The News: A User's Manual

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.

4.

WE CAN’T FIND everything we need to round out our humanity in the present. There are attitudes, ideologies, modalities of feeling and philosophies of mind for which we must journey backwards across the centuries, through the corridors of reference libraries, past forgotten museum cabinets filled with rusting suits of medieval armour, along the pages of second-hand books marked with the annotations of their now-deceased owners or up to the altars of half-ruined and moss-covered temples. We need to balance contact with the ever-changing pixels on our screens with the pages of heavy hardback books that proclaim, through their bindings and their typefaces, that they have something to say that will still deserve a place in our thoughts tomorrow.

5.

WE NEED RELIEF from the news-fuelled impression that we are living in an age of unparalleled importance, with our wars, our debts, our riots, our missing children, our after-premiere parties, our IPOs and our rogue missiles. We need, on occasion, to be able to rise up into space in our imagination, many kilometres above the mantle of the earth, to a place where that particular conference and this particular epidemic, that new phone and this shocking wildfire, will lose a little of their power to affect us – and where even the most intractable problems will seem to dissolve against the aeons of time to which the view of other galaxies attests.

6.

WE SHOULD AT times forgo our own news in order to pick up on the far stranger, more wondrous headlines of those less eloquent species that surround us: kestrels and snow geese, spider beetles and black-faced leafhoppers, lemurs and small children – all creatures usefully uninterested in our own melodramas; counterweights to our anxieties and self-absorption.

A flourishing life requires a capacity to recognize the times when the news no longer has anything original or important to teach us; periods when we should refuse imaginative connection with strangers, when we must leave the business of governing, triumphing, failing, creating or killing to others, in the knowledge that we have our own objectives to honour in the brief time still allotted to us.