by David Brin
Soon, audience members are shouting titles of favorite books, from Catcher in the Rye to On the Road, and a plethora of films whose heroes disdained every hierarchy in order to go their own way. Popular authors—from Koontz, King, and Clancy to Atwood and Anderson—all seem to worry unrelentingly about potential oppressors. Yet many in the crowd remain grim-faced, finding it unpleasant to imagine that their own fierce independence could have come about this way, as something they were spoonfed all their lives, as natural and wholesomely American as Wheaties.
I sympathize. It hit me the same way—a revelation that poses more questions than it answers. Like how did such a bizarre propaganda campaign come about in the first place?
We’ll return to this point later, but for now it is enough to note the irony, as rich as any in our complex human stew, that we individualists were taught to believe in ourselves, and in our powers as free-thinking, autonomous beings.
Nor is the battle over, by a long shot! It remains forever tempting to fall back on older views of human nature, especially the ego-gratifying assumption that the great mass of our fellow citizens are fools, easily gulled and needing protection against the deadly influence of noxious ideas. It is harder to contemplate that many others, even our political opponents, may be quite a bit like us. Equally cantankerous. Equally bent on autonomy. And equally determined to protect their uniqueness, as important to them as life itself.
At the same time, there are pragmatic compromisers. Before the Supreme Court rendered its decision on the CDA, Deputy Solicitor General Seth Waxman held that adults could still access any kind of material they desire, even if offensive content is banished from open areas of the Net, by joining private online clubs with passworded entry for those eighteen and older. Responding for the American Library Association, the ACLU, and other plaintiffs, attorney Bruce Ennis conceded that parents might have an interest in monitoring what their kids view, but maintained that this issue should be handled by adults and guardians installing supervisory software in their homes and schools, to bar offensive stuff coming in from the outside world.
Both suggestions were (and remain) seriously flawed. But for our purposes here, the interesting point is to notice how they differed. One side put the burden of assertive effort on would-be users, requiring adults to perform a complex act of volition in order to see. The other side contended that the Internet’s default condition should be openness. Those wishing to limit the kinds of words and images entering their homes should be the ones burdened with a chore of taking active steps to avert the family gaze.
This particular battle ended in June 1997 when, as nearly everyone expected, the Supreme Court threw out the CDA, basically agreeing with federal appeals Judge Dalzell, who earlier wrote: ... the Internet may fairly be regarded as a never-ending worldwide conversation. The Government may not, through the CDA, interrupt that conversation. As the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed, the Internet deserves the highest protection from government intrusion. Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects.
This rejection could hardly have been couched more emphatically. It was a typically ferocious (and predictable) defense of free speech. Yet, it was no final victory by the maturity view over darker models of human nature. As surely as the sun rises, or as innovations have unintended consequences, both sides will soon be back, pugnaciously debating whether people are innately vulnerable to bad ideas, or if we can trust them to handle such inputs with good sense.
The argument won’t end soon, because neither side can ever prove it is completely right.
Despite all the moral posturing and charges of “censorship” and “immorality” flung at each other, what the disputants fall back on is an endless stream of anecdotes. • In Amsterdam, twelve children aged eight to eleven are injured (one blinded) by grenades they built from instructions downloaded from the Internet. In New York teens are poisoned following a bad recipe for kitchen-made drugs.
• In Birmingham, a nine year old exploring the Web reads an article about pedophilia and correlates it with things he witnessed going on next door, realizing that his unhappy best friend is being abused. His resourceful use of open information leads to three children being rescued from an intolerable home.
It goes both ways. For every case study of a child traumatized by some scandalous speech or image, there are a myriad counterexamples of children who withstood far worse onslaughts of verbal or pictorial offensiveness, and reacted only by growing more resilient, with all the inquisitive skepticism that makes truly sovereign citizens. And yet, for every group of junior high students who avidly discuss modern events, welcome diverse viewpoints, and seek wide-ranging evidence to improve their models of the world, you can also come up with some band of adult nitwits—people well past supposed maturity who should know better—who nevertheless swallow implausible myths and self-righteous clichés, about long disproved ethnic stereotypes, or purported Washington Beltway conspiracies, or the fatuous UFO aliens worshiped by those poor cultists who killed themselves just a mile from my home.
Returning to the Heaven’s Gate tragedy, one is struck by incongruities, such as how well educated many of the deluded victims were, or how their ideology mixed hatred of authority with utter obedience to a single leader. In some ways they differed radically from comparable sects—gruesome Jonestown, Japan’s terrifying Aum Shinrikyo cult, or the dour Branch Davidians. (The Gaters’ final fling? Visiting Las Vegas, Sea World, and various amusement parks.) And yet, none of these disparities masks the essential, common thread.
For some people, ideas can indeed be lethal.
