How we got to where we are is an interesting and depressing story, and one where, curiously, the media probably plays at least as important a role as the people and institutions that were its subject-matter
Cross-posted from Cross-posted from Aurelien’s substack “Trying to understand the world” “Trying to understand the world”
Photo: Wikiwand
When I was a lot younger, I was something of a news addict. For much of that time there wasn’t a TV easily available, and in any case broadcasting hours were limited. So I inevitably listened to the radio a lot, and my day was rhythmed by the morning news, if I was awake, and by Radio 4’s The World at One (“with William Hardcastle”) and The World Tonight (“Douglas Stuart reporting.”) I remember these programmes, in spite of forgetting an infinite number of others, because of the calm and authoritative way in which they dealt with the events of the country and the world. Reports from overseas would come from foreign correspondents already in place, who had lived in the region for years, if not decades. Coverage of UK politics was by lifelong political correspondents who knew everything and everyone. Within the limits of human nature, and with allowance for the constant possibility of outside influence, you really did feel that, after listening to a five-minute piece by “the BBC’s East Africa Correspondent,” you actually understood the 1970s’ conflict between Ethiopia and Somalia in the Horn of Africa better than you had before.
In those days, the barriers to entry into broadcast media were very high. I don’t just mean the ability to broadcast, which was strictly legally controlled in most countries, but simply to get noticed, and to qualify for the limited number of minutes available on TV and radio, and the limited column inches in newspapers. This had its inevitable downsides, of course, as any limited system does, but at its best, it did two things. One was to focus broadcasting services towards subjects that editors considered the most significant. In such a system, especially for government-funded channels, audience share and attracting eyeballs, were not the main priority. It was only in this way, for example, that Kenneth Clark’s ground-breaking Civilisation or the first episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus could ever have been broadcast: each was a risky endeavour in its own way, and neither seemed a guaranteed success at the beginning.
The other was to encourage opinion formers, and especially politicians, to stick to the more important issues when they were interviewed, because they might only have a ninety-second spot every now and then. Of course, politicians attacked each other as fiercely in those days as they do now, but there was less personal abuse and grandstanding, because there wasn’t time for it. The coverage of politics also reflected the relatively straightforward political organisation of the day: there were, broadly speaking, established parties of the Left and of the Right, they said different things, and when in government they behaved differently. Policies of one side would be defended by them, and criticised by the other side, in ways that were generally comprehensible.
At the international level, the framework of the Cold War provided a grammar for understanding the world, which was often comprehensible as well. A movement or a country would be supported by one side, so its opponent would automatically favour the other. The end of Portuguese rule in Angola, for example, meant that the various resistance movements of different ethnic and political persuasions could now spend all of their time fighting each other without the distraction of fighting the colonial power as well. Because the Soviet Union supported the Marxist MPLA, largely the party of the mestizo coastal elite, the West reflexively supported its opponents. This was very much the model for understanding other parts of the world as well and, whilst it was somewhat facile, it wasn’t entirely misguided. As we’ll see, though, the underlying complexities that were to some extent hidden by the Cold War heuristic came back to haunt us later, and the conflicts in Algeria, in Rhodesia or in Vietnam turned out to be a lot more complex and nuanced than people had been ready to admit at the time, or indeed were even aware of.
It wasn’t that the world was necessarily “better” then, either in the West or outside. This was, after all, the era of the Vietnam War, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, military coups and dictatorships in Latin America and Africa, a brutal civil war in Nigeria, and many other horrors. Even in Europe, there was the bloody uprising in Hungary in 1956 and the peaceful one in Prague in 1968, a military/political coup in France in 1958 and an attempted one in 1961, not to mention a desperate political crisis in 1968, the overthrow of the Salazar regime in Portugal in 1974 and the death of Franco the next year, and of course widespread terrorism in the 1970, not to mention the conflict in Northern Ireland.
