Isolation, attention, and totalitarianism

UCSD scientists wrote,

Joint attention episodes set the stage for infant learning. In many cultures and contexts, infants and children learn to attend to whatever adults attend to. This helps children learn their group’s language, social routines, and practical skills.

We learn by paying attention to what others attend to. I speculate that this is why in-class learning works better than watching a lecture on line. When I am in a classroom, others are paying attention to the speaker. This makes my attention to the speaker instinctive. I don’t have to use so much willpower to pay attention. But when it’s just me sitting in front of a computer, I have to will myself to pay attention. It uses up more effort and takes more out of me.

In the twentieth century, watching television or listening to the radio were often social activities. TV and radio could command our attention the way the speaker in a classroom would, through people paying attention to what others were attending to.

But we use 21st-century media in isolation. That means that the media need other means to command our attention. They cannot rely on our use of social cues. Instead, they have to rely on dopamine hits. Porn. Games. And demonization.

We get a dopamine hit by seeing the demonization of people with whom we disagree. So demonization becomes a winning Darwinian strategy in the age of contemporary media.

The whole point of writing The Three Languages of Politics was to describe demonization rhetoric under the assumption that people would not want to demonize. I thought that if you recognize the rhetoric, you would back away from it.

Instead, the religion that persecutes heretics justifies demonization. To criticize demonization is to be a heretic. In a world where people consume media in isolation, an ideology that justifies demonization has an advantage.

My thought is that the fact that we consume contemporary media in isolation has made made people more receptive to demonization, with its totalitarian characteristics. This is probably accentuated by the virus-induced isolation, which increases our use of contemporary media and reduces our social interactions.

18 thoughts on “Isolation, attention, and totalitarianism

  1. Nice post.

    It would be interesting to assemble a bunch of essays on “How I learn from lectures.” Written by people who do a good job of learning from them. Many of them will be academics–a self-selected group.

    = – = – = – =

    My own experience is that I need to write things down and review them later. Without that, little gets transferred into long term memory.

    In addition, motivation is key-the best motivation for me is knowing the following things.

    1. The lecture will never be given again, and

    2. I need to grasp everything I possibly can, because I am responsible for explaining it to others, or for grading a test in which they may be responsible for the material in the lecture.

    = – = – = – =

    On a different note, the blogger Bruce Charlton has some interesting thoughts on the role of lectures in education.

    http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-compleat-lecturer-special.html

    = – = – = – =

    The demonization factor is real. I can see how it’s “a thing” and how it is promoted these days by phones, isolated consumption of media, etc.

    However–I recall reading somewhere the notion that at least now we have notions of privacy and silent personal reading, and the notion of individual responsibility. Somewhere…I recall reading that out stone age environment (a band of hunter-gatherers) was totalitarian. “Let them all go to hell, except for Cave 76” seems to make that point.

  2. Yes, nice post Arnold. Remember when we thought the internet would make people smarter and wiser? Those were the days.

    Turns out it mostly amplifies the most extreme voices on all sides in a way that makes it harder for common sense to compete.

    • The term “purity spiral” is useful. One of our fabulous commenters recently recommended the old book by Crane Brinton on the French Revolution. The point he made is the hypothesis: zealots compete in pushing things further to the left until eventually there is a Thermidor and a return to the center and order. Authoritarian order.

      Oddly, it seems like a good time to study “Social Revolutions,” the big long earth-shaking events that begin with the overthrow of the Old Regime and then have a Terror, a Thermidor, and (often) expansionist wars.

      One of the short-comings of history as it is taught in the US these days is that the term “Revolution” is rarely unpacked to distinguish between, for example, the American Revolution and the French Revolution. (I’m a good example. Most of what I know about history comes from free voluntary reading–maybe that’s usually the case. sorry to digress)

      = – = – = – = – =

      Niall Ferguson proposes that what we actually have is something like the period after the invention of the printing press and Luther’s successful triggering of the Reformation.

      Youtube video on “Long Now” channel

      Title: “Historian Niall Ferguson on the roots of today’s political polarization”

      length: 5 minutes:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLiPPtxKRAA

      • Thanks for that Niall Ferguson video Charles. It was right on the money and well worth the time.

  3. STOP DEMONIZING DEMONIZATION!

    the fact that a fun activity can be abused does not make it inherently evil
    demonization is only problematic if it is baseless

    there is a reason why we developed a positive response to demonization
    the threat of being demonized is a very strong deterrent to bad behavior
    so it makes sense for us the enjoy an activity that is socially positive

    being a scold is also fun (and can have a positive effect)
    but it can be and is easily abused
    does that mean we should never call out the fool?

  4. The dopamine-media connection theory intuitively seems explanatory. All the online click-bait, cults of hysteria, tragedy porn, commercial advertising appealing to moral superiority, hate-based political campaigns etc., that define USA culture could be explained as exploitation of the cravings of the dopamine deprived. The argument would be strengthened if we saw similar tendencies in other countries.

