No News, Fake News
by Theodore Dalrymple (May 2020)
The Newspaper Seller, Marc Chagall, 1914
The introduction, by Henri Martineau, doctor, poet, literary critic and Stendhal scholar, to my edition of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir, begins by stating that Stendhal was an avid reader of the Gazette des Tribuneaux, a journal that reported court proceedings. Stendhal believed that in this way he would be apprised of the actions to which the depths (or is it the heights?) of human emotion can lead. He was avid for sensation.
Ibsen also was a keen reader of newspapers, indeed during the second half of his life he read nothing else, except for the Bible. He kept himself informed in this way, even of medical matters. In his play, Ghosts, for example, the plot turns on whether the first manifestation of late-stage congenital syphilis can be mental deterioration, madness and dementia, and also whether syphilis can be transmitted to a child by a father alone. On both questions, Ibsen was right: though, with the disappearance of untreated syphilis and hence of congenital syphilis, even venereologists are uncertain of this. At the time Ibsen wrote the play, this was very recent medical knowledge (which has since disappeared), and it is probable that he became aware of it through the reading of newspapers.
Neither Stendhal nor Ibsen were idlers, still less were they fools. They may have enjoyed reading the press, but they clearly derived intellectual benefit from having done so. They turned their reading to account, but they were exceptional men. Even on the assumption that their reading of the newspapers was vital to them as inspiration to their literary productions, however, would their great literary productions be enough to justify the millions or billions of man-hours that people of their time spent unproductively reading the newspapers?
The proliferation of sources of information might at first blush be thought to obviate the dangers of totalitarian control: there is no one and nothing at the centre of the spider’s web. There is no plot of the nature that the paranoid like to imagine. It is true that we are sent the kind of news stories on our phones (our chief source of news) that, historically, we have shown an interest in, and that only a few corporations have the powerful algorithms to preselect stories for us. If we have shown an interest in murders, murder stories is what we will get. But all we have to do to change our diet is to look at something else. We retain a degree of control, if we desire or choose to exercise it. It is not because junk food is available that we have to eat it.
A Swiss writer has just published (in English) a little squib exhorting us to cut ourselves off completely from the news, much as an alcoholic or drug addict is exhorted to abjure alcohol or heroin. The subtitle of Stop Reading the News is A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life. The author says that looking constantly at news is, or has become, as much an addiction as those to the aforementioned substances, and that the only cure is abstinence.
And yet, at the same time, I feel there is something not entirely satisfactory about the author’s argument. He assumes that we can, and should, be interested only in that which affects us in a narrow, practical way, an in those things that we are able directly to influence (which are very few). In this connection I remember a joke told me by my late friend, Peter Bauer, who was a world-famous economist.
Two women, friends in their youth, meet again after a long interval. One has been happily married, and the other unhappily. The second asks the first how she manged to stay happily married for so long.
She replies, ‘It’s simple. I decide all the small things: what house we buy, where we go on holiday, how the children should be educated, what we should buy and eat. My husband decides all the important things: the interest rate and foreign policy.’
vice versa.
The author also uses the term to mean what is of immediate practical or emotional consequence to a person’s life. Quite apart from the fact that events over which one has no control may have a large practical effect on one’s daily life—for example, an increase in interest rates—it is a dispiriting view of the possibility of a rich and varied mental life that one’s attention should be fixed only on what is relevant to oneself in this narrow sense of the word. Indeed, one of the best ways to avoid depression of mood is to have interests that distract one from the day-to-day flux of one’s emotions, which are the borborygmi of the soul.
Mr Dobelli says— I think rightly—that the constant bombardment of the mind by a kaleidoscopically-changeable series of miscellaneous facts does not conduce to a deep understanding of the world and that it is better to study one thing, or a few things, in depth in order to achieve some higher level of understanding of the world. But the thing, or things, studied in depth need not be, perhaps ought not to be, relevant to the person’s life in any obvious utilitarian sense.
Not long ago, for example, I read a wonderful book titled Cuckoo, by Nick Davies. It was, as the title would suggest, about the common (though less and less common) cuckoo, on which the author was a world authority. This bird is of little relevance to my everyday life, though I like to hear it in the spring. If all the cuckoos in the world were to disappear, I could not honestly say that my life would be deeply affected, though in the abstract I do not relish the idea. I cannot truthfully say that I would lose my appetite or be unable to sleep over the disappearance.
Professor Davies has spent his life studying these birds, but I do not suppose that even he would claim that this was the most important subject of study possible, if the importance of the subject of study is to be measured by the number of people whose lives will be deeply affected by it. The study, on the contrary, is an end in itself because the creature is fascinating and it is delightful to know about its habits and behaviour. Great ingenuity has been expended on discovering information about the cuckoo, and I for one am glad of it, though I also gladly concede that the information is not relevant, in Mr Dobelli’s narrow sense, to my life.
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