The reporter announces in a highly retweetable video that there’s this café in Toronto that is proudly anti-capitalist. (Retweets are, of course, always endorsements of Twitter’s retweet functionality.) The café owner calls himself an anarchist but there will be no anarchy here. His coffee shop, filled to the brim with merch, looks like a haven for consumers of woke semiotics. I wonder: Does he not see what he is doing? Does he not recognise the disjunction between his proclaimed ideological affiliation and his actions? He materialises what looks like capitalism, walks like capitalism, and quacks like capitalism. All the signs are there. I mean the signs, not the referents. Endorsers of such silliness can’t see the referents. The café owner is a well-organised anarchic anti-capitalist who charges $4.75 for a doughnut. Welcome to the flattening.
In another video in another corner of the devil’s electric nervous system, a man with a microphone and a camera pointed at him asks a stranger what she’d think if he told her that he’s really female. The woman says she’s fine with that. So he presses further and asks what she’d think if he told her that he self-identifies not only as female but as Chinese. The interviewee glides into a further agreement. The man flips through a range of other identifications. He gets no resistance. And so from what we can tell, in the mind of the woman being interviewed, the tall white American man with a beard ends up being a short Chinese woman.
This plays somewhat smoothly into a fairly natural human capacity. Human perception includes an awareness that what we see is not all there is. We know that the surface can mislead sometimes. However, even in finding something potentially misleading, we know that there must be a backstory that explains what appears. We watch the magician manipulate what we see, for instance, and we know as a matter of immediate perception that the appearance is not the whole story. Inattentional blindness is up to something, perhaps. And so the bifurcated woman before us is—thank heavens!—not really split in two; the card you picked was not really inside that orange the conjurer just cut open; and the audience was not really teleported across the room. We know there was a trick even if we don’t know how the trick was done. We know that there was a trick because we are naturally and inherently aware of contingency. We have a contingency-sense. Even without training, we feel that nothing explains itself. Everything requires reasons for its being that its being cannot supply. Arguably, as Filipe Fernández-Armesto suggests in his book Out of Our Minds, it is such a contingency-sense that gave rise to the earliest intimations in people that there are spiritual realities. Bugs and lizards are materialists. Only people can be spiritualists.
The sense of a backstory is crucial to thinking itself. In his Republic, Plato suggests that enticing people into thinking requires eliciting a felt tension between what appears and what we know. Contradictory impressions should get us to think further, to dig deeper, to think beyond the obvious—that is, beyond the play of shadows on the proverbial cave’s wall. But strangely, we find ourselves in a world now where contradictory impressions do not inspire more thought. In fact, they often inspire the very opposite. We’re allowed once again to perceive the world as bugs and lizards do but to perceive humanly, with hesitations and questioning, is almost an abomination in this anti-culture with its obsessive flattening.
Given the rise of materialism and the way that secularisation has infiltrated the noosphere in our time, it is perhaps no surprise that the natural contingency-sense in people seems to be disappearing. Yes, there are ideologically specific cases of how this plays out. I have named two above. However, my concern here is less about left-wing identity politics than about the general trend, which, given enough time, could play out on almost every other political or personal front. What we see so pervasively now is not at all like a magic trick, the appearance of which might entice an audience to want to know how the trick was done. Oversocialisation seems to demand that we must not even ask questions.
This can backfire terribly, as most of us already know. In fact, when certain (especially politically bothersome) signs of contingency-sense are made apparent, there is a common trend to actively discourage it, if not shut it down. I think of the recent case of how the wet-market theory of the origin of the novel coronavirus was snatched up so readily by legacy media. This happened despite the fact that a few things about the theory didn’t line up right from the get-go. And, more than that, the theory that the virus may have resulted from a lab leak was denied as a ludicrous conspiracy. Only nutters would believe such a bogus thing! It had to be—had to be!—only the wildest of coincidences that a lab specialising in coronaviruses happened to be in the same city where the pandemic started. At the time of writing this, I still don’t know what kicked off the pandemic; but surely the contradictory impressions we received on this issue should have encouraged more people to pursue at least some further investigating?
And yet, think of what happened to people who said anything that went against the mainstream narrative at the start of the pandemic. Anyone who even gently entertained ideas that went against the mainstream was subject to a rather nasty dose of gaslighting. As you know, unfortunately, this is by no means the only example of such retaliation against contingency-sense in our time. The loss of contingency-sense has given rise to the most absurd scepticism. It will have us deny what our senses tell us and believe only the discourse. Of course, if we are not allowed to believe our senses, it will become especially essential to have a class of elites be paid a significant amount of money to tell us what we ought to be thinking about what we cannot perceive. We wouldn’t want to unnecessarily anger the emperor who we think is naked when, in fact, it is more politically expedient to believe he is wearing expensive and delicately designed clothing. Right?
The most obvious explanation of this flattening—this common denial of a backstory—is found in Iain McGilchrist’s well-supported contention that the left hemisphere of the brain, which cannot appreciate context, depth, or humanness, has become overly dominant in our time even to the point of absurdity. We seem to be training our perceptions into accepting some aspects of the world at the expense of others. In The Matter with Things, McGilchrist writes, “The more one pays, for example, dehumanising, mechanising attention to the world, the more only those aspects of the world that can be construed in terms of mechanisms stand forth.” Whatever doesn’t fit the trained model of perception becomes invisible. The acceptance of discourse over experience may not be owed to willful ignorance. It may be that perception itself has been severely damaged.
