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The Covid-19 Experiment has revealed that greed rules much of America. The Aspen Institute, a high-powered think tank with an endowment of $115 million and several billionaires on its Board, applied for and received a federal small business bailout loan of $8 million.[1] Workers at a Tyson meat processing plant in Arkansas earn $12 an hour to process 120 chickens per minute. They stand shoulder to shoulder cutting and deboning birds that fly by so quickly that a worker cannot pause to cover a cough and thus may be exposing others to the Covid-19 disease; with no regularly scheduled bathroom breaks, some workers wear diapers.[2] Over the last forty years, the top 1% of America got $21 trillion richer, while the bottom 50% got $900 billion poorer.[3]
In Buddhism, greed is a poison that destroys communal and spiritual life; in Christianity, greed is a moral failing and a cardinal sin that blocks the path to God; in America, greed cannot be directly addressed, since values are believed to be personal. A physicist friend of mine told me with a smirk that “there are two levels of truth, one scientific and objective, the other personal and subjective; justice falls into this latter category.” To cite the head of Tyson Foods and the top 1% as moral lepers is illegitimate and offensive to the American ear; instead, greed is seen as a structural deficiency in the economic and political system. To explore the likelihood that Congress will right the economic injustices exposed by Covid-19, we must first realize that the civic and history lessons we learned in the seventh grade were mainly stories of American exceptionalism. In the mid-1990s, politics was dramatically altered by two technological innovations — the Internet and cable TV.
We live in a post-truth society.
The mouse and the Graphical User Interface made the Internet available for the technically ignorant; Netscape, the first browser, was released on December 14, 1994. The new digital technology for everyone administered the coup de grâce to truth.
The Internet is the first medium in history, besides the agora of ancient Athens and the town meetings in New England villages, to create many-to-many communication; the phone is one-to-one and books, radio, and television are one-to-many. Clay Shirky, a prominent thinker on the social and economic effects of the Internet, points out that “every time a new consumer joins this media landscape a new producer joins as well, because the same equipment — phones, computers — let you consume and produce. It’s as if, when you bought a book, they threw in the printing press for free.”[4] The Internet encourages everyone to be a reporter, a broadcaster, and a commentator.
Smartphones, tablets, and laptops are cheap, and consequently ubiquitous. In 2016, Facebook had 1.86 billion monthly active users worldwide[5]; the corresponding numbers for Twitter were 319 million.[6]
Social media allow hundreds of millions of Americans with the click of a mouse to disseminate their opinions without the scrutiny of grammarians, fact-checkers, and editors, the guardians of print culture. Anyone, anywhere, anytime, now, can instantly post an opinion on anything. The Internet has become an ocean of opinion, one comment washing over another, quickly submerging whatever truth that tries to surface.
Spend the better part of a day reading online comments, watching CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, and listening to Alex Jones or Glenn Beck on talk radio, and you will be convinced that as a general rule strong feeling about an issue rarely indicates a deep understanding.
The online comments I read convinced me that a person in Peoria, Illinois, previously unheard, perhaps poorly educated with no real understanding of American governance or the intricacies and deficiencies of capitalism, now can judge the world. Such a person knows he has been lied to and manipulated by advertising that sells the products of Corporate America and also by politicians whose consultants are advertising agencies in disguise. Our commentator is mad as hell and believes that underneath the fake world he has been sold are hidden, deep conspiracies that truly run things.
Or perhaps our commentator from Peoria is like Jeremiah, a brilliant student of mine with an outstanding Great Books education. He taught himself digital languages, and although not a “professional,” he delivered several papers at meetings of the Boston Computer Society. In his late forties, Jeremiah developed a rare, inherited blood disordered that would have been fatal thirty years before. He retired on disability, and with nothing to do, he surfaced the Web day in and day out. Within two years, concrete experience was eclipsed by the Screen; images became his world, a world ruled by imagination where anything is possible. Jeremiah became a conspiracy theorist, proposing one lunacy after another, supremely confident in his fantasies.
