Human Meme

This show is about the ideas that copy themselves through us, the ones we carry and hand on without inspecting them, and today's idea is a number. My new book reaches the world this week. It is called The Eighteen-Minute Lie, and it is the biography of a statistic that was never true, followed from the hour someone forged it to the moment it convinced a civilization that it had lost its mind. I spent two years on it, in part because I owed the work. I helped carry the lie. You have heard the louder version of my number, the one that beat mine and traveled the world. The human attention span, it says, has fallen to eight seconds, one tick shorter than a goldfish's. You have met it in a TED talk, on a morning show, inside a slide deck built to sell you the software that will rescue the same focus the previous slide told you that you had lost. It is one of the most repeated figures of the age.

So how did the cartoon win? In the summer of 1925, in a hot courtroom in Dayton, Tennessee, William Jennings Bryan agreed to defend a law against the teaching of evolution. Clarence Darrow put him on the stand and took him apart in front of the country. A newspaperman named H. L. Mencken filed dispatches that turned the old orator into a national figure of fun, and the dispatches were funnier than they were fair. Then Bryan died, five days later, and Mencken wrote an obituary that buried the man before the grave was dug. The prose was brilliant. It was also a kind of murder, a reputation killed while the body was still warm. A play came along a generation on, Inherit the Wind, and finished the job. The meme was sealed, and it has been copying itself ever since.

In the spring of 1973, in a public school in Lincoln, Nebraska, a teacher handed me a paper armband and told me to wear it for the rest of the day. Mine was blue, and it carried a single printed letter, an "S." The children with brown eyes wore brown bands lettered "M". No one explained the letters to a room of eight-year-olds. I have spent the rest of my life arriving at what they meant. "M" for Master. "S" for Slave. The next morning the roles reversed, and the children who had ruled became the ruled. No one in that room was Black. The teacher said the lesson was empathy. I want to talk today about the book I built out of that morning, and out of fifty years of watching that morning return in new costumes. It is called Not My Thing: How We Teach Cruelty to Cure It, from the Armband to the Diversity Seminar. That armband was one early specimen of a method that has since grown into an industry.

Picture a man in a bright room in a great house. In front of him sit three boxes. One is gold, one is silver, one is lead. He may open exactly one of them. Open the right box and he marries the cleverest and richest woman in the room and clears the debt closing around his friend's neck. Open either of the others and he leaves forever, sworn never to court another woman as long as he lives. The woman who waits for him loves him, and by the terms of her dead father's will she is forbidden to give him the smallest hint. Music plays. He reads the words cut into the three lids, he talks for a while about the gap between how things look and what they are, and he lays his hand on the dullest of the three, the lead, and wins her. That is the casket scene from The Merchant of Venice, and it may be the most rigged fair contest in the English language. Shakespeare wrote it in the fifteen-nineties. It never closed. You walked through a version of it this morning, and you will walk through another one before you sleep tonight.

Let me start with a piece of paper. Early in the twentieth century a printed rate card circulated among the opera houses of Italy, a schedule of charges from a claque, one of the applause brigades that worked the great houses of Europe. Approval came in grades, and the grades came at prices. Polite appreciation cost little. Insistence cost more. Down at the luxury end, for a wild ovation at any cost, the price became a sum to be arranged. A psychologist named Robert Cialdini reprinted that tariff decades later in his study of social proof, where it sits among the laboratory findings like a fossil among X-rays, the same animal at two stages of preservation.Now move forward a hundred years. A company in West Palm Beach sold the same product from a drop-down menu, five hundred followers for ten dollars, more than two hundred million of them moved before a newspaper took the operation apart in 2018. The invoice was older than the empire that first printed it.