Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Our next guest, Farhad Manjoo, is a staff writer at Salon.com and the
author of "True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society." He manages
Machinist, a daily blog that covers new gadgets, tech culture and tech
policy. He lives in San Francisco.

Leading the conversation with Farhad is Bob Rossney, a software engineer 
and writer who has been on the WELL since before it had .com after the name.  
His enduring claim to fame is that his was the first email address ever 
published in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Welcome, Farhad and Bob. I'm looking forward to hearing lots more about
"True Enough."
  

    
I'd like to welcome Farhad, and maybe give a little introduction to his book
and why I think it's important.

The last decade and a half have been full of distressing developments on
the American scene, but topping my personal list is what I think of as the
assault on reason.  American politics in particular has become
extraordinarily ideological, ideological to the point of magical thinking.

We're living at a time in which a high-level member of the president's
staff (unnamed at the time, but now widely believed to be Karl Rove)
famously told Ron Suskind of the New York Times that critics of the
Administration comprised what he derisively called "the reality-based
community."  "We make our own reality," he said.

It's remarkable enough that such a man would think that "We make our own 
reality" was a bold statement of purpose, and not an admission of being 
delusional.  But even more remarkable is the administration's doggedness.
They deny everything.  Catch them in the act of ordering their 
subordinates to torture their captives, and they'll say "We don't 
torture."  We find that this means that what the rest of the world calls
"beating people to death" they call "enhanced interrogation techniques."
And so on.

I think that the current administration's assault on reason goes well 
beyond these famous examples, and I'm sure I'll have occasion to say more 
as we go on.  But there's something that this assault depends on, and it's 
at the core of Farhad's book:  Objective truth is no longer significant in
discussions of political and social matters.

_True Enough_ is about how this has happened, and what it looks like.  We 
hear the phrase "marketplace of ideas" quite a bit; Farhad digs into work 
by psychologists and sociologists to uncover why it is that it is a 
marketplace in which bad ideas drive out good.  I think it's a fascinating 
book that's full of interesting ideas, and I think these are ideas that we 
need to be talking about.
  

    
Thanks, Bob, for the marvelous introduction. You summarize my
conclusion perfectly: For many Americans, on many issues, objectivity
has been supplanted by subjectivity. In my subtitle, I call this the
"post-fact" society. 

Here are some examples: Some people think that global warming is a
real phenomenon, and that it's caused by humans; others think the facts
show that the planet isn't warming. Some people think that 9/11 was
carried out by Al Qaeda. Others think it was the deed of the Bush
Administration. Some people think HIV causes AIDS. Others think that's
bunk.

These are all, of course, questions on which there is a definitive
answer. Rigorous analysis by experts has shown that HIV does cause
AIDS, that global warming (caused by human activity) is a real and
dangerous phenomenon, and that it was Al Qaeda that carried out the
9/11 attacks. 

Yet for all these questions, significant minorities of Americans hold
different facts. It's not that they believe a different idea -- it's
more fundamental. They see a different a reality. 

But why? Let me summarize my thesis. New technology has given us more
information than ever seemed believable. Think about where you get your
news -- not just newspapers and network TV, but also blogs, cable
news, talk radio, podcasts, etc., all these rich forms of media that
we'd never dreamed of three decades ago. 

We also have more power of that information than we once did. With
tools like iPods, Digg, blog networks, and other new mechanisms, now we
can easily pick and choose our media.

There's something wonderful about this new freedom; we're no longer
reliant on an institutional media for our facts about the world. 

But the shift also creates a problem. In the book, I discuss dozens of
psychological studies that suggest we humans have an innate preference
to seek out information that confirms our worldview. That's just how
our brains work: If given a chance, we'll avoid news facts that we
don't like.

Digital technology allows us to indulge those human desires better
than we could in the past. On the Web, television, radio, and all
manner of new devices, today you can watch, listen to, and read what
you want, whenever you want; seek out and discuss, in exhaustive and
insular detail, the kind of news that pleases you; and pursue your
political or social or scientific theories, whether sophisticated or
naive, extremist or banal, grounded in reality or completely insane.

