An old joke goes that if the telegraph had existed in 1776, there would not have been any American revolution. I came to think along those lines in 2011. I was in the US at the time of the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. The excitement was palpable, even in a country that had its roots in a revolution against the monarchy. Classical liberal ideas as embodied in the Declaration of Independence and later in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are evidently easily discounted as the products of enlightened minds, in an enlightened time.
The idea of keeping the state within limits preceded the expansion of the franchise and government becoming “popular”. For some that increased inclusion of more citizens in the government changed all their concerns. Limiting the power of kings was certainly important to the American founders, but is it still crucial if the king is “the people”? For others, the rise of mass culture implies that the classical liberal vision may be seen as anachronistic. It worked well, and may work well, but only with the best and brightest in charge. Alas, this attitude is sometimes paradoxically popular among classical liberal intellectuals, too. The intellectual, whatever her politics, self-defines in contraposition with the mass. She decries mass culture, mass music, mass politics, mass whatever. Hence the idea that what empowers the masses, like technological advancement and media innovation in particular, is dangerous for the republican and liberal spirit. Is it just me, thinking that if they had TV Bostonians and Virginians might well have kept content with the enjoyment of the theatre of the British monarchy?
Better to think twice. Mass media can be, but are not necessarily, an aid to the powerful. Nor does mass consumption always make people dull.
One may remember that David Hume, in acknowledging and praising “the extreme liberty of the press” which allowed for open criticism of king and government in England, somehow contrasted freedom of the written word with that of the spoken one, which may lead to “the harangues of the popular demagogues of Athens and tribunes of Rome”. Reading is a personal and a private experience (“a man reads a book or pamphlet alone and coolly”), whereas freedom of speech as exercised collectively could originate occasions in which one can catch the virus of enthusiasm. Bookworms are not populist – but what about great speakers?
In the 1990s, political scientist Giovanni Sartori published a forceful pamphlet, Homo Videns, arguing that TV was putting in motion an anthropological transformation. Sartori was horrified by media mogul Silvio Berlusconi entering politics in 1994 and winning elections, with a brand new political party, in a handful of months. Sartori’s concerns inspired his theories about mass media. Berlusconi owned three TV networks. Hence, Sartori assumed, they must be the factor explaining his political success.
Different from any previous advancement in media, Sartori maintained, the invention of TV set in motion an existential change. It started the mutation of Homo sapiens into Homo videns. It marked the decline of the age of the word, with a general impoverishment of cognitive abilities, as people were no longer required to practice their power of abstraction as when the word was sovereign (either in print or on radio waves). Politically, Sartori prophesied voters would be increasingly dependent on whatever opinion TV fed them, with democracy fated to be infantilized and weakened by an oversimplified public debate, while political parties were doomed by the impact of television.
Our media diet has certainly changed over years, but something has kept constant. Relatively new media keep being associated with a decline in understanding and judgment. Democracy and the public debate are constantly threatened by the new game in town.
Such a thesis may continuously reinforce itself. Once you postulate that this or that media is shaping the conversation, you are likely to consider whatever happens next as making your point. No wonder Silvio Berlusconi got elected, he brainwashed the voters! In 1995, Italy had a referendum that was conceived to seize Berlusconi’s media power, by forcing him to renounce a network over three and limit advertisement. It seemed an easy fight to pick: who would not prefer watching movies ads free? Yet it failed, miserably.
But for those who taught that Berlusconi’s true secret was his media dominance, everything was easily explained. No wonder the referendum to seize his media power failed; he played the voters as an orchestra. And yet, one year after the referendum, Berlusconi lost the general election, and a center-left coalition won.
Here’s a different thesis. In 1995, Italians voted to keep the highly imperfect TV market (no cable, two big national players only) they had—not because they were brainwashed by Berlusconi, but because they valued their liberty. The liberty of picking TV programs from six rather than five national channels, for example.
This episode is very significant (had the referendum gone otherwise, the political fate of Silvio Berlusconi may have changed dramatically) but seldom remembered in Italian politics. I think this is the case for two reasons. On the one hand, we tend to remember changes, and not political events which somehow kept the status quo. On the other hand, the intelligentsia keeps finding the referendum’s results quite embarrassing. Those very people who were supposedly easily brainwashed by TV ads understood them, economically, as a feature of a service provided for free. And they consciously defended not a man they worshiped, but a liberty they already had.
