Rev Left Radio - American Individualism and the Cultural Maintenance of Capitalism

Episode Date: September 11, 2017

David Bosworth is a professor in, and the former director of, the University of Washington’s Creative Writing Program. His fiction, poetry, and literary and cultural essays have been published in numerous journals. His collection of short fiction, The Death of Descartes, was selected by Robert Penn Warren for the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and won a special citation from PEN and the Ernest Hemingway Foundation. His novel, From My Father, Singing was a recipient of the Editors’ Book Award. Bosworth’s work has been reviewed or discussed in Newsweek, New York Times Book Review, U.S. News and World Report, The Washington Post, The Nation, and elsewhere. He has given readings, lectures, held workshops, and conducted colloquia at various locales, including Harvard University, Pomona College, Boston College, University of Louisville, and the New America Foundation. Brett and David sit down to discuss American Individualism, its philosophical roots, and its cultural manifestations. Topics include: The Enlightenment, American culture, The philosophical and historical roots of Individualism, the connections between individualism and capitalism, Ronald Reagan, Thomas Paine, and how 40 years of capitalist decadence has given rise to Donald "The U.S. Id Monster" Trump. David Bosworth's website, where you can find his books and essays, is here: http://www.davidbosworthauthor.com Our Outro Music is "Precarious Work" by Mohammad Ali which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLB2Y7JAtPE Please support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio and follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio This podcast is officially affiliated with the Nebraska Left Coalition: https://www.facebook.com/TheNebraskaLeftCoalition/ and the Omaha GDC: https://www.facebook.com/OmahaGDC/

Please support my daddy's show by donating a couple bucks to patreon.com forward slash rev left radio. Please follow us on Twitter at Rev. Left Radio. And don't forget to rate and review the Revolutionary Left Radio on iTunes to increase our reach. Workers of the world, unite! We were educated, we've been given a certain set of tools, but then we're throwing right back into the working class. Well, good luck with that, because more and more of us are waking the fuck up. so we have a tendency to what we have, we have earned, right? And what we don't have, we are going to earn.

We unintentionally, I think, oftentimes kind of frame our lives as though we are, you know, the predestined. That people want to be guilt-free. Like, I didn't do it. Like, this is not my fault. And I think that's part of the distancing from, like, people who don't want it to do it. Because that's always how our imperial war machine

justifies itself. It's always under the context of liberating the Libyan people, liberating the Iraqi people. The U.S. Empire doesn't give a fuck about anybody except the U.S. Empire and its interest. According to the legend, Sterner actually died due to a beastie. So the ultimate individualist was actually killed by the ultimate collectivist. Both sides are responsible for the violence. What the fuck are you talking about, dude? Are you kidding me?

there's one side inciting fascist violence. The other side saying give us free health care. Welcome everybody to Revolutionary Left Radio. I am your host, Ann Comrade, Brett O'Shea. And today we have David Bosworth on the show to discuss individualism in American culture. David, would you like to introduce yourself and say a little bit about your background? Okay, so I was raised in the Northeast. My parents were a World War II generation and pretty dramatically impacted by that war. When I was seven years old, I'd moved six times primarily because of the two wars that went on during that period, which were World War II and the Korean War. After, it's pretty, my mother's brother was killed in World War II, my father, his only brother, as a matter of fact, and my father was a scout during the Battle of the Bulge, and it's clear to me in retrospect, though they didn't have the terms then. he had some form of post-traumatic stress effect from that war though he kind of master

masterly disguised it or contained it in our lives um so anyway that we uh after raising being raised in the northeast and going to college i did not go to graduate school which is why i don't have a doctor or appended on my name i uh i um again was having to deal with another war which was the vietnam war taught seventh grade for a year which happened to be a draft of firm and And then the next 12 years or 13 years did blue collar work to support my writing habit. The first two years of that, I was working in a factory, small artsy-craftsy factory, but nevertheless a factory. And from that, I had a particularly strong impact, I think, of my thinking, because I had a personal sense of a sort of dehumanizing nature of the industrial project.

It may be efficient and productive, but it's also dehumanizing to the workers. and I certainly experienced that, even in that small factory that I worked in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And after that, for 10 years, I was the super of a superintendent, otherwise glorified janitor of a 36-unit apartment house. All this was to support my writing habit, and I had some success for that, and one day went from being the super of an apartment complex to being a professor at the University of Maine, and then subsequently the next year at the University of Washington, Seattle, where I've been ever since teaching in a public university. My intellectual profile is that my first love was literature, my first publications were all in fiction.

My last two books, though, and the reason why I'm sure I'm being interviewed here, focused on cultural change in America, even as those books do draw on the deep repository of emotional and psychological and allegorical wisdom to be found in novel stories, plays, and poems. So that's a very brief sort of biography, but it does sort of give some sense or maybe frame where my opinions are coming from. Yeah, absolutely. And I think the fusion of sort of cultural analysis and your literary background is really interesting and important and it makes you stand out for that reason. But before we get into the questions, do you might want to touch on what your political orientation is or how you think of yourself politically, just so people know where you're coming from on this? Yeah, I've always considered myself an independent, never belonged to either political party.

Certainly, in this day and age, I've been probably best described as an anti-Republican since the Republican Party has turned completely toxic, as composed of Democratic Party, which is only partially toxic. But that's where I placed myself. I try and especially in these two books, I'm trying to take a deeper look at where we are in the historical moment. And I can't say that's a neutral point of view. I'm not sure anyone ever has a neutral point of view. But I'm trying to get that distance on where we are, because I feel like we're in the middle of a apical E-P-O-C-H-A-L transition and consciousness and culture right now.

And I'm trying to get a hold of where we are and what we might do. All right. Well, let's go ahead and dive right into the questions then. Starting off, we're going to really dive into individualism and modernity. So what are the philosophical and historical, roots of individualism and how has individualism been brought into the founding ideas of the United States? This may be a long answer, but I think it needs to be.

