Salesman in the Sanctum Sanctorum

What really happened was this: we allowed the salesman into the sanctity of the home. — Russell Banks

I’ve been around now for the biblically allotted lifespan of threescore years and ten. And then some.

During that entire span and sans doute long before, the rotating cast of adults in the room has devoted much of their time worrying about what the heck is wrong with young people.

Much of the rest of our time has gone into devoting an astonishing amount of ingenuity, capital, technological sophistication and cultural energy to making it almost impossible for those same little darlings, young punks and ne’er-do-wells to become adults.

We have often blamed the education system for failing to impart the knowledge and values that teachers instilled back in our day. Sample complaint:

“I don’t know what they do teach in schools. You’ll have to write better than that. Lads learn nothing nowadays, but how to recite poetry and play the fiddle. Have you seen his writing?” he asked of Mr. Pappleworth.

Not many lads learn how to recite poetry and play the fiddle these days, but the gripe about failing schools is as contemporary as today’s weather forecast. The quotation is from D.H. Lawrence’s first novel, Sons and Lovers, published in 1913.

Here’s Roman courtier Petronius in his scandalously satirical Satyricon from the ’60s — the ’60s as in the First Century A.D., that is:

This is the reason, in my opinion, why young men grow up such blockheads in the schools, because they neither see nor hear one single thing connected with the usual circumstances of everyday life.

So let’s maybe give the schools a pass and dig a little deeper into whatever it is we imagine is lacking in the young people of today.

We have diagnosed their alienation, their restlessness, their apparent inability to concentrate, their diminished capacity for independent thought, their anxieties, their narcissism, their political confusion, their sexual dysfunction, their loneliness and their general unwillingness to participate in the inherited institutions of civilized life as if they were the ungrateful offspring of Bartleby, the scrivener. We have treated these things as problems of character, education, discipline, parenting, neurology, and, most recently, screen time.

What we have been considerably less willing to examine is the possibility that these are not principally defects in the young but symptoms of the society into which we have delivered them.

This is hardly a new thought.

In 1960, antiestablishment cultural theorist Paul Goodman published Growing Up Absurd, a book whose central argument was both simple and, in retrospect, rather devastating: the problem with young people was not necessarily that they refused to grow up, but that American society had become so deficient in the conditions necessary for growing up that their refusal was, in many instances, perfectly rational.

Goodman identified those conditions as things that sound almost embarrassingly old-fashioned in a troubled Trumpian time: consideration for others, self-respect, meaningful work, an honourable community, sexual freedom and spiritual sustenance. These were not luxuries, nor were they the sort of things that could be supplied by a more efficient educational system or a better-designed youth program. They were the basic materials of a meaningful human existence.

Goodman was writing at a moment when postwar America was congratulating itself on its unprecedented prosperity. The factories were humming, the suburbs were expanding, household appliances were multiplying and the American Dream was becoming increasingly indistinguishable from the American shopping list. The country had apparently solved the problem of material deprivation, or at least convinced itself that it was on the way to doing so. Precisely the same dynamic was at work in Canada, though in a quieter, less ostentatious manner. Same as it ever was.

Yet as Goodman saw things, something was profoundly wrong. The young were growing up in a society that offered them an abundance of commodities and a scarcity of reasons to care about any of it. And the mistake, he suggested, was to interpret their dissatisfaction as a failure to adjust to society rather than as an accurate perception of society’s failure to provide a life worth adjusting to.

It is worth pausing over this distinction, because it has become more important with every passing decade. A society can be materially prosperous while being spiritually impoverished. It can offer unlimited entertainment while offering very little meaning. It can provide an almost infinite number of choices while systematically diminishing the capacity to make choices that matter.

And as we have witnessed in the intervening decades, it can be extraordinarily successful at producing consumers while becoming progressively less capable of producing citizens, neighbours, friends, lovers or adults.

Smile, we’re on Candid Camera!

Twenty-five years after Goodman, media theorist Neil Postman approached essentially the same problem from a different direction. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, published in 1985, Postman argued that television was not merely a new medium of communication but a transformative force in the way Americans understood reality itself.

The way Postman saw things, the danger was not simply that television encouraged passivity or shortened attention spans, although it certainly did both. The deeper problem was that television imposed the logic of entertainment upon virtually every category of public discourse.

Politics became performance. Journalism became spectacle. Religion became show business. Education increasingly became a matter of making learning entertaining. The distinction between being informed and being amused began to disappear.

Postman’s great insight, as time also has shown, was that a culture does not have to be deprived of information to become intellectually incapacitated. It can be drowning in information and still be incapable of understanding anything. It can know more and comprehend less.

