{"id":137312,"date":"2021-02-24T12:09:17","date_gmt":"2021-02-24T20:09:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=137312"},"modified":"2021-02-24T19:42:22","modified_gmt":"2021-02-25T03:42:22","slug":"does-adam-curtis-offer-compelling-ideas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=137312","title":{"rendered":"The Beautiful Films & Empty Ideas Of Adam Curtis"},"content":{"rendered":"

When you listen to Barack Obama and Tony Blair speak, you often feel that you are hearing something profound, but when you read their speeches, you realize there is no there there. So too with filmmaker Adam Curtis<\/a>. There’s nothing there. The visual and aural tracks of Adam Curtis’s documentaries are compelling, but when you look at his ideas in black and white, do they stand up? Not so much. There’s no sin in loving entertainment but confusing that which looks good for that which is good is a mistake. <\/p>\n

Also, many Americans think that because something is said in an English accent, it must be deep. Not really. Kerwin tweets: “I’m going to re-dub all of Adam Curtis’s documentaries, swapping his voice out with a guy who has an Appalachian hillbilly accent. We’ll see how intellectually insightful and mature he really is…”<\/p>\n

Obama and Blair can write lyrical passages, but beneath the surface shimmer, there’s nothing. Curtis makes stunning films, but the arguments he presents are nothing but unverifiable assertions. <\/p>\n

Time magazines says Feb. 23, 2021<\/a>: <\/p>\n

He is best known as the pioneer of a radical and unique style of filmmaking, combining reels of unseen archive footage, evocative music, and winding narratives to tell sweeping stories of 20th and 21st century history that challenge the conventional wisdom. \u201cI\u2019ve never thought of myself as a documentary maker,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m a journalist.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Feb. 11, Curtis dropped his latest epic: Can\u2019t Get You Out of My Head, an eight hour history of individualism, split up over six episodes. Subtitled \u201cAn emotional history of the modern world,\u201d the goal of the series, Curtis says, was to unpack how we came to live in a society designed around the individual, but where people increasingly feel anxious and uncertain.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The reason that some of us live in societies designed around the individual is primarily biological. Individualism is not something constructed by society. Rather, states filled with people who have an individualist orientation (they are usually Northern European in origin) tend to be individualist. Nicholas Wade wrote in his 2014 book Our Troublesome Inheritance<\/a>: <\/p>\n

Contrary to the central belief of multiculturalists, Western culture has achieved far more than other cultures in many significant spheres and has done so because Europeans, probably for reasons of both evolution and history, have been able to create open and innovative societies, starkly different from the default human arrangements of tribalism or autocracy…<\/p>\n

Tribal societies, for instance, are organized on the basis of kinship and differ from modern states chiefly in that people\u2019s radius of trust does not extend too far beyond the family and tribe. But in this small variation is rooted the vast difference in political and economic structures between tribal and modern societies. Variations in another genetically based behavior, the readiness to punish those who violate social rules, may explain why some societies are more conformist than others. <\/p>\n

The entry to the modern industrial world has two principal requirements. The first is to develop institutions that enable a society to break away, at least to some substantial extent, from the default human institution of tribalism. Tribalism, being built around kinship ties, is incompatible with the institutions of a modern state. The break from tribalism probably requires a population to evolve such behaviors as higher levels of trust toward those outside the family or tribe. A second required evolutionary change is the transformation of a population\u2019s social traits from the violent, short-term, impulsive behavior typical of many hunter-gatherer and tribal societies into the more disciplined, future-oriented behavior seen in East Asian societies and documented by Clark for English workers at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.<\/p>\n

Looking at the three principal races, one can see that each has followed a different evolutionary path as it adapted to its local circumstances… Consider first Caucasians, the grouping of populations that includes Europeans, Middle Easterners and people of the Indian subcontinent (Indians and Pakistanis). Most European countries followed England almost immediately in transitioning to modern economies. Their populations, like that of England, had abandoned tribalism in the early Middle Ages.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As Samuel Francis noted: “The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.”<\/p>\n