Usually when I introduce this topic and try to talk about it, I begin with a joke by Lily Tomlin. And the joke goes, it's pretty serious joke, actually, a very profound joke. It goes, we're all in this together by ourselves. The by ourselves is a punchline there, of course. But that gets the human nature is not in a fixed state necessarily. necessarily, but it's variable within limits. And one of those key limits, one of those key variables is in any cultural expression

of who we are, the degree to which as society stresses either our social nature, the fact that we depend on and interact with people at all times, or our individualistic nature, we have bodies, we're embodied, we have individual appetites, self-centered needs, et cetera. looking over the vast scope of human history and prehistory really i should say the stress was almost always on sociability on the human enterprises you know primarily a familial or tribal a person being a part of rather than apart from his or her social group individualism as we know it didn't really begin as far as we can tell until uh didn't appear on the scene until ancient greeks and that was largely at least in my opinion a number of

or other people's opinions, was part was due to the invention of literacy in the phonetic alphabet. The phonetic alphabet, I won't go into the details about it, but what I did allow was for a much higher percentage of the population to learn to read and to do so at a much earlier age, so it had an impact on the literal development of individuals. There are many, many, many unanticipated after effects of psychbohsychological, aesthetic, political to the invention of the alphabet. There always are with major technical innovations,

especially ones that are a primary means of transmitting knowledge, and that's something we need to acknowledge right now when we're going through a similar and equally disruptive set of innovations. But the primary point is this. Western philosophy and democracy, including its emphasis on individualism, are literally unthinkable prior to the arrival of alphabetic literacy. The origins of modern individualism,

The origin of it is rooted in the model of the silent reader. If you can picture that alone, or you know from your own experience, alone in a room, withdrawn from social company, the privacy and authority and dignity of one person controlling the pace and evaluating the worth of anything, any book or pamphlets, say, or novel or poem. And this is just very important, too, talking back without fear of censure. When information was exchanged in public, you always had to worry about someone's response, so there's a political impact of literacy, too.

In other words, it is conducive to revolt or to talking back to an authoritative source because you're by yourself and do not have to suffer the consequences. So that's the sort of deeper historical point of the original origins, I think, of individualism, and that goes back to communications theory for people who want to sort of trace that and read more about it. That's not to say that technologies like the alphabet are absolutely determined, I think, you know, what a particular society is going to be like, but they do interact with previous historical conditions and can, you know, have impacts on the society where they arrive in the societies themselves will change to some degree depending on those technologies.

Now, jumping ahead to what I think is your primary interest here is American individualism. That was the culmination in part of the right. radical revival literacy in Europe through the invention of print. Obviously, that democratized literacy and did it so quite rapidly. I think the cultural implications are most revealing with that were expressed during the Protestant Reformation. It aimed to eliminate all the ecclesiastical intermediaries of the Catholic Church to establish a one-on-one relationship between the single souls, supposedly, and God. The basic premises of liberal, modernity, and democracy, I think, are present there in that early restructuring of church authority.

You could say that the original revolt against and the separation from the Roman Pope preceded and predicted the eventual revolt in separation from the English king. It's the idea of establishing the individual as the primary unit of the social enterprise. It's a pretty radical idea. absolutely and when you talk about individualism being tied to the invention of written language I'm a philosophy major and I go back to Descartes and he's called the you know the father of modern philosophy and his big greatest work was literally him sitting by himself in a room in front of a fireplace questioning what he knows and what he doesn't know and kind of deconstructing his own psyche so that's kind of like the picturesque notion of individualism right well he was I mean

He's the exact, and to go further on Descartes, he was one of my arch exemplars of the modern era. It's a very apt question you have there. He also believed that he could solve all of reality's problems on his own, separate from tradition or current public opinion, which is, you know, an amazingly arrogant. But it does stress the idea that the individual was sufficient in and of himself and doesn't need either the historical past or the social present to aid him in all of his investigations. And the founding fathers really came out of the Enlightenment and were heavily influenced by thinkers like Descartes, is that correct?

That's absolutely correct, for certain, yeah. One of the reasons why America has so stressed individualism because the unique circumstances really of the settlement here. It's distance from Europe and from immediate monarchical rule. It's early population. I mentioned the Protestantism before because I think they were the first signs of what about individualism and modernity were going to be. And in America, the early population was radical Protestants who were bent on separation

from the church, but also from the state. It had a relatively high rate of literacy, so the impact, some people have claimed that, in fact, was the most literate society in the 17th century, 8th, 17th and 18th centuries. I don't know if that's provable in any kind of way. But anyway, the impact of literacy that I mentioned before was very high here. Also, the abundance of open land on the frontier, all those things sort of encouraged independent self-conception, you know, the idea of on your own. And not just that, also the period economically at that time, and you have to say,

with the egregious exception of slavery, a phrase you can use time and time again when you're talking about the American experience and an expression of American culture. With the egregious exception of slavery, the prevailing colonial economy at that time was dominated by small farmers, craftsmen, shopkeepers, and the like, fishermen. These were people who were sort of economically independent.