Postman’s comparison of television with the feel-good drug “soma” in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was particularly prescient. In Huxley’s dystopia, people are not primarily controlled through terror, censorship, or physical coercion. They are controlled through pleasure. They are given what they want, or what they have been conditioned to want, and in exchange they surrender the habits of mind and the emotional capacities that might otherwise lead them to question the arrangement. Nobody needs to imprison them because they have stayed too long at the fair and possess no direction home.

The genius of this arrangement is that it does not feel like oppression. It feels like freedom. Indeed, it feels like a particularly agreeable form of freedom, because the individual is constantly presented with the reassuring evidence of personal choice: another program, another channel, another product, another distraction. The cage is furnished with an extraordinary number of options.

Consistent with the Hollywood truism that the Postman always rings twice, John Lennon’s 1970 song “Working Class Hero” neatly distilled what he was talking about:

Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV And you think you’re so clever and classless and free But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see A working class hero is something to be A working class hero is something to be

Strip out the references to sex and TV and you could argue that Karl Marx got there 130 years earlier, but let’s move on to 1995.

That was the year novelist Russell Banks gave this overall argument a more intimate and, in some ways, more disturbing dimension in his interview with Eileen Cavanagh as part of the Hennepin County Library series. It was titled “What Have We Done to Our Children?” and is available on YouTube.

Banks’s main observation about the introduction of television into the American home during the 1950s was not simply that television changed family entertainment habits. Rather, it was that TV changed the moral and psychological architecture of the home.

Banks described the television as a “magical blue eye,” an object that families willingly installed in the centre of their living rooms, almost as though they were establishing an altar.

This was a remarkable historical development. For centuries, the home had represented something like a protected interior: a place where the family could establish its own values, maintain its own rhythms and exercise a measure of sovereignty over the outside world. One of the defining characteristics of a home was that it had a door. And the door could be closed.

Banks’s point about being able to slam the door on a salesman’s foot is especially revealing. The salesman represented the external world of commerce, with its instrumental values and its relentless imperative to convert human needs into profitable transactions.

The home was one of the few places where that imperative could be resisted. A parent could decide that the children would not be exposed to a particular product, a particular argument, a particular appetite or a particular set of values. The family could maintain some distinction between what it believed and what somebody else wanted to sell it, including earnest proselytizers for various religious denominations.

Television effectively abolished that distinction.

The salesman — or evangelist — no longer had to knock. The family invited him inside, gave him a permanent place in the living room, and then, in a gesture of almost supernatural generosity, pointed him directly toward the children. The television became a conduit through which the commercial world could reach the most impressionable members of the household without having to negotiate with the adults who were supposedly responsible for protecting them.

Banks was not merely lamenting advertising. He was identifying a profound abdication of parental and cultural responsibility. The home had surrendered one of its essential functions: protecting the young from the amoral logic of the marketplace.

And the salesman, of course, was only getting started.

If television was the salesman entering the sanctuary, the internet was the salesman acquiring a key, moving into the spare bedroom, learning the family’s routines and eventually becoming so familiar with the occupants that they no longer remembered what it had been like to live without him.

The smartphone completed the transformation by making the salesman portable.

What had once been a piece of furniture in the living room became a personal possession carried everywhere, including the bedroom, the bathroom, the classroom, the dinner table, the workplace, and, perhaps most significantly, the interior spaces of consciousness that had previously remained relatively inaccessible to commerce.

The salesman no longer needed to wait for the family to gather around the television. He could approach each individual separately, continuously, and with an increasingly sophisticated understanding (and marketable database) of that individual’s fears, desires, insecurities, habits and vulnerabilities.

The television was a broadcasting device. The smartphone is a relationship.

Moreover, it is a relationship in which one party knows an extraordinary amount about the other, while the other party has very little idea what the first party is actually doing.

The original television salesman had to guess what children might want. The contemporary digital salesman has access to their search histories, viewing habits, social networks, purchasing behaviour, geographical movements, pauses, clicks, likes, dislikes and countless other behavioural signals. The old salesman had a pitch. The new one has a psychological profile. The old salesman wanted to sell you something. The new one wants to understand you well enough to know what you might be persuaded to want next.

Insidious.

For this is not simply a more efficient version of advertising. It is a different kind of commercial relationship, one in which the individual’s attention, emotional reactions and behavioural tendencies become raw material for an elaborate industrial process. The commodity is no longer merely the thing being advertised. Increasingly, the commodity is the human being whose attention is being captured and whose behaviour is being shaped.

