Two Superstitions Ruining the US

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Superstition: “1a: a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation . . . 2 a notion maintained despite evidence to the contrary[.]”—Miriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition (2003).

“Pro-Trump political influencers have spent years building a well-oiled media machine that swarms around every major news story, creating a torrent of viral commentary that reliably drowns out both the mainstream media and the liberal opposition.”

“The result is a kind of parallel media universe that left-of-center Facebook users may never encounter, but that has been stunningly effective in shaping its own version of reality. Inside the right-wing Facebook bubble, President Trump’s response to Covid-19 has been strong and effective, Joe Biden is barely capable of forming sentences, and Black Lives Matter is a dangerous group of violent looters.”—Kevin Roose, “What if Facebook Is the Real ‘Silent Majority,’” New York Times, August 27, 2020.

Introduction: A New Dark Age?
Superstition 1: “Free trade and free markets make everybody better off.”
Superstition 2: “Free speech is good even when it deceives, distracts, divides and destroys.”
Conclusion

Introduction: A New Dark Age?

Roman senators killed their own Donald Trump, Julius Caesar, on the Ides of March, March 15 of 44 BCE. But his assassination ultimately made little difference. As the National Geographic so succinctly stated, it caused “a long series of civil wars that ended in the death of the Roman Republic and the birth of the Roman Empire.”

Thereafter, no democracy with the power and scope of ancient Rome emerged until well into the Age of Enlightenment. So the democratic hiatus after Rome’s fall lasted nearly 1,800 years—about a third of our species’ recorded history. Much of it was a time of feudalism, near-perpetual wars, intellectual stagnation, racial and religious intolerance, and superstition—the Dark Ages.

This sorry history reveals all that Trump’s misbegotten reign may ultimately put at risk, even if it ends next January. His laziness in thought and action, his incompetence and corruption, the division and hate he has fostered, the low people he has put in high places, and the bad ideas he has put forward with Big Lies could outlast his term of office.

But the Age of Enlightenment was, most of all, an age of big ideas. We might keep its flame going if we can distinguish useful big ideas from superstitions.

Our lodestar ought to be science. In the four centuries since Galileo proved that the Earth orbits the Sun, we have visited the Moon and are planning our way to Mars. Where once we fought plagues with exorcism, blood-letting and burning each other at the stake, we now have antibiotics, CAT scans, and gene-sequencers. We can decode a virus and synthesize vaccines from the most fundamental building blocks of life: proteins and nucleic acids.

Unfortunately, all that progress now stands in jeopardy, at least in the West. The menace is two modern superstitions or, in the dictionary’s words, “notion[s] maintained despite evidence to the contrary.” One Trump himself has fought, albeit crudely and haphazardly. The other Trump has exploited shamelessly. Both are intensely fashionable among our elite and could long outlast Trump.

Laboratory science can’t dispel them, because they are social, political and partly economic. You can’t put a nation, let alone our entire species, into a test tube. But if we in the West don’t soon give them up, China, which follows neither, will own our species’ future as far ahead as the eye can see.

Superstition 1: “Free trade and free markets make everybody better off.”

This first great superstition goes by many names. They include “globalization,” “free trade,” “free markets,” and (mostly in Britain) “liberal economics.” Whatever we call it, its essence is simple. We believe that giving businesses free rein to pursue profit for their owners and masters, in global free markets with few or no restraints, will produce the best of all possible worlds.

Leave aside this superstition’s close resemblance to the more generalized “best of all possible worlds” trope that consumed the French aristocracy until the French Revolution. (Voltaire also ridiculed it in his famous work “Candide, or Optimism.”) Leave aside the notion’s formal repudiation, before Congress, by no less a free-market guru than Alan Greenspan, at least on the limited question whether free financial markets automatically correct their own excesses. Leave aside the facts that no scientist worthy of the name would ever seriously entertain such a broad hypothesis, and that economics purports to be a science. Leave aside the realization that there is no possible way to test such a superstition scientifically, even in theory, because the words “always and ever” are implicit in it.

Just look at the practical consequences of turning this superstition into global economic policy. Tens of millions of jobs have left the United States and much of Europe, possibly never to return. Hundreds of millions of developed-nation workers worldwide, who used to make cars, appliances, tools, machines, hardware, clothing and furniture, have been reduced to hawking foreign-made products or flipping burgers (or their European equivalents). Thus deprived of the dignity of important work, and reduced to the near-peasant status of low-level servants in a “service” economy, they have slowly lost their prosperity, their self-respect, their jobs, their factories, their families, their communities, and (through despair and substance abuse) their lives.