Digital technology has made us inhabitants of the Image-World. Before the invention of the camera, manmade images were exceedingly rare; ordinary people saw statutes, stained-glass windows, and paintings only in church, while the privileged few owned a small number of paintings, usually commissioned by them, their ancestors, or one of their wealthy brethren. The first art museum was the Amerbach Cabinet, originally a private collection, bought by the University and city of Basel in 1661 and opened to the public in 1671. Nowadays, through streaming movies, the smartphone, and the Internet, we are saturated with manmade images. According to a 2016 Nielsen report, the total amount of time American adults spend on average in the Image-World, namely watching TV, surfing the Web on a computer, and using an app/Web on a smartphone, is eight hours and forty-seven minutes per day.[7] The average person spends more time in the Image-World than at work or in bed.
Photo and video editors are masters of using the emotions that photographs can evoke to sell political candidates as well as products. In the 2016 Coca-Cola Emoticons commercial, four wholesome-looking teenagers, two boys and two girls, are strangers in front of a Coke machine. Out of the machine, one of the boys takes a Coke with the emoticon Kiss on the label; the teenagers laugh over different bottles with the emoticons LOL, Sexy, Naughty, and Hello. The teenagers get to know each other, and at the end of the 45-second commercial, one couple walks off together with the voiceover “take the feeling, share the feeling,” a happy feeling with Coke that brings young people together.[8]
We sophisticated adults maintain that ads do not affect us, but I am not so sure. A former student of mine, a young man approaching thirty, complained to me that he could not think straight about purchasing an off-road vehicle because of a Jeep commercial aired during Super Bowl 2016.[9] He could not shake the feeling of himself as once again a young, wild dude, racing over the desert in a Renegade, heading for a bevy of beautiful girls. My former student drew a finger from the top of his forehead to the tip of his nose and said half of me knows that the Jeep ad is a crock and the other half of me wants that youthful joy again — buy the Renegade! Not once did he mention the overall quality, reliability, and resale value of the Jeep as assessed by Consumer Reports or J.D. Power.
The association of Coke and happy teenagers or Jeep Renegade with being a young, wild dude again is an emotional judgment that is ridiculous to reason; drinking Coke does not result in friends or happiness, owning a Jeep does not result in a new person; the juxtaposition of images is not cause and effect. The Image-World falls outside the realm of reason; persuasion through images is not based on logic, intellectual analysis, and assessment of data, but on feelings. This is not to deny that consummate artists can use images to present a profound truth. Charlie Chaplin in his silent movie Modern Times conveyed the dehumanizing aspects of industrialism by showing how the Tramp’s work on an assembly line reduced his life to what serves the machine.
Americans inhabit the Image-World for nearly nine hours a day, and as a result, they acquire the habit of judging people and products by feelings; likes and dislikes determine whether a song, a movie, a sitcom, a pop celebrity, or a political candidate is good or bad. In combination, capitalism and technology replaced reasoned argument by emotional judgment.
Images and words are two totally different ways of communicating. A writer can fashion factual statements and established principles into a rational argument that persuades her readers of a certain truth. Syllogisms are not in the toolkit of the photo editor, who orders images by association. The pursuit of truth through experience, experiment, and rational argument is not present on Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.
Digital commentators, like ours in Peoria, employ the only means of persuasion they know—straw-man arguments, ad hominem attacks, outrageous and unverifiable claims, and righteous anger.
Judged by past standards, citizens of a post-truth society have no concrete experience and no capacity for critical thinking. According to political theorist Hannah Arendt, the “ideal subject of totalitarian rule is . . . people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”[10] For Arendt, the main threats to political liberty were communism and fascism. Today, however, such totalitarianism seems remote; the peril on the Left is the Nanny State, whose “power is absolute, thoughtful of detail, orderly, provident and gentle,” a state that keeps its citizens in “perpetual childhood,”[11] and the danger on the Right is the Corporate State, which uses the powers of government to enrich the 1% at the expense of the citizenry and keeps brutalized workers, such as those at Tyson Foods, from view on mass media.
