Propaganda

Continuing my trawl through some of the books that have been waiting to be read for way too long....  Quite some time ago I bought a second-hand copy of Jacques Ellul's Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, probably at a Lifeline book sale.  I remember starting to read it, finding it dense to the point of incomprehensibility, and putting it on the shelf for later.  I'm not the only person who felt this - the book's previous owner covered the pages with underlining and illegible marginal comments for about the first third of the book, after which its pages are completely untouched.

If this memory is accurate then I must have got smarter in the intervening years. His writing is not nearly as impenetrable as I remember it.  Not that it is exactly an easy read - he's a French intellectual, after all - but I found it clear, highly logical, and completely disconcerting.  

Ellul was a prominent Christian intellectual in the second half of the 20th century, writing extensively on the crossover between theology and social theory.  He was primarily a sociologist and lawyer rather than a theologian and some of his books were purely sociological.  This is one of them.  It was first published in French in 1961, with its English translation appearing in 1964 (well before feminists succeeded in teaching us that our book titles shouldn't casually exclude half the human race).  The title is self-explanatory - he explores propaganda, what it is, its key characteristics, what the conditions are for its flourishing, why it is effective and what the limits are to this effectiveness.  Writing as he was in the shadow of World War 2, in which France was ruled by a fascist government, and at the height of the Cold War, this was obviously a pressing subject for him and it is hardly less so for us.

The book is disturbing because he suggests that propaganda is not the occasional rantings and misinformation of totalitarian regimes or self-interested elites.  Rather, he sees it as integral to, and possibly indispensable in, any advanced, technological and urban society - any society in which citizens live en masse in large, impersonal communities.  Hence, communist and fascist societies have their propaganda but so do capitalist democracies, and this propaganda is firmly embedded in the structure of these societies.  

Not all propaganda is the same, and he describes it through four somewhat overlapping dualities.  

The first is the distinction between political and sociological propaganda.  Political propaganda is what we normally think of when we hear the term - communication from political actors designed to persuade us to support certain leaders or policies.  Sociological propaganda, on the other hand, aims at persuading us to adopt a particular way of life and set of values and attitudes.  The two are, of course, not unconnected - the background values and priorities make us receptive to particular political messages.

The second is the distinction between what he calls 'the propaganda of agitation' and 'the propaganda of integration'.  These are, in a sense, opposites although they may be used by the same leaders or parties.  The propaganda of agitation stirs us to action.  It is what brings us out on the street to protest, riot, launch pogroms or rise in armed rebellion against our masters.  It is what revolutionary parties use but it may also be used by established authorities if they feel threatened, as a way of deflecting attention from their own failings onto some unfortunate minority.

The propaganda of integration seeks to persuade us in the opposite direction.  It urges and teaches is to accept things as they are, to live within the bounds of society, to be good obedient citizens and consumers.  It is both more pervasive and more pernicious, attaching us more and more firmly to where we are.  Although the propaganda of agitation may be more explosive and produce more striking results, it is also time-limited.  We can only live in a heightened emotional state for so long before we run out of steam, but we can be passive for our whole lives, gradually leaning to accept more and more outrageous impositions as right and normal.

The third duality is between vertical and horizontal propaganda. As the names suggest, vertical propaganda comes to us 'from above' from those in authority be they government officials, party leaders or 'captains of industry'.  The second comes to us via our peers - our workmates, our neighbours, our families.  Effective propaganda uses both, the messages of leaders are reinforced and amplified by local representatives who 'sing from the same song-sheet'.  The result is that we do not just feel, as isolated individuals, that we should obey this great leader.  We also feel that we are all in it together, that our friends and family are on the same journey so if we rebel we not only renounce a leader but our community.

The final duality is between what he calls 'rational' and 'irrational' propaganda.  Some propaganda is purely an appeal to the emotions, unconnected to any facts.  It is like the connection between buying a four-wheel-drive and living a carefree life.  The connection makes no sense if you examine it, but it has a huge emotional resonance.  On the other hand, he suggests that a lot of propaganda is intended to appeal directly to our rationality, or at least to present us with facts.  These facts will even be true - indeed, truth makes them more effective as blatant lies can be exposed.  But this does not mean that it is neutral - facts are carefully selected and presented in a particular way to lead us to a particular end.  Facts are not valued for themselves, they are tools of manipulation just as much as our emotions are.

