On public opinion and the imaginative void of our modern moment: a historical glance.
Oscar Wilde defined public opinion as “an attempt to organize the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force.” I took special note of that description when I came across it in Adam Phillips’s Unforbidden Pleasures four years ago, figuring it might usefully be applied at some point to the unfolding presidential political debacle (it didn’t take a lot of prescience to imagine that, I admit). But I forgot about it until a few months later, when I came across Madame de Staël’s earlier and more nuanced conception of public opinion as a force that grows to fill the gap between the governed and the governing classes when a common promise loses its power to connect them. This idea was discussed by Robert Darnton in his review of Germaine de Staël: A Political Portrait, by Biancamaria Fontana, in the June 23, 2016 issue of the New York Review of Books. The persistent attachments of the people, Staël suggested in her contemporary rumination on the French Revolution, could become passionate weapons in a pervasive war against the existing political structures, whatever their denomination.
You can imagine why this train of thought from four years ago is barreling down the tracks toward me again, as we head toward what looks to be another electoral calamity. In his essay, Darnton smartly invokes the work of Walter Lippmann, who wrote more than a century after Staël:
When Walter Lippmann tried to characterize public opinion, he, like Staël, emphasized the tenuous link between the governed and the governors. Public affairs are enormously complex, he insisted. The public can know them only imperfectly, at a great distance, and through the haze of collective views, which he described as a “pseudo-environment.” Intermediaries, especially in the press, intervene in this environment by translating the decisions made by public figures into stories that the public can consume as news. But this process is more a matter of manipulating symbols than of diffusing ideas . . .
What Lippmann described as a “pseudo-environment” is now no longer solely the province of the press; thanks to the internet and social media—and, especially, the commercial constructions created by Facebook, Google, and others to exploit those technologies for their profit with a swashbuckling sociopathy—everyone can be an intermediary and, more to the point, determined forces can weaponize symbols and automate their delivery with pernicious precision and effect. The power of the media in translating events into “stories that the public can consume as news” has been compromised, at times corrupted through its own complicity, while new breeds of unmediated insurgents, like fast-mutating viruses, replicate with abandon to infect opinion with gleeful destructiveness. When the “pseudo-environment” comes to encompass all of “reality,” and the symbols begin to manipulate the intermediaries as well as the public, you get the pathology we’re browsing online, reading in the papers, or watching on television every hour these days. And who knows what’s in your neighbors’ newsfeeds.
Considering the continual turmoil that roiled France following the first flash of the Revolution, Darnton quotes Fontana, who is channeling the insight of her subject, the astonishing Madame de Staël: “No one . . . had the ‘capacity to fill the imaginative void left by the legacy of the old monarchy.’” A similar imaginative void engendered the gap between electorate and elected that surprising political forces rushed through in 2016, a gap that only seems to have grown in the past four years to include the reckless manipulation of more than symbols: the long-standing logistics of justice, national interest, and market economics are being both disrupted and corrupted before our eyes. It’s the void created when, like the old monarchy, institutions—legal, political, civic, economic, educational, religious, even scientific—that might steady our course in a climate of intensities lose their moorings but continue to operate as if they haven’t, abdicating their responsibilities under the influence of the glitter of greed, the allure of celebrity culture, the hysteria of the 24-hour news cycle, the stupor of doctrinal absolutes, and the terrorism of technology-fueled disinformation. Longing for an older America may be a fantasy, but it is fueled by a lost promise so clear and present to the fantasists—and so disconnected from the no less wishful narratives of self-anointed reasonable players—that, without the ballast of institutional convictions, our collective phantasms threaten to hold us in their grip for some time to come.