Are We All Dr. Faustus?

All things that move between the quiet poles

Shall be at my command…

Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please,

Resolve me of all ambiguities…

- Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus

Among the many gifts bestowed upon Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus by Mephistopheles, as important to him as wealth and power, was the resolution of “all ambiguities.”  Alongside the material was that spiritual good - certainty, clarity, simplicity.  Faustus, like so many of us, had a compelling desire to soar above the clouds of confounding facts and ideas, the vast multiplicity of viewpoints, and see clearly.

Meanwhile, don’t overlook Marlowe’s plain implication - that the absence of ambiguity is a gift of the Devil.

That same need disturbs today’s society, animates the airwaves, pollutes political discourse, divides us one from another, threatens violence and even nuclear war.  We have come to a point in our history when we feel ourselves at sea, uniquely lacking the perception of a needed certainty.  Now one idea looks as meritorious as another, conspiracies are everywhere, or perhaps they’re not; all things are possible, even the most bizarre.  Pizzagate, anyone?  Closer to reality, but still matters of faith, are a stolen election, a president the tool of Russia, more stolen elections, the human race destroying itself in a matter of years, racism everywhere, the end of democracy, an infinite variety of sexes.

The point is not just the bizarre nature of the claims, but that each one has adherents who believe them passionately and regardless of conflicting evidence.  Those beliefs are, above all, so certain, so utterly free of nuance, so black and white.  All ambiguities are resolved, usually in a word or phrase – “Trumper,” “climate denier,” “racist.”  The indignant rejection of hard thought and the dogmatic refusal to consider alternative theories or conflicting facts dominate thought and speech.

And it’s far from a nutcase fringe or the uneducated who seek certainty’s safe harbor.  Perfectly intelligent people do as well.  Indeed, the leaders (and many of the followers) of the various true beliefs are almost all highly educated, highly functioning individuals.  They could do better, but they don’t.

Why?  And why now?  Why the sudden headlong drive for certainty, clarity and simplicity, the abrupt intolerance for the very subtlety, nuance and ambiguity that are the very soul of intelligence and legitimate inquiry?  

I blame social media.  The Internet is an excellent tool for acquiring and disseminating information.  We can learn via search engines more in a matter of an hour than we previously could in days or weeks in musty libraries.  But social media is a different animal altogether.  There, anyone can say almost anything and, if provocative enough and free enough of doubt, gain an audience, even a huge one.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but what passes for “information” on social media often descends into nonsense.  The carnival of absurdities on social media would be OK if people had the ability to readily weed out the sensible from the not.  But we don’t.  Doing so takes diligent work and ultimately the ability to simply distinguish the real from the unreal, not always an easy task.  And in any case, few people have the time to do so, even if they have the inclination, which many don’t. 

On the contrary, many people prefer belief - particularly the type that confirms what they already think - to the difficult work of sorting out one fact, one opinion, from another.  And what results is a morass of competing claims, ideas, facts, falsehoods, fads, fallacies and opinions.  What’s a person to think?  It’s easier and more comfortable to simply grab a set of beliefs and hang on, like a person in mid-ocean clinging to a lucky plank.

Compare today’s regime of social media with public discourse only, say, 30 years ago.  As recently as the early 1990s, there were relatively few outlets for news and opinion.  A few national newspapers, many local ones, a few weekly magazines of national scope, three or four traditional television outlets and CNN.  That’s pretty much where we got the news “that’s fit to print” and opinions about the news.  Because they nearly monopolized the flow of information about current events, those outlets wielded tremendous power over what we could know and the range of acceptable opinion.  Every day, editorial boards met to decide what we could hear or see and what could – and couldn’t - be thought about it. 

We the People had no choice; we were a subject race, forever under the influence of those who controlled the flow of information.  And, I now believe, we liked it that way.  We were more comfortable with the gatekeepers of the press making the decisions about what could and couldn’t be known.  Plus, at least to an extent, those gatekeepers seemed to have a sense that, because they were so powerful, they had an obligation to act responsibly toward us and not just in the service of power elites.  Up to a point, serious criticism of the status quo was permitted and even encouraged.  It took too long, but eventually the powers that were knuckled under to the public’s demand to end U.S. involvement in the war in Viet Nam. 

The point being the stark contrast between the long decades of press control over the flow of information and today when a tsunami of “information,” whether true, false or part of each, swamps our minds and senses.  Whatever else can be said of those bygone days, we had little sense of being overburdened, of swimming in a vast sea of miscellany in which anything could be possible and no one had a sure way of knowing what was and wasn’t true.

Our response to that change has been to grasp for the nearest plank floating by, to clutch onto something, anything, on which to rely and thereby ease our minds of endless, unresolvable uncertainty.

Of course, there’s an irony at work.  Just as in decades past, the powers that be put our need for certainty to their own use.  Then, editors and reporters knew what could be said and power elites knew they could be counted on to never stray far from accepted narratives that usually supported the status quo.  There was a sense of certainty to that, a cozy lack of complexity.  

Today, the MSM is in decline and social media ascendant, but much the same obtains.  Our need for a simple narrative still rules the day.

Consider the war in Ukraine.

The narrative preferred by Left and Right alike, is that Vladimir Putin is either evil or insane (possibly both) and invaded Ukraine due to paranoid delusions about NATO expansion.  The U.S. and most of Europe oppose Russian territorial ambitions that have no legitimacy.  Therefore, pretty much any amount or kind of support we provide to Ukraine is acceptable.

Anyone who points out the many obvious facts that contradict that narrative is dismissed as a Putin partisan, but a sensible conversation - to say nothing of sensible policy - would be almost entirely different from what the Biden Administration says and does.  The prevailing narrative entirely ignores the centuries of conflict between Russians and Ukrainians, the many Ukrainians who identify as Russians, the U.S.-assisted overthrow of duly-elected president, Viktor Yanukovich, the signing of an agreement to allow Ukraine to apply for membership in NATO, three decades of NATO expansion and attempted expansion into former Soviet republics, etc.  The idea that U.S. and NATO aggression might have had anything to do with Putin’s decision to invade is an anathema in almost all parts of the MSM.  That a Ukrainian-U.S. “victory” would essentially guarantee an all-but-permanent U.S. military presence in the region has, as far as I can tell, found no expression anywhere in the U.S. press.  That, regardless of who its president is, Russia will never agree to give up its Black Sea naval facilities goes likewise unmentioned.

Those facts and many more are highly relevant to what U.S. policy toward Ukraine should be, but are ignored because the need for certainty trumps all; it allows most of the country to support U.S. policy, regardless of how ill-informed or dangerous.  The Left, that once could be counted on to at least question U.S. belligerence is now AWOL.  And naturally, the Biden Administration and the neo-cons permanently installed in the State Department like it that way.

Did I mention that the guarantee of a blissful certainty is the work of the Devil?  Yes, I believe I did.