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Jon Ronson and Adam Curtis became friends in the late 1990s, having bonded over their shared interests in power, society and the stories we tell about ourselves. Curtis, 66, is a Bafta-winning documentary film-maker whose credits include The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear and HyperNormalisation. His most recent six-part series, Cant Get You Out of My Head, draws on the history of psychology and politics to show how we got to where we are today. Ronson, 54, is a US-based Welsh writer and journalist whose books include 2015s So Youve Been Publicly Shamed, about social media brutality and the history of public shaming. In recent years, Ronson has turned to podcasting, investigating the porn industry in The Butterfly Effect and its follow-up The Last Days of August.

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His forthcoming BBC podcast, Things Fell Apart, is about the roots of the culture wars and the ways the present is echoed in the past. Over eight episodes, he talks to individuals caught up in ideological conflicts, conspiracy theories and moral panics. These include Alice Moore, the wife of a fundamentalist minister and unexpected culture war instigator who campaigned to remove textbooks containing liberal material from schools, and Kelly Michaels, a daycare worker and victim of the satanic panic who was wrongfully imprisoned in 1988 by a New Jersey court for child abuse (the verdict was overturned in 1993).

We are on: Curtis is talking from his office in London while Ronson is at home in New York. By way of preparation before their chat, Curtis has binged on Ronsons new series. No sooner are cameras switched on than the reminiscences begin.

Jon Ronson Do you remember that time we went to an auction of [the late Romanian dictator Nicolae] Ceauescus belongings?

Adam Curtis Yes, now that was exciting.

JR It was. We went on a minibreak to Romania together.

AC I bought Ceauescus cap, and a pair of socks.

JR I also got a pair of socks. There was some very heavy bidding from a mysterious gentleman who got all the ornaments. The prices were getting pretty high so I stuck with the socks. I dont even know where they are now. I bet you know where your stuff is.

AC I do, actually.

JR We have had many conversations over the years and generally I find Im asking you questions because Im trying to get ideas. I always think of you as a fantastic source of insights into the future. In the early days of social media, you were the very first person to say to me: Dont think of this as a utopia. There are some problems here. There are two or three people in my life where, when they talk, I really want to listen to what they have to say, and you are one of those.

AC That is completely not true. What actually happens is that I bollock on about theories which you completely ignore and then you go off on your stories. Anyway, Im trying to remember when we actually met.

JR I think the first time I met you was when I made the [1997] documentary Tottenham Ayatollah and you came to the screening.

AC And your wife Elaine invited me to meet you in a cafe off Tottenham Court Road. She said: Can you come and talk to him? Then you could take some of the pressure off me by talking about his film.

JR She probably said: I cant take it any more. He wont stop agonising.

AC But when we met you didnt agonise at all. I think what we recognised in each other and its been the professional bond between us is that were both interested in what happens outside those normal areas that most political journalists examine that involve politics and power. We want to look at things like psychology and how a conspiracy theory plays out and how feelings work through society.

JR Im really surprised at how frequently the things that we tell stories about overlap. But the way we go about it is so different. I think your brain works better thinking about theories and my brain works better thinking about stories.

AC I think you and I are creatures of our time. I got interested in this idea that power now works not through traditional forms but through the idea of individualism; it says you should be allowed to do what you want to do, but we will serve you to get that. You and I both know what its like to be an obsessive individualist, but weve become intrigued by how that plays out in a society in which youve got lots of people wanting to be individuals. Ive always had this theory that self-expression is the conformity of our age. The most radical thing you can do is something extraordinary like walking naked around the world, and not tell anyone that youve done it. You cant post anything online. When you say that to people, they cant conceive of it.

JR I really like that idea.

AC The other thing that we both do when were interviewing people is not follow a list of questions. You go into a situation where you have questions in your head but suddenly theyll say something which is either funny or unexpected and you just learn to go with it. Its like suddenly a little piglet swerves off from the herd, and you go with it up and over the hill.

JR One positive thing that has been said about what I do is that theres a sincerity to it. I never go into something with an idea of how it will turn out.

AC Were talking about sincerity? Dont go there, Jon! Youll be writing poems next.

JR [Laughs] Well its really to do with trying to figure out what I think from my research without being told what to think by other people. I think people appreciate the fact that Ive worked hard to come to the thoughts Ive come to.

AC Yes, I agree with that.

