Everybody's Totalitarianism
I have been taking a break from reading for leisure the works of Western Australian author Tim Winton (I wrote a review of his The Shepherd’s Hut for Humanum Review, which you can read here), and picked up John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. This was a book that I have for years been committing myself to read, but only acted upon this year.
The novel looks at American rural life through the lens of two families, as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth. Among Steinbeck’s many sharp insight, one of his sharpest was impact that technology - in particular industrial scale production - was having on ways of thinking. In Steinbeck’s words:
When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking
Reading Steinback jogged my memory of a 2016 Commonweal Magazine article by Regina Munch provided some helpful reflections on the post-Brexit fallout among millennials, as well as the recriminations of racism and xenophobia following the narrow victory of Britons wishing to leave the European Union.
Though this was not the central point of her article, what is indeed interesting is what seems to be Munch’s calling out of a kind of universalism in the production of political opinion by media elites - and now algorithms. To quote Munch:
The genius of sites like Buzzfeed and programs like John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight is that they encourage their audience to believe that everyone agrees with him or her—everyone, at least, worth agreeing with. They isolate consumers of these media along fault lines of disagreements, but while giving the illusion that they speak for everyone. They assume that they are merely speaking “common sense,” and that anyone who disagrees must be disqualified from discussion as bigoted or irrational. These organizing fault lines are sometimes ones that consumers themselves have drawn, based, for example, on party affiliation or taste in media, but more often, they are enforced by a host of other factors that we do not recognize or do not acknowledge (and which, of course, in part determine party affiliation and taste in media).
In a way, what Munch indicates goes beyond what Michel Foucault wrote about deviancy in his History of Sexuality. In that trilogy of books, Foucault spoke about the processes that led to the production of normality on the one hand, and deviancy on the other.
The difference in what Munch seems to indicate is that, while there were shrill cries of deviancy (namely racism and xenophobia) from the Remain camp, the manufactured commentary went further by denying the existence of a different opinion altogether, with cries like “everybody” or “universally” thrown about like so much political confetti, papering over any geographical, class, age-based or economic nuances on the ground.
Regardless of the side of the debate, or regardless of the topic of debate, and regardless of the variety of opinions that the media showers us with, the filtering of opinion via media channels both new and traditional still bears within it a new form of massification identified by Herbert Marcuse in One Dimensional Man, a logic synonymous with totalitarianism.
In a way, this kind of massification spoken of above is more subtle due to its erasure of any type of complexity by manufacturing a simulated notion of the “everybody”, outside which no real thought or person exists. What is more, this simulated uniformity can apply to opinions manufactured on all sides of any debate, so much so that even purported responses to massified thinking can themselves become a massified inverse of their opponents.
As media (mass or social) becomes an increasingly important source of information (and more disturbingly verification of facts) instead of lived experience, one temptation to resist would be the one that such media encourages, namely the tendency to ignore the complexity that embodied experience can uncover and instead adopt the virtual uniformity of whatever is being flashed on one’s screen.
Vigilance against the massifying processes (and massified uniformity) might be all the more needed if we seek to defend a truly human politics, which Aristotle to be predicated on difference rather than sameness.
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