HOW WE GOT HERE

How We Got Here: Melville Plus Nietzsche Divided by the Square Root of (Allan) Bloom Times Žižek (Squared) Equals Bannon

Forthcoming from Sublation Books, September 2024

Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Q-Anon, Fox News, etc., etc., etc. have weaponized the last century of intellectual thought and philosophical investigation: poststructuralism, quantum physics, deconstruction, the current “crisis” in “nonfiction”-journalism-“media.” If the perceiver, by her very presence, alters what’s perceived. Steve Bannon, Vladimir Putin, Vladislav Surkov (performance-artist-turned-Putin-strategist), et al. have quite consciously created—are all still quite consciously creating on a day-by-day basis—a universe in which nothing is true and therefore public discourse is, in effect, over.

Dominion Voting Systems was founded to rig elections for Hugo Chavez; Italian space lasers modified voting machine data; the FBI staged the January 6 attack—this is a strategy that goes back at least as far as Dostoevsky’s underground man. God is dead, so everything is permitted. Or is it?

 How We Got Here is a TED-talk-on-speed, a thrilling slideshow, an unnerving intellectual history of the last 170 years, in which David Shields argues that Melville plus Nietzsche divided by the square root of (Allan) Bloom times Žižek (squared) equals Bannon.

Early praise for the book

“I’m grateful for this brilliant book, which sagely counterposes the massive irony of twentieth-century philosophy with the way it’s been put to use. Now that we know we’re here, the next question is how we get out of here.”—Charles Baxter, author of Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction

“David Shields has written another sneakily essential book. This one’s a murder mystery. Truth is dead, and Shields is the forensic detective on the case. He’s got a notebook full of clues and no end of suspects. The question is, can he get a conviction?”—Nicholas Carr, Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“A diagram of the origins and direction of our current intellectual quagmire. Kafka wanted to read only books that were an axe to break the frozen sea within us. Shields’s book is an axe for the frozen sea that surrounds us.”—Stephen Marche, author of The Next Civil War

“I’m a sucker for sexy metaphysical arguments, none hotter—and more relevant—than the ancient one: ‘What is truth?’ What’s needed now is not another dreary pundit tussle over Fox News but someone like David Shields, who conjures up mad, aphoristic wisdom, from Greek philosophers to the great Continental (and American) thinkers of the past two centuries. Shields has created a cacophony of voices that make us think more deeply than we believed possible about the question of truth. Can we define it, can we find it, can we fake it? Once I began How We Got Here, I couldn’t stop reading.”—Ron Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler

“Shields’s arguments—via his inspired annotations and brilliant literary assemblages—are always seductive, propulsive, and provocative to read. In the electric and terrific How We Got Here, he goes full velocity into this demented American moment, and he nails it.”—Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward

“David Shields’s genius for deploying the words of others to create wholly original essays is on brilliant display in this book. The connective tissue of his comments is key, guiding us as we jump from Socrates to Luther to Melville to Nietzsche, all the way to Tucker Carlson and Trump. Both erudite and accessible, classical and pop, How We Got Here stitches together the threads of thought that have landed us in the nihilistic abyss of today. Illuminating.”—Michael Greenberg, author of Hurry Down Sunshine

“A clutch of intriguing maddening metaphysical prompts for taking up what Samuel Beckett called ‘the old questions’—old, but still waiting for answers.”—Sven Birkerts, author of Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age

“Once again Shields has deconstructed our collective reality so that we can look at its pieces with the hope that we might put it all back together, a little less slovenly this time. Tracing the path of how we got here is sobering, healing, maddening, and ultimately and absolutely necessary.”—Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women

“No barbed wire. No lugubrious ponderosity. Instead, heavy stuff in a light space. Juicy and marvelous.”—Padgett Powell, author of The Interrogative Mood

“How We Got Here consists of the statements of a culture that has lost its way. The statements are gathered and fed back to us in such a way that we realize—if only for a moment—how our situation became so horribly warped. Where does the truth lie? Work your way through this book and you might just find out.”—John Kaag, author of American Philosophy: A Love Story

“David Shields is one of our most necessary writers. A century from now, people will look back on the self-destruction of the West the way we look at other historical disasters: in horror, asking how it could have happened. They will find, in How We Got Here, a lucid roadmap, a lament, a plea from the ruins, heard years too late.”—Andrew Altschul, author of The Gringa

“How We Got Here offers a trail of idea-breadcrumbs through the forest of confusion and viciousness that is current public discourse. By way of apposite quotation and clever juxtapositions, Shields shows us how the human desire to be rational is forever thwarted, perverted, and yet renewed.”—Mark Kingwell, author of Singular Creatures: Robots, Rights, and the Politics of Posthumanism

“I love this provocative, unsettling book, which is both prose poem and polemic. In the originality of its form, it enacts the very anxiety about language, and how it’s deployed, that it takes as its subject.”—Vauhini Vara, author of The Immortal King Rao

“Simply overpowering. No one else could have come close to doing what Shields has done here: locating the present circumstances in crucial, revelatory context. And there’s even something magical about this book (magic in this case being something of a dark art). To reach back into the history of ideas and lay out such a convincing case for ‘how we got here’ is a massive accomplishment.”—Fred Moody, author of The Visionary Position

 “A rigorous, taut, invigorating, bracing, chilling, and successful attempt to explain who we were, who we are, and where we are headed.”—Neal Thompson, author of The First Kennedys

About the Author

David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of twenty-four books, including Reality Hunger (which, in 2020, Lit Hub named one of the most important books of the past decade), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (a New York Times bestseller), Black Planet (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN USA Award), and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors’ Choice). The Very Last Interview was published by New York Review Books in 2022.

A senior contributing editor of Conjunctions and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, and the PEN/Revson Award, he has published fiction and nonfiction in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire, Yale Review, Salon, Slate, Tin House, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Believer, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Best American Essays. 

His work has been translated into two dozen languages.

The film adaptation of I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, which he co-wrote and co-starred in, was released in 2017 (available now on Vudu). He wrote, produced, and directed Lynch: A History, a 2019 documentary about Marshawn Lynch’s use of silence, echo, and mimicry as key tools of resistance (available now on Sundance Channel, AMC, Amazon, Peacock, Apple TV+, and Tubi). Sight & Sound named Lynch one of the five best documentaries at the International Documentary Film Festival Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA); in his rave review in the  New Yorker, Hua Hsu wrote, “The film’s relentless rhythm overwhelms and overpowers you. Random acts of terror, across time and space, reveal themselves as a pattern: it’s a gradient of American carnage.” He also co-wrote the feature film I’ll Show You Mine, which was produced by Mark and Jay Duplass and was named runner-up for best film at the Seattle International Film Festival in 2022.