‘How We Got Here’ Makes Meaning from Chaos

• How We Got Here: Melville + Nietzsche ÷ √Bloom x Žižek (squared) = Bannon
• David Shields
• Sublation Media (2025)

I remember first hearing about writer David Shields’ work in 2010. My mother, who has read more than any human being I know, touted his book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto and it made its way through the family reading ranks.

Reality Hunger is a curious book that collages different pieces of writing from a cross-section of authors, all offered without attribution of any kind. At its heart, it’s a takedown of arts’ inability to adequately contend with the fractured, fragmented nature of the contemporary experience. Through a total of 618 different numbered sections, Shields builds an argument that a new form of art making is needed. An evolution of narrative, if you will.

There was a point to Shields’ mix-tape manifesto, and shades of it come back in his latest work, 2024’s How We Got Here: Melville + Nietzsche ÷ √Bloom x Žižek (squared) = Bannon.

Shields is a prolific dude. He has authored 25 books, including the New York Times 2008 bestseller The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, 1999’s Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, and 1996’s Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, which won the prestigious PEN/Revson Award. He has also made documentaries about everything from fighting with actor James Franco to examining race in America through the career of football star Marshawn Lynch.

In person, Shields is a fast talker, charming and loquacious. He’s a wee bit maddening, but always interesting.

How We Got Here has a companion work in documentary form, which brings together interviews with writers at the 2018 NonfictioNOW conference.

Each interviewee is posed a series of questions, some seemingly random and others more pointed. It runs the gamut from “Do you believe in ghosts?” to “Are you superstitious?” and “If you have siblings, have they shown your view of the world to be flawed?”

Then, there are thornier queries like, “How do you know what you believe?” and “Is there such a thing as truth?”

Running concurrently with these interviews is a timeline of many of the greatest thinkers, writers and artists in human history, and the various struggles they undertook in search of truth.

It’s a parade of ideas, ranging from Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas, the French impressionists to Andy Warhol, documentarian Adam Curtis to academic and philosopher Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind.

Reading Shields’ book and watching the associated documentary back-to-back offers a strange perspective on current political and cultural affairs. Connecting the dots from the ancient Greeks to the current moment is not a straight shot, but a circuitous, serendipitous loop-de-loop!

So, how did we get here, and why does it all feel so familiar?

Shields’ work is not a explication of the current state of global politics, but rather a cumulative approach to understanding why truth suddenly feels so tenuous and easily manipulated.

Shields is something of a provocateur, but always for a reason. In the case of Reality Hunger, it was a revolt against the form of the novel itself that challenged readers to consider whether the novel was sufficient to address the complexities of the present moment.

In How We Got Here, the overview is even wider: nothing less than the history of thought. Some of the texts Shields employs in making his arguments are deeply familiar, iconic even.

In taking this big approach, what becomes extremely apparent is that none of our current events (social upheaval, collapse, chaos) are without precedent, even if they sometimes feel that way.

A balm for our times, or salt in the wound?

The documentary gives a human face to these big ideas. The featured writers offer a wide array of thoughtful responses to the questions posed by Shields and his colleagues Nicole Walker and Robin Hemley.

Watching these exchanges, I was immediately curious about the writers being interviewed: I had questions not only about their work, but also about who they were as individuals.

Much of the film’s intimacy comes from the funny, occasionally sad details they provide.

One section of the film features selections of writers participating in the age-old game of “Two Truths and a Lie.” Except in this iteration, you never find out which statement is which, truth or lie. This lack of resolution leaves one with very mixed feelings. That mixture is essentially the crux of the film and the book itself. The ongoing, faltering, but still persevering quest to get close to the truth is the real work, even as it feels like it is becoming ever more elusive.

The danger in a book like this is that the ideas being explored, as accessible as they are, might only reach a small audience: those already familiar with Shields’ work, or readers eager and hungry for an explanation for the increasingly intense state of our politics. The book is not so much a roadmap as it is a discursive essay that attempts to bring some bigger-picture energy to the daily news cycle.

The advance praise for the book from a bevy of weighty thinkers is fulsome, but philosopher Mark Kingwell sums it up best when he writes: “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.”

In an interview about the book and film project, Shields stated:

“What no one was willing to talk about, and what the film addresses, is that what Kellyanne Conway, Trump, Giuliani, QAnon, Fox News and others have done weaponizing the last 150 years of intellectual thought and philosophical investigation and post-Einsteinian physics and Saussurean linguistics and the ‘crisis’ in non-fiction.

“If the perceiver by her very presence alters what’s perceived, then Steve Bannon, et al. are all quite consciously creating, on a day-by-day basis, a universe in which nothing is true — and thereby Trump and Putin and QAnon have successfully ended human discourse.”

So, what to take away from both investigations (book and film) about the ongoing conundrum that is humanity?

A short version film is free to watch online. Viewers can make up their own minds.

One resonant truth is this: Shields’ work is a pointed reminder of the ongoing, multifaceted human struggle to make meaning of chaos.

And it is a relief, a blessed one, to read intelligent thought. I keep returning to How We Got Here for exactly that reason.