Yet most of these conflicts and crises could be explained in some rational fashion. (Cambodia was an exception even at the time.) The dynamics of de-colonialisation, the rivalry between the Great Powers, disputes over borders and territory, economic struggles and the nefarious activities of whichever superpower you most distrusted, seemed adequate to explain most things. And even then, complicated conflicts such as that in Northern Ireland, which seemed to go on forever, were regarded by the British public primarily with exasperation and incomprehension (“let’s just nuke the place!”) as well as, for the most part, complete indifference to the issues. At a more everyday level, the large-scale political protests of the era were normally directed at tangible objectives that were relatively easy to understand, whether you agreed with them or not.
Now it’s trivially easy to dismiss all this as nostalgia (I’ve decided that accusations of nostalgia for the past are the last resort of those obliged to defend an indefensible present.) But not only, as I have pointed out, was the world far from ideal then, it was also very different structurally, and easier to understand, or at least to explain. It wasn’t just the basically stable East-West confrontation: there were other structuring influences, such as fixed exchange rates and stable commodity prices, as well as all sorts of international and national economic agreed practices, and strong trades unions in most countries with a formal negotiating role. On the whole, governments managed to run their economies pragmatically, with steady growth and low unemployment. Et cetera.
How we got from there to where we are is an interesting and depressing story, and one where, curiously, the media probably plays at least as important a role as the people and institutions that were its subject-matter. It begins, of course, with the mania for deregulation and privatisation that overtook western governments from the beginning of the 1980s. Unusually, this radical policy change was not based on any obvious need or even any popular demand, but on pure ideology. Back in the 1930s, British governments tried to deal with problems of poor housing and unemployment by using the unemployed to build decent houses the poor could afford to rent. (I was born in one.) Fifty years later, when new housing was urgently needed again and unemployment had risen sharply once more, a later British government decided to sell off the public housing stock to those with money. Such behaviour was rationally inexplicable, and it was an early example of events that seemed to come from another dimension, and left people scratching their heads and asking why?
It was possible to offer some mumbled justification for “a nation of house-owners,” but in reality, just like the idea that the private sector could manage national assets “more efficiently” it was actually nothing more than a gigantic leap of faith, and its inevitable failures were greeted, as they always are, with the excuse that the various policies simply hadn’t been tried well enough or for long enough. It was this sense of suddenly being governed by Martians—routine today in most countries—that began the long slide into a domestic and foreign system which today simply seems incomprehensible.
Nobody ever really tried to explain at the time why the deregulation of broadcasting media was a good idea, or even a rational one. There were the usual mumbles about “competition” being a good thing, because reasons, yet opinion surveys showed that quite quickly people became less satisfied with the output of TV and radio than they had been before. The explanations for that, of course, are banally economic. New TV channels, in particular, had to find a way of financing themselves, and that meant advertising. But there was only a certain amount of advertising actually available, and now it had to be spread across many more recipients. And advertising revenue depended on viewing figures, and there were only so many people to do the viewing, now divided between many more channels. Thus, the only way for the new channels to survive was by buying (since they could rarely afford to make) programmes as cheaply as possible. In most cases, this meany buying in and if necessary dubbing programmes from the United States, because economies of scale meant that they were very cheap. I first noticed this, as I recall, in a hotel room in Paris in the late 1980s, when of the exciting twenty channels available on the TV, four were showing dubbed versions of different US cops-and-robbers shows from the 1970s. I had to wonder how many people were actually watching. In theory, the less “efficient” channels, whatever that meant, should have gone under, but in practice most of them clung grimly on. (Needless to say, nobody has ever wanted to watch a TV channel just because it’s “efficient.”) So as Mr Springsteen observed at the time, you could have 57 channels and nothing on. For the first time, we began to confront the paradox that more apparent choice meant less real variety.
