American Unreality

[Sheilbh]

Some posters made comments on "wokeness" recently that made me think of some of the takes in this John Gray review in the New Statesman - thought they might find it interesting. It's certainly provocative

American unreality

In breaking the link between politics and objective truth, the United States seeks to fashion a new world – but it is one built on shifting sands.
By John Gray

"The unmasking of the bourgeois belief in objective reality has been so fully accomplished in America that any meaningful struggle against reality has become absurd." Anyone reading this might think it a criticism of America. The lack of a sense of reality is a dangerous weakness in any country. Before the revolutions of 1917, Tsarist Russia was ruled by a class oblivious to existential threats within its own society. An atmosphere of unreality surrounded the rise of Nazism in Germany – a deadly threat that Britain and other countries failed to perceive until it was almost too late.

For the Portuguese former diplomat Bruno Maçães, however, the decoupling of American culture from the objective world is a portent of great things to come. Finally shedding its European inheritance, America is creating a truly new world, "a new, indigenous American society, separate from modern Western civilisation, rooted in new feelings and thoughts". The result, Maçães suggests, is that American politics has become a reality show. The country of Roosevelt and Eisenhower was one in which, however lofty the aspiration, there  was always a sense that reality could prove refractory. The new America is built on the premise that the world can be transformed by reimagining it. Liberals and wokeists, conservatives and Trumpists are at one in treating media confabulations as more real than any facts that may lie beyond them.

Maçães welcomes this situation, since it shows that American history has finally begun. As he puts it at the end of this refreshingly bold and deeply thought-stirring book, "For America the age of nation-building is over. The age of world-building has begun."

The truth is America cannot help thinking of itself as a world apart. At an academic meeting in the US years ago, I smiled when a speaker declared that the cause of America's declining power and influence was its deplorable system of campaign financing. As heads nodded sagely around the table, no one seemed to have considered the possibility that, say, the rise of China might have something to do with events originating in China.

Many influential American thinkers are similarly introverted. Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) became celebrated for its assertion that in the future global conflict would be between civilisations not ideologies. Yet the book was only superficially concerned with world order. The civilisations between which conflict would occur were never clearly enumerated, and on closer inspection turned out to be indistinguishable from American minorities. For example, Huntington referred to "African civilisation". But surely the indigenous peoples of that continent created many civilisations. Plainly, Huntington was not talking about civilisations at all. His real subject was American multiculturalism.

Not discussed by Maçães, Francis Fukuyama's claim that history ends with "democratic capitalism" was a flattering résumé of American society as it appeared to the country's elites at the end of the Eighties. There was no reason, even then, to suppose that Soviet communism would be replaced by liberal democracy. Given Russia's almost unbroken history of authoritarian and totalitarian rule, any such development was inherently unlikely. It was not Russian history that informed Fukuyama's storyline, but a highly idealised reading of American history projected throughout the world.

American thought has always tended to a certain solipsism, a trait that has become more prominent in recent times. If Fukuyama and his neoconservative allies believed the world was yearning to be remade on an imaginary American model, the woke movement believes "whiteness" accounts for all the evils of modern societies. America's record of slavery and racism is all too real. Even so, passing over in silence the repression and enslavement of peoples outside the West – Tibetans, Uighurs and now Mongols in China, for example – because they cannot be condemned as crimes of white supremacy reveals a wilfully parochial and self-absorbed outlook.

Wokery is the successor ideology of neo-conservatism, a singularly American world-view. That may be why it has become a powerful force only in countries (such as Britain) heavily exposed to American culture wars. In much of the world – Asian and Islamic societies and large parts of Europe, for example – the woke movement is marginal, and its American prototype viewed with bemused indifference or contempt.

While Maçães welcomes the morphing of American politics into a never-ending reality show, he is fully aware of the perils that come with basing foreign policy on virtual worlds. He cites Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff in the George W Bush administration, as telling a journalist in the summer of 2002: "We are an empire now and when we act, we create our own reality." Maçães comments:
    Many of us will shudder thinking how the most powerful country on Earth could have been organised around the deliberate denial of objective reality and acted accordingly in its foreign relations, where every issue raises powerful passions and deadly risks, where prudence and moderation have a particular urgency.

