Edward F. Fischer

Voicing Dissent: A Conversation with Lewis Lapham (on 11/4/04)

Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper’s Magazine, is not a typical anthropological subject, but I was drawn to interview him because he writes with such clarity about the hegemonic workings of contemporary U.S. society.  Following Gramsci (1971) and the Comaroffs (1991), hegemony may be understood as a form of manufactured consent in which a particular political ideology comes to seem natural, leading the masses to not only acquiesce but to actively support a system that exploits them.  War and brute coercion, in Gramsci’s view, reflect a breakdown of hegemony--the real trick is to dominate without recourse to force, to have people buy into a vision of the world that justifies the current order and inoculates them against change, dissent, and revolution. 
            In The Gag Rule (2004), Lapham employs the image of the “mute button” to illuminate the ways dissent is muted in modern society.  He shows that the nature of big media interests, the emergence of new communication technologies, and the state of public education have converged to form the perfect hegemonic storm in the United States.  Rather than stirring up public discontent, this tempest acts to mute dissent, and brilliantly does so in the guise of greater freedom of choice.  Lapham argues that the decline in educational expectations—not testable standards but the more elusive critical thought—has moved the American citizenry away from enlightenment ideals of rationality and towards magical thought and superstition.  In this light, he calls for Americans to recover a secular sense of unity and purpose.

The Mute Button

Q: What is “the mute button”?

LL: The obstacles standing in the way of dissent, candor, and honest sharp-edged, open public argument. James Fenimore Cooper, in the book The American Democrat, makes the point that of all the American political virtues, candor is the most necessary. Cooper’s point is that the democratic idea means that we try to tell each other the truth. Somehow, if we do that, even though both of us may be wrong, we manage to correct our errors and therefore plot a course that neither one of us could have done alone but that will see us safely through to the future. Or to Oregon, as the case may be. So dissent is the collective expression of candid opinion. In the definition of Archibald MacLeish, dissent is nothing more than those indications when people think for themselves and do not simply mouth the conventional wisdom. The mute button is what stands in the way of candor in our modern times.

Q: How does the mute button work?

LL: There are several elements to the mute button. First is the nature of the large news the media, which in my view is better associated with the characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern than it is with the lonely voice of the whistleblower or truth teller on the ramparts of freedom. This is because so much of the large media is dependent upon access to power. When one becomes accustomed to accepting handouts (literally, as that is the term used by the media: the “press handout”), the journalist more often than not is the figure on bended knee who accepts this gift with gratitude. There is wonderful image of it in the panic of 1894: the stock market fell to pieces, many were unemployed, fortunes were lost, and the press went down to Wall Street to get a statement from either E.H. Harryman or J.P. Morgan. They sat in the anteroom of the great banker’s office for four hours, with their hats on their knees, and finally a secretary appeared and handed them a piece of paper on which was typed “The United States of America is a great and growing country” and, in parentheses, that “this is not for attribution.” That was the sum of the statement they received, but they were grateful for it, bowed, and brought back the great news to the New York world.

Q: So the state of the press today is nothing new?

LL: No, this is nothing new at all. Henry Adams writes that the American press is simply the creature of the moneyed interest. Kierkegaard once made the observation that if his daughter strayed into prostitution and repented of her ways he would take her back into his house without further remark. On the other hand, if his son strayed into journalism, he would deny it. The notion of the running dog of the yellow press has a long tradition. Samuel Johnson had similar remarks. Jefferson, of course, thought the press was a great scourge but that it was better than the utterly controlled press.
        Thus, one element of the mute button is the characteristic of the large moneyed press--its unwillingness to make objections, to make rude noises in the presence of power.

Q: “The mute button” also calls to mind the remote control and the multitude of channels that we have these days watched by multitudes of passive viewers.