There is no satisfying conclusion. No encompassing generalization, except to reiterate that humans are complex. No smug ideology ever encompassed the range of our quirks—the highs some can reach, or the lows that others plumb. In an open society some vulnerable folks are sure to be traumatized. But if we choose paternalistic (or maternalistic) guidance, it will only guarantee that our brightest feel stifled and muzzled; and our culture will be much poorer for it.
What are parents to do? While aiming to teach our kids critical judgment and mental self-reliance, we know that those skills don’t show up overnight, even in a home that encourages skeptical enquiry. Though details will be debated endlessly across generational lines, anyone with a grain of sense knows that children should not see or hear some things till they are older. One can be on the side of openness without wanting sadistic images floating on one’s television screen, or weeping over the demise of “Joe Camel” cigarette ads.
And yet, despite our lack of a perfect answer, there can be no equivalence between those two ancient, conflicting worldviews. While compromise and flexibility may be called for on a daily basis, one basic assumption should underlie society’s approach to the information age. In the long run, defensive shrouds simply don’t protect us as well as agility, the capacity to appraise and reevaluate as we go along. People acquire good judgment through practice, even if a milieu of ongoing uncertainty makes citizens feel queasy at times.
We must choose the maturity thesis. Not because it is inherently right, or because it works for everyone. (It doesn’t.)
We must choose it because it is our only hope.
There is the tradition of the young outsider challenging conventional wisdom. However, in real life it is always difficult for really new ideas to be heard. Such a victory is almost impossible in a hierarchieal structure. The usual way a new idea can be heard is for it to be sold first outside the hierarchy. When the project is secret, this is much more difficult.
ARTHUR KANTROWITZ
A CIVILIZATION OF “T-CELLS”
Faculty and students at Sonoma State University, in California, spent the last two decades pursuing a venture called Project Censor: The News That Didn’t Make the News. Their ambitious aim? To scan for significant stories and events that sank below the public’s
radar screen, instead of receiving the attention they deserved. Members of every academic department monitor more than seven hundred “minor” press sources, from scientific journals to gazettes of the radical left and extreme right, sifting for worthy items that somehow escaped the attention of the national press. This effort culminates in a synopsis of the year’s most seriously underreported events.
The members of this small university campus appear to have found themselves an interesting niche venture with some real social utility. Because many mainstream reporters subscribe to Project Censor’s annual summary, some items on the “neglected” list get another look. In other cases, online discussion groups take up the cause, continuing to probe slighted issues through the voracious channels of cyberspace. Even some pundits of old-style newspapers and broadcast networks laud this effort, calling it a useful annual resifting, a way to help make sure the regular media don’t miss anything truly important.
So far, so good. But the Project Censor coordinators don’t stop there. Not content with simply listing underappreciated stories, they go on to diagnose why some events may not be covered as thoroughly as they deserve to be. According to Peter Phillips, assistant professor of sociology at Sonoma State, some of these potential scoops were squelched because of pressure applied by corporate interests, for example, when big-time advertisers threatened to pull their accounts from media outlets that dared carry muckraking articles about their products. In one case, a Chicago television station that began airing stories about the real (and inexpensive) contents of overpriced cosmetics hurriedly yanked the series when a large commercial account complained. In other cases, blame is attributed to government pressure or coercion, as when NASA purportedly swayed newspeople from widely discussing the space agency’s plans to launch the Cassini space mission with 72 pounds of highly toxic plutonium fuel aboard. Though encased in high-tech armor, this substance could theoretically have endangered the populace of south Florida if the rocket had blown up. Project Censor members ascribed the lack of public outcry only partly to direct government intimidation, adding that media outlets can also fall prey to patterns of laziness and social suasion.
Naturally, some mainstream journalists take exception to this appraisal. Bernard Kalb of CNN responded that submitting to commercial or bureaucratic pressure “is not what working journalists do. For the most part, they are feisty, skeptical and committed.” In other words, Kalb believes that no power broker can reliably suppress a big story once the basic facts leak beyond a very tight inner circle. Surely the fondest dream of any ambitious correspondent is to achieve the career-making coup of a startling expose. Many stories would never have been revealed without undercover journalism, a tradition that goes back more than a century; during the 1880s, Nellie Bly, a courageous reporter for New York World, got herself committed to a mental institution in order to expose the horrors of New York City’s lunatic asylums. Ever since then, investigative journalists have been nosing around for hints and clues leading to the next ripening scandal, or the next sensational story.
It is certainly tenable that advertisers and politically connected publishers wield undue influence over various periodicals, from time to time. For this reason some cutting-edge publications, notably Consumer Reports and Whole Earth Review, refuse advertising in order to safeguard their vaunted reputation for credibility. Nevertheless, such meddling can be counterproductive. In a competitive environment, the chief effect will be to drive the best reporters away to other journals, where freedom of inquiry is the common culture. In other words, suggests Kalb, if some stories fail to reach general awareness, it may be because the public did not find them compelling in the first place.
Why do some news reports provoke great interest, while others languish in obscurity? The preceding two contrasting explanations, posed by spokesmen who each seem quite convinced of their point of view, present an engaging dichotomy.
