As I write this, the presidential election has just been called. I believe the president-elect is striking the right tone in reminding us that 70 million of our fellow citizens voted for a liar who has exploited the divisions in our society for his own profit. We have stepped back from the abyss; now the hard work must begin.
The immediate challenges are obvious. A COVID-19 vaccine may be available within months. It may be distributed within some further months, but in the meantime, tens of thousands of Americans, and many, many more humans across the world, will die. Further, the long-term consequences of having the illness are unclear. Another pandemic, that of racism, rages on. The indecency of increasingly extreme wealth inequality, nationally and globally, aggravates the effects of both.
Although the United States, by comparison with most parts of the world, enjoys material comfort, even here poverty stalks the land with people living on the streets of our cities and many more facing eviction, hunger and lack of health care as the winter worsens. Yet the call for economic justice is met with propaganda that mindlessly bellows “socialism” with no interest in, or understanding of, what that concept means beyond the power of the word to persuade.
Behind those most immediate crises, and little mentioned during the election, the existential threat of the environmental collapse of the planet, and thereby the end of human civilization, deepens daily.
So, what chance is there of reconciliation? An essential foundation is reconstructing the idea of truth. At this time, the incumbent is still mindlessly shouting through a device that he won the election by a large margin. That would not matter very much were it not that millions may still believe him. We must hope that the incoming president will not communicate through the antisocial media that have weaponized the lies of anonymous people cut off from human interaction, in a grotesque democratization of propaganda. His administration must take control of Facebook, Twitter and the like while working to restore that most essential element of democratic society, a free, independent, honest and economically viable press, the ally of the people.
Historically, the ultimate cynicism of the view that truth is irrelevant, that all that matters is what people can be persuaded to believe, can be traced back, in particular, to the father of the public relations and advertising industries, Edward Bernays, a nephew of Freud.
Based on his uncle’s theories about “the herd,” Bernays took the view that the people should not be trusted but rather should be manipulated. And he developed the science/art of how to do that, initially at the point when American capitalists realized that continuing expansion of profits needed to go beyond providing what people need to providing what people want, having first artificially created those desires.
Now, politics are pervaded by the same attitude, the ethical stance of the advertising industry, combined with all that money can buy. As Stephen Colbert put it, “those with the most money get to decide what the truth is.” We may be past the point of no return in that any attempt to change the rules of distribution of financial resources and the associated power is counteracted by deploying a fraction of those resources.
All of these developments have been exacerbated by the technical degradation of communication among humans, and by what Noam Chomsky termed “miseducation,” whereby the goal of schooling has become to keep people from asking questions that matter about important issues that directly affect them and others.
The incoming administration will need to work hard to restore the status of science, which has a conception of truth based on a complex interplay between the assembly of evidence and the formulation of falsifiable theories to explain that evidence. Accordingly, there must be coherent plans to ameliorate the effects of the pandemic and, even more importantly, to take a leadership role in the diminishing hope of saving civilized life on the planet. At the same time, we should remember that the crises facing our species will not be solved by technical means alone; they are human problems requiring human solutions.
The relief that we feel at this moment must be tempered by the realization that the hard work starts now. Reconciliation cannot be achieved without a foundation of shared understanding of historical, scientific and social truths. That we are living through a very dangerous time is as true now as when James Baldwin so characterized the situation to begin his “talk to teachers” in 1963. And, as he warned then, “You must understand that in the attempt to correct so many generations of bad faith and cruelty, when it is operating not only in the classroom but in society, you will meet the most fantastic, the most brutal, and the most determined resistance.”
To adapt the words of Joe Hill: “Don’t rejoice — organize.”