As he goes on to point out, the invasion of Iraq provided some hard lessons on the limits of American world-building. He writes:
    The point of the enterprise was to act decisively against an old foe and bring him down. What might happen after that was never considered. The connections linking the invasion to the surrounding context, the parallel plot lines, the vast network of unpredictable consequences the war would inevitably bring about, or the new possibilities it would open up – all these elements were ritually ignored.         

****

Reflected in varying degrees throughout the west, America's immersion  in self-invented worlds contrasts starkly with Russian practice. Like the US, Russia conceals awkward facts behind a media-created veil. Unlike those in the US, Russia's ruling elites know this virtual world is deceptive. The point is not to create a new reality but to obscure what is actually happening. When Vladimir Putin asserted that Russian forces had not entered Ukraine, no one apart from a handful of anti-western ultra-leftists believed him. When the Kremlin denies Russian pilots are targeting schools and hospitals in Syria, there is well-founded disbelief. When officials deny that the Russian state had any hand in the 2018 Novichok attack in Salisbury and the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, hardly anyone believes this is true. Nonetheless, the continuous repetition of these falsehoods has succeeded in clouding perception of the behaviour of Putin's regime.

There can be no doubt that Maçães is on to something important when he claims American politics has decoupled from objective reality. The proposition that human beings create fictional worlds is not new. The German philosopher Hans Vaihinger – deploying some of Nietzsche's ideas on the conscious cultivation of illusions – argued in The Philosophy of "As If": a system of the theoretical, religious and practical fictions of mankind (1911) that ideas known to be defective or false are indispensable in human life. Before Vaihinger, a theory of the social role of fictions had been developed in the early 19th century by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), the English founder of utilitarianism. The idea of fictional worlds has been around for much longer than the technologies that now daily create them.

What these early theories could not foresee is the role of mass media. This was the theme of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), in which he coined the expression "the medium is the message". In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), the neo-Marxian Guy Debord argued that capitalism had come to depend on an all-pervading image of society that erases the past and any alternative future. The cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard (cited critically by Maçães) suggested in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991) that reality had been overtaken and replaced by what he called "hyper-reality".

One of the problems of Maçães's account is that it does not clearly distinguish between different ways in which human consciousness can be detached from the real world. For those who construct it, a fiction is not an illusion but a tool for shaping the perceptions of others. A virtual world is not a fantasy, which may be personal and private, but an alternate reality that is necessarily collective. Lying behind these conceptual slippages are deeper ambiguities. Are virtual worlds deliberately manufactured, or do they emerge – like myths in past times – from the depths of a common form of life? Might not a society produce radically antagonistic virtual worlds? American society is polarised between a view in which the country is a flawed but basically benign experiment and a vision in which it has been irredeemably racist from its foundation. Will one of these virtual worlds triumph in the up-coming presidential election? Or will the division in America persist regardless of who wins?

Under what conditions do virtual worlds disintegrate? Some – such as the one Karl Rove inhabited – are self-destroying and essentially ephemeral. Others – such as the Trumpian view that the virulence of coronavirus has been nefariously exaggerated – may suffer a shock from reality, only to subsequently grow stronger in the minds of tens of millions of conspiracy theorists.

Above all, is there a realm of discoverable fact behind these virtual realities, or are we left with divergent world-views that cannot be rationally assessed? Maçães wavers on all these questions. Throughout the book, he oscillates between a buoyant relativism and a peculiarly European scepticism – detached, ironic, and darkly playful – about America's future.

****

Maçães recognises that the US is not the only country reinventing itself. Much of the world no longer aims to emulate any liberal model of society or government. Like many, however, he conflates a rejection of liberalism with rejection of the West. Russia has repudiated both, and for that reason is most feared by western liberals. For the Bolsheviks Soviet communism was an avowedly westernising project, a combination of French Jacobinism with American Taylorism – the ideology of "scientific labour management" which Lenin admired and Trotsky tried to implement. Nothing could be further from the future Western liberals imagined for post-communist Russia than Putin's blend of autocracy, anarchy and Orthodoxy. Despite being much more repressive and vastly more costly in human lives, the former Soviet Union is far less alien.