So one of my key points in doing this analysis This has been the recognition that political stances and theories tend to be reactionary in a little sense. I'm not talking about reactionary, you know, and a particular political party, but that they are belated responses to significant changes in social circumstances. So before individualism and individual rights were theorizing the political documents in America, which gets back to your question, they were experienced firsthand by average people in their everyday lives in the unique circumstances of the American settlement. Another way of saying that might be people in the colonies were proto-democrats in everyday practice

before they recognize that in their codified beliefs. In traditional times, transitional times like that, there's always a growing, you know, discrepancy between what a people think they believe and what they actually believe, I mean, by how that's evidence in their pattern of their everyday actions. That's important for us to get to probably later on and what's going on now. But at a certain point, Americans were acting as if they were individualistic and democratic, but they didn't have those beliefs. And the revolution was that point, that pivot point, that sort of tipping point,

where there was a sudden recognition of that they were, in fact, democratic citizens or independent citizens or conceived in themselves as such rather than royal subjects. Have you read common sense recently or ever? Yeah, I think Thomas Payne is actually, I think, one of america's first revolutionaries first real radicals but absolutely yeah i i think you're right to and i i hadn't read it embarrassingly for you know well into my adult life and i happened to be looking for it founded on a miraculously in a secondhand bookshop and the oregon coast and read it and what it is is an incredible relentless attack on the concept of the

monarchy and in particular on the history of the english monarchy um it was its whole purpose is political propaganda, and it's probably the most effective piece of propaganda in history. It's certainly what I know of, because it had an amazingly dramatic and rapid impact on the American public, but what it was aiming to do

was sever the emotional affiliation that people might feel towards the monarchy. The kind of thing you still see ironically and kind of ludicrously in England, you know, with her affection for the queen and the queen's family and the royal family. And it really ripped that apart. And once people

that that pamphlets spread like wildfire through the colonies. And once it did, I think what happened was Americans realized who they really were at heart and had been for a while. That is, they concede themselves as independent and not as independent citizens more than they did royal subjects. Absolutely. And I also would recommend agrarian justice. It's a much shorter piece, a much less well-known piece by Thomas Payne.

But in it, he really lays out this idea of like a social safety net. And this is in the 1700s. He's laying out this wealth redistributive system where we take care of workers, and we take care of young and old people, and it was so ahead of its time. It really went, it really kind of went unnoticed those aspects of it at the time.

But when you read it in the 21st century, it's like, wow, he was a century ahead of his time. Right. He sort of lost, I mean, he was discredited in the way, and unfortunately, I think, you know, after the revolution actually occurred, when his importance to the, success of the revolution was paramount, in my opinion, from, you know, at least from my reading. Yeah, I think towards the end of his life, he lost favor with a lot of the founding fathers,

and, you know, they had spats, and they referred to him as a dirty atheist, and after the American Revolution, he actually went to France to help them with theirs, and criticized the reign of terror. He was in prison there at some point? He started criticizing the excesses of the reign of terror, and he got locked up and was slated to die, but because of a mistake. stake on the markings of his prison sale, he escaped. But he came back to America with no friends and there's only six people ended up at his funeral. And I think three of them were

African-American. So that showed how his end. Yeah. But anyway, that's all very interesting. I encourage listeners to go down that rabbit hole if they have time. But so moving with this notion of individualism and this building up of capitalism around the same time, what role does this focus on individualism, play and maintaining capitalism, in your opinion? Yeah, this can be an extensive answer, too. So let me start out by saying initially, I think the new economic order, which became capitalism, when it was freeing itself from monarchical rule in the 18th and even in the early 19th centuries, because the sort of economic apparatus and cultural and traditional apparatus

was still in place, there was a direct link between the notion of individual, the experience of individualism as people were doing it and the idea some of the ideas of capitalism that was the phase when there still were many small farmers craftsmen and shopkeepers independent economic actors as it were the ones that the sort of people that the economy keeps to like to idealize and fantasize about there actually were a high percentage of those back in those early days many people working for themselves they were relatively independent they had only a few or no employees but by the mid-19th century and after the civil Civil War especially, the frontier closed, so there was no independent settlement anymore,

and industrialization has started to occur by large corporations, and Democratic governance was being undermined by the dawning oligarchy of corporate money, which happened really rapidly after the Civil War. Capitalism undermined the conditions to make effective form, and make any effective form of individualism actually feasible. There are two phases to this just very simply stated and could go into a lot of detail about both of them. But the first phase is perhaps the most obvious one, and that was conversion of the independent worker into the wage employee in large factories or offices, with its day-to-day sort of a disempowerment of the workplace. That whole idea that you're an independent person with your own making decisions on your farm

or in your craftsman shop or your store, that goes out the window. And, you know, so replacing the ecclesiastical authorities in the church, which is an ideal ability of Protestants. Now you have them reinstated as your factory boss and the bureaucracies and large organizations. So that's the first phase of undermining sort of the notion, the practical reality of the independent worker as, in fact, an individualist.

But later then in the early 20th century, And this does not get remarked on quite so much, though to me it's very, very significant and important, with the co-opting of the new electronic mass media, beginning with radio, then TV, and now, of course, the Internet, and the corporate promotion of consumption through relentlessly invasive advertising. Through that, individualism, which we defined

and corrupted into the pathetic belief that who I am is, you know, what I buy, freedom lost in the workplace, but it's supposedly gained, you know, in our private lives. And there's a reason behind that, obviously, corporate America, in order to continue to make profits, it's sort of run out, done all it could do as far as major manufacturers, steel, coal, trains, the stuff that sort of occupied the big capitalist in the 19th century. So they needed a new place to go, and that was consumption.

and by doing that, they became, if you think, authoritarian regimes usually control, will not usually, almost always, control the means of communication. If you think in America, who controls the means of communication ever since the early 20th century, especially starting with the electronic media, and that's corporate consumerism. Three of the most insidious words are two of them sponsored by. You know, all the programming is sponsored by advertising, consumer advertising. So those are two phases. First, taking the independent worker out, eliminating the independent worker

and bringing him into or hurry into the factory or large office. And then the redirection of intention of individual achievement and ambition towards consumption, two aspects of capitalism's sort of attack on the end. idea of independence. That's all that said. You know, it's rolling and eviscerating the actual grounds for individualism hasn't stopped it from hijacking the symbols and myths of democratic independence. This is one of the more remarkable stories.

