M2D #1: The State of Dialogue
A Post-Doom Reading of Reports from the Tower of Babel: Moving Beyond 'Connected Isolation'
It’s been two years since my last report on the State of Dialogue, so I “hasten slowly” to bring you this inaugural edition of M2 Dialogue, a monthly essay about the gap between our stories and realities. Of course, M2D#1 only scratches the surface of noteworthy developments, but I launched this Substack in order to keep scratching, not only through this newsletter but also through my first three serialized books (in various stages of development). If these lines of inquiry align with your intuitions about the meanings of our special moment in history, I invite you to subscribe and stay tuned.
Acceleration to Epistemic Event Horizons
In all the games we play, especially the game of business and “social media”, the rules are changing faster and faster, in accelerating cycles of stasis and disruption. By the time the machinery of institutional consensus produces another batch of white papers that presume to describe the “New Normal”, it’s too late. The moving target leaves the curators of informed opinion befuddled, again and again.
The befuddlement of our institutions and the irrelevance of most white papers on “best practices” raises a question for flesh-and-blood human beings crawling through life in decrepit institutions: Should we even speak openly about the widening gap between our narratives and the realities we co-create?
Whether or not we decide to speak about this gap, it serves as fertile soil for epistemic anarchy, an apparently ruleless search for the new rules of the games we play. Without a deliberate intervention, the process unfolds unconsciously, further widening the gap between our stories and realities.
These unconscious processes often predetermine collective, institutional and individual responses to the meta-crisis.1 For a time, denial may serve a protective function, but overtime, the protective barrier weakens or breaks, and the denied realities leak or erupt into awareness.
After these leaks and eruptions, we can either engage in a mutually destructive politics of nomenclature, or we can turn to dialogue as a Tabernacle in the epistemic wilderness. As Jacque Ellul wrote: "Propaganda ceases where simple dialogue begins."
This Substack is dedicated to the study of what obstructs and enables the transitions from propaganda to dialogue, and vice versa. If there’s one conclusion I draw based on my latest readings on this subject, it’s that we have many ways to reclaim dialogue as a path to the future we want, but we probably shouldn’t hold our breath for our institutions to lead the way. The future of Dialogue, in my view, is post-corporate — even (or, especially) in corporate settings. Judge for yourself.
At First Glance
It’s hard to search for worthwhile reading on the "attention economy" or "media ecology" without doom-scrolling to the conclusion that the state of dialogue seems comparable to the state of a water lily trying to thrive in desert sand.
For example, if you read in The New Atlantis that Reality Is Just a Game Now (July 6, 2022), you may struggle to reconcile the persuasiveness of the argument with your need for a real and stable reality. You may also reasonably wonder: "If reality is a just game now, what are the rules of the game?" Again, the answer in this essay won't provide much comfort. According to the author:
The “game masters” don’t necessarily write out the whole story in advance. They might make up some parts of it as they go, creating clues in response to what players are doing. Some games offer prizes, like coordinates to a secret party. But really, the reward is just the satisfaction of solving the mystery.
If you inquire about the identity of the “game masters”, the answer pulls you into another deep rabbit hole that, strangely, leads right back to you. It's not because Edward Bernays2 was wrong when he wrote about the "invisible government" responsible for the "conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses." The answer leads back to you precisely because Bernays was right when he argued that “the ideas conveyed by the words [of propaganda] will become part and parcel of the people themselves.” See Masters of Crowds: The Rise of Mass Social Engineering (MIT Press Reader - June 29, 2022).
If these insights haven’t caused you enough anguish, you can turn to Noema Magazine (April 21, 2022) to learn that All That Is Solid Melts Into Information and that “everything that binds and connects is disappearing.” In this interview with the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, the author of Psycho-Politics, you can explore some vertigo-inducing twists and turns in the all-too-familiar observation that “There are hardly any shared values or symbols, no common narratives that unite people.”
This first glance at 2022 reports wouldn’t be complete without a mention of the
essay on Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid (The Atlantic - May 2022). Here, Haidt helps us think about the current state of dialogue as a grim reenactment of the Tower of Babel story in which God scrambles our language, leaving us unable to understand each other’s speech.I could cite more sources suggesting that dialogue has become impossible and that institutional responses to this crisis are spiraling downward into ineptitude and pathocracy, but it may help to punctuate this narrative with a deep breath. (Continue after scanning and soothing all your chakras.)
A Deeper Reading in Search of Remedies
After this glimpse into the heart of darkness, you can transmute the terror you may have felt. For example, you can marvel at the prophetic resonance of 20th century thinkers such as Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, and Jean Beaudrillard. You may even include Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann in this list, despite their amoral and elitist leanings. You can also seek solace in the work of living cartographers of our post-reality world.
Still, some anxieties may linger, and their expression often begins with the question — What is to be done? — famously posed in 1863 by Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Applying this question to the predicament of the water lily in the arid desert sand, how does one transplant the delicate flower into a more hospitable environment? So, let's look again at the descriptions of the problem in the above-mentioned sources to check for any promising transplantation options.
