The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time
97
The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time
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Overview
Reality, as she shows us, was never what we thought it was—there is always a bubble, people are always subjective and prey to stereotypes. And that makes reality actually more vulnerable than we ever thought. Enter Donald J. Trump and his team of advisors. For them, as she writes, lying is the point. The more blatant the lie, the easier it is to hijack reality and assert power over the truth. Drawing on writers as diverse as Hannah Arendt, Walter Lippmann, Philip K. Dick, and Jonathan Swift, she dissects this strategy, straight out of the authoritarian playbook, and shows how the Trump team mastered it, down to the five types of tweets that Trump uses to distort our notions of what’s real and what’s not.
And she offers hope. There is meaningful action, a time-tested treatment for moral panic. And there is also the inevitable reckoning. History tells us we can count on it.
Brief and bracing, The Trouble with Reality shows exactly why so many of us didn’t see it coming, and how we can recover both our belief in reality—and our sanity.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781523502622 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Workman Publishing Company |
| Publication date: | 05/16/2017 |
| Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 97 |
| File size: | 860 KB |
About the Author
Brooke Gladstone is the co-host and editor of the Peabody Award-winning radio show and podcast On the Media from WNYC Studios, heard by well over a million people each week. She’s also author of The Influencing Machine, a comic book treatise on two millennia of media madness. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
IN HERE
Perhaps you picked up this book because an icy hand grips your viscera; sometimes squeezing, sometimes easing, always present. And you suspect that this intimate violation, this forced entry, proceeds from something more profound than politics. You imagine that reality itself is engaged in an epic existential battle and you stand helpless against the onslaught, as the truth is trumpled into dust.
That said, you can feel better. After reading this, perhaps that terrible pressure will begin to ebb, but it will never leave you. Having watched history unspool in a direction you never believed it could go, now you question reality, and it's likely you always will. Because reality is more slippery than a pocketful of pudding.
Is reality what we are able to confirm with our five senses? As New Scientist magazine noted some years back, "This answer ignores such problematic entities as electrons, the recession and the number 5," not to mention a heap of phantom limbs.
Is reality what a significantly large group of people hold to be true? Certainly no one currently living in America (or on Earth) could believe that. Now the unknowing or unhinged can coalesce a vast number of likeminded souls into a force so powerful it can shift reality's prism or elect a president.
Part of the problem stems from the fact that facts, even a lot of facts, do not constitute reality. Reality is what forms after we filter, arrange, and prioritize those facts and marinate them in our values and traditions.
Reality is personal.
* * *
America's most determined architect and annihilator of reality was the science fiction master Philip K. Dick. Included in the anthology The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick is a speech he delivered in 1978:
"It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question 'What is reality?,' to someday get an answer...."
Even after writing over thirty novels, he never found one. Finally, when a philosophy student asked him to define reality, he replied:
"'Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.' That's all I could come up with."
But he knew we urgently needed a better answer:
"... because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. ... Very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. ... It is my job to create universes. ... And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later.
"... the matter of defining what is real — that is a serious topic, even a vital topic. And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human. Because the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly — as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. ... It is just a very large version of Disneyland."
What Dick saw forty years ago many of us see now, at least those of us whose reality embodies liberal values. It was as if that reality was sucked into a black hole, which then erupted, spewing hot flows of a grimmer vision. No American escaped the tremors — many enjoyed them — but more than half the nation suffered some degree of vertigo.
What to do? Often, the graver the illness, the harsher the treatment.
* * *
If fake reality is the problem, the logical first step is to track it to its source, but that is a very short, very frustrating expedition, because fake reality begins at home. In your head. And even before that, in your umwelt.
Umwelt expresses the idea that different animals living on the same patch of earth experience utterly disparate realities. Writing in Edge, neuroscientist David M. Eagleman put it this way: "In the blind and deaf world of the tick, the important signals are temperature and the odor of butyric acid. For the black ghost knifefish, it's electrical fields. For the echolocating bat, it's air-compression waves.
"The small subset of the world that an animal is able to detect is its umwelt.
"The bigger reality, whatever that might mean, is called the umgebung.
"To appreciate the amount that goes undetected in our lives, imagine you're a bloodhound dog. Your long nose houses two hundred million scent receptors ... your wet nostrils attract and trap scent molecules. The slits at the corners of each nostril flare out to allow more airflow ... your floppy ears drag along the ground and kick up scent molecules. Your world is all about olfaction."
