by Martin Butler
I was listening recently to some teenagers on the radio talking about how they saw their future lives and was struck by how many expressed the desire to be internet ‘influencers’. Why did I feel distaste? Was it my age, my generation? My problem is not with the internet itself but with the very expression ‘influencer’, and the fact that there was no reference at all to the nature of the influencing. That was almost an afterthought, as if the key to being a successful influencer amounted to mere popularity, chalking up the followers. Presumably though, there are good and bad influencers, and I don’t mean good here in the sense of being able to influence lots of people, but good in the sense of having a positive rather than a negative influence.
It’s the age-old problem of the relationship between the good and the popular. Plato saw the popular as the enemy of the good, but then he is at one end of the scale, famously arguing that democracy was bad because it confused the good with the popular. Societies, he believed, need good government while democracy merely delivers popular government, which is quite a different thing. (Plato uses his simile of the ship to describe democracy, which gave rise to Sebastian Brant’s 15th allegory of the Ship of Fools.) Similarly, with regard to the arts, the unashamed elitist might argue that good art is by its very nature difficult, requiring education, intellect, and effort. Popularity requires less. In line with Plato, Mill argued that there are two qualitatively distinct pleasures, the lower and the higher, the lower pandering to popularity, the higher more difficult to access. According to this way of thinking, the artist, writer or musician who follows high artistic ideals better not give up the day job, and it’s folly to expect the general paying public to appreciate such ideals even if the work produced is of the highest calibre. Rembrandt died in poverty, Van Gogh only sold one picture in his lifetime, and Moby Dick was a flop and out of print for many years. The list goes on and on.
At the other end of the spectrum are those who deny that there is any intrinsic distinction between the good and the less so, and that the only way to make a meaningful distinction is simply to count the ‘likes’, so to speak. Everything is simply a matter of opinion, so if we want to identify something as good, popularity is the only ‘objective’ means by which we can do it. As in the commercial world, ‘the customer is always right’, and the popular is the good. It is mere snobbery to pretend otherwise, a snobbery I could be accused of with my distaste for the aspiration to be an influencer. For according to this view there is only one kind of good influencer, and that is a successful one.
Both these extremes are unsatisfactory. Surely there can be some kind of relationship between the good and the popular?
We see it in the arts with the passage of time. Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Melville all received their posthumous dues. If the good is separated from the popular in too rigid a way it becomes so far removed from people’s lives that it starts to lose any significance. Why should anyone care about what is unattainable or unknowable? Plato understood that the good was accessible, but thought this was only for a very small and select group of people – the philosopher kings or ‘guardians’. What he did get right was the idea that the good and the popular are not the same, however much we might want them to be. And here we need to ask the basic question – what’s wrong with being popular? I remember growing up in the 60s and 70s when bands who, after struggling for years with a small niche audience, were labelled as having ‘sold out’ if they suddenly gained a mass following, as if the mere fact of popularity was a mark against them. Popularity just means bad, according to this logic. Of course you could argue that the increased popularity coincided with a decrease in quality, but that doesn’t mean that popularity itself is the problem. Popular equals bad is just as silly as popular equals good.
However ill-defined and however much room there is for argument, some concept of goodness (and indeed truth) that does not reduce simply to levels of popularity is needed. This applies right across the board from internet influencers to art, music, politics, science and even business. Without such an idea the very notion of argument or disagreement loses meaning, since disagreement in these areas (and others) is about what is good or true. We do, of course, often simply agree to differ – I like coffee you don’t, there’s no argument here, just difference. But our cultural landscape would be alien indeed if there were no argument, not even suppressed argument, if everyone always just agreed to differ and the only accepted means of identifying ‘goodness’ was popularity. In such an inarticulate culture – if it is indeed conceivable – no reasons would need to be given as to why X is better than Y. All that would matter is that ‘more people prefer X than Y’.