Donald Trump is our president because, as selfish and erratic as he is, he became their champion. He promised to bring back their jobs, sagging pay, dignity and political influence. In a different way, with less demagoguery and law-breaking, Boris Johnson achieved Brexit because British workers seemed to want it.

Yes, globalized free trade (along with the nuclear deterrent) has helped to avoid major wars among major powers since World War II. It has done so by shifting competition from military conflict to industry and commerce and by making the great powers economically interdependent. Yes, the globalized economy has raised almost a billion people in poor countries out of extreme poverty. Yes, free-market globalization has “defeated” obsessive central control of national economies under Communism, albeit mostly because its chief practitioners (Russia and China) voluntarily gave Communism up after seeing how it had failed them.

But those “gains” have come at a terrible cost to the West. Unemployment, underemployment and lack of dignified, well-paid work have caused an inchoate and incoherent rebellion among workers in developed nations worldwide. Trump and Brexit are its products. Economic equality has fallen to levels rarely seen in the West since Genghis Khan conquered much of Eurasia. According to Oxfam, eight men now own half the world’s wealth.

And within each developed nation, wealth and economic power have become so concentrated that a new, more fluid oligarchy is rapidly replacing the landed aristocracy that ruled mankind throughout the Dark Ages. Since 2014, sober analysis of US government reveals that, in its policy choices, the United States is more an oligarchy than a democracy.

As for motivation, what do you think? Did the corporate elite who have become our oligarchs do it all for the sake of raising foreign peasants out of poverty and forging a new and better global order? Or did they do it to enrich themselves beyond measure, as the natural consequence of turning their self-serving superstition into hardened policy?

Western economies still see themselves as sleek and speedy cars, with powerful engines fueled by private greed. They laugh and scoff as visions of collective farms and government control of industry fade in their rear-view mirrors.

But they’ve failed to notice the front wheels coming loose. The foundation of any industrial economy—its workers—are hurting badly, unhappy and starting to rise. Already they have produced Trump’s presidency and Brexit. At the same time, the industrial base—the other foundation of any industrial economy—has migrated abroad. At home it has shrunk to such a degree that the US no longer makes the basic hardware that underlies all manufacturing or the protective equipment it needs to protects its people in a pandemic.

As Republican data guru Kevin Phillips wrote fourteen years ago, the US is now following Spain, Holland, and Great Britain down the road of financialization to economic and industrial weakness and geopolitical irrelevance. Can a nation that doesn’t make its own nuts and bolts and subassemblies (or protective equipment) ever compete in science and technology, let alone warfare, with the nation that makes most of those things for it?

There are solutions to these problems. They don’t involve “socialism,” Communism, or the type of micromanagement of business and enterprise exemplified by Soviet Russian and “Red” Chinese collective farms. They do involve giving up our blind faith in “free trade” and “free markets” as the sole source of all that is good and true.

We Americans still command the world’s second biggest market, after the EU. Economic alliances with our “free-nation” allies could expand that market further, to rival if not exceed China’s.

We could devise and erect intelligent, precisely targeted tariffs and trade barriers to neutralize international wage differentials, in order to revive our manufacturing and industrial base (and our allies’). We could re-employ legions of unemployed and underemployed skilled workers—at living wages and with strong unions—before they lose their skills. We could re-invigorate our industrial and applied scientific and technological research establishment. We might even start making nuts and bolts and subassemblies again, so we can at least have a credible claim of being able to resist the nation that now makes most of them for us.

We can renew and expand our world-beating research partnerships between government and industry, as embodied in DARPA and ARPA-E. That partnership used tax dollars to fund basic research, which private investors just will not support, and applied research with too low a chance of success and too long a time frame to attract private investment. (The Internet arose from a DARPA project.) We can hold some, but not all, of our innovations close enough to our chest to make sure that American workers and American investors get the first crack at exploiting them and making follow-on inventions.

In short, we can modify our nineteenth- and twentieth-century plans for success with such changes as are appropriate to this new century, when we must both compete and cooperate with an enormous, rising power that follows its own, completely different rules. What we can’t do, without fading from historical relevance, is continue believing blindly in our abstract economic superstitions as if we had learned nothing from the hard lessons of the last twenty years.

Superstition 2: “Free speech is good even when it deceives, distracts, divides and destroys.”

The second superstition that is killing Western democracy is equally decisive in its effect but more subtle in its action. It’s the notion of “free speech” as a near-absolute good.