One day while trotting behind your master, you are stunned by a revelation. The human with whom you stroll is profoundly disabled! You glory in smell while he stumbles along with stunted senses! How diminished, how sad, his life must be.
"Obviously, we suffer no absence of smell because we accept reality as it's presented to us. Without the olfactory capabilities of a bloodhound, it rarely strikes us that things could be different."
Therein lies the root of the problem, succinctly rendered by the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer in his aptly titled Studies in Pessimism: "Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world."
We cannot know the world, but we have to live somewhere. So we construct cozier, more comprehensible versions, move in and hunker down. Meanwhile, out there in the umgebung, millions of others do likewise, people we don't know and mostly don't care to. These people are stereotypes.
Journalist and critic Walter Lippmann introduced stereotypes, in the psychological sense, back in the 1920s. In his seminal work Public Opinion, he noted that we pick up a salient detail about a person or group — black, white; international banker, kindergarten teacher; in Brooklyn, Baton Rouge — and then blithely fill in the rest of the blanks. Now we think we know them.
Our worldview is built on a bedrock of stereotypes, not just about people but also about the way things work. The power of those stereotypes — vital to survival in this unfathomable world — is as profound as it is inescapable.
Stereotypes, Lippmann wrote, focus and feed on what is familiar and what is exotic, exaggerating each in the process: "The slightly familiar is seen as very familiar and the somewhat strange as sharply alien." They are refreshed continually, both by close observation and false analogy.
True or not, they carve neural pathways, sluices that stem the torrent of conflicting impressions and ideas churning through the umgebung.
In the end, stereotypes create the patterns that compose our world. It is not necessarily the world we would like it to be, he says, it is simply the kind of world we expect it to be.
"We feel at home there. ... We are members. ... And though we have abandoned much that might have tempted us before we creased ourselves into that mould, once we are firmly in, it fits as snugly as an old shoe.
"No wonder, then, that any disturbance of the stereotypes seems like an attack upon the foundations of the universe. It is an attack upon the foundations of our universe, and, where big things are at stake, we do not readily admit that there is any distinction between our universe and the universe."
It stands to reason that if such a disturbance can endanger our universe, our own stereotypes can wreak terrible havoc on the universes of others. How could they not? The purpose of stereotypes is to filter, to shrink our field of vision. So they give rise to vast blind spots that inevitably lead to smash-ups when worlds collide.
Case in point: Looking back at America before the First World War, Lippmann observed that one of America's core "stereotyped" ideas was that technological development was synonymous with progress. All evidence to the contrary was channeled off. He described what followed: "They saw the expansion of cities, but not the accretion of slums. ... They expanded industry furiously at reckless cost to their natural resources; they built up gigantic corporations without arranging for industrial relations. They grew to be one of the most powerful nations on earth without preparing their institutions or their minds for the ending of their isolation.
"They stumbled into the World War morally and physically unready, and they stumbled out again, much disillusioned, but hardly more experienced."
After the war, many of the nation's highest ideals were shipwrecked along with the shattered stereotypes, leaving an entire generation adrift. We pay a high price to live in our gated realities.
* * *
Stereotyping is like eating, an act essential to our well-being. And like eating, there is an unhealthy tendency to overindulge. For this disorder, there are no sure cures, and most treatments are deeply unpleasant.
It is a nauseating enterprise, tinkering with your universe. You could break it.
But what if you have no choice? You know what happens; you've done it. We've all done it. In a 1906 lecture, pragmatist William James described exactly what transpires when suddenly a person's trusty stock of old opinions is imperiled. The reason can vary; maybe it's because the facts contradict them, or they contradict each other, or they are getting in the way of what he wants. No matter, the result is always a deep and strange unease, which can be escaped only by modifying one's previous opinion.
"He saves as much of it as he can, for in this matter of belief we are all extreme conservatives. So he tries to change first this opinion, and then that ... until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter. This new idea is then adopted as the true one. It preserves the older stock of truths with a minimum of modification, stretching them just enough to make them admit the novelty, but conceiving that in ways as familiar as the case leaves possible. ...
"The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one's own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity."
You alter only what you must to avoid collateral damage to the code you live by. To do otherwise would both deny you serenity and defy your biochemistry. It's behavior bred in the bone, and the blood, and the brain.
