New way to treat the news
ON THE track record of nations, squabbling will surely never end. But there’s a nice side to it. As the world matures it becomes a two-way squabbling. We rise out of old simplistic “my side was best” into fairly genuine truth-seeking.
In my WASP youth it was nailed to our brains that Britain’s wars were (a) right, and (b) fought by Queensbury rules. Now,WASP orthodoxy would treat anyone sticking to those stances as simple-minded. Everybody can find good and ill in every clan’s history.
Two things you can’t take from the Brits, are slavery and new ideas. There is no pinpointing the global beginning of slavery, it was everywhere, but there’s an exact pinpointing of the beginning of its global end – the founding of the Anti-Slavery Society in London in 1787.
There are other ideas that flowed full-throttle from that small misty island, founding schools of politics, economics, engineering, medicine, the lot. This included much presence by non-British people who got to Britain because ideas were allowed.
Karl Popper’s big thinking was done in Britain. Friedrich von Hayek’s, too. Karl Marx’s tragic life (four children and six grandchildren predeceased him, and the three daughters who buried him all committed suicide) saw repeated flight to Britain.
The Marxes set up in countries looking ripe for revolution, and met the midnight rat-a-tat, security police handing Karl a 24-hour deportation. He’d bid sad farewell to his wife Jenny and the ill or dying children, saying, “see you back in London”.
Which is prelude to what I’m bringing up today, wild-cards. Heavyweights aside, Britain’s ideas cornucopia contains idiosyncrats, people who might, or not, one day rate as pioneers but in their lifetime face lots of put-down, albeit often mitigated by fat royalty cheques.
Edward de Bono (ex Malta) has in 85 years produced 57 books, on it seems, 57 ways that everything you’ve always believed is upside down. Lately an overlapping (ex-Swiss) name, Alain de Botton – another De Bo-, harkens to Zille and Lille as Cape Town’s duomvirate – has been ringing bells. I didn’t know why until my Christmas stocking delivered The News, a User’s Manual.
The News focuses on the media’s faults, which may be summed up as everything the media did or dreamt. Alain’s case is less than watertight (as media mense have told him!) But he stretches your mental envelope, especially on the sad diet of celebrity-worship. Samples: Rescuing people from storms or floods is a simpler challenge than making a living, staying in love, raising sane children, and not wasting our brief lives.
Much that is now obvious started as radical/absurd/insane – for example minimum wage and child labour protection.
The media warn us of flash photography, nudity, profane language. Why not of mental jeopardy caused by witnessing the success of others?
The media should keep economic utopia in mind, plus fairness, justice, kindness.
“Gaffe” and “punitive” journalism – names to blame, not ways to improve – are in oversupply. News treatment is a “homogenising force in danger of turning the rich, idiosyncratic, handcrafted gardens of the mind into rolling mechanised insipid wheatfields”.
Go, Alain! Right or wrong, stirring the cranium can’t be bad.