Picture the pendulum.
In the eighth grade, my then physics teacher—always a fan of what he called “bringing science to life”—rigged the class room with a bowling ball suspended from the ceiling. While the twenty of us ogled the set-up, my teacher positioned the bowling ball squarely in front of his face, and released.
“If you don’t flinch,” he called out, “that means you know that this maximum potential energy. 1000 joules. It cannot go to 1001.” The kid behind him giggled and mimed the bowling ball smashing into his face with the palm of a hand. The challenge—not flinching—was posed to the rest of the class.
The prize in question for such demonstrable scientific courage? A half-melted Snickers bar.
My eighth grade self did not win the Snickers bar, and neither did any of my classmates. When the ball lurched back towards me, I staggered backwards on reflex—all of us did.
Social and political upheavals have often been equated to the perpetual motion of the pendulum: swinging cleanly from left to right, progressive to conservative, or in more subjective terms, progress and the backsliding. This phenomenon is often used to demonstrate that history does have its odd way of striking balance—that even as we face seemingly insurmountable turmoil, we can find comfort in the fact that the pendulum must swing centre again.
However, in an age where everything—identity, social values, and politics—seem to be perpetually escalating, forcing the pendulum faster and higher than ever before, I wonder where this leaves us now. Complicating, or perhaps exacerbating, this is the fact that we now project our lives online, with the internet becoming the primary means for both connection and exchanging discourse. As the vast expanse of the internet has taken on a hellish cast, it feels almost essential to fix our eyes on the pendulum, as if at any moment the chord the weight is suspended on could snap, unravelling our world.
A Law of Change
The principle is simple: even as cultural and political attitudes swing in one direction, the reactionary energy is accumulating. In a New York Times column from 1927, Professor Munro of Havard notes that many trends “seem to fit with this hypothesis”:
After a war, there is a strong reaction in favour of peace. Following a few years of rule by a strong party and virile personalities, the people seem to prefer to drift back to a more easy going government and less strenuous rulers. Moreover, the alternation seems to apply to political principles as well as to parties. For a long period a given country may appear to be lurching into socialism; but then it pulls itself up and tends strongly for a time toward even extreme conservatism.
Indeed, the ‘pendulum’ has been present since the outset of politics. In a TIME article, writer Lily Rothman suggests that America’s first lesson came about in 1800, when control of the government transferred from the Federalist Party to the Democratic Republicans. In the 1950s, post World War Two, Americans retreated inwards—encouraged by values of order and family-centric conformity.
This eventually gave way to the counterculture movement of the 60s that sought freedom and equality through the civil rights movement, antiwar protests, the new wave of feminism, and the incitement of the LGBTQ+ rights movement. This too reached a perceived tipping point. In a 1968 article from the New York Times, The Revolution in Middle-Class Values, author James Michner recounts (with a pervading sense of horror) the statements of young activists. The pair, when confronted by Michner himself about the pitfalls of abandoning a conventional education, stated that they were “not concerned about losing the relative advantages a middle-class young person acquires if he gets an education.” They concluded that they were, “as a matter of fact” not concerned with “any middle-class values.” With dismay, Michener mourned the loss of unifying American morals and Puritan morality. Thus, it was only a matter of time before the optimism of the counterculture dimmed and dissipated, giving rise to a familiar strain of conservatism in the 70s, with the election of Nixon.
The Pull of Mass Media
In her book Trick Mirror, author Jia Tolentiono contends that “Mass media always determines the shape of politics and culture.” Accompanying, or determining, the path of the 50s was the infiltration of the television into the homes of everyday Americans. In 1947, 15,000 television sets were manufactured monthly; by 1955 the figure had skyrocketed to 637,000. Usurping its predecessor, the radio, as the driver of consumerism through advertisement, the television solidified Americans’ identity as, first and foremost, a consumer. Three major networks controlled 90% of the information and entertainment Americans consumed, thereby fostering the creation of a narrow set of widely proliferated social norms. However, the role of the television shifted in the 60s: the Vietnam War was the nation’s first major televised military conflict, fuelling a generation of pacifists that protested the horrors of warfare.
What then does this mean for an age where our everyday interactions, dissemination of information, and livelihoods are reliant on the internet? In her book Kill All Normies, author Angela Nagle paints a ghastly portrait of online subcultures that lie beneath the much more palatable mainstream media. It’s a portrait that, a few years ago, might have seemed cynical and fatalistic, but now rings as strangely prophetic. Nagle argues that the a resurgence of far-right online subcultures shaped the 2016 election, successfully mobilising a “strange vanguard of teenage gamers, pseudonymous swastika-posting anime lovers, ironic South Park conservatives, anti-feminist ranksters, nerdish harassers, and meme-making trolls.”
Nagle tracks the motion of the pendulum even as it occurs on a digital landscape. She points to the 2010s in which mainstream media’s endorsement of a sanitised, leftist iteration of the internet—centering on liberal feminism, LGBTQ rights, racial equity, and political correctedness—reached its height. Callout, or cancel culture, Nagle states, has amplified even the smallest transgressions into condemning sentences that could potentially ruin an individual’s career.
Whether call out culture and leftist principles wielded the power necessary to deride public figures in a way that was both meaningful and lasting is debatable. But it was the perception of power that mattered.
Then, unbeknownst to most, the pendulum swung again. An online backlash of “irreverent mockery and anti-PC (politically correct)” culture emerged. Endorsements of white supremacy, misogyny, transphobia, and so on were worshipped as usurping out-of-touch mainstream media. The bolder, more inflammatory the claims, the better. As more people became radicalised in internet rabbit holes—perpetuated by internet algorithms and confirmation bias—we have seen this harm and violence manifest in real life. “Public discourse has never been as cruel, idiotic, irrational, and utterly pointless in my lifetime as it is now,” Nagle concludes grimly.
Perhaps this is where the metaphor of the pendulum loses its utility. In the digital age, individuals still react and rebel against movements that hold the most cultural power. Yet the swing doesn’t always balance out. Professor Munro made the point that though, “the pendulum may keep swinging, the point of attachment is not stationary.” Maybe it is the internet itself—or what we have reduced the internet to—that is responsible for this breakdown. Tolentino points to mechanisms of the internet that unhinge our sense of reality, such as a disruption of our sense of scale and a maximising of our sense of opposition.
Yet one realisation erodes the pendulum the most: the fact that history is not deterministic. We need to acknowledge we still have the ability—or responsibility—to redirect the swing of the pendulum. We can shape its course with both individual and collective action, by recognizing the full humanity of our actions, both in online and offline spheres as it becomes increasingly unclear where one ends and the other begins.
Works Cited:
https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/08/03/how-the-grotesque-online-culture-wars-fuel-populism
Comments