The News: A User's Manual

Tragedy

A Manhattan doctor plunged 30 stories to his death from his Upper East Side high-rise yesterday in an apparent suicide, police and witnesses said. The body of Dr. Sheldon ‘Shelly’ Steinbach, 68, an anesthesiologist, slammed into a second-floor balcony at the building, at 246 E. 63rd St., at 9:35 a.m. ‘I heard a large bang, and we looked outside and saw him. His body just exploded,’ said resident Jonathan Kershner, 25, who lives two floors above where the doctor landed. ‘Then a doorman came by saying a woman was looking for her husband,’ Kershner added. Steinbach had a Twitter page but had not updated it since October 2011. The personal description on his account reads: ‘I am an anesthesiologist in New York City and am having a great day. Married. Love aerobic activities and music.’

New York Post

1.

EVERY TIME WE connect with the news, we can be sure that we will be confronted by graphic accounts of some of the most appalling eventualities that can befall our species: a depressed man leaps out of the window, a mother poisons her children, a teacher rapes his pupil, a husband beheads his wife, a teenager shoots his classmates. The news leads us very reliably into the crucible of human horror.

A decent impulse is to look away and to insist that such deaths and traumas are simply too sad and too private to be subjected to a stranger’s gaze. Any curiosity seems, from this perspective, to be a particularly shameful and modern kind of pathology.

Motivated by fears of intrusion, the more serious news organizations typically adopt a reserved tone in their reports on the sorts of events that severely test any faith one might still have in the reasonableness and decency of mankind.

They leave it to their less dignified colleagues, unfettered by scruples, to evoke the truly vivid details of the latest outrages: to give us a close-up view of the body after it fell from the balcony, the bedroom where the little child was tied up or the carving knife with the spouse’s blood still on its blade. Their reward for being willing to undertake such investigations is the occasionally guilty but concerted and lucrative interest of many millions of readers and viewers.

2.

IT ISN’T HARD to characterize the interest of the public in horror stories as tasteless and unproductive. But beneath the surface banality, we should allow that we are often – in confused and inarticulate ways – attempting to get at something important. When immersing ourselves in blood-soaked narratives, we are not always solely in search of entertainment or distraction; we are not always being merely prurient or callously appropriating intensities of feeling that our own lives have failed to provide.

We may also be looking to expose ourselves to barbaric tales to help us retain a tighter hold on our more civilized selves – and in particular, to nurture our always ephemeral reserves of patience, self-control, forgiveness and empathy.

Rather than just inveigh moralistically against our fascination with heinous events, the challenge should be to tweak how they are reported – in order that they better release their important, yet too often latent, emotional and societal benefits.

3.

EVERY YEAR, AT the end of March, the citizens of ancient Athens would gather under open skies on the southern slopes of the Acropolis in the Theatre of Dionysus and there listen to the latest works by the great tragedians of their city. The plot lines of these plays were unmitigatingly macabre, easily matching anything our own news could provide: a man kills his father, marries his mother and gouges out his own eyes (Oedipus Rex); a man has his daughter murdered as part of a plan to revenge the infidelity of his brother’s wife (Iphigenia); a mother murders her two children to spoil her unfaithful husband’s plans to start a new family with another woman (Medea).

Rather than regarding these stories as grotesque spectacles that all right-minded people should avoid, in his Poetics of c. 335 BC, the philosopher Aristotle looked generously upon the human fascination with them. He proposed that, when they are well written and artfully staged, such stories can become crucial resources for the emotional and moral education of a whole society. Despite the barbarity they describe, they themselves can function as civilizing forces.

But in order for this to happen, in order for a horror (a meaningless narration of revolting events) to turn into what Aristotle called a tragedy (an educative tale fashioned from abominations), the philosopher thought it was vital that the plot should be well arranged and the motives and the personalities of the characters properly outlined to us. Extreme dramatic skill would be required in order for the audience to spontaneously reach a point at which it recognized that the apparently unhinged protagonist of the story, who had acted impetuously, arrogantly and blindly, who had perhaps killed others and destroyed his own reputation and life, the person whom one might at first (had one come across the story in the news) dismissed as nothing but a maniac, was, in the final analysis, rather like us in certain key ways. A work of tragedy would rise to its true moral and edifying possibilities when the audience looked upon the hero’s ghastly errors and crimes and was left with no option but to reach the terrifying conclusion: ‘How easily I, too, might have done the same.’ Tragedy’s task was to demonstrate the ease with which an essentially decent and likeable person could end up generating hell.