As I say in the book, in the last few years, pollsters and political
researchers have begun to document a fundamental shift in the way
Americans are thinking about the news. No longer are we merely holding
different opinions from one another; we're also holding different
facts. Increasingly, our arguments aren't over what we *should* be
doing -- in the Iraq War, in the War on Terrorism, on Global Warming,
or any number of controversial subjects -- but, instead, over what *is
happening*. You can go so far as to say we're now fighting over
competing version of reality.

So what do you think? Do you accept my thesis?
  

    
I think that it's a compelling argument, but I suspect that you're giving
more credit to technological changes than perhaps is due.  The technology 
certainly makes it easier for people to build communities of nonsense.  
But I think a big thing had to happen first, without which the technology 
would probably not have had the effect that it has.

There was a significant *psychological* shift that occurred in this
country between about 1968 and 1976:  the mainstream disappeared.

I'm talking about the mainstream that George W.S. Trow wrote about, the
one in which there were a small number of voices in American public life,
and when they spoke, they spoke with authority.  Men (they were always
men) like Walter Winchell, Charles Van Doren, Walter Cronkite, John
Kenneth Galbraith, Bennett Cerf.  The world these men spoke from, and for,
vanished completely in the cultural revolution of the 1960s.

I'm of the generation that Trow wrote of with something akin to amazement:
those who can watch _Sweet Smell of Success_, as anti-establishment a
movie as has ever been made in this country, and respond with something
like nostalgic envy for a world it depicts.  Of course I'm not nostalgic
for the reality of that world - one in which there were people far worse
than J.J. Hunsecker.  The men who murdered Fred Hampton in his bed were
part of that mainstream, and so were the men who thought sending a
generation of American men off to fight a losing war in an insignificant
country was of critical importance.  But still, the idea that there's a
right answer, and that there's someone sitting in a booth at El Morocco 
*right now* who can tell you what it is.  It's intoxicating.

One of the things that happened in the 1960s was that the idea of 
authority - the idea that *there was such a thing* as authority - began
to dissolve.  That happened in the world of the intellectuals, as post-
modernism swept through one field after another clearing out deadwood
(and, in the nature of such transitions, sweeping in deadwood of its own).
It happened in the world of the ordinary citizen, as Walter Cronkite 
stepped down and *no one stepped up to replace him.*

I think the technologies you've mentioned have accelerated this process.  
So has the deliberate assault on authority conducted by people in 
positions of authority, which you write so convincingly about as well.

But I feel like the disappearance of the mainstream from American life is
the big story.  It's one of the most significant things that ever happened
in this country, and we're still trying to come up with the right terms to 
describe it.
  

    
i also think the accent on self-expression, the pervasive culture of therapy
--- have also contributed to 'it's what i feel. dont complicate it with
facts'.

wasnt it norman mailer who 1st coined the term 'factoid', which i think
he intended to mean something like s. colbert's 'truthiness'?
  

    
I think the term you're thinking of that was Mailer's coinage was "sound
bite," but I could be misremembering.
  

    

(Note: Offsite readers with questions or comments may have them added to
this conversation by emailing them to <inkwell@well.com> -- please be sure
to put the author's name in the subject line. Thanks!)
  

    
I was having a discussion yesterday with a Wikipedia skeptic
and ran a suggestion past him: that we should do to Wikipedia
what TiVo does with television.  Instead of having edit wars over
which version of a page is the One True Version, each user could
give thumbs up to the version they like.  Then the system would
automatically present them their favorite version of that page,
and other pages that similar people have thumbed similarly.
You should have seen the look of horrified fascination on
his face.

The analogy I used to sell him this idea was Israel/Palestine.
No one except the utter fanatics expects there to be a single
nation there.
  

    
(Factoid, if I remember correctly, was coined by Mailer in his book on
Marilyn Monroe).
  

