Truth and Vibes
CrowdSource 7.29.2024
Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements, and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: What are “vibes”?
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What is a “Vibe”?
The shifting fortunes of Donald Trump, along with the waning and/or waxing of “Woke,” has inspired much talk of “vibes” and “vibe shifts.” So, it’s time to ask: What is a vibe? A feeling? “The spirit of the age”? A trend? Bullshit?
A vibe is the elite lying to itself. So goes the vibe-skeptical take of professor Henry Farrell. “ ‘The vibes’ are no more and no less than a given political elite’s theory of public opinion. This theory provides some information about public opinion … It usually provides much more information about the beliefs and ideology of the relevant political elite …”
Vibes can only be felt, not defined. Sean Monahan, a well-known “trend forecaster” wrote: “Why does something feel in or out of style? Why does one cultural object feel representative of an era while another doesn’t? … You know them when you see them — you just have to have your pattern recognition goggles on. … My methodology is more instinctual than factual.”
Vibes are the harmony between elites and the public at large. Consider this take in Vogue magazine: a vibe shift is when “the view of a designer or a group of designers aligns perfectly with the preoccupations of society and culture at large.” Or this post from a defense industry researcher: “My entire timeline being swamped with pro-US, pro-natal, pro-Kardashev, pro-Defense is honestly giving me conviction that the kids are alright and we’re all gonna make it.” The latter was cited by the influential tech-optimist venture capitalist Marc Andreessen as evidence of a welcome “vibe-shift.”
“Vibes” Alternatives
Today, even a sober rationalist like economist Tyler Cowen is trying to “read” vibes, and famous statistician/election predictor Nate Silver toys with quantifying them. Here’s two ideas that could improve our grasp of the concept:
Public Opinion. Walter Lippmann defines it thus:
The world that we have to deal with politically is out of reach, out of sight, out of mind. It has to be explored, reported, and imagined. … Those features of the world outside which have to do with the behavior of other human beings, in so far as that behavior crosses ours, is dependent upon us, or is interesting to us, we call roughly public affairs. The pictures inside the heads of these human beings, the pictures of themselves, of others, of their needs, purposes, and relationship, are their public opinions. Those pictures which are acted upon by groups of people, or by individuals acting in the name of groups, are Public Opinion ...
Pattern Recognition. “Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition,” argues Marshall McLuhan. “The absolute indispensability of the artist is that he alone in the encounter with the present can get the pattern recognition. He alone has the sensory awareness to tell us what the world is made of. He’s more important than the scientist.”
From the Crowd
Nato Powell, commenting on “Freddie DeBoer on Democracy and the Democrats”:
I don’t know for sure how seriously people take Trump as an existential threat, but I know that people facing death or other fateful circumstances often don’t behave every moment like that’s the case. I can’t personally say much about how much of this is people being in denial and how much is some sort of fatalism or whatever. Speaking purely for myself as a person who thinks that reelecting Trump will be the end of the US as we know it, I just can’t spend all my time freaking out and also I don’t think it would help if I could. I’m no political scientist so my lack of imagination on the topic isn’t very instructive, but it usually seems to me that the best response to Trump’s loony, existential threat politics is basically normal politics, except with much greater penalties for losing. Biden’s, “well, at least I did my best” is pretty tone deaf, but to some extent that’s where I am, too. I mean, it may wreck my livelihood or even my life, but all I can do is my best and then adjust as best I can as the disaster descends.
Ryn Corbeil, responding to Tara Isabella Burton’s “Trump, the Magic Candidate”:
I know that your readers will understand what you are saying. I would go further, and say there's a difference between “material success” and spiritual success. And religious traditions have been showing us this since the dawn of time. New Thought isn’t new when applied to the simple act of caring for others (the Upanishads for example). It’s no revelation that humans are flawed beings, but that’s exactly why we search for “something beyond.” There is nothing wrong (and everything wonderful) with being curious, having imagination, and having humility. This is what transforms us, (perhaps towards the divine if we are so inclined.) The rub, as always, is being able to choose goals that advance us all, as opposed to me alone. And that is why we must do the hard work.
See you next week!
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Interesting collection of links! I think vibes is a useful description of that which is difficult to be put into words but still significant, like reading someone's body language, or having a hunch. I wouldn't make too much of predictions based solely on feeling the vibes (synchronicities abound in the age of the algorithm). But, then again, we also can't predict the weather very well, so being wrong about a vibe shift doesn't invalidate the existence of shifting vibes. It's also more fun to talk about vibes than about intractable social and political problems: the vibes will continue shifting so that nothing has to change.
'Vibes' make me nervous. There seems to be a presumption that there is only one acceptable vibe at a time, and that we must all adhere to them.
Let's all remember the phase, 'marching to the beat of a different drummer'. That sounds much more appealing to me than 'marching in lockstep'.