Quite quickly, 24-hour TV became the norm, and the same economic constraints applied. Advertising budgets and audiences didn’t get any bigger, they were just stretched thinner. The result in part was the flight from quality (“reality TV” for example”) but also the consequences of the simple fact that there was much more going on in the world than TV channels could cover. For 24-hour news channels such as CNN, budgetary limitations meant covering only a few important stories, and having to cover them again and again throughout the day, perhaps with minor variations and updates. This may have been less obvious if you were passing through an airport or sitting in a bar, but I remember working underground, sometimes for days at a time, during one long-lasting crisis, and being driven to distraction by the endless repetition of the same stories on the numerous TVs that surrounded us. Much of the coverage was, in fact, based on nothing more than speculation, or on alleged stories that later turned out to be false. So A Pundit would rabbit on about something that may or may not have happened, and an hour later another Pundit would present a different but equally hypothetical opinion, while the producers were frantically ringing around trying to find A Third Pundit to say something different. After a few weeks, and suffering the third or fourth repetition of this cycle daily when I was trying to work, I was ready to bang my head against the wall.
All this was before the Internet, but it was the beginning of the commodification of information about the world, and its presentation on a wholesale basis but in bite-sized individual chunks, forever interrupted by advertising and almost always without any depth or context. The objective, after all, was not anything so old-fashioned as to inform, it was to attract viewers and sell advertising and subscriptions The rot probably set in with the outbreak of fighting in the Former Yugoslavia, and especially after Bosnia fell off a cliff in 1992. Here we began to encounter the basic problem which endures and has worsened until today: too many events, too many opinions but too little actual knowledge and experience. And for that matter, too little interest in acquiring any actual knowledge. You’re a politician or a “strategic analyst” offered a two minute spot on TV or radio the next day to talk about European peace efforts in Bosnia (of which there were an incalculable number). Are you going to say modestly “sorry, I don’t know anything about that,” or spend the rest of the day speed-reading a history of Yugoslavia? Of course not: you’re going to open your mouth and see what comes out. You get paid whatever you say.
This was, I think, Year Zero of the trend towards our current situation of infinite information and little real knowledge. Hardly anyone had anything interesting or valuable to say, hardly anyone knew the country or spoke the language, but the demand for opinions was such that almost anyone could contribute. The result was a kind of rabid kaleidoscope of disconnected reports and impressions, mixed with righteous indignation and not a little hatred. For the first time, perhaps, people wrote articles in newspapers not about the events themselves, but about how those images on TV made them feel. Unsurprisingly, attempts to “discuss” the actual issues turned into shouting matches. Because satellite time was expensive, stories came in small chunks and often devoid of any context (ironically, much the same is true today but for different reasons.) Politicians, as much as pundits and the general public, had difficulty understanding what was going on, from the disconnected fragments that were broadcast by journalists who had just got off the plane, and at a time when those journalists were just beginning to see themselves as the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Sometimes this could be severely misleading. For a long time, the BBC began its nightly coverage of the fighting in Bosnia with a few seconds of archive film of a shell hitting an high-rise apartment building. This actually happened on a number of occasions (I saw the results) but it gave the misleading impression that such things happened daily, or at least frequently. Yet in reality the majority of the casualties on the Muslim side in Sarajevo were troops killed and wounded in the fighting. But such impressions endure.
It has to be said, though, that the problem was not just ignorance and media distortion. Even with hindsight, the phantasmagoric mixture of violence, cruelty, opportunism, cynicism, and corruption in that conflict seems inexplicable—I have referred to it several times as Hieronymus Bosch interpreted by the Marx Brothers. Slowly, it began to dawn on the more perceptive that there were dark and terrible things happening in the world that we could not, or would not, understand in traditional terms. And the ghastly events of the civil war and its aftermath in Rwanda seemed to defy explanations of any kind, and left people gasping. Not too long afterwards, aeroplanes crashed into tall buildings, and people had begun to wonder if the world had really gone mad. The Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 had at least seemed comprehensible in Great Power terms, but who on earth were the Taliban, and where had they come from? For that matter, how was it possible to have an Islamic Republic in Iran at the end of the twentieth century? Nothing made sense any more.
