Media

Sympathy for the Devil

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Surveys show a disturbing degree of support for Hamasand even justification of the October 7 atrocitiesamong younger Americans…and also, following the posting of Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ recently on TikTok, a significant number of peopleagain, especially younger ones reading it for the first timereacted favorably to his message.   Anti-Israel views among the young are significant enough that even the rather lame support of Israel offered by the Biden administration has resulted in  negative poll numbers.

What is going on here?…What is driving the sympathy toward enemies of Israel and America, even ones who have clearly and provably committed horrible atrocities?

Wesley Yang, at X, said:

When we made the succession from a text based culture to a streaming one, all prior knowledge instantly evanesced, reformatting all prior culture and leaving a blank slate In the resulting brave new world children can know they are the opposite sex, mass murderers of civilians are heroes of resistance — and Osama Bin Laden is a profound and wrongly maligned truth teller.  

Anything can happen now.

I do think that the characteristics of a media type as well as its content have an influence, as McLuhan argued long ago; I’ve written about that point recently.   And it’s well known that social media algorithms tend to amplify extreme and emotion-driving points of viewand furthermore, given TikTok’s corporate parentage, it’s quite possible that there has been consciously-malign algorithmic behavior directed by the CCP.   But types of medium and editorial behavior (these algorithms do significantly mimic the role of a traditional editor) by no means the whole story; the degree of acceptance of the ideas that Hamas-is-good and Bin Laden-Wasn’t-So-Bad point to some deep problems in American education and American society.

The late Dr. David Yeagley, a Comanche Indian (traditional name ‘Bad Eagle’) and college professor, described an interaction that took place in one of his classes. (excerpted)

“LOOK, DR. YEAGLEY, I don’t see anything about my culture to be proud of. It’s all nothing. My race is just nothing.”

The girl was white. She was tall and pretty, with amber hair and brown eyes. For convenience’ sake, let’s call her “Rachel.”

I had been leading a class on social psychology, in which we discussed patriotism what it means to be a people or a nation. The discussion had been quite lively. But when Rachel spoke, everyone fell silent.

“Look at your culture,” she said to me. “Look at American Indian tradition. Now I think that’s really great. You have something to be proud of. My culture is nothing.”

Her words disturbed and offended me in a way that I could not quite enunciate.

and

When Rachel denounced her people, she did it with the serene self-confidence of a High Priestess reciting a liturgy. She said it without fear of criticism or censure. And she received none. The other students listened in silence, their eyes moving timidly back and forth between me and Rachel, as if unsure which of us constituted a higher authority.

Yeagley saw a resemblance between Rachel and those Frenchwomen who were quick to associate with the conquering Germans…and he wondered:

Who had conquered Rachel’s people? What had led her to disrespect them? Why did she behave like a woman of a defeated tribe?

The interaction that Dr Yeagley described took place more than 20 years ago.   The individuals marinated in the intellectual climate in which the student was steeped have, in many cases, grown up to be professors or teachers inculcating a later and probably even worse version of the attitudes that she voiced.

Yeagley also cited a Cheyenne saying:   “A people is not defeated until the hearts of its women are on the ground.” I don’t have any quantitative data on gender mix, but it’s been observed that a high % of anti-Israel extremistslike those tearing down the ‘kidnapped’ posters and the three just charged with arson at an Israeli defense factory in the USare female.   Would a wise Cheyenne advise us to be very worried?

(The Yeagely passage was cited and discussed in my 2020 post  Bad Eagle’s Question)

The constant lectures about how bad our society is, how Americans are dangerous people who are on a hair trigger to attack Muslims or gay people or minorities…all of these things have surely had an effect on America’s civilizational self-confidence, especially among those who are too young to remember anything else.   As  Chris Ferguson  said at X:

The modern approach to US history is the equivalent of telling people to think of the worst thing they’ve ever done. Then think about it over and over, everyday, without any positivity or relief. Then, later, wonder why everyone is neurotic.

A commenter on that thread noted   that “in all the recent hoopla over identities, kids’ development of an  American  identity has been completely ignored.”   (emphasis added)

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Worthwhile Reading & Viewing

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How to spot high-agency people.    Interesting list.

