Brexit and Foxe's Book of Martyrs

You know when a friend, family member or coworker is walking out of sight you can often tell who they are.  A subconscious bit of your brain has stored previous observations and assigned a particular pattern of sounds to that person.  Unbidden, their name cames to your mind when you ears clock the sound signature.  This all happens out of your control and with no effort on your part.


Your brain does all kinds of things like this.  How you know just the right amount of potatoes to prepare for a meal is another good example.  Some things you just learn by experience without even trying.  Just so long as you don't disrupt the regular pattern - by having people to stay and having meals at different times of day like say Christmas.  When the situation changes you suddenly find that your normal thought patterns don't work very well.

There's a good theory I've seen a couple of times discussed on line that suggests that disruptions to our normal flow of information mess with our normal ability to judge things. This means that changes to information technology in turn lead to upheavals in society until we have worked out what the actual value of the new information source is.  The examples given are the growth of literacy in the Roman Empire gave monotheism, which could be spread by books, a new advantage over polytheism which had previously been able to rely on statues and temples.  The advent of printing wrecked the Catholic Church.  The emergence of newspapers led to the rise of fascism.  I dare say there is some academic literature on all this somewhere, but I haven't actually checked it out.

But it does sort of make sense.  I instantly thought of an example.  During the reformation there was a widely circulated book called Foxe's Book of Martyrs.  This book contained many lurid tales of persecution of protestants by catholics and played a big part in transforming England and Scotland into protestant countries.  It's hard to imagine people being taken in by such obvious propaganda - especially as partisans highlighted the most extreme examples. But at the time there wasn't much previous history of these kinds of things.  With no baseline to judge it against, and with the written word still carrying a lot of authority, people simply took the stories at face value and behaved accordingly.  The Catholic church has never been able to repair the damage to its image in England.

Nobody is accusing the EU of burning people at the stake yet, but a lot of the things said about it bear much less relation to reality than the protestant fears of catholic persecution.

So on this view the current wave of populism is the result of people paying way more attention to internet memes than they should.  So for example there was a photo circulating during the referendum campaign showing a starving a polar bear with the caption claiming that the EU prevents action being taken to protect them.  This was targeted at people whose profiles suggested they were concerned with animal rights.  It seems to have been effective.  This may well be because that kind of thing is still quite new and we aren't on our guard the way we are with standard advertising.  Interestingly the divide between the young and the old on the EU question might well be that young people have a better grasp of the reliability of the information to be found on social media.

So I suppose the good news is that the era of Trump, Brexit and unsavoury europopulists might be a relatively short-lived one as our collective subconscious kicks in and we all become less skittish about emotional propaganda.