Antisocial, page 8
What was unacceptable can become acceptable. Acceptability is just a norm, and norms can change for the better or for the worse.
Whenever this passage was posted on Facebook, commenters tended to treat Rorty’s words like a prophecy, a revelation of the fact that the American experiment had always been doomed to fail. But Rorty put no stock in revelation. “We should face up to unpleasant truths about ourselves,” he continued, “but we should not take those truths to be the last word about our chances for happiness, or about our national character. Our national character is still in the making.” As the title of his book suggests, he did not believe that we are doomed or that we are saved. He did not believe that We Are Good or that We Are Bad. He believed something more liberating and also more terrifying: that history is contingent, that the arc bends the way people bend it.* The American attitude toward fascism has long been an article of faith: it can’t happen here. But if history is contingent—if anything can happen—then our worst fears are not impossible but improbable, which is not at all the same thing.
Electoral prognostication was only Rorty’s hobby. He was mainly a philosopher. Just as Darwin had shown that biology proceeds not by design but by evolution, Rorty held, so might contemporary philosophy show that history is the result of countless human actions, not the fulfillment of an eternal plan.
In his 1989 book, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty invoked the concept of “vocabularies,” by which he meant broad systems of thought—“the moral vocabulary of Saint Paul versus Freud’s, the jargon of Newton versus that of Aristotle.” According to Rorty, the way a society talks to itself—through books, through popular films, through schools and universities, through mass media—determines that society’s beliefs, its politics, its very culture. Why, after almost a century of legalized apartheid, did the United States start to pass antisegregation laws? It was not the result of the inevitable arc of history, or of white Americans finally living up to their inherently noble character. Rather, it was made possible by decades of political and intellectual work—by organizers and preachers and artists and all sorts of other people, many of them perceived as fringe, who gradually pointed the way toward a better moral vocabulary. And yet the arc could also bend in the other direction. How did Weimar Germany, one of the most progressive societies in modern Europe, descend into barbaric madness? It was possible, in part, because Germans spent a long time treating barbaric madness as inconceivable, and then their sense of what was conceivable began to change.
Rorty argued that a transition from one moral vocabulary to another happens roughly the way a paradigm shift happens in science. Premodern people believed that the sun revolved around the Earth; now everyone, except for a few internet conspiracy theorists, believes the opposite. This shift didn’t occur because the sun decided to intervene in human life, revealing its true nature. Rather, a few scientists learned to speak differently about the world, and then a few more learned to speak that way, and then, eventually, everyone else learned to speak that way, too. “The world does not speak,” Rorty wrote. “Only we do.” To change how we talk is to change who we are.
* * *
• • •
In January 2009, in the days leading up to Obama’s first inauguration, an innocent, ecumenical mood came over downtown D.C. Teenagers hastened to help old ladies cross the street. A guy on a crowded Metro played a disco remix of a Stevie Wonder song, loud and distorted, on his phone; instead of glaring at him, people started dancing. No one seriously believed that one black president would make the United States a postracial country. We knew that we were playacting, that the moment would pass. Both despite and because of this, everyone seemed determined to make the most of it.
The moment passed. In January 2017, people in D.C. wept openly—sitting on benches on the National Mall, standing in line at the Sbarro in Union Station—and the weeping didn’t even seem out of place, as if the whole city had been transformed into a hospital waiting room. I was walking down Eighteenth Street, in Adams Morgan, when a motorcade of black town cars approached, blaring their sirens to part the traffic in front of them. “Pence,” someone near me averred, citing some insignia on a license plate. We all stopped on the sidewalk to watch. One driver, while pulling his SUV to the side of the road, lowered his windows and played “My President,” an unofficial Obama-campaign anthem by Young Jeezy, at full volume, until the last town car was out of sight.
It was a Friday night, the first night of the Trump administration. I stopped by a loft apartment where some friends were gathered for a loosely Shabbat-themed potluck dinner. The notion of a dance party was raised a few times, in a hypothetical way, and then dropped. No one felt up to it. At dinner, we piled our plates with salad and lentils and rice and passed around twelve-dollar bottles of red wine and did our best to avoid talking about Trump. This, too, was part of the hospital etiquette. We all knew that the prognosis was daunting at best, catastrophic at worst. Why dwell on it? People made plans to meet up the next morning, at various landmarks at various precise times, for the Women’s March. Someone told a joke. Someone else burst into tears. The last thing anyone wanted to talk about was the intrinsic goodness of the American people.
After an hour, I stood up and found my coat. I had to get back to the same cigar bar to meet up with some of the Deplorables.
“Guess we’re just not as much fun as the Nazis, huh?” a friend said.
“They’re not all Nazis,” I said, attempting a feeble, apologetic grin. I understood that we were each operating on some level of irony, but I couldn’t tell which level, exactly, or whether mine was the appropriate one. In the cab on the way to the cigar bar, I tried to reassure myself that the work of a journalist was to go out into the world, even into its most uncomfortable and morally squalid corners, and try to disinter a few shards of truth. I thought I believed my own pep talk, but I couldn’t be sure. The pentatonic protest melody kept thrumming in my head: Which side are you on?