Reagan, so, remember Ronald Reagan, of course, his so-called role of a lifetime presidency was actually that role. I don't know if you remember, but he ran for president his official campaign. uh... poster we had him in a cowboy had a white cowboy had of course he was good guys uh... but he so he had this pose we had this pose of rugged individualism that was uh... promulgated by popular culture it supposedly supported the average guy but it concealed the course his actual

administration which uh... enhanced the corporate takeover and disenfranchised workers left and right throughout the american economy you can say the same thing for pseudo patriotic disney uh... they're copying of the traditional fairy tale and amusement park i have a whole chapter on my book demise of virtue and virtual america uh... which i published in two thousand fourteen on on disney

uh... and if we get i don't do this now but later i can tell you the story of the origins of disney world because it's kind of allegory about the dangers of privatization but for now i'll just quote you know the the the uh... the first lyrics of the song for pinocchio which is the virtual disney anthem when you wish you upon a star makes no difference who you are everything your heart desires will come to you well that's uh that's just a fantasy it's the it's the admin's delight the ad man's perpetual pitch

the idea that if you wish for something it's going to come to you um all their so-called celebrations of individualism are actually mass de masculations of the you know of the realism that's necessary for a mature individualism so those are a couple examples just a couple examples of how, despite undermining the actual grounds of independence for workers and citizens, capitalism has continued to exploit it, and there are more, actually, I should mention some more. They continue to try to equate the entrepreneur, their entrepreneur, whose actual primary goal is self-interested profit, with a lonesome hero of American mythology, that part that Reagan was trying to play or symbolize.

But that's an highly idealized hero, the lonesome hero. But his point is that the lonesome hero rescues the community when it's in danger. He isn't self-interested the way the entrepreneur is. But they continue to equate the entrepreneur with that lonesome hero. And a similar kind of thing is they, you know, throughout the 80s, and this is the result of Reaganism and what's followed, they continue to shed the rights and privileges that have been gained from employees slowly over the years, primarily by unions and some government regulations, and they offer instead what they call freelance work,

touting their supposed independence. You know Thomas Frank's work, his book, One Market Under God, it's truly terrific on that, how by disenfranchising and actually laying off employees, they were given this story how they could be their own free agents, they could act on their own. Now, it's really the same scam as being placed on digital steroids with the rapid arrival of the so-called gig economy, which I think is probably a disaster for the American worker, but it's still in its earliest phases. Another way the corporations, the capital world, the corporate world exploits individualism, even as it undermined the necessary condition to actually have an effective individualism,

is the Supreme Court's most outrageous decision, or one of its most outrageous decisions. It's a mega corporation, it has the constitutional rights that it is an individual, so it borrows on that, on our Declaration of Rights, really, it's sort of a parasitical claim on that. And finally, I think when things go wrong, like, for example, when corporations devastate whole communities

by sending their manufacturing overseas, they can deny responsibility for, you know, all the social pathologies that are likely to follow, and they're relying on the old, you know, ethos of individual accountability. People are supposed to pull themselves up by their so-called bootstraps, or as Reagan used to say, the unemployed should vote with their feet, that is to say, desert their communities. The basic fact to emphasize, though, I think here is that corporate American continues to exploit the language logic and the symbols, too, of democratic individualism,

while destroying the actual social, economic, and psychological predicates that make it possible. Yeah, perfectly said, I totally agree with that. And I think that there's some weird manifestations lately. I don't know, it was like 10 years ago. Oprah was a big fan of this book, but it was called The Secret. And it's this new agey sort of hippie idea that if you just think positive thoughts, that good things will come to you. And that's sort of a manifestation of that Disney-esque thing you were talking about in your answer,

about this sort of mythical idealism that people can just subscribe to and make their world a better place. Yeah, I was thinking Michael Moore's first documentary about his hometown there when it was devastated by the collapse of the flight of all automobile manufacturing, and the people would come around and try to cheer them up as if, and they, you know, all they have to do is magically, you know, pull themselves up by their bootstraps and their lives would be put that together again. That's simply obviously not the case. Absolutely. So what are some of the, you touched on this a little bit in your answer, but what are some of the pathologies, both individually and culturally, that arise in a society like ours, which is so dedicated to individualism, or at least the mythology of individualism. Right. Yeah. Well, you know, just all, this is probably an obvious point, but you need to state it. Unchecked, individualism is inherently a threat to any social order. If individuals have no allegiance to anything other than their own self-interest, anarchy is going to quickly.

follow. That's really very evident to go back to the origins of modernity in the early 17th century, which is a key period. I can't emphasize this enough. It's so worth going back there because we can study a period in which there was a real flip in the consciousness and culture of the West, and that's the modern era, primarily due to print literacy. But in case, the dangers of individuals are very evident at the beginning of that period in the early 17th century, when the early emergence of literate individualism was helping to tear apart, really, the remnants of what was left of the medieval social order. John Donn, skips my literary background.

There's a line from one of his poems, Tizz all in pieces, all coherence gone, all just supply, and all relation. He feels at that time in the early 17th century, and he was a contemporary of Shakespeare's, that the whole world is being atomized and falling apart and chaotic. More revealing, still is Shakespeare himself, I think, if you turn to the histories and the tragedies especially, which were, as I said, done in Shakespeare, are actual contemporaries.

And especially take a look at the Machiavellian villains who drive most of the action in those histories and tragedies. They are supremely intelligent, but also utterly self-centered and secretive. They're what we would call today sociopaths, and they tear apart the ruling social order. At the end of Act 5, the stages, littered with corpses. They are disaster, and yet they're appealing and intelligent in a certain

kind of way. They're very powerful figures, but they're completely destructive to the social order. The message here, I think, at least the message I take, my interpretation of this is that before a new literacy-empowered individualism, and those Machiavellian villains, they're smarter than everybody else in the stage there, too, so they're very intelligent. But before that kind of literary empowered intelligence can be licensed by society. It had to be domesticated or civilized or moralized in some way. It had to be infused with a voice of conscience. The root of that word, conscious, conscience.