If we were entirely sane, if madness did not have a serious grip on one side of us, other people’s tragedies would hold a great deal less interest for us. While we circle gruesome stories in the media, we may at a highly unconscious level be exploring shocking but important questions: ‘If things got really out of hand late one night, and I was feeling wound up and tired and insecure, might I be capable of killing my partner?’ ‘If I was divorced and my spouse was keeping my children from me, would I ever be able to kill them in a form of twisted revenge?’ ‘Could I ever start chatting with a minor on the Internet and, without quite realizing the enormity of what I was doing, end up trying to seduce him or her?’

A man drives into his family home to punish his wife, Manchester, 2012.

(picture credit 15.1)

Medea kills her son to punish her husband, Greek jar, c. 330 BC.

(picture credit 15.2)

Our fascination with crimes may be part of an unconscious effort to make sure we never commit them.

For civilization to proceed, we naturally need the answers to be a firm no in all cases. There is a serious task for the news here: the disasters we are introduced to should be framed in order to give us the maximum encouragement to practise not doing the things that the more chaotic parts of us would – under extreme circumstances – be attracted to exploring. We may never actually fling our children off a bridge at the end of our access day or shoot our partner dead during an argument, but we are all, at times, emotionally in the space where these sorts of things can happen. Tragedies remind us how badly we need to keep controlling ourselves by showing us what happens when people don’t.

4.

TRAGEDIES SHOULDN’T ONLY help us to be good, they should also prompt us to be kind. How likely we are to be sympathetic to someone who kills their spouse or children depends in large part on how their story happens to be told to us: what information we are given about them, how we are introduced to their motives and with what degree of insight and complexity their psyches are laid before us.

In Greek tragedies, a Chorus regularly interrupts events to direct sentiments and richly contextualize characters’ actions. It tends to speak with solemn respect about the protagonists, whatever the sins they have committed. Such sensitivity ensures that few audience members are likely to leave a performance of Oedipus Rex dismissing the unfortunate central character as a ‘loser’ or ‘psycho’.

The news is less careful in its narrations; and our judgements are – as a result – far more intemperate and nastier.

A Teesside doctor who downloaded more than 1,300 child porn images, including scenes of torture, has been jailed. Police found the ‘sickening’ images on the laptop of James Taylor, 31, from Wensleydale Gardens, Thornaby. The doctor, who worked at Pinderfields Hospital in Wakefield, earlier admitted looking at indecent images of children. Taylor was sentenced to a year and a day in prison by a judge at Teesside Crown Court on Friday and was banned from working with children for life.

BBC

At first glance, the doctor seems to deserve no sympathy whatsoever. But our decision about how we consider him is crucially dependent on how the facts of his case are presented to us. We could sympathize with more or less anyone if their story was told to us in a certain way – and we wouldn’t necessarily be wrong to do so (as Dostoevsky or Jesus would have reminded us).

In the context of news reporting, this claim seems contentious, even dangerous, because we have to juggle two ideas which sound opposing: that we can sympathize with a criminal and at the same time firmly condemn his or her crime. The news is tacitly convinced that its audience wouldn’t be able to pull off this conceptual feat, and that any sympathy it might express would lead the audience to want to open up the prisons and let murderers roam the streets. It hence remains steadfast in its refusal to undertake the narrative and psychological manoeuvres required to humanize criminals.

Instead it rushes through their stories. A performance of Oedipus Rex might last an hour and a half; the news story in which the doctor appears is 304 words long.

Inevitably, a feeling of outrage is likely to be at its height when we confront the headline:

Doctor had ‘sickening’ child porn

But, as we read on, our certainty might be challenged. Towards the end of the piece, we learn:

Ordering Taylor to sign the Sex Offenders Register for 10 years, the judge said: ‘As a result of this conviction no doubt your career will come to an end.’

We might feel a chill at the thought of how seven long years of medical school had come to this. The article gives a hint of the panic the doctor must have felt:

The court was told Taylor initially denied being responsible, but later admitted, during police interviews, that he had downloaded the images.

