Columbia English professor Charles Van Doren briefly became a celebrity in 1957, when he won a streak of matches against opposing contestants on the NBC trivia game show Twenty One. As audiences grew, with up to 50 million tuning in per night, he accumulated $128,000 in winnings, answering obscure questions about the Incas and On the Waterfront. After landing on the cover of Time magazine, photos of him swanning about town with movie starlets splashed across gossip rags.
After four months of handily defeating opponents, Van Doren finally lost a match of Twenty One. Soon after his reign as champ snapped, a controversy began to brew over rumors that Van Doren had secretly received answers in advance. After much denial, including grand jury testimony, Van Doren finally admitted his acquiescence to the rigged game in 1959 before Congress. Producers, it was later revealed, had essentially choreographed every dramatic turn of the show, coaxing nearly a hundred contestants to participate in the scripted ruse. (Even Van Doren’s trysts with film vixens were orchestrated for the press.) Seventeen contestants, including Van Doren, were eventually indicted. He later pled guilty to second-degree perjury, a misdemeanor, for lying to the grand jury.
In 1994, Ralph Fiennes portrayed Van Doren in a Robert Redford–directed movie, Quiz Show, which dramatized the scandal as a moral tale of unsuspected fame. Today, compared to the subterfuge factory of reality television, Van Doren’s fib seems a trifle, but for his naive knavery alone, he deserves an entry within this tome. His name would be too obscure for even the hardest Jeopardy! question today, but his postscandal actions make him something of a hero around these parts. After the uproar, Van Doren resigned from Columbia and took a job at Encyclopedia Britannica, eventually becoming its editor-in-chief. In 1962, he published “The Idea of an Encyclopedia,” a prescient essay that intimated the demise of the treasured compendium. “The tone of the American encyclopedias is often fiercely inhuman,” he wrote. Credibility, he cautioned, would not hasten the encyclopedia’s extinction, but a lack of vitality would.
SEE ALSO: MECHANICAL TURK; ROCKEFELLER, CLARK
Hermann Göring wanted a Vermeer.
It was the middle of World War II, and the founder of the Gestapo still didn’t have any paintings by his favorite painter, Johannes Vermeer. His boss, Adolf Hitler, who was himself a failed artist, had already nabbed two works by the seventeenth-century Dutch master of light. Göring was desperate to catch up with der führer.
During their reign, the Nazis relentlessly pillaged art from across Europe and Russia. Göring alone stole, or sometimes bartered for, approximately 1,800 paintings, building his personal collection to a net worth of $200 million. But his favorite painter remained elusive: Vermeers were in short supply, with only around thirty works known to exist.
Finally, in 1942, a collector in the Netherlands, Han van Meegeren, made an announcement: A new Vermeer had been discovered! “What we have here,” said a leading art expert at the time, “is the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer.”
Göring was thrilled. To get his Vermeer, Christ and the Adulteress, he immediately traded 137 paintings, worth an estimated 1.7 million guilders, or $11 million today, making it the most expensive painting ever purchased up to that point—a record that would stand for forty years.
A few years later, after the Allies had taken back Europe, Göring was standing trial at Nuremberg when he received the worst news: His Vermeer was a fake! The Dutch dealer who sold Göring the painting, van Meegeren, confessed in prison that he had forged a total of six Vermeers, which netted him $60 million. The forger was facing treason charges, punishable by death, for collaborating with the Nazis by not revealing the paintings’ true owners. But the charge of art fraud yielded only one year in prison, so he confessed to one of the greatest art forgery scams of all time.
Göring—a man so despicable that the most despicable man in modern history called him grotesque—was enraged to discover that he had been duped. “He looked as if for the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world,” his biographer later wrote of Göring’s art-fraud anguish.
A few weeks after hearing the news, Göring dropped a cyanide pill to avoid sentencing. Christ and the Adulteress can still be seen on display—with a title placard that says “Han van Meegeren”—at a museum in Rotterdam.
SEE ALSO: ART FORGERY; CHINESE ART REPRODUCTION; F FOR FAKE; HITLER DIARIES
It’s marketing, but they don’t tell you.
SEE ALSO: THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT; CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST; PRODUCT PLACEMENT; SUBLIMINAL ADVERTISING
Everyone knows the type. It’s the person who drapes their Instagram selfies with hashtags for ambiguous causes, and who makes absolutely certain their charity tote bag flashes in-frame. It’s the person who pours a bucket of ice over their head, on camera, to demonstrate their depth of compassion for a disease they cannot pronounce. It’s the person whose Face-book profile photo has been tinted green for years, in support of some far-away crusade no one quite remembers. It’s the person who douses every calamity in their “thoughts and prayers,” or who is woke—so very, very #woke. We might roll our collective eyes toward this person, but the internet has gone a step further, pushing a term to subvert for their gaudy campaigning: virtue signaling.
It’s a snide accusation, but also undeniably clever. Roughly, virtue signaling connotes exhibitionistic expression of moral values—conspicuous showboating that solicits approval and tells the audience, “I am a good person.” The appendage signaling adds a sciencey flavor, suggesting a technical process recognized by sociology, or even more primordially, biology. It evokes a peacock unfurling its plumage, as other birds of a feather flap their approval. Of course the term flourishes on the internet, where every status update smacks of preening a personal brand. In this digital habitat, where clicking on a Like or Retweet button can pass for political labor, everyone seems to project some image or embody some character. On the internet, we are all signaling virtues, to some degree.
