ConnorEl
Well-known member
A companion piece.
Why We Are So Vulnerable to Charlatans Like Trump
Why We Are So Vulnerable to Charlatans Like Trump
It’s impossible to characterize a historical period before it’s over, but I think one plausible name for our era will be the Age of the Charlatan. Everywhere you turn there seems to be some kind of quack or confidence man catering to an eager audience: Fox News hosts like Sean Hannity have moved from pushing ill-informed opinion to flat-out conspiracy mongering; pickup artists sell “tried and true” methods for isolated young men to seduce women; and sophists pass off stale pedantries as dark and radical thought, selling millions of books in the process. In politics, too, our highest office is occupied by a man who was once aptly called a “carnival barker.”
What makes us so vulnerable to charlatans today? In part it’s the complexity of the modern world and the rate of technological and social change: Quackery provides what Saul Bellow once called a “five-cent synthesis,” boiling down the chaotic tangle of the age into simple nostrums. Modern life bombards us into exhaustion and boredom as much as anxiety; sometimes we are just looking for entertainment in a surprising notion.
But I think we have also forgotten that charlatans exist, or that they exist for us, and not just for other people. We all like to think of ourselves as pretty sharp, and the term itself sounds old-fashioned: We laugh at how people in the past fell for phony remedies, but never suppose we could fall for the same tricks.
A largely forgotten book from an earlier and similarly discontented, era offers insight. In 1937, a journalist named Grete De Francesco published a volume called “Die Macht des Charlatans,” or “The Power of the Charlatan,” a history of the quacks and mountebanks that roamed Europe in the Middle Ages and early modern period. She was Austrian and had been a writer for the Frankfurter Zeitung, but with the Nazis in power, it makes sense that her book about demagogues manipulating crowds was published in Switzerland.
It garnered attention in academic circles and was positively reviewed by the literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin. Thomas Mann wrote a blurb for the cover when the book was translated into English in 1939, but it has long been out of print.
Ms. De Francesco explains that the word “charlatan” comes from the Italian “ciarlatano,” itself probably related to the verb “ciarlare,” which means to babble or to go on incessantly without reflection. The original charlatans would babble on and on to mesmerize their audiences.
Medieval and Renaissance mountebanks often employed elaborate shows featuring musicians, clowns and performing animals to captivate an audience on the town square. Ms. De Francesco observes that this was the beginning of the mass communication techniques perfected by the public relations and advertising industries.
Crucially, the charlatan provides palliatives for a confused public. These nostrums can be either literal pills or phony ideas, for as Ms. De Francesco notes, “a quack is a quack — whether he sells opinions or elixirs.” Frequently they sell both. See for example Alex Jones, one of the most popular charlatans of the present age. He peddles bizarre conspiracy theories, including that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax, but also his own line of snake oil in the form of dubious dietary supplements. A similar case is Mike Cernovich, who hocks “Gorilla Mindset: Timeless Strategies to Unleash the Animal Within You” as a way for the proverbial 90-pound weakling to become an alpha male.
Charlatans, Ms. De Francesco tells us, become especially prevalent in ages of “rapid development of the sciences, or quickened progress in technology” when “minds are overburdened with the effort to keep us with these accumulations of facts.”
In these periods, conspiracy theories and simplistic reductions of social ills function the same way as quack medicine: They seem to provide a cure, but since they only further inflame the underlying fears, they are just driving their own demand.
Like the clowns he shared the town square with, a good charlatan could often juggle, simultaneously keeping up pretensions to scientific rigor and mystical profundity. The most sophisticated mountebanks employed a hodgepodge drawn from science, alchemy, astrology, myth and philosophy. As Ms. De Francesco wrote:
Through his mysterious and appealing lectures, they were guided away from the cold sobriety of genuine knowledge into the picturesque realms of pseudoscience. … These fake scientific talks were indeed excitingly mystical, yet to all appearances they could be understood by the common man.
That passage could be a description of Jordan Peterson’s popular YouTube videos, mélanges that include everything from evolutionary psychology to Jungian archetypes to Taoism. His book “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos” has sold a million copies, combining hokey self-help bromides, like “Make friends with people who want the best for you,” with cosmic explanations drawn from Babylonian myths or from Darwinian biology.
Like Bragadino, the 16th-century confidence man who used his command of alchemy to live for a while at the expense of the Venetian Republic, or like the more famous Cagliostro, the 18th-century “prince of quacks” who was a favorite of Marie Antoinette, Mr. Peterson is now finding favor with the great and the good — even among respectable gatekeepers of public opinion, including seasoned newspaper columnists.
Disturbing, but not, Ms. De Francesco would argue, surprising. The danger arises, she explains, when the serious-minded journalist strives to be “open minded,” finds something “interesting” in the charlatan’s discourses and ends up being just another puffer. Particularly if a person thinks of himself as clever, he will often have a hard time admitting his own ignorance.
“If the opinionated person belongs to the ranks of the quack’s predisposed victims, he will sublimate his doubts by magnifying the person or the occurrence about which he is dubious. … To silence his own conscience, he will refuse to swallow the insinuations of the skeptics; and to soothe himself invents stories which attract ever more throngs to the impostor.”
It’s also clear that Ms. De Francesco saw a parallel between the totalitarian movements of her own time and the charlatans in her book. She believed they both reduced people to the lowest common denominator: “They viewed mankind as a totality, seeing persons only in their special functions as buyers — purchasers of nostrums or theories.”
How can we avoid the snares of the charlatan? Fortunately, we live in a literate society: The compiled judgments and experiences of the past are available to still us, and we have really seen this all before.
Ms. De Francesco says some people just won’t fall for it, but some people always will: “They want to believe, and would only hate the argumentative expert who tried to injure the object of their faith.” So, remonstrating at length might not always be worth it. Neither does smugness make us any less likely to be suckered, and in fact, it can make us more open to humbug, so long as we can sneer at it later. .
As William Hazlitt wrote, “We affect to laugh at the folly of those who put faith in nostrums, but are willing to see ourselves whether there is any truth in them.” But maybe one way to avoid becoming taken in by a charlatan is to avoid acting like one. In place of their pomp and self-seriousness, some self-irony might be in order.
And against the pretension to understand every single social ill according to some simple formula or another, some humility might help. When someone offers a too-easy explanation, we might choose instead the less satisfying but far healthier, “I don’t know.”
