Alain de Botton : The News – a User's Manual
Contents
1. even chiefly just material satisfaction we are also guided by a deeper often unconscious desire for some form of psychological transformation We don t only want to own things we want to be changed through our ownership of them Once we examine consumer behaviour with sufficient attention and generosity it becomes clear that we aren t indelibly materialistic at all What makes our age distinctive is our ambition to try to accomplish a variety of complex psychological goals via the acquisition of material goods 227 Material objects are promises of and enticements to future states of mind they provide us with idealized images of where we want to get to The diminutive Italian city car speaks of a winning cheekiness and playfulness the titanium desk lamp hints at a busy life reduced to its meaningful essence the mountain hiking holiday promises an end to hesitancy and fragility and the birth of a new and more resilient self 230 Religions understand this they know particular foods clothes travels and items of interior decoration shape character and influence people in spiritual ways eg Zen Buddhism advises adherents to own simple and beautiful pots It may work today a new coat may make us feel more confident But it won t work simply through the act of purchase In an ideal consumer news section there would be headings like Confidence and Calm presenting us with a range of both conceptual and material options BECAUSE WE HAVE allow2. is that it s better to have shaky partial grasp of a subject NOW than to wait for a more secure understanding further down the line We need the larger headings signposts otherwise we just shelve the info we have nowhere to put it Eg bus shelter graffitied by vandals belongs under the heading the difficulties faced by liberal secular societies trying to instil moral behaviour without the help of religion Most news organisations however claim to present neutral facts dispassionately they do not presume to tell us what the facts actually mean The difference between the news and religions is that religions know they can t tell us too much in one go or we switch off they focus on repetition and rehearsal slow us down What kind of country do we live in We don t know based on our own local experience Our impressions are formed using two tools architecture and the news The nes is usually bad and it colours our views Things become harder people are violent hospitals poor the world corrupt dangers abound The news claims to give us the facts a father actually did murder his baby And yet it s not true because millions of others didn t We don t get headlines like grandmother helped up stairs by stranger So the news acquires the power to assemble the picture that citizens end up having of each other the power to invent a nation It focusses on the darkness to prevent the nation from lap
3. Alain de Botton The News a User s Manual Hamish Hamilton 2014 a Wl Notes Alison Morgan April 2014 VY VA AN HA NEWS N Cover reminiscent of Bible with red letter text inside Bold print for emphasis is mine Ke a0 ser5 mamat gt Italics are summary of the content normal print is extracts NX ALAIN DE Ze SW BOTTON s PREFACE IT DOESN T COME with any instructions because it s meant to be the most normal easy obvious and unremarkable activity in the world like breathing or blinking After an interval usually no longer than a night and often far less if we re feeling particularly restless we might only manage ten or fifteen minutes we interrupt whatever we are doing in order to check the news We put our lives on hold in the expectation of receiving yet another dose of critical information about all the most significant achievements catastrophes crimes epidemics and romantic complications to have befallen mankind anywhere around the planet since we last had a look What follows is an exercise in trying to make this ubiquitous and familiar habit seem a lot weirder and rather more hazardous than it does at present THE NEWS IS committed to laying before us whatever is supposed to be most unusual and important in the world a snowfall in the tropics a love child for the president a set of conjoined twins Yet for all its determined pursuit of the anomalous the one thing the news skilfully avoids training its eye
4. ed ourselves to divorce consumption from our deeper needs our purchases have become unsupportive of our psyches Just as consumer news has helped to create this schism it can also help to rectify it for it is in large measure the media that informs our notions of what we should be buying and to what end The categories language positioning and cues it uses when presenting options for purchase possess an extraordinary power to influence what we feel we must own and do By changing something as apparently minor as the categories in which consumer news reports its findings by focusing on genuine needs rather than inchoate desires we might start to do proper justice to the underlying aspirations generated by consumer goods goods that we exhaust ourselves and our planet to make and pay for We thereby stand a chance of becoming truer versions of what consumer news has always wanted us to be happy shoppers 232 CONCLUSION We can now personalise the news Good if we had a mature sense of what news we need to hear So what should the news be Political news should interest us in the complex mechanics of our societies help us to agitate for their reform and enable us to accept their limitations World news should open our eyes to the nature of life in other countries giving us rich sensory and personal portraits of other nations Economic news should investigate workable approaches which could effect saner versions of market capitalism and represen
