Will reality bite? by digby
Here is a great deep dive by Andrew O’Hehir about our weird state of unreality
An excerpt:
Trump recently authorized the release of an extensive trove of government documents relating to the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy, an event that is often understood to have disordered the American psyche and that unquestionably sent us down the path of conspiracy theory and fake news and collective fantasy. There’s an obvious and terrible irony at work here, or perhaps symmetry: The president who seemed to represent America at its most idealistic and cosmopolitan, and the one who represents us at our most cynical and closed-minded; the president whose death is shrouded in rumors about the Russians, the CIA and the Mob, and the one whose dubious ascent to power was (perhaps) enabled by a strikingly similar cast of characters. Trump is JFK in the Upside Down.
Predictably, the new National Archives dump is nowhere close to the full accounting Trump had promised; historians will still be arguing about the JFK assassination 100 years after everyone who lived through it is dead, and 100 years after that. Kennedy’s death was not the beginning of the American tendency to believe in fanciful, improbable unified theories of everything, a topic I discussed recently with author and journalist Kurt Andersen, whose new book “Fantasyland” traces that current back into our nation’s prehistory.But Dallas 1963 was definitely a moment when a whole bunch of crazy crept out from under the rug, and it’s noteworthy that Trump himself (and a large proportion of his voters) are the right age to have been shaped by the JFK assassination and the years of turmoil that followed it. I don’t think it’s fair, however, to blame “grassy knoll” conspiracy theorists for the degradation of reality, even if somebody like Alex Jones, with his lizard men on the moon and “false flag” mass shootings and endless, borderline-pornographic Hillary Clinton fantasies, is their direct descendant. You also can’t blame Trump voters or Republicans in general or the culture of the 1960s or postmodern critical theory. Those are all symptoms. What led us from “ask not what your country can do for you” to “#Fake News is DISTORTING DEMOCRACY” was mostly the contradictions of human history, and I don’t think any of us knows what to do about that.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous aphorism about the death of God was a diagnostic remark, not a celebration: Human society was going to have big problems in the 20th century, observed the melancholy German, because even people who claimed to be guided by Christian morality didn’t actually believe in it anymore. You couldn’t come up with a more spectacular example than Donald Trump and his sanctimonious supporters on the Christian right, of course, but the real problem is bigger than that.
God and the church were viewed for several centuries in the West as custodians of an external, unshakable reality that conferred power on kings and princes. Many dreadful things were done in their name, and many glorious works of art created. But all that started to fade with Martin Luther, as Andersen’s book observes. Religion became a private and subjective affair, subject to infinite variations, which inescapably meant the loss of most of its power. Even a showboating fanatic like Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, or a million more like him, can’t turn that around. (Indeed, Moore’s behavior suggests he is less concerned with divine power than his own.)
With the coming of the Enlightenment, the cobwebs of superstition and pseudo-reality were supposed to be swept out of human society by the real reality of Science and Reason and Democracy and other grand abstractions. Why did that happen only incompletely, or temporarily? That might be the central question of modern history — and perhaps of philosophy, psychology, political science and a whole bunch of literature as well. But even without a graduate degree, we can conclude that there was considerable hubris at work, and that the balance between competing narratives of meaning was more complicated than it looked in Rousseau or Jefferson’s time.
One answer might be that human beings thrive on stories. We need myth. If you’re anything like me, when you get home from work you’ll flip on Hulu or Netflix to soak up some middlebrow moral parable aimed predominantly at people of your class and background. Another answer lies in Nietzsche’s central insight, which was more or less that all systems of thought are always power relations in disguise. That doesn’t mean that no such systems are better than others, or that there’s no such thing as objective reality. There are facts out there about how Kennedy was killed in 1963, and about how Trump was elected in 2016 — but we are never likely to know them for sure, or to agree about them.
There’s more. This is the view from 30,000 feet and it’s actually extremely bracing even though it’s scary as hell considering the stakes in the nuclear age.