The term, therefore, should be politically neutral. Whether a person flamboyantly demands that professional athletes “honor the flag,” or they bloat their News Feed with outrage over some minor comedian’s politically incorrect joke, they are signaling to an audience, Hey, look at my moral commitments.
Slacktivism—clicking buttons on websites rather than getting up and doing something about it—honors no party affiliation. Nonetheless, virtue signaling has been weaponized by the alt-right, who hurl the accusation of phoniness at any and all expressions of political empathy. But those reactionaries who accuse internet activists of lecturing their virtues are just as willing to shout furious indignation when a professional athlete kneels during the national anthem. The hypocrisy is blinding.
Every ideology advertises itself. (Even nihilists promote something, though nothingness is a hard sell.) Who is to say which actions are showy performances, and which are authentic appeals to a greater good? The distinction is most blurred on the internet, where the line between sincere pronouncement and meretricious sermonizing is especially gaunt. What seems like histrionic jackassery to you might be a form of honest activism to someone else.
Like CLICKBAIT and fake news, virtue signaling was once a useful term, summarizing a certain type of inane righteousness and platitudinous braying. But it has since inflated into a lazy putdown for any expression of political conviction. Shrieking “virtue signaler!” at every foe has become the most insufferable type of virtue signaling.
SEE ALSO: CLICKBAIT; IMPOSTER SYNDROME; MIMICRY; PLANDID
A letter appears in the mail, summoning you to a nearby government agency for a “quick personality analysis.” Arriving at the bleak testing facility, you are directed to the dusky interrogation room, with a ceiling fan chopping shadows through hazy air. A dashboard-size contraption sits on the table, connected to a laser phoropter and huffing bellows, hissing white noise readouts like a steampunk POLYGRAPH machine. “We just want to ask you a few questions,” says an investigator, in the tone of some hardboiled noir detective. After calibrating the gizmo to your pupils, he begins the interrogation:
• Describe, in single words, only the good things that come into your mind about your mother.
• It’s your birthday. Someone gives you a calfskin wallet. How do you react?
• You’ve got a little boy. He shows you his butterfly collection, plus the killing jar. What do you do?
• You’re watching television. Suddenly you realize there’s a wasp crawling on your arm.
The contraption—a Voight-Kampff machine, which measures your respiration, heart rate, pheromone release, blush response, and eye movement—appears in Blade Runner (1982), the Ridley Scott movie adapted from a Philip K. Dick story. Special police investigators, known as blade runners, use the machine to quantify empathy and identify replicants. Or more specifically, to detect robots who secretly live among us.
Science fiction is lousy with this trope—the person who might be a CYBORG. And science philosophers have kept pace, inventing thought experiments like the TURING TEST to distinguish humans from bots. Despite its fictional provenance, the Voight-Kampff might be the most successful of all such thought experiments. We now rely on countless Voight-Kampff–like devices to identify humans: the algorithms that scan email for spambots, the drones that identify armed combatants, the software that detects scripted password cracking, the facial recognition systems that scan faces in a crowd for suspects. All of these machines pinpoint humans in the noise. Created as a fanciful thought experiment, Voight-Kampff machines are nearly ubiquitous.
SEE ALSO: CYBORG; IMPOSTOR SYNDROME; MECHANICAL TURK; POLYGRAPH; RORSCHACH TEST; SODIUM PENTOTHAL; TURING TEST; UNCANNY VALLEY
There are many profound historical questions we might never be able to answer. Was Jesus cool? for instance, and How did the universe begin? Other inquiries we can hold out hope for eventually solving, like Were dinosaurs warm- or cold-blooded? and Where is Cleopatra’s tomb? Someday, we might even know the answer to the question posed in Stand by Me by a baby-faced Wil Wheaton: If Pluto is a dog, what the hell is Goofy?
One of the biggest historical questions likely falls somewhere in the middle, between knowable and unknowable: Why did the Roman Empire fall? Historians have offered plenty of potential reasons for its demise, including barbarian raids, corruption, overexpansion, and maybe even Christianity. One pet theory involves moral decay; the Romans, especially the nobility, had become gluttons. As Caligula speculated, the orgies did them in!
For centuries, this image of the Romans, as licentious hedonists, has been a widespread belief. They ate decadently, they fornicated decadently, they entertained decadently. They were so debaucherous that when they finished gorging on blood pudding and Falernian wine, they would retreat to an antechamber—a vomitorium—to purge themselves, clearing room in their bellies for more vino and concubines. This indelicate image of an upchucking aristocracy was a recent addition to the historical profile of moral decay, not appearing until the twentieth century, but it fit the perceived notion of a sybaritic nobility. The myth eventually found its way into popular travel guides and Latin phrase books. The folk story even emigrated to The Hunger Games series, which tells of sumptuous Capitol parties in which lavish inhabitants imbibed a drink that acted as an emetic.
Alas, it was all a misinterpretation. There were no purging chambers. Vomitoriums (in Latin, vomitoria) were something completely different—the wide, vaulted exit points in coliseums, through which large crowds could rapidly egress after a performance. The word, which did not even exist during Caesar and Cicero, was coined 400 years later, to describe how the architectural feature could “spew” crowds into the street. The mistranslation of vomitorium was popularized by Lewis Mumford’s huge urban studies tome, The City in History (1961), which depicted a room adjacent to the dining chamber, where gluttonous eaters could “throw up the contents of their stomach in order to return to their couches.”
Bulimia and vapid decadence did not destroy the Roman Empire. And Goofy, like one of those depraved pagan demigods, was a human/dog hybrid.
SEE ALSO: 13TH FLOOR; ALT-HISTORY; HISTORIES