5. ginal 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 255 Alison Morgan www alisonmorgan co uk www resource arm net
6. h into a climactic spectacle dissuades us from accepting it as a daily reality We are whisked from the bomb site to the smouldering plane crash we are rarely shown the everyday business of an octogenarian heart giving out Before they were displaced in our consciousness by the news religions placed the task of preparing us for death at the heart of their collective missions The needs and fears that we once brought to our places of worship have not disappeared in the secular age we remain tormented by anxiety and a longing for comfort in relation to mortality But these emotions receive little public acknowledgement being left instead to haunt us in the small hours while in the more practical and functional parts of the day the news keeps drawing our attention with deranged zeal to the newly discovered anticarcinogenic properties of blueberries and a daily teaspoonful of walnut oil 220 221 CONSUMPTION There is a lot of disapproval about consumerism but the news has a role to play in helping us ensure that our acts of consumption proceed as well as they possibly can So journalists research test and assess products These are surely important matters yet to restrict consumer news to such practical investigations is to overlook a key feature of why we are motivated to buy certain things in the first place The kinds of purchases surveyed in the news generally sit well beyond necessity In acquiring them what we are after is rarely solely or
7. monstrate the ease with which an essentially decent and likeable person could end up generating hell Might be capable of killing my partner We need the answer to be no and tragedy helps us practice not doing the things that we might under extreme circumstances be attracted to exploring The news however is a lot nastier Compare Oedipus Rex with the commentary of the chorus helping us understand Oedipus struggles and motivations with a paragraph about a doctor downloading child porn We roundly condemn and move on we learn nothing Accident reporting reminds us that humanity suffers not just us It restores meaning to our lives by reminding us of our fragility TO LIVE IN modernity an era contemporaneous with the triumph of the news is to be constantly reminded that thanks to science and technology change and improvement are continuous and relentless This is part of the reason we must keep checking the news in the first place we might at any moment be informed of some extraordinary development that will fundamentally alter reality Time is an arrow following a precarious rapid and yet tantalizingly upward trajectory In pre modern societies by contrast people thought of time as a wheel Life was ineluctably cyclical The most important truths were recurring the cycle could not be avoided or broken Even if having regular access to news had been technologically possible it wouldn t have been very psychologically necessar
8. n highly distinctive priorities As revolutionaries well know if you want to change the mentality of a country you don t head to the art gallery the department of education or the homes of famous novelists you drive the tanks straight to the never centre of the body politic the news HQ 12 Why do we keep checking the news Dread we know how much is liable to go wrong and how fast In the immediate vicinity there may well be peace birds singing in the garden dust gathering on the bookshelves but we are aware that such serenity does not do justice to the chaotic and violent fundamentals of existence so it grows worrisome Also perhaps because it provides relief from the claustrophobic burden of living with ourselves persuading other people to take us seriously To ask why the news matters is not to presume that it doesn t but to suggest the rewards of approaching our intake more self consciously POLITICS Many headlines are simply boring Tenants rent arrears soar in benefits pilot scheme Suppose it was an extract from Anna Karenina that d be boring too But that s what it is the news randomly dips readers inot a brief moment ina lengthy narrative and then pulls them out again without offering any explanation of the wider context News organisations present us each day with minuscule extracts of narratives whose true shape and logic can only emerge from a perspective of months or even years The implication