The genealogy of nuclear fear. (Nuclear here referring to nuclear power, not nuclear war.)

A survey cited at LinkedIn:   Gen Z (aged 16-25) wants to work in media and entertainment when they grow up.   “This generation values things like work-life balance, flexibility and creativity over more traditional values like job security” also, half of this demographic is interested in pursuing entrepreneurship in some way.   Here’s a link to the actual survey.

How much ‘work-life balance’ does a successful actor or director really have, though?   And entrepreneurship, other than the most casual, tends to be quite intense in its time demands.

CBS News reports that roughly one in three young shoppers in the U.S. has admitted to giving themselves five-finger discounts at self-checkout counters, according to a recent survey.   A response at X:

America does not have the moral cultural norms for there not to be a massive amount of theft. We’re too self-centered, individualistic, and we celebrate envy as a desert claim in the name of “equity.”

There is certainly a big cultural problem here, but I question the idea that Individualism and Community are opposites…traditionally, there has been quite a lot of both in America, as I believe Tocqueville observed.   My thought is that both individualism and community are in danger of being replaced, and in many case have been replaced, by anomie.

Claire Lehmann suggests some books for helping children learn about history and philosophy.   Other suggestions in the replies.

NYT finally reports what many others have been writing and speaking about for some time:   the school closures for Covid are correlated with a sharp decrease in student learning.   How do we square this data, though, with what we know about the preexisting generally poor low and declining quality of US public education?

The AI world is all astir with the news that San Altman has been removed as CEO of OpenAI…and now, the board is negotiating with him for his possible return! There are many explanations floating around as to what is really going on. The organization/governance chart for this enterprise, which someone posted at X, is rather…unique.

 

Speaking of AI, somebody at X thought that Biden should have issued an executive order to require the rehiring of Sam Altman and his associate who also left. (Tweet   now deleted.)   There was no mention of what possible legal authority Biden might have for issuing such an order, but increasingly people seem not to worry much about such things. The other thing that struck me was that such an order would be analogous to an order by President Eisenhower to require the Traitorous Eight to return to Shockley Semiconductor in 1957.   Or, even earlier, to require Bardeen and Brattain to remain at Bell Labs and keep working with Shockley on grounds that the transistor was such a critically important technology for national security and economic well-being.

A lot of people have trouble grasping the idea that if something important is being done by a particular institution, that doesn’t mean it could not be done equally well…or much better…by other institutions, including ones that may not yet exist. We see this phenomenon, for instance, in discussions of education and the future of the Social Security system.

Stories and Society

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There’s a promising new Substack, The Story Rules Project, written by Erin O’Connor and Maurice Black. Their subject:   How stories affect the human mind and emotions, and how they can be used to reduce polarization. (I must note that stories can also be and often are used to increase polarization.)   There are already several posts well worth reading.

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind,” said Shelley, and indeed, it’s not only written stories that have an impact on how people think and feel, but also poems, music, plays, sculpture cartoons …also video games.   All are ‘media’ in a broad McLuhanesque sense.

I’m reminded again of Neal Stephenson’s book In the Beginning was the Command Line, in which he contrasts explicit word-based (textual) communication  with graphical or sensorial communication, and applies this contrast both to human-computer communications and to human-to-human communications.   Here, I will be focusing on that second application.

As an example of sensorial communication Stephenson uses something he saw at Disney Worlda hypothetical stone-by-stone reconstruction of a ruin in the jungles of India. It is supposed to have been built by a local rajah in the sixteenth century, but since fallen into disrepair.

The place looks more like what I have just described than any actual building you might find in India. All the stones in the broken walls are weathered as if monsoon rains had been trickling down them for centuries, the paint on the gorgeous murals is flaked and faded just so, and Bengal tigers loll among stumps of broken columns. Where modern repairs have been made to the ancient structure, they’ve been done, not as Disney’s engineers would do them, but as thrifty Indian janitors wouldwith hunks of bamboo and rust-spotted hunks of rebar.

