Anthropologists are always reminding us about the basic equivalence between the cultures they study and our own. Sociologists tell us to mind the gap: our post-agrarian, hierarchically organized societies are, for those very reasons, comparable with each other but not with hunteer-gatherer or nomadic societies that lack these traits. The sociologists are wrong, the anthropologists are right, and we’re going to pay a steeper price the longer we fail to confront the consequences of this fact.
I’m writing (as pretty often) with particular reference to the problem of so-called “post-truth:” we’re apparently living through a moment in history when people who know the facts no longer have the authority to command the agreement of other, less well-informed sectors of society. The problem with this account is that, for the very reason it appeals to the sort of people who would describe themselves as “knowing the facts,” it fails to capture a deeper substrate of the problem. When the question of who really “knows the facts” is under debate, as I think it is now, then it’s meaningless for individuals or groups to cite their “knowledge of the facts” as a justification for their authority claims. The status of that knowledge is, after all, exactly what’s being disputed.
Bruno Latour has it largely right in his recent work on climate change: scientists can’t (any longer) complacently dismiss anyone who contradicts their account of the facts as out of touch with reality, they need to offer an aggressive defence* of the claims to authority that would justify their “knowledge of the facts” as such. Where Latour gets it partly wrong is in his assumption that conflicts like the one now ongoing about climate change can be “won” anymore in a meaningful sense. If by such “winning” Latour envisions, as he often seems to, a political victory that results in certain actions being taken by whatever collective agency still inheres in the government, then the concept still has a sense. If, instead, as he also sometimes appears to do, Latour means “winning” in the debating sense of convincing the other side or assembling a consensus, then the concept seems to me to be a thing of the past.
Since Socrates, this style of debate has assumed a set of shared definitions that ensure we’re talking about the same thing in similar ways. That we do share such definitions is so far essential to the institutions of liberal democracy that we’ve even become habituated to debating those fundamentally private topics, pleasure and pain, in a utilitarian framework that pretends to treat them ostensively and objectively.** As Socrates also knew, however, consensus definitions can only exist at the cost of close policing of public discourse – a task that was possible even a decade ago, when that discourse really was public and under the control of a relatively small number of people, but which facebook and twitter have (wisely or not) abandoned.
The truth is, the existence of consensus definitions has always been an effect of hierarchical society that was essential for the reproduction of that society. What else is a monarchy, for instance, but a society where everyone roughly agrees about who (but more importantly what) the king is? In retrospect, the first sign of our present predicament may have been the appearance under Bush II of bumper stickers claiming that Bush is “not my president,” a trope that’s repeated itself in ever-wider generic contexts for every president since. The speaker of a phrase like that is either delusional (sometimes), a declared political rebel (unlikely), or someone who means something different by “president” than what the word meant for the first 230 years of American history.
That division is symptomatic of a series of growing splits in American society, not just over what should be done with X, but about what X actually is. To take probably the least politically noxious example, there was widespread consensus as recently as five years ago about the shape of the Earth; now you can find communities to support your claim that it’s round, flat, toroidal, and many alternatives other than these. Just search on youtube and go down the rabbit hole.
People understand that the modern internet tends to build communities around shared beliefs, then insulate these communities from evidence that would seriously challenge such beliefs. What’s been less appreciated is the potential depth of the divisions that result. There’s no reason to think that this echo-chamber effect will stop (or has stopped) short of what anthrolopogists call cultural fission, the splitting of one group into two that share no particular loyalties or concepts. The facebook algorithm’s practice of showing us content that “generates engagement” by giving us an outrageous representation of the other may even accelerate this process by providing material for a chiasmatic schizmogenesis through which we construct our own identities in direct opposition to a cultural other.
The groups that result don’t just disagree about certain issues, which would hardly anyhow justify my calling them different cultures. They don’t even agree about the objects of agreement. Never mind whether we should cut CO2 emissions to limit climate change: is it carbon dioxide we’re talking about, or dephlogistonated air? When we talk about saving our national parks, are we talking about preserving remarkable geological phenomena or the stumps of titanic ancient trees, cut down and harvested by Luciferians? Your evaluation of Trump’s policy choices might actually change depending on whether you think he’s governing a nation or, as QAnon maintains, trying to hunt out a global cabal of child sex traffickers.
That these discussions are even being had is evidence that, intellectually at least, we now live in a fissional culture for which government, in the classical agrarian-state sense, has no meaning. There’s no one who can tell us we need to grow grain for Marduk; there’s not even anyone who can tell us the earth is round.
In a practical sense, obviously, “government” still does have meaning for these United States. Even if we can’t agree what a president is, we’ll (probably) all participate in the ritual of electing one in 2020. But what does democratic politics actually mean over a territory in which there are dozens or hundreds of different cultures, none of whom can agree on what the objects of political struggle really are?
One thing it means is that, for any particular culture, the outcomes of political struggle take on a cosmological significance, not as policies rationally articulated according to some set of values but as an incomprehensible evil forced on us by a hostile other. This is why politics is now immensely depressing for practically everyone, and, if the current situation ends violently, then politics itself is going to be to blame. For a hierarchical society, politics is the field of peaceful struggle; for a fissional society, politics is what generates hostility betweeen cultures that would otherwise have remained closed off unto themselves.
* The phrase “aggressive defense” is only apparently an oxymoron, but the incongruousness of the phrase does point toward a tactical difficulty that status-quo institutions and opinions are confronting everywhere right now: to mount an attack on rival positions is to admit that those positions are rivals and, accordingly, to sacrifice the fetishized “unquestionability” of whatever’s being thus defended. Nevertheless, this is a sacrifice that will have to be made.