New technologies shape behaviors, dissolve civilities
George F. Will
Impulse control is unfashionable as well as unpresidential, but perhaps you should resist the urge to trip people who stride briskly down the sidewalk fixated on their phone screens, absorbed in texting and feeling entitled to expect others to make way. New technologies are shaping behaviors and dissolving civilities.
In 2005, Lynne Truss, in her book “Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door,” presciently said we were slouching into “an age of social autism” with a “Universal Eff-off Reflex.” Long before progress, understood as streaming, brought us binge watching, she foresaw people entertaining themselves into inanition with portable technologies that enable “limitless self-absorption,” making people solipsistic and unmannerly. Truss foresaw an age of “hair-trigger sensitivity” and “lazy moral relativism combined with aggressive social insolence.” This was 12 years before some Wellesley College professors said, last month, that inviting conservative speakers to campus injures students by forcing them to “invest time and energy in rebutting the speakers’ arguments.”
In the latest issue of The American Interest, the Hudson Institute’s Carolyn Stewart, revisiting Truss’ book, wonders, “What is it about social media that compels us to throw off the gloves?” Stewart notes that, people “have taken an expectation that previously applied to the private sphere — control over our environment — and are increasingly applying it to the public sphere.” Social media’s “self-affirming feedback loop” encourages “expectations for a custom-made reality” and indignation about anything “that deviates from our preferences.”
The consequences of what Stewart calls “our growing intolerance of an unedited reality” are enumerated in Tom Nichols’ new book “The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters.” Our devices and social media are, he says, producing people who confuse “internet grazing” with research and this faux research with higher education, defined by a wit as “those magical seven years between high school and your first warehouse job.”
“It is,” Nichols writes, “a new Declaration of Independence: no longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that aren’t true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.”
Today, there will rarely be disagreement without anger between thin-skinned people who cannot distinguish the phrase “you’re wrong” from “you’re stupid.” Equating “critical thinking” with “relentless criticism” results in worse than the indiscriminate rejection not merely of this or that expert. Nichols says this equation produces “a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden” disdain for even the ideal of expertise. This ideal becomes an affront in a culture that “cannot endure even the slightest hint of inequality of any kind.”
The “spreading epidemic of misinformation,” nowadays known as “alternative facts,” gives rise to a corollary to Gresham’s Law (“bad money drives out good”): “misinformation pushes aside knowledge.”
Nichols recounts an old joke about a British Foreign Office official: “Every morning I went to the prime minister and assured him there would be no world war today. And I am pleased to note that in a career of 40 years, I was only wrong twice.”