The problem of politics in a noisy age

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Which is worse? Having someone describe your ethnicity in a way that you dislike, or having someone knock on your door in the dead of night, demand your proof of residence and bundle you into a van? I ask only because apparently the question is rather more difficult than I had thought it was.

There is no question that there are many labels that the well-meaning left seeks to impose on me without my consent. One particular dislike is the people who write to tell me that I should refer to myself as “mixed heritage”, a term that makes me sound like a tomato.

So I understand why the word “Latinx” actively pushes some of the people it describes towards Donald Trump. But then I consider Trump’s promise to deport 20mn people from the US — a pledge so central that it made it on to Republican National Convention placards — and, frankly, the profound fear this should provoke for anyone who doesn’t “look” like a white American makes the tomato talk seem less problematic.

People who are members of political parties shouldn’t ever say that the voters have goofed on the grounds that the customer is always right. But as someone who is not a member of a political party, let me say: something has seriously gone wrong with your threat perception if you are letting the half-baked opinions of some social justice types direct your vote.

Nor is this problem confined to the American right. I have lost count of the number of people in British politics, including some card-carrying Conservatives, who have said to me that while Trump is “for four years”, Brexit is for an eternity. Brexit represents a major blow to the UK’s economic prosperity and, if you think as I do that the British presence in the bloc improved policymaking, a blow to the continent as a whole. But it simply isn’t comparable in content or downside risk to a president who pledges to water down or abandon the institutions of multilateralism, which have been a vital part of America’s contribution to all our security and prosperity.

What has gone wrong here? I think there is a shared problem: we are living in a noisy age. Kooky and unhelpful ideas about race are not new, but now they make it on to the BBC website. The mounting marginal losses of Brexit are with us all the time, but you can’t even take to social media to complain about an additional charge on ordering something from the continent without being lectured on how this metropolitan smugness is why Brexit happened. There is good evidence that, far from broadening our horizons, being exposed to stridently opposed views on social media can actually cause us to double down on what we already thought.

This isn’t the first time that humans have had to live through an increased amount of ambient noise from one another. The invention of writing and of printing both represented similar information revolutions.

As Lyndal Roper describes in her excellent forthcoming book on the German Peasants’ War, Summer of Fire and Blood, the 1524-25 uprising was not the first time that lordly power was challenged by the peasantry, nor was Martin Luther the first priest to take on the orthodoxy of the Catholic Church. But they were the first to benefit from the easy dissemination of ideas thanks to the printing press. While Luther may simply have been referring to spiritual “freedom” in his writings, the peasants believed he was talking about something more radical — and acted accordingly.

Of course, the Peasants’ War wasn’t just about the spread of ideas. It was also, as Roper describes, about longer-running economic and social problems, just as Trump and Brexit are also about the entry of women into the workplace, the transfer of middle-income jobs across the world thanks to globalisation, immigration and the lingering consequences of the global financial crisis.

But the information revolution is a major part of it. We are once again having to readjust to a vast expansion in the amount of conflicting information at our fingertips. Some react with “news avoidance”: preferring not to pay much attention to what goes on. Others can never unplug. Neither approach leads to good decision-making.

It took a century of war for us to invent a new idea — liberalism — which allowed Europeans to stop killing one another as a result of the last information revolution. I used to think that, for all the problems that social media has brought, we were doing a better job of navigating this one. I am no longer quite so sure.

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