Brief Genealogy of the Midwit
We all know the type: self-assured, confident in topics he knows nothing about, falsely humble in the face of credentialed information, and skeptical to a fault when offered anything that contradicts an established media narrative. The midwit. Not the drone, who simply doesn’t know any better. And not the demoralized ones, who do know better but believe—rightfully or wrongfully—to have no choice in their lot in life.
Sometimes the midwit is a professor, at other times, an engineer. Periodically, he’ll be a manager of some sort. The midwit is not a know-it-all per se, but he’ll come across as one. He rarely asks questions, but he’s unafraid to share his own opinions. He knows what the problem is. Usually, he’ll speak as often or more than he’ll listen. And in general, you’re more likely to find him online than in real life, though this is likely due to how the computer screen filters out self awareness in favor of some absent-minded vice.
Where does the midwit come from, though? The general category has probably existed for as long as the human race has, yet this wouldn’t explain the unique situation that our contemporary civilization finds itself in. The midwit is today considered the perfect citizen, our managerial class seems predominately staffed by them, and most of the media encourages this behavior. The white liberal elite and their Millennial serfs are especially prone to the sort of midwittery found in the comedy of George Carlin or on the website Reddit. But Redditors and Carlinism are, admittedly, extreme examples.
Far more benign midwittery will find itself peppered about just about every class of our social order. You’ll know it once you see it. It usually takes on the form of a general knowledge about unimportant details of the professional class. And, usually, these details end up being totally false. It could almost be compared to an adult version of a child deducing facts about space travel from watching Star Trek or Star Wars, though the differences here are key. The role the media plays in shaping this sense of imagination is the same, but the crux of the problem is deeper than this. It comes down to the relationship that imagination plays in forming an adult’s sense of the world versus that of a child’s.
For a child, the boundary between his imagination and his lived experience is a little blurrier than for an adult. Nonetheless, they do understand distinctions, as the careful fostering of a child’s imagination—what sort of stories and images he has access to—is one of the major components of a parent’s duty. By the time the child is a teenager, how he reconciles his imagination with reality will define his interaction with the world as he enters adulthood. This applies to his moral judgments just as much as it applies to his sense of aesthetics and his capacity for reasoning.
But consider when midwittery came to dominate the world, and which generations specifically were most affected by it. Boomers, largely, as well as every generation after them. What could have happened to the imaginations of the people in the West that could date itself so specifically to beginning with the Baby Boomer generation? What could impact the development of a person’s imagination such that it impeded his practical sense of differentiating truth from falsehood, right from wrong, and beauty from ugliness? What, with all this in mind, exactly is midwittery?
Police Procedurals and the CSI Effect
Some years ago, when police shows like Law & Order and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation were popular, an op-ed appeared in the Wall Street Journal explaining the CSI Effect. This was back in 2005; law dramas and cop shows were still on their ascendancy toward dominating prime time television. If you weren’t around back then, or if you weren’t in America at the time, you’ll know what I mean if you can get a TV guide program from the period: many hours each night across multiple stations all airing some procedural drama about law, justice, cops, or forensics.
You probably already know what the CSI Effect is. It pops up still in common parlance, albeit not as regularly as it did a decade ago. Specifically, it refers to the demand by juries for DNA evidence in order to present guilty verdicts, ostensibly on the grounds that the crime show CSI popularized the scientific side of evidence collection. The article for the Journal, however, dismisses the notion of an actual CSI Effect existing, claiming “There is a robust field of research on jury decision-making but no study finding any ‘C.S.I. effect.’”
The authors, an assistant professor of criminology at UC Irvine and a grad student from the same college, both express skepticism that the CSI Effect has any impact on juries. Far be it for me to critique the work of California academics, but their comment should leave many of us skeptical. As an example of their airtight logic that “it is not even clear what the ‘CSI Effect’ actually is,” they point toward what both prosecutors and defense attorneys have to say on the matter:
Prosecutors claim that the show makes juries less inclined to convict because they have inflated expectations for the comprehensiveness, sophistication and clarity of forensic evidence—all those threads and fibers and DNA traces left behind at crime scenes.
Fair enough; that seems to fit what’s believable about evidence processing and its glamorization during the Bush years. But then they say this:
Defense attorneys contend that the show makes juries inclined to convict because it portrays forensic evidence as unambiguous and more certain than it is. Lisa Steele, the co-chair of the Forensic Evidence Committee for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, suggests that “C.S.I.” is “making folks less skeptical about the potential for forensic error or fraud.” Max Houck, the director of the Forensic Science Initiative at West Virginia University, argues that the show “incorrectly depicts forensic science as this juggernaut of infallibility.”
