Information, Media and Meaning: Alain de Botton Lecture

Image Credit: 80000hours.org

Why We Should Think About Journalism


Philosopher Alain de Botton gave a lecture on Journalism and popular culture. Here is my interpretation and adaptation of what he said:


News is the last thing many of us see at night and the first thing we hear in the morning. We are constantly in contact with it.


News: what is it? Is it only information?


The great hope and promise of news, in the 19th century, was that enough of it would enlighten and liberate us. People thought that the abundance of news would make us freer and smarter. As it turns out, it is not as simple as that.

How the Flood of Information Dulls Our Thinking


There are two ways to keep a population uninformed: (a) suppress the news with an iron fist, as dictators and totalitarians have done for years or (b) make news so abundant that the population is unable to keep up with it, process it, or sift through it, separating the significant from the trivial, as we do in our "free" societies.


News is actually more than mere information; it is how we figure out what matters and what our lives mean. News helps us, for better or for worse, to process our experiences in life. This was a role that religion used to play, and needs to play again. As it stands news, in all of its fragmentation and amorality, shapes our understanding of reality.


The news always presents itself as being “new”, but actually the stories that appear on the news are not that new; they are largely the re-packaging of the same thirty or so archetypal stories that have been in circulation since the dawn of time.


Why Consumers of Popular Media Lose Sight of What is Important


Our assumption is that the news is about the important stuff; but so much that is important is not even covered by the news. It is a mistake to assume that if you watch and read the news you will keep up with everything that is important and, conversely, that if something is not covered by the news it is not important. Some of the most important events and experiences in life never appear on the news.


We Have to Learn How to Package Important Ideas and Information


The assumption used to be that if you had important information and made it available to the public it would enter into the popular consciousness and politicians would be forced to respond to it. This was thought to be the way an open society brings about progressive social change. This assumption should now be questioned, especially now, in the era of information overload.

We also have a cultural bias, in Western society, to believe that everything that is important is current and everything that is current is important. We are such a future-oriented society that we have lost the capacity to enter into history and to salvage its richness and wisdom. Yet it is the richness and wisdom of the past that will be essential for any successful effort to navigate our way into the future.


What enters the popular consciousness these days is not important information, but celebrity appeal and “cute babes.” One cannot assume that the public will be interested in important information just because it is made available to them.


But the appeal of celebrities and cute babes have always been the subjects that have preoccupied the public consciousness. In the past, however, religions have known how to package important ideas in popular images in order to “sell” them. Today we forgotten the importance of making important ideas and information attractive and interesting to average consumer of ideas.


Why We Don’t Care When Tragic Things Happen in Unfamiliar Lands


We have to recapture the art of telling stories. In order for a tragedy to feel tragic to the general public the public must first care about the people to whom the tragedy occurs -- in other words, they have to know them. Few people care about the deaths of people they never even knew existed before they found out they were dead. The audience has to see people in normal times before they care about what happens to them in abnormal times.


The other side of this problem is that, because of our selective attention, we usually don’t learn much about many parts of the world until there is a disaster there. The disaster becomes our first introduction to the people who live there and we find it hard to empathize with those people because the abnormal situation is all that we know about them and the abnormal begins to seem, to us, to be normal for them.


There is a Difference Between Good Photojournalism and Lifeless Images


The solution to the problem may be that storytellers will have to be more artistic; they will have to find ways to present more information in their images and stories. This is the difference between good photojournalism and dead photographs. A good photojournalist's image is one where the viewer learns something new by looking at the image. It advances the viewer's knowledge. A dead photograph, on the other hand, merely corroborates what the viewer already knows.


Images should be agents of information for us, but instead, in popular media, they tend to be bland and lifeless. They simply reinforce what we already know.


Why We Believe Our Society is Sicker than it Really Is


The new features in social media, such as the comments sections below content that is posted, present an image of society that makes us seem nastier people than we really are. People are nastier in their internet personas and in their anonymity than they are during face-to-face encounters in everyday life.


Perhaps this nastiness may be understood as being analogous to what people write in personal diaries and journals. The reason we are afraid to show other people our diaries and journals is because we usually write in them when we are at our emotional low points. Once we recover, we realize that what is in the journal is not really us, and if an outsider were to read our journals that person would think we lived a very sad, lonely and depressed life.


The comments section of online media is "below the line" media discourse. Below the line in the media does not really represent who we are -- it shows us at our nastiest and our worse. In addition, the stories that get the most coverage in the news make it seem as though our society has gone completely insane. Tragic stories, in the media, catch our attention.


