By Don Curren
(Originally published in April on Linked-In)
For quite some time now, I’ve been grappling with a
question someone posed to me on Twitter.
If it’s taken a while for me to get my thoughts
organized, I have an excuse – it’s one of the most mportant questions that’s
emerged from the pandemic.
Here it is in the form it was posed to me by a
twitter correspondent of mine with the handle @dougthecoach:
“Why are our governments, who are supposed to
represent our interests, especially in public health, not putting People
First?”
It’s a simple but eloquent formulation of a question
that’s been perplexing people around the world: why did our governments do such
a mediocre job protecting us from COVID-19?
The question referred specifically to provincial
governments in Western Canada, but its relevance is much broader. Governments,
as a whole, have done a remarkably bad job at handling the pandemic.
This is not to say that all nations have done an
equally catastrophic job. Some – New Zealand and South Korea spring to mind –
performed relatively well at periods during the pandemic. Others – the United
States and Brazil, for instance – have handled it in a consistently disastrous
way since the beginning.
Of course, comparing the relative performances of
nation states can be misleading, as it’s not necessarily an apples-to-apples
comparison.
In federal states such as Canada and the U.S., much
of the overall “national” performance is in the hands of the states and
provinces, municipalities, school boards, and, ultimately, businesses and
individuals.
But the same tendency toward mediocrity or worse
that appeared at the national level seems to apply on the subnational level, as
well. Some states, provinces and other jurisdictions have done relatively well
– others, not so much.
On average, governments of all ideological
persuasions around the world have done an unaccountably poor job of protecting
the health and safety of their citizens in what’s arguably been the greatest
global catastrophe since WW II. (As of April 12, the death global death toll
had reached 6,183,583, according to Johns Hopkins University.)
It’s interesting that even some of the governments
which achieved success early on have subsequently tripped up to some degree,
bringing them closer to the mediocre global average.
Trying to identify the causes for this overall
failure isn’t easy. It’s a “multifactorial” phenomenon – one that has a number
of different, inter-related causes. And it reflects tendencies that have been
at play for decades before coming to a head in the failed response to the
COVID-19 crisis.
There are also many different disciplines,
perspectives and approaches that can be used separately, or in a more
integrated fashion to help understand a catastrophe of this magnitude,
including political science, epidemiology, economics, and philosophy.
For that reason, I’m only going to focus on one
aspect of the problem.
It’s the problem of living in what Guy Debord, the
primary theorist of the Situationist movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s, described
as “The Society of the Spectacle” in his book of the same name, published in
1967.
Trying to explain the failure of provincial
politicians in Western Canada to deal with a coronavirus pandemic in 2020-22 by
invoking the sometimes-cryptic manifesto of a defunct artistic and political
movement of 1960s France may seem like a rather large leap.
In the next several hundred words, I’ll try to
bridge that apparent gap.
I’ll begin with a quotation from an opinion piece
that appeared in the Globe and Mail in December.
It was a piece about UK Prime Minister Boris
Johnson and his remarkable ability to survive scandals – specifically the
multiple scandals surrounding a succession of social functions in and around 10
Downing Street that defied the spirit, at the very least, of the COVID
guidelines the UK government had issued to its people.
Johnson’s political resilience is an interesting
and somewhat inexplicable phenomenon. Looked at through the lens of the
conventional wisdom of political science, it would seem the likeliest outcome
of his repeated entanglement in popularity-damaging scandals would be for the
Conservative Party to eject him.
But it hasn’t.
And the reason suggested by Tom Rachman, the author
of the piece, helped to crystallize my thinking on the question posed to me on
Twitter.
“Mr. Johnson is not necessarily finished,” Rachman
presciently wrote. “He rose among a crop of world leaders – men unbound by the
guardrails of dignity or shame – who thrive through their entertainment value.
Donald Trump is another case, albeit more violent and less witty.”
“Whereas Mr. Trump hides ineptitude with
aggression, Mr. Johnson employs a more English dodge. When caught out, he
resorts to the endearing Hugh Grant stammer, musses his hair and rebounds with
a charming quip,” Rachman continued.
It’s an insightful remark.
Johnson and Trump, albeit in very different ways,
were able to achieve their political success through their talent as
entertainers. That same talent enabled them to escape the political
consequences of their misdeeds to a remarkable extent. (Yes, contrary to his
own mendacious claims, Trump did lose the presidential election in 2020, but
his success as politician to that point and his ability to escape the
consequences of his misdeeds is undeniable).
The entertainment-politics nexus is clearer in
Trump’s case than in Johnson’s. Trump literally was an entertainer – a Reality
TV star – immediately before his jump into politics.
His success as a politician derived in large part
from his ability to sell an image of himself to his followers, the image of an
ultra-successful master of the “art of the deal,” and at the same time sell
them on the grotesquely simplified world-view that image presupposes: a view of
the world consisting of a series of divisive, zero-sum confrontations between
deserving “real Americans” and the undeserving hordes who don’t belong to the
tribe.