What began to be apparent was that that the world had always been more complicated than the ideological straitjacket of East-West confrontation had made it appear. Yes, that was an important factor, even a dominant one in some cases, but all sorts of groups on the ground had agency and were pursuing their own interests, often managing to play the two sides off against each other. Yes also, the confrontation did provide a kind of stability, and stopped a number of the more dangerous episodes from getting out of control. Nonetheless, even at the time, the historic cultural antipathy between the North of Vietnam (the Court) and the South (the merchants), or the complicated internal politics of African liberation movements were not exactly a secret, but they tended to be pushed into the background for ideological, and to be honest also for racial reasons. It was not really thought that non-western leaders could have agency, or that they could make use of major powers to secure support and financing in return for a few perfunctory pro- or anti-Soviet remarks or a vote in the United Nations General Assembly. When the Cold War intellectual framework fell away, there was a period of utter political and intellectual disorientation
There were two broad and related reactions, which endure to this day. One was a kind of transferred intellectual nostalgia (yes, that word is appropriate here) for the certainties of the Cold War, and a desire by politicians and pundits to see world events still as the struggle between great nations with competing imperial ambitions, and to dismiss the role of local actors as insignificant. The other is to desperately seek some—any—structuring narrative that makes the confusion of today’s world seem less total. International finance, competition for energy and mineral resources, religion, the City of London, World Zionism, the Deep State, the Deeper State, UFOs and alien bases, and a dozen other explanations compete and sometimes overlap, in an attempt to make the world seem as comprehensible, as it once seemed to be. And of course all of them provide pre-fabricated frameworks of interpretation that can easily be imposed on real-life events: it isn’t necessary to know anything about the situation itself, because you can always find something to support any argument.
I’ve suggested that the current intellectual confusion results both from the unacknowledged and often rejected complexity of the modern world and from the changes in the way we are informed about it. But it’s necessary to point out that the problems of the modern world are found just as much, if not more, in the West as outside it. (Indeed, many non-western states are now better governed than we are.) The link, I suggest, is that something like deregulation has also been applied to politics. If you think about it, traditional political parties were collectivist: they had to be, since a political party of everyone for themselves is a logical nonsense. And indeed today’s politicians behave increasingly like senior managers in a private company, shafting each other to get ahead, moving from party to party as their opposite numbers move from company to company, and in some cases leaving the party to found a start-up party elsewhere. It’s not that politics was ever without feuds and infighting—it would be silly to suggest that—but there was at least a recognition that overt conflict and flagrant disloyalty were bad for the party you represented. Nobody seems to care now.
If you think about it logically, a political system based around the interests of the individual politician is going to be pretty weird. For example, actual policies carried out by governments, or even announced by governments, are secondary issues. What matters is the interests and promotion of the individual, even if that person is advocating things that are completely ridiculous. It has led, for example, to a grotesque competition among European leaders to be more radical than their neighbour about Ukraine. The nonsense perpetrated is only comprehensible if we assume that these people live in a kind of virtual world, where nothing they say has any practical implications, and anyway it will all be forgotten tomorrow so who cares? The important thing is the headlines, the status and success in out-radicalising your rivals. Indeed, there are no rewards for the traditional virtues of calmness and good judgement: all that matters is making more noise than the others. We are pretty much at the end of rational politics in the West now, and the Martians who first appeared in the 1980s appear to have taken over completely. It’s hard to imagine a more dangerous combination than a complex and unstable world, and western governments that no longer behave rationally.
This irrationality extends to domestic politics as well, of course. In many cases, what governments are doing makes no sense at all, whether you approve of it or not. Again, it seems to me a case of turning the volume up to eleven on every subject. The idea is no longer, insofar as it ever was, to provide good leadership and good government, but rather to make your career by shouting louder and making more outrageous proposals than your opponents, or even your notional allies. Politicians no longer feel the need even to pretend to serve the national interests: after all, politics is just an entry on their CV before progressing to other things, and it can bring no greater rewards than being well-known. So you might reasonably suppose that Mr Trump is out to destroy the American economy, but that pre-supposes purpose and rational objective. As far as I can see, he just doesn’t care, provided he gets the news coverage. And indeed modern politics in western nations seems largely a question of getting more coverage by shouting louder and being more outrageous than your competitors, which is why the current set of western leaders seem more and more to be a parody or a caricature of traditional politicians, like children competing to attract attention.