Art and Ritual: A New Harmony with Temporality
The Noema interview points to several basic shifts in our orientation that can help teleport us from the wilderness of infocracy to the Promised Land of human-to-human dialogue. These include:
Reclaiming art and ritual as a form of resistance to compulsive consumption.
Developing new narratives that do not presuppose a hierarchy and embedding these narratives in the physical body.
Leaning into the ritual character of cultural events such as theater, dance and football.
Understanding that a culture held together solely by instrumental and economic relations cannot found communities; it can only isolate people.3
Establishing a stable harmony with temporality and using rituals as temporal structures (Tabernacles, if you will) to escape the terror of short-termism.
Finally, for anyone who feels a resistance to the idea of rituals, consider Han’s definition:
Rituals can be defined as temporal technologies for housing oneself. They turn being in the world into being at home. Rituals are in time as things are in space. They stabilize life by structuring time. They give us festive spaces, so to speak, spaces we can enter in celebration.
Pathways to Institutional Reforms
In After Babel, Haidt suggests that humanity rebuilt the Tower of Babel circa 2011. That’s when Google Translate became available on most smartphones. This milestone marked a culmination of the euphoria about humanity’s tech-fueled journey to a more connected and collaborative future. In the view of techno-optimists at the time, the broad use of Google Translate served as a symbol of our liberation from confusion through language.
After the speedy destruction of this tower of hubris and exuberance, we find ourselves in a dessicated world that, according to Haidt, will get much worse as amoral opportunists, now aided by AI, “flood the zone with shit”. But we’re not out of moves, Haidt argues. He sketches out three categories of reforms:
Harden democratic institutions (e.g., end closed-party primaries and replace them with non-partisan open primaries).
Reform social media (e.g., modify the “Share” feature to slow the spread of content).
Better prepare the next generation (e.g., restrict pre-puberty access to social media).
The Future of Influence
The history of public relations (PR) and advertising can easily support the view of these methods of influence as handmaidens of pathocracy. Until a few weeks ago, I held the view that these industries have not yet produced a role model who can serve as an alternative and an antidote to the lasting influence of practitioners such as Edward Bernays. However, my view changed when I discovered Howard Luck Gossage, aka the “Socrates of San Francisco”.
Gossage stood out as “an ad man with a conscience”, often remembered for the ways he used his craft to make the world a better place. In this LinkedIn post, for example, Justin Oberman tells the story of how Gossage used propaganda to feed starving children in war-torn France.
But, in addition to Gossage's conscience, I appreciate his insights:
Nobody reads advertising. People read what interests them; sometimes, it's an ad.
And
An advertisement that sticks its neck out in a forthright manner, as though it expected to be spoken back to, is rare indeed; and it is too bad. For this attitude is the beginning of reality, of experience, of personal responsibility. It is as necessary for corporations — who are, after all, legal persons — as it is for individuals.
For any advertising and PR agency principals sincerely asking themselves “What is to be done?”, part of my answer is: make your agency and your industry more hospitable to people who dare, as Gossage did, to stick their necks out. Otherwise, the future of influence will be no different from its past.
The Future of the Game
In a game without rules, there's no future without dialogue. Without “game masters” who hand us the script, we have no choice but to start writing and negotiating the rules with each other. The future of the game is dialogue.
Part of what irks me about the question “What is to be done?” is that it is an inelegant translation of the Russian “Что делать?” In my view, “What to do?” would have been a simpler and better translation. The prevailing framing of the question in the passive voice obscures what matters most: Who is asking the question?
In this evocatively fragmentary essay on What Is To Be Done?
- August 30, 2022), L.M. Sacasas highlights this problem:The question “What is to be done?” implies another one that is rarely discussed explicitly so much as it is implicitly argued about. That question is this: “Who is going to do it?”
The thing about dialogue is that it reveals the participants to each other — who is posing the question and to whom the question is posed. In dialogue, I get to ask you, and you get to ask me: What are you going to do? Do you trust or doubt that impulse or intuition? How can I help you on your journey? How can you help me with mine?
I don’t want to romanticize dialogue, but neither can I suppress my intuition that the path through our epistemic wilderness is fundamentally dialogic.
Conclusion
For the image in the header of this post, I selected a Jacques Ellul quote:
When we become conscious of that which determines our life, we attain the highest degree of freedom.
The Convivial Society post above includes Ellul's response to the charge that, in his view of these determinants, humanity appears helpless against these assaults on freedom. Ellul reframes the charge into a choice: We can become conscious of these determinants, or we can allow them to be transformed into inevitabilities.
Given this choice, how can anyone still lead a “trivial existence in a technological civilization”?
I provisionally define the meta-crisis as a civilizational deficit of self-knowledge feeding the epistemic root of all crises. The meta-crisis broadens what Alfred North Whitehead called the ignorance of our ignorance. The growing weight of this second-order ignorance reinforces the compulsion to reenact ineffective and unsustainable responses to catastrophic risks.
Edward Bernays was one of the most influential engineers of this "game". For anyone new to Bernays and the history of his craft, I recommend PR! A Social History of Spin.
I believe that this understanding is necessarily incomplete unless it imbues and transforms our economic relations. This is the central theme of my third “book”: Naming the Price)