JR I guess what we have in common is were not ideologues. We dont go into a situation with a set of agendas. Were more willing to be a twig in the river of the story and just go where it takes us. By doing that were forced to keep an open mind. I dont even have a list of questions in my head when Im interviewing somebody. Im literally a tightrope walker with no safety net, and I have, on many occasions, plummeted to my death like in Squid Game.

AC I think that open-mindedness is clear in your podcast. And its absolutely the right time to examine the roots of what were calling the culture wars, which is such a difficult and sensitive area. So much journalism, when it goes back into the past to see why something happened, always interviews the people who are defined as the actors, the people who consciously set out to [create conflict]. What Im increasingly intrigued by is the people who were acted upon by that thing or idea. Because the way ideas or concepts play out in society are never the way that the people who started them think. What youve done in these programmes is follow individuals who are acted upon by these forces, because it shows you the real dimensions of what these things called culture wars are.

JR Well, I realised that I would watch people become overconsumed by these cultural conflicts, to the extent that it was impacting their mental health and tearing families apart. But every show thats about the culture ends up a part of the culture wars, and I didnt want to do that. So I thought the way to do it was by focusing on a moment and a human story and tell that story in as unexpected a way as possible. In the end we found eight stories about the complexity of human life and they all happen to be origin stories. These are the pebbles being thrown in the pond and creating these ripples.

AC Yes, these people have got caught up in the great tides of history that have come sweeping over them. It feels real. If you follow people who are acted upon, you start to understand, in a much more sympathetic way, why people do things that you might not like or approve of. You see how someone is led to something, with no idea of the consequences. In the first two episodes, you talk about how the evangelical movement up until the early 1970s had been completely detached from any involvement in the moral, political or social questions of American society. And what you trace is how two people got sucked into a particular issue, which then acted like a fuse to reawaken the evangelical movement.

JR For decades the Christian right were silent: they consumed their own media, they went to their own churches and they listened to their own radio shows, and they were totally unengaged with what was happening. But then a few things happened that finally galvanised them into becoming soldiers in a culture war, and one was a new diversity of thought in school textbooks. In the series I talk to Alice Moore, who is in her 80s now and was one of the earliest cultural warriors for the evangelical right. She was a church ministers wife in West Virginia who discovered there was going to be a new sex education lesson taught in schools, and she wasnt having that. So she got on to the school board, and then the new curriculum arrived in 1974 that was full of all these multicultural voices, and things got so heated over just one semester that school buses were shot at in fact, shots were fired from both sides and a school was bombed. And I discovered while talking to Alice that one of the reasons for the intensity of the anger was a misinterpretation of a poem [that appeared in one of the new school textbooks].

AC By Roger McGough!

JR Yes. It was a poem [1967s At Lunchtime: A Story of Love] that featured a spontaneous orgy that takes place on a bus, because the passengers thought the world was about to end at lunchtime in a nuclear war. So Alice was reading out this poem to me and I was thinking: I dont think this is in favour of spontaneous orgies on buses. I think this poet is agreeing with you, to an extent. So then I went off to talk to Roger about it.

AC And then you went back to Alice, and she was quite grumpy about it, which was funny. But I think this is a beautiful example of what we were talking about. As I was listening to that episode I was thinking: Hang on, this isnt quite as bad as she thinks it is. And then, Jons brain is thinking the same thing, but without judgment.

JR I like to steer clear of conflict as much as I can.

AC Which is good and also rare. Most people would pursue her with their agenda. Right now, everyone is judged as either being good or bad. Its good versus evil thats where journalism has got to now. But yours doesnt do that.

JR Im interested in everybody as a human being and Im quite startled by the myriad examples of the media being a part of the culture wars. It seems to happen everywhere, this mistelling of a story so it fits into a particular ideology a little more clearly. It happens on all sides. I get very disheartened when CNN lies to me or is biased or omits certain aspects of the truth to tell a certain version of the story. During the Trump years I really felt that with CNN. I felt like I was in QAnon and my Q was Anderson Cooper.

AC I would read the New York Times all about the close friendship between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. And I know enough Russian journalists who I trust to know that its just complete rubbish. So hysteria happened on both sides. I mean if you go back over reports even from my own organisation, the BBC, about how Trump was actually an agent of Putin, its extraordinary. Its a conspiracy theory. Thats as much of a panic as anything else you get on the right.

