We shall momentarily discuss anti-semitism, the collapse of media and the planetary effect of the human race. As you were hoping.
First, though, if this detour isn’t too obvious, let us consider Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story and its place in entertainment history.
Television programming has been in our lives for 75 years. Tens of thousands of shows have come into our homes, some better than others. Some much, much better than others. For example, The Wire (2002-2008) versus My Mother the Car (1965-1966).
Now it happens that one third of television’s history has been in the 21st century. It thus stands to reason, even accounting for the output of our current Golden Age of TV, that approximately one third of the greatest shows of all time would date from the year 2000 on. Give or take.
Yet if you go to the top 150 shows ever, as rated by IMDb, not 33% but 79% are from the third trimester of TV history. That’s pretty freakin’ golden — I mean, if you agree that Blue Planet II, Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood and, yes, Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story belong in any accounting of the best shows ever. My thought is that they do not.
I myself have never seen #25-ranked Scam 1992, so forgive my presumption when I say it is likely not superior to Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1962), which is not even listed in the top 150 (it sneaked in at #249). I’m delighted to report that My Mother the Car is not on the list at all. But neither is The Wire.
Why such distortion? The answer is recency bias, a cognitive quirk that predisposes us to overestimate experiences we’ve had of late, relative to distant ones. It affects our memory, our standards and, maybe most of all, our grasp of historical significance, relevance and proportion.
As a more momentous example, let us consider the collapse of the media business model, which has resulted in the slow, steady destruction of network TV, cable TV, magazines, newspapers and radio since the dawn of the internet.
In the late 1990s, the digital revolution delivered a lethal one-two punch: 1) making content cheap to produce and free to distribute world wide, depriving legacy media of their monopolies and leading to millions upon millions of outlets competing for both audience attention and advertising dollars, and 2) thanks to the annoying but immutable law of supply and demand, causing the value of advertising space and time to plunge. And not just for the analog incumbents. The parallel effect was for those low ad rates to make virtually all of those millions and millions of competitors incapable of turning a profit either. Ever. Such are the economics of glut.
And now (even though some heroic visionaries were writing articles and books about this chaos scenario 19 years ago), The New York Times, the Washington Post and The Atlantic and others are suddenly wringing their hands about its impact on journalism and democracy. Yes, the erosion of both institutions is highly correlated, but implicit in the desperation is the idea that we simply cannot lose what we’ve always had — namely, a robust media landscape underwritten largely or entirely by advertising.
Uh … yes we can. Sure, ad-supported media is what we’ve always had in our lifetimes — and, in fact, for four centuries. But 400 years is not always. Sure, it's about two-thirds of the history of widespread literacy, but in the history of mankind it is but a blip. There is no law of physics or God’s commandment guaranteeing thou shalt have My Mother the Car or the Wall Street Journal for free.
The advertising-media total symbiosis was great while it lasted, and its collapse is catastrophic, but it is not something stolen from us — any more than the Ice Age was stolen from us. It simply came and it went. But, because it was not just recent but overlapping (for all generations older than Millennials) with our entire lives, we assumed it was the natural order of things. Nope. That’s recency bias talking. It was just an accident of history.
A similar blip, according to a recent Franklin Foer piece in The Atlantic, is the experience of American Jews since World War II living lives largely free of outward anti-semitism of any kind, much less the virulent anti-semitism that over the millennia beyond our shores yielded the Holocaust and countless pogroms, exiles and genocides. But here assimilation and non-discrimination — never mind freedom from violence — had become the norm.
“American Jewish success,” Foer told his colleague Isabel Fattal this week to preview his article, “is this incredible historical anomaly.”
In the way that Barack Obama in 2008 saw his election as the verge, at long last, of a post-racial society, Jews came to believe we’d not only achieved full acceptance but an honored place reflecting achievements in science, medicine, business, entertainment, academia, politics and every sphere of American life.