Khan means together, science is to know. So together, that means knowing together. That's crucial, really, to my whole overall argument about what's happened in the past with modernity and what's happening now with post-modernity, to let the individual go free in the 17th and 18th and 19th centuries, as a word, to let him go free. It was necessary, if you weren't going to have the impact that Shakespeare dramatized, it was necessary for him, that individualist, to hear the voice of the communal togetherness in its ongoing needs as he was going about his business. And then I'm going to get back to the Protestant revolt again or Reformation, because

this is precisely what you see happening in that same error. with those radical Protestants. If you read the spiritual diaries, and personal diaries are a new artifact arising out of the spread of literacy. If you read them, you're struck by the almost comical hyperbole of their sense of sinfulness.

A good example, that would be John Bunyan's grace abounding to the chief of sinners. He's both best known for Pilgrim's Progress, but that's actually a more interesting read and more revealing read from my point of view. Anyway, this was, as comical as it seems today, with a necessary phase, a crude necessary phase, and sort of moralizing the individual

before could allow the individuals to gain some power in the social world. Later in America, the myth of the lonesome hero was doing the same kind of psychological and ethical work, it's a Protestant Reformation, but in a secular manner. It was endorsing, you know, you think of Natty Bumpo from those early novels and the Western hero, He's endorsing a hero who often lives by himself and often lives out in the wilderness and is totally self-reliant, but would always come to the aid of the community when they were in trouble. They'd save the day and then right away, right out of town like the Lone Ranger. So the importance for individuals and in order for individualism to work at all,

it needed to have that voice of conscience, that commitment to the community, even when apart or separate. That said, those social solutions of a sort to try to domesticate or civilize or moralize individualism, it's always a risk. And it always was threatened, individuals was always threatened with a sense of alienation and estrangement, a sense of social and existential loneliness. There's always a danger there of that when you have a society that stresses individualism. And you think we see that in some of these, like you can see it in sort of like, you can see it in sort of like, this white supremacist movement, this sort of alienation that gives rise to this desperate need for community, and so they're attracted to this horrible ideology, but it's like, you know,

in lieu of anything else, it's better than nothing. And I also... Yeah, I definitely think that's partially what's going on there is the attraction to belong into a group if you feel you want to belong. People need to belong. So getting back to Lily Tomlin's joke, which I started, we're all in this together by ourselves. We do need that togetherness. If people don't have it, they will seek it.

If they seek it, they're not necessarily... Togetherness is not in itself a good thing. Just as there's destructive individuals, and there's destructive togetherness, and obviously the white supremacist group would be a perfect example of destructive togetherness, or gangs, urban gangs and cities, those teenage boys, and now teenage girls as well, they're desperate for some sense of belonging, but in their deracinated communities with no work and families destroyed,

they turn to what they can get, a sense of belonging. It's almost a military belonging in all cases. White supremacists, they're very militaristic, and really the gangs are, too. ISIS is another example. That sense of being a part of a group

is to the human enterprise. Absolutely. I said ISIS would be another example of that. The picking off of Westerners and Western societies to go and fight for ISIS would be another example. of that alienation giving rise to to sort of pathological behavior. Yeah, I think they share that. They definitely share that. I think ISIS may be a little

bit different than the profile of the ISIS supporter is different. I mean, it's sheer overlaps in ways you were just pointing out. I think that's an excellent point you just made. But I think there are also some differences that ISIS supporters tend to be second-generation immigrants, especially this is more true in Europe than it's been in America because they haven't in that many cases in america uh... but i think they're there they're they're caught between cultural identities not just isolation they're they're they're caught between two identities they're perhaps their parents or grandparents old sense of what culture should be

in the american scene and uh... they're desperate for some kind of solution they don't and they and they end up uh... being attracted to the most extreme group is possible uh... i'd be honest with you though i'm much more worried about white supremacy in america especially with the Trump presidency, endorsing it, than I am about ISIS in America. Oh, absolutely, yeah, I share that 110%.

I just want to say, real quick, before we move on, you mentioned the contemporary of Shakespeare, John, will you say John Dunn? John Don, yeah. Wasn't he the poet who wrote for whom the bell tolls? Yes, exactly right. And he says, whenever any man dies, you know, I die, and it's sort of that collectivist community center to that poem, which I love. Yeah, he was a conservative for the day, and his conservation was based on this fear of anarchy and the atomization of the whole social project. And that beautiful meditation by his is a reminder that we do belong to each other.

It's a reminder of togetherness, the innate necessity of togetherness. So that was a huge issue for him. And you mentioned this notion of modernity. And you've, in previous interviews, you've said the most, you've described the United States as the most modern society on earth. What is modernity, and why is the United States the most modern society on earth? Well, I'll start with a second, answer the second question for why it is, and that gets back to some of my earlier comments. The Anglo-American settlers, when they arrived here, they arrived in a land without conservative and medial. and institutions in place, whereas the same people in Europe had to fight those institutions

and traditions. And in fact, many of them came to America precisely to escape those institutions. Consequently, modernity could take hold here much faster and more completely than it could in Europe. That meant an emphasis on not only an individualism in the church, but in the economy and eventually in politics, leading to... the first successful democratic revolution. It also, to get to some of the qualities or beliefs or biases of modern thinking,

a faith in the new rationalism, you mentioned this before, that the rationalism that would lead to modern science, Tocqueville made the observation that we mentioned Descartes before. He said that Americans were Cartesians without reading him. This is really a funny line. But very, very, very, very observant. uh... and that that belief that that faith in rationalism to lie with the belief that rational thought could provide a practical and even final

solutions to every human problem that is to what we now call american how to and can do every problem can be solved practically speaking and also modernity also involves a little kind of linear and progressive thinking the utopian notion that through successive rational solutions of the Cartesian sort life would get better and better uh... modernity is characterized

by individualism, I would say, in the social scene, by atomism, in the field of physics and science, and by specialization, more generally, as the best approach to studying the world or solving its social problems. You see, they're all sort of a metaphorical analog, the atom, the individual specialization. So modern thought tends to be believed in technical rather than ethical or spiritual or political solutions to the human predicament, hence Silicon Valley and my own hometown here now, Seattle and all the technophiles who we give so much authority to. And neoliberal technocrats in Washington.