A child watching an advertisement for a sugary breakfast cereal at least encounters an identifiable attempt at persuasion. There is a product, a pitch and an implied transaction. The child might be susceptible to the appeal, but the appeal is relatively legible.

By contrast, a child scrolling through an endless succession of algorithmically selected videos is participating in a system whose commercial intentions are often invisible, whose persuasive techniques are continuously adjusted, and whose principal objective might not be to sell anything immediately but simply to keep the child watching.

The result is a form of influence that is both more intimate and more difficult to recognize. No salesman will come to your door. There is no door to close. There is only the next video, the next notification, the next little red circle announcing that somebody, somewhere, has noticed you.

And here we encounter an unpleasant paradox: the technologies that promise to connect us to one another have become extraordinarily effective at isolating us from one another.

A family can sit together in a restaurant, each member physically present and psychologically elsewhere, absorbed in a separate stream of images and information. Parents can communicate with children through devices while sitting in the same room. Friends can maintain hundreds of nominal relationships while finding it increasingly difficult to sustain one actual conversation. People can spend entire evenings in the company of strangers they will never meet while neglecting the people with whom they share a home.

In effect, the salesman has gone from knocking on doors to recasting a 1971 classic (“Riders on the Storm”) by the Doors:

If you give this man a ride, sweet family will die. Killer on the road, yeah …

Now, the point is not that people used to be wonderful at conversation or that family life in the 1950s was some lost Eden of human intimacy. If it had been, Goodman’s book wouldn’t have sold 100,000 copies in its first three years and become a bible for student activists and the New Left in the 1960s. He himself wouldn’t have been such a sexist.

The point is that attention is one of the principal ways in which human beings demonstrate that they matter to one another. To attend to somebody is to make a temporary gift of one’s consciousness. It is to say, implicitly, that the person in front of you is worth more than whatever else might be competing for your attention.

We have built an economy that makes this gift increasingly difficult to give.

Goodman’s meaningful work, honourable community, and spiritual sustenance begin to look rather different in this context. These things require sustained attention. They require the capacity to tolerate boredom, frustration, uncertainty and delayed gratification. They require relationships that cannot be abandoned the moment they become inconvenient. They require an ability to distinguish between what is immediately pleasurable and what is ultimately worthwhile.

But these are precisely the capacities that the attention economy has little incentive to cultivate. In fact, they are viewed by Big Tech billionaires as commercially inconvenient.

A person who is content with a book, a walk, a conversation, a difficult piece of work, or an evening of quiet reflection is not a particularly attractive customer. A person who can tolerate being alone without immediately reaching for a device is a person whose attention is not readily available for monetization. A person who has a strong sense of identity, belonging and purpose will be less susceptible to the endless manufacture of artificial needs.

There is a reason the commercial world has become so interested in the psychological condition of its customers. An insecure person is potentially a more profitable person. A lonely person can be sold connection. An anxious person can be sold reassurance. A bored person can be sold stimulation. A person uncertain of his or her identity can be sold an endless succession of identities to try on.

The machinery does not necessarily have to make people unhappy. It merely has to ensure that they remain sufficiently dissatisfied to keep returning. And this brings us back to the question of growing up.

Growing up, in any meaningful sense, involves learning to exercise judgment. It involves acquiring the ability to distinguish between one’s impulses and one’s interests, between what one wants and what one needs, between what is gratifying and what is good. It involves the gradual development of an internal authority that makes it possible to resist external pressure.

This is difficult enough under ordinary circumstances. It becomes considerably more difficult when virtually every institution surrounding a young person is organized around the systematic stimulation of appetite. If you’ve spent any time recently with teenage grandchildren, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

Consider what happens to the experience of childhood when the child’s attention is continuously occupied by an environment designed by adults whose financial interests are often directly opposed to the child’s developmental interests.

Consider what happens to imagination when every moment of potential boredom is immediately filled with professionally produced entertainment or even the dazzling idiocy on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube.

Consider what happens to the capacity for independent thought when information arrives in preselected, algorithmically ordered fragments, each one competing to provoke an emotional reaction before the next arrives.

Consider what happens to self-esteem when the ordinary, private process of becoming oneself is conducted in front of an invisible audience, with popularity quantified through likes, views, followers, and other numerical approximations of human approval.

The child is no longer simply growing up in a family or a community. The child is growing up in a marketplace that has learned to simulate the language of friendship.

This is a terrifying development. The commercial world has always attempted to associate products with desirable human experiences: belonging, attractiveness, happiness, success, adventure, sexual fulfilment. But social media go considerably further. They do not merely advertise an idealized life. They provide the infrastructure through which people attempt to construct and display one.

