The experts have, of course, been preoccupied with explaining and defending the basis of their mispredictions. In their post-mortems they have focused their interest not on the actual opinions gathered (never, of course, gathered at the moment and in the places where legally valid votes are actually cast), but rather on comparison of the “artificial” election (by opinion pollers) with the real election (at the ballot box). Some scientific polling experts, like George Gallup, have been anxious to prove that opinion polling is an aid, rather than a menace, to representative democracy. In his Pulse of Democracy (1940), Gallup concludes with an unintended ominousness that “the limitations and shortcomings of the polls are the limitations and shortcomings of public opinion itself.” The deepest peril of polls comes, however, not from their inaccuracy, but from their accuracy. If and when polls become so scientific that they can precisely predict our opinions at the ballot box, at that moment they may cease to be very interesting; at the same time, of course, the process of voting will have become superfluous. The defenders of the polls, like Gallup, declare that polls are valuable—even essential—for what they now define as our representative government: “government responsive to the average opinion of mankind.”
The larger problem which the rising interest in public opinion and public opinion polls illustrates is the rise of images and their domination over our thinking about ourselves. We hopefully exaggerate our expectations of the power of these polls to predict how we will decide. The more confidence pollsters can inspire in their power to offer us an image of what we will really believe or will choose at some future time, the more blurred becomes our notion of what is our own real preference as voters.
Here again arise some of our most bewildering blurs—produced by some of the most sharply contrived images. Just as in the world of news the roles of the actor and the reporter have been more and more intermixed (through press conferences, news releases, institutionalized leaks, and other devices), so the same is true of manufacturer and consumer, political leader and political follower, statesman and citizen. Now the consumer can look at advertisements to see what he “really” wants (the best manufacturers make only products which they are convinced the consumer really wants). Now the citizen can see himself in the mirror of the opinion polls. Having been polled as a representative of the public, he can then read reports and see how he looks. As polls become more scientific and detailed—broken down into occupations, counties, income groups, religious denominations, etc.—the citizen can discover himself (and the opinions which he “ought” to have or is likely to have) in the views reported as predominant among people like him. Public opinion—once the public’s expression—becomes more and more an image into which the public fits its expression. Public opinion becomes filled with what is already there. It is the people looking in the mirror.
6
From the American Dream to American Illusions?
The Self-Deceiving Magic of Prestige
“WHEN the gods wish to punish us,” Oscar Wilde might have said, “they make us believe our own advertising.” The God of American destiny has answered our prayers beyond Jules Verne’s imaginings. He has given us domination over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. But no power is without price.
Have we been doomed to make our dreams into illusions?
A dream is a vision or an aspiration to which we can compare reality. It may be very vivid, but its vividness reminds us how different is the real world. An illusion, on the other hand, is an image we have mistaken for reality. We cannot reach for it, aspire to it, or be exhilarated by it; for we live in it. It is prosaic because we cannot see it is not fact.
America has been a land of dreams. A land where the aspirations of people from countries cluttered with rich, cumbersome, aristocratic, ideological pasts can reach for what once seemed unattainable. Here they have tried to make dreams come true. The American Dream was the most accurate way of describing the hopes of men in America. It was an exhilaration and an inspiration precisely because it symbolized the disparity between the possibilities of New America and the old hard facts of life. Only the stagnators of America—the prophets of rigid Puritan theocracy, of Southern slaveocracy—ever mistook the dream for reality. Only profitless visionaries—the utopians in narrow ideal communities like New Harmony and Brook Farm—ever thought they could make the dream a mold in which to live. If America was also a land of dreams-come-true, that was so because generations suffered to discover that the dream was here to be reached for and not to be lived in.
We have been notorious as a country where the impossible was thought only slightly less attainable than the difficult. The unprecedented American opportunities have always tempted us to confuse the visionary with the real. America has not been plagued by utopianism, for the very reason that here, finally, dreams could be striven for and made real.
Yet now, in the height of our power in this age of the Graphic Revolution, we are threatened by a new and a peculiarly American menace. It is not the menace of class war, of ideology, of poverty, of disease, of illiteracy, of demagoguery, or of tyranny, though these now plague most of the world. It is the menace of unreality. The threat of nothingness is the danger of replacing American dreams by American illusions. Of replacing the ideals by the images, the aspiration by the mold. We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so “realistic” that they can live in them. We are the most illusioned people on earth. Yet we dare not become disillusioned, because our illusions are the very house in which we live; they are our news, our heroes, our adventure, our forms of art, our very experience.
Formerly we were saved from the menace of ideology by the elusiveness and the promise of the American dream. Now we replace the dogmas by which men live elsewhere, by the images among which we live. We have come to think that our main problem is abroad. How to “project” our images to the world? Yet the problem abroad is only a symptom of our deeper problem at home. We have come to believe in our own images, till we have projected ourselves out of this world.
