Producing our Illusions
The Image: or What Happened to the American Dream.
by Daniel J. Boorstin.
Atheneum. 315 pp. $5.00.
All social science assumes that men do not fully understand the reasons why they act as they do. It presupposes that the explanations we give for our actions often cloak rather than reveal reality. These false explanations may be called “myths” or “ideologies” or “rationalizations.” We invent them because the reality they conceal—whether this be the reality of sexual instinct, or class struggle, or death—is too painful to face.
In this brilliant and original book, the historian Daniel Boorstin argues that in modern America the normal and spontaneous fabrication of false reasons has given way to something far more perverse and dangerous: the deliberate and self-conscious contrivance of our mental environment. The reporting of real events has become the creation of pseudo-events by means of the press conference, the leak, and the provoked interview. The hero, who was great by virtue of the gifts of God and the slow judgment of time, has given way to the celebrity made great by his press agent. Travel, the encounter with new experience in its most obvious and physical form, is now “tourism,” wherein genuine unexpectedness is artfully insulated by careful preplanning of phony thrills and adventures. The unique and inimitable form of a true work of art has been diffused and packaged until the consumer of culture obtains only what market research has ascertained he will be most likely to want: what he feels already. All experience becomes “homogenized.”
Not only experience is contrived. So are the ideals and values by which we once measured experience’s meaning. The ideal, which tied us to a future distinctly different from the present, has become an “image” merely mirroring what we already are. The dictionary sense of “value” was once an ethical ideal; new American dictionaries define “value” as custom. Once young men hitched their wagon to a star. Now, more sophisticated, they believe that stars were provided by the Great Salesman, along with frigidaires, as part of the interior décor.
As a historian, Boorstin can give his argument a knobby concreteness which such wide-ranging evocations of Weltanschauung usually lack. Step by step we see newspaper editors move from recording the news to making it. In the crude and frank improvisations of P. T. Barnum, the reader observes the bending of the twig which flourishes today as the luxuriant tangle of corporate advertising. Charles Lindbergh’s painful transit from naive hero to atrocious celebrity is used as a case study.
Clearly Boorstin has also immersed himself in the daily round of the modern image-maker. Instance after instance is documented of the planned invention of a public face for a corporation, a starlet, or a president (to the technician, it hardly matters which).
Unlike many historians, however, Boorstin has not hesitated to plunge into the psychological currents which bear up and propel “the facts.” In one flickering phrase after another, he sets our artificial image-world against the backdrop of the deeper perceptions and aspirations which men of other times have known. In worshipping the work of our own hands, he says, we commit idolatry. In so contriving the world that we find in it only our own reflections, we express narcissism. In con-forming to the formless forms we father, we only “pursue the phantoms of ourselves.”
The wholesale devising of dreams is a paradoxical outcome of tendencies long present in American life. The seemingly hard-headed pragmatism of a Franklin or a William James involved a concentration on the tangible appearance of things to the exclusion of their undisclosed potentialities, and has led us on, ironically, to become the prisoners of illusions. “Without abandoning belief that we are made by our environment, we also believe our environment can be made almost wholly by us.” American practicality, guilty at first merely of superficiality, has by a passage of quantity into quality become its opposite: a well-nigh insane detachment from the real world.
Let no one imagine that this tale concerns only the outer skin or superstructure of American society. Boorstin closes with a dissection of the fatuous attempt to sell an image of America overseas. But the knife cuts deeper. Highly placed bureaucrats prepare for Armageddon by manipulation of the “credibility” of the American defense “posture.” That is, they plan their action by speculation as to how much what we think others see in us (for no one can observe his own posture) will in fact be believable to them. Nuclear testing, for example, was apparently resumed because of the weakness others might see in us were we not to do so. The road to hell leads right down Madison Avenue.
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I quarrel with boorstin, however, both in his analysis of how we got this way, and in his advice as to what we can do about it.
More than once, Boorstin seems to recognize that economic forces, not merely vague psychological forces, are at work in the manufacture of the American image-world. He states that advertising is the arch-proponent of the process he describes. He recognizes that the production of images is above all the production of public relations for the great corporation. At one point he even uses the language of Marx: what America has done, he writes, is to make “all experience a commodity.”
Yet he insists that the underlying pressure has been, not the concentration on selling of an economy which makes more than it can market, but—the “Graphic Revolution.” As a deus ex machina, this is about as cogent as David Riesman’s invocation of population growth to explain other-directedness, or William Whyte’s notion that Elton Mayo is to blame for the Organization Man. In my opinion all these phenomena are rooted in the inability of modern capitalism to unleash its productive capacities (including those of human beings) without destroying itself in the process.
Boorstin fervently resists this conclusion. “Having read a good deal about the villains who are said to be responsible for our perplexity—the hidden persuaders, the organization men, Madison Avenue, Washington bureaucracy, the eggheads, the anti-intellectuals, the power elite, etc., etc., etc.—I am unimpressed by their villainy.” The fault, dear reader, lies in yourself. You got billboards and Coca Cola because you wanted them. “Our real problem is personal.” “Each of us individually provides the market and the demand for the illusions which flood our experience.” Boorstin even has the temerity to assert that we deserve this bomb-haunted, fear-wracked life of ours because we have “extravagant expectations,” because we “expect too much of the world.”
Necessarily, therefore, each individual is responsible for his own emancipation. Like Riesman, like Whyte, Boorstin believes that “the hardest, most discomfiting discovery is that each of us must emancipate himself.” There is a passing reference to the Freedom Riders, but evidently this is a doctrine not intended for Jackson, Mississippi.
Nevertheless Boorstin, for all his talk about extravagant expectations, really believes in the potential abundance of life, in the wonder and glory of life when we expose ourselves to it. “Each of us,” he says at the very end, “must prepare himself to receive messages coming in from the outside. The first step is to begin to suspect that there may be a world out there, beyond our present or future power to image or to imagine. We should not worry over how to export more of the American images among which we live. . . . We should seek new ways of letting messages reach us; from our own past, from God, from the world which we may hate or think we hate. To give visas to strange and alien and outside notions of which neither we nor the Communists have ever dreamed and which we can never see in our mirror. One of our grand illusions is the belief in a ‘cure.’ There is no cure. There is only the opportunity for discovery. For this the New World gave us a grand, unique beginning.”
Amen.
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