“Tom Hanks” Is Always The Easy Answer, and Other Hard Lessons From the Pandemic

Some questions trigger not answers but reflexes. “What’s your favorite food?” has a reflex, the same as favorite football team or favorite President. You need not think, merely blurt, the answer spilling out like a fast-twitch muscle.

One of the great reflexes of our time is “Tom Hanks.” It’s the reflex to that living, breathing, always-present question … “Who is today’s greatest actor?” It is nearly bullet-proof in its unflinching and universal truth. Really, who can argue against “Forrest Gump,” “Saving Private Ryan” and “Big”?

But what about Willem Defoe? Before you reflex with laughter, consider these movies as the waves against your Hanks-ian seawall: “Mississippi Burning,” “Platoon,” and “The English Patient.” Or why not consider Defoe simply as the anti-Hanks … mug faced, gravel throated, the grease to Hank’s gravity. But no. Defoe has little to no chance, the victim of reflex.

Today, in the midst of the pandemic, this reflex runs much darker and much deeper than any pithy “best actor” question. Within the tall grass of the virus raging, I’ve discovered that humanity’s reflex — the always easy answer — is a great sin, one that imbues our media, our experts, and our factions with a cultish, and uncrackable, idolatry.

The Media Reflex

I’ve never been one to believe the town crier, especially the loud, ringing yell of “fake news!” The phrase sounds vaguely cartoonish, like the exclamative clue within a Scooby-Doo mystery. But within the pandemic, the reflex (and I’ve seen it from my wife) has been to nursemaid “yellow journalism,” while starving the more difficult … that is, the calm, the deep, and the rational.

This isn’t to say the media (and step with me away from “fake”) is some kind of agendized, fiction machine. It very well could be, but that’s not my fight. My fight is with pandemic media as ogre and bogeyman, with its bending of already dark things into a deep black from which no light can escape. I understand “if it bleeds, it leads,” but it’s in witnessing this reflex on an amped up scale that I’ve embraced a close cousin to “fake news.” Maybe, I’ve been blind too long and now I see. Eighty years ago, in his book The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler might’ve seen it too:

Their accounts of the affair came as close to the truth as newspaper stories usually come — as close as Mars is to Saturn.

The Expert Reflex

Within the framework of the pandemic, another easy reflex is to uphold the “expert” as all things said and done! And I mean “done!” with heavy exclamation because it appears that “done” does double duty here: 1) for the expert, who’s personal opinion is the “done” to all counter thinking. and 2) for the receiver, who deploys the expert like an ace up his sleeve, one that catches bullets in its teeth.

No, I haven’t lost faith in our experts. But within this box of history, within the thin, cellular walls of “this moment” and “right now,” I don’t know who’s right and who’s wrong. And this is compounded by the rush to “prove smart,” to step into the sweet spot of social media and flaunt knowledge like a peacock. Doctors as Facebook friends jockey for position against doctors as specialists jockey for position against doctors as influencers jockey for position against …. What’s right is impossible to discern when everyone’s right and their degree of rightness is unflinching.

Maybe, within the morass of all this unflinching, we need an unreflexive (i.e., non-Hanksonian) guide. I’d suggest Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, who lodged this warning against our experts:

Epistemic arrogance bears a double effect: we overestimate what we know, and underestimate uncertainty, by compressing the range of possible uncertain states (i.e., by reducing the space of the unknown).

….

You cannot ignore self-delusion. The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know. Lack of knowledge and delusion about the quality of your knowledge come together — the same process that makes you know less also makes you satisfied with your knowledge.

The Faction Reflex

In 1787, James Madison said that “a pure democracy … can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction.” In Federalist Paper №10, Madison described “factions” as:

… a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.

As pandemic beings, having lost our humanity, factions have become our reflex, which (I guess) is really just a quality of man as animal. The kind, movie-loving animal that reflexes to Tom Hanks is the same angry, finger-pointing animal that reflexes to masks or no-masks, school or no-school, distance or no-distance (all simple, easy answers, right?). This, as Madison mentioned, is the mischief of factions, but really, did Madison envision — in his wildest imagination — our democracy fractured by facial cloth?

… united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.

These words ring selfish and shocking if you draw them into the context of World War II or 9/11. To define these historic moments as brother vs. brother, neighbor vs. neighbor, Americans not as “fellow” but as “factions” is to ridicule our greatest asset — unity. But here we are … reflexing to ridicule and anger … when unity is needed most.

“You factioned over the sick?!?!?” This would be the dizzying exclamation of our forefathers, their strange gaze falling forward on a democracy — not battling empires outward — but battling within itself, divided against an enemy that assaults in microns. This reflex, I suppose, is the worst of all because one would think that when facing our common enemy, we’d unite as loving family, not separate as screaming fiends.

But have solace. Because if we can’t unite against this great threat of our millennium, we’re at least willing — without failure or waiver — to unite, as one America, over Tom Hanks.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.