Whether America slides into one of these totalitarian regimes is anyone’s guess. But a post-truth society cannot rationally solve the enormous problems generated by technology and capitalism: climate change, a declining middle class, racial and economic injustice, extreme materialism, and military adventurism. If a people cannot distinguish fact from fiction, then political disaster awaits them.
America is at war with itself.
Cable television challenged the dominance of ABC, CBS, and NBC. What would become the two extreme poles of cultural and political storytelling began in 1996, MSNBC (July 15) and Fox News (October 7). Shortly thereafter, storytelling shifted from the major networks to the two cable channels, from a market that included everyone to niche markets. Fox News went after cultural and political conservatives, and MSNBC captured the other pole of the national market, the liberals.
Fox News and MSNBC market opinion, speculation, moral indignation, and outrage. For devoted followers of either channel, the Other of the hot and cold wars became an opposing group of Americans; the former unity of the United States split into two conflicting groups at loggerheads.
What keeps the avid viewers of MSNBC and Fox News glued to their TVs are the commentaries, the performances of Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, and other hosts who skillfully fabricate drama and conflict that evoke fear and anger, the two most intense negative emotions.
MSNBC, Fox News, and corresponding Websites skillfully cater to and reinforce the opinions and prejudices of political junkies, seeking a fix of anger and righteousness. Such political junkies live in a safe bubble, where not one of their deeply held ideas and beliefs will ever be challenged by argument or facts. These faithful attend a political church of their own choosing and hear sermons that dramatize their opinions and prejudices that leave them feeling superior to the yahoos in the other political church.
Two Opposed Morality Plays
Both MSNBC and Fox News present a simplified morality play, but with different heroes, villains, and lessons. In both plays, only two sides exist, Left and Right, Democratic and Republican; beyond the pale are pacifists and anarchists. The two major East coast newspapers have narrowed their political perspective to Left versus Right. The New York Times ensures diversity by lining up hardcore conservatives Bret Stevens and Ross Douthat against staunch liberals Paul Krugman and Nick Kristof. At the Washington Post only the names change, George Will versus Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin opposite Dana Milbank. The wisdom of Mark Twain will never appear in newsprint or be heard on air: “Nothing could be worse for a country than this. To lodge all power in one party and keep it there, is to insure bad government, and the sure and gradual deterioration of the public morals.[12]
A person who is pro-union and anti-abortion does not exist in the world of MSNBC or Fox News. One of my neighbors immigrated illegally from Mexico seven years ago, and through hard work now owns a successful restaurant; as a result, he opposes welfare and the bureaucratic rules of local and federal government. Despite his immigrant background, he could never appear on MSNBC, since he opposes the Nanny State, nor could he be on Fox News, because he once was an undocumented worker.
In the two morality plays, conflict must be permanent, for if the Left and Right reached an accord on fundamental political and cultural issues the game would be over, viewers would disappear, advertising money would dry up, and MSNBC and Fox News would be history.
Both morality plays focus on personalities, such as the character strengths and flaws of Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, rather than on such big issues that the Democratic and Republican parties agree on: deregulation of the financial industry, the burgeoning budget deficit, the militarization of police, deindustrialization, and the endless wars in the Middle East.