And the enormous price that he has subsequently had to pay:

Stephen Rich, defending, told Judge George Moorhouse that Taylor’s wife and newborn baby had left him and that his life had collapsed.

An addendum informs us that while in prison, the man tried to commit suicide. All this is no less sad than the plot line of Madame Bovary or Hamlet – and, let’s argue, the character of the doctor is not fundamentally any worse; Hamlet is, after all, a murderer and Emma Bovary is guilty of extreme child cruelty. We consider them ‘tragic’ figures – that is, entitled to a degree of complex understanding – because we imagine that there must have been something unusually noble and dignified about their nature and circumstances. But really it is only the generosity of spirit of Flaubert and Shakespeare that elevates Bovary and Hamlet above the ordinary criminal and dissuades us from judging them as harshly as we might the imprisoned doctor.

5.

WHEN REPORTING ON a tragedy, the news tends to make dreadful conduct seem unique to a particular person. It resists the wider resonance and the more helpful conclusion: that we are all a hair’s breadth away from catastrophe. This knowledge should, if properly absorbed, sink us into a mood of reflective, mature sadness. We are more implicated than we might like to believe in the misdeeds of other members of our species. A lack of a serious criminal record is in large measure a matter of luck and good circumstance, not proof of an incorruptible nature. A clean conscience is the preserve of those without sufficient imagination. Were life, or what the Greeks termed the gods, ever really to test us, we would almost surely be found wanting – an awareness upon which a measure of understanding towards the guilty should be founded.

The tragedians of ancient Greece never forgot this. They liked to tell us how vicious, stupid, sexual, enraged and blind we could be, but they allowed room for complex compassion as well. Through the examples they leave us, we are coaxed into accepting that we are members of a noble but hideously flawed species; capable of performing amazing feats, ably practising medicine or parenting with love for many years, and then of turning around and blowing up our existence with a single rash move. We should be scared.

6.

THE ANCIENT GREEKS saw tragic plays once a year, at a specific time, within a particular context and with some knowledge of the works’ larger purpose.

By contrast, we take in tragic news stories almost every day, but we rarely recognize them as belonging to a coherent narrative cycle with a distinctive moral to impart. The news doesn’t help us to place in a single genre all those incidents in which self-control is lost and the monster within is released. It doesn’t, as it should, gather all its varied tales of horror under the unified heading of ‘Tragedy’ and then narrate them in such a way that we can more easily recognize our own smouldering tendencies in the demented actions of the bloody protagonists.

(picture credit 15.3)

Father with his son – and the car in which he later killed him.

(picture credit 15.4)

After struggling to cope with the end of his 10-year marriage to wife Erica, Mr Pedersen killed their two children, Ben, seven, and Freya, six, and then killed himself. The bodies of Ben and Freya Pedersen were found stabbed to death next to their father after he knifed them on Sunday evening. Their father had recently split from his wife, 43. After frenziedly stabbing the children to death in a ‘terrifying’ attack, Mr Pedersen turned the larger knife on himself and drove it three times into his chest and once into his forearm. Mr Pedersen took the children to a remote country lane in Hampshire where he parked the car. The bodies were found by a dog walker, who saw Mr Pedersen’s Saab Convertible and then noticed a child’s leg.

Daily Mail

7.

MUCH OF THE news is in the end an account of people around the globe, in all sorts of positions, getting things very wrong. They fail to master their emotions, contain their obsessions, judge right from wrong and act decently when there is still time. We shouldn’t waste their failures. The news, like literature and history, can serve as that most vital of instruments, a ‘life simulator’ – which is to say, a machine that inserts us into a variety of scenarios stretching far beyond anything we might ordinarily have to cope with and that affords us a chance safely, and at our leisure, to hone our best responses.

Yet too often the news doesn’t help us to learn from the experiences of our wretched brethren; it doesn’t actively try to spare us and our societies the full force of error at every new turn. If, as we have already seen, a good life demands that we learn from, and imitate, the example of inspiring figures, it also requires us to undertake close study of those whose behaviour should profoundly scare, horrify and warn us. These are two sides of the same coin of growth and development, and it lies within the remit of the news, if not yet on its agenda, to help us with both.