9. o a parade of extraordinary men and women people who can run faster than anyone else on earth who know how to make us laugh who have started revolutionary businesses who can design succulent meals and whose faces are flawlessly beautiful Their achievements personalities and good looks excite us as few other things can As a result we often want to ask them how they did it hear them talk about their childhoods observe what they are wearing find out whom they are in love with peek inside their homes follow them to the seaside and even accompany them across the road when they go out to buy groceries 157 The instinct to admire is an ineradicable and important feature of our personalities But we should channel it to focus on the people who embody the highest nobles and most valuable beneficial values Ancient Athens celebrated sporting prowess Catholics celebrate saints encouraging us to improve to strive for better We need to locate celebrities who can function as guides to virtues we need to bolster in ourselves Not publish photos of Emma Watson buying strawberries or ask Usain Bolt how many times he has been in love Often we are so fed stories of success and celebrity that we despair of ourselves repeated evidence of the accomplishments of humanity s most energetic and inventive members fills us with envy and discontent Why do people want to become famous The longing to be treated nicely Fame is the opposite of being o
10. of the politics but because it s about us We read travel literature because we travel with the companionship of the narrator but journalists seek to be objective impersonal It ain t the facts it s the relationships experiences which we are interested in We need not just the info about the theft of money from the Ugandan prime minister s office we need the smell of mango trees after the rains William Carlos Williams It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there The news rarely brings life News photography most corroboration there to break up the text Occasionally revelation advances our understanding and challenges the clich s ECONOMICS We are the inheritors of an idea endorse by both the right and the left wings of the political spectrum that the most fundamental reality of nations is their financial state and that economic reporting should therefore be recognized as the most important facet of all news output 127 To assess a nation through its economic data is a little like re envisaging oneself via the results of a blood test whereby the traditional markers of personality and character are set aside and it is made clear that one is at base where it really counts a creatinine level of 3 2 a lactate dehydrogenase of 927 a leukocyte per field of 2 and a C reactive protein of 4 2 p128 CELEBRITY THE NEWS CONSTANTLY introduces us t
11. on is itself and the predominant position it has achieved in our lives Half of Humanity Daily Spellbound by the News is a headline we are never likely to see from organizations otherwise devoted to the remarkable and the noteworthy the corrupt and the shocking Societies become modern the philosopher Hegel suggested when news replaces religion as our central source of guidance and our touchstone of authority In the developed economies the news now occupies a position of power at least equal to that formerly enjoyed by the faiths Dispatches track the canonical hours with uncanny precision matins have been transubstantiated into the breakfast bulletin vespers into the evening report But the news doesn t just follow a quasi religious timetable It also demands that we approach it with some of the same deferential expectations we would once have harboured of the faiths Here too we hope to receive revelations learn who is good and bad fathom suffering and understand the unfolding logic of existence And here too if we refuse to take part in the rituals there could be imputations of heresy The news knows how to render its own mechanics almost invisible and therefore hard to question It speaks to us in a natural unaccented voice without reference to its own assumption laden perspective It fails to disclose that it does not merely report on the world but is instead constantly at work crafting a new planet in our minds in line with its own ofte
12. s all illness Not hard to come up with equivalents today News stories tend to frame issues in such a way as to reduce our will or even capacity to imagine them in profoundly other ways Through its intimidating power news numbs Without anyone particularly rooting for this outcome more tentative but potentially important private thoughts get crushed 74 They need ideas which will be generally embraced subtleties don t sell in large numbers WORLD NEWS News organisations are unexpectedly idealistic the idea is that by exposing the world s ills they can be eliminated And yet 6m people read the BBC article on the Duchess of Cambridge s pregnancy and 4500 read about the humanitarian crisis in East DRC We have instant access to info about events in every nation on earth but we aren t particularly interested It s not that we are ignorant and need informing it s that we are indifferent Journalists prioritise the unusual the terrible bloody and murderous so torture by the security services trumps the nature of a bucolic lifestyle by the River Jordan But if we don t know about the normal we won t be interested in the abnormal We won t identify Further they focus on state and business military commercial and humanitarian concerns We don t really want to know where to fight trade or offer sympathy we want to understand identify relate Why do we attend Shakespeare s Julius Caesar not because