    
Here's the Wikipedia entry:

"A factoid is a spurious (unverified, incorrect, or invented) "fact"
intended to create or prolong public exposure or to manipulate public
opinion. It appears in the Oxford English Dictionary[1] as "something which
becomes accepted as fact, although it may not be true", namely a speculation
or an assumption. The term was coined by Norman Mailer in his 1973 biography
of Marilyn Monroe.[2] Mailer described a factoid as "facts which have no
existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper", and created the word
by combining the word fact and the ending -oid to mean "like a fact".[3][4].

Of course, since this is from Wikipedia, it could very well be a factoid.
  

    
What about this is actually new?  Haven't some people always believed
what they want to believe?  Nutty beliefs have a long history.
  

    
Like, man never set foot on the moon, all the pictures are from a
'set' at NASA? 

We've been living on and beneath this mountain for centuries why
should we worry about a bit of smoke once in a while?

I think a lot of Factoid may be the new coinage but the old saying
about burying the head in the sand and rose colored glasses show it
ain't exactly a new thing. 

I think a lot of it is people trying to come to terms with something
they can't change and are afraid of. 

Like the volcano thing. -We live and get our living from the volcano.
The soil from ashes is perfect for grapes. If we pay attention to the
FACT the volcano WILL errupt again, we would go nuts. We derive a good
living here. It's not like we can pick up and move and live as well
somewhere else.  SO   The volcano is our Friend. It will never hurt us.
Therefore, these people develop the attitude of not only coping with
reality but ignoring and denying it. So that WHEN the volcano starts
giving off warnings, they don't heed them. 


Isn't that what you say we are going through? And the technology helps
rather than hinders the spread of Factoid thinking? Or do you think
this is something altogether new?
  

    
How do we reliably distinguish true facts from false or misleading
ones? In some cases, it's pretty easy - "the moon orbits the earth"
kind of thing - but in other cases, the cases where it most likely
makes a difference, it can be considerably more difficult. For most
facts we have to rely on the reporter or reporters (journalists,
scientists, scholars, researchers, people we know and so on) because we
usually don't have the capacity to check them out for ourselves.

(rbr)'s point is well taken. We've lost that mainstream authority that
seemed to ground our culture's sense of reality. A sense of reality
that was probably more sound than a lot of fringe and religion-based
stuff that's so prominent now. But as (rbr) pointed out, that
mainstream authority was often itself misleading.

I believe critical thinking skills go a long way toward sorting solid
facts from wiffenpoof. But critical thinking skills seem in short
supply, or people check them at the door when it comes to cherished
beliefs or strong prejudices. A failure of education? I wonder.
Rigorous critical thought requires a capacity to hold in doubt any idea
you might have about the world. I'm not sure to what extent that
capacity can be taught.
  

    
I enjoyed this book very much.  You did a great job with the political
psychology, I think, just as in your explanation of why Lou Dobbs
panders, but not to the point of doing away with facts altogether. 
Your explanation of "naive realism" was exactly what I needed in an
argument I was having with a friend who is a died-in-the-wool,
no-nuances-needed-here empiricist, too, so that you for that.  

As I read your book, I also found myself wondering how much was new. 
For example, extreme polarization in views among different racial
groups in the U.S. has a long history--along with different sets of
"facts."  Trust, too, while it used to be more widespread, I bet wasn't
if the question were framed in a racial way.  If you look at newspaper
articles from the first half of the twentieth century, the level of
casual propaganda around race, including in papers like the New York
Times and the Washington Post, is astounding.  

Do you think it is possible that the issues around which we are "post
fact" have shifted somewhat (though I don't mean to sound like we are
now "post-racial," because obviously we aren't), but the underlying
psychology predates the technological changes you are discussing?
  

    
I'm going to tackle Brian's question, which is one I get often. "What
about this is actually new?  Haven't some people always believed what
they want to believe?  Nutty beliefs have a long history."

I won't argue that isn't so; people have always believed what they
want to believe, and nutty beliefs do have a long history. Indeed,
that's part of my thesis: A long strain of studies in psychology show
that converting beliefs into a kind of "reality" is an irrepressible
human tendency. It's innate. 