If a different people than the English had settled North America, the United States today would be less individualist. As a declining proportion of the American people can trace their genetic heritage to England, individualism retreats and collectivism increases. <\/p>\n

Professor Geert Hofstede analyzes cultures on six dimensions including individualism vs collectivism<\/a>: <\/p>\n

The high side of this dimension, called Individualism, can be defined as a preference for a loosely-knit social framework in which individuals are expected to take care of only themselves and their immediate families.<\/p>\n

Its opposite, Collectivism, represents a preference for a tightly-knit framework in society in which individuals can expect their relatives or members of a particular ingroup to look after them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty. A society\u2019s position on this dimension is reflected in whether people\u2019s self-image is defined in terms of \u201cI\u201d or \u201cwe.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The most individualist countries according to Hofstede’s index are in order<\/a>: United States, Australia, United Kingdom, Netherlands, and New Zealand. These are all states developed by northern Europeans, who also orient towards individualist religions such as Protestantism. DNA is upstream of religion, culture and politics. <\/p>\n

Adam Curtis tells Time magazine: “I have no problem with identity politics. The left retreated from economics in the 1980s, because the right got into power everywhere. And in response to that, the left did some extraordinary things with identity politics, which actually did liberate lots and lots of people. I think it\u2019s an amazing achievement. I think my criticism, which I think is clear in the films, is that they lost control of economics, and it ran out of control, and money took control.”<\/p>\n

Well, only some groups are allowed to play the identity politics games. Whites, for example, are not. For all the people the left liberated with its civil rights law, there were as many people enslaved. As Christopher Caldwell pointed out<\/a>, the founding American constitution has been superceded by the new constitution of civil rights, which has diminished freedom of association.<\/p>\n

Adam: “But you voted for the wrong person. He\u2019s going to con you, which Trump did. Because actually the truth of the last four years is that Trump completely failed. He didn\u2019t do any of what he said he was going to do domestically. He said he was going to get rid of the corruption in Washington. It spread. He said he was going to rebuild the infrastructure of America. He did nothing and it is still falling apart. He said he was going to bring the factories back home. He didn\u2019t. And the opioid crisis increased. He said he was going to end the futile wars abroad. He didn\u2019t. By any measure, he was a total failure. And in a way, he\u2019s another of these examples of these people coming up with this great wave of anger behind them. Because there are a lot of people who are very angry. And you can still see from the voting patterns in the most recent presidential election, in 2020, that they\u2019re still there. Yet, nothing actually changed. What I was astonished by was that there was this sound and fury. But actually, no one was doing anything.”<\/p>\n

Martin Gurri has a more coherent explanation — the explosion of information has reduced the power of the elites and fueled anger by raising unrealistic expectations.<\/a> The notion that Trump was a total failure is purely polemical. It might sound great to Adam’s friends but it does not accord with reality (real wages started rising in America for the working class, immigration was slashed, etc). <\/p>\n

Adam: “The readership for newspapers began to collapse in the early \u201890s. Which is the point at which journalism became very boring, because it had nothing else to say. It didn\u2019t have any dramatic narratives.”<\/p>\n

Journalism is a business. The business collapsed, not because of a lack of dramatic narratives, but because its business model of packaging news to assemble eyeballs to sell advertising to could not compete with the age of increasing information. <\/p>\n

Adam: “Individualism is born out of mass democracy. It\u2019s a natural consequence of it.”<\/p>\n

No. Japan and South Korea are democracies but they are not individualist. There’s no evidence for the assertion that mass democracy promotes individualism. <\/p>\n

