Third Meditation: No, They Don’t Know Either

The political theorist Jonathan Haidt, for example, well known for his criticism of elite education’s biases toward a hyperintelligent foolishness, has argued that the past decade of American public life has exhibited an unprecedented degree of stupidity.¹

His chosen metaphor for this disintegration of public coherence is the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. “But Babel is not a story about tribalism,” Haidt argues; “it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.” Oh dear. The statistical evidence is clear: people have less and less trust in government as the twenty-first century progresses: in 2024 only two in ten Americans trust the government to do the right thing “just about always” (2%) or “most of the time” (21%). That’s an alarming fact in itself, but their trust levels are also significantly aligned with who happens to be in power. Trust declines overall but tracks partisan commitment along the way.”²

Not surprisingly, this utter fragmentation, and the steady decade-long rise in general discursive “stupidity” that Haidt identifies, is correlated to the rise of social media, especially Facebook and Twitter, which were once (say, circa 2011) fonts of potential political optimism and now are cesspools of hate speech, threats, conspiracy theories, disinformation campaigns, and deliberate hostile misunderstanding. “Social scientists,” Haidt notes, “have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three.” The addition of “Like” and “Retweet” features, seemingly innocuous, were in fact force multipliers, significantly raising the stakes and changing the basic dynamic of social media by allowing or even encouraging mob-like piling on and cancelling.”³

Most obviously, social media heighten the degree of pile-on bias in the cognitive space of civic discourse. This grouping in turn begets a kind of reactive harm at the institutional level, speech chill or self-silencing, whereby individual members of identifiable belief clusters or groups fail to speak their minds for fear of the piling on underwritten by social media’s openness to random and mostly unregulated attacks. “This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics,” Haidt noted. “Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each new action.”

Trust is no longer reliably lodged even in oneself. If discursive self-defeat can grow within a population as a basic fact of technopolitical life, we may be doomed. That is, if political stupidity is both influential and burgeoning, the usual tactics for dealing with stupidity are even more limited than we thought.

The standard proposals for dealing with a lack of trust and authority are about what you’d expect: regulation of social media, education of future generations, reinforcement of democratic institutions. Haidt again: “American politics is getting ever more ridiculous and dysfunctional not because Americans are getting less intelligent. The problem is structural.” Fine, yes, but any assumption that the general trust problem is entirely structural strikes me as incorrect. But what if Americans, what if all of us, are actually getting less intelligent and so less reasonable?

By this I don’t mean quite the same thing as getting more stupid in the sense that we usually deplore, the moral and cognitive failure of taking pride in ignorance, refusing to consider the different aspects of a question, never looking for possible solutions even when they are of benefit. I mean something less dramatic and more common, maybe endemic in a contemporary developed-world population: reading less, thinking less stringently, isolating ourselves from contrary views, failing to revise opinions in light of facts. Also allowing our attention spans to become, first, truncated and cruder and then, worse, selling what passes for our attention in an overstimulated, underconsidered economy of distraction and fleeting cognitive hits. In such a condition we grow dynamically less willing to entertain contradictions, less able to grapple with cognitive dissonance or boredom, and more dependent on the hits and highs peddled by those who gleefully harvest our eyeballs. Distraction becomes its own form of self-replicating program, a large-language model operating on the platform of human community itself, not a cluster of chip-based heuristic algorithms.

NOTES
1.  Jonathan Haidt, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” Atlantic, April 12, 2022, https://www.theatlantic. com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/. Haidt’s gesture to structural change rather than lowering of collective intelligence might be related to a novel aesthetic theory advanced by Sianne Ngai: what she calls stuplimity. See “Stuplimity: Shock and Boredom in Twentieth-Century Aesthetics,” Postmodern Culture 10, no. 2 (Jan. 2000), https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2000.0013. The idea is that sheer volume of aesthetic stimulus, coupled with vast human processing power, leads to the particular two-step of (1) astonishment followed quickly by (2) ennui: thus stuplimity, sublimity and stupor combined. This does account for some of the plain stupidity of Haidt’s analysis, perhaps; but I stand by the criticism that the issue is not strictly structural, and Ngai’s dynamic notion of stuplimity neatly captures that.

2. Public Trust in Government: 1958–2024,” feature, Trust, Facts & Democracy, Pew Research Center, Jun. 24, 2024, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/24/public-trust-in-government-1958-2024/.

3. Haidt, “Uniquely Stupid”; “By 2013, social media had become a new game, with dynamics unlike those in 2008. If you were skillful or lucky, you might create a post that would ‘go viral’ and make you ‘internet famous’ for a few days. If you blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. Your posts rode to fame or ignominy based on the clicks of thousands of strangers, and you in turn contributed thousands of clicks to the game.”

Mark Kingwell is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine. He is the author or co-author of more than two dozen books.

Mark Kingwell (Claire Foran)

Excerpted from: Question Authority: A Polemic About Trust in Five Meditations by Mark Kingwell. Copyright © 2024 Mark Kingwell. Published by Biblioasis. Reproduced by arrangements with the publisher. All rights reserved.

Question Authority: A Polemic About Trust in Five Meditations was published in November.