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I was born into a world of television advertisements and product packaging. I never had the opportunity to encounter these things as being something introduced into the world; rather, they were, for me, always an intrinsic component of reality. Early on, my parents explained to me that many—indeed, most—of the messages I was hearing came from people who were trying to sell me things. They were not to be trusted, they said, because they had a conflict of interest. But at some point in my childhood I also came to believe that these messages were, at worst, a necessary evil. How else would we know what products are available? And certainly I understood that the television programs I was watching in large quantities were monetarily free only because they were compensated by my attention towards advertisements. So it all seemed part of a just and reasonable order: people need products, producers need to advertise what they’re selling, and television provides a happy medium in which both interests can be satisfied. I get free, entertaining content, and the producers get my attention for a few minutes every half hour so they can inform me of their available products, and of course I’ll take the advertiser’s message with a grain of salt, but it’s really only reasonable that they make the most compelling case they can for their product, and it’s all in good sport if we both know that their claims might be a bit exaggerated.
The products around me—the house I grew up in, the food we ate, the appliances which stored the food and aided in cooking it and those which cleaned our clothes, the clothes themselves, my collection of action figures and other toys, the cars I was driven around in, the books I read, my school supplies—all seemed like necessities. Clothes have to be cleaned; why not have a machine do it? Isn’t that better for everyone? I need entertainment; why not action figures from the shows I watched? I assumed that the media content was prior to the action figures; that someone developed a show in order to bring joy and entertainment to millions of children, and that someone else developed action figures for the show because, after all, why not? We enjoyed the content, didn’t we? Why not provide another opportunity to engage with it? And if those involved could make a little extra money off the content in the process, doesn’t everybody win? In reality, of course, the actual process went in the reverse direction: what kinds of toys will children want their parents to buy for them? What media will make them get their parents to buy these toys? Thus the product; thus their advertisements, both short- and long-form.
This being the mid-1980s, I was particularly fond of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. “He-Man:” What a bizarre name! If I weren’t already familiar with the franchise, I expect the impression I’d get would be that of an exemplar of the human species reduced to his sex, as though aliens had given names to the humans in a Terran nature diorama they had created. Of course, with children, one can get away with such things—children’s minds are structured so as to take in the world, to create schemata of what is normal and natural, rather than to question the foundations of their experience.
The physiques of the action figures are commensurately bizarre and exaggerated. I’d estimate the breadth of the shoulders of a typical He-Man figure at about three times that of the waist. Looking at pictures of body builders—purely for research purposes, of course, though my data might be skewed towards images of Israeli bodybuilder Lavie Kafra—I’m pretty sure He-Man’s body shape is humanly impossible.
As I said, all of this seemed perfectly natural, unavoidable, and even desirable to me at the time. It seemed like the best way for everyone to achieve their rational and natural needs. And I had a role to play in this: to go to school and get good grades so that I might, in the future, get a good job and contribute to the total ecosystem myself.
But what seemed natural to me then was of course a remarkable and revolutionary outlier in the general order of things, viewed from the perspective of human history. Humans have been around for somewhere between 2 and 3 million years, our own species Homo sapiens for about 300,000 years of that time, and it was only somewhere between 160,000 and 80,000 years ago that we even started talking to each other. (Of note, the paper “Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa” by Quentin Atkinson [2011], which is where I got the date range for the origin of human language, suggests that complex language may have been the key innovation driving human behavioral modernity; another book I’ve been working on for related research, The Symbolic Species by Terrance Deacon [1997], suggests that language may have actually even driven human biological evolution).
Outside my immediate family, I had only two sources of information: school and television (I had a few friends, yes, but their sources of information were only school, television, and their own families, so they were really just an indirect source of information from the same sources). How different would this have been a thousand years ago? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? A million?
The situation is this: our lifespans create a partial social amnesia, in that, while we have other documentation of the past, living memories of events are limited to the generation of humans presently alive on this planet. This prevents us from getting a clear picture of how the human condition has changed over the course of our history and in particular in the very recent past (i.e. the modern era and beyond). Really only for the past century, out of three million years of human history, has media had such a pervasive role in our lives. But our individual memories don’t extend back even that far, and this fog, this inability to directly compare the conditions of our existence from era to era, blinds us to the reality that our technologies and our media fundamentally change what it is to be a human being, almost always for the worse.