Why do we have propaganda?  Well, of course, governments, parties and leaders create propaganda because it works.  But why does it work?  He suggests it works because as people living in a mass society we want and need it.  We no longer have the intimate, traditional community relationships, the religious, ethnic and personal identities which ground us and tell us who we are and how we should live.  These are swept away in the tide of urban industrialisation, and we are left looking for alternative sources of meaning.  Propaganda slips into this space, filling our lives and giving them meaning and purpose.

If this points us to why propaganda works, it also points us to its limits.  Propaganda works if it meets our psychological needs, if it fits in with the world as we are experiencing it.  If it cuts across this too jarringly we will reject it.  If it presents us with assertions that are a long way from what we believe or know to be the facts of the case we will not believe it.  As they taught us in Social Work 101, you need to 'start where the person (or the society) is at'.  The propagandist can't be too far away from those he or she seeks to influence, and can't move them too far - at least, not all at once.  Propagandists hold their subjects captive but are also, in a sense, captive themselves.  

***

As I was reading this, I kept thinking of CS Lewis' The Abolition of Man.  I read this a long time ago and pulled it off my shelf to refresh my memory.  

In a review some years ago, I compared Lewis to Ellul.  They were both intellectuals and prolific authors, committed Christians who worked in fields other than theology and combined the insights of their chosen field with a careful understanding of the Christian faith. 

Like Propaganda, The Abolition of Man is not a specifically Christian book.  It consists of three short lectures Lewis gave in the early 1940s, collected into a fifty-page booklet first published in 1943.  He doesn't use the term 'propaganda' but what he describes is precisely what Ellul means by 'sociological propaganda', propaganda embedded in the material of ordinary education.  His target is a text-book on English composition by two un-named English schoolteachers which encourages students to view statements of value ('this waterfall is sublime') as statements of feeling ('I have sublime feelings').  In the process they imply that things don't have any value in themselves, they only have the value we impute to them.  We should do away with this silly emotionalism, they imply, and stick to the bare facts.

This is his starting point for a critique of the idea that things only have the value that we give to them, and the consequent licensing of humans (educators, elites) to shape others - particularly students - into whatever form they deem most advantageous.  The problem is, how do they decide what is advantageous?  By what criteria do they judge this?  Advantageous for what, or whom?  The end result of this logical development is that a few elites in one generation would build a depleted humanity - a human race in which what makes us human has been abolished.

Against this he sets what he calls the Tao - the teachings of major religions and philosophies throughout the ages which tell us what has value, what is good, what we should do and avoid doing.  These ideas are foundational - they are not logically derived, they are themselves axiomatic.  If we do away with them we don't end up with something more logical or reasonable, we end up with something quite arbitrary.  In attempting to conquer nature we end up surrendering to it because we have nothing which separates us from it.

What he is describing here, and talks about more in other writings, is the idea of 'Natural Law' - that humans have certain ideas of right and wrong which are embedded in us and recur in all cultures at all times.  For Lewis, this Natural Law is a sign that the universe is designed by a conscious, intentional deity, and that humans carry something of the image of this deity.  We attempt to deny or suppress this image at our own peril, to do so makes us less human, not more.

There's a lot to critique in this argument.  One starting point would be to point out that he uses the term Tao to mean something quite different to the meaning given to it by Lao Tsu, the founder of Taoism.  This being the case, it is worth asking how real is his supposed consensus between the great sages.  The answer is, not nearly as real as he makes out.  These things are matters of contention and argument.  Lewis knows this and acknowledges it, but he doesn't do anything with this knowledge.  At the end of the book he presents an appendix with collected sayings from various ancient teachers showing their commonalities, but this is an artificial procedure - what he has presented in reality is a series of carefully curated statements which agree with his view.

The second thing is that his critique is weakened by the lack of any sophisticated analysis of power.  He recognises that certain elites would end up deciding for us what sort of humans we should be.  What he doesn't analyse is who these elites are, how they come to be the elites and what they are aiming at.  

One of the key requirements of propaganda is that it is purposeful.  Successful propagandists know what they are doing.  In propaganda we have insiders who create propaganda, we have those who do their bidding in spreading it and amplifying it, and we have those who receive it and are acted upon.  It is not necessary that the elites who create the propaganda believe it.  In fact, it is better in many ways that they do not.  They need to be clear-eyed about the effects it will have.  Even their agents need not totally believe it it - they may be given a glimpse of some hidden knowledge that they are persuaded would not be in the wider interest to spread.  Propaganda is the exercise of power, not the exercise of belief or conviction.