Absolutely. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, speaking about one reason why the, but there are many reasons why the Democrats lost the presidential election. It was their technocratic, ever since the Clintons more or less converted the party in that direction, it's just simply not a solution that people are recognizing or one they no

longer believe in in the way they did in the past. So, transitioning off this question of modernity, this is something that, this is a word that's used a lot, but I think very few people understand it, and that is postmodernism? So in relation to modernity, what is postmodernity, and what challenges does that pose for a society, you know, kind of in the middle of the tension between the two? Yeah, it's a very good point about the term. You're stuck with the terms that people use, and I make a, in my second book, that's a result that involves analyzing cultural change. This is a big issue in there. And I make a point of even spelling post-modernity different than post-modernism. The post-modern work in art and humanities,

which caused a lot of controversy during the culture wars, is usually not hyphenated. And I use it first. It's just a literal thing, post-modernity, meaning after modernity. We're now an historical era in which we're passing modernity. We don't really know what it is yet. and we need to discover what it is yet, and furthermore, we need to somehow civilize and domesticate what it's going to be, because it's likely to be ugly in the beginning, witness the white supremacists that are now parading around Charlottesville and other towns in America.

In brief, I guess you could say that postmodern biases reverse, many of the ones I just listed, the preferred approaches from the modern mind, rather than togetherness, togetherness rather than a partnerness or by oneselfness. And so socialism or tribalism, and again, I'm just using those words, not to identify them with a particular party, but just to say the idea of a social group over individualism. And as far as the, even in the physical world, scientists are no longer so interested or no longer have faith

that just by the reductionism of studying the smallest part, that is atomism is the best way to understand the world. Instead, they're more interested in the whole field of interactive effects. And as far as approaching study, multidisciplinary work is now preferred over specialization. Rather than final perfection, the idea of a utopian end, there's more of a sense of a constant interaction and constant changing. Think about Wikipedia, how it's constructed, and how the entries can be edited constantly. That's just one example of the kinds of changes that are going on in this post-modern environment. It's being driven by our digital technologies, I think primarily as they transform the way we communicate in our everyday lives

and the way we experience our everyday lives. The central problem we face now is that our cultural beliefs are still modern. What we think we believe is still modern, if you go back to that example I gave in the revolutionary era, where when many citizens still thought they, many Americans still thought they were royal subjects and didn't know quite yet that they were actually behaving more like independent citizens, we're sort of in that phase right now in which we still believe in modernity, and yet we're not behaving as if we believe in modernity. And that's not being changed by outsiders.

That's the scapegoating technique to blame it on, you know, Mexican immigrants, or China or somebody else, that's being, it's being driven by our own inventions, by the ones we use every day, our digital technologies primarily. And just to add a real warning, and that's just as the new individualism

was dangerous in ways I was talking about the Machiavellian villains, and it was very dangerous at the start and had to be civilized in some way, I think so too with a new tribalism, the new social grouping, the new socialism. And that, again, gets back to the white supremacist, and a lot of the ugliest versions of togetherness that we're now seeing arise in our particular period. Absolutely, yeah.

And I think your point about there being dangerous forms of individualism and good forms and the dangerous forms of collectivism and healthy forms is extremely important for us to remember going forward because these aren't black and white issues. You can't just say, I dismiss individualism in favor of collectivism or vice versa. There's way too much nuance and complexity there that we have to rest. with if we're really going to come to an understanding of what these terms means and the different manifestations that they can take. Yeah, very well said. I mean, and I think, you know, getting back to Tomlin's joke again, we are both. We are both social creatures and then we are somewhat individual, and any civilized social order needs to have somehow, even if it emphasizes one, it needs to recognize and protect that other dimension of our existence in some way and some form.

And I think history is rife with examples of societies going too far. far in one direction and the other and i think a right of the united states in twenty first century has gone way too far in the individual's direction in that unhealthy individualism that you know corporate america feeds off of right it but you know here's a little me when we bring up a new idea and see what you whether you agree with this or not but here's the fact

corporations are collectives they're just i define the corporation the contemporary corporation is a machiavellian collective in other words it's all the power of togetherness but it has it's directed black all of John Dunn's moral sympathies and empathies. It has one purpose that's to make profit for itself.

And it's got all the power, a lot of the power of togetherness, but it does not, it practices it in ways that are detrimental to the social good. So for me, I think individuals are actually in decline now. We're in a decadent face of individualism.

And what's really going on is a kind of collectivism, but most of the collectivism we're seeing initially, lot of it, not all of it, is very ugly. And we have the established collectivism of the corporation, which is really a lot of people brought together

but brought together and very specialized to get back to my idea that one of the key aspects of modernity is specialization. Well, it's a collective, but it's a specialized collective. It's made by people who've invested money to make profit. And somehow, I mean, one

of the key political things that needs to be done is corporations need to be somehow moralized and domesticated. I don't have an agenda for that, but I don't see any positive outcome until that takes place, because right now they hold most of the, too much of the political power. Yeah, and insofar as corporations are collectives, they're like, as you hinted at this, they're like vampiric, amoral collectives, you know, just out to make a book. Exactly.