The guys at the other desk claim that juries are more skeptical of the prosecution, and more inclined to agree with defendants, specifically because of this glamorization of forensics. That falls exactly in line with what they just claimed that prosecutors were complaining about. What our academics can’t seem to grasp is that the CSI Effect hinges on whether or not there’s any sophisticated-looking forensic evidence for the jury to ponder. That’s the point of the shows, after all.
The writers’ apparent befuddlement does hit, perhaps unknowingly, on the crux of the issue a paragraph later. The presence of a show like CSI, and likewise of television media in general, alters the average person’s perceptions about very real events and professions. According to the piece, the show attracted “record numbers of college students into forensic-science programs, much as ‘E.R.’ drew them into medicine, ‘L.A. Law’ into law and ‘All the President’s Men’ into journalism,” adding dryly that “no one should choose an occupation based on Hollywood’s version of it.” True words, certainly, but a person’s choice in career is far less important than their understanding of reality, and if the CSI Effect exists, then the latter remains a bigger problem to worry about.
This article was published in 2005, right before the informational revolution that occurred in 2007. Two things of relevance occurred that year: the release of the first iPhone, and the start of Netflix’s streaming platform. Just a few months beforehand, in October of 2006, Google had acquired YouTube; a month before that, Facebook opened to casual users. In about five years, between Fall of 2006 and the start of 2012, the way the casual internet user interacted with media and information would change so radically as to be unrecognizable. These were pivotal events in the construction of the current internet.
This must be remembered when speaking of television from the mid-2000s. At the time, television and legacy programming maintained some sense of coherency: a unified point of reference for all things popular culture. This doesn’t exist anymore. What took its place has been shows produced and written to be binge-watched, but for the most part, the only demographic engaged in this exercise are center-left Millennials and the white liberal urban types. There might be one or two shows that gain broader appeal, but the domination of streaming over legacy television has had the predictable result: greater polarization and a diversification of demographic appeal.
In some corners, culture is talked about with relation to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and whatever new films are being pumped by the Hollywood machine. In others, usually among the older crowds, it’s the shows that still play on television networks. Over the last ten years, these have become increasingly dominated by news and political punditry. Still others will watch the low-budget superhero-themed serials that play on whatever the equivalent of UPN is. The same can be said of the police procedural shows, for which there will probably always be a small market now that its bubble has burst.
This diversification of media has only affected the audience who consumes it, however, as the people who produce and finance television remain part of a more or less cohesive group of people who all share the same ideology. So even though there is more availability of media, the general settings with which these pieces are made, the backgrounds, the baggage, so to speak, is all more or less the same. Keep this in mind.
The CSI Effect is still talked about today, though somewhat less often. Crime dramas and police procedurals still, even after all this time, find audiences among the Boomer demographics that can’t be bothered with streaming platforms. As they age out of the market, the term itself will probably disappear and be replaced by something else.
But the CSI Effect hasn’t gone away, nor has it really been studied in any detail. Why do audiences do this? You might say, they’re adults, they shouldn’t be confusing real life with fantasy. Intuitively, we recognize this. “I play a doctor on television” doesn’t mean that an actor has the foggiest idea of what practicing medicine is actually like.
But maybe it’s a bit more complicated than simply confusing fiction with reality.
Fiction, Narrative, Real Life
Murder serials have been popular on television almost since television’s invention. After cowboys, sitcoms, and soap operas, the detective or mystery show is a mainstay of American programming. Often, more than the mystery itself, the success of the show relies on all the same things that other genres rely on: the charisma of its lead actors, and the interest in drama on the part of the writers’ team.
The shows mentioned in the article above—E.R., L.A. Law, the film All the President’s Men—date to periods in television history even earlier than CSI, but for this reason they’re even more illustrative of the affect media has on American consciousness. As such, we’ll draw upon one of the older classics in order to illustrate an example contrary, somewhat, to how CSI apparently invented the CSI Effect. And it’s a classic that hopefully most of my audience is familiar with.
In 1968, Peter Falk starred in the pilot episode of Columbo, the legendary murder-themed drama about the protagonist of the same name: a doddering, seemingly absent-minded police lieutenant. He apparently went nowhere with a pencil or anywhere without a cigar, and he did so in a beat-up jalopy of a convertible. The show was shot against the backdrop of then-affluent California suburbs, in the idyllic regions of West Coast high society. The character has a lot to owe, by the writers’ own admission, to the likes of Dostoevsky and Chesterton.