In one place, you walk along a stone wall and view some panels of art that tell a story.

…a broad jagged crack runs across a panel or two, but the story is still readable: first, primordial chaos leads to a flourishing of many animal species. Next, we see the Tree of Life surrounded by diverse animals…an obvious allusion (or, in showbiz lingo, a tie-in) to the gigantic Tree of Life that dominates the center of Disney’s Animal Kingdom…But it’s rendered in historically correct style and could probably fool anyone who didn’t have a PhD in Indian art history.

The next panel shows a mustachioed H. sapiens chopping down the Tree of Life with a scimitar, and the animals fleeing every which way. The one after that shows the misguided human getting walloped by a tidal wave, part of a latter-day Deluge presumably brought on by his stupidity.

The final panel, then, portrays the Sapling of Life beginning to grow back, but now man has ditched the edged weapon and joined the other animals in standing around to adore and praise it.

Clearly, this exhibit communicates a specific worldview, and it strongly implies that this worldview is consistent with traditional Indian religion and culture. Most visitors will assume the connection without doing further research as to its correctness or lack thereof.

One thing about the sensorial interface is that it is less open to challenge than is the textual interface. It doesn’t arguedoesn’t present you with a chain of facts and logic that let you sit back and say, “Hey, wait a minuteI’m not so sure about that.” It just sucks you into its own point of view.

Moreover: when you accept a point of view based on written materials, you have a good chance of being able to explain to other people why you hold that viewpoint.   This is much less likely when you are influenced toward a view based on something you saw at a theme park or experienced in a videogame.   In that second case, you are less likely to be able to defend your position in debate…since you really can’t identify exactly why you hold it…and are more likely to respond with anger and a demand to cancel your opponent. I think this explains some of the unpleasant characteristics of present-day political discussion.

So-called “Tunnels of Oppression” have been a thing on college campuses for quite some time…here’s an article I found describing some of them.  The article is from 2008, but additional searches indicate that these have by no means gone away.   These are clearly examples of the sensorial communications mode, which, as I noted above, is less open to challenge than the textual interface. Again, it doesn’t arguedoesn’t present you with a chain of facts and logic that let you sit back and say, “Hey, wait a minuteI’m not so sure about that.” It just sucks you into its own point of view.   This is propaganda more than it is education.

And in a society in which sensory communication threatens to become overwhelming, shouldn’t one of the primary responsibilities of the university be the preservation of the text-based communication mode and the propagation of the ability to deal with this modality? Don’t “Tunnels of Oppression,” by their very nature, tend to undercut this mission?

Indeed, how many college students today know how to take a proposition and then go to the library and/or the Internet and assemble seriously relevant facts and arguments, pro and con? And is there any evidence that this ability gets any better after 4 years in college? (Or, for that matter, 8 years?)

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Worth Pondering

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Like all intelligent men who are not in any way creative, Sir Robert Peel was dangerously sympathetic towards the creations of others. Incapable of formulating a system, he threw himself voraciously on those he came across, and applied them more vigorously than would their inventors.

–Andre Maurois

I don’t know enough about Sir Robert to have an opinion about whether this was a fair assessment of him, but I think it’s a valid and important point in general.   “Intelligent but not creative” describes a high percentage of people in academia, ‘nonprofits’, and the media (as long as you don’t set bar for ‘intelligent’ too high, especially in the case of the media)…and I think this has a lot to do with their eager adoption of theoretical frameworks such as critical race theory, cultural Marxism, and various types of gender theorizing…and the special and often weird vocabularies that tend to go with such things.

The need to conform, the desire to promote oneself and to feel superior, and the search for meaning also play a part, of course.

See Lead and Gold, which is why I discovered the Maurois quote in the first place. As LG notes, the voracious-framework-adoption phenomenon is also found in business, though at a somewhat lesser level than in academia, media, and nonprofits, I think, due to the exigencies of competition and the need to deal with reality sufficiently well to actually produce products and services.

See also my post Professors and the Pornography of Power, which cites Jonathan Haidt on what he calls the single-lens approach.

Previous Worth Pondering post.