I’d been covering the bad-guys-on-the-internet beat for a few months, and in that time I’d experienced several such encounters with relatives, colleagues, strangers at weddings. Sometimes these encounters verged on subtle interrogations, as if I were a spy suspected of having been turned into a double agent. With friends, it was usually more like a gut check: just making sure that, all jokes aside, we still agreed that these guys were beyond the pale. Not every Trump supporter, but certainly the social media demicelebrities at the forefront of the alt-right and alt-light movements, the ones who sold this swill for a living.
Every time I reassessed how I truly felt about the demicelebrities, I discovered that, in my heart of hearts, I was not at all confused. I found them deplorable. This wasn’t a personal assessment—some of them were worse company than others, but I have a relatively high tolerance for intolerable people. Nor was it a political assessment, really; like Trump, the Deplorables were not fundamentally political figures. They were metamedia insurgents. Some were web-savvy bigots; some were soft-brained conspiracists; some were mere grifters or opportunists. Their opinions about specific matters of policy were almost beside the point. Of course, reasonable people can and should disagree in good faith, both about mundane issues (tort reform) and incendiary ones (immigration, abortion). But anybody who was paying attention could see that the leaders of the Deplorable movement were not good-faith interlocutors. They didn’t care to be.*
Throughout the 2016 election, the mainstream media continued to lavish attention on the group they insisted on calling the alt-right, but they never found a way to cover the group with real nuance and moral clarity. They tended to describe it as a political movement, albeit one situated on the outer edge of the Overton window. Picture the most conservative American voting bloc you can think of; then keep going, a step even further to the right. That’s where you’ll find the alt-right.
This was a category error.* The metaphor of the window is a metaphor of connection: to be anywhere within it, even near its far-right edge, is to be granted a kind of legitimacy, to be in dialogue with everyone else. The Deplorables weren’t interested in dialogue. They were fine with being described as controversial, even dangerous, so long as they were placed somewhere within the bounds of recognized political opinion. Their long-term goal was to shift the Overton window, or to smash it and rebuild it in their image.
* * *
• • •
After another long night at the cigar bar, around the time my eyes started to sting and the Deplorables grew too intoxicated to be useful, I took a Lyft back to Shaw, a D.C. neighborhood named for a Civil War colonel from an abolitionist family. Two of my closest friends, married lawyers who were expecting their first child, had opened their small rowhouse to a dozen visitors. I expected everyone to be asleep, but I’d forgotten to account for the hospital vibe, which had warped time into an irrelevant abstraction. The kitchen was warm and brightly lit; a Spotify algorithm was DJing via Sonos; almost every inch of floor space was occupied by an air mattress or a human body. “You smell like hipster fascism,” one of the hosts said, handing me a whiskey and a slice of babka.
Everyone was making picket signs for the next day’s march—squinting over glossy expanses of posterboard, sliding permanent markers across the floor to one another, trying to decide which tone their slogans should strike. Snide? Hortatory? What was the point of a protest again? RESIST BIGLY, one sign read. DONALD, YOU ARE IN WAY OVER YOUR HEAD! read another. I couldn’t stay for the march— I had to leave town for more reporting, and it was almost time to check in for my early-morning flight—but I made a suggestion. Three letters, followed by an exclamation point: “Sad!”
Some on the left still found it comforting to assume that every Trump supporter was a shiftless rube under a demagogue’s spell. The reality I’d seen so far was more unnerving in its complexity. The leaders of the Deplorable movement were deeply wrong on many fundamental questions, both empirical and ethical, but they weren’t guileless or stupid. They were deft propagandists who, having recognized that social media was creating an unprecedented power vacuum, had set out to exploit it. As Hillary Clinton often said of the rancor that fueled Trump’s campaign, “This is not who we are.” The sentiment was nice to hear, but it was wishful thinking. We are not Good. We are not Bad. Our behavior is a product of many contingent factors, not least our cultural vocabulary, and our cultural vocabulary can change.
INTERLUDE
Movable Type
I n 1476, about two decades after the publication of the Gutenberg Bible, a merchant named William Caxton built Britain’s first printing press in a house near Westminster Abbey. The following year, he used it to publish a book, one of the first ever mass-printed in English, called The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers. The title was redundant: “dictes” and sayings were the same thing. Moreover, “dictes” was a made-up word, part of a clumsily literal rendering of the title Les Dits Moraux des Philosophes, the popular French anthology from which Caxton’s book had been translated. The French anthology was a translation of a Latin anthology, which was a translation of a Spanish anthology, which was a translation of an Arabic anthology, which had been collected from oral tradition and written down in eleventh-century Egypt.
The book was what classicists call a doxography—a list of ancient thinkers and what they said, or what they were said to have said. There were twenty-two chapters. Each one opened with a thumbnail biography of a philosopher; this was followed by a greatest-hits compilation of that philosopher’s dictes, presented in no discernible order and without segues or punctuation. The chapter on Socrates included a brief summary of his life and death, a few descriptive details (“when he spake he wagged his little finger”), and a recitation of his various opinions, including his opinion that philosophy should only be transmitted orally, not through books.