Why Tragic Stories, Properly Told, Make Us Healthy


A tragedy, properly understood, is a way of narrating a momentary loss of control that brings the hero down. We are drawn to tragedies because we are drawn to stories about heroes with fatal flaws that become their undoing. These stories attract us because we are therapeutically impacted by them. They help us to realize how close we all are to disaster, and this realization humbles us, makes us more empathetic and kinder to each other.


Tragic stories should be agents of civilization for us; but in today’s popular media they become gratuitous horror and make us fearful of each other. They tend to harden our hearts.


The news treats tragic stories as if they will encourage the total breakdown of society when a tragic story, properly told, actually increases the bands of civility. The news doesn’t really seem to trust us to be able to handle the narration and depiction of tragic events. They do not want us to see ourselves in tragic figures, for fear that this will lead to breakdown of society and mass lawlessness. Ironically, this is precisely what the presentation of tragic stories would prevent.


The reason why we are fascinated by tragic scenes, chaos and death is not because we sick and morbid, it is because we are trying to make sense of the meaning of our lives. The thought of death helps us to focus on what really matters. The tragic provokes, in us, a memory of death, which actually makes us saner and more human.


How Unreasonable Fear and Unreasonable Optimism Alienate Us from Ourselves


But popular media play too much on our fears. The image of humanity that appears in popular media encourage us to fear one another. We get an exaggerated sense of the sickness of humanity.


After being bludgeoned with stories and images that inspire fear in us -- giving us an excessively pessimistic view of humanity -- the media turn around and give a few stories of exaggerated hope. The hope is always centered on new discoveries based on science and technology. These are stories of miracle cures for diseases and silver bullets and “science-based methods” to solve all of the world’s social problems. These stories are as unrealistic in their optimism and the tragic stories are in their pessimism.


In contrast, the Christian narrative is that we are fallen people, we are imperfect and we are extremely vulnerable. This narrative fits the norm, whereas the images of an artificial “perfection” in the media give us an unreasonable and unrealistic lens on our lives and distorts our sense of meaning. Popular media distort our sense of perspective.


Why Healthy People in a Healthy Society Always Need Good Role Models


Connected with this distorted sense of perspective is our obsession with the wrong celebrities. Throughout human history people have always been obsessed by the equivalent of today’s celebrities, even if the “celebrities” in antiquity, for example, were the pantheon of mythical gods or the lives imputed to rulers who were practically deities.


A healthy society needs healthy role models. The problem with our celebrity culture is not that we are focused on celebrities, and tend to model ourselves after them, it is that we are focused on the wrong celebrities and they make lousy role models. We do not create ourselves, whole cloth, out of nothing -- we always take our guidance from the example of someone else. We should be very careful, therefore, to whom we expose ourselves and whom we pattern ourselves after.


How Envy Can Either be Potent or Impotent


Popular media also encourage us to envy. Envy is not, in itself, an unhealthy emotion, so long as we are able to examine our envy and learn from it. What is it that we admire in the people we envy? What is our connection to them? How can we learn, grow, and become better persons as a result of our admiration of them?


Envy should be a clue to what we should or could be doing to improve ourselves. At the very least, envy should help us to understand ourselves better.


Popular media, however, do not encourage this positive notion of envy. Media put people in front of us who have achieved extraordinary things, yet there is no connection between them and us. Media suppress what we might have in common with the people we admire, there is no bridge between where they are in life and where we are. This leaves us with nothing other than envy.


How Bias can Either Bring People Together or Drive them Apart


Popular media are also afraid of bias. There is a sense that media content should be artificially “objective”. Bias, however, is not inherently bad. Bias, properly understood, is a perspective -- it is a point-of-view. Bias is an angle on events and circumstances. One should not be afraid of bias, rather one should be able to distinguish between good bias and bad bias. The bias that media should be promoting is a bias toward what we all have in common; a bias that brings us together. Media bias should emphasize our commonality.


Popular media, afraid as it is of bias, steers away from the big questions such as: What is the meaning of life? How can we make our lives more purposeful? How can we make this a better world? Media are afraid that to ask these questions is to be vulnerable to accusations of media bias -- and also to being called a “Marxist”.


How Popular Media Prevent People from Thinking Systemically


We have reached the point where the assumption in media is that one must either ratify the status quo or one must be a “dangerous revolutionary”. It is an either-or proposition; there is no room for improving the system beyond tinkering around the edges.


Likewise, the popular media are obsessed with “bad eggs”. They present our problems and situations as though they are created by individual actors who need to be identified, captured, and put into prison -- then everything will be all right. The problem with this paradigm is that it ignores the systemic nature of our problems. It over-simplifies the notion of bad actors, acting on their own, while ignoring how social systems cultivate such bad actors in the first place.


