False Idols, The Image, The Future

How do we know when we're fooling ourselves?

There’s an old and well-shared thought experiment that says if you put an infinite number of monkeys in a room, give them each a typewriter and set them banging the keys without limit that, sooner of later, they will produce a complete script for Hamlet. Without constraints of time or place, all things that can possibly be typed will be. The Complete Works of Shakespeare will show up and so will grandma Ida’s recipe for tortellini in brodo. This tells us something about the nature of infinity and eternity and about how random chance will produce all possible outcomes under those conditions.

Lately, I’ve found myself bringing up the infinite monkeys in another context, though. In his hilarious short play from 1987, David Ives imagines that the monkeys are trying to write Hamlet. It’s a goal for them, but they keep accidentally writing Paradise Lost instead and they are very disappointed. In the thought experiment, of course, the monkeys aren’t trying to do anything. They are just banging on the keys. So what the experiment also tells us, and Ives has fun with this, is that banging on the keys and producing Hamlet at random is fundamentally different from being William Shakespeare, taking an old Northern European myth and intentionally turning it into a work of theater. Shakespeare and the monkey are not the same and neither are their scripts, even if they are identical to the letter.

The difference between Shakespeare and the monkey comes down to intentionality, creativity and critical thinking, as opposed to randomly bashing characters together, which is what an Artificial Intelligence does, with a pattern recognition overlay to that helps it not take an eternity to generate a Hamlet. This matters because we seem to be losing sight of just what human thought is. A lot of influential people look at large language models and don’t see a difference between pattern recognition and human reason.

I just read a new book by Kurt Warner, a social worker an therapist in Syracuse, New York, called False Idols: How Diversion is Destroying Democracy. It is fundamentally a book about thinking and why our dominant media culture makes it a difficult activity. I’ve read a lot on this topic from media critics, philosophers and even advertising people, but I was curious to get a take from a practicing psychological counselor and was rewarded with this insight:

“One does not learn to think by thinking….one learns to think by analyzing thought.” The role of a therapist is to help people analyze their thoughts and to figure out why it is that whatever their mind is producing isn’t leading them towards a satisfying life. Warner doesn’t delve into too case studies from his clients, which would surely be fascinating, but you can tell that is patients have typically come to him after years of focusing on the wrong things. Of course they are. His patients, like all of us, are subjected to between 4 and ten thousand advertisements per day, some so quick we barely notice them. Algorithms tells us constantly what we value based on what we watched or listened to most recently. We no longer have to seek out echo chambers that reinforce the ideas we already have, online services push us into them, the owners of capital knowing we’ll be more pliable consumers if we’re flattered. Have to ever noticed how sycophantic large language models can be?

In 1962, Daniel Boorstin, a scholar and an advertising man, published The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America. Boorstin unintentionally pioneered postmodern thinking just by looking at the world around him. He describes as a pseudo-event any moment that is manufactured and packaged for commercial purposes, rather than being what it seems like on the surface. He describes, for example, a hotel holding a celebration of its place and contributions to its community — it’s not really a party or a spontaneous appreciation of the business by its neighbors, but an event engineered by the owner of the hotel to create the impression of the hotel’s importance, ultimately to drive up business and to increase the value of the enterprise and its real estate. Boorstin sees pseudo events in celebrity culture (his takedown of Charles Lindbergh is great) and even in travel packages, where experiences abroad are sanitized so that the American traveler can set foot in far flung places without getting too mixed up in all of those other cultures with their other ideas. He also writes about films made for passive consumption, sports staged for our amusement and how the mass production of publishing and art lead to a kind of conformity of output, decided by sales and profits.

Decades later, we got Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business which argued in 1985 that even news programming had become entertainment, a trend that Postman was able to call but not hinder (the brilliant 1976 film Network couldn’t do much about it either).

This isn’t trivial. With a therapist’s perspective, Warner sees it all adding up to a lot of misspent and wasted time, which is a big problem for us mortals. Worse, the very people who are creating the pseudo-events are demanding more and more of our time and even access to our bodies. Warner clearly likes to watch sports, for example. He appreciates the beauty of athletic accomplishments. But, he points out, an NFL game should take an hour, maybe two, to watch. But the NFL routinely stretches out broadcasts to cover 3-4 hours. Warner cites the Super Bowl as an especially extended event, but the NFL is also giving us Thanksgiving and Christmas Day games with as much fanfare and they’re driving fans to consume more and related content online. Worse, says Warner, most people (mostly men) watch these games alone. Then they wonder why they haven’t connected with friends and don’t have meaningful relationships.

The subtitle to Warner’s book is about the future of democracy which, but I sense a bit of the political being personal here and recall Candide’s insistence that we must all “tend our own gardens.” If the body politic is ailing, it’s because those of us who comprise it was unnerved, unhappy, anxious and feeling powerless.

Warner doesn’t offer easy answers because there aren’t any. Consider it more of a warning — the inputs we’re getting from entertainment, the news, advertisers and politicians isn’t there to help us follow our bliss, or even figure out what our bliss might be. We might find some solace in art, music and literature but what’s made available to us is often controlled by the very gatekeepers who are feeding us unhelpful stimuli.

In the end, the only answer is mindfulness, critical thinking and some healthy skepticism. The least equipped to deal with this are the 43 million Americans who the government defines as having “low literacy skills,” meaning they cannot engage independently with text, infer meaning, or put written knowledge to use in their lives. This is only going to become more difficult in an age where computerized intelligences assure you that the decisions you’re making are all fine and good, brilliant, even, as you shop online for items that don’t make you any happier when they arrive the next day.