Читать книгу A Citizen's Democracy in Authoritarian Times - Thomas S. Harrington - Страница 5

Prologue

It has been fascinating to watch how, in recent months and years, the meme of “fake news” has taken root in the public discourses of the US and Europe…and thoroughly demoralizing to observe how so many people charged, explicitly or implicitly, with nurturing the civic conversations essential to the functioning of our democracies have come to lazily, indeed flippantly, employ the term.

To question the veracity of a given element of the information environment around us is, of course, very legitimate. Indeed, it is much more than this. It is an essential duty of all citizens desirous of transcending the master-slave dynamic that has, sadly, served as the organizing template of most societies during human history. But as is the case with so many pursuits, the key lies in how you do it, or more precisely, the degree of care you bring to the task.

In the vast majority of the cases I have witnessed and read about, those using the term “fake news” have displayed virtually none of this attitude of careful circumspection. Rather, they have used the term as a cudgel for bludgeoning into a state of nullity ideas originating in political sub-cultures they have come, or have been taught, to distrust over time, that is, as a way of “winning” arguments without having to engage in the slow and arduous tasks of documentation and refutation.

The evil genius of the charge of “fake news” is that it allows one to be dismissively authoritarian regarding the views those you don’t like or trust while maintaining a pose of moral righteousness and civic probity. In this sense it is the intellectual first cousin of sweet-sounding but deadly concepts like “humanitarian intervention”, “US democracy promotion” and the drive to “protect free markets”.

In fact, the concept is flawed on an even more basic level.

To talk about “fake news” is to presume implicitly that there is “real news”, that is, that there exists information available to us that is free from slant or bias. But as anyone who has studied textual production in a serious fashion knows, or should know, there is no such thing. As Hayden White clearly demonstrated some four decades ago in his masterful “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,”[1] the slightest change in narrative tone or the ordering of words, in a given utterance change its meaning dramatically. Put another way, all forms of news are inherently slanted or partial in nature, and therefore getting informed is always work in progress or, as they say in baseball, a matter of percentages.

But this, of course, is not what the busy denizens of a hustling and bustling consumer culture, flooded with an ever-expanding ocean of information, and raised on a steady diet of false promises of total satisfaction, want to hear.

Stressed from their busy lives they just want, as many people have said to me over the years, “someone to give it to them straight” in the same way that they want the newly purchased gadget from the electronics store to function correctly right out of the box. And when I tell them that this is tantamount to wanting to believe once again in a Santa Claus that slips down chimneys with bags full of toys, the conversation usually ends with a dispiriting thud.

What these people are saying with their silence is that, when it comes down to it, they really do not want spend that much of their scarce and valuable time engaging in the acts of discernment necessary to become a truly informed citizen.

So when someone of apparent knowledge and authority comes along a says X or Y is an agent of “fake news”, suggesting that they therefore that need not worry about parsing anything this person or entity says, they breathe a large sigh of relief. Why? Because their assigned task of civic discernment has just become immeasurably more simplified.

Thankfully, there are still certain places in this so-called Western world where this alarming drift toward citizen infantilization and apathy is being bucked.

What makes the people in these places resist, and persist in the pursuit of a civic and political “something more” while so many Western “others” seem content to sit back and watch the technicolor implosion of their deliberative processes and democratic institutions?

My sense is that it a great deal to do with both history and memory, or to put it more specifically, the need and ability of people subjected, over centuries, to state-sponsored campaigns of “invisibilization” to develop cultural practices which say, with calm and persistent stubbornness, that despite what you, our nominal overlords, say to us and the rest of the world about our status as a non-entity, “we exist”.

It is the experience of knowing from an early age that what is said at the dinner table or the conversation between friends at a bar about who we are as a collective and what we are really all about is usually much more accurate than what is said about the same issues the schools we attend or at the highest levels of the government and the media. And it is also knowing that if you want to preserve these local versions of truth, you must create structures and institutions of your own, on the margins of officialdom, to preserve them.

It is to know from an early age that that massive media distortions about you and your way of being are nothing new, but rather the perennial bread and butter of those who persist in wanting to control you, and that the only solution to it is to testify, again and again, and in small ways and large, to what you have discerned to be more or less true and real. And in this sense it is to develop and sustain a trust in your self and your immediate others that is increasingly rare in our world.

The prime goal of the matrix of corporate, military and media power under which we all now live is to induce an deep sense of helplessness and atomization among us. Though it pains me to admit it, they have, so far, been quite successful in their efforts to induce these sentiments in us.

But the battle is not yet over. If we are to buck the set of “inevitabilities” these people have in store for us, we will have to analyze with very clear eyes the techniques of those in our midst who are resisting with a relatively high degree of success.....and the extent to which the leaders of the aforementioned matrix of power will got to preserve the status quo.

There is, in my view, no better place begin this course of study than in Catalonia. There we have, with all its flaws and tics, a movement of people who in the midst of relative prosperity are saying that they are neither satisfied nor apathetic, that they have dreams of a different life and that they are willing to peacefully and persistently organize to achieve it. And, of course, we have a corrupt and inflexible state bent on punishing them for the sin of persisting in the pursuit of their goals.

Sounds different? It is.

And hopefully the following pages will provide a better sense of where this unique civic effort came from, and where it might be taking the Catalans, and possibly the rest of Europe, in the not too distant future.

[1] Hayden White, “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact”, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural, Criticism, Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978, 81-100.