A flight cancellation forces me to arrange for accommodations on short notice. A call to a nearby hotel’s listed phone number connects me with Dave, who proceeds through a series of scripted responses to my questions. I have no means of assessing whether he himself believes or agrees with what he is telling me. For him, a successful interaction is predicated on my agreement to rent one of the hotel’s rooms for the night. Dave receives no direct benefit from this; it is doubtful that his continued employment is predicated on individual interactions rather than the statistical distribution of many such interactions. I expect, however, that he would receive the full detriment should the interaction fail, regardless of whether the failure is one for which he is personally responsible. I have no moral relationship with Dave beyond the fact that, in the absence of any clear intent on his part to do me any harm, I do not wish to do any harm to him. This incentivizes me to accept terms which I might otherwise refuse, as I recognize that the harms they cause to me are likely of lesser severity than the harms I might cause to Dave by refusing them. I know that I am simultaneously contributing to the continuance of his exploitation by the apparatus, but I have no way of assessing this in relation to other, more concrete harms. In this way, the apparatus profits from my morality, and offloads the consequent externalities onto Dave.
The apparatus requires that I rate my interactions with Dave. Again, I have no moral relationship with him beyond that I have no wish to do him harm, as he seems to have avoided doing any to me. The relationship I entered into with the apparatus in which I exchanged an abstract form of my labor for temporary lodgings was unsatisfactory overall, but this is difficult to quantify. Further, I cannot hold Dave responsible for this, nor do I think that he is capable of repairing the situation in any way. Not that the situation warrants this kind of analysis, but that seems to be what is demanded, and yet I cannot account for this interaction by means of the low-resolution one-dimensional scale offered to me. Five stars for Dave, then. Anything less would be to participate in the nonsense of the apparatus beyond the necessary minimum.
The interactions I have with most people are of this sort, mediated by our respective relationships to the economic apparatus of the state. People in general seem to take this as being an entirely normal and acceptable situation, though the historical view shows us that the present situation is in fact a major deviation from the conditions under which we have lived for most of our existence. What’s worse, my relationship to myself is of much the same character.
From whom did I learn what it is to be human? What it is to be a human with my particular ancestry? To be a human in my particular nation? To be a male-bodied human? I grew up in an upper middle class suburb south of Denver. To get an idea of the demographics that surrounded me, my high school student body of about 2000 students had exactly four Black students. But purely through a series of fortunate coincidences, my neighbors were always non-white. My first next door neighbors were Korean immigrants. My very first friend in this world was someone who, when I met him, barely even spoke English, but that was little impediment to a friendship that lasted until the family moved to California, when I was maybe six or seven. Maybe it was the positive influence of my parents—my dad in particular, who grew up in a racist household in rural Iowa and probably dispensed with those ideas during his service in the Air Force, was repeatedly emphatic that other people were fundamentally not any different than me—or maybe it was the absence of negative influences, but he always seemed to me like just another kid. But somewhere along the line, I learned that I was a white person, and that other people might belong to other ethinic groups. That sort of knowledge is not innate, so it can only be that I learned it at some point.
The various ethnic groups available seemed to be largely given: these are just the different peoples of the world. But this too only has any semblance of normalcy from the viewpoint of our collective amnesia. If we move back to about 500 years ago—which is not very long in terms of the scale of humanity—what becomes important is my specific national identity. I am a Northern European American. My great great grandfather Thor immigrated from Norway to take up a homestead in South Dakota. I’ve been to the region of Norway where he was born. Nothing I can say remotely describes how beautiful it is. Why did he leave? I did some research into the historical circumstances in Norway in the late 19th century, but found nothing conclusive. And at some point between Thor settling in South Dakota and today, my family stopped identifying as Norwegian, as Norwegian-American, as Scandinavian-American, or as Northern European American, and started identifying as white, because “white” is all I ever learned of myself. Not that Thor wouldn’t have identified as white, but while in Norway he would have identified primarily with his nation, and while in America primarily with other Scandinavian colonists.
