James McGrath writes about the need to build solidarity beyond stereotypes and misinformation, “One day at a time. One conversation at a time.” And thus I come back to an argument I’ve been having with Sting for more than 30 years now.
It’s maybe more of a conversation than an argument, as I’ve been going back and forth on whether or not I agree with his thesis. And, of course, it’s an entirely one-sided conversation, given that I don’t actually, like, hang out with Sting.
But there’s a line in a song of his that has me thinking, and has had me thinking, ever since that song came out back in the early ’90s. It’s from The Soul Cages, a melancholy 1991 concept album full of songs dealing with the death of his father a few years earlier. The biggest hit was “All This Time,” which tells the story of a young boy watching two priests arrive to administer last rites to his dying father. I’m pretty sure it’s the only song about that to ever crack the Top 10 on the Billboard pop chart.
Anyway, here’s the conclusion of that song, and the thing that I have still, more than 30 years later, not settled on agreeing or disagreeing with:
All this time
The river flowed
In the falling light
Of a northern sun
If I had my way
I’d take a boat from the river
Men go crazy in congregations
They only get better one by one
One by one
One by one, by one
One by one
In the specific context of the song and its semi-autobiographical story, the “congregations” here is the Catholic Church. Sting is from Newcastle, England, but “All This Time” reads more like something Irish — like an invocation of Parnell’s ghost in the long tradition of Joyce and Yeats and Sinead and Panti Bliss.
But on another level, “All This Time” offers a general, universal thesis: “Men go crazy in congregations, they only get better one by one.”
This parallels much of the prescription coming from those who study “disinformation” or the contagion of moral panics and their cult-like manifestations in things like QAnon. To liberate someone caught in such a false reality — and false identity — they say requires relationship, and trust, and time. This is the gist of that post-election challenge from James McGrath in that first link. One by one. One by one by one.
Henry Farrell suggests we may be looking at this all wrong. “The bigger problem isn’t disinformation. It’s degraded democratic publics.” And solutions designed to address the former problem won’t affect the latter one.
You may be familiar with Farrell from his many years as a contributor to the Crooked Timber blog, a site I greatly enjoy even though when reading it I sometimes feel like I’ve enrolled in a graduate level class for which I skipped the prerequisites. His post on all of this is a bit like that in places, engaging a long academic conversation that I’m not up to speed on, but the gist of it is something I think most of us laypeople can follow:
We tend to think of the problem of social media as a problem of disinformation — that is, of people receiving erroneous information and being convinced that false things are in fact true. Hence, we can try to make social media better through factchecking, through educating people to see falsehoods and similar. This is, indeed, a problem, but it is not the most important one. The fundamental problem, as I see it, is not that social media misinforms individuals about what is true or untrue but that it creates publics with malformed collective understandings. That is a more subtle problem, but also a more pernicious one.
The analogous context that got Farrell thinking about things this way came from “an article published in Logic magazine in 2019, about Internet porn.” This makes me feel better about using Sting lyrics as a framing device for this discussion.
But the porn analogy actually helps to clarify what he means by “malformed collective understandings”:
The article’s argument is that the presentation of porn – and people’s sense of what other people’s sexual interests are – is shaped by algorithms that respond to the sharp difference between what people want to see and what people are willing to pay for. The key claim:
A lot of people … are consumers of internet porn (i.e., they watch it but don’t pay for it), a tiny fraction of those people are customers. Customers pay for porn, typically by clicking an ad on a tube site, going to a specific content site (often owned by MindGeek), and entering their credit card information. … This “consumer” vs. “customer” division is key to understanding the use of data to perpetuate categories that seem peculiar to many people both inside and outside the industry. … Porn companies, when trying to figure out what people want, focus on the customers who convert. It’s their tastes that set the tone for professionally produced content and the industry as a whole.
The result is that particular taboos (incest; choking) feature heavily in the presentation of internet porn, not because they are the most popular among consumers, but because they are more likely to convert into paying customers. This, in turn, gives porn consumers, including teenagers, a highly distorted understanding of what other people want and expect from sex, that some of them then act on. In my terms, they look through a distorting technological lens on an imaginary sexual public to understand what is normal and expected, and what is not. This then shapes their interactions with others.
Something like this explains the main consequences of social media for politics. The collective perspectives that emerge from social media — our understanding of what the public is and wants — are similarly shaped by algorithms that select on some aspects of the public, while sidelining others. And we tend to orient ourselves towards that understanding, through a mixture of reflective beliefs, conformity with shibboleths, and revised understandings of coalitional politics.
Our personal preferences and beliefs are shaped by what we understand or imagine the preferences and beliefs of most other people are. When that understanding is distorted, we tend to conform to the imagined “normal.” Any “one by one” approach to countering this distorted social reality or “malformed collective understanding” is going to occur within that distorted context, making it less likely to bear fruit. It really is more like Joyce’s Ireland than Sting’s Newcastle — you can’t just opt out of the “congregation” because the congregation is the entire society.
The key thing that convinces me that Farrell is on to something here is his discussion of “reflective beliefs” or shibboleths. These are the kinds of untrue things that are widely “believed” and thus — because they are untrue and falsifiable and opposed to the facts of the matter — spark so much concern for “disinformation” and the need for “fact-checking” and the like. But they are also the kinds of “beliefs” that no one “really believes” — the kinds of totemic pseudo-beliefs that I have struggled to distinguish from actual beliefs by saying things like “choose to pretend to believe.” (See, again, “False Witnesses.”)
