This is scarcely any better. A decision to change the way that the government subsidizes housing for the lowest-paid is clearly significant; a high-minded news organization has spent time and money bringing the particulars of the scheme to public attention. And yet it isn’t easy to care.
This isn’t unusual. We regularly come across headlines of apparent importance that, in private, leave us disengaged. Boredom and confusion may be two of the most common, but also two of the most shameful and therefore concealed, emotions provoked by so-called ‘serious’ political stories presented by the news organizations of modern democracies.
Further down the list of headlines, however, there is one story, about an incestuous cannibal in Australia, that requires no effort whatsoever.
Perhaps one is, at heart, a truly shallow and irresponsible citizen.
2.
BUT BEFORE CASTIGATING ourselves too strongly, imagine if, in similar circumstances, we had been shown a headline that read simply ‘Man in Russia Consults Lawyer’, beneath which lay the following story:
Three women: an old lady, a young lady, and a tradesman’s wife; and three gentlemen: one a German banker with a ring on his finger, another a bearded merchant, and the third an irate official in uniform with an order hanging from his neck, had evidently long been waiting. Two clerks sat at their tables writing, and the sound of their pens was audible. The writing-table accessories (of which Karenin was a connoisseur) were unusually good, as he could not help noticing. One of the clerks, without rising from his chair, screwed up his eyes and addressed Karenin ill-humouredly.
‘What do you want?’
‘I want to see a lawyer on business.’
Imagine if at this point the story came to a sudden halt, and we were expected to express deep fascination and a desire to know more, even though it wasn’t clear when ‘more’ would appear and it might be many weeks before a dozen further lines of this wearisome tale were made available.
It would be implausible to suppose that we could nurture a sincere interest in Anna Karenina in this way, but the habit of randomly dipping readers into a brief moment in a lengthy narrative, then rapidly pulling them out again, while failing to provide any explanation of the wider context in which events have been unfolding, is precisely what occurs in the telling of many of the most important stories that run through our societies, whether an election, a budget negotiation, a foreign policy initiative or a change to the state benefit system. No wonder we get bored.
3.
WE’RE STANDING FAR too close. To draw another analogy from the arts, it is as if we were being asked to open our eyes a millimetre or two above an inchoate bluish-purple surface marked with random black dashes tinged white along their edges. For all we could tell from such a vantage point, we might well be looking at the landscape of Jupiter, the surface of a bruise or the fossilized footprints of a prehistoric creature – none of them especially engaging options. Yet we might in fact be gazing at a detail of one of the most psychologically compelling portraits in Western art, Titian’s Portrait of Gerolamo Barbarigo, only at the wrong distance – for this is a masterwork that requires a viewer to be standing at least a metre away from it before it begins to yield any of its interest.
4.
BOREDOM IS A new challenge and responsibility. For most of human history, there simply wasn’t any news to be bored by. What information there was lay in the hands of a small and secretive aristocratic governing class. It went only to the few: the king, the chancellor, the commander of the army and the senior members of trading companies.
Now the news is for everyone, and yet the wheels of our curiosity are too often at risk of spinning idly in a soft slush of data. It is as if, every day before breakfast, a stern and alarmed civil servant rushed in to see us with a briefcase filled with a bewildering and then in the end tiring range of issues: ‘Five hospitals are predicted to breach their credit limits by the end of the month’, ‘The central bank is worried about its ability to raise money on the bond markets’, ‘A Chinese warship has just left the mainland en route for Vietnam’, ‘The Canadian prime minister will be here for dinner tomorrow’.
What are we meant to think? Where should all this go in our minds?
Who cares?
Titian, Portrait of Gerolamo Barbarigo, c. 1510.
(picture credit 1.1)
5.
NEWS ORGANIZATIONS ARE coy about admitting that what they present us with each day are minuscule extracts of narratives whose true shape and logic can generally only emerge from a perspective of months or even years – and that it would hence often be wiser to hear the story in chapters rather than snatched sentences. They are institutionally committed to implying that it is inevitably better to have a shaky and partial grasp of a subject this minute than to wait for a more secure and comprehensive understanding somewhere down the line.
Given the dangers of confusion that result, what we need above all are good signposts. Under a headline such as ‘Man in Russia Consults Lawyer’, an extract from a novel – even one of Anna Karenina’s power – will seem irksome. However, if we were told that we were reading a small, slightly monotonous passage that belonged to an extraordinary thousand-page book exploring the tragic dimensions of marriage, in particular the tension between the desire for adventure and the demands of domesticity and social conformity, we might anticipate a next instalment with a little more excitement.
We need news organizations to help our curiosity by signalling how their stories fit into the larger themes on which a sincere capacity for interest depends. To grow interested in any piece of information, we need somewhere to ‘put’ it, which means some way of connecting it to an issue we already know how to care about. A section of the human brain might be pictured as a library in which information is shelved under certain fundamental categories. Most of what we hear about day to day easily signals where in the stacks it should go and gets immediately and unconsciously filed: news of an affair is put on the heavily burdened shelf dedicated to How Relationships Work, a story of the sudden sacking of a CEO slots into our evolving understanding of Work & Status.
But the stranger or the smaller stories become, the harder the shelving process grows. What we colloquially call ‘feeling bored’ is just the mind, acting out of a self-preserving reflex, ejecting information it has despaired of knowing where to place. We might, for example, struggle to know what to do with information that a group of Chinese officials was paying a visit to Afghanistan to discuss border security in the province of Badakhshan or that a left-wing think tank was agitating to reduce levels of tax in the pharmaceutical industry. We might need help in transporting such orphaned pieces of information to the stacks that would most appropriately reveal their logic.
It is for news organizations to take on some of this librarian’s work. It is for them to give us a sense of the larger headings under which minor incidents belong. An item on a case of petty vandalism one Saturday night in a provincial town (‘Bus Shelter Graffitied by Young Vandals in Bedford’) might come to life if it was viewed as a minuscule moment within a lengthier drama titled ‘The Difficulties Faced by Liberal Secular Societies Trying to Instil Moral Behaviour without the Help of Religion’. Likewise, an indigestible item about yet another case of government corruption in the Democratic Republic of Congo (‘Kickback Accusations in DRC’) could be enhanced by a heading that hinted at its grander underlying subject: ‘The Clash Between the Western Understanding of the State and the African Notion of the Clan’.