Remember here that the series was not specifically a murder mystery in the proper sense of the term. If you’re unfamiliar with the show’s premise, each episode introduced a conflict which by the end of act one ended with a homicide. This homicide prompted the police investigation and the arrival of the titular lieutenant. But in every episode, the murderer is shown. There’s no mystery for the audience, just a story that shows off Columbo’s skills, charm, observation, and cunning.
If you’ve never seen the show, or if it’s just been a while, it’s easy to forget how outlandish some of the conclusions to the episodes were. In one of them, a programmable machine—in an appearance by Robby the Robot—is used to provide an alibi for an ultra-high IQ man overseeing wargames scenarios at a remote camp for geniuses. In another, a gadgets guru uses complicated video editing hardware to fake camera footage of his mother-in-law’s murder—in the days that clap-on/clap-off technology was still something of a technological novelty. And then there was a rather convoluted one about Leslie Nielsen, playing a spy, getting killed.
Columbo’s outlandishness is almost something to be admired, in fact. Beyond Falk’s ability to bring the character’s blue collar charm to life are the little things: technology used as a magic box that just seems to work, revolvers with functional silencers that are never explained (no, they weren’t Nagants), surveillance cameras with impeccable resolution. Episodes are littered with the sort of oversights that only a TV writer’s room could make, filled with people who are good at drama but seem to have little experience beyond working inside a studio.
This was part of the charm in classic television programming, to some degree, but that sort of amusing cluelessness never went away. As our academic observers from the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed pointed out regarding CSI: “much of the forensic science depicted on “C.S.I.”—40%, according to forensic scientist Thomas Mauriello—does not even exist.” There’s a point in any fictional endeavor where storytelling has to collide with realism, insofar as the realism has to both keep the setting consistent as well as maintain the audience’s suspension of disbelief.
A good story will meet realism and blend into it with a seamless embrace. A bad one has a violent accident, at which point the mistake is handed off onto the audience. They have to judge whether the story is worth consuming to its uninteresting end, or to drop it for a more prudent use of time.
Contemporary writing, by which we should point to the blockbusters of the last decade, is notoriously lax on this front. But the audiences of today are even less shrewd than the audiences of previous generations, having had their imaginations and senses of critical reasoning hollowed out by excessive consumerism, advertising and, yes, pornography. Storytelling sits at a crossroads of aesthetics and reason, and the more one indulges in crimes against these, the more hateful one grows of both.
But we stumble here upon what makes the dramas of Columbo and the mysteries of CSI different. According to the op-ed referenced above, Anthony Zuiker, CSI’s creator, considered the show “educational”:
“People know science now,” he says. “They watch ‘C.S.I.'”
Columbo’s writers did no such thing, and neither did any of the writers on NBC’s Mystery Hour. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone, from the writers of Adam 12 up through Murder She Wrote, to be looking to make some sort of “edu-tainment’ for prime time audiences. The reason an audience watched the show was for the drama. And the shows were very up front about that. This was television, you weren’t tuning in for a look at real life. You were looking for entertainment. Entertainment meant characters, conflict, intrigue, suspense—all things CSI had, of course—but it didn’t mean teaching, presenting, or informing.
It’s healthy to be wary of entertainment that tries to do this. Instruction can be fun, but one engages with instruction as instruction first, and any entertainment value is derived secondarily to this first engagement. The same is true, however, for entertainment, yet entertainment is by design not the best suited means for presenting instructional material. This is where entertainment ceases to be harmless half-hour chunks of rest and relaxation, and instead becomes social programming.
It’s possible that the advent of reality television changed some things. I’m not looking to survey that here. But what is noteworthy is the shift in television storytelling in the late 90s and the early 00s: the rise of the sort of “edu-tainment” style of drama that came at the expense of the older generation’s stories. This novelty contributed to the boom of crime dramas during the mid-00s and into the 2010s, but it also contributed to its bust. Audiences at the time wanted to see technology in action. It was cool. But because of how they interacted with media—and likewise because of how the writers’ room operated—it ended up skewing their understanding of that same technology and the professions which used it.
As mentioned above, it’s not that a show like CSI was even educational. The writers barely knew what they were talking about, and when they didn’t—which was often—they had the creative license to just make it all up. The writers knew that they were operating in the same creative sphere as Stargate Atlantis and The Simpsons. And, at least implicitly, the audience understood this as well; audiences tuned into CSI not to learn about crime scene investigation methodology or forensics, but to watch charismatic actors fulfill the roles of compelling characters in order to carry out narratives.