Adam: “Black Lives Matter is great because it\u2019s the first movement that comes along and says, this is structural, this is about power. Because in the age of individualism, the word power has disappeared. You\u2019re supposed to be empowered, yourself. What is reemerging is that old idea that actually, it\u2019s about changing the structure. That\u2019s what Black Lives Matter is saying, and it won\u2019t go away. And it\u2019s very interesting that it took a group which has been excluded from that system to come smashing through to the mainstream, and bring that debate into the mainstream. I think it\u2019s great. I think, in boring terms, it\u2019s the return of sociology. It says that actually, the reason you feel shit doesn\u2019t just come from inside you, it isn\u2019t your failure, which is what a lot of modern positive psychology says. What Black Lives Matter says, and the wider movement which they\u2019re part of says, is no: a lot of the reason you feel shit is because you live in a shit society, or where you are in the power structure is horrible and unequal, and it\u2019s not your fault.”<\/p>\n

BLM is the first movement to says that the problem is structural? That’s absurd. Marx and Marxist critiques for over a century have argued that our principle problems are structural. If life is so bad for BLM activists, why don’t they move to where things are much much better? The notion that your problem are not your fault has long been a popular one. It is not new to BLM. <\/p>\n

Adam: “I think the COVID pandemic has shown, brutally, that the further you are away from the system of power, the more likely you are to fall ill and die. Whereas the higher you are up the hierarchy of power, the safer you are.”<\/p>\n

Covid has shown that the stupider and fatter you are, the more likely you are to die. Covid does not kill on the basis of how close you are to power. It kills people with comorbidities such as obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, etc. It has always been thus. Stupid fat people near the center of power die quicker than smart healthy people away from the center of power. The center of power has next to nothing to do with whether you live or die. Medical care makes very little difference for most people’s quality of life and life expectancy. Genetics matter for your quality and length of life much more than medical care. <\/p>\n

Adam: “The reason you got Brexit and the reason you got Trump was because of the response to the banking crisis in 2008. And in both America and Britain, people realized that those lower down the chain were being asked to pay for the rich\u2019s corruption and criminality.”<\/p>\n

Do you know why virtually no bankers went to prison for the Global Financial Crash of 2008? Because, by and large, they obeyed the laws of the game established by the U.S. government which forced banks to lend to people who were unlikely to pay back their loans. Countries that did not require affirmative action in lending did not have banking crises unless they had significant exposure to the American mess. <\/p>\n

Adam: “The people who have to drive a bus in order to make society work are more likely to die than those who run a hedge fund. I think that\u2019s going to go very deep, I really do. So there are good things to this pandemic. It\u2019s shone a very powerful searchlight on exactly what we\u2019re talking about: social class and power.”<\/p>\n

This life expectancy difference has next to nothing to do with social class and power and almost everything to do with genetics. The genetics of the people who run hedge funds predict a longer life than the less intelligent people who run buses. Life is an IQ test and smart people live longer, on average, than dumb people. <\/p>\n

Adam: “A lot of people in advertising are beginning to question whether Google\u2019s magic ability to target people and predict how they as individuals behave may not be true.”<\/p>\n

See George Gilder’s 2018 book, Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy.<\/a><\/p>\n

Spiked<\/a>: “He portrays suburban life as detached from reality, as if this state of alienation was more a product of lifestyle or architecture and planning than politics. But the suburbs were once thriving hubs of popular participation (though as John Carey\u2019s The Intellectuals and the Masses demonstrates, this participation was held in contempt by the elites).”<\/p>\n

Has Adam Curtis ever lived in the suburbs? On what basis can one argue that life in the suburbs or life in any particular place is detached from reality? Life is not more real in the country or in the city. <\/p>\n

Spiked<\/a>: “Our rulers have persuaded themselves that free will is a sham and that ordinary people are easily manipulated.”<\/p>\n

That’s nonsense. Read Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Spiked<\/a>: “Brits and Americans withdrew from churches, sports clubs, book clubs, parent-teacher associations, the Boy Scouts, the Red Cross, rotary clubs, you name it.”<\/p>\n

And why was that? Because the left’s civil rights legislation destroyed freedom of association. Men could no longer gather only with men except in certain religious settings or in a strip club. <\/p>\n

New Statesman<\/a>: “The commanding belief of humanity is individualism, the idea that the individual \u2013 their thoughts, actions and feelings \u2013 is superior to the societies in which they live.”<\/p>\n