The “problem” abroad is valuable, however, as a symptom. It can remind us that men need not live in a world of images, that our life of images is a strangely modern, New World life. And it can remind us also of some of the dangers of having so successfully persuaded ourselves.
I
ALL AROUND the world we have revealed a shift in our thinking from ideals to images. Everywhere we have been the victim of this shift. Without reflecting on consequences, we have become preoccupied with creating “favorable images” of America. Yet by doing so, we may be defeating ourselves.
Almost everywhere today American images overshadow American ideals. The image of America overshadows the ideals of America. How has this happened? Some of the explanations are obvious. Many I have already recounted in describing the Graphic Revolution, the rise of pseudo-events, the multiplication of images, the improvement of instruments for making and receiving images, and the rise of image-thinking here at home. Abroad, some special accidental factors have been at work: our wealth, our technological precocity, and especially our ability to make attractive motion pictures. All these have enabled us to flood with American images the people who have never heard of American ideals, and who do not know whether we have any ideals.
The most important single influence in parts of the world which have heard of the United States has been the prevalence of American movies. I encountered this myself in a trip to South Asia in 1960. For example, in Bangalore in southern India, we had an admirable United States Information Agency library with a wide selection of books. It was being visited by perhaps 250 people a day. Of these, a considerable number were coming in to escape the dust, or because they had no other place to do their schoolwork. Some came to learn about the United States or other Western cultures. At the same time a half-dozen motion picture houses in the city customarily showed American movies. Her
e the language barrier almost disappeared. The people reading in the USIA library were a handful. Any one of the movie houses offered images of America to many more people and at a far greater rate than that at which the library was offering them ideas about America.
The motion picture is to real life in America what any image is to the commodity or corporation it stands for. The motion picture, seen abroad, is of course synthetic. It is believable. It is passive. It is concrete. It is simplified, and it is ambiguous. Thus the world has been flooded with images of America. The selling of American images abroad is a remunerative business.
Our government operations also have had a large part in spreading these images. Much of our propaganda has been trying to create an image (we always say, of course, a “true,” by which we mean a favorable, image) of the United States. Through our libraries, our mobile movie and exhibit units, and our displays at world fairs, we offer photographs and models of skyscrapers, farmhouses, factories, clubs, suburbs, and churches. We offer samples of farm implements, automobiles, farm machinery, and home conveniences. Our documentary films depict town meetings, drugstores, schools, churches, and countless other American activities and artifacts. Even where people cannot read, or read very little, they can have a more concrete (and I believe a more accurate) picture of life in America than of life in any other country equally remote from them.
Most of the efforts we make to educate people (especially “underdeveloped” people) about our country are the offering of vivid concrete images. During the winter of 1960, I attended the International Agricultural Fair in Delhi. There we were making one of our most strenuous and expensive (and by conventional standards one of our most successful) efforts. The American pavilion, a light and graceful structure, danced in the sun. Inside, it was neat and uncluttered. One of the sights most impressive to all comers was an American farm kitchen—a dazzling porcelain-and-chrome spectacle, complete with refrigerator, disposal, deep-freeze, automatic washer and dryer, and electric stove. Before it walked a procession of Indian peasant women. Long pendant earrings, bangles on arms and ankles, objects piercing their noses—these pieces of gold were their savings which they dared not put in the hands of banks. In their arms they carried bare-bottomed infants. They stopped and stood in bewilderment. What was this? It was the image of America.
That was an almost perfect example of how an image can emphasize irrelevance. A vivid image, well-tailored to a spectator, can entice him to lose himself and fit perfectly into it. But an irrelevant image reminds another that he has no community with its makers. A large banana would have been easily enough understood. The ideal of abundance or of health or nourishment or well-being was not irrelevant to these people. They were eager for it and would embrace it. But the image of an American kitchen was meaningless: a barrier between them and America.
In our cliché-ridden “Battle for Men’s Minds,” perhaps our problem is not so much that peoples abroad have an “unfavorable image” of America while they have a more favorable image of life among our enemies. Some of our difficulty may be much simpler, and too obvious for us to notice. I suspect we suffer abroad simply because people know America through images. While our enemies profit from the fact that they are known only, or primarily, through their ideals. That is, through their professed goals of perfection.
Images are the pseudo-events of the ethical world. They are at best only pseudo-ideals. They are created and disseminated in order to be reported, to make a “favorable impression.” Not because they are good, but because they are interesting.