The problem is that audiences expected the fiction—the drama between the characters—and without even realizing it, came away with the setting—the procedural. The CSI Effect began when CSI’s window dressings became its most memorable component. You could attribute this to the novelty of its approach.
Making crime scene forensics look “glamorous”, as the op-ed writers said, is only seeing half of the problem. The problem was the presence of something utterly false, utterly fake, injected and taken for granted within a show that audiences took to be grounded in some sense of reality. Forensics don’t work they way they do on CSI. Labs don’t look like that. The technicians aren’t that suave or good looking. And police investigations, even in Las Vegas, aren’t conducted the way the show depicts them. And all of that would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that there was some concerted effort beyond the show to cast this as intellectually stimulating, educational, informative.
Remember, Columbo was riddled with outlandish elements that drove any given episode to its conclusion. Anyone familiar with classic television will see the same across most crime dramas—Matlock, Murder She Wrote, Perry Mason, name any one of them and you’ll find writers working with limited time to produce something entertaining. Making sense and bending realism weren’t as important as making the deadline. CSI operated this way as well. It had to; it was a television show.
And yet it’s hard to deny that there’s a disparity. There weren’t many who would watch Perry Mason and walk away from it believing themselves better versed in the ways of trial law. Maybe a few, admittedly, but it didn’t affect the broad subset of viewers quite the way CSI and related programming did in the 2000s. What had changed between 1975 and 2005?
The Media & the Midwit
The shortest answer is that the average level of intelligence across the American public had drastically declined, particularly among the quality of our educated, professional classes.
On one hand, the transition of the universities from centers of education to centers of indoctrination was certainly orchestrated. The money trail of federal grants is enough to indicate all sorts of confused incentives behind the curtain. But on the other hand, the universities themselves are also only bringing in students of so high a caliber. High school graduates aren’t what they once were, after all. Those subjected to the public option can attest to this personally.
Boomers don’t recognize this decline except when they’re confronted with it in person—either when they’re behind a hiring desk or in front of a cashier’s counter. Gen X and Millennials recognize the decline but are such a product of it that they either feel unable to criticize it or lack the resources to do anything about it. The failure of the public school apparatus is especially crucial to blame here, but so is the revolution in electronic media. When children are locked away in classrooms for eight hours a day, twelve years of their life, fed nothing but busy work and taught only the bare minimum of subjects to any competency, media fills in the gaps left by faulty curriculae. Media, you could say, exists to program the public.
It is with some trepidation that I use this term, as it brings with it connotations of a materialist view of cognitive behavior that is as wrongheaded as it is convoluted. But it is not without its practicality; the study of human behavior does reveal patterns and motives that, at least in a general sense, are receptive to conditioning, coordination, et cetera. Human behavior, and even thought, can be conditioned and programmed insofar as it presents to the soul the temptation of absolution—but not from sin. Rather, from responsibility.
There is more that can and should be mentioned on this subject, but in the interests of brevity, it must be passed over. Consider briefly, instead, the NPC memes of a couple years ago: the passive abandonment of critical thinking, to whatever degree any given person is capable of it, in favor of the security of a media-driven narrative. To assume that these people have no wills, that they are husks of automatons with no hope of maintaining either rational thought or free agency, is to sin against charity. But at the same time, to presume that there is anything short of the grace of God to break them out of their own frames of mind is to demand a level of personal communication that very few of us are afforded. The use of reason, we should hopefully all recognize by now, is not enough.
What would possess someone, then, to relinquish control over their agency? Putting it more appropriately, what would possess someone to freely give his agency away in return for the base humiliation of a well-trained media slave? Now the temptation should be a bit more obvious. It’s a temptation that preys on pride, offering to bear the responsibility of being wrong. All it asks in return is that the slave refuses to utilize his agency in the exercise of critical thought.
This works so long as the person making the deal overvalues his own knowledge. Modernity, however, has shaped the image of a good liberal, and chief among its definitions is knowledge, critical thinking, reasoning, the like. To be a good liberal—going further, to be a good person, as according to liberalism—one must be intelligent. This is especially obvious when terms like misinformed, or more crassly, stupid, are applied to political enemies.
The theory of liberalism runs into pragmatic problems, of course, which is that no one can ever be an expert in anything. So they turn to experts in order to be the best informed and, therefore, the better liberals—or better people. But the third problem totally escapes them: how can you trust the experts? Thus enter credentialism. Thus enter the media. Thus enter the narratives.