My Korean friend’s parents and my parents had enrolled both of us in a Karate class at the local recreation center. I remember one day we were waiting for class to start and several children began taunting my friend, all of them white. They were asking why he was even there. After all, didn’t he already know Karate? One of them pulled back on the sides of his face to slant his eyes, in a caricature of my friend’s face. I wasn’t very old but I remember being quite angry, for many reasons, but in particular because the accusation was so stupid. My friend was Korean. Karate is a Japanese martial art. I had taken some Tae Kwon Do classes as well and understood the difference well enough. But of course none of that mattered to them. Not that it would have been any better if my friend had been Japanese rather than Korean, or if we had been in a Tae Kwon Do class. I suspect that part of the problem was that the children, just like me, had no understanding of their own identities or family backgrounds. Perhaps their inability to see my friend as an individual with a particular background, like themselves, rather than as a generic Asian, resulted, in part, from their inability to see themselves that way.
In the book Stamped from the Beginning (2016), historian and activist Ibram X. Kendi describes how anti-Black racist ideas were constructed as a means of justifying economic policies which exploit Black labor. The policies arose first as a result of a demand for cheap labor, primarily in European agricultural colonies in the Americas, and racist ideas justifying these practices followed. In The White Racial Frame (2013), sociologist Joe Feagin describes how a pan-European “white” identity was similarly constructed to justify that exploitation from the other side, along with the justification of expansionist colonialism and the genocide of indigenous peoples. What this means for me is that something intrinsic to human nature and central to the construction of meaning and personal identity—the identification with a people—has been removed from the traditional context in which I would otherwise come to realize this identification, reconstructed for the purposes of supporting racist and economic agendas, and then imposed upon me without my even being aware of it. This is the fundamental structure of alienation, and again, this is only possible because our lack of historical memory allows the hegemony to naturalize the inhuman, to make it appear as though the way things are now is the way that things have always been and the way that they must be. I have no connection to or identification with the land I live on. No narrative or ethnological history binds me to the land or gives it any meaning for me. The only narratives that have ever served that role for me are structural supports for the construction of my white identity, stories of the colonization of the Americas that had been reconstructed or fabricated outright in order to make the protagonists heroic and their goals noble. Beyond their inaccuracy, those stories are far too general to be personally relevant. The specific story of how and why Thor came to this land in the late 19th century, or why my great great great grandfather Lazarus came to Rhode Island from England in the early 19th century, are completely lost to me. Given the timeline, it’s likely that Thor’s homestead had been very recently expropriated from the region’s indigenous Sioux people, and Lazarus’s later settlement in Illinois from the Wabash, and perhaps had even been expropriated specifically through their having claimed the land, but even this information is subsumed into the broader narrative of white colonization.
How about my identity as a man? Again, what I find is something not intrinsic or a priori but rather something that has been packaged for me by others, hoisted upon me from childhood, and made to seem as though just part of the natural order of things. Returning to the Masters of the Universe franchise will be illustrative here. First, note that, contrary to my childhood beliefs, the He-Man action figures were created first, and then a television series was created by way of advertising and promoting them. Second, I’ll note that there’s a large amount of literature on the internet exploring the subtle queer and gay coding of the early Masters of the Universe franchise, and that’s plenty interesting on its own, but what I’m interested in here is more the gender coding from my own childhood perspective. Third, I’m being a bit critical of the show here, and I want to note that a recent series reviving the franchise, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, goes a long way towards getting things right and is really just a great show.
The name “He-Man” suggests the generic archetype of a man; indeed, that’s precisely why the name was selected, according to the creator of the character, Roger Sweet (The Birth of He-Man, 2006). And what is a multinational toy company’s archetypal concept of a man? Notably, the archetypal man, according to the Mattel Corporation of the 1980s, was specifically a white man. As Sweet tells it,
The very first prototype He-Man was black haired with a deeply tanned eastern European or Middle Eastern appearance. His helmet had no horns. Later, at the direction of Tom Kalinske, then in Mattel’s upper management, He-Man was made more clean-cut and changed to a blond… Plus, He-Man’s skin was lightened, though definitely still tanned.
ibid.
He-Man is the superpowered alter ego of Prince Adam (more coding of generic male-hood). When Prince Adam uses the Power Sword to transform into He-Man, what he primarily gains in the transformation is “power.” The Power Sword is what gives him the ability to transform; the thing he says to initiate the transformation is “By the power of Grayskull!”; and after the transformation is complete, he says, “I have the power!” This is in contrast to Prince Adam, who is portrayed as sensitive and vulnerable: “Adam was designed to be a normal human boy, someone with flaws and self-doubt,” writes pop culture writer Brian Baer. “He would be uncertain but good-hearted, wanting to do the right thing until things became too dangerous” (2017, pp. 47-48), at which point he would use the sword to transform into He-Man. Prince Adam’s moral character underdetermines his manliness. The missing piece, the substance of his transformation into the archetypal man, is power in the form of physical strength.