From the idea that some things can be intrinsically better than others regardless of numbers, we can gain a more sophisticated concept of popularity itself. There are two kinds, it seems. Put simply, bad popularity arises when someone (say an ‘influencer’) has no other aim than popularity itself. The influencer has no ideal of the good but merely attempts to second guess and manipulate their audience. Kant’s humanity formulation of the categorical imperative, which proscribes deceptively using people for your own ends, pinpoints what is wrong with this kind of bad popularity. In contrast, someone who gains popularity in a good sense must have achieved it through their conception of the good, whatever area of life they operate in. This kind of popularity is an oblique consequence of their grasp and expression of the conception of the good, just as happiness is gained as an oblique consequence of other activities rather than through trying to be happy. Popularity alone cannot be the primary purpose.
It applies in politics too. Contrast the politician who has no coherent political vision but merely says what he or she believes people want to hear in order to gain power (in the UK context think Boris Johnson), with the politician who does have a thought-out vision of a good society and uses reasoned argument to convince the electorate to share this vision. This is a simplification of course, but if we are to take democracy seriously, a distinction of this sort is essential. The cynical view that ‘they’re are all as bad as each other’ is ultimately anti-democratic. Just so, the popular internet influencer who has researched what is likely to gain the most likes and carefully choreographed their internet posts on this basis has no other concern than maximising followers. Contrast this with a musician of some sort who has a particular musical vision which inspires them to write and perform their own songs on YouTube. Here the musician’s conception of the good (their musical vision) resonates with others and popularity follows obliquely from the realisation of their creativity.
Plato was pessimistic about the possibility of good popularity; he seems to have believed that it will always be outdone by bad popularity – which is of course why he rejected democracy. Mark Twain echos this pessimism with his quip that “A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots.” We might also point out that Nietzsche, Freud (and many others) tell us that our beliefs (and indeed artistic tastes) result from all sorts of completely irrational forces. The idea that masses of people can be inspired to believe or appreciate something on the basis of a shared conception of the good might appear quaintly naïve. However, we need to remember here that these thinkers themselves were writing to convince us of their vision of the world and not merely writing stuffing that they thought would tempt us to buy their books! So Nietzsche and Freud earn good popularity. In any case we need to get clear that what matters is the motivation behind the influencer rather than the reasons why the audience follow. The influencer with integrity produces good popularity, the psychology of the followers is to a large extent beside the point.
Here also there are criticisms. Isn’t the distinction I have made far too cut and dried? Surely even those of the highest integrity who open themselves to public scrutiny – whether artists, politicians, or internet influencers – will inevitably candy-coat their ’products’ to make them more appealing. And is anything wrong with this? Probably not, but this is quite different from the case where candy-coat is all there is. As with many similar distinctions, just because the borderline can be blurred it doesn’t mean there isn’t a borderline, and that’s the key point. But can we ever really tell the difference between the politicians, for example, who merely say what they know we want to hear and those who have a genuine vision of the good that we should take seriously? Not always. That’s the problem with democracy. But the fact that making these distinctions is difficult doesn’t mean it’s impossible and we should take care not to slip into the anti-democratic state of mind which claims ‘they are all as bad as each other.’
And of course there are important differences not just between but within categories. The novelist who writes novels to a tried and tested formula designed purely to maximise readership would generate bad popularity according to my definition, but that’s no big problem. Writing of this sort is simply a commercial project, and such books meet a need and don’t pretend to be high literature. Likewise the internet is a broad church and offers numerous opportunities for participation. You can post instructional videos, advise on cosmetics, health, exercise, write articles on substack (or 3 Quarks!) and so on. There are of course many good and useful influencers. There are also those who stray into such dubious and potentially dangerous territory as quackery, suicide, anorexia, or who spread conspiracy theories or other political theories that sound dramatic and impressive because there is a market for them. This is the internet influencer as political activist. But internet influencing is essentially a commercial enterprise where the logic of ‘the customer is always right’ can so easily prevail, so if this becomes the dominant culture within democratic politics we are in danger of losing any concept of the good which is beyond the popular. And here the problem is not so much about not knowing how to tell the difference, but the dissolution of the distinction all together. Politics then becomes just another commercial project, a competition between who can get the most likes. And that surely is something to be concerned about.