Some observers’ thoughts on America’s broken society

The New York Times published a couple of fairly long, complicated articles on this issue. These observations are not new, but they come from thoughtful people who are carefully watching what America is going through. The first article focuses on observations of a long time war correspondent Luke Mogelson, a journalist for The New Yorker. Mogelson sees deep fear grounded mostly in mirages as a major polarizing force in American politics and society. He is incredulous that mere vaporware (propaganda, lies, slanders, etc.) can foment such intense emotion and social damage. The NYT writes:

Living in Paris in the spring of 2020, during the early months of the pandemic, he was jarred by photos of armed lockdown protesters in Michigan. “The images of men in desert camo, flak jackets and ammo vests, carrying military-style carbines through American cities, portrayed a country I no longer recognized,” he writes in his new book, “The Storm Is Here: An American Crucible.”

So Mogelson flew back to the United States, where he reported on months of turmoil leading up to the Jan. 6 insurrection. “I had never doubted that the U.S., under the wrong circumstances, could succumb to spiraling cycles of violence as intractable as any I’d seen abroad,” he writes. “But what were those circumstances?”

I wanted to know whether Mogelson, who has witnessed real war, sees auguries of it here. The answer is complicated. At one point he writes, “Increasing talk on both the left and the right about the possibility of civil war left me somewhat bemused.” At the same time, he draws trenchant comparisons between ISIS in Syria and certain parts of the American right. And he recognizes something familiar in the growing sense among Americans of many different political persuasions that their government can’t protect them.

“This breakdown of confidence in sources of stability long taken for granted intimated the kind of social fracturing I’d covered overseas,” he writes.

“Every civil conflict that I’ve covered has been rooted in real injury and grievance,” he said. “In Iraq, for example, I was spending time with soldiers who had the scars to prove their suffering at the hands of the people they were fighting against.”

In America, by contrast, the right’s enemies tend to be either wild exaggerations or outright fantasies — antifa supersoldiers, totalitarian globalists, satanic pedophiles. “Whether or not the very real fear of these very unreal threats would be enough to sustain a hot conflict and people killing and dying for those projections of their own paranoias, I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never seen that.”  

“There’s a difference between the complexities of those long-running conflicts [Iraq, Syria, Liberia, etc.], and how certain people become radicalized in those environments, and what we have in the U.S., which would just be large-scale violence based from the get-go on lies,” he said.

The second article focuses on the effect that social media algorithms have on many Americans. The author finds the same thing about the neuroscience of morality that I came to see. Simply put, we can’t explain morality yet. That’s true despite billionaire blowhards (Zuckerberg, Thiel) arrogantly telling us they know how to fix what ails us, while actually making us more polarized and sicker. The gist of the article is that the algorithms feed into and amplify feelings of moral outrage, hate and fear. That generates revenue and profit.

[Max] Fisher, a New York Times journalist who has reported on horrific violence in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, offers firsthand accounts from each side of a global conflict, focusing on the role Facebook, WhatsApp and YouTube play in fomenting genocidal hate. Alongside descriptions of stomach-churning brutality, he details the viral disinformation that feeds it, the invented accusations, often against minorities, of espionage, murder, rape and pedophilia. But he’s careful not to assume causality where there may be mere correlation. [Fisher's] book explores deeply the question of whether specific features of social media are truly responsible for conjuring mass fear and anger.

The enjoyment of moral outrage is one of the key sentiments Fisher sees being exploited by algorithms devised by Google (for YouTube) and Meta (for Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp), which discovered they could monetize this impulse by having their algorithms promote hyperpartisanship. Divisiveness drives engagement, which in turn drives advertising revenues.  

The lesson of Fisher’s book is surely that we don’t need more celestial inspirations for ambitious projects of human transformation. Rather, we need to make individual members of societies resistant to such efforts. We have the means to do so if the political will is strong enough, and if our political system hasn’t yet been wrecked by the chaos machine.