George Will gets one thing right
In a recent op-ed in the Washington Post (link below), the conservative intellectual George Will engaged in one of his favorite tasks of bashing other intellectuals for their dire predictions of doom, using one of his favorite sages, Eric Hoffer.
There’s some truth in his point about doom-saying intellectuals, although on the tax bill issue he’s off the mark—he’s overlooking the long-term effects of the new tax bill. Not that George Will is myopic; instead he skips the subject because slashing the corporate tax is an item of conservative faith. He might think the cut was too big, but in principle it’s a move in the right direction. So he won’t talk about its defects.
The “attention economy” and undermining of human will
It’s at the end of this opinion piece that George Will (not “human will”) puts his finger on something that’s really troubling: the internet heating public discourse to the boiling point, especially in social media.
Will addresses a deeper topic than doom-saying intellectuals: the divisive and inflammatory impact of social media and indiscriminate outpouring of opinions by anyone and everyone. He quotes a past president of the American Enterprise Institute, Christopher DeMuth, on the topic of our society becoming “entangled by networks of communication.” We have entered “a world of empowered mass intimacy” that encourages the better but also “the darker angels of human nature.” Finally, Will speaks of “our ever-more-clamorous politics.”
In putting the emphasis on mood, process, and style, rather than the existence of multiple internet “echo chambers,” Will touches on what is a fundamental problem inherent in social media—its effect on our very mental and emotional processes themselves.
In support of that idea, I quote from a guy who comes out of the Google persuasion machine. (And is now very worried about where we, Google-boosted, are going.) Ex-Google strategist James Williams speaks of “the attention economy” and how it “privileges our impulses over our intentions.” The dynamics of Facebook and Twitter have had a political effect, in making us less rational and more impulsive. Williams notes that both the political Left and Right are subject to “internet outrage over issues that ignite fury. ”
Anger, amplified by repetition, is claimed by some to be an addiction. If it’s not exactly that, it certainly feeds off of itself, and there’s evidence that anger promotes the formation of new nerve cells, and re-structures the brain to foster even more anger. See this: Neural effects of anger
Meditators have known this for millennia. I’m just sorry I can’t get the hang of meditation. Darn!!! that makes me so angry at myself 🙂
James Williams’s point is that it’s not just a question of how many echo chambers there are, and the fragmenting of discourse, it is also the diminution of our rational faculties due to how our brains interact on social media platforms. It is the strengthening of emotionality—much of it rage—in mental processes that we like to think of as existing in our higher brains but not rooted in the limbic system. Example: do you ever hear of climate change denial without an immediate emotional reaction?
James Williams again: “The dynamics of the attention economy are structurally set up to undermine the human will. If politics is an expression of our human will, on individual and collective levels, then the attention economy is directly undermining the assumptions that democracy rests on.” This from a guy who used to strategize at Google.
I said more about this topic in my October 9th post, “The Other Addiction,” also quoting Williams, to be found here.
As for Will’s piece in the Post, find it here: George Will getting one thing right