Leo Frank, George Lincoln Rockwell, Father Coughlin, Henry Ford and Gentlemen’s Agreement were ancient history. Instead, we had a pantheon of genius. It was as if the heroic images of Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk, Barbra Streisand, Stan Lee, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Sandy Koufax and Seinfeld were carved into Mount Jewmore.
“Jews,” Foer says, “were able to do even better with liberalism than they had in Europe, because in Europe there was always this devil’s bargain: If you wanted to participate in France, you had to do it as a Frenchman. You couldn’t do it as a Jewish French person. One of the things that made this country so extraordinary was that you could participate as an American citizen and you didn’t have to give up your identity. That was what emerged in the 20th century, and it was an idea that Jews helped refine and then introduce to the rest of the world.”
In short, we had ceased to be an Other. Had we not?
No again. We had not. We had simply experienced a lull, a lull which the insurgent alt-right, white supremacy, Christian nationalism, Trump, MAGA and lately the anti-Zionist left have all but obliterated. As the philosopher Chris Rock says, when it comes to antisemitism, “That train’s never late.”
Or, put another way, the cancer was in remission, not cured. It is back. Because history is long, and just because we are in the now doesn't mean we are at an end. I mean, think of the hubris when political scientist Francis Fukuyama surveyed the global political landscape in 1992 — chiefly the rubble of the former Communist bloc — and penned a compelling treatise about the final triumph of liberal democracy. Apart from North Korea and a couple of ex-Soviet republics, authoritarianism was done for worldwide. Human rights and rule of law would forever guide our destinies. Fukuyama even had the chutzpah to title his book The End of History.
It wasn't, though, was it? There would be new seasons. The recency bias is so tempting that securities prospectuses must contain disclaimers along the lines of PAST RESULTS DO NOT GUARANTEE FUTURE PERFORMANCE. It’s solid advice about everything else, too.
The ultimate example of recency bias, however, is something I encountered only (ahem) recently — in Tuesday’s Times. It concerns an attempt by various prominent geo-scientists to formally designate a latest demarcation of Earth’s geological history. The current timeline culminates with the Holocene period, which extends back to the end of the Ice Age. The proposed update for the most recent epoch? The Anthropocene period (or Human Age), reflecting the impact of industrialized humanity on the planet’s physical evolution.
Makes sense. Humankind has roamed the Earth for 300,000 years and we’ve burnt it to a crisp in about the last 200. But the proposal to memorialize our planetary impact was voted down.
Why? Because for a planet almost 5 billion years old 300,000 years is also a blip.
“Time will march on,” writes the Times’ Raymond Zhong. “Evidence of our civilization’s effects on Earth will continue accumulating in the rocks. The task of interpreting what it all means, and how it fits into the grand sweep of history, might fall to the future inheritors of our world.”
In other words, maybe Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story enjoys its rightful place among the greatest television productions in history. But the Human Age? Too soon.
Well this is disappointing. I was a big fan of the Anthropocene.
What's next- cancel the Al Franken Decade? This is bullsh*t.
I think a better term for our current age would be The Plasticene, what with macro and micro plastics suffusing the entire planetary ecosystem ... but I suppose we can leave that to future historians, although at this point it seems unlikely those scholars will be humans. Like the apocryphal frogs in the slowly heating pot, we seem doomed to boil what's left of our civilization until it's gone, taking most of us along for the one-way ride.
As for The Blip ... yeah. It reminds me of the old joke where a guy is sent to Hell and instead of being tossed into pools of molten lava and being ravaged by pitchfork-wielding demons, he finds vast multitudes of the damned standing neck-deep in the most foul water imaginable -- but hey, they're all sipping coffee and don't seem to be suffering. "Maybe this won't be so bad," he thinks.
Then the siren wails and a voice that seems to come from everywhere bellows "Coffee break is over -- get back on your knees."
Ah well, civilization was nice while it lasted.