Who Appointed Neil Young to Be Our Minister of Information?

This combination photo shows Neil Young in Calabasas, Calif., on May 18, 2016, left, and UFC announcer and podcaster Joe Rogan before a UFC on FOX 5 event in Seattle, Dec. 7, 2012. AP Photo

Commentary

“Attention must be paid!” Or so says Mrs. Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” first performed in 1949.

In their context, her words refer to the neglect by her two sons, Biff and Happy, of their father, her husband, and of his sufferings. But the passive construction, making “attention” the subject rather than the two boys, who are supposed to be doing the paying, has made that line resonate far beyond its time.

Post-war America was in a mood to be told that the little people, people like Willy Low-man (get it?), who lived everyday lives and did everyday jobs, deserved some recognition—not just from their families but from society as a whole. Aaron Copland had written his famous “Fanfare for the Common Man” just a few years earlier. Like Miller, Copland was on the political left.

The public was not in a mood, however, nor I fear is it yet in a mood, to consider some of the implications of Mrs. L’s imperative declaration.

Why must attention be paid? And why to Willy in particular? He was just one among millions and billions on Planet Earth to whom attention was and is not normally paid—a situation that might seem intolerable to you until you remember that attention, like money and other things that must be paid, is not unlimited.

For if we can realistically pay attention to only a relatively few of the millions and billions, what gives Willy the right to be among those few more than anyone else? And if we must pay attention to everybody, do we then have the right to expect everybody to pay attention to us?

It took technology more than half a century to catch up with Linda Loman’s utopian vision of universal attention, paid and received, but the advent of social media in the early years of this century appeared to many of their users as a vindication of a similar claim on the world’s attention, to which they had always felt themselves entitled.

Suddenly, anyone could be famous—sort of—and parade their stuff on this newly opened stage with the whole world as notional audience.

Well, just as the value of money declines the more of it we put into circulation, so also does the value of attention. We may recognize that our virtual friends and followers are not real friends or followers, but at least they’re paying something in the inflated currency of attention.

Aren’t they?

I believe that the insecurity of the newly famous—famous, that is, in their own self-conceit—has a lot to do with the hurricane-force passions that have swept across both the new and the old media landscape in the last decade.

Calm rationality doesn’t get many followers, and nor does politeness. But anger and invective always call attention to themselves.

Moreover, the little people, the only slightly famous ones who must constantly feel themselves in danger of dropping off their public’s computer screens, commonly feel the need to attach their claims upon our attention to someone or something with a more solidly founded claim.

That seems to me as good an explanation as any for the reverence in which we hold our “experts”—especially those who, like Dr. Anthony Fauci, claim to represent “science.”

If you can’t ignore science—if, in fact, it’s scandalous to ignore science—then you can’t ignore me either when I say the same thing as science.

And when I do say the same thing as science, it means I can also demand that you say the same thing as science—or else shut up. Attention must not be paid to you!

The funny thing is that, if the coronavirus pandemic has taught us anything it’s that science properly so called—the science that’s more than just individual “experts” endowed by the media and the government with the power to tell people what to do—doesn’t really know what it thinks, let alone what it’s entitled to insist that everybody else should think.

This can hardly be surprising when you reflect that real science, as opposed to the rhetorically weaponized kind, is made up of millions of individuals, thousands of institutions and hundreds of specialities, each of which is supposed to be in the business of finding out things, rather than enforcing belief in the things that other people have found out. Or think they’ve found out.

None of this matters to the sub-scientific midwits, as someone has called them, who bring meaning and a kind of fame into their own lives by acting as official science’s enforcers in the scandal-seeking media.

It’s becoming increasingly apparent that what our political leaders mean when they say they’re “following the science” is this: that they’re following the followers of science—or rather, the followers of those particular scientists deemed qualified to promulgate the official scientific narrative. These devoted followers have volunteered for the job, with enthusiasm, of enforcing belief in that narrative because to do so allows them a share in the self-importance and self-celebration of the official scientists. They too, like Dr. Fauci, can “represent” science to the world.

And so, like him, they must be paid attention to, not only by the world at large but by Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau and Boris Johnson, all of whom, as recent events have shown, live in fear of incurring their wrath. Even Donald Trump never dared to stray too far from what he was persuaded was the scientific consensus about the coronavirus at the time.

It may be a bit of a stretch to say that so much anger and so much confusion have their origins in Linda Loman’s quaint idea that the world’s attention—and, by implication, the world’s admiration—are some kind of human right, but consider this.

Formerly those who gained the attention, if not of the world then of some considerable portion of it—artists, authors, journalists, entertainers, politicians—thought that such attention had to be won by having something interesting to say. Now they only want to say the same thing, and want us to say the same thing.

Even the entertainers—at least to judge by Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and others—think they owe it to their fame, and their fans, to stand with the official orthodoxy against open-minded renegades like Joe Rogan.

What do such people know about science? Or even “science”? Only that the shock troops of the would-be famous on Twitter and Facebook have pinned their hopes of immortality, at least in cyber-space, on standing up for bureaucratic science, science which, like Willy Loman, demands to be paid our attention simply because of who and what it is.

Could this be because Neil and Joni and the rest are a little insecure about their own fame?

Or have they just developed a taste, as so many of us have during the past two years, for telling other people what to think and what to do?

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.