JR I also think a lot of journalists are, like: Oh my God. All this time Ive just been a liberal but look at these things that are happening: Trumps election, George Floyd. So they think its not enough to be a liberal journalist, they have to be an activist journalist. And I think its completely understandable and, in some cases, its a great thing. But then in other cases, its really troublesome because journalism now has pre-existing ideologies.

AC And then journalism lifts off from Planet Real and goes off into the realms of histrionic personality disorder. I actually think histrionic personality disorder describes most of the progressive classes in western societies, in that theyve given up on their progressivism and retreated into a histrionic attitude to the world.

JR I do think these stories tell us an awful lot about the way we live our lives today. In the satanic panic episode, which is about moral panics in the 1980s, you think its going to be about the parallels today with QAnon. But it becomes clear that there are also parallels with the panics on the left today, and that we all have these cognitive biases. I tell this story in which daycare workers are being accused of satanic activity, which clearly never happened, and where people actually went to jail. Suddenly it wasnt just the Christian right worried about satanic cults at the end of your street, but mainstream America. When the flame is burning hot, we can all act in irrational, brutal or inhuman ways, and you see it across the spectrum.

AC The series did make me think: how has this happened? Not just the culture wars but their ferocity. And where is the escape hatch? Because I think all sides now feel that theres something not quite right. If you examine the years since Trump and Brexit, there has been this enormous hysteria in newspapers and on television about it. But actually the politicians have done nothing to change society. Its almost been like a frozen world. So, I think the real answer to why this is happening is because politics has failed. Its become this dead area, this desert surrounded by thinktanks, and someones got to get in there and regenerate it. The new politics is waiting to come. And I think it will happen.

Jon Ronsons Things Fell Apart continues Tuesday, 9am Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. It will be available in the US and Canada exclusively on BBC Podcasts Premium on Apple Podcasts. Adam Curtiss Cant Get You Out of My Head is on BBC iPlayer.

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Jon Ronson and Adam Curtis on the culture wars: 'How has this happened? Where is the escape hatch?' - The Guardian

Werner Heisenberg (19011976), central figure in quantum physics, gave lectures in the 1950s that were published a half-century later as a book of essays, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science. The formulator of the uncertainty principle had some thoughts about what we now call culture wars. Modern physics, he said, is part of a general historical process that tends toward a unification and a widening of our present world. This process would in itself lead to a diminution of those cultural and political tensions that create the great danger of our time.

But it is accompanied, Heisenberg continued, by another process which acts in the opposite direction. The fact that great masses of people become conscious of this process of unification leads to an instigation of all forces in the existing cultural communities that try to ensure for their traditional values the largest possible role in the final state of unification. He went on to express a hope that ultimately many different cultural traditions may live together, but hed pointed out why getting there was so difficult: new technologies and communications were putting contrasting worldviews into direct competition for dominance.

That seems even more relevant now. My reading of it, though, is just happenstance. A friend sent the Heisenberg collection to me along with mathematician Edward Frenkels excellent book Love and Math after shed borrowed and lost my copy of the latter. Then I started perusing the Heisenberg book after watching Frenkel lecture on YouTube about whether infinity is real, a question also explored in Hannah Frys Magic Numbers, a series I recently watched. Infinity and Heisenbergs principle are both areas where the search for definite knowledge ran into obstacles in the 20th century.

If youd asked me, in the 1980s or 1990s, what the 2020s would be like, Id probably have said something about a Mars colony. But Heisenberg was insightful in recognizing the underlying processes whereby a society with any prospect of settling the red planet would also have plenty of red-faced contretemps on Earth.

Heisenberg also was astute in perceiving, at the Cold Wars height, that modern science penetrates into those large areas of the present world in which new doctrines were established only a few decades ago as foundations for new and powerful societies. He specified that he was talking about Communism, as modern science is confronted both with the content of the doctrines, which go back to European philosophical ideas of the nineteenth century (Hegel and Marx), and with the phenomenon of uncompromising belief.

Heisenberg: Since modern physics must play a great role in these countries because of its practical applicability, it can scarcely be avoided that the narrowness of the doctrines is felt by those who have really understood modern physics and its philosophical meaning. He continued that the influence of science should not be overrated; but it might be that the openness of modern science could make it easier even for larger groups of people to see that the doctrines are possibly not so important for the society as had been assumed before.

In Love and Math, Frenkel, who came of age in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, notes that communist ideology controlled intellectual pursuit in the spheres of the humanities, economics, and social sciences. He continues: Many areas of science were also dominated by the party line, for example with genetics having been banned for many years, because its findings were deemed to contradict the teachings of Marxism.