Consider the experiment conducted by Emory University professor Drew Westen in 2006. He used fMRI brain scans to monitor what happens inside a voter's head when confronted with candidates' statements that showed lying or pandering.
As he described in an On the Media interview, voters in the study reckoned easily with the incriminating statements of the opposing candidate. But when they confronted hypocrisy from their own candidate ...
WESTEN: The first thing that is activated were a series of negative emotion circuits that were basically — for any of your listeners who can remember Lost in Space, it was "Will Robinson, danger, danger." They saw danger. They saw a threat, and you could see it all over their brain. Then you saw activation in the part of the brain called the anterior cingulate. It monitors and deals with conflict. So they were in conflict ... to figure a way out. And then, after they had come to their conclusion that there was really no problem for their guy, you saw activation in parts of the brain that are very rich in the neurotransmitters involved in reward. These are the circuits in the brain that get activated when junkies get their fix.
ME: You mean once they figured out how best to lie to themselves, they got a blast of oxytocin or something?
WESTEN: [laughs] Very, very close, that's right. So they got this huge blast of dopamine, which is involved in reward.
ME: In other words, the same thing you get when you take coke.
WESTEN: That's exactly right. There was no reasoning at all going on.
That is what you're up against. Who would choose violation over validation? The very wiring of your mind and body rebels against that choice. Yet any sincere reckoning with reality demands that you strain, violently, against the natural, lifelong limitations of your umwelt, or as neuroscientist David Eagleman proposes, at least accept the idea that the umwelt exists.
"I think it would be useful if the concept of the umwelt were embedded in the public lexicon. It neatly captures the idea of limited knowledge, of unobtainable information, and of unimagined possibilities. Consider the criticisms of policy, the assertions of dogma, the declarations of fact that you hear every day — and just imagine if all of these could be infused with the proper intellectual humility that comes from appreciating the amount unseen."
Especially in treacherous times. In Ursula K. Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness, a human envoy confronts a species locked in a cold war, whose customs and biology are confoundingly strange. His enigmatic guide muses, "To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness."
The patience to defer judgment — that's a start, but probably not why you picked up this book. If you are human, while you may have some concern for the chaos within, those icy fingers are pulsing in Morse code that there is a bigger problem out there.
CHAPTER 2OUT THERE
To ease the transition from the world within to the world out there, cast one last look inward and consider that, after all, we are what we eat.
In 1985, critic and educator Neil Postman published Amusing Ourselves to Death, the most incisive, impassioned warning label ever issued on our media diet. To illuminate the danger, he contrasts two pivotal works of dystopian fiction: George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
In Orwell's vision, he notes, we are crushed by a merciless oppression imposed by others, whereas in Huxley's vision, we are seduced, sedated, and satiated. We enslave ourselves.
"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much information that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.
"Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared that we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared that we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.
"In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain.
"In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. ..."
Orwell, who in 1948 was fixed on Nazi devastation and Soviet ascendancy, seemed to have nailed it. But thirty-seven years later, Postman saw that in our time and place, it's unquestionably Huxley. He portrayed a world that leads ineluctably to the election of Donald Trump.
* * *
Trump's campaign rhetoric pumped out endless streams of comedy and melodrama, apocalypse and deliverance, bitterness and bullshit. To some, it was enthrallingly frank. To others, Trump's victory did not merely subvert America's core values, it shattered their worldview. The codes more than half the nation devised to interpret the world, the channels they carved to divert the flow of incompatible ideas, collapsed.
What stereotypes were busted by Trump? Mostly, they pertain to our deep-rooted belief in the infallibility of our democracy, though some of those stereotypes were formed long before our nation was born.
English poet John Milton, famed for the seventeenth-century epicParadise Lost, spent years as defender-in-chief for Oliver Cromwell in a convulsive time. He penned a ferocious polemic to Parliament against censorship, declaring, Let Truth and Falsehood grapple! In a free and open encounter, Truth will win.
"Lords and Commons of England, consider what Nation it is whereof ye are ... a Nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Trouble with Reality"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Brooke Gladstone.
Excerpted by permission of Workman Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Dedication,
In Here,
Out There,
Lying Is the Point,
Recovering Reality,
The Reckoning,
Sources,
Acknowledgments,
Related Subjects
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