    A related line of inquiry would be to compare dopamine response levels in different demographic groups to different dopaminergic activities. Personally, I suspect listening to 50s on 5, followed by puttering in the shop or truck patch, and watching birds from my rocker on the back deck are my biggest dopamine boosters. I suspect further that hate-sploitation is probably most effective in dense urban areas due to the neurological weaknesses resulting from crowding. But that is just noodling.

    A competing alternate explanation that would take into account the USA’s apparent unique-ness in having a a hate-organized culture (with perhaps only the Gaza Strip rivaling it in intensity), might be that the current situation is the natural logical progression of the full-scale adoption and indoctrination campaigns in “diversity “ theory in the 1980’s.

    In the 1980’s every school child and every employee of a large corporation was indoctrinated in two ideas that define the dogma of “diversity”: (1) society is like a salad in which identity groups are the good parts and whites are the iceberg, and (2) cultures with multiple identity groups are superior to homogeneous cultures like that of China or Japan. Thus we had the federal government giving its agencies “diversity “ ratings in which having zero white males in the work force was considered most diverse and thus best. This genocidal attitude has not been challenged and continues to grow more pernicious the deeper it takes root as we see today. It will only get worse.

  5. My thought is that the fact that we consume contemporary media in isolation has made made people more receptive to demonization, with its totalitarian characteristics. This is probably accentuated by the virus-induced isolation, which increases our use of contemporary media and reduces our social interactions.

    It’s deeper than that – it’s atomization in general, which goes back long before the virus and social media, though of course those greatly exacerbate the situation.

    Consider this passage from Hannah Arendt’s “On The Nature Of Totalitarianism”

    Only isolated individuals can be dominated totally. Hitler was able to build his organization on the firm ground of an already atomized society which he then artificially atomized even further; Stalin needed the bloody extermination
    of the peasants, the uprooting of the workers, the repeated purges of the administrative machinery and the party bureaucracy in order to achieve the same results. By the terms “atomized society” and “isolated individuals” we mean a state of affairs where people live together without having anything in common, without sharing some visible tangible realm of the world. Just as the inhabitants of an apartment house form a group on the basis of their sharing this particular building, so we, on the strength of the political and legal institutions that provide our general
    living together with all the normal channels of communication, become a social group, a society, a people, a nation and so forth. And just as the apartment dwellers will become isolated from each other if for some reason their building is taken away from them, so the collapse of our institutions—the ever-increasing political and physical homelessness and spiritual and social rootlessness—is the one gigantic mass destiny of our time in which we all participate, though to very differing degrees of intensity and misery.

    The infamous “Life of Julia” from Obama’s 2012 campaign spins the atomization and State-based crowding-out of all other intermediating institutions as a plus and the logical extension of the perfected emancipation of the individual, interpreted as a freedom from responsibility as the State, with its experts and mandarins, takes care of all the hard ‘adulting’ for you in the background. Maintaining relationships is hard work. People don’t do it if they don’t need each other. They don’t need each other if they only need the State. Pretty soon they won’t be able to rely on each other anyway, so they will need to need the State for everything. Which suits the State just fine.

  6. The whole point of writing The Three Languages of Politics was to describe demonization rhetoric under the assumption that people would not want to demonize. […] Instead, the religion that persecutes heretics justifies demonization. To criticize demonization is to be a heretic.

    That’s a telling quote.

    https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/797952287591243776

  7. “The whole point of writing The Three Languages of Politics was to describe demonization rhetoric under the assumption that people would not want to demonize. I thought that if you recognize the rhetoric, you would back away from it.

    Instead, the religion that persecutes heretics justifies demonization. ”

    The three languages flow from three perspectives. All three are fully legitimate. You gravitate based on what matters more to you. None of them require demonization as a tactic.

    I would think that the whole point of writing The Three Languages of Politics is that it would provide a framework for reconciling perspectives. The three languages all have the components of conflict and the components of reconciliation. An idea then should have to be sold to multiple points of view.

    Each language tells us what they cherish and what they hate. The theory tells us nothing about why we are tending to focus on the negative sides of the personal ledgers of those who think differently. For that, we have to look to economics and the returns to marginal behaviors.

    If you really want to do some good, stop with the religion/heretical persecution stuff. There is nowhere to go with that, whether it is true or not. The only rational thing to do is to work towards the most proximate side of the other perspectives, and make that coalition work. When we focus on the negative extremities of the other axes, we give energy to them.

  8. Add on: Let’s unemploy 50 million people…and then wonder why there are aggravated social tensions.

    BTW. Innumeracy is rife, and dominates media coverage. Yes, police officers sometimes and unjustifiably kill citizens. There are 800,000 law enforcement officers in the US. If one-tenth of 1% of officers are bad eggs, you have 800 bad cops out there.

