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San Francisco Facts

In prior writing I cautiously argued that we in the West have entered a new cultural-historical period. What was tentative then is, today, all but conventional wisdom. But what should our era, which dawned right about 2014, be named? I wrote that it had not been labeled. But that wasn’t right. At least in some quarters, people had begun to call this the era of ‘post-truth’.

‘Post-truth’ has been used as a kind of epithet for the media world inhabited by right-wing populists and the like. Although the divide here isn’t so much left-vs-right as educated vs not. Educated people are supposed to know whats going on. Those not, not. But one should be cautious before taking this at face value.

Listen to our professional classes and you might be convinced that #TRUTH is as important as it ever was. They will certainly tell you that the truth matters. They might even scream it at you: ‘Fight misinformation!’, ‘Democracy dies in darkness!’ — you know the schtick. But their heavily advertised dedication to ‘facts’, ‘fact-checking’ and ‘Science’ may be a flimsy mask for what is actually a serious problem with their relationship to reality.

I suggest that there is a certain disconnect that is especially acute among the current crop of urban dwelling, professional-managerial classes which I will dub “the PMC”. And that this disconnect yawns wider in our present time than ever before. Wading into this arena, analysis is limited to a mix of psychologizing and conjecture, and there is always a risk that things go astray. But then neither is the exercise pointless: we can get closer to understanding if we consider well of the present landscape. And these are strange times that demand examination. So let us wade in, and speak strangely of strange things if we must.

For readers who aren’t familiar with the phrase ‘circling the wagons’, it originated in the American West when settlers used wagon trains to cross the North American landmass. In the event of a suspected attack by natives, settlers performed this defensive maneuver by lining their thirty or so wagon cars to form a circle — keeping their people and valuables on the inside while repelling whoever or whatever might ingress from the unknown wilds beyond.

In the wake of any newsworthy event various interpretations will arise and be heard. This is natural. But lately our professional classes are hostile to any opinion they haven’t already fixed upon. And it seems to me that this prompts something like the epistemic equivalent of circling their wagons. Once their sense of certainty is unbalanced by the ab extra perspective, they crave an intellectual anodyne. This they find by gauging the figurative room to re-confirm group consensus. They don’t look out so much as they look within, which affords them a sense of assurance that opinion is settled. But it is a cheap assurance: a quick escape from engaging with the invading viewpoint and, especially, their own.

This dynamic is tightly linked to what Michael Anton calls “San Francisco Values” — because it is these which define the boundaries of the in-group, the tribe who they lean on for confirmation and reassurance in matters of fact. But what are San Francisco Values? They are the alleged priorities which our financial, engineering and managerial elite cut in neon to signal that they are deserving of their wealth and position. ‘San Francisco Values’ entail overzealous concern about the environment, a bit of worry about poverty, and of course the holy trinity of racism, sexism and homophobia. This label was popularized by Michael Anton in his essay of the same name. And since his writing, the ethic has become mainstream in virtually every major institution. See any commercial, subway advert or ESPN show.

Anton provides the definitive account of how this ethic arose in San Francisco as a confluence of hippie-leftism and technological fantasia. It was such a fit for the 21st century that it soon conquered the world, or more precisely, “that chain of cities, suburbs, university towns, resorts, and nature preserves that connect and unify the transnational elite.” If you haven’t had the pleasure, you really must read his essay.

So antecedent culture in nearly all professional spheres has been routed — and replaced by San Francisco Values. The social terrain that enabled the spread in the first place is now further strengthened by it. This can be likened to a groove in sandstone which directs rainwater’s flow over its surface. Additional rainwater cuts the groove deeper yet, ensuring that later rains travel even more surely along its course, et cetera. One consequence is a highly structured social terrain across which ‘facts’ now disseminate.

The urban dwelling members of the Davos Archipealgo have been anxiously circling their intellectual wagons in this manner and the result is a shared, homologated Truth map. So they have their San Francisco Values and, increasingly, their San Francisco Facts too.