LL: This is the second element of the mute button: the nature of the electronic media, with the sheer white noise of so many channels and so much available on the internet. There is so much white noise that it is hard to make a clear statement. And dissent--which implies thought, which implies argument--does not lend itself to television because television is sound-bites, television is emotion, not rational thought.
        Television is a world in which there is no cause and effect: It is an eternal present, an eternal now. There is no past, there is no future, and nothing necessarily follows anything else. All the world’s sorrow, joy, tragedy, horror has to be condensed into however many minutes there are between commercials. Given the way that technology is now working (with the hundreds of channels and Direct TV and satellite) you can literally sit there with a remote control and find the world in whatever mirror flatters your own sense of yourself. At any one time, if you have enough channels, you could find the person of the president of United States presented as Richard Nixon himself, as Anthony Hopkins as Richard Nixon, as Morgan Freeman, as Harrison Ford, as John Kennedy himself. It goes on and on. At the very same time, you can then go directly to a pornographic channel and from there to a sporting event in Peru and then to a ship lost at sea and then to an episode of some police drama or reality t.v.
        In other words, there is no sequence, there is no coherence with television as there is on the printed page. The printed page is straight lines, more or less, like roads or the plot in a Jane Austin novel. This is not true on television—it is circular instead of linear. And that sensibility is tuned to improvisation as opposed to argument, to emotion instead of thought, and is not conducive to the expression of dissent because the sharp-edged argument on television would seem impolite, rude, and out of place. The character that works on television is bland and one on which images can be imposed, not an image or personality that is so sharply defined as to discourage its occupation by the viewer.

Q: Would that hold true for Bill O’Reilly?

LL No, that wouldn’t hold true for Bill O’Reilly. But Bill O’Reilly plays the part of exception to the rule. He is not really a dissenting figure—he is very much of the preferred wisdom.
        One gets typecast. If Bill Buckley were to suddenly walk on a stage somewhere and say that he had a revelation on the road to New Haven and that he had seen the error of his ways, his lecture fees would vanish because the public is buying Buckley as a product, a brand that can be relied upon to say the same thing under any circumstances. This happens to actors as well. Tom Cruise always plays Tom Cruise. Minor variations are permitted but the commodification is there. As Tom Frank wrote in Commodify Your Dissent, dissent becomes a product or an entertainment or a fashion statement. Because to think for oneself is to think something different today than one did yesterday—it is a kind of pilgrim’s progress and that is very hard to market.

Q: Then the real the insidiousness of all these television channels, of the modern media as compared to 100 years ago, that we have an image of so much dissent and diversity on television and yet it is just an image . . .

LL: Yes, it is an image, and it is often presented simply as entertainment.

Q: This would also apply to the trend in American schools toward edu-tainment—the idea that learning must be fun and entertaining.

LL: This is the third element of the mute button, the state of American education. Critical thinking is not uppermost in the minds of most of the nation’s schoolmasters. There is a set of correct of answers and if you know them you get an “A,” but doubt, argument, critical thinking--to question the wisdoms in office, whether they are literary or political—is lacking. There is not much of American history either. It’s hard to dissent unless you have some knowledge, it cannot be done ex nihilo. We don’t teach the story of American history very well in our schools, and that’s true for private schools I think as well as the public schools, and the universities as well as grammar schools.
        Woodrow Wilson said, addressing the High School Teachers Association in 1909 when he was the president of Princeton, that we want two classes of persons in the United States: one very small class to whom we will grant the privileges of a liberal education and one--a much larger class--of mechanics who will be consigned to the dreary, menial tasks required of an industrialized society (and there is no point in teaching them too much or encouraging them to think for themselves). The notion of a dissenting, actively thinking citizenry is not good for the advertising business. What we want is the easily abused consumer, not the critical, thoughtful citizen. We don’t teach citizenship, we teach marketing.

The Decline of Rationality

Q: How, then, do these forces come together to move individuals to act against their own self-interests?

LL: Allied to the elements of the mute button (the nature of education, the nature of the news media, and the nature of the electronic medium) is a happy return to religious superstition and to magical thinking, which is overcoming not only the news media but large segments of the population. This is encouraged by television. Television is a form of magical thinking. It has more to do with ritual and is passive rather than active. So that you have the phenomenon of somebody who sees perfectly clearly that the Bush administration has made a mess of our (pardon the expression) “liberation” of Iraq and yet ignores the evidence and chooses to believe that President Bush is a man of great character and integrity. This is the man who has lied to his teeth to the American public for four years, and he has made no made secret of it.
        But we set aside the empirical evidence in favor of the preferred, magical, superstitious belief. Somebody once said that “incompetent armies deify the commander.” And there we are. Or you have the phenomenon of the person who lives in the rustbelt, in Ohio or in a state that has lost fifty thousand jobs or maybe two hundred thousand jobs in the last four years, and here is the person who is making a salary of $40,000 a year. Every political and economic self-interest—you would think—would encourage this person to vote against the Bush administration. But not so: they shift. It is a bait and switch. Rather than political and economic questions about justice, we have moral questions about character.

Q: And this moves us away from the enlightenment ideals of reason upon which the country was founded?