The media gravitate to “neat stories”. Media do not like complexity and they do not like ambiguity. They want to identify a single person, causing a problem, and put that person away forever and believe that the problem will be solved.


And Finally....


It is important to spend time away from the news. A news Sabbath is a good idea. We need time to be left alone with our thoughts -- time when our thinking is not constantly being conditioned by popular media. At first we might find this boring -- or frightening, but eventually we will see things that we never would have noticed or thought about otherwise. We need a break to refresh ourselves, recharge our batteries and get a clearer sense of perspective on what is actually important.

Related Post: Journalism and the Need to Tell Ourselves Better Stories, in Transcendence journal

BRICS: How Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa May Be Changing the Global Framework

In 2014 China Central Television interviewed Victor Gao, director of the China Association of International Studies, about the potential role of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) in international development. The five BRICS nations consist of 25% of the world’s GDP and 45% of the world’s population.


The current international financial framework, which was established in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, is now outdated according to Gao. The Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) framework will supplement -- at least for the time being -- the existing international financial framework, which is no longer in line with the realities on the ground, Gao said.


He added that the BRICS development framework will not pose a direct challenge to the IMF, the World Bank and other global lenders, but those lenders can no longer provide all of the lending needs for international development on their own.


The BRICS development bank will provide lending for infrastructure development without attaching conditionalities to the loans, Gao said. In contrast to the practices of Western lenders. BRICS lending will be based more on financial considerations, as opposed to political and ideological criteria.


Gao pointed out that although each of the five member states of the BRICS enterprise have different political systems, cultures, demographics, economic interests and rates of growth they share common interests in maintaining domestic stability, international peace, and to create an environment that is conducive to industrialization, globalization, urbanization and modernization.


Gao said that the economies of the member states complement each other: China and India need to import raw resources and commodities, which Russia, Brazil and South Africa want to sell.


Gao said that despite the large size of China’s economy, each of the five BRICS countries will be equal partners in the development bank, which should provide a model for how the world’s emerging economies should be partners in development institutions.


The five BRIC country framework is not a “closed loop” concept, Gao said. It will eventually open up its membership for other countries to join. It will become larger and more substantive over time. In the future there will be greater opportunities for Turkey, Egypt, Argentina, Mexico and Indonesia to participate. Gao says that developed countries in Europe and North America should also consider joining the BRICS framework. He said that the door is open for them to do so.

High-Speed Internet: Why the U.S. is Falling Behind the Rest of the World

Image Credit: Fresh Air NPR

Why is internet access in the U.S. so many times slower, and more expensive, than it is in Korea, Japan, Norway, and Sweden -- among other countries?


What is the significance of the recent court ruling on net neutrality?


 Why does Youtube and why does Netflix take so long to buffer (hint, it's got nothing to do with your computer)?


How is the Internet like the transcontinental railroad, back in the 19th century, or the telephone and electricity in the early-to-mid-20th century, or interstate highways in the 1950s?


What are you likely to miss out on in the decade ahead if nothing changes in the way the United States handles internet access?


Listen to this "Fresh Air" interview with author Susan Crawford. It's a real eye-opener.

The Democratic Party: Picking a Candidate for President in 2016

Image Credit: Queen of Heart

As I watched the January 17th final Democratic Party debate before the Iowa caucus I was reminded of a bit of history and an old English ballad from the 18th century.

The ballad was about a race horse that was an unlikely contestant according to the odds-makers.

The song was made popular by Peter, Paul and Mary in 1968, as the Democrats were trying to decide between voting for the re-election of Lyndon Johnson as president of the United States or challenging the underlying assumptions and special interests behind the Johnson administration by voting for Senator Eugene McCarthy, the anti-war candidate, during the New Hampshire primary.

Many Democratic voters, who saw Johnson as being boxed in by powerful interests that limited his scope of action, and who thought that McCarthy more accurately put his finger on the problems that disturbed them, ignored their gut instincts, suppressed their criticism, held their noses and voted for Johnson because they thought his re-nomination was inevitable and they didn't want to rock the boat.

President Lyndon Baines Johnson
Image Credit: Arnold Newman, White House Press Office (WHPO) 

As it turned out, the time was right for McCarthy's message. His impressive challenge against Johnson was the final straw that brought Senator Robert F. Kennedy into the race and, shortly thereafter, led to the withdrawal and sidelining of the once "inevitable" Lyndon Johnson.