13. sing back into the tendency to gloss over its problems and feel foolishly content with itself The news needs to be invited also to train and direct our 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 45 As we spend time with the news we will become well acquainted with fear and anger 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 49 In stoking our fears the news exploits our weak hold ona sense of perspective We are frightened by stories of disaster angered by ones about the budget the deadlock The news proves we are ruled by crooks and idiots In hock to the excitements and commercial advantages of rage the news cruelly ignores the project of consolation 55 Flaubert hated newspapers because eh thought they encouraged readers to hand over to others a task they should do themselves form complex and intelligent opinions Here was a homogenizing force in danger of stamping out all the productive oddities of interior life and of turning the rich idiosyncratic handcrafted kitchen gardens of the mind into rolling mechanized insipid wheatfields 69 He kept an encylopedie de la betise humaine with entries such as Budget never balanced Christianity freed the slaves Exercise prevent
14. t more than cold economic data when representing business activities Celebrity news should introduce us to the most admirable people of our era and guide us to learn from them Disaster news should remind us how close we are to behaving in amoral or violent ways ourselves and encourage us to greet with gratitude every pain free hour Consumer news should teach us how complicated it is to generate happiness by spending money Warnings e We run to the news when feeling edgy and inclined to escape ourselves 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 e The news machine can crush our capacity for independent thought e Itis an adversary of inner examination it eliminates introspection 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 353 e We can t find everything we need to round out our humanity in the present e We need relief from the impression that we are living in an age of unparalleled importance e We should forgo our own news in order to pick up on the stranger more wondrous headlines of kestrels and snow geese lemurs and small children a flourishing life requires a capacity to recognize the times when the news no longer has anything ori
15. verlooked patronised humiliated But the appetite for fame depends on your childhood and the society you live in Most famous people experienced early rejection The happily anonymous adult is the lucky one the one who has received the sense of being central in the affections and care of a parental figure A decade of parental love can give a person strength enough to cope with fifty years of insignificance The only childhood properly deserving of the epithet privileged is one in which the child s emotional needs were adequately met P180 How good a job have we done parenting our own children The litmus test is do they have any wish to become famous A society where everyone wants to be famous is also one where being ordinary has failed to deliver the degree of respect necessary to satisfy people s natural appetite for dignity 180 Famous people dream of securing high grade attention But what they get is love followed by hatred a focus on their lapses They get hurt just like you and me Why are we interested because we are furious about our own lack of attention so we punish those who seem to have deprived us of our due It s jealousy DISASTER Greek tragedies focussed on the most awful human disasters and perversions they were resources Aristotle said for the emotional and moral education of a whole society We discover that the supposedly monstrous protagonist is in fact rather like us Tragedy s task was to de
16. y Societies that see time as a wheel rather than an arrow feel no pressing need to check the headlines every quarter of an hour 219 220 WE ARE MORE impatient and optimistic about the future The underlying unmentioned promise of health news is that science might one day discover a cure for everything death included It might be simpler if this unspoken claim were categorically untrue The reality is more complicated We will one day perhaps in 780 years time crack the mysteries of ageing and disease But it will be too late for you and me The fundamentals of our lives are fated to adhere to the same cycle known to all our ancestors Despite its general interest in the macabre the news refuses to be grim or dark enough in its reporting on health related matters It continues to treat the latest findings about red wine gene therapy and the benefits of eating walnuts with a superstitious reverence not dissimilar to that which might once have inspired a devout Catholic pilgrim to touch the shin bone of Mary Magdalene in the hope of thereby securing ongoing divine protection Rather than face up squarely to the unqualified inevitability of decay the news prefers to flog the newly discovered health advantages of drinking grapefruit juice and wearing tight cotton socks on long haul plane journeys Amidst its appetite for murders and explosions the news remains unhelpfully squeamish with regard to ordinary mortality Its proclivity for turning deat
Download Pdf Manuals
Related Search