Expect the beliefs which make up this shared truth map, then, to be much in vogue with the same lot who wore rainbow colored masks for Pride Month (season?). The same group who insists on sustainably-caught fish and frets endlessly about the ‘least-advantaged’ in society. They will never so much as question that ‘Generalized Anxiety Disorder’ is an exact medical diagnosis, or that ‘pregnant people’ should be injected with three (four?) mRNA shots to get us to ‘zero-covid’. They are certain that ‘he took a rifle across state lines!’ and that hormone-blockers are safe for pre-adolescents.

They also know that anything to the contrary is ‘disinformation’.

One might object that this is nothing new. Haven’t shared values always been the cement that unified groups? Haven’t people always been more inclined to pay credence to members of their in-group in matters of fact? Yes they have. But I count three vital differences in the present era.

Ideas spread as contagions through networks of people. Any reader who’s made it this far already knows this. But I venture further. I am saying that our environment, saturated with 21st century communication tech, continually perturbs us with opposing and conflicting viewpoints. Each a contrario narrative flashing across our radar sparks a real and living doubt — which we struggle to extinguish by clutching to our in-group’s respective counter-argument. The dynamic is more like active defense than passive dissemination. Come to think of it, the format of many opinion news shows represents a perfect microcosm of just this. Rachel Maddow will show clips of what was said by Sean Hannity or tweeted by Tucker– then spend a few minutes attempting to mock and rebut. Her opposition does likewise. News is now news plus whatever the opposite side thinks about it.

A second point of difference is that the social terrain has been able to do the trick across non-contiguous locations that circle the globe (‘archipelago’ is a perfect metaphor). This has never happened before — and it may be leaving the Davos denizens with the sense that their opinion carries more weight than is justified.

Finally, herd-like intellectual xenophobia was previously thought to be the mode of the provinces! Didn’t young people leave home and decamp to Universities for the very pursuit of knowledge which rested on sounder foundations? The discourse at college was supposed to be higher. Far from backwater prejudice, enlightened universities were supposed to be bastions of free inquiry; their alma mater a scientific-minded group of professionals. Its hard to defend universities or their PMC-product today when they are avoiding and silencing heterodox opinion as fastidiously as they’re social distancing.

It is for this reason that I critique them more forcefully than their ‘flyover-country’ counterparts. Q-Anon and chronic election denial are also falsehoods which have gone viral. So, no, the ‘folks at home’ are not oracles of truth by any stretch. But when they get something wrong, we at worst get a hoard of pre-diabetics wandering through the capital and a kid clad in a bear suit posing at a Congressional desk. Nothing to boast about, to be sure. But when our PMC gets something wrong, we might spend a trillion in an absurdist foreign adventure — over a period of two decades — all the while comforting ourselves with the narrative that we’re well on our way to building a shiny new democracy on cultural soil we plainly do not understand. These are not in the same order of magnitude. It is the PMC that determines the course of our nation’s future.

Why have they become so terrified of differing opinion? Why has circling their wagons become such a reflexive response?

There may be a few features of the contemporary environment which can help explain.

One explanation relates to our vastly increased information supply. Not only is the world changing faster than ever, but communication is increased tenfold. If you lived in, say, small town Ohio in 1910, you had a newspaper. Maybe the occasional telegram. Today you have print media, magazines, YouTube, Fox News, twitter, twitter notifications, 8 group-chats (7 of which are hopefully muted), email, long-form podcasts and digital signage (even at gas stations). Does more information mean we all have a better grip on reality? Not at all, because one is sure to get many conflicting reports. Trying to synthesize a coherent picture is beyond just tedious and time-consuming. Its often impossible, depending on the level of resolution you’re seeking. At least the sense of knowing ‘what’s going on’ was probably far more common in former days when a single version of the truth was on offer. In our time, the satisfaction of final truth is rare indeed.

Floods of incompatible anecdotes and data fuel doubt — a state which we naturally struggle to free ourselves from. This amounts to a twist of psychic muscle which is already exhausted and in knots. I believe this circling-the-wagons dynamic, this craving for quick epistemic closure, is not confidence but fear. It stems from a sense of vertigo. The greater the disorientation, the greater the pretend confidence.