McCarthy's "dark horse" candidacy, followed by the candidacies of Robert Kennedy, and later by George McGovern, led to a more thoughtful and open examination of many of the interests and assumptions that the Johnson administration had taken for granted and that limited the president's ability to match his promises with his deeds.

Arguably, the dark horse candidacy of Eugene McCarthy helped to change the scope of the debate for a brief moment in 1968 in ways that those who were afraid to support McCarthy, before New Hampshire, had thought were unimaginable. Unfortunately, a series of assassinations cut that debate short.

Senator Eugene McCarthy Campaign Poster (1968)

The 18th century ballad of an improbable race horse named "Stewball" is a narration in which a spectator was drawn toward an unlikely contestant, that more faithfully reflected the spectator's spirit, but chose to bet on the more conventional bay and the grey mare because they seemed "safer" and more likely to win.

In the ballad, it turns out that Stewball, because the time was right for him, was the more "practical" choice because the more conventional horses were no longer viable.

The spectator sacrificed both his interests and his future by betting on the "safe choice", which turned out not to be so safe after all. The spectator's lack of boldness, at the critical moment, caused him to miss his one shot at changing his fortunes.

Senator Kennedy attempted to
appeal to the power of reason
and passion in 1968.
Image credit: Ken Lambert, AP

If the narrator had bet on Stewball it would have set into motion a chain of events that would have changed everything. As it was, his moment was lost.

Just something to think about.

Peter, Paul and Mary Performing the Legend of Stewball

Republicans: Why They Find It Difficult to Attract Black Voters

The Durham County Republican Party fails
in their attempt to attract Black American voters.
Photo Credit: Blogging Blue: Blogging Liberally in the Badger State

It would seem to be the worst of all situations for a population is to be taken for granted by one political party while being written off by another one, yet this is the situation that we, as Black Americans have found ourselves in over the past 40 years.

The Democrats seem to think that they have a lock on the Black vote, offering little of substance to break down the barriers that have pushed Blacks to the margins of American society. At the same time, the Republicans think that nothing they do will win them a significant amount of Black votes, so they don't even seem to try.

Neither Black Americans nor Republicans would seem to benefit from this situation, as conditions in Black communities continue to deteriorate, following the Great Recession of 2007-2010, and as the Republican Party increasingly relies on a shrinking pool of aging white male voters to keep afloat.

Why is this? How did this situation come about? What can be done about it?

A Brief History of the Republican Party and Black Americans

The Republican Party was founded in the middle of 19th century. One of its strongest passions, at that time, was to abolish slavery, which was based on the ideology of White supremacy and exploitation of cheap labor. During most of that century people who were involved in movements for labor rights and an end to racial oppression tended to support the Republican Party, but all of that changed by the middle of the 20th century, when their competitors, the Democrats, began to support legislation to end racial discrimination and promote the right of workers to organize.

At that time many Democrats were White Southerners who were deeply committed to White supremacy. As Northern liberals in the Democratic Party began to win victories in changing the party’s official position on racial equality, those who supported White supremacy migrated to the Republican Party and the Republicans, hungry for more voters, gladly took them in.

In 1964 the Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater, a candidate who opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which ended racial segregation in public accommodations, to become president of the United States. Goldwater lost in a landslide, but the Goldwater campaign sent a clear message to both Black Americans and White supremacists about where the Republicans were headed.

In 1968 the Republicans stepped up their attempts to attract White voters in both the North and the South who opposed racial desegregation of schools, employment and neighborhoods. This trend continued, and expanded to include fear and hostility toward undocumented non-White immigrants during the 1990s, and Muslims in the 21st century.

As a result, the single most notable characteristic of the Republican Party today is its lack of racial and religious diversity.

A study conducted by Gallup Polling service, in 2013, verified by other studies on political affiliation in America, illustrates the situation clearly:

89% of the Republican Party is composed of non-Hispanic Whites, 6% of Republicans are Hispanics, and only 2% of Republicans are Non-Hispanic Blacks.

The Democrats are far more inclusive, in contrast, with 60% of Democrats being Non-Hispanic Whites, 22% of Democrats are Non-Hispanic Blacks and 13% of Democrats are Hispanics.

Moreover, in the past few presidential elections the Republican Party lost every single minority category, including Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, Asians, and Jews.

The Republican Party has increasingly become insular and self-segregated over the years. This is happening as the United States is becoming more and more diverse. Some see in this a pattern of reaction within the Republican Party against the changing demographics of America.

What Issues Are Most Important to Black Americans Today? 