Here’s Farrell:
When Republicans said in polls that Barack Obama was a secret Muslim, they did not believe this claim in the same way that they believed that water was wet. Instead, their claim had some of the qualities of what Hugo and Dan Sperber call a “reflective belief,” and some of the qualities of a shibboleth* — something that you know you are supposed to believe, and publicly affirm that you believe but might or might not subscribe to personally.
In short, the technologies through which we see the public shape what we think the public is. And that, in turn, shapes how we behave politically and how we orient ourselves. We may end up believing — in a highly specific way — in things that we know we are ‘supposed’ to believe, given that we are Republicans or Democrats, Conservative or Labour Party members. We may end up not believing these things, but also declining to express our actual beliefs publicly, because we know we’re not supposed to believe whatever it is that we privately think.
When seeking to describe this corrosive attempt to choose to pretend to believe that which you yourself know not to be true, Dietrich Bonhoeffer resorted to the book of Proverbs. He called this “folly.”
Bonhoeffer’s essay “On Folly” (from his Prison Notebooks) offers yet another way of looking at this problem, one that also rejects the notion that this is a problem of disinformation or misinformation or a lack of proper factual education.
I don’t think Bonhoeffer’s argument is quite the same as Farrell’s, but their views are, at least, congruent.
What strikes me, in “All This Time” terms, is how Bonhoeffer seems to hold a mostly congregational view of both the cause and the cure of folly — and yet he wavers from that, briefly, just before his conclusion:
Against folly we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it; reasoning is no use; facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied, in fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive. A fool must therefore be treated more cautiously than a scoundrel; we shall never again try to convince a fool by reason, for it is both useless and dangerous.
If we are to deal adequately with folly, we must understand its nature. This much is certain, that it is a moral rather than an intellectual defect. There are people who are mentally agile but foolish, and people who are mentally slow but very far from foolish — a discovery that we make to our surprise as a result of particular situations. We thus get the impression that folly is likely to be, not a congenital defect, but one that is acquired in certain circumstances where people make fools of themselves or allow others to make fools of them. We notice further that this defect is less common in the unsociable and solitary than in individuals or groups that are inclined or condemned to sociability. It seems, then, that folly is a sociological rather than a psychological problem, and that it is a special form of the operation of historical circumstances: on people, a psychological by-product of definite external factors.
If we look more closely, we see that any violent display of power, whether political or religious, produces an outburst of folly in a large part of humanity; indeed, this seems actually to be a psychological and sociological law: the power of some needs the folly of the others. It is not that certain human capacities, intellectual capacities for instance, become stunted or destroyed, but rather that the upsurge of power makes such an overwhelming impression that people are deprived of their independent judgment, and — more or less unconsciously — give up trying to assess the new state of affairs for themselves. The fact that the fool is often stubborn must not mislead us into thinking that they are independent. One feels in fact, when talking to them, that one is dealing, not with the person themselves, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like, which have taken hold of them. They are under a spell, they are blinded, their very nature is being misused and exploited. Having thus become a passive instrument, the fool will be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. Here lies the danger of diabolical exploitation that can do irreparable damage to human beings.
But at this point it is quite clear, too, that folly can be overcome, not by instruction, but only by an act of liberation; and so we have come to terms with the fact that in the great majority of cases inward liberation must be preceded by outward liberation, and that until that has taken place, we may as well abandon all attempts to convince the fool. In this state of affairs we have to realize why it is no use our trying to find out what “the people” really think, and why the question is so superfluous for the person who thinks and acts responsibly — but always given these particular circumstances. The Bible’s words that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Psalm 111:10) tell us that a person’s inward liberation to live a responsible life before God is the only real cure for folly.
But there is some consolation in these thoughts on folly: they in no way justify us in thinking that most people are fools in all circumstances. What will really matter is whether those in power expect more from people’s folly than from their wisdom and independence of mind.
I’m uncertain whether Bonhoeffer’s reference to “outward liberation” suggests a change of political context to address the “sociological problem,” or if it’s a reference to his Lutheran belief in divine grace as the true locus of agency. Maybe it’s both.
In any case, Bonhoeffer’s concluding sentence nicely complements Farrell’s discussion of the problem of a democratic public shaped by social media oligarchs. Farrell is concerned with:
The problems you get when large swathes of the public sphere are exclusively owned by wannabe God-Emperors. Elon Musk owns X/Twitter outright. Mark Zuckerberg controls Meta through a system in which he is CEO, chairman and effective majority owner, all at the same time. What purports to be a collective phenomena; the ‘voice of the people;’ is actually in private hands; is, to a very great extent shaped by two extremely powerful individuals.
… Can democracy work, if a couple of highly atypical men exercise effective control over large swathes of the public space?
Or, in Bonhoeffer’s terms, social media is currently a context in which “those in power expect more from people’s folly than from their wisdom and independence of mind.”
Note those last three words. “Independence of mind” — and we’re back, again, perhaps, to one by one, by one.
Still not sure if I agree or disagree with that song. But the mandolin sure is pretty.
* “Shibboleth” is used to refer to the kind of symbols or signifiers that distinguish membership, identity, or allegiance.
The term has biblical origins, from a bloody story in the bloody book of Judges. This is a story of civil war — of one group of Israelites slaughtering another group of Israelites. The Ephraimites — the group being slaughtered — were trying to flee, but so was everyone else caught in the path of their killers. So, since Ephraimites apparently all had an accent that made it hard for them to pronounce the “Sh” sound, their pursuers forced everyone suspected of being an Ephraimite to say the word “Shibboleth.”
I sometimes offer this condensed version of the story:
“Art thou an Ephraimite?”
“Um, uh … No?”
“Prove it. Say ‘shibboleth.’”
“Sibboleth.”
“Aha! Die Ephraimite!”
“Oh sit.”
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In