    So, even a dozen unjustified police killings annually in the US hardly means “police brutality” or racism is rife.

    BTW–I wonder if NYC or L.A. have a future. I felt this way in the 1970s also.

  9. Well, first you have to discount your attention in school because it’s been long proven that children are broken to the classroom by 3rd grade. That is, “school helplessness” is already growing strong. “School helplessness” is where students ” are capable of less initiative in connection with their school tasks than they commonly exhibit in the accomplishment of other tasks.” And, as you were obviously a good student, you likely learned to game schooling via lecture in order to get the good grades. I developed the skill to sleepily listen in class then retain what was needed to pass the test because schooling incentivizes getting good grades, not actual learning.

    But there is something to classroom after you’ve taken the effort to go to class and, in a non-disruptive environment, the reluctance is not to be the first disruptor. The “isolation” of the classroom is similar to the problem residential colleges now have. In the past, even in urban colleges, students didn’t have money or transportation to “get off campus” so they naturally migrated to group discussions of what they were learning to pass the time. Now they have money to go out, cars and the whole internet/social media/videos to occupy their off time.

    All of this probably contributes to the external locus of today’s students. A move toward despondency after constant harangues that “others”, not themselves control what happens to them. Emily Ekins discussed this on last weeks Free Thoughts podcast and the move to an external locus has been growing for the last 50 years. It is in the same vein that Thomas Sowell remarked, “Social justice is an actual impediment to acquiring human capital”. As he points out, the message is, why try when others are keeping you down rather than look inside for what to change to achieve your goals.

    Students with an external locus are not going to make the effort to learn how to learn from online since they don’t see it as something they control. Although, I can’t think of anything more dreary than logging in for a live, excruciatingly slow lecture, when a recorded and edited video, perhaps even with a transcript, would afford going back to review what you miss and can be viewed when the student is ready to pay attention instead of when the school or instructor wants to put it out.

  10. “virus-induced isolation”

    Really? There may be some “high risk” populations who have been induced by the virus but methink that most of us have been induced by government order…

    The fact that people try to live a life when they are authorised again (depending on the country they live in) although there still has been no convincing information about the virus spreading mode or its dangerosity (I know it can be lethal but certainly not to what degree under which conditions) tends to show that the virus plays a fairly small role in the dangerous levels of isolations we have been forced into.

  11. Good post but I have some critiques.

    First, the social cues haven’t been eradicated, but merely shifted. We still pay attention to what others are attentive to, and perhaps that is indeed the crux of the problem. For what others are attending to tends to be the most sensationalist and demonizing stuff out there.

    Second, in the old days, you are correct that if your social circle, say, family and friends, had moral interests then you’d be attentive to the right things. But this assumption–that your social circle has moral interests–doesn’t hold for everyone. Here, in Pakistan, there are thousands of children born in poverty and to families that have nothing but vile activities to take joy in, such as driving (motorcycles) recklessly, robbing, and doing drugs. That is their social circle; these activities are what their friends and family are attentive to. You can imagine the cues they are getting. The internet, frankly, is a blessing for them. It at least provides them an opportunity to choose other social cues.

    Finally, I don’t think attending lectures is better than studying alone. Sure, it may take some will, but it gets easier over time. And besides, if the entire class is attentive to not the lecturer but merely messing around, then that is also the social cue you, as a student, get. You don’t pay attention to the lecturer either.

    Thus, fundamentally, it all comes down to what your social circle is, and hence what it is actually attentive to.

    • Fasih Zulfiqar , you make an interesting point. Communications technology lets people who are “trapped” in a poor environment imagine a better way of life.

      This must be an old idea. What was the first instance? religion, myth, and epic poetry provide stories to get us out of our mundane existence, for example.

      As it so happens, your comment immediately reminded me of a charming little essay by the great (and prolific) Chicago economist Harry G. Johnson. He discusses TV as something that shows the lower classes how people with more money and cultivation spend their spare time and spare income. Not just having a beer down at the pub or gossiping over the laundry but perhaps going to the art museum or the symphony, or engaged in sports that the locals do not play.

      Harry G. Johnson was a good wordsmith. His turn of phrase eludes me. It’s somewhere in his essay collection _on economics and society_. He would have written this at least 40 years ago.

      Pakistan is mostly a mystery to me. I would hope that the people you mention are able to glimpse a wider world through the public service radio broadcasters if nothing else. BBC, VOA, RFI, Deutsche Welle, etc. Unless these are “haram.”

  12. This is a very interesting take, but I’d be curious about how to reconcile it with the fact that content still spreads somewhat socially online (at least in parts; as e.g. Fasih Zulfiqar has pointed out).

    Additionally, I wonder how the “missing social cues” weigh against the need to compete against ever more vast amounts of content out there as an explanation of why it becomes a winning strategy to polarize and make extreme statements.

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