A similar attitude can be discerned towards Xi Jinping's China. Regime-friendly Chinese intellectuals are fond of telling western visitors that China is not a nation state but a "civilisation state", and there has been a shift towards touting the merits of Confucian governance. Yet in many ways Xi's regime is copying the homogenising national states constructed in Europe after the French Revolution. Like them, it aims to impose a monoculture where different ways of life existed before. In Revolutionary France, which under the ancien régime contained many languages and peoples, this was achieved through military conscription and a national education system. Another, more violent process of nation-building by ethnic cleansing occurred in central and eastern Europe after the collapse of the Hapsburg empire.

Following these precedents, Xi is using the state machine to fabricate an immemorial Chinese nation and obliterate minority cultures. As in its pursuit of maximal economic growth, China is building a future imported from the Western past.

This may be why one can detect a sneaking admiration for Xi's tyranny among Western progressives. Rightly, they perceive that he is promoting an Enlightenment project; although not the liberal project of John Locke or John Stuart Mill, or the communist utopia of Marx, to be sure. Xi's dictatorship is more like the enlightened despotism of the early Bentham, who aimed to reconstruct society on the model of a Panopticon – an ideal prison designed to enable total surveillance of the inmates. How curious if, as the 21st century staggers on, a hyper- authoritarian China emerges as the only major state still governed by an Enlightenment faith in progress.

Much of the last quarter of the book concerns geopolitics. Yet Maçães says little of how this connects with his overall argument. How does the EU's hallucinatory self-image as a developing super-state square with the fact that Germany – its leading power – has a growing dependency on Russia for a crucial part of its energy supply? More importantly, Maçães devotes little space to the impact on politics of the increasingly unstable biosphere. At a time of rapidly accelerating climate change and pandemic, it is a telling omission. Most of his analysis focuses on shifts in human consciousness, but it is changes in the material world that will be decisive in shaping the next stage in history.

It may be true that America is drifting away from what used to be called Western civilisation. That does not mean it can fashion a new world disconnected from the past. In America as in other countries, history does not begin, any more than it ever ends.

History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America
Bruno Maçães
Hurst, 208pp, £16.99

[DGuller]

It looks more like world burning than world building to me. 

[The Brain]

A focus on fantasy isn't very new, is it? In the olden days you could be executed in Sweden for denying official fiction regarding fundamental facts about the universe.

[grumbler]

Sermons disguised as book reviews seldom work either as sermons or book reviews.  I cannot tell in this essay when the author is switching from talking about the America that Maçães believes exists and the one Gray himself believes exists.

Both the book and review are also oddly focused on obsolete books written 30 years or more ago.  Gray's belief that Xi's China is following Enlightenment ideals (and is the only nation doing so) also says a lot more about Gray's weird worldview (and understanding of the Enlightenment) than about China.

[Monoriu]

I think ignoring reality can never be a good thing. 

[Eddie Teach]

I think ignoring reality can never be a good thing.

Neither is disregarding people's power to change reality.

[Sheilbh]

Both the book and review are also oddly focused on obsolete books written 30 years or more ago.  Gray's belief that Xi's China is following Enlightenment ideals (and is the only nation doing so) also says a lot more about Gray's weird worldview (and understanding of the Enlightenment) than about China.

Surely it'd be weird if a Communist state wasn't in some way an Enlightenment project?

[grumbler]

Both the book and review are also oddly focused on obsolete books written 30 years or more ago.  Gray's belief that Xi's China is following Enlightenment ideals (and is the only nation doing so) also says a lot more about Gray's weird worldview (and understanding of the Enlightenment) than about China.

Surely it'd be weird if a Communist state wasn't in some way an Enlightenment project?

So North Korea is the only Enlightenment State?

The Chinese Occupation Government is Communist in the same way NK is a People's Republic.

[Syt]

I wouldn't consider the Khmer Rouge as beacons of enlightenment, either.

[Sheilbh]

So North Korea is the only Enlightenment State?

No.

The Chinese Occupation Government is Communist in the same way NK is a People's Republic.

Yeah and that's my bad. As Gray says Xi's Enlightenment vision is the utilitarian panopticon, which rewards social virtues (and punishes social vices). There's a really good LRB piece - I think I posted it a while ago in the China thread, can't find it now - on how scary and complete that vision is.

I wouldn't consider the Khmer Rouge as beacons of enlightenment, either.

No. But there's a reason Year Zero echoes Year One.

[grumbler]

Yeah and that's my bad. As Gray says Xi's Enlightenment vision is the utilitarian panopticon, which rewards social virtues (and punishes social vices). There's a really good LRB piece - I think I posted it a while ago in the China thread, can't find it now - on how scary and complete that vision is.