In today’s world of streaming media, the world of VCRs and national TV looks almost as remote as the pamphlet culture of the Founders. But there are a lot of assonances with our digital economy. History doesn’t repeat itself but rhymes.
Consider a popular criticism of the platform economy. “If you are not paying, the product is you”. The logic is the same as the criticism of old, commercial television: whatever is “content” was not produced nor supplied to the consumers as something good in itself, but to grab their attention in order to sell things. Nowadays the ability of Internet platforms to “profile” us raises similar concerns. More people seem to be concerned with Amazon “profiling” your consumption, hence suggesting you should buy other items related to those you bought before, than with the complete demise of bank secrecy.
Such a view understands the nature of media and communication business correctly: they are self-interested actors like anyone else, hence some degree of suspicion is in order. “Caveat emptor”: you check the grocer is using the scale properly, you should likewise monitor the possible interests behind your favorite publication, or TV program or blog. But then the argument gets carried away. Information is assumed to be something which cannot be left to the profit motive all together, due to its particularly sensitive nature. It shapes the view of the world of the people. The latter is assumed to be so gullible, that ought to be protected by attempts to hijack your views. You would all be so sensible, if it wasn’t for Fox News.
On the one hand, it is quite telling that all these changes are supposed to be “new”. Fake news is the current translation of a much older word: lies. Some contemporary discussions might make you wonder if lies existed ever before. It seems they were invented with Twitter, and perfected when Elon Musk acquired it.
On the other hand, if people are really so gullible, so incapable of doing their own fact checking, one wonders how can we trust them at all? How can we trust them to cook their meals without poisoning themselves? And more pointedly, how can we allow them to vote, possibly affecting the lives of others?
Information is assumed to be a business totally driven by suppliers, with the latter acquiring increased power at ever new technological evolution. Yesterday’s media were always better, sounder, more balanced. Perhaps information is, like any other business, driven by demand too. Perhaps what technology does, through time, is allowing for a wider supply, which can then better intercept people’s tastes. In late 20th century-Italy, Silvio Berlusconi gave Italian viewers three additional TV channels: six channels were evidently closer to meet people’s needs and tastes than three, all of them owned by the government, were. Today, social media allows for everybody to have a voice and search for their listeners. In this regard, technology may have created troubles for the narratives of liberal democracy but has certainly increased individual liberty—in this case, the individual’s liberty to select the sources of information and entertainment of her choosing.
Martin Gurri has spoken of the “revolt of the public”, pointing to the crisis of authority of traditional media (and institutions). Technological innovation has permitted people to find alternative ways of information, but the crisis of traditional media predates it and it has to do with a profound disconnect from the needs and views of the population at large. Technological development made it possible, but it did not cause it.
Individual liberty and limited government are fragile, as the American Founders understood well. They rest on a complicated nexus of ideas and institutions and are challenged, daily, both by special interests and by the challenges we all share in grasping the complexity of an order of freedom. It is very easy to grow impatient with it, as it often fails to deliver “solutions”, quick and dirty, to whatever problem of the day.
But it would be disingenuous to conflate the fragility of freedom with our perplexities with technological evolution, particularly in the realm of communication and media.
It is a shortcut: we blame the message on the messenger. Benjamin Constant, writing forty years after the American Revolution, beautifully explained the difference between the modern and the ancient conception of liberty. Liberty of the modern is what we would call individual liberty, and it has to do with the protection of everyone’s private sphere by the law, either “the right of everyone to express their opinion, choose a profession and practice it, to dispose of property, and even to abuse it; to come and go without permission, and without having to account for their motives or undertakings. It is everyone’s right to associate with other individuals, either to discuss their interests, or to profess the religion which they and their associates prefer, or even simply to occupy their days or hours in a way which is most compatible with their inclinations or whims”.
Constant acknowledges that this conception of liberty included having a say in the affairs of the government, but in a very different way than in ancient times. Ancient liberty was basically political participation: it was limited to few, who were supported by serfs taking care of production. They all lived in small political units, in which the free citizens could discuss the fate of their common enterprise, which for the most part was going to war or not.