Not only do relentless streams of conflicting anecdotes occasion a certain anxiety, but the stakes of current events today feel higher. At least to me they do and I’m willing to bet others my age feel likewise.

By most classification schemes I am considered a Millenial, albeit an old one. There might be some sociologist somewhere who would group me with Gen X. In fact, when I came of age during the years between Google’s debut and that of Facebook, they were calling us ‘Gen Y’. The idea was that the Internet was shaping our outlook or some such, enough to make us distinct from Gen Xers. After social media became widespread, the more catchy label ‘Millennial’ entered popular use and it stuck.

But truly, geriatric Millenials like me are the most Millennial of them all. Why? Well, we had maximal years to bask in the Fukayama moment without exposure to Cold War tensions. We grew up at a time when serious people wrote that the serious problems of rapid technological innovation and globalization had been solved. And who could blame them? After the economic troubles of the 1970s, the more vibrant and uncompromising capitalism of the 80s seemed to triumph over any industrial conflict, stagflation or oil crisis. With Soviet collapse, Western cheerleaders could declare this a kind of eschaton. Left/labor turned moderate (think Clinton and Blair). The Right, maneuvering for the post-Soviet era, added ‘compassionate conservatism’ to their rhetoric and policy playbook. The entire world would soon follow America’s lead in embracing democratic capitalism, even if a few countries needed a little shock n’ awe to help them along.

Throughout the Clinton and Bush II years, as long as no one was slamming a jumbo jet into a skyscraper downtown, political debate had specific remit: how to better manage our society. You didn’t have to be a Millenial to relax into the idea that solutions to managing society had been found that most people would accept. It was easy to think that a peaceful and prosperous order of free trade and global commerce was the state of normality, especially if you had never experienced otherwise.

Yet when the financial system melted down, our wars in the Middle East were dragging on without end and none of my university-credentialed friends could land a job outside of bar tending, our supposed normality no longer seemed so secure. For some of us, it was the very first time we even considered that American Progress could falter (and for others, it had been a long while). So it didn’t take long for more radical voices to be heard in the streets and the halls of Congress. These voices called, not for managerial adjustments, but for society to be changed fundamentally.

This condition partly defines the present era. Discourse is tense and stakes are higher. It’s an atmosphere of tension, really with no end in sight.

If a state of doubt triggers a struggle to attain belief, this effort resembles a frenzied scramble when our nerves are rattled by weighty issues. Under these conditions, doubt is not just a dissatisfied state we strive to be free from. Its more like a hot potato we drop, stat. The PMC simply isn’t in the mood for open-minded discussion, which would only add to their painful doubt. So the impulse is toward rapid epistemic closure and spasmodic clinging to in-group dogma in all matters political.

In addition to the dread which compels cessation of authentic discourse, there is something else worthy of treatment here. I am thinking of the lax manner in which many attribute finality to any proposition offered to ease their chronic disorientation. If the reader is not interested in philosophical discussion, pray let him skip seven paragraphs than that we should part company here.

Plato believed the surrounding objects which we perceive to be imperfect copies of their perfect counterparts, which reside in a separate realm called the Plenum. Down here in the sublunary world, each particular is a bit different from the next. Objects like trees will all bear a strong family resemblance but no pair will be identical. The same for each loaf of bread, each horse, and so on. The percept of a single tree will hint at the Truth of trees, but does not bring us to it finally. At least for the masses, the perfect forms will remain out of reach. We must contend with things in the muck of imperfection and incompleteness but we make do.

Plato’s ideas have inspired thought for millennia. Yet in the 21st century we face something like an inversion of the Platonic scheme. Consider that much of our best attention is directed at digital objects in their totality. If I am playing a video game, the digital object with which I interact is a perfect embodiment of itself. There is nothing more to Super Mario than Super Mario. His behaviors are well-defined and perfectly understood. And there is nothing more behind a YouTube video than the pixels which comprise it — once I have this set of 0’s and 1’s there is nothing else to know. Obtaining your latest Instagram post is the same as obtaining its entire Truth.