An essential element of Bentham's panopticon was that the jailor was as exposed to public scrutiny as the prisoners were to the jailor.  That does not describe the PRC.  Bentham would vomit at the thought that people were so misusing his idea.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

[The Minsky Moment]

Jeremy Bentham's Vomit would be a decent name for a punk band.

[Eddie Teach]

I prefer Love Jihad.

[Sheilbh]

Macaes on the events in Congress:

The Roleplaying Coup
Yesterday's astonishing events are further proof that we live in an age that is collapsing the distinction between fantasy and reality.
Bruno Maçães

What happened on Capitol Hill on Wednesday was uniquely bizarre and unwonted, but perhaps not in the way it looked at first. It was not a coup, if by a coup one means the illegal and violent seizure of power. Illegal and violent the day most certainly was, but there was no question of seizing power by sending a cosplay gallery of motley characters to the Senate chamber. Even as a pretext for military action from Trump, the event was hardly suitable. A coup is a different kind of political act altogether. Turn to Turkey in 2016 for an example.

I would not object to calling it a "coup," though, and that takes me to what I find most interesting about the events. We cannot interpret them within the framework of the American political tradition. They are significant because they signal a more radical shift. While a literal coup would have a precise meaning within that tradition, what happened Wednesday leaves us speechless. Look at the most-shared photos from inside the Capitol.

There is the one where a figure wearing a horned Viking helmet poses on the Senate dais while his companions snap photos. One lies pensively on the floor, seemingly on the phone. (The horned Viking turned out to be Jake Angeli, a professional actor.) In another, a gleeful insurrectionist sports a pom-pom woolen hat as he carries off a podium bearing the seal of the Speaker of the House. I was also struck by the image of the mob outside wearing a clothing line emblazoned with "Civil War, January 6, 2021," referring to the very production in which they were now playing a role. By the end of the evening, as the Senate reconvened in somber tones, the insurrectionists were spotted having cocktails in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt. Meantime, and as events on Capitol Hill developed, the Dow rallied 400 points to close at an all-time high. Not bad for a coup.

This was not theater, because a play is a safe and riskless activity, but it was roleplaying, which can be decidedly more dangerous for the participants—five people have died in these events. The "coup" ended, appropriately, when the main plotter was banned temporarily from social media. It was not a coup in the real world, but it was experienced as one by those taking part. More interestingly, those shocked by the events in the Senate were no less captured by the fantasy and might still believe that a real coup was attempted and defeated. In Washington, you can apparently now have the full "coup" experience in just a few hours. The action takes place in a kind of virtual reality, where terrible accidents can and do happen, but more tragic consequences to the political regime and the viewers at home are somehow prevented.

Does this mean that the Capitol extravaganza was trivial or unimportant? Not at all. In some strange way it was more significant than a real coup. A coup would at least make sense, while the almost complete replacement of serious politics by subterranean fantasy and roleplaying induces a sense of vertigo. Our traditional way of relating to the world has increasingly collapsed. Nothing seems real, and doubts persist about what to think or say in the face of this new situation. In the Senate debate that preceded the chaos, Ted Cruz was heard shouting to his colleagues: "Be bold. Astonish the viewers." Prophetic words. We were astonished.

Think of Trump not as an autocratic ruler, a politician dealing in hard facts, but as someone who lives so enmeshed in his own dream life that he now expects events in the real world to follow automatically from those fantasies. Trump always seemed to me to represent the Degree Zero of fantasy: the irritability with the frustrations and inconvenience of real life, the desire for a life free of the constraints of political correctness or even good manners. What was missing was the genuinely creative act, the complex relations of a fictional world. Regrettably, there seems to be only one tested way to deal with these psychoanalytical afflictions: to force the fantasy to crash against reality, and that is what happened on Wednesday.