What many Americans—and perhaps most of the world—don’t understand is that our First Amendment forbids censorship only by the government, including both our national government and the states’. There is no constitutional rule in America forbidding censorship, slanting, propaganda or outright lies by private media organizations.

All “news” media in the United States are privately owned and run, except for PBS, NPR, and a few others that are technically private but under a form of public stewardship. As a result, anything goes in our private American media, anytime, anywhere.

That’s why Fox and Sinclair have become the most powerful right-wing propaganda organs in human history—far surpassing Josef Goebbels’ efforts for the Nazis. It’s why Jack Dorsey’s Twitter can promulgate many of Trump’s 20,000 lies and misleading claims (so far) as Tweets with little or no practical repercussion. It’s why Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook can foster, for profit, the kind of under-everyone’s-radar alternative reality described in the second headpiece quote above.

Even the weak restraint of defamation law, which curbs only “reckless” falsehoods about public figures like Trump’s political opponents, doesn’t apply to social media like Facebook and Twitter. The reason is an appalling last-minute statutory amendment exempting social media from centuries-old rules. In truly Orwellian fashion, this blanket exemption is called Section 230(c)(1) of the “Communications Decency Act.”

The superstition underlying this destructive license is easy to state but hard to remedy. We Americans believe, in our bones but without evidence, that free speech is always good, that more speech is better, and that the only good remedy for bad speech is more speech.

That notion worked in our Colonial era of printed pamphlets. It worked in our Golden Age of the three TV networks, exemplified by Walter Cronkite, with their strict codes of factual accuracy, honesty, verifying sources and correcting errors obsessively, and general professionalism. It was starting to fail in the cable-news era of sensationalized lies, promulgated by oligarchs in their own long-term quest for riches, self-serving policies, and yet more political power. It has self-evidently failed miserably in the modern Internet era of “many to many” communications. There anyone, anywhere, with zero credentials and zero at stake, can start a rumor, invent a fake fact, nurse a grudge, incite a riot, inflame hatred, or push the public toward rebellion, race riots, or war.

If Donald Trump wins re-election, he will do so with the loyal support of vast reaches of our private “anything goes” media empires, and with the acquiescence or profit-driven negligence of the most powerful social media on the Internet. And he will have won with his 20,000-plus falsehoods unchallenged in the minds and the media bubbles of many Americans.

One sad truth of modern American media is that TMI (“too much information”) helps keep voters imprisoned in their separate and contradictory media bubbles. The Internet and electronic media generate whole libraries of new data and lies every day. No single human being-not even paid professionals-can keep up with it all. So people naturally sort themselves into their bubbles in large part because of the undrinkable volume of “news.”

If you can view only a small part of what’s available, why not look at what confirms your preconceptions, validates your thinking, and makes you feel better, or at least more self-assured? And if “more speech” is a reliable remedy for bad speech, how does it work when the public is already operating at full saturation?

Modern media’s undigestible volume of speech was not a problem in our Colonial days of printed paper pamphlets, or when we had only three high-quality TV news networks. It is today.

Thus does “free speech” actually work now, in twenty-first-century America. Much of it comes from actors—even outright criminals—with personal and political agendas and no legal, moral or professional restraint. They include pimply teenagers in their bedrooms, social outcasts and white supremacists in their squalid apartments, anonymous political trolls, paid political “operatives,” agitators, propagandists, foreign spies and disinformation experts. And we haven’t even yet reached the stage of digital technology—coming soon—when bad actors will be able to produce fake video indistinguishable technically from reality, as least by examining nothing more than the bits and bytes of the video lie itself. Then we will have to devise some way of reliably validating reality to defeat them.

It should be self-evident by now that our peculiarly American version of “free speech” is not working. It has morphed into an extreme form of verbal and video license. It’s busy destroying our culture, our social cohesion, our politics, our civil discourse, and our society. If it puts Trump back in the White House again, there will be no going back, except perhaps after a new bout of Dark Ages.

In this case, as in the other, identifying the problem is not hard. What’s harder here is finding a good solution.

In general and in the abstract, free speech is a good thing. Aided by Gutenberg’s printing press and Martin Luther’s Protestant revolution, it sparked the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, enabled the rise of science and modern democracy, and gave us our modern world. It lets me write this blog. So we have to thread the needle and find a way to keep the baby while throwing out the rancid bath water. That’s not easy.

