Hi Ted,
I'd suggest that the lack of education in media literacy and critical
literacy are the key things which have rendered the UK population
vulnerable to the sorts of rhetoric-based exploits that you identify.
I recall in the 1980s and 1990s, educationalists persistently identified
the need for these literacies, to enable citizens to navigate the
electronic media environment. Persistently, these calls for education
were marginalised, ignored, or transformed into "online safety"
training. The component of critical analysis was entirely dumped.
To understand just how bizarre the political situation is in the UK,
it's worth reflecting on who is a member of the Conservative Party,
which has ruled for the majority of the last century. Apologies in
advance for the excessive emphasis:
THE AVERAGE AGE OF A MEMBER OF THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY IS NOW MORE THAN
70 YEARS OLD.
Yes, you read that right. Average. 70.
To make matters even more bizarre, the Conservative Party now benefits
more from bequests than it does from membership fees.
The nation is literally being ruled by the Party of the Dead.
Is it any wonder that it is reactionary?
Best Regards,
James
=====
On 16/10/2018 17:24, tbyfield wrote:
On 16 Oct 2018, at 9:54, James Wallbank wrote:
Well, quite clearly I'm beginning to sound like a member of the
tinfoil hat brigade - but seriously, the level of democratic failure
and delusional thinking at the highest levels of governance are hard
to explain in other ways.
I agree with your analysis in spirit, but all of those things were
true when the UK joined the EU — so it doesn't do do much to explain
why this and why now?
The nihilistic turn that many established nations are taking is
maddening because it's hard to tell whether the driving forces are
structural or, instead, if we're seeing the resurgence of the 'great
man' model of history (yes, peanut gallery, I know this lot isn't very
'great'). In theory, those two ways of thinking about society are
radically different; in practice, they seem to be converging. A
handful of people who fancy themselves great have fumbled and
maneuvered their way into positions, political and discursive, that
allow them to seize — or maybe 'surf' — structural forces. The fact
that they're jabbering, sophistical narcissists is all the more
frustrating, because anyone with a shred of optimism left would think
those personal qualities would make it impossible to rise to such
power. And yet we also know that those personal qualities are ideally
suited to key aspects of how media works now, again ranging from the
structural (for example, the temporal model of 24/7 constant-coverage
media machines) to the personal (Rupert Murdoch and his ilk). So what
we're seeing isn't just a collapse of the national regimes, we're also
seeing the collapse of an epistemic regime that was tied to the heyday
of — and depended on — those national regimes to establish facts.
People like to cite that chestnut about everyone gets their own
opinion but not their own facts, but *in fact* what we're seeing is a
rising world in which people *do* get to have their own facts — for a
while. The first question is for how long, and second is what comes next?
In the US the concern is that the GOP under Trump is assembling a
one-party state at an alarming rate. Much of the basic work had
already been done before Trump came along, and his forces are now
mainly connecting the dots. The result may well be a governmental
regime that's adept at manufacturing its own facts on a just-in-time
basis — basically shoving crazy short-term noise into media pipelines
and networks in order to dominate both *how* things are 'framed'
(bleh) and *what* is framed — 'content' (even more bleh). In practice,
this relies heavily on subverting the segments of the government whose
strength has been that they moved *slowly*: the technocratic and
procedural layers of the executive branch, fact-finding mechanisms of
the legislative branch, and the analytical authority of the judicial
branch. Given the right conjunction — autocratic leaders, solipsistic
ruling parties, minority parties in thrall to institutionalism and
good manners, and judiciaries systematically subverted over decades —
this has been surprisingly to accomplish within individual countries.
But this turn involves several (maybe many) countries, which is where
it gets really messy. It's hardly worth mentioning the importance of
the community of nations to restrain individual countries' excesses,
but what happens when these nihilists start to cooperate? We're seeing
that all over the place: cabals meeting here, theaters of the absurd
there, shadowy influence networks playing next-level jurisdictional
games with data, employees, processing. Again, that's not new: for
example, the homogenization of politicians and campaigns was clear in
the '80s, and the rise of multinational news systems like News Corp
heavily shaped the politics of the '90s. But we're only beginning to
see how deeply political media consulting has been internationalized,
and there's a growing sense of defeat that any existing institutions
will be able to establish the facts, let alone determine whether they
were criminal, let alone prosecute and the people, organizations, and
networks involved.
And that's where your analysis, though largely accurate, becomes
dangerous. It may help us to understand some of the structural
conditions driving nihilistic projects like Brexit, but because it
doesn't address my initial questions — why this? and why now? — it
doesn't do what's needed: help to lay a basis for new frameworks,
institutions, and procedures that are capable of restraining this
turn. The dilemma that minority parties face is that they're largely
limited to assuring people that the institutions can be renewed
through normal civil processes and that we can return to some
semblance of sanity. What they can't do is frankly acknowledge the
possibility that these institutions are 'broken' or hopelessly
inadequate to the challenges. Again, this isn't especially new: we've
seen it in proxy wars, flags of convenience, the rise of multinational
capital that juggles entire nations, the subversion of the very idea
of a nation into offshore tax-havens, extraordinary rendition, and so
on. And yet I think we're facing a fundamental break on a new order —
of the kind that in the past required international war-crimes
tribunals, truth and reconciliation, or lustration. But those
processes rely above all on facts, which in many ways have become just
another commodity. And what they rely on, second to that, is some sort
of fiduciary entity: persons, organizations, corporation to attest or
to prosecute. A new generation of jurisprudence will need to squarely
address the problem of the network. There are precedents (for example,
in how organized crime has been prosecuted), but they're too scattered
and particular for the problem at hand.
Again and again, most of this isn't new. In my recent research I've
been gobsmacked to find how little scholarly attention has been paid
to the history of public-opinion polling, which — of course – is the
basis of the kinds of analytics used so effectively to manipulate
public opinion. Most of the 'work' has been done by people in business
schools, who are committed to anything but epistemic stability
grounded in historical fact — which is why they love 'case studies,' a
genre that's the bastard child of Vasari's art-hagiography and
quantitative trivia. There are a handful of books on the subject —
notably done by women, like Sarah Igo's _Averaged American_ and Liza
Featherstone's _Divining Desire_ — but before that most of the work
was tangential and squirreled away in the (wait for it...) 'great man'
mold of ~'60s/'70s business-political biography. What's missing is the
basic insight that opinion-polling *turned opinions into empirical
facts*: the fact that someone held an opinion became a fact as
effective — maybe more so — than natural facts. The impact of that
turn can't be overstated — and what we're facing now is its
consequence: the ability to mass manufacture 'facts' on a scale
capable of subverting major nations. Yes, yes, not new, Chomsky etc,
etc — but general systemic criticisms like his aren't enough. Ian
Hacking is more useful, IMO.
But to return to your point, it may just be that your fourth item...
(4) Britain is notable in being the only European nation to have
failed to rid itself of hereditary rulers. Of the 250 or so Dukes in
Britain (that's the highest level of the aristocracy outside royalty)
around 180 of them still own the land that their ancestors owned just
after the Norman Conquest. That represents nearly 1000 years of
occupation. They will stop at NOTHING to retain their hidden power.
...may turn out to be the UK's salvation. If (when IMO) they recognize
just how badly Brexit has damaged their interests, they may decide to
do something about it. Despite its catastrophic stratification, the US
has no such chthonic power. Normally I add 'Yet.' to a ending like
that, but not this time, because I don't think that's how it'll end.
Cheers,
Ted
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