In this environment, Frenkel writes, mathematics and theoretical physics were oases of freedom. Though communist apparatchiks wanted to control every aspect of life, these areas were just too abstract and difficult for them to understand. Soviet leaders also realized the importance of these seemingly obscure and esoteric areas for the development of nuclear weapons, and thats why they didnt want to mess with these areas. In some ways, though, politics did intrude on math and physics education in the Soviet Union, as when Frenkel was barred from attending an elite school because of his partly Jewish ancestry.

The United States has long been the world leader in physics and math, but itd be complacent to assume those subjects well-shielded from our heated-up culture wars. Over the past decade, Common Core standards in math have been a political target, mostly from the right, with much parental resistance arising from a limited grasp of what the standards entail. Recently, gifted education, especially in math, has become a high-profile target for the left, with opportunities for students to tackle advanced topics seen as unfair and inequitable.

Heisenberg was not an optimist about humanity embracing reason. We cannot close our eyes, he lectured, to the fact that the great majority of the people can scarcely have any well-founded judgment concerning the correctness of certain important general ideas or doctrines. Therefore, the word belief can for this majority not mean perceiving the truth of something but can only be understood as taking this as the basis for life. One can easily understand that this second kind of belief is much firmer, is much more fixed than the first one, that it can persist even against immediate contradicting experience and can therefore not be shaken by added scientific knowledge.

Kenneth Silber is author ofIn DeWitts Footsteps: Seeing History on the Erie Canaland is on Twitter:@kennethsilber

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Physics, Math, and Culture Wars - Splice Today

A central issue in the Virginia election that was held last Tuesday was education and the role of parental or governmental censorship.

One of the ads for the Republican nominee, Glenn Youngkin, displayed the mother of a high school senior upset by the assigned reading in his advanced placement, college-level American literature class. She claimed that the graphic depiction of slavery in it was deeply unsettling, even for this advanced student.

It turns out that the book in question was Beloved by Toni Morrison, a book that won the Pulitzer Prize and is considered a masterpiece of American literature.

Yes, novels are unsettling. Crime and Punishment is unsettling in its examination of the mind of the criminal. Madame Bovary is upsetting in examining adultery. Oliver Twist is disquieting as an examination of class and poverty.

The realistic novels of Eli Wiesel and other Holocaust authors include profoundly troubling accounts of violence. Morisons book is in part a story of the brutality of slavery.

Are stories of the Holocaust, of slavery, too problematic for our advanced students?

Is it not our responsibility to challenge students with provocative readings? Critical Race Theory, the product of hundreds of prominent scholars, offers a significant, if unorthodox, approach to law, civil rights and the role of race in society.

We need not agree with its premises or conclusions, many of us will not, but as open and concerned citizens should we and our advanced students not wrestle with its arguments, along with other outlooks.The culture wars now going on in school boards are deeply troubling. Where might this lead: to censorship and book burning, a favored practice of totalitarians? Or, to a meaningless or false orthodoxy?

Rather than disrupt school board meetings, we must work through elected representatives and those appointed by them for their expertise in education. Populist assaults by angry and often uninformed parents, and the hysteria that they may produce, can become daggers aimed at the heart of American democracy.

Howard Rock

Brevard

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Culture Wars - The Transylvania Times - The Transylvania Times

The brewing culture war over vaccine mandates now threatens to boil over after the Biden administration set a January deadline for all employers with more than 100 employees to require shots or regular testing.

Why it matters: The planned mandates which also include even more stringent standards for health care workers would impact more than 100 million Americans, or more than two-thirds of the workforce.

Driving the news: Lawsuits from 15 GOP-led states rolled in mere hours after the administration last week laid out Jan. 4 as the deadline for vaccine mandates at employers with more than 100 workers.

The other side: U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy took to ABC's "This Week" on Sunday to defend the Biden administration's mandate plan as a workplace safety and economic issue.

But, but, but: NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers took the mantle as a foil to employer vaccine mandates and COVID-19 protocol after it was revealed he was unvaccinated. He'd previously told reporters he was "immunized."

The big picture: A recent Axios-Ipsos poll found six in 10 employed Americans agreed their employer should require COVID vaccinations.

But they do not agree on what should happen for those who don't comply. Support for firing employees was low, at 14%.