This would not be possible, of course, without the changes in the media that I discussed earlier, and their recent pathological evolutions. These days, the barriers to entry, once considerable, have dwindled to effectively nothing. Assuming you can raise the money (a point to which I return) you can set up a YouTube channel, with more viewers than many conventional TV channels. This Substack costs me effectively nothing to run, and my essays are typically read by 12-15,000 people, or about the circulation of a small magazine fifty years ago. As a result, the barriers to entry are just about as low as they could be: you don’t need to know anything, and it doesn’t cost you any money.
But then how do you succeed, whether you measure success by readers and viewers or by the money you earn? How does your YouTube chain get financed? How do you even get noticed among the hundreds or even thousands turning out similar material? As with politics, as with what remains of the traditional media, you have to shout louder than anyone else. Sometimes, this can be a straightforward bargain: I saw this story on the Web today, I don’t know much about the subject but here’s an opinion piece with lots of obscenities and name-calling, so send me some money. Sometimes that’s enough. Consciously or unconsciously such writers understand that building a successful brand, just like being a successful politician today, depends on telling people what they want to hear, preferably with the volume at 11, and avoiding telling them what they don’t want to hear. That includes comforting them with the belief that responsibility for bad things in the world lies with people they have heard of, and can therefore hiss, boo and hold responsible, rather than with locals they haven’t. After all, people will generally pay at least something to have their gut feelings legitimated by someone with a name and a reputation who can write in connected sentences.
Back in the Spring, the Market was convulsed by the idea that nuclear war with Russia was inevitable because, um, the Ukrainians had launched a drone attack against an airfield whose name no-one can now remember, where the Russians based some nuclear-capable aircraft. Of course if you say “this is irresponsible and provocative,” or “this represents a potentially dangerous escalation,” your comment is lost in the clamour, so you pretty much have to say “we are days away from nuclear war!” just to be noticed. (Of course if we were days away from nuclear war there would be no point in appealing for paying subscriptions, but then you’re being rational.) And naturally, the incident is forgotten now, but, as with Mr Trump’s endless stillborn initiatives, the fleeting value and the publicity and the paid subscriptions have been gained.
Charismatic politicians and demagogues have always known this. There is no point in speaking quietly when you can shout, no point in shouting when you can scream with the volume at 11. Such individuals spurn logic and rationality: their appeal is anyway largely to their own supporters and if they ever hope to convince others they do so by battering them into submission. Much of the Internet (and for that matter much of political life these days) is like that. I often wonder what would happen if I were to take some elements from one of Hitler’s diatribes against the City of London, the British Empire and the ambitions of the US and post them in the comments section of one or two “alternative” Internet sites I can think of. I suspect it would all be well received.
Of course it’s an escalatory process, at least verbally, so your language has to be as extreme as the next pundit’s or you won’t be taken seriously in the Market. So if the European nations are described as “client-states” over Ukraine by one pundit, somebody has to escalate by calling them “vassals,” and somebody else will christen them “imperial possessions,” and so you have to resort to a term like “puppets.” Of course, neither you or any of the other pundits has any actual experience of the reality of Europe’s relations with the US, but then your objective is not to inform or explain, but to comfort the gut reactions of your readers and to entertain and earn money. We’ve seen the same process of verbal inflation over Gaza, which helps to explain, even if it does not remotely justify, the antipathy of western governments to the related protests, and which has alienated some of those who might otherwise be supporters. But then there is no reverse gear in this kind of polemic. Everything has to be ever more radical.
And it’s a process no-one is really in control of any more. Politicians are delighted that, probably for the first time in history, they can directly reach the mass of voters without passing through the screening mechanism of interviews, and without having to answer boring questions from reporters. At a stroke, the whole complex business I knew of trying to ensure that governments get their message across is subsumed into the ability to send a tweet at any time of the day or night. The problem, of course is that before social media, Ministers would be carefully briefed on what to say and how to avoid making fools of themselves. Now, nothing can stop a Minister or any other politician after a particularly good lunch from firing off some social media message that they regret five minutes later. But who cares? they say to themselves, it will all be forgotten tomorrow.