But this is new: Technology has made it easier for us to a) find
others who believe the same things we do, and, through group
deliberation and action, to amplify and project those beliefs, and b)
find and pass around purportedly objective, "facty" bits of documentary
evidence to "prove" that our version of reality is the real deal. 

I think an example makes this point best. In May of 2004, a group of
Vietnam veterans held a press conference in Washington. Reporters from
all over town attended -- the wire services, the networks, the big
newspapers. The Vets claimed that John Kerry had acted dishonorably in
Iraq. But they presented no evidence, and reporters ignored them. For
three months, this group -- the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, of
course -- found almost no coverage in the national media.

In the past, that would have been the end of it. A group holding no
evidence seeking to influence a presidential election would have died
for lack of attention. But this group knew it had another avenue. The
vets went to right-wing talk radio stations across the country --
hundreds of stations in the biggest markets but also the smallest,
where the Vets found an audience that lapped up their claims, an
audience sliced according to its ideology, one that didn't require any
evidence to believe that Kerry had lied. 

By winning over the radio audience, the Vets found traction online.
Blogs on the right began to discuss their claims, to speak of their
claims as fact. They formed a movement: People began passing around
Swift Boat videos and documents proving (to them) that Kerry had lied
about his time in Vietnam. Cable news networks noticed this movement,
as did a few big donors (it's a myth that the Vets were well-funded
from the beginning; their early FEC records show they didn't have any
money at the start). 

In August of 2004, three months after they'd held a failed press
conference, the Swift Boat Vets went supernova: They bought a few ad
timeslots, cable news began to feature them prominently, and then the
rest of the media establishment had no choice but to follow. 

The old media, by the way, was on the whole responsible: Online, in
print, and on TV, the AP, the networks, and the big newspapers
fact-checked the Swift Boaters very well, debunking most of their
claims. But did the facts hurt the story? Not really. By this time, the
group had built up a movement that was impervious to facts. 

Or, better to say this: They had created their own facts. 

Bob, I see your argument about how "disappearance of the mainstream
from American life" is the big story; I think I make much the same
argument in the book. But as I see it, it's technology that's
responsible for the disappearance of the mainstream (just as it was
technology that was responsible for the *appearance* of the mainstream
-- radio created the mass audience, and then TV cemented it). 

My idea, essentially, is this: When Walter Cronkite stepped down, no
one replaced him because, over time, technology increasingly allowed us
to do more with our time. We've got no one like Walter Cronkite
because we can't have one: One person, or one piece of art, can no
longer dominate over everything else, because we've got a lot more to
choose from.

So I'm slightly puzzled by your thoughts on this. If it wasn't new
technology that broke up the mainstream, what was it? What do you
finger as the primary cause of the end of "the idea that *there was
such a thing* as authority"?
  

    
Bob specified the 1960s as when the mainstream began to disappear; I
think he pegs it correctly. The combination of the Vietnam War, which
eventually even middle-class parents of draft-age sons began to doubt,
followed by Watergate, dissolved the faith of many Americans in the
correctness of the federal government. (Not too many years later,
Ronald Reagan gained votes by declaring that government was not the
solution but the problem.) I think the civil rights movement figures in
this too: watching demonstrators literally hosed or being bit by
ferocious dogs sicc'd on them by police eroded many peoples' faith that
cops are always the good guys. By the time the Nixon Administration
was over, doubt was America's national faith. 
  

    
Great discussion!  I'm particularly interested in this assertion that,
as a result of the social/cultural turmoil of the 1960's, the
mainstream of American life "disappeared." Certainly, the Eisenhower
Zeitgeist, as the definition of mainstream––with three TV networks,
Judeo-Christian conformist religion, Cold War binary thinking,
self-medicating through cocktails and prescription drugs,
Science&Technology as the inviolable God of progress––was turned on its
head.  The mainstream grand "narrative" of 1962 was radically
different than the "petit recit" or more fragmented small "narratives"
that guide us in 2008.