The teenager who once worried about fitting in with the children at school now has access to an apparently limitless population of people against whom to measure himself or herself. The adolescent insecurity that was once geographically contained can now be globalized. The ordinary experience of feeling inadequate becomes an almost continuous confrontation with curated images of other people’s apparent success, beauty, happiness and desirability.

And the irony is that the teenager is not merely a passive spectator of this spectacle. He or she is also a participant, performer, producer and commodity. The young person must simultaneously live a life and document that life, experience an emotion and consider how that emotion might be presented, develop an identity and monitor the audience’s response to it.

The experience of being alive becomes entangled with the experience of being seen to be alive. To adapt a saying from the legendary Argentinian thespian Fernando Lamas: “It’s better to look real than to be real.”

(And furthermore, may I just say to anyone who has made it this far: You read marvellous!)

But back to authenticity versus appearance. This is not a trivial alteration in the conditions of psychological development. It strikes directly at the distinction between an internal self and an externally constructed persona. It makes the ordinary privacy of becoming a person increasingly difficult to preserve.

Goodman argued that young people needed an honourable community in which they could find meaningful roles. The contemporary young person is offered something that resembles community but may be a poor substitute for it: networks of affiliation that can be enormous in scale but fragile in substance, that provide constant feedback but little dependable responsibility and that can disappear or turn hostile with astonishing speed.

An online audience can applaud you without knowing you. It can condemn you without understanding you. It can make you feel socially connected without requiring you to do the difficult work of actually belonging somewhere.

And belonging, unlike following, is reciprocal. It involves obligations. It requires you to tolerate other people’s imperfections and to allow them to tolerate yours. It requires showing up when there is nothing particularly entertaining happening.

It is difficult to imagine a more direct contradiction of the current prevailing technological ethos.

One might reasonably ask whether artificial intelligence represents the next stage of this development or something qualitatively different. The answer, I suspect, is both.

Television gave us a world of entertainment. The internet gave us a world of information and connection. Social media gave us a world in which we could turn ourselves into entertainment. Artificial intelligence now offers something more intimate still: a world in which the machinery of communication can respond to us, adapt to us, flatter us, assist us and increasingly simulate the experience of understanding us.

The salesman has learned to have a conversation.

This is potentially a wonderful thing. Artificial intelligence can make knowledge more accessible, help people understand difficult subjects, assist with creative work and provide companionship (of a sort) to people who might otherwise feel  isolated. It would be foolish to deny these possibilities simply because the technology also presents serious risks.

But the underlying question remains: What happens to human development when the friction of human relationships, the difficulty of learning, the discomfort of uncertainty and the necessity of independent thought can all be partially outsourced to machines?

Learning something has traditionally involved a period of not knowing. It has involved the often unpleasant experience of struggling with an idea, making mistakes, encountering resistance and gradually developing the intellectual muscles necessary to understand it. A machine that can provide an immediate answer to almost any question is an extraordinary resource. But it can also become a way of avoiding the very process through which understanding is acquired.

Similarly, conversation is not valuable simply because it produces information. Its value often lies in the unpredictable encounter between two separate consciousnesses. Another person may misunderstand you, challenge you, bore you, surprise you or force you to reconsider something you thought you understood. The difficulty is part of the point.

A machine designed to be agreeable, responsive and endlessly available may provide a more comfortable experience, but comfort and human development are not at all the same thing.

There is also the question of authority. If the machine increasingly supplies the answers, frames the questions, summarizes the arguments, recommends the choices and anticipates the needs, what happens to the individual’s capacity to develop independent judgment? What happens when convenience becomes the default criterion for deciding whether something is worth doing oneself?

The danger is not that artificial intelligence will necessarily make human beings stupid. The danger is that it may make it possible for us to appear to function remarkably well without exercising many of the intellectual and emotional capacities that once made intelligence meaningful.

We may become extraordinarily well-assisted and progressively less capable of assisting ourselves. The fair, childlike and feckless Eloi as a race of halfwits living in plenitude and abandon — as conceived by H.G. Wells in 1895’s dystopian science fiction novella The Time Machine — spring to mind in a roundy round Teletubbies revelry.

The salesman is in the living room. He is in the bedroom, the classroom, the car, the restaurant, the playground, and increasingly in the conversation itself. He has become so familiar that we sometimes mistake him for a friend. He has become so useful that we hesitate to question his presence. He has become so accommodating that we have forgotten he is there to sell us something.

And perhaps the most tragic part of the story is that, having invited him in to entertain our children, we have gradually allowed him to teach them what life is for.

It is time to ask him to leave.