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You meet someone, get along well, accept an invitation to their home and, as refreshments are prepared in the next room — hear that muffled sound of ice clinking in a glass — browse their bookshelves. And there it is. Not quite as predictable as death and taxes, no. But just as disheartening.
Sapiens.
The issue isn’t the book itself, whose alleged lack of depth and historical accuracy I lack the expertise to evaluate. The issue is the predictability. Like declaring “Guernica” as your favorite painting or watching the Oscar winner for Best International Feature as your yearly world cinema allotment, displaying the Yuval Noah Harari title on your shelf feels obligatory. It’s thoughtful enough.
The expansion of higher education started an entire generation ago. Individuals under 40 have grown up with the internet, giving them access to the entirety of human knowledge at no additional cost. There have been few formal restrictions on thought and speech since the decline of the Church. By now, life in the middle class should resemble a London coffee house in 1690: filled with intellectual discussions, amateur experimentation, and dissenting subcultures.
What surprises me instead is the homogeneity out there. Educated city dwellers across the Western world have converged on a more or less common set of tastes and sensibilities. One term to describe this type of person is “midwit,” but that implies that the core issue is a lack of intelligence, which is rarely the case. A better descriptor is “Normie.”
Normie wants to discuss Succession. Normie believes that Los Angeles is just a city dominated by cars and superficial people. Normie’s profile picture is a selfie taken on the steps of Santorini. Can you envision the kind of person I’m referring to? No? Let me elaborate, then. Normie privately questions new gender doctrines but doesn’t enjoy confrontation with friends or younger individuals. If Normie is English, they think Gareth Southgate has done an exceptional job reconnecting the national football team with the people. Normie leans toward a form of easygoing liberalism in their politics. Normie went to see Hamilton.
Now, I understand the danger here. Defining oneself against bourgeois conventions for the sake of it can lead to dark places. Often, some pretentious individual, having only read a portion of a blurb from a John Mearsheimer book between trades, will argue that NATO should have ceded Eastern Europe as a “buffer zone” with Russia. Give me a thousand Normies over the contrarian right any day.
Undoubtedly, each era has its clichés and common sayings. Gustave Flaubert’s posthumous work, Dictionary of Received Ideas, aimed to document those of late 19th-century France. Entries under “Animals” (“If only they could speak. Some are smarter than men!”) and “Beethoven” (“Don’t pronounce Beet-hoven. Praise the legato”) provide a glimpse into the mindset. Flaubert was mocking long-gone Parisians, but he also captured the atmosphere of modern dinner parties where meaningful conversation rarely occurs. The difference today is that there’s much less excuse for it.
This, to reverse Hannah Arendt, is the banality of evil. Perhaps I’m more sensitive to this because of my job. As a columnist, I thrive on ideas. The kindest thing someone can do for me is to say something original that stimulates a column. And the worst disservice is subjecting me to an evening of Normie babble (“But what does Keir Starmer stand for?”) as a deadline looms. For this reason, my interactions with people are increasingly reminiscent of medieval kings who execute jesters for being insufficiently entertaining.
I’m still not convinced that the internet has poisoned public discourse. (Was Joe McCarthy using Facebook?) I also waver on Peter Turchin’s theory that an excess of graduates — trained in abstract thinking but lacking career prospects — is driving extremism. No, in the end, the strongest case against the great surge in knowledge and communication over recent decades isn’t that it has been a civic or social catastrophe. It has simply fallen flat. What should have been an exciting mass culture has become a subject that even Flaubert would mock.
Email Janan at [email protected]
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