In dialectic terms, the mainstream "thesis" of the Eisenhower
Zeitgeist was negated by the "antithesis" of the counterculture with
its anti-mainstream, anti-authority, anti-establishment
counter-narrative espousing peace, love, and an alternative society. 
What resulted was neither the creation of this alternative society, nor
the victory of the mainstream culture over the counterculture, but a
synthesis that has come to be described, for lack of a better term, as
postmodernity or postmodern culture.

I look at this through the evolution of literature in my book, The
Hippie Narrative: A Literary Perspective on the Counterculture which
was discussed in Inkwell.vue a little over a year ago.  I sense that it
is a mistake to suggest that there is no longer a mainstream.  Rather,
as you aptly suggest, the amount and modes of information
dissemination are much more fragmented.  Also, as part of the dialectic
cultural synthesis, contemporary American society is both more
authoritarian AND more hip than the Eisenhowerian mainstream of the
early '60s.

In literature, the '60s ushered in greater diversity of literary
forms, ranging from the seminally postmodern juxtapositional and
fragmented narrative of Richard Brautigan's "Trout Fishing in America,"
to the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer, which were
radical in terms of old school journalism, much more intersubjective,
but highly conventional in their use of traditional literary techniques
of realism.  Neither did conventional fictional narrative disappear
either.  I mention this because, despite, the seeming disappearance of
the mainstream and what we face with information overload (Toffler's
term from "Future Shock"), and the irrationality and packaging of
public discourse, there is, in fact, a postmodern mainstream.

For example, last weekend I went to a RatDog concert, the group led by
Bob Weir (of the Grateful Dead).  It was hip; the
hippie/neo-hippie/countercultural presence in the crowd was obvious. 
Yet, the authoritarian mainstream presence was far more palpable than
at any concert I attended in the '70s.  The security presence was
tenfold what it used to be.  This is certainly a mainstream policing
behavior.  They search your backpack before allowing you inside, even
though in this City, for this Concert, there was no sense that people
were being shaken down for contraband.  Again, a more hip/more
authoritarian dynamic.  

This derivative group of one of the "hippiest" bands of all, had its
own booth of consumer wares in the hall, and, more significantly, Bob
Weir's last words after the encore was to "be sure and vote.  Go to the
HeadCount Booth outside and register.  We need to win back our
democracy."  The old hippie and leader of the band was giving the
audience a work-within-the-system-to-affect-change narrative.  Such is
the new way of our postmodern synthesized mainstream.   

FWIW, I guess I'm challenging your critical thinking on this idea that
the Mainstream has disappeared.  ;=)
  

    
i feel there is some cheap ironic snark to be made about this
<inkwell.vue> topic/author following so closely on the heels
of inkwell 328 book/author. but i am too stupefied by wildfire smoke
to unpack the thot...
  

    
That fits my memories of the era perfectly.   Born in 1945, I became world-
aware at a time when the US government had beaten back the Depression and
two actually evil empires.    When I hit college, in 64, my attitude, and
that of everybody I knew, was that we were the good guys, we could do no
worng, and our government just wouldn't do the kinds of things I later found
out we did do.

Steve makes an interesting point of the government's credibility get slammed
as a one-two punch, first by the left over the war, and then by right by way
of Reagan's repackaging of Goldwater.   Goldwater was just a bit too early.
The government had to make its dishonesty and incompetence inescapable
before that kind of thought found fertile ground in the mainstream.
  

    
2 slips.   I was responding to Steve's #15
  

    <scribbled>
  

    
Before technologies were available to bond the alternative history
types to one another, we may have had a stronger "prevailing
orthodoxy".  That said, is there evidence that the custodians of the
orthodox of yore were in some way more "right"?  

Careful now, let's not cherry pick the past as those alternative world
types do.

BTW, a case can probably be made for the value of a widely-accepted
world view even if it has significant errors.  
  

    

I think it's fair to say that technology has changed how this manifests,
but the 'big lie' technique was defined by Hitler.  It's true the Swift
Boat Veterans used the new medium for an old purpose. So superficially
I could argue that your thesis over-reaches.

