Sam Smith - When I first got involved in politics as a teenager over seven decdes ago, I was introduced to corruption, first in Philadelphia, then Boston. It was prominent but far less sinful and dangerous than what we face today. It was, after all, more an individual than institutional activity. You paid real people for influence and they returned the favor as a personal response. People like George Washington Plunkett of Tammany Hall whose biography includes his schedule of the weddings he had to go to, the churches and synagogues he had to visit and the court sessions he would attend. Politicians were looking after themselves and their neighbors more than serving large corporations and other sources of big money. Did they undermine good government? Of course, but the forces behind the corruption had not yet become hugely larger than the individual politicians. Corruption was still a human thing.
I find myself reflecting on such matters as we face what is probably the worst political crisis of American history, a choice between a virtueless, unskilled, and constantly deceitful Republican and a well meaning, well acting Democrat who can't convince enough people of his decency.
Yet someone like Trump didn't just rise out of nowhere. What is not being well discussed is how such a crooked fool could be doing so well. To help us resolve this crisis, we should spend more time considering its causes and not just the results.
For example, two of our worst presidents - Trump and Reagan - got their power from show business and television, with TV creating a artificial personal relationship with the viewer. As the Yale University Press puts it on its website:
Big and small screens alike rush in to fill the void of social connection. In our popular imagination, the portrait of loneliness is an isolated teen hunched over a smartphone. If we pull back the lens a bit further, we might see the screen is not only a phone and the person isn't always young. Time diary studies are quite clear: older adults, particularly retirees, spend the most time in front of screens, but it is a TV not a smartphone. Adults spend five times longer watching TV, including streaming video content, than they do on social media. Even young adults spend less time on social media than watching streaming and broadcast content.
I grew up in a different time. As I explained it in a 2008 interview, as a journalist "you weren't working for your sources, you weren't working for a network. Your responsibility was to serve the reader. The change I think really came with television, the more I think about it, and I think that hugely changed, in ways we still don't understand, a lot of things. One of these affecting politics was to change it from a bottom up operation to a top down."
The story of a good part of the last century is about replacing human behavior, skills and relationships with post-human alternatives whether technological or institutional. Long before artificial intelligence we had a massive growth in institutions and systems. Increasingly, more work was controlled not by people and their human relationships but by people working for soulless technological, bureaucratic or institutionally expansive structures.
I'm aware of this in no small part because I live now in a small town in Maine where traditional human behavior and relationships survive. I'm repeatedly conscious that my human behavior still matters, exemplified by the number of smiles I get in my dealings with others compared to doing business in a large urban corporate office.
The idea that traditional human habits are not essential to efficient behavior has been growing steadily. For example, Laura McGann wrote recently in the Washington Post: "Friendships are crucial to living our best lives. We can reach each other in more ways than ever in the digital era. So why has American friendship fallen off a cliff? In 1990, only 1 percent of Americans told Gallup they had zero friends. By 2024, that figure surged to 17 percent, according to a poll by the Survey Center on American Life."
A 2017 survey of 1,000 British workers found 42% saying they'd be "comfortable" taking orders from a computer. And Slashdot reported: "EdX, the online learning platform created by administrators at Harvard and M.I.T. that is now a part of publicly traded 2U Inc., surveyed hundreds of chief executives and other executives last summer … Nearly half - 47 percent - of the executives surveyed said they believed "most" or "all" of the chief executive role should be completely automated or replaced by A.I. Even executives believe executives are superfluous in the late digital age..."
The decline of community organizations, churches, and teaching civics in schools are other signs that we no longer consider our human nature and relationships essential to our lives. We are essentially mechanizing humanity as recently discussed in the NY Times by art curator Daniel Birnbaum:
In the world at large, Birnbaum acknowledged, there were "frightening scenarios" whereby artificially intelligent systems could control decisions made by governments or the military, and pose grave threats to humanity. In the creative industries, he said, a number of undertakings could soon be carried out by machines that would mix together the best examples of human creations and deliver reshuffled versions of them.
In other words, we are moving towards a society in which the human is increasingly considered antiquated or obsolete. This is not just a matter of technological or bureacucratic actions but -strikingly unmentioned in current discussions - also virtue, values, decency, constitutional democracy, cooperation, friendship and, yes, love.
Or to put it more simply, we are increasingly praising and constructing a substitution for what it means to be human.
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