So what are the alternatives to the hyper unhealthy individualism that we see today? Like, what could a society look like, in your opinion, if we really embraced a sort healthy collective alternative to an unhealthy individualism or put another way, what would it look like if we had a healthy balance of healthy individualism and healthy collectivism? Like, what could we accomplish if we tried to? Well, you know, that would be the goal. And I can't, you know, I have to have some I have to express and admit and confess some modesty here. I'm not sure if I understand what it will be like and give you some little glimpses of signs. I don't believe these are even

remotely close to formula for total success, but even if you look at something like Wikipedia in which people have invested their time and money and used the technology to create a public good, a public resource. It's philanthropy understood not as money, just people will have made a lot of money sort of using the buy off their guilt to do something and control it themselves. It's the philanthropy of actions actually committing to doing something for the social good. So there's a way in which digital technologies can do that. There's something called the Sentinel Project.

I think I got the right name of that. I may be wrong about that, but it's Harvard, Google, and even some celebrities have donated some money. And what they do is they try to use satellites, rent satellite time, to keep track on potential genocidal actions around the world. In other words, they try to make in real time. And what normally would be concealed and hidden, they try to make evident and out, as it were.

So there's an example where a combination of peoples and institutions using digital technology. Also, you know, there are a number of NGOs that have developed to respond quickly to natural catastrophes. Some of them are talking to you, we have one going on in the Caribbean right now. So those would be some examples of kinds of things you can do. If there's a principle involved, let me get back to the John Dunn, the ethos of John Dunn, it's collective action, it's based on affiliation, loving human beings, rather than accumulation, just acquiring money, somehow infusing the collectives with a conscience in the same way that individualism had to be infused with a conscience in order to amend its behavior.

That said, and I have to say this, no one in the early 17th century understood what institutions, art forms, mythologies were going to be required to civilize the modern order. No one really, not even Shakespeare, but I consider one of the most brilliant and brilliant, not just in the abstract sense, but in the emotional and psychological sense. No one really understood. Prior to the 17th century, one of the primary art forms of the morality play after it was the privately read realistic novel. Before you had an economy that was run from the top down by the king, and afterwards you eventually developed us an economy of private licensing and laws, et cetera. All those institutions need to be made. but they need to be made in ways that reform and revise our innate inclination now being enhanced by our technologies to social togetherness. Yeah, and I think in the same way that in the 17th and 18th century, when people were entering this new era, there was a lot of optimism, there was a lot of fear,

there was a lot of reaction to progress, and as you say, nobody really knew what forms it would take. So the best thing, I think we're in a similar position now. We're at a crossroads, another crossroads, perhaps the biggest crossroads of our species in all of human history. And we have ideas. We're grasping in the dark for alternatives, but we really don't know. And it would do us well to have a little bit of intellectual humility when it comes to trying to move forward, knowing that we don't know what's going to happen. But then again, these issues of climate change and failing economies around the world,

it's going to create more of a speeded-up, like, hyper-desperate situation. No, yeah, definitely will. There's going to be conflict over water. There's going to be conflict over, and if societies fall apart, there'll be many more, I think, immigration crises. Oh, yes. That's huge. And we see with the Syrian Civil War and some of the refugees spilling from the Middle East

into Europe, how that gives rise to fascism, to the far right. And imagine, imagine, imagine, you know, 10 times that, after a climate change disaster wipes out an entire coastal region and people flood into different countries, that sort of tension is going to become the norm, I think, and that's scary. It is scary, and one thing to make it even scarier is using historical example, the early 17th century, was rife with religious warfare. In that case, we need to be reminded as we are hypercritical of Islamic countries.

In that case, it was Protestants and Catholics slaughtering each other with unrepentant zeal. You know, these kinds of transitional times are extremely dangerous, I feel, because the internal contradictions that we all feel tend to get projected into scapegoating and otherness. We attract the alien instead of dealing with a problem. What my mission in life at this phase in my life, really,

is try to announce that, you know, to try to show what the problems are to sort of maybe alleviate the temptation to some degree at least to try to scapegoat other groups and people and recognize that we're actually generating the change ourselves it's not being imposed upon us by alien forces the things that are driving change in the world are internal and especially the internal to America definitely definitely all right so we're reaching up on an hour I've had a blast having a conversation with you. One more question for you, because I thought this was extremely interesting. In a previous interview, you've called Trump our id monster, which I just

laughed out loud when I heard that. But you argue that he's the result of, you know, 40 to 50 years of decadence. Can you just elaborate on that idea and lay out kind of how Donald Trump is a manifestation of the worst parts of our culture? Yeah. To me, this is a very revealing thing. Actually, when I was writing the demise of virtue and virtual America, I booked him to our published in 2014 and actually been working on for a long time. It's not as if I predicted him, but

it is in the sense that I did predict him because that's why we were heading to some kind of disaster, and he's sort of the impersonate the embodiment of that disaster. He's not appalling him, I have to say. But his cleverness is narrowly invested in exploiting the absolute worst instincts in people.

But I have to say this, and this is really the news, he's also very much He's an American creation. He's a public figure. Just think of his careers. A public figure spawned in the cultural room of the last 40 or 50 years. The lottery mania, casino construction, money worship, real estate scams, tabloid cable news shows and celebrity stalking,

all of which he took part in maybe with the exception of Lotto mania. And then we can't forget our national addiction to reality television programming, which has been hugely popular since the turn of the millennium. and which was Trump's primary vehicle for gaining a truly national following. How a nation amuses itself is always indicative of its underlying character. I spent the whole chapter in the demise of virtue and virtual America discussing that, looking at various ways we were amusing ourselves in the early knots, just prior to the invasion of Iraq.

So thinking about that, what is reality television after all, but the very template for fake news? It's fake news. If we agree to watch, we agree to watch it, reality TV, and a lot of people do, and it's a delusion to think that its climate of showbiz deceit isn't impacting our worldview. It is, and it did, and now we have Donald Trump as president. One other thing I'd say about that, the id monster, I thought about this after you sent me the question, because that was my original answer.

