advice for journalists
Online is increasingly where people live. My average screen time this past week was close to ten hours a day. Yes, a lot of that is work-related. But the idea that I have any real conscious life outside this virtual portal is delusional. And if you live in such a madhouse all the time, you will become mad. You don’t go down a rabbit-hole; your mind increasingly is the rabbit hole — rewired that way by algorithmic practice. And you cannot get out, unless you fight the algorithms to a draw, or manage to exert superhuman discipline and end social media use altogether. […]
In the past, we might have turned to more reliable media for context and perspective. But the journalists and reporters and editors who are supposed to perform this function are human as well. And they are perhaps the ones most trapped in the social media hellscape. You can read them on Twitter, where they live and and posture and rank themselves, or on their Slack channels, where they gang up on and smear any waverers. They’ve created an insulated world where any small dissent from groupthink is professional death. Watch Fox, CNN or MSNBC, and it’s the same story.
Point out missing facts or context, exercise some independence of judgment, push back against the narrative — and you’ll be first subject to ostracism and denunciation by your newsroom peers, and then, if you persist, you’ll be fired. The press could have been the antidote to the social media trap. Instead they chose to become the profitable pusher of the poison.
This is precisely and tragically correct.
I immediately wrote to Andrew to tell him that he needs my new book, stat. But even Andrew, who writes on a weekly basis, who has stepped back from the moment-by-moment insanity of journalistic Twitter (and from the hour-by-hour insanity of the old Dish), probably doesn’t have time to step back a bit further still over the next few weeks and read some old books.
Or doesn’t believe he has time. Maybe, and maybe for journalists more than for anyone else, this is in fact the perfect, the ideal, the necessary moment to recover “real conscious life outside this virtual portal.” One might begin with the epistles of Horace, a man who in exile from Rome learned to love the countryside. Just a thought.
My son and I are sorting through the Big Issues
disparities
If Ibram X. Kendi did not exist, it would be necessary for a certain kind of conservative to invent him. But because he does exist, whenever someone wants to talk about the actual sufferings of black people in America, then a certain kind of conservative can reply, “Look, I don’t claim that America is perfect, but did you see this crazy thing Ibram X. Kendi said??”
I was going to write a longer post about this, but today’s David French newsletter says it for me:
On the right it often seems that if we can effectively rebut the radicals, we act as if our rhetorical work is done. Debunk critical theory, reject various definitions of systemic racism, and then move along. Back to business as usual (with the conventional and obligatory “to be sure” paragraphs noting that a few racists still haunt American life)….
Broken and breaking systems can still leave powerful, enduring legacies. If you take any population of human beings, treat them as property for 245 years, actively, legally, and violently discriminate against them for 99 more, and only give them the necessary legal tools to effectively fight back 56 years ago, then you’re going to still see significant consequences — and those consequences are going to be very hard to ameliorate.
I was interested to see that a number of readers commented on my Sunday newsletter about the disparities between the disproportionately white, rich private school I advised and the nearby much-poorer, disproportionately black public school down the road and said that the relevant difference was wealth, not race. But when you’re talking about a community that was afflicted by all the systems of 1619 (including within the lifetimes of thousands of residents), why would anyone think that wealth disparities would vanish by 2020 — or that the racial history that created the initial disadvantage would no longer be relevant?
If your economic starter pistol goes off after your neighbor’s — and they’re also running as fast as they can to achieve prosperity — doesn’t it stand to reason that even as you run as hard as you can, the gap might persist? And isn’t that largely the tale of the tape in black/white income and wealth disparities?
French provides an intelligent critique of the left also, but I was especially encouraged to see him acknowledge that certain racial disparities in income, and social success more generally, are deeply embedded in our social order. It would be helpful if the people talking most loudly about race, on the right and left alike, spent less time making empty symbolic statements and more time thinking about practical solutions to this enormously challenging and indeed tragic affliction in American life.
I’m a huge fan of Leuchtturm notebooks, but I’m a little concerned about their pricing.
lessons for activists from Edmund Burke
We do not draw the moral lessons we might from history. On the contrary, without care it may be used to vitiate our minds and to destroy our happiness. In history a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind…. History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same “troublous storms that toss / The private state, and render life unsweet.” These vices are the causes of those storms. Religion, morals, laws, prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are the pretexts. The pretexts are always found in some specious appearance of a real good…. As these are the pretexts, so the ordinary actors and instruments in great public evils are kings, priests, magistrates, senates, parliaments, national assemblies, judges, and captains. You would not cure the evil by resolving, that there should be no more monarchs, nor ministers of state, nor of the gospel; no interpreters of law; no general officers; no public councils. You might change the names. The things in some shape must remain. A certain quantum of power must always exist in the community, in some hands, and under some appellation. Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names; to the causes of evil which are permanent, not to the occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear. Otherwise you will be wise historically, a fool in practice.
— Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
the failings of biographers
In this interview, C. S. Lewis’s stepson Douglas Gresham reveals facts about his upbringing, and especially about his brother David, that he has kept secret for more than half a century:
For decades, despite a booming cottage industry of Lewis biographies and endless academic theorizing about the last years of Lewis’s life, Douglas kept to himself the fact that Lewis struggled mightily to help his mentally ill stepson. “We didn’t tell anybody,” he told me. “The only reason I’m releasing it now is because people should know what Jack put up with and what Warnie put up with and how heroic they were to do it at all.” It is time, he added, “that people understand what Jack and Warnie went through. Jack and Warnie didn’t know what the heck to do.”
Gresham tells more harrowing tales, and then at the end we get this:
“Nobody seems to know that David was ever there,” Gresham told me. “He seems to have faded out of existence… the biographies that I’ve encountered about Jack, for example, hardly mention my brother.” For Gresham, it’s a signal that the biographers haven’t dug deep enough.
So the biographers haven’t dug deep enough to discover … what Gresham himself has made a special point of keeping hidden all these years, including in his own memoir of his years in Lewis’s house. What does he think we should have done, tied him down and administered truth serum? Threatened him at gunpoint? (I set aside the question of whether biographers of C. S. Lewis are obliged also to be biographers of David Gresham.)
Tomorrow!