We suffer unwittingly from our own idolatry. The more images we present to people, the more irrelevant and perverse and unattractive they find us. Why? The image, because it invites comparison, is irrelevant. Few people are not sensible enough to see that the image does not relate to them. Our images suggest arrogance: in them we set ourselves up as a mold for the world. Even the most belligerent and unrealistic Communist ideals do not seem to do that. Instead, they present people with standards of perfection which they are supposed to apply to themselves.
The image—limited, concrete, and oversimplified—inevitably seems narrow and unadaptable. Because it is a projection of ourselves, it declares our conceit. Images always seem more static and rigid than ideals. Utopianism has a happy fluidity and vagueness. What people in self-conscious, turbulent Asia and Africa want is fluidity: something dynamic, something iridescent, something that changes. Least of all do they want somebody else’s image to fit into.
Much of what we have been doing to improve the world’s opinion of us has had the contrary effect. Audio-visual aids which we have sent over the world are primarily aids to belief in the irrelevance, the arrogance, the rigidity, and the conceit of America. Not because they are poorly made. On the contrary, because they are well made and vividly projected. Not because they are favorable images or unfavorable images, but because they are images.
This helps us explain, too, why we seem “materialist” to all the world. To future historians it may seem bizarre that in our age Communism, a historical movement which most explicitly based itself on materialism, should have been called “idealistic.” And that the United States, a nation explicitly built on ideals, should have had a reputation for being materialist. Any prosperous country will, of course, be blamed (and envied) for its materialism by its less prosperous neighbors. Discovering we cannot have another people’s virtues, we call them vices. They similarly reproach us. But in addition we especially suffer in the eyes of the world because our prosperity and our technological success have doomed us to present ourselves to the world in images.
Although we may suffer from idolatry, we do not, I think, suffer from materialism—from the overvaluing of material objects for their own sake. Of this the world accuses us. Yet our very wealth itself has somehow made us immune to materialism—the characteristic vice of impoverished peoples. Instead, our peculiar idolatry is one with which the world till now has been unfamiliar. Others have not been rich enough nor had the technology to flood their consciousness with shadows. Nor to flood the world with images of themselves. It is to these images and not to material objects that we are devoted. No wonder that the puzzled world finds this unattractive and calls it by the name of its own old-fashioned vices.
The multiplication of images, by stimulating our economy and arousing extravagant expectations, has, of course, helped make us the richest country in the world. Despite some flagrant injustices and inequalities, we have diffused opportunity more equally and more widely than ever before. Yet by no image-magic can we extend the American continent, nor can we include others in American history. If we must speak to other peoples, we might do better to speak more simply. Not with the devices by which we sell ourselves on images of things we are not sure we want, nor in the new rhetoric of the neither-true-nor-false.
Of all nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody’s image. It was the land of the unexpected, of unbounded hope, of ideals, of quest for an unknown perfection. It is all the more unfitting that we should offer ourselves in images. And all the more fitting that the images which we make wittingly or unwittingly to sell America to the world should come back to haunt and curse us. Perhaps, instead of announcing ourselves by our shadows and our idols, we would do better to try to share with others the quest which has been America.
II
TO DO THIS has never been easy. It is doubly difficult since the Graphic Revolution and the rise of images have transformed our thinking. A great obstacle, itself a product of the Graphic Revolution, is our belief in “prestige.”
It is on this very quest for prestige that we now spend our efforts. Formerly our statesmen—Washington or Adams or Jefferson or Jackson or Lincoln—would have said they wished others to admire, love, or fear the United States. They sought respect for America and for American ideals. Today we no longer speak so directly. Instead we hope America will have a “favorable image” abroad. We hope our nation will have “prestige.” What does
this mean?
It means we hope the world will be attracted to, or dazzled by, our image! Formerly, when we worried about our reputation, we worried about what the world would think of us or our way of striving. Now we worry about what the world will think of our image.
Although the word “prestige” in its dominant twentieth-century American usage is novel, it has not strayed too far from its etymological origins. It is probably not unrelated to the word “prestidigitate”—to perform a juggler’s trick or magic. “Prestige,” which came into English through the French language, came ultimately from the Latin praestigium, which meant an illusion or a delusion, and was usually employed in the plural, praestigiae, to signify jugglers’ tricks. This in turn had come from praestringere, which meant to bind fast, or to blindfold—hence to dazzle. In English, too, the word “prestige” originally meant deceit or illusion; “prestigious” (an adjective especially closely related to the noun “prestidigitation”) until recently meant deceitful, cheating, or illusory. For a long time “prestige” had only an unfavorable sense. The new favorable sense is probably an American invention. In our common American parlance, the merest hint of the old unfavorable sense still remains. A person who has prestige has a kind of glamor: he momentarily blinds or dazzles by his image.
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (Vintage) Page 26