But I think there's another level. Part of your thesis as I understand it
is the lack of trusted voices of consensus and that is certainly true.
Add to that the firehose of multiple channels of information of various
kinds and it's much easier for someone to confirm their preconceptions.

I also think that being exposed to the scientific process blurs the line
between truth and opinion. For just one example, I just read a Discover
Magazine article decrying the lack of quality in medical research. In the
past decade medical "facts" have often been reversed by a subsequent
discovery. So how is someone to know whether or not to give credence to
anything that is reported?
  

    
I thoroughly enjoyed your book and I celebrate your clear illustration
that Truth is not as apparent as we would lead ourselves to believe. 
The degree to which some would use our subjectivity against us has
grown and I believe it is as insidious now as any time in recent
history.  History - a "Truth" diluted by time and points of view - is
truly "his story".

Your book suggests what others have asserted, myself included, that
Truth is often subjective and frequently unobtainable.  What I find
saddest is the gross abuse of subjectivity by agents of politics and
Madison Avenue.

As others have discussed, our society divided over what and who we
believed in the Sixties.  Our loss of faith in authority was genuine
and apparently well deserved.  What we are experiencing now eclipses
anything I have ever seen before.  The lies and carefully engineered
cover-ups have grown larger and more complete in an era when we have
greater access to information than ever before.  Our willingness to
swallow what we think we want to hear I believe only goes to show how
helpless and utterly inundated the average individual feels.  I know I
no longer watch any news programs or read any newspapers.  I don't want
to have to work that hard filtering out all the garbage just to get to
the crux a story so I can do all the necessary research myself.  I
fear many have chosen the Peace that I have and where the leaves us.

The question I have is, now what?  How can we best battle the false
sources other than maintain a jaundiced eye and an inability to believe
anything.  I try to personally research anything important to me, but
you know as well as I we can never cover all the bases.  And with the
emerging technologies, it is only getting worse - more sources, more
opportunities for twisting "facts" to suit one's agenda.

I appreciate your work and the effort you appear to have put into it. 
At least we can acknowledge as a community what many of us have felt
as individuals.
  

    
Very eloquently stated <philg25>.  Isn't this the postmodern ennui
that most of us feel?  (That info-inundation and manipulation of
desired threads is our plutocracy and globalized consumerism at work.
With fragmentation and pseudo-democratic access to information, that
underlying control IS the "new" mainstream).
  

    
Thank you and, to answer your question - no and yes.  

No, I don't believe this is primarily related to post-modern ennui.  I
don't doubt there is some relationship, but there is a difference of
the loss of faith of the Boomers as opposed to the post-modern ennui of
the D and X generations (and beyond).  Their sense of boredom or
disinterest is the very reasonable response to a world they see as
already corrupted by their predecessors - me and mine . . .  Whereas,
my generation - the Boomers - find our dissatisfaction from having a
belief system, a sense of worth and hope, and losing it to an
overriding reality that we apparently were ultimately unable to
conquer.  The Greed was greater than we were.  The contemporary
generations are so much more rational and realistic having seen our
successes and ultimate failures.  I perceive them as having a much
better grasp of the depth of egregious greed and corruption of our
establishment, our nation and, perhaps, our society.  Which leads us to
Yes . . .

The info-inundation and info manipulation is the "communication" arm
of our plutocracy.  Joseph Goebbels could not be prouder.  A new
mainstream indeed - unfortunately you are all too accurate in your
description of "fragmentation and pseudo-democratic access to
information" and I'm afraid the "pseudo-democratic" goes beyond our
access to information and directly to our political process.  We no
longer can fully believe on the very process itself.

Globally, America has defined itself and the world perceives us as
what we are.  And as we all know we are defined by what we do.  What we
say and what we do no longer bear any resemblance to the America the
Boomer and previous generations grew up envisioning.  America today
doesn't begin to compare to the vision defined by our Forefathers.

I try not to be too negative in the way I see things - my own
self-editing and subjectivity.  I only wish I could convince myself.