Imagine this: one day you are wasting time scrolling through political Twitter in an election year. Amid all the angry ranting, the stupid jokes, the obligatory posturing, the bots, the polls, etc. you see some rando post a cover of a book, saying something like, “this will explain it.”

The book looks interesting, so you make a note of it. It’s expensive on Amazon, so instead you wait to get it from the library. Meanwhile, politics continues. The election happens. A great deal of pixels are expended by people writing about the election, the transition, and the meaning of it all. Social media is the epicenter of all these different sources of opinion, competing to emit the “hottest” of all possible “takes.”

Finally, you read the book. The book is over sixty years old. Indeed, it’s older than one of the candidates in the election. Most of the media we are familiar with today did not exist when it was written. Innumerable technological and cultural changes separate the book’s era and the present day.

So you know that whatever agenda the book’s author had, it can’t possibly have had much of anything to do with the current controversies. He didn’t have any type of modern “derangement syndrome”. Any such hang-ups he may have had are entombed with him. After all, you know what happened between 1962 and today, whereas the book can ipso facto only make educated guesses.

You might expect the book to feel outdated or quaint or charmingly naive. After all, many books from these bygone eras evoke nostalgia for their time, and what American hasn’t occasionally felt wistful for decades past? On the other hand, you might expect the book to feel like a relic in another way, to be offensive, or to expound views of the world that we find at best laughable or at worst repugnant. There are certainly a lot of old books that do that, too. When you read old books, your reaction is usually, “Ah, the good old days!” or “Oh, how far we have come!”. There is also a third category, which is “<sigh>, nothing ever changes…”

The Image is different. It does occasionally evoke all three of these feelings in various places. But none of them form your dominant reaction. Instead, it’s more like…

Well, put it another way: when you read an old book you expect to know more about your own time than the author of that book. That’s not to say you’re “smarter” than the author in any way; just that you are aware of facts that they are not. You read old books, generally, to either understand Universal Truths, or else to learn something about a particular period in the past.

This Daniel J. Boorstin, though… he understands our time perfectly. And he knows us—better, methinks, than we know ourselves.

JFK was still alive. Watergate not only wasn’t a scandal yet, but the place hadn’t even been built. Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were just names on a map to the average American. And the nearest thing to “social media” was fan clubs.

Yet, though he was writing in the oft-romanticized era of a supposedly more innocent America, Boorstin saw, with terrifying clarity, the shape of things to come. Like a prophet of old, he inveighs against evils that 1960s America must have seen as remote and unfathomable, but are now familiar to the citizens (prisoners?) of the internet age.

The pervasive alienation of modern life; this strange world of propaganda, manufactured controversies, of information warfare, where elections turn on social media ads, and celebrity influencers shape the course of geopolitics… this is the world that anyone my age or younger has grown up in, and which, if we are to lead happy, fulfilling lives, we must somehow navigate. Or perhaps even escape.

Of course, just as a fish cannot know what water is, having never known its absence, it is hard for us to clearly see the pseudo-world that surrounds us. That is Boorstin’s other great advantage: he knew the other world, the one that came before… and so he is well-suited to be our Virgil, guiding us through post-modernity.

I know, this seems like a tall order for a simple book. And make no mistake, I’m not saying that reading it will instantly solve all our troubles. Like the famous quote from The Twilight Zone says, it will not end the nightmare… it will only explain it.

Let’s begin, shall we?

***

Boorstin starts off innocuously enough with a definition of “pseudo-event”: i.e. a manufactured event that exists solely for the purpose of making news. The quintessential example is the press conference, when politicians and other public figures speak to reporters. Any one who has ever watched a press conference knows there is an inherent artificiality to them, and yet they remain major topics of discussion among pundits. As Boorstin puts it, “demanding more than the world can give us, we require that something be fabricated to make up for the world’s deficiency.”

Once you’ve read Boorstin’s description of pseudo-events, you start to realize that the news is full of them. On a typical day, there are far more pseudo-events than real ones in the headlines. And one pseudo-event can spawn more. A good modern example would be when President Obama, after a controversy surrounding a clumsily-worded answer to a question at a press conference, held a “beer summit” to try and smooth over hurt feelings.

Increasingly, politics has come to be dominated by those most adept at generating pseudo-events. To use one of Boorstin’s examples, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s great talent was his ability to manipulate the press–many members of which despised him–into providing breathless coverage of his flamboyant announcements of names and lists of alleged communists.

As Boorstin explains, in the era of modern media, even a politician doing nothing at all can be “news”, e.g. Senator so-and-so’s silence on a given issue can spawn a whole series of speculative articles. The entire category of news known as “current events” is completely saturated with pseudo-events that it takes a truly spectacular development for reality to break through.

Pseudo-events are one epiphenomenon of what Boorstin calls “The Graphic Revolution”: the logarithmic increase in the transmissibility of, and demand for, news. This revolution began with the invention of the telegraph in the 1830s and continues to the present day.

One consequence of the Graphic Revolution, as the name implies, is the proliferation of images. Whereas before people learned information about the world primarily through wordy descriptions, either spoken or textual, beginning in the 19th century, images could now be readily created and reproduced. This change in how information was transmitted began to slowly redefine how people perceived reality, to the point where images could actually overshadow the real thing they were meant to represent.

(It’s not billed as such, but on top of everything else The Image is a fantastic chronicle of American history. Boorstin concisely narrates the flow of major technological and cultural changes that have shaped the country’s growth.)

Boorstin gives example after example of how pseudo-events can be staged to seem more interesting to viewers on television than those witnessing the event in person (e.g., a parade for General Douglas MacArthur’s return to the United States) or how a minor comment by a senator can be blown up into a full-fledged controversy. Real events are later re-enacted for the cameras, and so the reenactment rather than the reality forms the dominant image in the public mind.

Summing up, Boorstin says that, “our ‘free market place of ideas’ is a place where people are confronted by competing pseudo-events and are allowed to judge among them.” With the rise of pseudo-events, which are neither wholly true nor wholly false, Boorstin argues, “the American citizen thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality.” Which has frightening implications for America’s democratic institutions. When a government is built on the idea of a well-informed populace, what happens when the very concept of what it means to be “well-informed” becomes blurry?

So, by now I hope you are saying to yourself, “Well, this sounds like a very intriguing book. Perhaps I shall have to see if I can acquire a copy.”

Reader, I have not finished summarizing the book yet. What I have described above is only Chapter 1.

The Image is not just about the collapse of America’s governing institutions as a result of our increasing inability to discern lies from truth. As Arthur C. Clarke would say, “nothing as trivial as that.” From here, things are going to get much weirder, much darker, and much more personal. What we’ve covered so far is like the titular play in the book The King in Yellow: where reading the seemingly-innocuous first act sucks you in, and only once your eyes fall on the opening lines of the second act do you descend irrevocably into madness.

Except, of course, in reverse. Obviously, I think that reading The Image is actually a path to sanity, to making sense of an increasingly mad world. Then again, Hildred Castaigne would say the same thing about the play The King in Yellow, so it really is all a question of trust.

I make a pact with you, dear reader: you check out the free sample on Amazon, and see if you’re intrigued enough to want to read the whole thing. Then come back here in, oh, I don’t know–shall we say two weeks? Two weeks it is! And there will be no more shadows between us, only truth, as exists between master and apprentice blogger and reader.