works out.
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