What these arguments over Project Censor actually illustrate is a distinct aspect of our neo-Western civilization that I call “social T-cells.”
For a helpful analogy, let’s take a brief detour into the realm of biology. The body of any large vertebrate animal contains billions of component cells, each performing a variety of roles. Most stay primly in place throughout their life spans, providing chemical or structural services. Others, such as red blood cells, roam all over the place, delivering nourishment or transporting waste. Every day, your body comes under threat from contaminants and invading parasites. Furthermore, throughout the organism, cells occasionally “go crazy.” For some reason these rogues abandon selfless devotion to the whole, instead setting forth on a campaign of individual aggrandizement and unrestrained reproduction that is called cancer.
Whatever the nature of these varied threats, they are all errors that must quickly be overcome by an effective immune system, or else life’s delicate balance will be forfeit. We all know how catastrophic it can be when the immune system becomes deficient, as in AIDS, or grows hyperactive, as in lupus or some forms of arthritis, mistaking the body itself for an enemy, attacking and savaging healthy organs. For many reasons, immunology has become one of the most important fields of modern medicine.
Now, if some human engineer had been asked to design a strategy for defense and error correction, he or she might be tempted to create a central information center, with a master control program, constantly comparing the body’s current status with some ideal condition, and then sending out proxies with specific instructions to repair any deviation. Such a hierarchical approach may sound logical. (So logical, in fact, that it was used as the model for “planned” economies such as the Soviet Union.)
But that is not the way living organisms do it. Instead, our bodies throng with semi-independent agents, caroming randomly through the blood and lymph networks, sniffing for trouble like lone marshals of the old West. Chief among these roving deputies are white blood cells, especially “T-cells,” whose mission is to detect threats on the spot and emit a chemical summons for help, so that the problem can be counteracted before it gets out of hand.
T-cells are not generalists. In fact, a human body comes equipped with countless subtypes, each of them tuned to recognize just a narrow range of potential perils. Every day, our lives depend on having an adequate variety of these little troubleshooters, and on having the right ones drift randomly toward each new danger zone, arriving in the nick of time. For the most part, it is a startlingly effective technique for dealing with organic or cellular errors, one that is far more flexible than relying on central control.
This protection depends, above all, on having an unobstructed circulatory system. One that lets these T-cells and other error-correcting agents into every corner of the body to deal with potentially mortal dangers as quickly as they occur.
How do immune systems relate to Project Censor? Or to transparency, for that matter? Recall the keystone epigram of this book.
Humans have found one fairly reliable antidote to error: criticism.
Elsewhere I discuss the great irony this poses. Free speech and open criticism are good for a nation, helping it discover mistakes before they bring lethal consequences; and yet those qualities so threaten national leaders that kings, priests, oligarchs, and demagogues have always suppressed criticism to varying degrees.
Criticism might be viewed as a civilization’s equivalent of an immune system. Moreover, it cannot be mandated or levied from some high source. The capriciousness of human nature means that any central intervention, even by a well-intended ruler, will inevitably wind up squelching the most desperately needed criticism of all, a critique aimed at those on top. Instead, a healthy immune system must be distributed, dispersed, and based on an almost random overlapping of function, so that if one agent fails to detect a festering problem, there is a good chance it will be uncov ered by the next one to come bumping along.
Moreover, our bodies show yet another type of inherent “wisdom.” Those swarming T-cells that go scurrying around looking
to detect errors are not the same cells principally in charge of eradicating them. A separation of roles behveen detection and enforcement is a principle that will come up later in this book.
Perhaps now we can see how all this is relevant. In social terms, our contemporary neo-Western civilization already throngs with the human equivalent of T-cells, independent-minded persons who are well educated, skeptical, and driven by pumped-up egos to the point where their most devout goal is to find and reveal some terrible mistake or nefarious scheme. This category enfolds a lot more than news reporters, activists, and professional muckrakers. Any of you reading this book can probably close your eyes and envision quite a few friends or colleagues whose personalities exhibit some of the following traits: • strongly held opinions
• a belief that he or she can see patterns in some field of knowledge (such as the news) that others are too obstinate or ignorant to perceive
• a distrust of certain (and perhaps all) types of authority
• profound faith in his or her own unique individuality
Perhaps you recognize, or even proudly avow, many of these traits in yourself. If so, it hardly makes you exceptional. For most citizens of contemporary America and many other subcultures of the neo-West, these personality attributes are the very ones that have been drilled into them from a very early age.
This point, though already discussed, merits reiteration. The characters we find admirable in books and films often exhibit driven individualism and have difficulty accepting regimentation by formal organizations. They are irked by rules and routines, and above all display suspicion of authority. This archetype is copied in such endless profusion that the “lonely rebel” might by now have become the most dreadful of clichés. But in fact, it seems to have escaped the notice of most social observers that the principal moral lesson carried by neo-Western media is scorn for stodgy establishments of any stripe.