Society and Spectacle

Whether you are celebrating or mourning the election results, it’s worth a moment to reflect on the campaigns, both of which were often confusing, offputting, and disappointing. They did not engage the American people as we deserve to be engaged, namely, as sober, deliberative, and self-governing.

Already by 1985, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business warned us that the form of our political discourse, then dominated by television, posed a significant challenge to rational argument. The debate proper to print and to a people shaped by that form allowed for long attention, nuance, inference, and the building of a case with sustained evidence, counterargument, and persuasion. Reading is dialectical, allowing time for the reader to pause, reflect, and argue back against the text, while television is essentially passive and receptive. Postman reminds us of the debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, with each speaker allotted an uninterrupted hour, at least, in front of large audiences, and with transcripts printed in their complete form. Arguments were long and complex. Postman claims the language and form of print is “serious business” and it was no accident the ages of print and reason overlapped. Television, he cautioned, 

is altering the meaning of “being informed” by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing.

This, by the way, was long before the internet, deepfakes, or the current species of so-called disinformation or misinformation. He is not talking about bots flooding social media with false stories or foreign governments attempting election interference; instead, the medium of television fostered politics as entertainment, excitability, and a sense that if one was current one was informed, even if that currency did not result in understanding, let alone understanding at a fundamental or deep level. A well-known example is the Nixon–Kennedy debate of 1960, the first ever televised, which found those listening on the radio thinking Nixon won while television viewers thought Kennedy had done so.

Flash forward to 2024 and we observe even less print culture and sustained debate. I recall some years ago being told that the winner of the presidential debate was the candidate who had three soundbites when the other had only two. Two soundbites, something under fifteen seconds; Lincoln–Douglas this is not. Recently an advertising executive told me that having any words on Instagram was undesirable for a brand, since short video received far more attention.

Given this, it’s all but inevitable that campaigns will resort to spectacle. One side brings out Kid Rock, the other brings out Eminem; one gives time to Amber Rose, the other to Beyoncé; one gives time to Hulk Hogan, the other to Katy Perry. Are we not entertained?

The campaigns have turned into a spectacle. You might recall Don DeLillo in White Noise and the “most photographed barn in America.” Its entire status came from photographs. People went not to see the actual barn but the most photographed barn, taking pictures once there, thus contributing to its status. No one cared about the barn but only about the spectacle of the barn, and that is not the same thing, not at all.

Elections are serious things. Much depends on them. Serious things depend on them, and a sober and self-governed citizenry should be deliberating, not distracted by spectacle. It’s beneath us. As Guy Debord argues in Society of the Spectacle (a book wrong about many things), the spectacle gives a vision of reality that only “partially unfolds,” but “in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished.” In an election, we ought to be considering the common good. Many goods are at stake in an election, and no party has correct ideas about all those goods, but if no option presents how they might unify into the common good, what precisely are we basing our decisions upon?

Deliberation ought not to be based on memes. Or the preferences of a celebrity. Those are entirely insufficient for the serious work of deliberation, reasonable judgment, and responsible choice. It’s not accidental that our politics have become deranged and emotional; it’s not that we disagree about serious and controversial matters, it’s that we are not even disagreeing—we are simply emoting and counter-emoting. I can disagree with your judgment, I can find your understanding lacking, but how am I to respond to your emoting, especially if the emoting is disproportionate to the subject’s weight?

I am not being a sore loser or a gloating victor here. Far from it. I am simply a citizen who believes in the decency and intelligence of the citizenry, and thus we must demand better than we are receiving, and we must demand better from ourselves.

A self-governed people are not merely those who are allowed to vote. More than that, a self-governed people direct their own judgments, attention, choice, and emotion. They are not passive. They are not easily swayed. They value their own counsel more than that of a famous person and they value the counsel of their friends more than that of an online mob.

We would do very well to get offline and get outside. We would do well to read slowly, patiently, and attend to long books. We would do well to take counsel with our friends and neighbors. I have no solutions for our feverish regime, but it is feverish, choked with passions but short on sound argument. I do know that each of us, however, as persons given care and responsibility, can exercise that great right, privilege, and obligation, which is to learn to govern ourselves in recognition that we are called to account for our virtue and the stature of our souls.

Image by THANANIT and licensed via Adobe Stock.