The solution to dis-information is not more knowledge
Why we might need to consider a more radical prescription for our cultural crisis
Over at the Yale University Press blog I have written a short essay that tries to situate my new book in terms of a wider cultural conversation about polarization, suspicion, disinformation and mistrust. Here’s an opening snippet:
Call it what you will—our age of polarization, an epoch of epic uncertainty, or a cultural moment plagued by distraction and dis-information. Under any of these descriptions, we are trying to name something we feel in our beleaguered collective psyche.
One of the reasons I wrote Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark is my conviction that we will only begin to really grapple with what plagues us if we recognize this as a spiritual condition. I do not mean this in a narrowly “religious” sense. Rather, we will only begin to address these maddening phenomena if we attend to deeper challenges for the human spirit. We are up against something that technocracy can’t fix. I want to venture a diagnosis of this spiritual condition and then explain why, surprisingly, we might find a remedy in ancient mysticism.
Diagnosis: Our “Spiritual” Condition
We are awash in knowledge and overwhelmed by a flood of information. We have unimaginable libraries of data available in our pockets. In such a world, we feel pressured to demonstrate that we are “in the know.” Knowledge has become both currency and identity.
Yet because our society is organized as an information economy, we are also vexed by mis- and dis-information. In an age of AI slop and digital duplicity, we can’t even believe our own eyes anymore. Hence, a sad paradox: somehow, we know more than we ever have before and yet we feel less confident that we know what’s true. So despite astronomical amounts of information and knowledge, we trust one another less and less. We are more suspicious than ever. There are always people and movements willing to capitalize on these conditions, to leverage our collective suspicion to serve their own ends. These people we call Cynics.
And does it not feel like we are more occupied than ever before? The unending blitz of information has made us more distracted than ever. Entire industries exist to occupy our attention (in both senses of the word). The point of that “occupation” is to either colonize our attention for consumption or carve us up into factions of tribal animosity. We become merely “branded” by labels we’ve acquired, whether its Prada or Lululemon, Republican or Democrat, or “us” versus “them.”
Our spiritual condition, then, is one of engineered distraction that occupies our attention in order to make us complacent consumers and clannish competitors, carved up into warring classes and identities.