Succinctly: the more a man prides himself on his knowledge, and the more he defines his worth and moral character by it, the easier it is for him to surrender his reasoning over to the narratives of the experts. Doing so frees him from ever actually being wrong, while alleviating the tedium of actually having to know anything. Social conditioning on the widest scale operates according to a similar principle.
When asked what would possess a man to surrender his agency like this, it becomes pretty obvious. And so too does the appropriateness of the word ‘possession’.
This sort of pride is not as simple as an unwillingness to admit when one is wrong. Such cases, numerous as they are, are hardly as egregious. After all, if someone refuses to admit he’s wrong, he still engages with the consideration that he might, in fact, be wrong. And then he simply denies it. It’s possible he’s correct in denying it, but it’s also possible that he’s just being stubborn.
But this other phenomenon is worse. It results in tiresome conversations in which a conclusion is reached, someone comes around to another’s position, a compromise is agreed upon, only for the exact same argument to be had again between the exact same people only a day or two later. It’s not an issue of admitting some untruth or factual error. It’s about refusing all awareness of being responsible for one’s words in the first place. The narrative assumes that responsibility. The people parroting the narrative give that narrative that responsibility.
How Not to be a Midwit
Midwittery does seem to fall on a certain segment of the intelligence bell curve, but remember that it’s fundamentally a moral problem rather than some deficiency or surplus of reason. Intelligence is not synonymous with reason, but rather one’s capacity to wield it. Some choose simply to ignore that capacity, shortcut their reasoning skills or otherwise leave them undeveloped, and live as zombies addicted to some exterior messaging. It is a choice, but more often than not, it’s a choice that is surrendered to rather than engaged with on level ground.
Some avant-garde theorists of the last century hypothesized the creation of a word virus that could infect language itself and render it incapable of meaning. A fantasy, to be sure, but it’s not quite as outlandish as it sounds. Instead of a virus, what we’re dealing with here is a drug against reason, a language drug, a logic drug. Like a drug, it corrupts one’s use of language and reason, and like a drug, it makes those engaged with it addicted to the irresponsibility it affords. And, like a drug, it has its peddlers and dealers, its cartels, its moguls—perhaps better known to us as news anchors, reporters, professors, media conglomerates, universities, political parties. And, like a drug, the longer one engages with it, the harder it is to disentangle yourself from its negative effects. To reference Orwell here, learning to love Big Brother means giving up your agency because doing so seems to make life easier. Cast in this light, midwit liberals have taken a blackpill even blacker and harder to swallow than any doomsayer on the right.
The CSI Effect was just one illustrative example of how this midwittery shows up in real life. It’s certainly real. Consider it the appropriate counterpart to the scientism of modern liberalism. The midwit places all of his trust in experts who are supposed to know what they’re doing, and then turns around and parrots what the experts say as though he considers himself a member of that class. At no point in this process does the midwit have to review information for himself or consider ideas in abstract.
And the worst part is that there’s no differentiation between actors, writers, politicians. A good liberal fed on a steady diet of media consumption will have numbed the relationship between his own imagination and his reasoning capabilities. Although he recognizes the obvious—that what happens on a television screen isn’t real life, at least per se—things that look real enough will just be brought into his own world view. This is how you end up with grown men viewing shameless propaganda and actually believing it, at the expense of any counterfactual but more legitimate information.
In similar fashion, it’s why TV shows that aren’t some kind of edu-tainment—some kind of programming, or otherwise loaded with the cultural artifacts of woke-lib signaling—is treated, at best, as an amusing artifact of another culture. They might enjoy it, but it doesn’t seem to mean anything to them. The narrative of a drama has to include the greater organizing narratives pushed by the broader media in order for the smaller drama to have a context. This is especially true for the consumption habits of Millennials and Zoomers. Older programming lacks the context that they’ve been trained to use as interpretive guides.
How then should we not be midwits? Painting with broad strokes: avoid media. Cultivate taste. Grow and train your sense of aesthetics. Recognize beauty. Practice virtue. Pray. It’s a simple solution for a problem that is even simpler, once the root issue is revealed. Vice prefers to hide in shadows and pull different excuses or lesser vices over itself in order to never be found. Midwits by definition do not believe themselves, at least by outward appearances, to be acting in bad faith. That’s why they sold their agency for such a low asking price in the first place; if they’re wrong, it’s the narrative’s fault, not theirs. Or so they wish to believe.
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