Hitler himself maintained that the people will sooner believe a big lie than a small one: he would have done well on YouTube, because sweeping explanations are more attractive and easier to assimilate than careful, nuanced ones. (Ironically, Hitler’s example of a Big Lie—that the German Army had been defeated on the battlefield in 1918—was of course actually true, but then that’s how it goes.) Thus, politicians in trouble have always blamed a foreign power for the country’s problems, as Hitler and many others have done, whether it’s the Russians, the US, the French, the Chinese or abstractions like “neo-imperialism” or “international finance.” But why stop there? With a bit of effort, entire paranoid schemes can be contrived, the more sweeping the better. After all, a theory that explains everything is always going to be more attractive than one that explains only a few things. And as with religious doctrine (which is the ultimate intellectual origin of this way of thinking) apparent contradictions can always be resolved at a higher level, with more and more complex explanations involving more and more layers of hypothesis. But if you begin from the emotional conviction that Everything is Connected and This Was All Planned, then all that remains is to contrive an explanation which is as sweeping as possible and involves absolutely everything. And indeed, such explanations have a clear Market advantage, in terms of time needed to absorb them, by comparison with finding out things for yourself, which is difficult.
But suppose you did decide to do so. Let’s assume that you decide to write something about the new government in Syria and the western reaction to it. You’ve never been to the region and don’t speak the language but why should that stop you? Then you start flicking through Wikipedia and already it starts to look complicated. You don’t have time to go into the Ottomans (Ottomans?) and the Mandate period, but it looks like Assad was a pretty nasty piece of work but tolerated by the West because his government was secular, and then this bloke burned himself to death in Tunisia in 2011, forgotten about that, and the West cocked it up badly by supporting Ben Ali for too long, and then when similar demonstrations started in Syria and the regime reacted with extreme violence and Sunni Army units rebelled, didn’t know about that, and then serious fighting started, the West decided that Assad was toast so let’s get involved now so that we can claim credit, and influence a new government in a strategic area, but Assad managed to hang on and the initiative passed into the hands of the jihadists, and the West, now having burned its boats with Assad and desperate to get rid of him started offering arms and training to anyone who opposed him and that turned out to have some nasty repercussions later, this is starting to give me a headache. But where does this Al-Sharaa guy come from? Well, it turns out that it’s more complicated than you thought because he was never part of Al Qaida, which was pretty much in pieces by then and losing support to a younger generation of populists who wanted the Caliphate like now, didn’t know that, and took over parts of Iraq (Iraq?) looting US weapons and vehicles from the Iraqi Army, and expanding into Syria with foreign jihadists, forgotten about those, but then the Russians (Russians?) got involved and stabilised the situation. And then eventually Assad falls, but that also involves the Kurds (who?) and somehow Hezbollah and the Iranians are involved, and my brain hurts. No, there’s a lot more where that came from and I’m just going to blame the CIA for everything instead. It’s easier.
It seems as though we are now trapped in some kind of media-political escalatory process that cannot now be stopped, a train with no brakes going downhill. The political class has given up all pretensions to statesmanship, and is acting in ways that nobody outside can now understand, and perhaps have no rational explanation anyway, without really knowing, or caring what it is doing. This is the end-result of deregulated politics, just as the paranoid theorising, the social media fights and the hysterical escalation of language are symptoms of the deregulation of media and the end of barriers to entry. Every part of this feeds every other part, and I can’t see how this will end, except badly. There is no argument anymore: I don’t know how long it is since people wrote, or spoke, in an attempt to convince and persuade, or even inform. Now, this process of deregulation has reached its inevitable end-state of total fragmentation: tiny groups or politicians or pundits screaming at each other and trying to pummel each other into submission. We are surely approaching some kind of climax, like the end of an Ionesco play or a Feydeau farce, where things just break down completely. We will never get back to the world of The World at One.
As for me, I’m no good at shouting, and I write to try inform and explain, only where I think I might have something to add. I plan to keep doing that next year.
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