Again, the real world is different. There is more to the objects which are present to us than meets the eye. There is more to them than even the best scientific analysis can ascertain. Pick up a rock. You can weigh it, but even the finest instrument gives results that vary in the tiniest degree. And that’s to say nothing of the situation at the sub-atomic level, where trying to understand the particles of which the rock is comprised really is a humbling endeavor. And this is only a rock. Now just imagine how difficulties compound when the object of study is something as complex as collusion, climate change, peaceful protest, natural immunity… you get the picture.

Sound habits of thought involve harboring some quanta of doubt. They involve avoiding premature leaps to certainty. And they involve managing the risk that stems from the chance of being wrong; from the chance that appearances differ from reality. In short, taking things with the proverbial grain of salt as we move through this world. While this is no stunning revelation, its worth noting that in our online lives we can largely do away with all this. We don’t take the extra pains, because digital appearance is digital reality. A metaverse indeed. We are swimming in digital space; enough that it has skewed our temper of thought.

Martin Heidegger had a similar yarn to spin about technology in general. He seemed to think — if you can make it through his books — that reliance on sophisticated instruments in the early-modern period precipitated a shift in mental outlook. The more we had tools readily available to manipulate our environment, the more we began to instinctively consider ourselves as separate from the being of nature. He attributed the sharp distinction between subject and object, found in Descartes, to this proliferation of tools.

I think this digital, inverse-Platonification is significant. People can often be observed accepting ideas in a manner that is curiously devoid of skepticism. Obsessions with ‘facts’ and ‘fact-checking’ confirm my suspicions here. The emphasis is really on access, as if only those who have been in contact with the Authority will have the Truth written on them. And there’s no need for a cognitive court of appeal. The Truth, once indexed, is Final. This departs from scientific inquiry in the key respect that it is based, not on experience or empiricism, but on authority. Irrespective of domain, settlement of opinion just like Googling restaurant hours or movie times!

This tendency is about what I would expect from a generation who is accustomed to satisfying their curiosity by a quick web search or scroll of the social media feed.

In our day, the professional-managerial class is to be identified by their San Francisco Values more than anything else. Are they defined by their nation of origin? Or by their present city of residence (which can be changed in a moment thanks to remote work)? Forget about it. The PMC is unified by their specific canon of ‘shall’s and ‘shall-not’s which govern opinion as regards race, sexual orientation, equity, the environment… you get it. But again, it is this which identifies the ‘who’ in the story.

Our world is changing quickly and noisily advertising its change. At the same time, the impregnable foundations of liberal worldviews are showing a few cracks. This has led to a perplexing atmosphere and exhaustion. Asking questions or expressing dissent would only further rattle nerves and add to an underlying sense of disorientation. It is this anxiety which is driving the phenomena of self-censorship and speedy epistemic closure. All the while, a Platonistic temper of mind stemming from reified digital objects serves to make this closure quicker than ever.

The PMC reaches for their San Francisco Facts for quick relief. See, epistemic closure has to work with token beliefs to serve as pacifiers. Some sham, filler idea is needed as an occlusion to shut down discourse and inquiry. A sort of meat-substitute for genuine inquiry (Beyond Science?). The sum of this makes up the shared San Francisco Fact map.

On some level, social media companies understand this and cater to it. Make no mistake, slapping absurd and patronizing fact-check labels on YouTube videos and tweets is not about truth — still less is it about ‘our democracy’. Its about the end-user’s experience (‘UX’, as we say in the biz). The last thing most anxiety-ridden users want is to meet with and take account of a viewpoint which would dislodge some pacifying belief.

So some ideas and content are, apparently, just too disturbing to consider.

We’ve seen this before, haven’t we? Who remembers those ‘Parental Advisory’ labels on CD album covers? What warnings were about then is precisely what they are about now. They signal that some particular piece of content is unpalatable. They are not really about pronouncing on truth or falsity.

Culturally, there’s a tincture of Medievalism here. Those were long years of pervasive fear. Plagues (actual plauges), famines, war. Witches, evil spirits, viking raids and the devil. Periods of societal anxiety do not correlate with flourishing discourse. Free inquiry retreats when fear is in the air. The bustling agoras and forums of the ancient world were slowly replaced by inquisitions, papal infallibility, and the censure of mobs. Open debate slowed to a trickle by the early Middle Age.