By selling them a stark, simplistic world view that
exalts them and excludes others, Trump secured the unthinking loyalty of enough
Americans to secure the presidency.
This view of the politician as entertainer may seem
to fit comfortably with Trump and Johnson, but not perhaps quite as comfortably
with the likes of Alberta Premier Jason Kenney and Saskatchewan Premier Scott
Moe.
But I would argue a similar process is at play:
Jason Kenney, for instance, offers a simplistic narrative to Albertans. It
validates them by depicting them as hard-working individuals who secured their
prosperity through their individual toil.
It’s arguably not as toxic as the tribal
narrative offered up by Trump, but it functions in a similar way.
When the pandemic struck, Kenney, like Trump,
offered a response that was consistent with his own master narrative, no matter
how inappropriate it was to a phenomenon like COVID-19: in essence, that
individual responsibility is the key to defeating COVID. Hence Kenney’s
response to the pandemic was to emphasize “individual responsibility” and
eschew government-mandated restrictions and lockdowns.
Not only is political discourse shaped by the
“logic” of entertainment – policymaking as well is driven by the same master
narratives, as well.
One objection to this line of analysis is that
entertainment has always been a component of politics in the democratic era
(and well before.)
Politicians have always co-opted elements of
entertainment and advertising; they’ve been using pithy but almost meaningless
slogans, and carefully orchestrated rallies replete with marching bands, etc.
to appeal to voters’ emotions since the inception of modern democracy.
What’s changed is that, to a much greater degree,
politicians have been captured by the Spectacle. Rather than using the elements
of the Spectacle to secure power and then setting policy on the basis of
something else, be it reasoned analysis or ideology, politicians remain
entertainers when in office, doing and saying things calculated to convey a
message consistent with their master narrative rather than achieve a
substantive result.
Trump was not, of course, the first POTUS to have
his origins in the world of entertainment. Ronald Reagan was famously a
Hollywood actor long before becoming the 40th president of the United States.
But it’s a reflection of how much more dominant and
pervasive the world of entertainment is now then it was in the 1970s and ‘80s
that Reagan acquired political credibility by putting in a long political
apprenticeship – including a stint as governor of California – while Trump
jumped directly into the presidency from his role as a boss of “apprentices” on
a reality-TV show.
(Not that having had a career in entertainment
should disqualify one from political leadership in the genuine sense. The
transformation of former comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy into an authentic and
inspiring leader attests to that.)
The rapid evolution of the technologies that make
the Spectacle possible – at first radio, the movies and television, more
recently the internet and social media, has made the Spectacle that much more
powerful in recent decades.
The immense gains in the power and pervasiveness of
entertainment media as a transmitter of messages from politicians to the public
has been paralleled by commensurate gains in technologies for obtaining
feedback on the effectiveness of those messages in the form of polling.
The development of more powerful, accurate and
frequent public-opinion polling has helped create a powerful feedback process;
politicians whose ultimate objective is to tell their constituencies the
stories that will win their support have ready access to data pointing to what
the winning stories are in the form of high-frequency polling results.
The Spectacle in all its forms is no longer an
instrument that political leadership can employ in achieving its aims – it has
taken the whole process captive. The spectacular (performative) tail is wagging
the substantive dog.
“(The spectacle) is not a supplement to the real
world, an additional decoration,” Guy Debord writes. “It is the heart of the
unrealism of the real society.”
The Spectacle does not consist solely of the media
that envelop us and the messages they deliver. It is also a way of framing the
world, a filter that recasts all of reality in the light of entertainment,
amusement, and appearance.
“Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is the
affirmation … of all human life, namely social life, as mere appearance,”
Debord writes.
In the society of the Spectacle, it’s the
appearance that ultimately matters. That may explain why so much of happens in
contemporary political discourse is performative – why debates about Mr. Potato
Head and Dr. Suess preoccupy so many people.
The appearance of conforming to a particular
narrative seems more important to them than the other more substantive issues
they could be engaged with, because, in the society of the Spectacle,
appearance is what ultimately counts.
“In all its specific forms, as information or
propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle
is the present model of socially dominant life,” Debord writes.
It’s the logic of the Spectacle and the narratives
it embodies that dictate the tone and much of the substance of our public life.
Pandemic policies, for instance, are frequently chosen because they are
consistent with – and reinforce – the chosen narrative of the government in
question rather than their compatibility with reason and reality.
Debord had a somewhat absolutist conception of the
Spectacle; he saw it as exercising an unchallenged hegemony over contemporary
culture. But reality is a little more complicated. The values of the Spectacle
– diversion and affirmation chief among them, confronting reality not so much –
are of course not the only values at play in contemporary society. Reason,
science, ethics, ideology – these also play a role, and frequently jostle with
the values of the spectacle for dominance.
But it’s dangerous to underestimate the power of
the Spectacle, and in many ways it’s considerably more powerful than it was in
Debord’s time.
