This logic isn’t alien to news organizations of today. What is problematic is their judgement about what the national need actually is. Most countries, far from taking too rosy a view of their condition, far from trusting too much and feeling stupidly hopeful, do precisely the opposite. They are at risk for reasons other than the ones currently implicitly diagnosed by the media. They scupper their chances through excessive fear, anxiety and gloom. They are all too familiar with their litanies of problems, and yet they seem to feel debilitatingly small, unambitious and weak in the face of them. They can’t see a way past decline, broken relationships, out-of-control teenagers, status anxiety, physical vulnerability and economic ruin.
There is a task for the news here: not only to remind us daily of society’s worst failings, but also – sometimes – to train and direct its capacities for pride, resilience and hope. National decline can be precipitated not only or principally by sentimental optimism, but also by a version of media-induced clinical depression.
9.
ARCHITECTURE CAN OFFER a useful example of how the occasional showcasing of what is positive has legitimate uses. The members of the team charged with designing the velodrome for the 2012 London Olympics (less than a mile from North Woolwich) were well aware of Britain’s many challenges – its class divisions and economic inequalities, its educational failures and its housing shortages, its high rates of family breakdown and its degraded manners and morals – but they decided, on this occasion, not to dwell on them.
Instead they chose to create a structure that would stand as an eloquent expression of politeness, modernity, class harmony and reconciliation with nature, in the hope that these qualities might become more present in the country at large through their articulation in a cycling venue clad in glass, steel and western red cedar. The building was an essay in flattery. It hinted that desirable qualities were already widely possessed by a country in which they were in fact only nascent or intermittent.
We are used to thinking of flattery as sentimental and dangerous, an abandonment of reality, but this is to underestimate how reality can be moulded. The child who is praised for her first modest attempts at kindness (when sharing a toy with a neighbour’s offspring), and called lovely as a result, is being guided to develop beyond what she actually happens to be right now. The thought is that she will grow into the person she has flatteringly been described as already being.
As with architecture, so with news. Alongside its usual focus on catastrophe and evil, the news should perform the critical function of sometimes distilling and concentrating a little of the hope a nation requires to chart a course through its difficulties. While helping society by uncovering its misdeeds and being honest about its pains, the news should not neglect the equally important task of constructing an imaginary community that seems sufficiently good, forgiving and sane that one might want to contribute to it.
This is perhaps (also) what ‘other people’ might one day be like in Britain: a suggestion from the Olympic Velodrome, London, 2012.
(picture credit 2.3)
Fear & Anger
PANIC AS METEOR INJURES HUNDREDS
NBC
ATYPICAL PNEUMONIA LIKELY TO SPREAD
Sydney Morning Herald
OFFICE CHAIRS COULD BE FATAL
Business Week
EBOOKS ARE BAD FOR CHILDREN
Guardian
POLITICAL FUTURE IN SHAMBLES
CNN
INEXCUSABLE BUNGLING IN PARLIAMENT
Daily Telegraph
1.
TWO EMOTIONS WITH which we’re likely to become extremely well acquainted the longer we spend with the news are fear and anger.
The news leaves us in no doubt that there are a lot of things in the world which we should be very scared about: extraterrestrial objects, mutating viruses, office furniture, technology … In relation to these and many other ills, the news directs us to adopt a distinctive stance: one of timidity, panic and fragility. Our chances of surviving the difficulties facing humanity are deemed to be very slim – though slightly increased if we habitually keep up with the headlines.
2.
IN ITS STOKING of our fears, the news cruelly exploits our weak hold on a sense of perspective.
In the visual arts, having perspective means a capacity to see different things in their true spatial relations: what is far away looks distant and smaller, what is near looks closer and larger. It was surprisingly difficult for artists to learn how to achieve perspective on a canvas – which suggests that the manoeuvre may be equally challenging in other areas of our lives.
Applied to the news, having perspective involves an ability to compare an apparently traumatic event in the present with the experiences of humanity across the whole of its history – in order to work out what level of attention and fear it should fairly demand.
With perspective in mind, we soon realize that – contrary to what the news suggests – hardly anything is totally novel, few things are truly amazing and very little is absolutely terrible. The revolution will not mean the end of history; it will just change a lot of things in many different small and complicated ways. The economic indices are grim, but we have weathered comparable drops many times over the last century and even the worst scenarios only predict that we will return to a standard of living we had a few decades ago, when life was still possible. A bad avian flu may disrupt international travel and defeat known drugs for a while, but research laboratories will eventually understand and contain it. The floods look dramatic, but in the end they will affect merely a fraction of the population and recede soon enough. Cancers and heart attacks have multiple causes that we may never understand completely, but eternal life was never on the agenda. Rome fell, but 600 years later everything was almost back to normal again.
Village evacuated as severe floods hit swathes of Britain
(picture credit 3.1)
Wallington, in Hampshire, was one of many parts of Britain that were inundated, leaving motorists stranded on roads, cars submerged and even resulting in a caravan being washed away.
Daily Telegraph
Our capacity for calm ultimately depends on our levels of expectation: if we suppose that most things normally turn out to be slightly disappointing (but that this is OK); that change occurs slowly (but that life is long); that most people are neither terribly good nor very wicked (and this includes us); that humanity has faced crisis after crisis (yet muddled through) – if we are able to keep these entirely obvious but highly fugitive thoughts alive in our minds, then we stand to be less easily seduced into panic.
But we shouldn’t be surprised if this kind of stoicism is of no interest whatsoever to the news, for it has sound commercial incentives for overemphasizing our vulnerability. Naturally the news badly needs its audience to feel agitated, frightened and bothered a lot of the time – yet we have an even greater responsibility to try to remain resilient.