The result is a stress on what Martin Heidegger calls the present-at-hand. This theoretical apprehension of the world, the world as that which we can re-present (i.e. theoretically reframe), becomes the only thing that registers. In the process, being recedes into oblivion. Thinking, as a hesitant happening dependent on encountering the real, is denied a room in the inn and must be sent off to a cave of a different kind to be born. There is no being; there is only what you consciously believe and consciously articulate. There is no world, only the theories certain so-called smart people have about the world. This is what I mean by flattening. Shadows start to count more than the bright light of form and meaning. Enslavement becomes the new freedom. This is not only a sad state of affairs but desperately and irrationally defeatist.
Predictably, there are significant consequences to this domineering way of perceiving and misperceiving. There is, for instance, no chance of regarding the world and others as anything more than manipulable cogs in a political machine; no chance of encountering genuine novelty; and no opportunity for circumspect thought—that is, for knowing anything other than fragments. When attention ossifies into the acceptance of the surface alone, there is no story, only data; there are no people, only tick-boxes to be checked by bureaucrats; and there can be no felt sense of the body. I mean, after the flattening, there can be no felt sense of what it means to be a body rather than only to have one. It is by no means merely coincidental that the rise in left-hemispheric overstress matches the tendency to reframe the body in entirely theoretical terms. “My fat is political,” one morbidly obese woman once told me once. Her gluttony was showing. How does one even have a conversation with a person whose framework of interpreting the world has been designed as a kafkatrap? There are signs of this sort of theoretical obfuscation of the real in medical science as well as in the human sciences. The body is commonly reframed as political meat and this means that people start to want to play games of political meat Lego. (I’m borrowing Mary Harrington’s brilliant metaphor here).
Our media—I mean our attachments to electrified machines—have certainly helped this slide into a world of mere surfaces. It is easy to trick your brain into thinking that what you see is all there is when most of what you see is the surface: the simple, univocal news item or memeable simplification of complex happenings. People with flags overlaid on their profile pictures and placed in their bios suggest the widespread love of current-thingism. But these are not just signs. If only that were true! No, these are demands and commands. The more language detaches from real referents—electronic media help this but this is by no means the only cause—the more language ceases to be concerned with embodied truths and descriptive utterances, and so the more it takes on the form of the command. A command does not want disagreements or questions. It wants all negativity to disappear. It wants its own supremacy. Language transforms into the means by which experience is suppressed. When you lose contingency-sense you gain an absolute discourse. When not concerned with presencing being, language becomes oughtistic. Even representation turns into a kind of legislation. Obedience becomes primary. “We moderns are such prisoners of law,” Giorgio Agamben writes in Creation and Anarchy, “that we think everything can be legislated without limit.”
I’m reminded of the scene in George Orwell’s 1984 in which Inner Party member O’Brien tests protagonist Winston Smith’s allegiance to Party (so-called) ‘truth.’ He does this by demanding that Smith sees five fingers instead of the four he is holding up. Smith’s refusal to see something other than what his eyes tell him means that some incentive is required. In this case, intense physical pain is granted to him, courtesy of the Ministry of Love. I know that it can be misleading to reframe present circumstances in terms imagined by an author of fiction, especially if that author is Margaret Atwood. But there is certainly something of an echo of Orwell’s nightmare in our time. If violent disturbances can be reframed as mostly-peaceful, if anti-capitalist merch-manufacturers can overcharge for doughnuts in the name of their anti-capitalism, and if a man can self-identify as a Chinese woman with no questions asked, we are perhaps at some risk of believing that the flattening is the best of all possible simulacra. Opposition is shouted down as some form of phobia, even when no fear is evident. In Orwell’s book, Winston Smith’s crime is to retain a sense of connection to what is going on behind the re-presentation that is dictated to him. He retains, in other words, a sense that his perceptions are connected not to theory alone but to reality itself. He experiences the Party as requiring him to “reject the evidence of [his] eyes and ears” such that common sense becomes “[t]he heresy of heresies.” And speaking of heresies …
Towards the end of his 1905 book Heretics, GK Chesterton talks about a strange kind of scepticism that “does not really destroy the beliefs” but rather “creates them.” This works in two opposite ways: the scepticism of our time—that compensation for lost contingency-sense—has created a world in which some people believe only in their abstract ideas and in the flattening of the world into a realm of shadows; but it can, rather helpfully, also create an affirmation of the world beyond the proverbial cave. Even before we have decided what it means, we know that there is more than what the flattening will have us believe. And this is certainly part of what we find now. Yes, there’s a push for many of us to accept the flattening without hesitation. Many do, sadly. But the vibe has shifted, if only subtly. Once, it was the one who hesitated who was lost. Now, it is the one who fails to hesitate who is really lost. Hesitation can save you by allowing you a moment to appreciate what is right there in front of you. Thankfully, the same push towards losing the real is inspiring many of us to push back—even if only gently and politely. We don’t have to be raging mutant oppositionalists. We can simply ask questions. In our time, Chesterton writes,
“The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed.”
Once upon a time, the man who believed without seeing was blessed. Now, those of us who have seen and yet have believed will be truly blessed, even if our perceptual clarity ends us up in a world of pain. It is true that the denial of contingency-sense gives rise to a mad kind of scepticism, packaged as discourse. The discourse functions as AI. It is an artificial intelligence that teaches us nothing but what will happen to anything that passes through its algorithmic procedures. But it is marvellously and profoundly contingent. It cannot sustain itself. It is flimsy enough to assure us that it cannot last. It will not last. If you sow contingency-sense and not mere scepticism, and I highly recommend that you do this, you will reap reality.