Nonetheless, there is something in what Lewis is trying to say, even if he doesn't see clearly what it is.  Lewis would like us to hold firmly to the idea that some things are true and good, and other things are false and evil.  To do this, we need criteria for truth and goodness.  Where will we get this from?  These questions are contentious, but humans have been working on them for thousands of years so we have plenty of resources to draw on.  If we simply debunk all of this and say 'there is no criteria for truth and goodness' or even 'truth and goodness are illusions' we deprive ourselves of humanity and find ourselves at sea, unable to do anything meaningful.

***

I started reading Ellul again because of my concern about climate change.  Right now we have a clear scientific consensus that the world is locked in to warming of somewhere between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius, and that this will be much greater unless we cut our emissions rapidly over the coming two or three decades.  But this is not new - scientists have been clear about this for over three decades now, and yet we have continued to increase our emissions.  Why is this?

The reason is that climate change has been the subject of a concerted propaganda campaign.  The hub of this campaign is the hugely wealthy and influential industries that benefit from fossil fuels - miners of oil, coal and natural gas, and the users of these fuels to generate electricity, power transport and so forth.  These industries are motivated by naked self-interest - they want to keep profiting from their investments, and their propaganda seeks to protect these profits.  The result has been a sophisticated, multi-pronged strategy which involves funding think-tanks to produce 'scientific' analyses debunking the science, buying political influence through hard lobbying and generous political donations through which they have steadily insinuated themselves into our political system, and the turning of key media outlets to their cause through strategic shareholdings and relationships.  

The result has been a general population that is either ignorant, doubts the science, does not see it as an important issue or thinks it is insoluble.  It doesn't matter that these positions are incompatible with each other, or with the actual science which is widely known.  What matters is that the resulting confusion keeps us compliant and focused elsewhere, so that the oligarchs can go on profiting.  As Ellul suggests, propaganda works because it tells us what we want to hear - that things can go on as they are, that our patterns of production and consumption need to not change.  This is indeed the very message to which we have been conditioned by the bombardment of advertising over the past half century and by the neo-liberal economists and politicians who 'preach the gospel of unlimited growth', to borrow a phrase from Graeme Connors.  The advocates for action have a much harder sell, even with the weight of science on their side, because they are asking us to change.

Crucially, though, the oligarchs themselves don't believe their own propaganda.  They understand and believe the science.  They are preparing for climate change and for a post-carbon world.  Even as they milk their investments in fossil fuels they are developing their renewable assets, using their market and political power to ensure that new players will not get the jump on them and force them out of business.  If to do so requires the world to warm by three or four degrees instead of two this is a risk they are prepared to take in order to shore up their long-term market position.

It's ironic that so many conservative Christians who admire Lewis (although not necessarily Ellul) have fallen for the trick and are among the most strident advocates for this industry-led propaganda.  Indeed, they have been specifically targeted by it, with clever messaging using Bible quotes and pseudo-religious reasoning to turn them against the environment movement and bring them onside with industry.  Hence followers of a faith that demands repentance, truthfulness and reverence for the works of God become resistant to change, assert that truth is a matter of opinion and adopt an instrumental approach to nature.

Perhaps it is worth reflecting on the way Lewis begins his lectures, with a reference to a story in which the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge overhears two tourists talking about a waterfall.  One calls it 'sublime', the other 'pretty'.  To Coleridge, the word 'sublime' captures well the grandeur of the sight, while the term 'pretty' is inadequate and trivial.  For Lewis (unlike the authors of the text he is critiquing) Coleridge is right because the waterfall is inherently sublime.  There is a grandeur and power in God's creation which exists in and of itself, and not merely because of how it makes us feel.

Whether they have this value because they are created by God, because they are animated by a spirit of life, because they embody an objective standard of beauty or because they represent an important part of the web of life into which we ourselves are inextricably integrated (options which are well worth discussing) the point is that the non-human world has a value in itself.  It is worth preserving for itself, not merely because it is useful for us and whether or not a cost-benefit analysis identifies a higher and better use for the resource.  

Perhaps, then, we could agree with Lewis that it is objectively good to preserve life on our planet and its fragile ecosystems - that the species we are driving to extinction are valuable in themselves, that the seasons are beautiful and fitting, that our beautiful coastlines would be objectively poorer for their erosion.  Perhaps we could also agree that nature is inherently orderly and knowable, created by a good intelligence, and that this means scientific findings are not mere matters of judgement or competing truths.  The evidence does not lie.

All of this would help us, and give us the grounding, to resist fossil fuel industry propaganda.  It would, indeed, provide a pathway through the inevitability and necessity of propaganda identified by Ellul.  The more we can recover our roots, our identity, the values of our faith and our heritage, the less we will be duped by the wealthy and powerful people who would like to manipulate us.