Unlike Medieval morality plays that good Christians never tried of seeing, the modern morality plays of MSNBC and Fox News must increase the level of anger to keep their viewers returning; thus, incompetent bureaucrats and corrupt politicians morphed into authoritarians, demagogues, and dictators. The most scornful terms for opponents became “Nazi” and “fascist.” Roger Ailes, when Chairman and CEO of Fox News, declared that NPR executives “are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don’t want any other point of view.”[13] Keith Olbermann, as the host of his popular MSNBC program, denounced President George W. Bush as a fascist: “If you believe in the seamless mutuality of government and big business, come out and say it. There is a dictionary definition, one word that describes that toxic blend. You‘re a fascist—get them to print you a T-shirt with ‘fascist’ on it.”[14] MSNBC and Fox News appear to follow Godwin’s Law, the Internet adage asserting that “as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”[15]
The morality play of MSNBC and the Left focuses on an imagined future where every individual is free to choose any lifestyle he or she desires unhindered by social pressure and law. Progressives claim that history is on their side: Kings, princes, and nobles no longer exist; oligarchs and patriarchs are being eliminated; the few remaining social fetters of Protestantism will disappear. “At the heart of freedom is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of life.”[16] To ensure freedom for all, the LGBTQ community must be protected by law, because the Right hopes to marginalize them again. Chronic illness, ignorance, and poverty preclude freedom; thus, every American has a right to health care, education, and employment. A woman owns her body and thus has an inherent right to abortion services. The founding principle of American is equality, now subverted by wealthy individuals and Corporate America. To restore the promise of America, the unjust influence of the economic elite must be countered by a more progressive tax system; otherwise, America is lost.
The morality play of Fox News and the Right harks back to a golden era, a past sometimes imaged, where America embodied the traditional values of Protestantism, essentially middle-class life of the 1950s. Decent people, the majority then, adhered to family values. The men worked hard, prospered, and looked after their families; the women willingly sacrificed career ambitions for their children and their husbands’ careers. With the ascendency of liberal values, indecency, perversion, and moral corruption became normal; psychological and social disorders took over the Left. Scornful of normal, decent people, the Left is intent upon destroying tradition. All that the decent, normal people want is to reclaim America. The elites on the West and East coasts have isolated themselves in gated compounds and do not know what is really going on in the hinterland or with the declining middle class. To save the world, the elites would force a vegan diet on everyone and ignore that the good-paying jobs were shipped overseas, followed by a marked increase in midlife mortality of white non-Hispanic Americans, the result of “deaths of despair” caused by drug addiction, alcoholism, and suicide in a declining middle class.[17] Abortion, a crime greater than slavery or the Holocaust, must once again be prohibited by law; over 61 million medically induced abortions have been performed since Roe v. Wade. America is exceedingly close to losing its founding principles. Freedom is to choose the good, not the license to do whatever one wants.
These two morality plays are irreconcilable; the devoted members of each play are bound together by unshakeable core beliefs and a collective hatred of the Other. The storytelling after the collapse of the Evil Empire produced internecine warfare that portends a downward arc for America.
The Covid-19 virus, the invisible enemy, did not unite America as the terrorist attack of 9/11 did. The response to the viral pandemic by federal and state governments split the country further apart. Rightists rebel against the mandate to wear a mask in public, which they see as a further erosion of individual rights by the Nanny State. Leftists frightened by expert assessment of the dangers of the Covid-19 virus are afraid to go outside of their houses, claiming community consciousness.
Rightists desire to protect the American way of life founded on personal freedom and free markets. Leftists embrace “safetyism,” the maximal rules of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention to protect citizens from the dangers of using ladders, hairdryers, and power tools and now the new threat to public safety, the Covid-19 virus.
Now seen through the lens of Right and Left, science is politicized. Fox News and MSNBC parade their scientists to support or attack that Covid-19 is merely a flu, preventable by taking hydroxychloroquine, and only the elderly are vulnerable to the disease. Their viewers surf the Web to find physicians, immunologists, and virologists to support their opinions about the origin of Covid-19, herd immunity, and the effectiveness of social distancing. For some, the Chinese manufactured Covid-19 to bring the West to its knees; for others, Bill Gates is the mastermind to further enrich himself by taking over the world’s healthcare and that “test and trace” is a scheme of Google and Facebook for permanent surveillance of U.S. citizens; and yet others hold that such conspiracy theories are nonsense and that the ineptitude of President Trump and his administration is the principal cause of the Covid-19 disease becoming a pandemic.
Rightists believe that the Covid-19 virus death count is inflated; Leftists hold that the real numbers of Covid-19 deaths are under-reported. Such strong opinions do not rely upon an understanding of statistics or the rational assessment of how such data is gathered. In the world of alternate facts, opinions rule, despite the reality of death.