One key, I think, is the distinction between facts and opinion. Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, including crackpots and foreign spooks, as long they clearly identify what they say as opinion. But when you say that vaccines cause autism and have killed millions, that Joe Biden advocated defunding the police when he had not, or that Trump’s “leadership” has put our nation in the global forefront of effective pandemic fighters, you’d better have proof.

This approach might involve a national panel of experts, public or private, tasked to debate key issues of political and near-historical fact. A “jury” of randomly selected citizens might sit in judgment, and their verdict could be widely publicized and taken as truth, subject to possible modification with changes in circumstances.

Another answer might be a beefed-up law of defamation, without a stricter standard for disapproving false political discourse, and without requiring a particular plaintiff to show personal injury. If you deliberately promulgate something proven false, and if a plaintiff or the state can prove personal, political or social motives and consequences, you ought to be held responsible somehow, even if the only sanction is public shaming. Or you might have to pay a fine calibrated to dent your personal or corporate net worth, and so reduce your power to go forth and lie again. (This approach would not stray too far from the old law of defamation, now repealed for social media: it let cases turn in part on the truth of falsity of allegedly defamatory material, which a jury would determine based on evidence.)

Whatever we do, we can begin by repealing Section 230(c)(1) of the Communications Decency Act. At a minimum, that would recruit Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg into the fight to save our democracy. Right now, they seem to be sitting on the sidelines, raking in the cash while feigning just enough interest to keep a feckless Congress at bay.

In the absence of our First Amendment, the old English common law might have arrived at some of these solutions eventually. After all, it had developed our now-neutered law of defamation over centuries, on a case-by-case basis. But our American First Amendment would preclude a defamation-based solution, to the extent it relied on state suits or prosecution. Unfortunately, our American penchant for putting everything in writing, including statutes, has practically wiped out the case-by-case evolution that once characterized English common law.

As things are, with most of our law compiled in statutes and with Congress divided and confused, any such solution is no more likely to happen than the repeal or revision of our First Amendment. Meanwhile, more adaptable authoritarian societies, like China, Russia, and even Iran, have been moving to protect themselves from the Internet’s cesspool. Unfortunately, they do so by limiting not just the sewage, but honest and useful opposition, too.

The Chinese are the people farthest along in protecting themselves from the anarchy and the flood of sewage on the Internet. Yet they are also the farthest along in using modern technology to build a durable surveillance state in the interest of social stability-something the US and Europe are unlikely ever to do.

So whatever solution the West adopts, it probably won’t be like China’s. But we can’t go on forever as we do today. We can’t have the public’s mind continually poisoned by millions of anonymous liars and schemers, who work freely and often for profit, far beyond the reach of law or any sense of responsibility, professionalism or honesty.

Internet-fueled demagoguery is real. Fake news is real. Trump’s 20,000-plus lies and near lies are real. Government by Tweet, including many falsehoods, is real. Information bubbles are real, and some of them are filled with falsehoods. We can’t put our heads in the sand and pretend these things don’t exist or are inconsequential. At least we can’t and expect to survive as a democracy.

Conclusion

The West is rife with has-been empires, including democracies. Greece was the first to implement and record democracy’s abstract principles. Rome was the first nation to build a great empire on a foundation of democracy. Where are Greece and Italy today?

Spain and Holland once had global empires of shipping, trade and colonization. Britain added the rule of law and abstract principles of justice. But is Spain or Holland a geopolitical mover and shaker today? Is Britain, let alone after Brexit?

More than any other nation in human history, the United States has leveraged the power of realism, science, truth, technology and law to project geopolitical power and dominate our species’ thinking, culture, arts and dreams. But the United States is now in self-evidently precipitous decline. We now believe in and do things that no one of my generation ever could have imagined, until Nixon, Reagan, Gingrich, Dubya, McConnell and Trump inculcated us with durable superstitions. (Two of those once-unthinkable things were electing Trump president and failing to remove him despite clear evidence of his law-breaking and treason.)

History gives no nation a guarantee of success. Every nation has to think, work and persevere to succeed, every step of the way. If we Americans persist in clinging to our superstitions, rather than recognizing our problems and finding practical solutions, our promise and our “exceptionalism” will slip away, just like the dreams of all the other faded Western empires.

Along with our geopolitical and industrial power will go the dreams of widespread personal freedom and true equality of opportunity that have animated our Republic since our Founding. Those dreams are worth cherishing and advancing. But to save them we must give up our superstitions, embrace Reason and Science, and start acting like rational beings again. To do that, we must start inventing practical solutions for our very real problems. Most of all, we must stop dismissing every plausible solution as inconsistent, in the abstract, with our superstitions.

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