But it's also this. Modernity is often, you know, preceded under the utopian delusion, something I sort of mentioned before, that technological inventions equals, equals, social progress. Technologies, though, are powerful, but they're just as likely to be socially destructive, especially early on. And that's something that our very best sci-fi authors have always warned us about. Now, I think back now, you think back now, all those clever technophiles, those hip establishment figures and media mavens that were exchanging their bone mows and pet peas and 140 characters or less. And yet, look who learned first to master the political potential

of Twitter. It's the arched, Bulgarian, and current president, Donald Trump. And how was he elected? He was elected with the aid of digital hacking so much for Silicon Valley's techno-utopia. So, I mean, he is ariad monster, meaning he shows what all the dark things that can come out despite our glorious and glittering inventions that we've brought into the world. Given all of that, are you optimistic about the future? I'm neutral I don't you know I hear one of the I don't I don't know if you I think back my literary my one of my great heroes is Herman Melville and he his later projects which are completely rejected by the American public which is no

surprise because they were going the opposite direction he was criticizing it his later work especially especially the confidence man was an attack on the notion of of necessary good news. If things were going to get better, was an attack on the American optimism. So I'm not going to be optimistic. I feel it can be solved. We can talk about it.

We can analyze it. We need to work on it. It's urgent. But whether it will happen or not depends on our vigilance and our actions and our willingness to address a lot of these problems and our willingness to take on and admit our own responsibilities for the problems that we're facing them. Absolutely. Well said, and it's really been a fascinating conversation. We could talk for hours and hours more, but before we go, can you please point our listeners to where they can find your works and then maybe give a recommendation or two beyond your work for people who listen to this conversation and want to find out more about any of the topics we've touched on?

Sure thing. I've published two books recently that are the ones that are centered on the ideas I've been discussing with you today. And the first one is called The Demise of Virtue and Virtual America, subtitle the Moral Origins of the Great Recession. And you can look online and find that. It's a small publisher, not surprisingly, but you can find that online in any number of different places. And then I just recently published six months ago a book called Conscientious Thinking. That gets back to my definition of conscience and conscientious thinking, making sense in an age of idiot savants.

And that also discusses a lot of the issues, especially the crisis in the turn from modern to post-modern ideas. I published a lot of essays that are related to that work in the Georgia Review and Salma Gundy, or two very fine literary reviews that also publish essays of this sort. Unfortunately, I don't post much of their work online, but you can find them one way or the other, I think, in hard copies. The other thing I guess if it might suggest for people to read, because these are things have been helpful to me

is the importance of having the historical perspective of our current moment. There is, we do have a written record of the radical shift between the medieval and the modern social orders. That's the 17th and late 16th, early 17th, and 18th centuries. And there are lessons to learn there about our own transitional era if we pay attention to them.

And there's also another work that I think that people don't think of when they think of political issues that some of the ones we've been discussing is the communication scholars, the ones who investigated the differences, between oral cultures and literate cultures. Because now we're leaving a literate culture. We're entering a post-literate culture, a digital culture.

And so some of those scholars like Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, who made a name for himself, and Eric Cavalock, those kinds of people. Thinking about what happened and how different an oral culture is from a literate culture is very, very revealing and helping us to try to imagine what a post-literate culture might be. All right, perfect. Thank you so much for coming on again.

It's really been a great time talking to you, and I really appreciate it. Thanks a lot, Brad. I appreciate the invitation. All right, David. Have a good night. You too. Bye.

market riot mob flipping burgers with a bachelor's degree serving to you on my master's what's the matter to me call me a millennial Facebook status Instagram at a clay station Xbox having you tell me get a job okay where's the job you got some nerve sir somewhere with all white and graffiti kids is trying to mark the spot you don't think we'd rather have a pension a parking spot you don't understand you must be in the dark a lot I can't even get an interview a target dog you the people stand up we the people Put your hands up, unless you in handcuffs, I want to see you amped up.

We the people, keep them hands up. You're the people, stand up, we're the people. Put your hands up. Unless you in handcuffs, I want to see you amped up, we're the people, keep them hands up. You're working Mickey D's, what's it like there? You're working Starbucks, how's the child care? Is your babysat? Where your wages at?

Rent, food utilities, are you making that? Does your hard work seem to have an odd worth? Do your arms hurt? Does your car work? Do you ride the train across the whole city map? Spend the first two hours making that back. Now, how do you work as a home? It's 11 bucks an hour seem a little bit low.

I mean, did you even know? Did you ever think if we all walked off? The store's closing in the plate. If we all caught sick, who would stock the shelves if the bosses took over? What they do is just as well is the clothing sell itself putting dollars in their pockets? No, does the cash register the profits?

Oh, you're the people? Stand up. We the people. Put your hands up. Unless you in handcuffs, I want to see you amped up. We the people. Keep them hands up. You the people?

Stand up. We the people. Put your hands up. Unless you in handcuffs, I want to see you amped up. We the people. Keep them hands up. I rep the union like I'm uniform. If they had one, then I'd be in the uniform.

That's what I'm at your college pushing units for. Utilizing student minds what I went to uni for. They say a good job ain't what it used to be a fair living wage. I ain't ready for its eulogy. Time to unify. Wouldn't you agree? Measure the units of the unions by the unity of you and me. We got a dictionary in the area.

They say I'm useless, but it sounds utilitarian. They're telling me I'm smart, but my union isn't? Kiss by, you know what? There's a euphemism. Say unionism, and you can help me. You can't turn me to a robot, but I'm user-friendly. Time to unify. Wouldn't you agree?

Measure the units of the unions by the unity of you and me. Bang! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!

You know? Oh! Oh! Thank you.