The Covid-19 Experiment increased the anger and potential political violence in America. Protestors of social distancing in Michigan forced their way into the state legislature. Wearing MAGA caps, screaming and yelling, they brandished handguns and automatic rifles.
The hope that most liberals and a few conservatives have that the injustices of America can be righted through a peaceful revolution like the one began by Lech Wałęsa with Solidarity or like the Velvet Revolution overseen by Václav Havel is unrealistic. America is a violent society with much domestic violence and child abuse, with unsafe neighborhoods where women fear to go out alone at night; bankers have been known to rob a client with a fountain pen and employers to fire a worker because of personal dislike. For a more likely source of revolution in this country, see the illustration.
Rightists disregard the severity of Covid-19 disease and clamor to fully open the economy immediately, because of the incalculable damage already done to personal freedom and free enterprise. Leftists ignore that the Covid-19 Experiment has to be assessed and that maybe the demographics of the viral disease — one-third of all U.S. coronavirus deaths were nursing home residents or workers — required merely keeping the vulnerable safe, not the entire population.
No matter how the Covid-19 Experiment is assessed, Congress has dealt with the current fifteen percent unemployment and the likelihood that many small and midsize businesses will close permanently in the only way possible given the unbridgeable divide between Right and Left. Trillions of dollars were spent in the hope that enough money thrown at enough people would halt the free fall of the economy, while underlying economic and racial injustices stayed hidden and will remain hidden unless the country falls into an economic depression.
The featured image by cherrybeans is courtesy of Getty Images via iStock.
Endnotes
[1] Jonathan O’Connell, “Aspen Institute Think Tank Receives $8 Million Federal Small-Business Loan,” Washington Post, May 13, 2020.
[2] Magaly Licolli, “As Tyson Claims the Food Supply Is Breaking, Its Workers Continue to Suffer,” Civil Eats, April 30, 2020.
[3] Paul Constant, “Coronavirus Didn’t Bring the Economy Down — 40 Years of Greed and Corporate Malfeasance Did,” Business Insider, April 10, 2020.
[4] Clay Shirky, “How Social Media Can Make History,” Ted Talk, 2009, https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_history.
[5] Statista, “Number of monthly active Facebook users worldwide as of 4th quarter 2016 (in millions),” https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/.
[6] Statista, “Number of monthly active international Twitter users from 2nd quarter 2010 to 4th quarter 2016 (in millions),” https://www.statista.com/statistics/274565/monthly-active-international-twitter-users/.
[7] The Nielson Total Audience Report, Q1, 2016. Available file:///C:/Users/George/OneDrive/Word%20New/Submissions%202016/Documents/total-audience-report-q1-2016.pdf.
[8] Coca-Cola Emoticons, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRRm1Kpx5zQ.
[9] The Official 2016 Jeep Super Bowl Commercial is no longer available on the Internet.
[10] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1958), p. 474.
[11] Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Doubleday, 1955 [1856]), p. 692.
[12] Mark Twain, Autobiography, Vol. 1 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010), p. 315. Italics in the original.
[13] Howard Kurtz “Fox News Chief Roger Ailes Blasts National Public Radio Brass as ‘Nazis’,” https://www.thedailybeast.com/fox-news-chief-roger-ailes-blasts-national-public-radio-brass-as-nazis.
[14] Keith Olbermann, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, February 14, 2008, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/23184008/ns/msnbc-countdown_with_keith_olbermann/t/countdown-keith-olbermann-feb/.
[15] Godwin’s Law, Wikipedia.
[16] Anthony M. Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor, and David Hackett Souter, “Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania versus Casey” in Constitutional Law: 1995 Supplement, ed. Geoffrey R. Stone, et al. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), p. 955. Available http://supreme.justia.com/us/505/833/case.html.
[17] Anne Case and Angus Deaton, “Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century,” https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/casetextsp17bpea.pdf.