Fake news, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter, history, identity and the dawn of civilisation
Busy few weeks, hence lack up updates (that and the Medium Android app not seeming to allow you to add stories to publications…)
Caught up on some of my reading backlog over the weekend. An interesting piece from Reason from back in November had a quote it’s worth remembering:
“the fake-news meme is a dangerous self-deception. Behind the notion that “misinformation” elected Donald Trump lies this assumption: People wouldn’t have voted against Hillary Clinton if they knew the truth.
“This is a seductive delusion not unlike the one conservatives tell themselves when they lose elections. A candidate could stand to the right of Attila the Hun and a certain segment of the American right would insist that he lost because he just wasn’t conservative enough. Conservatism is never at fault, in this reading — only the inadequate application of it is.
“But the fake-news meme provides Democrats with an excuse to avoid self-reflection; it clears Clinton (and them) of any responsibility for the loss.”
While the Reason piece itself doesn’t explain this concept adequately, and is deliberately over-the-top in its dismissal of fake news as a problem, the core argument is sound.
Why is fake news effective? Because it confirms prejudices.
The problem isn’t the fake news, it’s the prejudices fake news confirms
Does the fake news increase the number of people who hold such prejudices? Yes. But those prejudices exist for reasons other than fake news. They go back centuries. They’re a core part of Western culture. (Hell, not just Western culture, for that matter…)
Xenophobia and racism are baked into the whole concept of national or tribal identity: You can’t be a coherent nation/tribe without being different to some other group. You can’t be a different race without being able to identify some kind of physical difference. (Amusing here is the current far-right pro-Brexit meme that it’s impossible to be racist to Europeans, because they’re white — not realising that this argument is in itself an indication of racism, while also conveniently forgetting centuries of explicit racism towards the Irish, Slavs, etc., or those Europeans whose whiteness has been disputed, be they Roma, Jews, or darker-skinned Mediterraneans from regions once ruled by Islam — Sicily, Spain, Greece, the Balkans…)
Elements of these prejudices are also baked into religion, going back aeons. Believers vs non-believers. Blaming other religions’ followers for perceived evils or injustices. Ascribing malevolence or insult to other religions’ traditions.
The sense of difference is the foundation of human culture
The idea that “we are the same, they are different” is the starting point of the sense of community, and therefore of human civilisation. And this concept has, from the earliest years of human consciousness, been based on often fraudulent emphasis on usually only perceived (often made up) differences.
The same is true in nature: Groups of animals, insects, birds, fish, whatever band together to fight other, effectively identical groups in pursuit of better resources, better food, better territory.
The instinct to defend those similar to you against those you see as different predates humanity itself. It’s a gut instinct.
Liberalism, internationalism — these don’t come from the gut, they come from the head. They aren’t instinctive. They are learned behaviors, which have — in their current forms — only been around for a few decades, nowhere near long enough to be fully baked into the culture.
Shifting the cultural narrative: History, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and Harry Potter
Britain joined the EEC before I was born, yet when I was growing up I was still raised on the traditional xenophobic stereotypes of our European neighbours. My attitude towards the French wasn’t based on our European partnership with them, but on centuries of conflict: Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Vichy regime were far more compelling narratives than cooperation.
History — my passion at school to the extent I went on to study it to postgrad level at university — only confirmed these old stereotypes. It continued (and continues) to be focused on national lines. British history (by which was usually meant English history), not European or global. And only certain types of British history — the Wars of the Roses, the Tudors, the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, the First and Second World Wars are the core of the national curriculum. All focusing on the rise of an English/British national identity or national glory to some extent. Very little on the Empire, or national injustices. Very little on anything other than the ruling classes, except in passing with the Industrial Revolution. A continual Whiggish narrative of ongoing national improvement and progress.
Another love was The Lord of the Rings — a book with a core underlying racial narrative typical of most attitudes up to the late 20th century. The same was the case in the Narnia books, The Wind in the Willows, and most other children’s parables — some “races” (orcs, goblins, weasels) were simply inherently evil.
It was only from the 1970s onwards that popular culture began to get more complex on an industrial scale. Star Wars showed the racially homogenous Empire to be evil, the racially diverse Rebellion to be lauded (little wonder racists are upset about the new films, but how has it taken them nearly 40 years to realise?). The likes of ET showed us children of the 80s that even aliens were not necessarily to be feared. Harry Potter made this even more explicit, with the racists (those who hate Muggles and Mudbloods) all supporters of the evil Voldemort.
There were multiple other popular films and books that began to push this more liberal approach to difference — yet the narrative of different = bad (or even just comical / less good) in popular culture continued in parallel. I was raised on the explicitly racist Noddy books, with their Golliwogs (though the way that the goblins were all, as a race, evil is what makes them more concerning — the golliwogs were mostly presented as friendly and nice, as I remember it), as well as Little Black Sambo and countless other relics from the late 19th and early 20th centuries with portrayals of characters from other parts of the world no more than stereotypes.
But it wasn’t just that the older cultural relics persisted — even new culture continued to perpetuate narratives of racial difference and non-white inferiority. “Liberal” Westerns — Dances With Wolves showed Native Americans as noble, respectable savages, but the lead was a white guy. Ditto The Last of the Mohicans. This continues even now — Tom Cruise as the lead in The Last Samurai, set in 19th century Japan; Matt Damon as the lead in The Great Wall, set in medieval China, and released only last year.
And then you still get racist aberrations like 2015’s No Escape, in which Owen Wilson tries to get his pure white family out of an Asian country in revolution, where the local Asians are portrayed more or less like zombies. Or well-intentioned racism like the shoddy Independence Day 2, in which despite an attempt at an ethnically-diverse cast and global perspective, almost all the key moments are driven by white men (Will Smith not returning, his character’s son ends up very much secondary), and despite nods to the rest of the world (i.e. a female Chinese pilot, who exists purely as the potential love interest for a comic relief character) it’s all fought (once again) as if the United States is the world.
Using the techniques of fake news for good
This is all off the top of my head, of a grey Sunday in January. Suffice to say that there have been books and PhDs written on this.
What I’m saying is that fake news is part of a tradition. It’s nothing new. Some of it is a modern manifestation of the blood libel (though now mostly aimed at Muslims), but most is more subtle, more insidious, playing to existing preconceptions and prejudices in the same way that the books and films of yesteryear tapped into cultural tropes about good and evil.
The question is not so much how to counter fake news, but how to use the same techniques to subvert the promotion of single identity politics that the racists, xenophobes and nationalists are trying to push. How can we do what Star Wars and Harry Potter did — taking established narratives and making the good guys the diverse ones for a change — but apply it to current affairs?
Hell, the anti-liberals already think the media is a liberal propaganda machine. Why not turn it into one for real?