Technological evolution has provided the Spectacle
with ways of invading and pervading people’s lives than ever before. Debord
acknowledges the importance of what were then referred to as “mass media” in
disseminating the Spectacle, and argues, in a position reminiscent of Marshall
McLuhan, that “this equipment is in no way neutral.”
But the rise of the internet and social media and
the dissemination of computers and mobile phones has made the spectacle more
ubiquitous and powerful than before.
Debord depicts the Spectacle as emerging as a
dominant force in times of abundance, writing that “the root of the spectacle
is within the abundant economy.”
It’s when abundance, broadly defined to include
safety and security as well as material prosperity, is challenged that the
Spectacle begins to run into trouble. That’s when things begin to get real
again, and the Spectacle reveals its weaknesses.
That’s what we’ve witnessed during the pandemic.
When adherents of the simplified narratives that succeed in a world of
abundance and security – Trump and his ilk – run into complex, intractable
realities like pandemics, their shortcomings start to become glaringly clear.
The problem is that the supremacy of the Spectacle
may have done significant damage to society’s capacity to respond to problems
in the real world.
Ever see one of those clips where people wearing
Virtual Reality goggles thrash around clumsily in the real world? They could
serve as a metaphor for what happens when a society that has been taken over by
the Spectacle confronts threats in the real world.
Or maybe “augmented reality” would be a more
accurate metaphor. What we see is a complex interweaving of the real and the
unreal.
We can see the problems hurtling toward us but are
distracted by the illusions interwoven among them and unable to react
intelligently – even if our scientists are able to provide us with effective
solutions, as has been the case in the pandemic.
There’s a mismatch between what we collectively
think the situation is and what is really happening - and we behave as if we
are collectively hypnotized.
As Debord describes it “When the real world changes
into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective
motivations of hypnotic behaviour.”
Of course, Debord hasn’t been the only observer to
try to alert us to the dangers of the Spectacle in the last several decades.
The American writer and social critic James
Baldwin was one of many who have written about the dangers of immersion in an
environment defined by entertainment.
“To watch the TV screen for any length of time is
to learn some really frightening things about the American sense of reality. We
are cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are,”
Baldwin once said.
Baldwin explicitly referred to the damage that can
do to our collective ability to deal with real-life problems.
“These images are designed not to trouble,
but to reassure. They also weaken our inability to deal with the world as it is
— ourselves, as we are,” he said.
Marshall McLuhan, Daniel Boorstin, Neil Postman,
Neal Gabler also pointed to the dangers of the Spectacle. The title of
Postman’s book on the subject, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” has become more
grimly appropriate than ever in the pandemic, when people can pay a fatal price
for taking medical advice from entertainers and podcasters.
And, with predictable irony, the entertainment
industry itself has explored the society of the Spectacle in films such as
Network in 1976, and more recently, this year’s Don’t Look Up.
Whatever weaknesses it may have had as a film,
Don’t Look Up does capture the trivialization that ensues in the wake of the
Spectacle, depicting a world where even a threat to the continued existence of
life on the planet can be reduced to just another meme.
The problem encapsulated in the idea of the
Spectacle is arguably more acute now than it was in the mid to late 20th
century, when the writers referred to above were issuing their warnings.
And that’s for at least three reasons: one is that
new telecommunications technologies have made the Spectacle more powerful.
Another is that the sheer complexity of our
contemporary globalized world means trying to cope with its problems while
besotted with the Spectacle is that much more dangerous.
Thirdly, the nature of the Spectacle itself has
changed. It’s become divisive rather consensus-building.
With the initial emergence of mass media in the
20th century, the Spectacle tended to towards the creation of a consensus
audience. Everyone tended to watch the same shows on the handful of networks,
read broadly similar newspapers and magazine conveying a relatively narrow
range of opinions and perspectives, resulting a kind of consensus.
Now, the opposite is the case. The new purveyors of
the Spectacle, the platforms of social media, are highly effective at driving
us into our own isolated, echo-chamber versions of reality.
We can’t even arrive at a consensus understanding
of what our problems are, much less begin to forge solutions for them.
For all those reasons, the dominance of the
Spectacle, to come full circle, is one of the key causes of governments all
over the world failing to rise to the challenge of protecting their people
effectively from COVID-19.
It’s not the only reason, and it’s closely linked to
some of the others, notably the pervasive scientific illiteracy and the
scarcity of critical thinking that enabled misinformation to become so
prevalent – and so dangerous
Counteracting the effects of the Spectacle –
teaching critical thinking, attaching a higher value to understanding than
diversion – will need to be a priority.
Despite the temptation to burrow even more deeply
into the Spectacle afforded by the accelerating technologies of the
“metaverse,” we need, collectively to take off our metaphorical VR goggles and
re-orient ourselves to the real world, in all its problematic complexity.
We need to be ale to understand reality – what our
real problems are – before we begin to tackle them, particularly as those
problems multiply and intensify into an intimidating array of genuinely
existential threats.
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