Almost none of the dictes were philosophical in the sense that we now understand the term. Rather, they were anecdotes, unjustified opinions, mystical aphorisms (“Thought is the mirror of man, wherein he may behold his beauty and his filth”), alarmist diet tips (“Wine is enemy to the soul, and is like setting fire to fire”), and paeans to a deity who was made to sound blandly, anachronistically Christian. The chapter on Pythagoras began: “Pythagoras said that it is a right blessed and noble thing to serve God.” Omitted was the fact that Pythagoras was a pagan who believed in reincarnation and occult numerology. Still, at least Pythagoras was a real person. Some of the other philosophers memorialized in the Dictes, such as Zalquinus and Gac, probably never existed at all.
As it turns out, the book was shot through with fake news. Caxton did not introduce these errors; they were there all along. According to the Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, the original Egyptian anthology, on which all subsequent translations were based, was “highly influential as a source of both information and style” despite the fact that it was “almost entirely inaccurate, and the sayings themselves highly dubious.”
Because human beings are vain and prone to self-flattery, the story we often tell about the printing press is a story not of contingency but of linear, teleological progress. It goes like this: before Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type, books were precious objects, handwritten by scribes and available only in Latin. Common people, who couldn’t afford books and wouldn’t have been able to read them anyway, were left vulnerable to exploitation by powerful gatekeepers—landed elites, oligarchs of both church and state—who could use their monopoly on knowledge to repress the masses. After Gutenberg, books became widely available, setting off a cascade of innovations, including but not limited to the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the steam engine, journalism, modern literature, modern medicine, and modern democracy.
This story isn’t entirely wrong, but it leaves out a lot. For one thing, Gutenberg didn’t invent movable type—a Chinese artisan named Bi Sheng did, using clay and ash, three and a half centuries before Gutenberg was born. For another, information wants to be free, but so does misinformation. The printing press empowered such religious progressives as Erasmus and John Calvin; it also empowered hucksters, war profiteers, terrorists, and bigots.* Nor did the printing press eliminate the problem of gatekeepers. It merely shifted the problem. The old gatekeepers were princes and priests interposing themselves between the commoners and their God. The new gatekeepers were entrepreneurs like William Caxton, or anyone else who had enough money to gain access to Caxton’s technology.
From the beginning, Caxton was ambivalent about his status as a gatekeeper. He seemed uneasy even acknowledging this power, much less deciding what to do with it. In an epilogue to The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, Caxton wrote a behind-the-scenes account of how his edition of the book had come into existence. First, he hired a translator to render the French anthology into English. When the translation was done, Caxton read the manuscript and “found nothing discordant therein”—well, except for one thing. “In the dictes and sayings of Socrates,” he wrote, the translator “hath left out certain and divers conclusions touching women.” In the French version, and in all previous versions, the chapter on Socrates had included a sudden digression into petty misogyny—not a philosophical argument or a witty allegory, just a vituperative jag, apropos of nothing. (“Socrates saw a woman sick, of whom he said that the evil dwelleth within the evil. And he saw a young woman that learned to write, of whom he said that men multiplied evil upon evil.”) In the English translation, as the translator had delivered it to Caxton, the digression was gone.
Did Socrates actually utter the words in question? Like most classical-era Greeks, he probably was a misogynist—he was also, by most accounts, fine with pederasty and slavery—and yet one would assume that if Socrates did walk around dispensing non-sequitur denunciations of women, he at least found a way to be more eloquent about it. In any case, William Caxton, nearly two thousand years after Socrates’ death, had a decision to make. The translator had excised the troublesome passage, but Caxton, as the publisher, had the final say. Should he overrule his translator and restore the original text? Or should he let the censorship stand, implying that even if such insults were acceptable in ancient Athens or medieval Cairo, they were now beyond the pale?
After many sentences of ornate hand-wringing, Caxton tried to have it both ways. He decided to translate the misogynist passage into English and reproduce it in full; but instead of restoring it to its original context, in the Socrates chapter, he put it in the middle of his epilogue, as if to quarantine it from the main text.
Then, as soon as he’d announced his decision, he attempted to rationalize it. In the rest of his epilogue, he tried to imply that he wasn’t a gatekeeper after all. The choice wasn’t really his, he argued. He was merely serving his customers, who deserved to hear all perspectives and make up their own minds. Besides, anyone who was offended should blame Socrates, not Caxton; better yet, a reader who disliked the passage could “with a pen race it out, or else rend the leaf out of the book.”
About five centuries later, in the 1960s, the U.S. Department of Defense built the computer network that would evolve into the internet. At first, this technology was so unprecedented that it could only be understood by metaphor: web, page, link, node, matrix. A generation of futurists and TED Talkers emerged, explaining the vast new system to the laity in a spirit of wide-eyed techno-utopianism. They compared the World Wide Web to a superhighway, to a public square, to a marketplace of ideas, to a printing press. Anyone who was spending a lot of time on the internet surely knew that many parts of it felt more like a dingy flea market, or like a parking lot outside a bar the moment before a fight breaks out. The techno-utopians must have been aware of those parts, too, but they didn’t mention them very often.*