In his recent interview with The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, Barack Obama initially tries to see Trump as an authority figure—even a proto-fascist—only to confess his puzzlement: "I think about the classic male hero in American culture when you and I were growing up: the John Waynes, the Gary Coopers, the Jimmy Stewarts, the Clint Eastwoods, for that matter." But is that Trump? No, rather the opposite. He is much closer to the characters of Dreampolitik so vividly captured by Joan Didion: the bikers who no longer regard the small irritations of life as something to be tolerated, the aspiring actresses who regard the future as somehow managed by a Hollywood divinity with its benevolent providence. "Anything less than instant service in a restaurant constitutes intolerable provocation, or hassling: tear the place apart, leave the owner for dead, gangbang the waitress. Rev up the Harleys and ride." Later in the interview, Obama comes closer to the truth, though predictably he recoils from accepting it. Trump is not a figure of authority but a figure of freedom—freedom understood as the realization of every desire, no matter how extreme, in the here and now—and therefore someone representing powerful and growing forces in contemporary American society.

In this vision, the world exists to provide a stage for our fantasies. This is harem politics on the grandest scale. Unseemly and, in its current form, most likely unsustainable. What strikes is how much it relies on destruction as a force. There was only one alternative to Trump and that was to push Trumpism to the breaking point. And yet, all throughout the Trump years, the system worked. I think it worked even better than people assume, because the American system of government is not meant to be a placid Northern European social democracy. It is meant to create considerable room for the enactment of political fantasies, while preventing them from becoming too real. Every time Trump pushed things in the direction of reality—in the direction of imposing his stories on everyone else as real—the system pushed back, not so much by moving toward some more-accepted version of the world but by insisting that Trump and his followers remain mostly within the domain of fiction and playacting, that is, in the world of Dreampolitik. The system worked, but the problem is it now works to prevent only catastrophic outcomes, and it works through cycles of boom and bust.

Would it be better to replace fantasy with a proper sense of the real world? Ideally, yes, perhaps, but we're now seemingly past that. The real world is almost a figment. We live surrounded by the Internet—we live inside it—and the institutionalized truth of the past has lost its hold. The hierarchical society, religion, the old elites, the natural limits of technology: all the monuments of the past are struggling to survive in the new America. So we will have to be somewhat more sophisticated about these matters. It's not that all the conspiracies and prophecies multiplying on both the Right and the Left should be taken seriously, but that it has become increasingly difficult to say what should—the real world? Perhaps the Supreme Court could tell us where to find it. At this point, the best one can hope for are better fantasies, better attempts at world-making than our current political dramas. Where have you gone, Ronald Reagan? A lonely nation . . . and so on.

It looks like a beginning. A disastrous one, in many respects, but does anyone believe the demons unleashed in the past few years can be put back in their box and the lid firmly shut? James Madison argued in The Federalist that the way to break the violence of faction is to create a greater variety of interests and parties, so that a majority is not allowed to arise. The lesson remains valuable today, when the violence of fiction can be broken by multiplying its sources and, paradoxically, giving it freer rein — as Madison wanted to give faction a free rein, and was deemed mad for saying it. But a new James Madison and a new Alexander Hamilton would have their work cut out for them today because the institutional framework of the virtual society—a political theory of virtualism—still waits to be developed. This will require deep reforms in how the Internet, technology, and the media landscape are organized. We have only begun.

Bruno Maçães is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the author of History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America.

Edit: I keep thinking about the cosplaying elements and I don't think that makes it less serious. If anything I think the fact that people are cosplaying their own fantasies is to an extent driving extremism. An election genuinely being stolen; a country on the brink; the religious on the verge of a new age of persecution and martyrdom - these create heroic fantasies of the insurrectionist, the martyr etc which people are then playing out genuinely on the world. There is also something of this on the left. But it's like the individual fantasy/cosplay comes first and the politics follows.

[The Minsky Moment]

There were similar elements of wish-fulfillment and role playing in the French Revolution and with the Muscadin dandies of Thermador.  One reason these elements seem so prominent in last week's attack and that the Trumpist coup seems so unreal is that the effort was leaderless, shambolic, inchoate in organization and purpose.  If we hypothesize a counterfactual of the same march but led by a critical mass of a Leninist vanguard element it could have turned out quite differently, particularly if the mob had moved quickly and accurately enough to seize some legislators or get its hands on Pence.  The US was in one sense unlucky in that the defenders of the Capitol were so unprepared for what happened, but lucky in the sense that the invading mob was equally surprised at their own unexpected success and at a loss of what to do once their initial objective was obtained.  But emphasizing the fantasy aspects risks trivializing a reality that there is a hard ideological backing here which is driving the action, albeit incoherent in expression, one that is violent, racist, and anti-democratic at the core an that has deep roots in bowels of American history and politics.