Prior generations were overwhelmed by new mediums, so they were duped in strange ways. Today we’re so deeply sunk in another medium that we’re also easily fooled.
Think about it.
* Orson Welles caused mass hysteria with his 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast. Listeners really thought Martians were invading.
* When Shakespeare filled the Globe Theater with his stories, people rushed the stage to save actors pretending to be murdered.
* Robinson Crusoe was one of the earliest mass-produced fiction books, and across the English-speaking world readers swore it really happened. They couldn’t conceive of such a story being invented.
The level of “unsophistication” of these earlier peoples — just a few generations removed — is hard for us to believe. They seem like credulous rubes.
None but the mentally ill and the very young are taken in by today’s “pretend” movies or books. Everyone understands these tales aren’t happening and are the entertaining products of fertile imaginations. They’re part of a genre called fiction.
But why wasn’t this obvious a few generations ago? Why did people find the line between entertainment and reality so porous?
Probably for the same reason many ancient peoples and Christian groups opposed theater.
In The Republic, Plato says poets and playwrights should be banned unless they tell the truth; it’s too dangerous to have them spreading lies because they can cause great harm. If this seems like totalitarian censorship, it is, but it may not have been an overreaction. Plato’s fellow citizens were not us, and they sometimes had trouble telling the difference between fantasy, satire, and reality.
Plato’s beloved mentor, Socrates, was sentenced to death in 399 B.C. after being convicted of corrupting the youth and introducing new gods. But he was first tagged with these charges two decades earlier in Aristophanes’s comedy play, The Clouds, which most of the adult citizens of Athens saw in the theater. It was an absurd comedy, and Aristophanes was on friendly terms with Socrates. He was ribbing him, not trying to get him killed.
Yet in Socrates’s Apology, Socrates tells the jury, “You yourselves saw [the accusations] in the comedy of Aristophanes, where a Socrates was carried about, claiming to walk on air and talking a great deal of nonsense about things I know nothing about.”
Socrates found these older slanders harder to refute than the actual legal charges. People who didn’t know him assumed they were true because they’d seen it in a play.
Why were so many Athenians taken in by this absurdist comedy?
Plato’s contemporaries and the later Romans certainly had imaginative literature — Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Seneca’s Philosophical Tragedies, and proto-novels like Apuleius’s The Golden Ass — but they didn’t have a fiction genre like ours.
To vastly oversimplify Greek and Roman genres, they saw stories as being true, false, or an allegory of truth— not simply “fictional.”
Early Christian thinkers like Tertullian and Augustine read Plato and agreed. They lambasted the theater as promoting idolatry, deception, and vice. So with the exception of some Christian plays (seen as true), theater mostly died out during the Dark Ages.
Entertaining Lies Hit The Page and Stage
When fictional works appeared in print and on stage again centuries later, people were flabbergasted and confused and had trouble telling them apart from reality. They appeared authoritative, often more so than the bible or neighbors they actually knew.
In the early twentieth century:
“Thomas Jones recalled that his mother, a Rhymney straw-hat maker, “was fifty before she read a novel and to her dying day she had not completely grasped the nature of fiction or of drama.” When she read Tom Jones “She believed every word of it and could not conceive how a man could sit down and invent the story of Squire Allworthy and Sophia and Tom out of his head.”
This was not an unusual reaction. It was perhaps the most common reaction to fiction.
Another man said he grasped the idea of fiction in books, but when watching Portia’s judgment of Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in a theater, he “leapt from the box and assaulted Shylock.”
A London theater goer noted how people reacted when they hadn’t fully mastered the idea of fictional theater:
“Look out!” an overwrought galleryite would shout, “’e’s going to stab yer with a knife.” Or when the poisoned cup was offered to the handsome hero, the action of the play would be delayed by voices anxiously bidding him not to drink it.”
Spotting Fantasy:
So how did people figure out how to tell the difference between reality and fiction?
Slowly and with great effort, mostly. And through the passing of generations. The distinction penetrated last in rural areas and among the poor, so that many were still alarmed when Orson Welles came on the radio speaking of aliens from Mars in 1938.
But as the idea of fiction being a thing separate from truth or lies took hold, society itself stepped in to remind the lagards that they were shouting at phantasms.
“Shut up, Fathead!” some grumpy old chap [(who understood the medium and the genre] would yell to a fool shouting at the stage. “‘ow can the play go on if he don’t get drugged? Besides, the ’ero’s bahnd to win in the end, ain’t he?”
— Books, newspapers, plays, radio dramas, and movies — It’s as if each new medium is so overwhelming that it takes a while for most people to see it as a story’s fictional medium and not reality itself.
Today, perhaps we’re relearning the same lesson with the internet. Will people find it hard to believe that we were so easily duped by internet misinformation in a hundred years?
“How could they have been so gullible?” they’ll say. “Isn’t it obvious that that’s just how the medium of the internet works?”
The Final Medium:
“Nothing is more difficult than to separate obvious things from the dubious, once your own mind has provided them.” — Lucretius, On The Nature of Things, 4.469
But there’s one last medium where a porous border between fantasy and reality dupes us all. Wise men and women have probably known about it since the beginning of humanity. They’ve written about it and spoken about it, but society hasn’t taken their observations to heart at scale.
I’m of course talking about the tinted glasses we wear, interposing a fantasy of bias and identity between ourselves and reality, deluding us about what’s real and true.
If you’re shaking your head, saying, “Andrew’s daft. I’m not wearing tinted glasses. I’d know it!”
Then I’d like to remind you that Victorians said the same thing when confronted with the overwhelming immediacy of a story on paper or actors on stage. This is real! It feels real! It’s true!
But no one believes that today. And I suspect if there are humans around in 500 years, they’ll have a far more nuanced, skeptical view of the intense, tinted medium through which existence is served to us.
I’ve written about some steps that would lead to a society where everyone is aware of our distorted medium.
But one of the major missing ingredients to scaling these solutions is the wise reframe from normal people. We have no modern version of those grumpy Victorian theater goers who shouted down the fools rushing the stage to interfere in pretend murders.
In fact, in my lifetime, we’ve skewed further away from that level of societal pushback to our medium’s distortions. Now “the hecklers” are encouraging the opposite.
Social media is filled with posts about trusting your emotions above all else. If something makes you uncomfortable, it’s bad. If you’re scared, you’ve been attacked. Don’t question those feelings — lean into them.
I hope we start to reverse course as a society. If we’re going to, we need more people trying to inject a measure of objective correction when the majority are blinded by distortions.
But even if you’re not eager to play this role, you yourself should consider training yourself to spot the distortions. It may be the most surefire way to avoid mistakes and misery.
This is what the good life requires.
Thanks for reading Socratic State of Mind.
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