LL: That is the title of Henry Commager’s great book The Empire of Reason, which was about formation and formulation of the United States as the practical, political working out of the enlightenment idea: European theory, American practice. But it appears that idea has run its course, at least in the United States. It is 200 years later and with what do we replace it? We seem to be replacing it with a return to superstition, a move backward. The hard question is how we replace it with something that carries us forward towards a better place for larger numbers of people. I don’t know who is going to formulate that or on what basis or how one would give it the strength of religion. It is much more difficult to sell a secular idea of paradise (either here or there) than it is to sell it with a miracle and faith. The existential proposition is a very frightening one: most people are scared of freedom. There is a great speech in Dostoevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor that says the only thing that people really want is magic, mystery, and authority and as soon as they are free they become terrified. This is Aldous Huxley’s point, this is Orwell’s point—the distopias all take this into account. So did the Third Reich. This is the question--and I don’t have any answer to it--that we should be addressing and that the Democratic party should have been addressing and trying to give that set of notions a political structure. They haven’t done that.

Q: You write that the dumbing down of schools is no accident, that it is by design . . .

LL: It’s by design, that’s true.

Q: But isn’t that too conspiratorial? Is there some cabal of big media and government and academic leaders plotting the demise of our schools?

LL: No, it’s not that way. I made that argument as an inference. I started out by saying that we are a country of very intelligent people with enormous resources—in other words we have the money and the brains to build a truly first-rate school system. We once had that in this country. The public schools in California in 1930s and 1940s were truly good, as were many of the city colleges in New York. We have let that deteriorate: collectively, we don’t put that much value on first-rate schools because (and it’s not a conspiracy) one does not want to have troublesome students asking too many questions for which there are no answers. Or for which the answers are hard to arrive at. So it is not a conspiracy, it is a kind of consensual response to a world that suddenly becomes much more frightening with the invention of the hydrogen bomb. We are now in the shadow of our own powers of Armageddon.
        Then there is the enormous expansion of knowledge. In the 19th century it was still possible for men to believe that they could know all that was to be known—look at the Encyclopediasts in France. By 1960, if you graduated in physics, ten years later everything that you knew would be obsolete. Knowledge was expanding at light speed in so many different fields that it encouraged a response of “we can’t know.” And if we can’t know, then everything is matter a rumor and faith. What you know is just as true as what I know and history is simply a costume trunk from which we can dress up in merchant ivory in any way we choose. It all becomes magic, we go back to the firelight in the cave and those are the images on television 24/7. We begin to believe in Scientology. Look at the advertising for drugs on television now—what are they advertising? A whole parade of new drugs, and many of them don’t even tell you what they are supposed to cure. It’s just long life. It’s just a blue pill--and they never tell you why or what its about. It’s like a fountain of youth. The other thing they advertise is Viagra (three or four forms of it). We are back to primitive rituals, people dancing around maypoles, bacchanalia and ritual that become increasingly primitive.
        This is a vision that the future that can be bought instead of earned. It is as if excellence were some form of very good suit or well engineered SUV, whereas the existential situation is lonely, full of doubt and not likely to lead to riches or worldly success. You could say that in the world of the printer, in the world of the 18th century, in the world of the Enlightenment, it was “truth as passion.” In the word of the media it is “passion as truth.” That is a much more primitive formulation, it is ritual and Viagra and the magic pill.

A Secular Awakening

Q: So do we need a revolution to set the country on the right course?

LL: Probably. Or we need some form of secular awakening, some understanding that we make our freedom with politics--something made by men for other men in the world of time. Freedom is not, as Mr. Bush would have it, a gift of God. I think Ashcroft has gone so far as to say the Constitution or the Bill of Rights was written by God, received on some American variation of Mount Ararat long ago.

Q: What would a secular awakening look like?

LL: We have to recover that sense of the Enlightenment, reverse the American retreat from the faith in reason to the comfort of religious certainty and superstition, which of course is very close to George Orwell’s notion that ignorance is strength. For 200 years much of the rest of the world has looked towards America as the light of the future and the hope of mankind, and I don’t think that’s the case now. The rest of the world still looks to America as a market, a place to get rich and sell their goods, but I don’t think it looks to America as a political ideal. We are not setting a very good example. From what I know of them (and I am sure they have their flaws), European societies--France or Germany, even Italy and certainly the Scandinavian countries--seem to me closer to the idea of a just society.
        It is no accident that we rate so low in infant mortality, longevity, quality of life, cost of medicine, degrees of education. We don’t stand very well on those lists and it is because we have translated the notion of the American dream into enlightened selfishness. And that is not a dream that is very well suited to the circumstances of the 21st century. Maybe it was a consummation greatly to be wished in the 19th century and the 20th century when the abundance of our resources was such that we could afford to ravage the land and then move on across the next set of mountains and plunder the next valley, when there seem to be no end to water and pasture and so the American dream became a kind of nomadic browsing of the country’s natural resources. But now that isn’t going to work so well as when we thought we were protected by the two oceans, inhabiting a city on the hill in an Arcadian world out of time. That doesn’t work in a world that has become, as we never tire of saying, interdependent, when disease can cross frontiers as easily as debt and when of none of the major problems in the world are available to solutions by any single nation. If we are talking about the environment, climate, disease, war, terrorism--all of these things are contagious and spread very easily across borders. Thus, the notion of “everything for me and nothing for anybody else (or as little for anybody else as possible)” is simply not tenable except by increasing demonstrations of force.

