Luke Ford

From the LROB:

* Things were different only a couple of generations ago, when the cult of the founders underpinned consensus. In the 1960s sociologists discussed the role of a non-denominational ‘civil religion’ centred on the founders’ secular scriptures – the Declaration of Independence, the constitution and the Bill of Rights – and a calendar of public observance. Was America’s civil religion a substitute for Christianity, or merely a supplement to it? In the easy-going days before the rise of the evangelical right, it didn’t seem to matter, and the cult of the founders had no ulterior partisan or ideological significance. Indeed, liberals were just as committed to it as conservatives, happily hymning the Jeffersonian separation of Church and state.

* Stacy Schiff’s life of the revolutionary patriot Samuel Adams is an unobtrusively subversive contribution to the genre. Schiff’s Adams is, if not quite a purveyor of fake news, a master craftsman in the arts of distortion and exaggeration, whose spin and sensation-mongering transformed loyal colonial Britons into revolutionary Americans over the course of little more than a decade.

* The most persuasive explanation, advanced by Bernard Bailyn in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), is that the reading habits of the 18th-century colonists tilted heavily towards the fretful opposition Whiggery of the mother country. By contrast with mainstream Whiggish celebration of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, opposition Whigs – indebted to mid-17th-century commonwealth ideals, suspicious of government power in general, and nervous of conspiracies against liberty – stressed the frailty of English freedoms, not least from the poisons they identified in the body politic. Transatlantic distance aggravated such concerns. Eventually, colonials came to fear that England’s liberties were on the point of expiry, and British America’s might be next.

Schiff adds a twist to this story. The colonies’ instinctive British loyalties counterbalanced suspicion and mistrust; it took sustained, deliberate effort from Adams between the mid-1760s and mid-1770s to transform protest into outrage, then militancy, and finally a willingness to shed blood for an as yet unimagined American nation. Abetted by London’s misunderstandings of Boston, and Boston’s exaggerated misreadings of London’s intent, Adams’s persistent scheming, Schiff suggests, contrived America into existence.

* Her Adams and the mid-18th-century Boston crowd supply disturbing precedents for rabble-rousing populism, truth-bending demagoguery, intimidation, violence, vandalism and the destruction of property; the hanged effigies of Oliver and Grenville foreshadow the gallows the Capitol mob built for Vice-President Pence. Founding-era exemplars of this sort still matter. Most obviously, the Tea Party movement, which has now been absorbed by the Republican Party, klaxoned its debt to the American Revolution, and its anarchic, ultra-libertarian obstructiveness crudely echoed the chariness of government so characteristic of 18th-century Whig patriots.

Megan Garber writes:

One of Springer’s legacies will be his realization that shamelessness is a lucrative industry. Another will be his recognition that even shock can grow stale. Springer had to keep finding new ways to outdo the drama on his show. In the 2000s, he began arriving onstage by sliding down a stripper pole. When real people’s stories seemed insufficiently titillating, he brought on a character—the drunken “Reverend Shnorr”—to punch things up. Springer masterminded the havoc, but on-screen, he presided over it for the most part like a mild-mannered father amused by his unruly children. And then, for the final twist, he tried to graft meaning onto the chaos he’d just presented to his viewers. Springer ended each episode with his “Final Thought,” the wan sermon he delivered as a response to the stories just aired. The address, a holdover from a similar one he’d delivered during his days as a news anchor, tried to find a moral in the madness. It concluded, always, with the same line: “Take care of yourself, and each other.”

The hypocrisy of the Final Thought—its episode-by-episode effort to cleanse all the scandal with sanctimony—will be Springer’s most lasting legacy. The Jerry Springer Show exploited people fervently and ruthlessly and lucratively. It treated real tragedies as diversions. And it did all of that as it pretended to be more profound than it was. Springer tried to frame the show’s exploitation as anthropology, as something revealing and instructive. But it was Springer’s own arc that would prove most culturally revelatory: His show’s concessions predicted the ease with which American politics would give way to entertainment. He was an omen of all that can go wrong when audiences treat boredom as vice.

Faith Hill writes:

Discomfort with intimacy seems to be on the rise—and no one’s quite sure why….

About a decade ago, the social psychologist Sara Konrath led a study that yielded some disturbing results. As a researcher at Indiana University, she’d already found that narcissism rates seemed to be increasing among Americans, and empathy decreasing; that was a combination that didn’t bode well, she feared, for the quality of people’s relationships. So she decided to look more deeply into the state of Americans’ connections—and in order to do so, she turned to attachment theory…

People are feeling precarious right now.” He rattled off a list of fears that people may be wrestling with: war in Europe, ChatGPT threatening to transform jobs, constant school shootings in the news. When society feels scary, that fear can seep into your closest relationships. People tend to think of attachment style as a static personality trait; really, Chopik told me, “it’s an evaluation of the broader world.”

Konrath pointed to financial precarity in particular. The 2008 recession seems to have really rocked people; not long after that, she saw empathy start to rise and narcissism start to dip, and some researchers think the recession contributed to an increase in insecure attachment too…

Many people grow more securely attached over time. They make friends, go on first dates, fall in love, get heartbroken and survive it. “We all learn from those things, and we try to figure out relationships as we go along,” he told me. The world is a scary place, and our personal lives exist within it. But, as Chopik noted, “there’s a lot of power to a life lived.”