Celebrity News
In this category, we would be introduced to some of the most admirable people of our era – as judged by mature and subtle criteria – and guided as to how we might draw inspiration and advice from them. The famous would make us envious in productive and measured ways, helping us to realize our own genuine but timid talents by the example of their audacity and perseverance. But we would also be reminded that the best cure for a longing for fame would ultimately be a world in which kindness and respect were more generously and evenly distributed.
Disaster News
The tragedies of others should remind us how close we ourselves often are to behaving in amoral, blinkered or violent ways. Seeing the consequences of such impulses harrowingly played out in the lives of strangers should leave us feeling at once scared and sympathetic rather than hubristic and self-righteous. For their part, the accidents that every day cut down our fellow human beings should demonstrate to us how exposed we constantly are to the risk of sudden death and injury, and therefore make clear with what gratitude and generosity we should greet every pain-free hour.
Consumer News
This field of journalism should alert us to how complicated it is, within an aggressively commercial society, to generate genuine happiness by spending money. It should strive therefore deftly to direct us to those objects and services (and, just as important, those manoeuvres of mind) which stand the best chance of answering our underlying aspirations for a fulfilled existence.
4.
BUT EVEN IF, by a succession of miracles, the news managed one day to do all of the above reliably, we would still retain a handful of reasons for ongoing caution …
News from Inside
If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter – we never need read of another … As for England, almost the last significant scrap of news from that quarter was the revolution of 1649; and if you have learned the history of her crops for an average year, you never need attend to that thing again, unless your speculations are of a merely pecuniary character. If one may judge who rarely looks into the newspapers, nothing new does ever happen in foreign parts, a French revolution not excepted.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854
1.
WE EVOLVED FROM humans who lived in societies where not much ever changed – and where any change that did occur was liable to be very significant, and perhaps life-threatening. From this background, we have inherited a cognitive frailty as regards novelty: we immediately suppose that the new must also be the important.
It isn’t always. Sanity in a news-dominated age requires us to see that the categories of novelty and importance are overlapping – yet crucially distinct.
When we are feeling edgy and inclined to escape ourselves, what better, more immersive and more respectable solution than to run to the news. It provides the ideal, serious-minded excuse for failing to pay attention to many things that might matter more than it does. We willingly give up all responsibilities to ourselves in order to hear of such large and pressing issues as Brazil’s debt, Australia’s new leader, child mortality rates in Benin, deforestation in Siberia and a triple murder in Cleveland.
2.
IN ITS SCALE and ubiquity, the contemporary news machine can crush our capacity for independent thought. In the European control room of one global news organization, one finds close to 500 people sitting in a gigantic dimly lit concrete atrium decorated with screens and bulletin boards connected by fibre-optic tendrils to every corner of the world. More data flows into the building in a single day than mankind as a whole would have generated in the twenty-three centuries between the death of Socrates and the invention of the telephone. Down the wires come accounts of earthquakes in Guatemala and murders in Congo, profit warnings in Helsinki and explosions in Ankara. There are stories on every conceivable topic and geographical region: on the elections in Burkina Faso and child mortality in Vietnam, on Canadian agricultural subsidies and Rio Tinto’s African strategy, on Prada’s autumn collection and dim sum restaurants in Zurich. Clocks reveal that it is just after lunch in Khartoum but still early morning in La Paz. It feels like the departure area of a large international airport, affording one something of the same heady sense that one has left behind everything local, rooted and slow-moving and entered into a frenzied, weightless, global realm. Here we are firmly in the modern era, a time of disorientation and randomness in which, thanks to new technologies, we have surrendered our provincial attachments, abandoned the rhythms of nature and, within vast cities, become vividly aware of the simultaneous existence of millions of our demented fellow creatures, all burdened with their particular blend of misfortunes, ambitions and peculiarities.
The pace of the news cycle is relentless. However momentous yesterday’s news – the landslides, the discovery of a young girl’s half-concealed body, the humiliation of a once-powerful politician – every morning, the whole cacophony begins afresh. The news hub has the institutional amnesia of a hospital’s accident and emergency department: nightly the bloodstains are wiped away and the memories of the dead erased.
One wonders whether the torrent of stories could ever momentarily be made to dry up; whether – by an extraordinary effort of coordination – mankind might agree to behave so cautiously that, for a day, there would end up simply being no news. Murderers the world over might delay their intentions, foolhardy swimmers would remain ashore, adulterous politicians would fix their attentions on the lawn. But the overseers of the news need never fear such scarcity. Statistics will assure them that by the end of any twenty-four-hour period, 3,000 people will unwittingly have lost their lives on the world’s roads, forty-five people will have been murdered across the United States and 400 fires will have broken out in homes across southern Europe – quite aside from any new and unforeseen innovations in the fields of maiming, terrorizing, stealing and exploding.
3.
IT IS NEVER easy to be introspective. There are countless difficult truths lurking within us that investigation threatens to dislodge. It is when we are incubating particularly awkward but potentially vital ideas that we tend to feel most desperate to avoid looking inside. And that is when the news grabs us.
We should be aware of how jealous an adversary of inner examination it is – and how much further it wishes to go in this direction. Its purveyors want to put screens on our seat-backs, receivers in our watches and phones in our minds, so as to ensure that we will be always connected, always aware of what is happening; never alone.
But we will have nothing substantial to offer anyone else so long as we have not first mastered the art of being patient midwives to our own thoughts.
We need long train journeys on which we have no wireless signal and nothing to read, where our carriage is mostly empty, where the views are expansive and where the only sounds are those made by the wheels as they click against the rails in rhythmical succession. We need plane journeys when we have a window seat and nothing else to focus on for two or three hours but the tops of clouds and the constant presence, only metres away in the inconceivable cold, of a Rolls-Royce engine, slung under the broad ash-grey wing, its discipline and bravery helping to propel our own vagabond thoughts.