Human Meme

In the spring of 1973, in a public school in Lincoln, Nebraska, a teacher handed me a paper armband and told me to wear it for the rest of the day. Mine was blue, and it carried a single printed letter, an "S." The children with brown eyes wore brown bands lettered "M". No one explained the letters to a room of eight-year-olds. I have spent the rest of my life arriving at what they meant. "M" for Master. "S" for Slave. The next morning the roles reversed, and the children who had ruled became the ruled. No one in that room was Black. The teacher said the lesson was empathy. I want to talk today about the book I built out of that morning, and out of fifty years of watching that morning return in new costumes. It is called Not My Thing: How We Teach Cruelty to Cure It, from the Armband to the Diversity Seminar. That armband was one early specimen of a method that has since grown into an industry.

Picture a man in a bright room in a great house. In front of him sit three boxes. One is gold, one is silver, one is lead. He may open exactly one of them. Open the right box and he marries the cleverest and richest woman in the room and clears the debt closing around his friend's neck. Open either of the others and he leaves forever, sworn never to court another woman as long as he lives. The woman who waits for him loves him, and by the terms of her dead father's will she is forbidden to give him the smallest hint. Music plays. He reads the words cut into the three lids, he talks for a while about the gap between how things look and what they are, and he lays his hand on the dullest of the three, the lead, and wins her. That is the casket scene from The Merchant of Venice, and it may be the most rigged fair contest in the English language. Shakespeare wrote it in the fifteen-nineties. It never closed. You walked through a version of it this morning, and you will walk through another one before you sleep tonight.

Let me start with a piece of paper. Early in the twentieth century a printed rate card circulated among the opera houses of Italy, a schedule of charges from a claque, one of the applause brigades that worked the great houses of Europe. Approval came in grades, and the grades came at prices. Polite appreciation cost little. Insistence cost more. Down at the luxury end, for a wild ovation at any cost, the price became a sum to be arranged. A psychologist named Robert Cialdini reprinted that tariff decades later in his study of social proof, where it sits among the laboratory findings like a fossil among X-rays, the same animal at two stages of preservation.Now move forward a hundred years. A company in West Palm Beach sold the same product from a drop-down menu, five hundred followers for ten dollars, more than two hundred million of them moved before a newspaper took the operation apart in 2018. The invoice was older than the empire that first printed it.

Here is the idea at the center of it. Money has come in two families for about as long as we have had money. There is value that travels by possession: the coin, the note, the bill in your pocket that asks nothing of anyone. And there is value that travels by permission: the tally, the ledger, the account entry that moves only when a chain of institutions agrees to move it. Neither family is wicked. A healthy monetary world has always kept both, because each covers the other's failures. The story of our moment is that the first family is being retired, and the second family is being wired to a switch.

There is a coin in your pocket right now, and there is an identical coin in someone else's pocket across town, and those two coins are worth different amounts. Same metal, same stamp, same date. The difference between them comes from how each coin arrived. One of them was spent early, while prices still belonged to yesterday. The other arrived late, after the prices had already risen to swallow it. That gap, between the coin in the nearest hand and the coin in the other pocket, is the subject of the book I am holding today.

In the winter of 1393, the King of France gave his court an order that no one knew how to obey. He asked them not to touch him: not to brush against him in a corridor, not to take his arm on the stairs, not to embrace him on his name day. Charles the Sixth had become certain that his body was made of glass, and that one clumsy hand or one careless shoulder would shatter him on the floor of his own palace. He had the front of his clothing reinforced with rods, so that if he fell, the pieces of him might hold together long enough to be gathered up. He was a king at the center of a crowded court, and he spent his days in terror that the people closest to him would break him by accident. It is tempting to file that away as a medieval oddity, a story about one sick man six hundred years gone.

In 1868 the office of the Surgeon General put out an order asking Army doctors to gather Native skulls so the size of them could be studied. A grief that any family on earth would know on sight was treated, on the other side of the counter, as a research opportunity. The dead became holdings. An ancestor became an object that a stranger could keep, study, and decline to return. I anchor the book in the Pawnee because their story shows you the whole machine in one place. These were a people who read their own lives in the stars. The Skidi band, the Wolf people, built their earth lodges as small models of the heavens, with four posts for the four stars that hold up the corners of the sky, and they watched the Pleiades come through the smoke hole to know when to plant.

The subject is recantation: the coerced word, the public taking back of a belief by a person who has been given no real choice. We use the word recant without hearing what is buried inside it. It comes from the Latin for singing again. To recant is to sing your own song over, backward, in front of the people who marched you to the microphone. A confession of error that someone else wrote. An apology the speaker does not mean, in a room where everyone knows he does not mean it. The act has a sound, and the sound is a voice saying the opposite of what its owner believes, out loud, so the saying can be witnessed. Once you start listening for that sound, you hear it everywhere.

I want to tell you about a clay mask. It sits in a glass case at the British Museum, in the Mesopotamian galleries. The mask is approximately three thousand eight hundred years old, made in southern Iraq during the Old Babylonian period. Its face was made to terrify. The hair tangles into serpentine coils across the brow. The grin is bared, with one tooth chipped on the left side. Hooded sockets sink the eyes into darkness. Time has cracked the surface of the clay in seven places that I have counted. That mask was paid for. Someone took silver from a temple administrator's hand and walked it across the city to a workshop, where a craftsman took clay and pigment and several days of his working life and converted them into a monster. The monster was a job. The figure left the workshop on the back of a delivery cart, settled by an invoice that the temple's accountants logged in their cuneiform ledgers. We do not know who the patron was. The artisan is also anonymous to us. The tablets that recorded the rate structures of the Old Babylonian craft economy survive in archives in London and Chicago and Berlin, and those tablets establish that the transaction happened, even though the specific contract for this specific mask has not survived.

The simple argument is the trade. Across more than a dozen contemporary cases, voter populations have agreed to trade the material future of their political communities for the maintenance of a fantasy past. The trade is voluntary. The costs include dead soldiers, dismantled institutions, scientific apparatus lost across decades, and democratic procedures captured by movements that openly oppose them. Voters know the costs. They have decided that the costs are worth it. The difficult argument comes after that recognition. Once you accept that the trade is voluntary, you cannot organize around the assumption that the voters have been tricked. You also cannot organize around the assumption that better information will change their minds. The voters know what they are doing. They are participants in a transaction they understand at the level that matters to them. They are buying something. Today we ask what the something is, and what it would take to offer them a better deal.