Between the lines: As Axios' Jennifer Kingson wrote, employer vaccine mandates have already impacted millions of workers, and rather than leaving in droves most have either decided to get the shot or have taken advantage of wiggle room offered by their employers.

What we're watching: A mandated deadline for about 4 million federal workers coming up on Nov. 22 could give us a glimpse at how the broader mandates may play out.

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Vaccine mandates inflame the culture wars - Axios

These themes structured the Youngkin campaign. In a revealing postelection interview with Politicos Ryan Lizza, two top Youngkin strategists, Jeff Roe and Kristin Davison, outlined their campaign plan, which included, but was certainly not limited to, highlighting critical race theory:

One of our first advertising pieces in the general election and one of the first things we hammered on was that the Thomas Jefferson School in Northern Virginia had lowered their academic standards. It was then literally the first stop, Roe said, moving on to describe the goal of uniting under the Republican banner seemingly disparate constituencies:

If youre an Asian-American family going to Thomas Jefferson School and they lower the standards to let more kids who arent in accelerated math into the best school in the country, thats pretty important to you. Advanced math is a big dang thing. But it also is to the Republicans: Why would you not help and want your children to succeed and achieve? So we were having a hard time; those people dont fit in the same rooms together. You know, having school-choice people in the same room with a C.R.T. person with an advanced math [person] along with people who want school resource officers in every school thats a pretty eclectic group of people.

Achieving this goal received an unexpected lift from Terry McAuliffes now notorious gaffe during a Sept. 28 debate:

As Davison recounted the story to Lizza:

Within three hours of the debate where Terry said I dont think parents should be involved in what the school should be teaching, we had a video out hitting this because it tapped into just parents not knowing. And that was the fight. It wasnt just C.R.T. Thats an easier issue to talk about on TV. Thats not what we focused on here; it was more parents matter. Launching that message took the education discussion to a different level.

Yascha Mounk, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, captured the problem with a common progressive analysis of the Virginia election in You Cant Win Elections by Telling Voters Their Concerns Are Imaginary, a Nov. 3 Atlantic essay the idea that Youngkin, an extremist posing in the garb of a suburban dad, was able to incite white backlash by exploiting fake and imaginary fears about the teaching of critical race theory in public schools.

The truth, Mounk continued, is rather different. Youngkin capitalized on a widespread public perception that Democrats are out of tune with the country on cultural issues.

The idea that critical race theory is an academic concept that is taught only at colleges or law schools, Mounk continued, might be technically accurate, but the reality on the ground is a good deal more complicated. He noted that across the nation, many teachers have, over the past years, begun to adopt a pedagogical program that owes its inspiration to ideas that are very fashionable on the academic left, and that go well beyond telling students about Americas copious historical sins.

In some elementary and middle schools, Mounk wrote,

Students are now being asked to place themselves on a scale of privilege based on such attributes as their skin color. History lessons in some high schools teach that racism is not just a persistent reality but the defining feature of America. And some school systems have even embraced ideas that spread pernicious prejudices about nonwhite people, as when a presentation to principals of New York City public schools denounced virtues such as perfectionism or the worship of the written word as elements of white-supremacy culture.

While just under half of respondents (49 percent) described themselves as very or extremely familiar with critical race theory in a June Fox News poll, the theory and arguments based on it have become commonplace throughout much of American culture.

On Sept. 9, 2020, for example, Larry Merlo, then the chief executive of CVS, held a Company Town Hall, at which he invited Ibram X. Kendi to lead a discussion on what it means to be antiracist. Merlo asked Kendi to explain what it means to be a racist.

Kendi replied:

I first have to define a racist idea, which I define as any concept that suggests a racial group is superior or inferior to another racial group in any way, and also to say that this is whats wrong with a racial group, or whats right, or whats better, or worse, or connotations of superiority and inferiority. And a racist policy is any measure that is leading to inequity between racial groups.

The Racial Equity Institute offers programs lasting from 18 months to two years to battle racism, a fierce, ever-present, challenging force, one which has structured the thinking, behavior and actions of individuals and institutions since the beginning of U.S. history.

The institute, which cites the work of scholars like Kendi, Tema Okun and Richard Delgado, lists more than 270 clients including corporations, colleges and schools, foundations, hospitals and health care facilities, liberal advocacy groups and social service providers.

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Opinion | Republicans Are Once Again Heating Up the Culture Wars - The New York Times