Speaking of the State
Posted by Thomas L. Knapp on Jun 8, 2009 in Commentary • 3 commentsUS President Barack Obama’s Cairo speech played to mixed reviews last week. Some saw it as likely having a positive influence on relations between Americans and Muslims; others saw it as capitulation or appeasement by America in the face of an Islamic threat.
I have my own opinions on the subject, but what I find more interesting than the content of the reactions is the fact that both the speech and the reactions to it are arguably contextually archaic.
Of all the monopolistic activities which the state pursues, attempting to speak on behalf of large groups of individuals — to channel through a single voice some summary of their beliefs, sentiments, goals and aspirations — is quite possibly the most passe.
In Cairo, President Obama purported to speak, on behalf of 300 million Americans, to 1.3 billion Muslims. While some might characterize this as chutzpah, it sounds more like hubris to me.
There may have been a time when funneling this kind of communication through the bottleneck of a single spokesperson made some kind of sense.
Until the late 1830s, the communication of large amounts of information over long distances was unbelievably (to those of us looking back, anyway) cumbersome and expensive. Smoke signals and semaphore were slow in terms of the amount of information which they could convey; post riders could carry larger loads of information, but it arrived less quickly. And, of course, groups of people separated by vast oceans had to rely on slow ships to carry information hither and yon.
The telegraph made it possible to transmit information quickly and over a long distance, and the first transatlantic cable connected America and Europe for this purpose in the 1860s. At the receiving end, of course, further dissemination of that information still had to be done by town criers or newspapers.
The telephone made one-on-one communication quick and convenient; radio and television sped up the dissemination of information (you didn’t have to wait for tomorrow’s newspaper to find out what happened today), although that dissemination tended to run in one direction.
All of these technologies suffered from “bottleneck” problems: The number of input (”talking”) channels were limited, even more so than the number of output (”listening”) channels. Under these conditions, it was a given that the number of “speakers” would be much smaller than the number of “listeners.”
Naturally, the state planted itself in the middle of this situation in various ways. It seized control of some channels (radio and television frequencies) and doled out that control to favored patrons; it used its bully pulpit and prestige to control disproportionate … for lack of a better word, bandwidth … on other channels, such as the front pages of newspapers.
That’s the way things used to be.
Today, however, we are by almost any reasonable measure well into at least the second decade of the “Information Age.” The Internet is not just a two-way communication channel, it’s an all-way communication channel between the more than 1 billion people on earth who, as of 2005 (according to the newfangled Wolfram Alpha search engine — I’m boycotting Microsoft’s Bing), had access to it.
Those 1 billion people are capable of acting, and often do act, as the equivalent of “telegraph offices” for the people around them who don’t personally have access. They can send messages on behalf of people other than themselves, and they can deliver messages to people other than themselves.
The Internet revolution (itself, along with “Internet Age,” a term that already seems dated hyperbole as applied to what is now banal and everyday fact) has made politicians obsolete as instruments of communication. We don’t have to attempt to distill varieties of viewpoint and funnel them through single channel “spokesperson” bottlenecks any more.
Obama’s speech is an anachronism. It’s as jarringly out of place in 2009 as would be a web site selling tickets for travel by stagecoach. The nation-state, at least in its form of imposture as “the voice of the people,” is dead.
You under estimate the value of celebrity. If Obama is more popular than bin Laden on the Arab Street and the speech demonstrates this, it was an effort well spent.
Mr. Knapp writes, “In Cairo, President Obama purported to speak, on behalf of 300 million Americans, to 1.3 billion Muslims. While some might characterize this as chutzpah, it sounds more like hubris to me.”
Hubris, indeed. To use a Spoonerian line of argument:
(1) The president is incapable of speaking for all Americans because not all Americans are allowed to vote. Anyone under eighteen is barred from the voting.
(2) The president is incapable of speaking for all Americans who are legally able to vote because not all Americans do.
(3) The president is incapable of speaking for all Americans who voted because not all of them voted for him.
And, most importantly, (4) the president is incapable of even speaking for all Americans who voted for him because (A) they do so secretly, by secret ballot; because (B) their purpose for voting for him is completely unknown to him, and he may have received those votes not out of support but as a result of the voters wishing to defend themselves from his opponent; because (C) it’s not necessarily true that they supported all of his objectives at the time of the election; and because (D) even if they did support all of his objectives at the time of the election, there is no reason to believe they continued to do so the day after.
To believe that the president can speak for the people of her or his country is quite collectivist. It’s unfortunate that both the U.S. President and Osama bin Laden share this collectivist outlook. If one reads bin Laden’s speeches, one sees clearly that he believes the U.S. government does represent the U.S. people, and he uses this as his justification for murdering innocent U.S. citizens. What bin Laden and the U.S. politicians must learn is that the U.S. government does not and cannot represent the U.S. people.
Regards,
Alex Peak
I agree with Michael Binder’s comment, but I can’t fully say I say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to Mr. Knapp. My response to the article would be: “not yet.” Were the current global conditions to exist, say in 2015, and the president to make this speech — with the truly natural progression of the internet — I’d say that this article is spot on, but not now.
The speech was full of Newspeak — to an exponentially better-informed population — but cleverly crafted to adapt to this population. Unless I misunderstand Mr. Knapp, this article assumes that the speech didn’t meet it’s primary objective. That assumption is a large leap. With tonuge-in-cheek, co-founder of “The Electronic Intifada” Ali Abunimah responded that: “[Obama's Cairo Speech] will please American liberals much more than it will convince intended audience (unless that is the audience).” The American so-called “liberals” were the intended audience for this script and they’re convinced. See the NYT, HuffPo, DKos, MSNBC, etc. Yes, the internet has a large role, but the gatekeepers were convinced.
Strategically speaking, the libertarian is best doing what libertarians do best — dissecting others to display their hypocrisy, in order to discover and display the hypocrites true objective: the hypocrite’s exploitation of those whose consent is required for the hypocrite’s position of authority (for that hypocrite to be relevant, in any way.)