No. Individualism is not inherently superior to collectivism. It depends on people and circumstance. Collectivist solutions to Covid-19, for example, have generally approved far more effective than individualist ones. <\/p>\n

New Statesman<\/a>: “Just like the great 19th-century novelists such as Dostoevsky, Curtis is deeply concerned with how we came to hold such a pessimistic view of human nature.”<\/p>\n

People on the right take for granted that the human is a dangerous animal. You’d have to be an idiot to think otherwise.<\/p>\n

Adam: “What I\u2019m asking in these films is why in the great age of individualism, which promised empowered individuals, have we ended up with entire societies that are uncertain, anxious and distrustful \u2013 not just of those in power, not just not just of each other, but of themselves? That is the fundamental thing that is stopping us from having the confidence to imagine different kinds of worlds.\u201d<\/p>\n

The lack of freedom of association has more to do with this than anything. <\/p>\n

Adam: \u201cThe ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.\u201d<\/p>\n

No, the world is as it is, and our ability to change it is severely limited by biology and geology and genetics. <\/p>\n

Adam: \u201cThis [conspiracy] theory was going to have a very powerful effect in the future because it would lead to a profound shift in how many people understood the world. Because what it said was that, in a dark world of hidden power, you couldn\u2019t expect everything to make sense, that it was pointless to try and understand the meaning of why something happened, because that would always be concealed. What you looked for were the patterns.\u201d<\/p>\n

The problem is not that the world makes no sense, the problem is that the world does not make perfect sense. <\/p>\n

The New Yorker describes Adam’s method<\/a> as “a stream of unusual, evocative images from the past, richly scored with pop music, that are overlaid with his own, plainly delivered, often unverifiable analysis.”<\/p>\n

Adam: \u201cI\u2019m fundamentally an emotional journalist. The mood my films create\u2014and possibly the reason why people like that mood\u2014is because it somehow feels real, even though it seems dreamy and odd. It actually gets at what\u2019s going on in people\u2019s heads, which is sort of what realism always is. People in the nineteenth century did not think and feel like we do today.\u201d<\/p>\n

Adam delivers feelz, whether they bear any resemblance to reality is debatable. <\/p>\n

The New Yorker:<\/a> “Curtis finds writing much harder than what he calls \u201ccutting the archive,\u201d which he does briskly and without particular effort.”<\/p>\n

Of course he does. Writing is a mirror to the mind. When you read Adam’s writings, you realize there isn’t much there. <\/p>\n

The New Yorker:<\/a> “[W]e live in societies without narrative coherence.” <\/p>\n

You can’t have narrative coherence shared by diverse peoples. <\/p>\n

The New Yorker:<\/a> “Each of his projects is anchored by a single, provocative idea, and the claim of his new series is that we have become unable to imagine the future\u2014we are citizens of an eternal present stilled by dubious technology, hollow politicians, and catastrophic self-doubt.”<\/p>\n

The future is not knowable. We are not stilled by dubious technology and hollow politicians and catastrophic self doubt. Talk for yourself, mate. Religious people, by and large, have an optimistic outlook on life. For example, within my Orthodox Jewish community, technology, politicians and self-doubt is not a widespread problem. <\/p>\n

The New Yorker:<\/a> “As a storyteller, Curtis is drawn either to revolutionaries, who want to change the world, or to engineers, who plan to stabilize and control human society with the help of machines. (He generally takes the side of the revolutionaries, even though he acknowledges that they are often wrong.)”<\/p>\n

He likes to tell stories and to make unverifiable assertions. I don’t see any reason to believe that what he does has anything beyond an entertainment value. <\/p>\n

Jon Boone writes in 2015<\/a>: <\/p>\n

\n

Curtis\u2019s story, as simplistic as anything told by ‘those in power’, is made to seem frightfully clever by his acid-trip filmmaking style, perfectly spoofed by Ben Woodham (watch below) as the ‘televisual equivalent of a drunken late night Wikipedia binge with pretension for narrative coherence’.<\/p>\n