I remember that, when I was a child, my physical capability was often at the forefront of my mind. I had no interest in sports and understood that I was not as physically developed as many of the other children. I was more inclined towards books and science, which, combined with my general social awkwardness, made me a frequent target of bullies. Physical strength was the fantasy I used to escape from my real self. I’ll mention that I often had difficulty distinguishing between fantasy and reality as a child. The fantasy scenarios I played out became real to me, and I spoke about them with my friends as though they were real. Lacking a clear identity of my own, these fantasy identities had plenty of room to impose themselves on my ego, and this was incentivized by the sense of power and identity that these identities conferred. When I played Dungeons and Dragons with my friends, I often organized my characters’ attributes so that they had immense strength. This was typically at the expense of Dexterity and Charisma, but not Intelligence or Wisdom. I didn’t want to play a dullard, but I didn’t care if he was slow or unsocial. More recently, I’ve played through the computer game Skyrim four or five times and, at least with regards to my approach to combat, I’ve taken the same approach every time: two-handed swords with an emphasis on power attacks; basically: charge in, and hit things as hard as possible, repeatedly, until they die. Oh, and I joined the Army. Multiwar veteran Marine Smedley Butler described military service as being “a gangster for capitalism,” and that’s 100% true. For most, it’s a theater and a playground for the exercise of power over others.
The persistent theme in all this is the postmodern devaluation of the real and the emptying of meaning from the world. Here’s how it works (and this—this entire essay, really—is inspired in large part by the work of 20th century philosopher Marshall McLuhan and his book Understanding Media [2003]): new media—by which McLuhan meant any technology—change the human condition in part by changing our relationship to time and space. Take this podcast as an example. You’re not physically present with me right now, nor is this the same time at which I made these utterances. The technology of the podcast allows both of us to exist, in a sense, at places and times where we otherwise wouldn’t. In combination with our basic historical amnesia—the inability of humans to remember anything beyond our own lifetimes—this has the effect of radically detaching us from our past. This is not only the lack of a living memory of the past: after all, we have historical documentation, but the postmodern world drains this documentation of meaning because the media of postmodern humanity make the past incomprehensible to us.
To understand this, consider the Ancient Egyptian civilization. Across the fourth millennium BCE, various cultures living along the banks of the Nile consolidated into kingdoms, which were unified in approximately 3150 BCE by King Narmer. This civilization continued as a unified state—admitting various periods of instability and foreign rule—until the death of Queen Cleopatra in 30 BCE, over 3000 years later. More time passed between the founding of the Egyptian state and its dissolution than has passed between its dissolution and today; the Great Pyramid, built early on in the Old Kingdom period, was more ancient to Cleopatra than Cleopatra is to us. And during this time, the art and culture of the Egyptian people barely changed at all. The Egyptian art of the Old Kingdom is much the same as that of the New Kingdom—excepting only the innovations under Pharaoh Akhenaten in the 14th century BCE, which were quickly expunged after his death. Any Egyptian from the New Kingdom—whether Pharaoh, administrator, or commoner—would have understood their life as being substantially the same as the lives of their ancestors, stretching back for millennia.
Today, we have debates about whether the Constitution of the United States of America should be interpreted according to the intentions of those who wrote it. This debate is comically nonsensical to me. Imagine transporting James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, or Alexander Hamilton to the present era. My prediction is that they would rapidly go stark raving mad. Constitutional originalism and textualism are illegitimate because the founding fathers could not even have comprehended the postmodern conditions of human existence. There is simply no way to predict how they might have wanted their own texts to be interpreted in the context of the postmodern era, because the conditions of the postmodern era are simply incomprehensible to the minds which created those texts.
Let’s call this detachment from the past multimodal historical amnesia. Multimodal historical amnesia creates a void with regards to certain human needs for personal and collective identity. Inquisitive beings that we are, we naturally seek to understand ourselves, and the most natural way to do this is by situating ourselves with regards to our past. But because of multimodal historical amnesia, we are detached from our past, and this severs a vital support for our personal identities. This absence is filled in by various opportunistic power interests. From day one, my identity was made not in the image of God, not in the image of my ancestors, not even in the image of my parents, but in the image of the Mattel Corporation.