Modern men, including the most affluent ones, are to a certain extent busy with production. The liberty he has guarantees the range and scope of his activities. Freedom is for the first time for the masses, who are no longer serfs, who enjoy the protection of the law, and who can choose their trade and their consumption. The active humans of the modern world, who are personally concerned with their own wellbeing, live in much vaster communities and do not have the time to participate actively in political life either. The part of the day in which they try to take destiny in their hands concerns, indeed, their personal destiny.
In this context, it may well be that politics has been turned, by technological innovation in media, into another kind of entertainment. As the market supplies you with whatever TV series, so does with political debates. There is a niche of people who enjoy it more than science-fiction, or opera for sure.
This elicits the irritation of those who take politics very seriously. Even those, like the present writer, who firmly believe the liberty suited for our time and world is the liberty of the modern, cannot stop thinking like the ancients. Politics is so damn important, and people talk about it trivially, as football. Well, football fans are likewise irritated when somebody discusses football superficially, and so do Star Wars and Harry Potter fans. We are not different, because we talk about Thomas Jefferson and not Obi Wan Kenobi.
But for most people entertainment is something that can be enjoyed rather superficially. Watching a football match does not necessarily entail a mastery of the physics of football; enjoying your casual Star Wars movie does not require you to know the genealogy of the Skywalkers by heart, and you may get your utility in talking about politics by being blunt and superficial about it. Is politics different because you have a say? Think again. Your individual vote is, as an individual vote, rather meaningless. The best you can trade it with is the few bucks Elon Musk offers you to show up at the ballot. You can make a difference only in the small municipality, or in the very small province or region or state, when each vote really counts and when politics is concerned with highly practical matters you can judge based on your experience: how traffic moves, how good is the new underground train, how public gardens look. To the contrary, as Eric Hoffer once observed, “ignorance tends to be extremist. Our opinions about things we do not know are not likely to be balanced and moderate”. We are considerate about the bridge which ought to be built in our town, but wild whenever we talk of a distant war, happening between countries whose language we cannot understand.
The distance of politics from us, on a national scale, would call for exactly the kind of devices classical liberals thought of, over time. The rules and institutions of limited government were conceived thinking of our limited cognitive abilities, which may have been affected negatively by the Internet or TV, but they were not great to begin with.
If technology and communication magnify our cognitive limits, then the case for limited government is stronger than ever. Limited government means it is not only the voters’ cognitive abilities that are limited, but their governors too. It is an exercise in building trust through rules.
Too often, in the last decades, the intellectual classes worked against this. Intellectuals are the arch-defenders of ancient liberty; they all think they ought to be born in 5th century Athens. They despise the vulgarity of most people’s cultural consumption and find their politics primitive. Their conception of liberty does not include the liberty of being superficial in politics. Hence, they called and are calling for “limiting” government: a government that, enlightened in its rulers, limits the power of an increasingly vulgar mob. Such rhetoric fuels its opposite, that revolt of the public against elites. And it is weakening the understanding of liberty among those who, talking about it, are framing it for the next generation. If liberty becomes something we only afford to those who share our tastes, we should at least have the decency of calling it by another name.
The Pamphlet Debate on the American Question in Great Britain, 1764-1776, selected by Jack Greene, makes available in modern digitized form a trove of eighteenth-century books and pamphlets that directly addressed what became known in metropolitan Britain as the American Question.
Temple Univerity historian Jessica Choppin Roney engages with two prominent pamphlets debating the legitimacy of the Boston Tea Party.
Up Next
Related Media
Up Next
Find the full list of archived and upcoming themes on our Countdown page.
Writing a Declaration that could secure support required compromises and negotiations: How did these compromises chart the course of, or delay the recognition of equality for coming generations?
How important are religious and Enlightenment ideas to the concepts in the Declaration? Are these influences necessarily in conflict?
Liberty Fund offers a rich set of educational programs. These include Socratic-style conferences, thought-provoking books, and engaging online resources focused on the understanding and appreciation of the complex nature of a free and responsible society.