Q: This is underwritten by an economistic view of the world based on a simplistic reading of Adam Smith, that this invisible hand can transubstantiate private greed into collective good.

LL: That’s a mistake. I think that we think that politics is a ancillary function of economics. First the money and then we hire the politicians. And the politicians are supposed to come in like accordion players or butlers or caterers, and serve the temple of Mamon. But over time that notion fails. You can read history, go back how ever many thousands of years you want and you always see that happening, and then the society turns rancid with an overstuffed and therefore deeply stupid oligarchy--and then comes your revolution or despotism or something: it becomes violent change.

Q: And are we at that stage?

LL: We are getting close to it. I don’t think we are there yet. There are not enough unhappy, humiliated, angry people in the United States. I mean we are not in the position of France in 1789. We have not yet faced the famine or complete drying up of the water in the western desert (which is a distinct possibility—it’s already happening in China).

Q: Do you think that in France before the French revolution that there was not a media that was so anesthetizing to the population?

LL: No I don’t think there was--but there was, of course, in Rome, with bread and circuses.

Q: Yes, but look at the two outcomes there: the fall of the Roman Empire and the formation of the French Republic.

LL: Yes. One would hope we would have the formation of some kind of improved, political structure rather than 500 years of total darkness.

Q: If we need more dissent in public discourse, how do we go about it? Is dissent something that you are allowed to do because of the unique nature of Harper’s? I believe you have an endowment.

LL: We do have foundation support, a kind of endowment.

Q: Does that insulate you from market pressures to the extent that you are able to dissent?

LL: Yes, it does. It insulates us from the kind of pressures brought to bear on Time or Vanity Fair or The New York Post. I don’t have to concern myself with not offending advertisers, and I don’t have to put pretty girls on the cover. I don’t have to say what everybody else says. I can afford to let the writers speak for themselves in language that is often complicated. I don’t have to speak down to the reader. I have an enormous freedom, and that is the kind of freedom that comes with small markets. I remember going to a lecture at Cambridge University where this very famous professor (whose name escapes me right now) gave only one lecture a year. The first time the lecture was announced, the entire auditorium was filled with students because he was a celebrity. But he never showed up and the lecture was rescheduled a week later. On that date there were about half the number of people in the auditorium as before, but he still didn’t show up. The third time it was scheduled there were about 5 people present and he walked in right on time and said “good, now we can talk.”

Q: Is this a model for the rest of the media? Do we need more media outlets insulated from market pressures so that they can focus on the public good?

LL: I think we need more television channel like C-Span. I would like to see a television channel that that does the same thing that C-Span does for culture. Just stick a camera in an off-Broadway theatre or in a University lecture hall or in a laboratory amphitheater or with a dance group in New Mexico. Try to engage the audience not as children that have to be entertained but as adults who hope to be informed. It would be very cheap, obviously. You wouldn’t need any production values, just the way you don’t with C-Span. It would make people more aware of the number of intelligent people there are in this country, although you don’t see them on the major media. We need more of that, whether it is small magazines or obscure television channels or internet blogs. The big networks are moribund and on the way out, so are newspapers. There are still a large numbers of people in this country who would like to learn. The self-improving, questioning spirit is not dead. On the other hand, it is not easily marketable in big movies or on big television channels or in big newspapers.

Bibliography

Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff. 1991. Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity and Consciousness in South Africa, vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago.

Commanger, Henry Steele. 1994 [orig. 1977]. Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cooper, James Fenimore. 2001 [orig. 1838]. The American Democrat and other political writings. Washington: Regnery Publishing.

Frank, Thomas and Matt Weiland, eds. 1997. Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from the Baffler. New York: W.W. Norton.

Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Lapham, Lewis. 2004. The Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and Stifling of Democracy. New York: Viking Penguin.

Taussig, Michael. 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.