We can see exactly how this works in practice. Consider the current debate over the teaching of Critical Race Theory in public school classrooms. Not that that’s something that is even on the table—no one’s teaching or seeking to teach Critical Race Theory below the college level—but a certain American demographic seems remarkably paranoid about it nevertheless. This is an argument I’ve personally witnessed from some of my contacts among conservative Americans: I wasn’t a slaveowner. I’m not a racist. So why am I getting blamed for Black oppression? This is a strawman, of course; no one’s blaming them for historical Black oppression, but rather trying to raise their awareness of their present complicity in systems of oppression. Their counterargument requires total detachment from the past. It is necessary that the person making it be fully ignorant of how the wealth appropriated by their ancestors has been passed down to them, and that they be fully unable to comprehend how the comparative poverty of Black people is the result of a past in which they were systematically exploited for centuries, and in which institutions were established which have perpetrated their oppression to this day. It requires a total ignorance of the obvious, fundamental, and natural reality that the present is a consequence of the past. This allows thought leaders among certain demographics to promulgate a white supremacist narrative. But that narrative isn’t obvious or out in the open. Rather, they’ve created conditions under which counternarratives to this seem absurd.
So, basic historical amnesia, which is just the general inability of humans to remember anything prior to their own lifetimes, creates the opportunity to induce multimodal historical amnesia—one might argue that it occurs as an unintentional result of technological progress—and this leads to the reconstruction of even our own individual identities in support of various agendas. Because of the objective factor of basic historical amnesia, we are blind to the ways in which our identities are coopted by the powerful to support their interests. We assume that we simply “are who we are.” The truth and meaning of our identities and communities are subsumed into economic relations, which are not part of a real and objective order but rather one that is imaginary and socially constructed.
This concept of “imagined orders” is a central theme of historian Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (2015), a history of the human species. Some structures of human order are natural and biological, such as the general physical structure of our bodies, and others, such as our systems of laws, are imagined, not intrinsic parts of our nature but rather created by us for various reasons. These imagined orders are not necessarily bad or harmful—they are, to some degree, necessary for human civilization and cultural cohesion—but when they do become harmful, part of what sustains their existence is belief that these imagined orders are actually natural ones, “just the way things are.”
This same concept was explored from a different angle by the 20th century French structuralist philosopher Roland Barthes in his 1957 book Mythologies (2006). In our ancient history, our myths were a substantial contributing factor to the establishment and maintenance of imaginary orders, and with that in mind, Barthes analyzes that which performs the same role for people today: popular culture. In a section titled “Myth is depoliticized speech,” Barthes writes, “[M]yth has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal…. What the world supplies to myth is an historical reality, defined… by the way in which men have produced or used it; and what myth gives in return is a natural image of this reality” (p. 142)
He continues a bit further on,
A conjuring trick has taken place; it has turned reality inside out, it has emptied it of history and has filled it with nature, it has removed from things their human meaning so as to make them signify a human insignificance. The function of myth is to empty reality: it is, literally, a ceaseless flowing out, a haemorrhage, or perhaps an evaporation, in short a perceptible absence. (pp. 142-3)
Our world, he is saying, has been swapped out from under us, and what we’ve been given in its place is hollow, drained of its meaning in the service of what Barthes refers to as a bourgeois ideology. And because of our multimodal historical amnesia, we’re none the wiser.
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Atkinson, Q. D. (2011). Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa. Science, 332(6027), 346–349. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1199295
Baer, B. C. (2017). How He-Man Mastered the Universe: Toy to Television to the Big Screen. McFarland.
Barthes, R. (2006). Mythologies (A. Lavers, Trans.; 47. [print.]). Hill and Wang.
The Birth of He-Man. (2006, April 18). http://www.thesneeze.com/mt-archives/000500.php
Deacon, T. W. (1997). The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain. W.W. Norton.
Feagin, J. R. (2013). The white racial frame: Centuries of racial framing and counter-framing (2nd ed). Routledge.
Harari, Y. N. (2015). Sapiens: A brief history of humankind (First U.S. edition). Harper.
Kendi, I. X. (2016). Stamped from the beginning: The definitive history of racist ideas in America. Nation Books.