Recently, Glenn Greenwald interviewed Chris Hayes about Hayes’s new book, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy. I have the audiobook cued up in the car, and will start it as soon as I’m done with the one I’m listening to now (Charles Ferguson’s Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America, which is superb and might become the subject of a subsequent post here).
For me, the most thought-provoking part of the interview came at the end, when Greenwald asked Hayes about Hayes’s assertion that even the most well-intentioned people will inevitably be corrupted — what Hayes calls “cognitive capture” — by entry into the American elite (aka the One Percent, aka the American Oligarchy). Given that Hayes, who started out writing for The Nation, is now an establishment TV personality and employee of one of the world’s largest media corporations (Hayes hosts his own talk show, Up with Chris Hayes, on MSNBC), Greenwald wanted to know what steps Hayes is taking to prevent his own cognitive capture.
As someone who deals extensively with questions of subornment in fiction (and who once had some training on the subject, courtesy of Uncle Sam), I found the question itself extremely interesting. I was also interested — and, as admirer of Hayes and his work, concerned — that Hayes really had no answer. He said he would try to protect himself by continuing to practice what he recognized as good journalism, which he said consists at least in part of ensuring that a wide variety of voices are heard on his show. But countless people have gone astray before Hayes, and surely all of them — at least the ones who weren’t corrupt to begin with — promised themselves at least this much, that they would continue to practice good journalism. And alas, the promise wasn’t enough.
So I got to thinking. What are the warning signs, the real metrics a well-intentioned and clear-eyed journalist should consider before her subornment begins, and by which she can judge whether her integrity is slowly being compromised, corroded, and lost? It’s important to think about these issues in advance. Cops and soldiers, after all, use when/then thinking to prepare for physical danger. The principles apply to the danger of subornment, too.
I’ve come up with a few general warning signs that I think represent a good start. I hope Hayes, and others, will consider them, and I hope readers will add to them.
1. Probably the first compromise will take the form of a rationalization. You’ll be pressured to do something you know isn’t quite right. But you’ll be scared not to do it — if you don’t, you’ll alienate someone powerful, your career will suffer a setback, your ambitious goals will suddenly seem farther away. At this point, your lesser self, driven by fear, greed, status-seeking, and other selfish emotions, will offer up a rationalization, and your greater self will grasp at it eagerly. As Reinhold Neibuhr put it, “hypocrisy… is the tribute which morality pays to immorality; or rather the device by which the lesser self gains the consent of the larger self to indulge in impulses and ventures which the rational self can approve only when they are disguised.”
For me, Hayes’s first big test came after he said on his show that he was “uncomfortable” calling American war dead “heroes,” and I wish Greenwald had asked about this specifically, as it was directly relevant to Greenwald’s more general question. There was a predictable Twitter and blogosphere outcry in response to Hayes comments, and Hayes quickly apologized. I thought the apology was unfortunate. Of course my heart goes out to every family that’s ever lost a loved one in combat. But whether it follows from this that every American soldier who dies in combat is automatically a hero is, at a minimum, not a topic that in a democracy should be taboo.
I don’t know the extent to which Hayes’s apology was heartfelt (personally, I find it incomprehensible). But my guess is that he felt he had to make it — perhaps because of pressure from corporate higher-ups; perhaps because he felt that his show wouldn’t be properly heeded if he became a poster boy for rightist attacks.
The first compromise will likely be the hardest (and maybe this one was for Hayes), because you’ve never made one before, or at least not one of this magnitude, and the contrast with your relative purity will be strong. But they’ll get easier over time, just as impurities are harder to notice when added to water that’s already turbid. The danger of this increasing ease is part of the reason I blurb so few books. I won’t claim absolute purity when it comes to the abysmally corrupt practice of blurbing; I’ve found myself (rarely, for what that’s worth) in situations where I felt the cost of a no was too high, and I tried to square the circle by saying good things about a book that, while not exactly untrue, weren’t exactly from the heart, either. But I’ve also said no many times where the no was uncomfortable and a yes would have done me a lot of good. From the beginning, I’ve sensed that once you start saying positive things about books you didn’t really enjoy (or that you haven’t even read), it gets easier and easier, and that the increased commercial success you might enjoy as a result of all those increasingly easy blurbs will be purchased with your own integrity. The best way out of that trap is not to get into it in the first place.