While most Black Americans would agree that the election of 2008 was a watershed moment in the struggle for an end to the ideology of White supremacy, they are more reluctant than whites to believe that racism is no longer a significant factor in everyday American life.

They point to criminal justice statistics that suggest that Black Americans are twice as likely to be arrested and nearly four times as likely to experience force during encounters with the police as white Americans for the same offenses and under similar circumstances.

Moreover, they point to a militarized police force patrolling African American neighborhoods and arrests of Blacks for minor offenses that would merely generate a warning in other communities.

They also point to increased measures to make it more difficult for Black Americans to vote, which have escalated since the Supreme Court weakened the 1965 Voting Rights Act in 2013.

Above all, they point to continuing racial disparities in both schooling and employment in the United States.

In schooling they point out that Black students attend schools with high concentrations of inexperienced teachers in contrast to their White counterparts.

In terms of employment, they note that Black unemployment is roughly twice as high as the rate of white unemployment no matter what level of educational attainment an African American has achieved. They also point out that African American youth unemployment, in real terms, is over 50%.

Why Black Americans Vote for Democrats

Black Americans, as a group, are far from being a monolithic population. We have many different perspectives within our population and many different interests. Rather than being a single, coherent community, Black Americans may more accurately be described as being a community of communities. There isn’t even an approximation of a single agenda for Black Americans, as a bloc, to rally around and support. There is also no reason to assume that the interests and concerns of Black Americans are significantly different from those of white Americans of similar socio-economic backgrounds.

The fact that Black American voters are overwhelmingly Democrats has more to do with the Republican Party’s post-Second World War history of courting former Dixiecrats, and cultivating white suburban fear of an increasingly non-white inner-city, than it has to do with any coordinated strategy on the part of Black Americans.

The fear and racial resentment that seems to fuel much of the discourse in the Republican presidential debates in 2016 — conflating Islam with terrorism, and African-Americans and Latinos with crime, reflects the self-segregation and insularity of that political Party. The Republicans have become a party of racial and social insularity whose composition does not remotely resemble that of the nation as a whole. This is a problem which they must address if they ever expect to attract more Black Americans.

Related Posts on this topic:

Sections of this blog post were excerpted and revised from my posts on this topic that appeared in Africa on the Blog: "Ben Carson, African Americans and the Republican Party." and "Obama and Trump: What Black Nationalists and White Supremacists Get Wrong."

Related blog posts:

Africa on the Blog: "The Marginalization of Black Americans"

Transcendence Journal: "Black Capitalism and the Future of African American Communities,"

Africa on the Blog: "New African American Voters Determined Not to be Taken for Granted"

Africa on the Blog: Decoding African American Support for Hillary Clinton

What is Happening to the American Economy and How Should It Be Fixed?

It's economic commentary time. Generally I do not intend to post content on the economy but for this post I will make an exception. Two recent videos that have been circulating on the internet this past week nicely complement each other in helping viewers understand what is wrong with the American economy and how to fix it. The first video was uploaded by AJ+; it is titled "Killing the Middle Class". The video makes the argument that the greed of the top 1-10% is squeezing out the middle 40%, making it more and more difficult to sustain a traditionally middle class standard of living.

The second video was posted by former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, who argues that "deficit-hawk" austerity program is precisely the wrong prescription for a week economy; it will only make a weak economy even weaker, possibly throwing it into recession or worse. Reich identifies three essential points in order to understand what is necessary for an economic recovery. These three points are, waved in front of advocates of austerity measures, are like garlic when you wave in in front of a vampire; they make the enthusiasts for austerity measures shrivel up and blow away.

Together these two video clips provide a clear and concise explanation of what is going wrong and how to fix it.

Confusion and Silence

This was, hands down, one of my favorite songs when I was growing up. This song captured the spirit of the times, when society seemed to be spiraling toward total breakdown and chaos and states squandered human and material resources on endless warfare. It was a period that did not inspire much confidence in political leadership or in the future. This song speaks to the sense of hopelessness and futility that many people have in their lives if they cannot see beyond the bookends of birth and death.

Another song that explored the theme of wisdom being silenced by fools was this popular song by Simon and Garfunkel:

As you can see, I was a very deep, if not melancholy, child (lol). I grew up in a time when we were afraid that truthful witness would be swallowed up in commercial absurdity. That sense that futility might triumph over meaning may not have been very different from any other period of history, really. Both of these songs mention the suppression of the words of "prophets". Both songs mention the all-pervasive "silence" that envelopes meaningful expression. It seems to me that people without faith, without hope and without love still live with the fear that meaning will be swallowed up by silence.