Which, in a sense, sounds familiar. Dissenting voices are being silenced all around us — especially in Universities. Lest you think this is just a bit of nutty left-wing academia, you’d be wrong: James Damore was silenced and fired from Google for expressing dissent. And there are many other examples in private industry and government institutions. Some in the PMC are so rattled that speech feels, literally, like violence; this they will tell you in plain terms. Or take ‘fact-checking’. A group of Twitter employees are held to have special access to the Truth, for all matters and any branch of knowledge; Papal Infallibility come round for the 21st century. But how do they perform their miraculous fact-checking? Unless they have eyes and ears everywhere and at all times, their omnipotence is pretty questionable. They fact-check various assertions by Googling them. And since you can find just about anything on Google, they cherry-pick what they want from the San Francisco Fact register, you can be sure. Whatever lands on the catalogue is held to be The Truth. It resembles Scholasticism’s reasoning via premises and authority. The crucial difference is that Truth now emerges in circle-the-wagons fashion to be identified as a fact as soon and as hastily as possible. Yet once it lands on the homlogated Truth map it is, thereafter, referenced as if backed by ecclesiastical Authority.

While the Medevials were dogmatic and canonical about matters theological, our present-day PMC has less ambition. They are not dogmatic about anything sacred; still less anything uplifting. No, they reserve their unyielding devotion for the most mundane issues, typically shrieking as if the matter were life-or-death. It often feels like a schoolmasterly exercise in pettiness: “he took horse dewormer!”, “ infection rates are up 4%!” Both banality and intensity seem to be chief characteristics of San Francisco Facts.

I can only travel so far along the road of a Medievial comparison: my memory doesn’t stretch back to the Middle Ages. It does stretch back to the 90s, however. And I can attest that the behavior was different in those days of relative confidence. The moderate Democrats of the PMC mostly laughed at their opposition. Sure, George W. Bush won a few elections, stirring considerable annoyance. But their response was frustration and mockery. Dubya was a laughing stock. If you truly disrespect someone, neither their ideas nor their person can really cause you worry. There was no Bush Derangement Syndrome and for good reason.

They aren’t laughing at Trump; when they pretend to it is caked in anxiety. Still less are they laughing at Steve Bannon. Opposition commentators from the prior era, like Bill O’Reilly, were held to be unintelligent. But Tucker Carlson is thought to be dangerous.

The PMC is in a collective bout of insecure nervousness in our new era and the effects are plain to see. So this is the true root of San Francisco Fact epistemology. And its the real reason that the ‘post-truth’ label caught on. Instinctive accusations of ‘anti-science!’ and ‘misinformation’ are part of the play-pretend game the PMC acts out to stave off panic and reassure themselves that they know whats going on.

The problem with this is all too obvious: when we retreat from free inquiry, discourse and shared reason, there is no corrective for errors which land on the shared canon. There is no epistemic immune system and things can misfire pretty badly. We might end up in a place where the public believes a gay actor has been attacked on a freezing night by, of all people, Trump supporters proclaiming Chicago is “MAGA country”. We might end up in a place where a professor can snicker at, say, how low anti-science populists have fallen — or look down on how little they comprehend of climate science. Then in the very next breath declare that men are women. Or that speech is violence. Or that in this year 2021 there is a ‘scourge of white supremacy’ we must oppose urgently. All this without a moment’s reflection on how deranged he and his fellow travelers have become.

So are we living in a ‘post-truth’ era? In a way we are — but not in the sense the PMC would like to believe. Were I to name our era, my vote would go for “the Great Derangement”. Because “the era of San Francisco Facts” is just too wordy. But I was not the only one to spot this link. Fred Armisen, in his stand-up, dedicated a part of a recent show to exploring regional American accents. He began in the northeast and walked the audience through various locations, stopping at each to utter a token line characteristic of the subculture in its respective accent. For Queens, it was a female voice shrieking “nobody told me!”. A mundane line about “motor oil” was held to be emblematic of Baltimore.

When he finally got to San Francisco, the line was “this is a fact. This is a fact!…”

Of course.

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