[Note: I'm at GodBlogCon thru the weekend so normal posting will resume on Monday.]
Why is Dan Rather not considered one of the wisest men in America?
Perhaps I should substitute intelligent or knowledgeable for wisest, though I suspect the reaction would be the same. The question appears random, even absurd. But consider: Last year Rather ended a 56 year career as a reporter and broadcaster. His career spanned from the assassination of JFK to the Iraq conflict. He covered eight U.S. presidents and hundreds of global leaders. He witnessed hundreds of conflicts, from Cold War battles abroad to Civil Rights struggles a home. A conservative estimate would be that he spent roughly 75,000 hours reporting, researching, or reading about current events.
So if that level of intimacy with the news does not make Rather notably more wise, intelligent, or knowledgeable, then what exactly is the benefit? And what do we expect to gain by spending an hour or two a day keeping up with the latest headlines?
Tell people that you rarely read blogs, listen to talk radio, or watch reality TV and they will make no general assumptions about your lack of intellect. Tell people you never watch TV news, rarely listen to radio news broadcasts, and only read newspapers on Sundays and the reaction will be markedly different. They will automatically peg you as a person who is ill-informed, out-of-touch, and possibly even anti-intellectual. The same people who would dismiss the notion that Dan Rather is an cosmopolitan intellect, will automatically assume that their forms of entertainment make them wiser, smarter, or at least better informed than you.
Why do so many people buy into the ridiculous notion that a daily diet of current events is anything other than a mindless (though perhaps harmless) form of amusement? Even ardent news-hounds will admit that the bulk of daily "news" is nothing more than trivia or gossip. How much of what happens every day truly is all that important? How many of us have ever even stopped to ask why we have daily news?
As University of Florida history professor C. John Sommerville notes in his excellent book, How the News Makes Us Dumb: The Death of Wisdom in an Information Age:
The product of the news business is change, not wisdom. Wisdom has to do with seeing things in their largest context, whereas news is structured in a way that destroys the larger context. You have to do certain things to information if you want to sell it on a daily basis. You have to make each day's report seem important. And you do that by reducing the importance of its context.
This focus on change has had a crippling effect on conservatism. Once we believed our mission as conservatives was to "stand athwart history yelling 'Stop.'" Change was something to be undertaken slowly and with reflection. After all, the important institutions--family, religion, government--shouldn't change on a whim. But now even conservatives are becoming more like liberals. We don't just ask what government has done for us lately; we ask what it has done for us today. We don't just ask for change when it is needed, we ask for it daily.
The late media critic Neil Postman once wrote that the media has given us the conjunction, "'Now, this...', which does not connect anything to anything but does the opposite: separates everything from everything."
'Now, this...' is commonly used on radio and television newscasts to indicate that what one has just heard or seen has no relevance to what one is about to hear or see, or possibly to anything one is ever likely to hear or see. The phrase is a means of acknowledging the fact that the world as mapped by the speeded-up electronic media has no order or meaning and is not to be taken seriously. There is no murder so brutal, no earthquake so devastating, no political blunder so costly - for that matter, no ball score so tantalizing or weather report so threatening - that it cannot be erased from our minds by a newscaster saying, "Now ... this."
As a Christian, I'm expected to reject this "Now, this..." mindset in favor of an eternal perspective, viewing events not just in their historical but in their eschatological context. But I can't do that if my attention is focused on the churning detritus of the 24 hour news cycle. Besides, events that are truly important are rarely those captured on the front page of a daily paper.
As Malcolm Muggeridge, himself a journalist, admitted, "I've often thought that if I'd been a journalist in the Holy Land at the time of our Lord's ministry, I should have spent my time looking into what was happening in Herod's court. I'd be wanting to sign Salome for her exclusive memoirs, and finding out what Pilate was up to, and--I would have missed completely the most important event there ever was."
Indeed, imagine if Dan Rather had been a reporter during that era: "...three revolutionaries were crucified on Golgatha today. Included among the executions was a man called Jesus, who some Jews considered to be the messiah. Those hopes were dashed, however, around three P.M. when Roman soldiers declared Jesus dead. And now, this...
Boy, Joe, this is one of the best posts I've read here. Your observation underscores a powerful mindset that leaves us disconnected from each other and from society. Perhaps "alienation" is the best word for it.
Wisdom does erode when the greater picture is lost. Each decision becomes its own, rather than reinforcing a greater whole. This makes it far easier to chip away at conservative strongholds and gives us the pathetic excuse for conservatism that maintains a stranglehold on the Republican Party.
Ironically, liberalism trumpets the disconnections. Gradually, they seep into the collective unconscious and can't be removed with societal upheaval.
The way the economy is going, expect to see some of that upheaval very shortly.
C.S. Lewis says in Surprised by Joy: "I can hardly regret having escaped the appalling waste of time and spirit which would have been involved in reading the war news or taking more than an artificial and formal part in conversations about the war. To read without military knowledge or good maps accounts of fighting which were distorted before they reached the Divisional general and further distorted before they left him and then “Written up” out of all recognition by journalists, to strive to master what will be contradicted the next day, to fear and hope intensely on shaky evidence, is surely an ill use of the mind. Even in peacetime I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read the newspaper. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in New Zealand."
Thank you Joe, for yet another brilliant illumination of this cancer that is so much a part of our modern culture. Were I a brilliant man, I would invent a sensory garbage filter with built in irrelevancy scrubbing matrices, that would allow people to watch the news and actually learn something useful. I wonder how our society would change then if we were to focus on what is truly important to it's foundations, and it's direction, rather than the garish and often grizzly decor that presently adorns it.
"I would invent a sensory garbage filter with built in irrelevancy scrubbing matrices"
Think of the time you would save for people. The nightly news would be reduced to twelve seconds and constant cable news would peep for a second or two every few hours
wow. Maybe we should all be consumed by our own personal daily cares and not be concerned about the rest of the world. Now I agree, we need not waste two hours on daily news, but lets not throw it all out. Find a few credible news sources and don't get carried away with it.
How are we ever supposed to have any impact on culture if we don't know anything about it? When we start telling people we are replacing things they value for "wisdom," we are not winning over the hearts of people but rather doing what christians are known for in our culture, acting like we are better than everyone else...
www.fromthefield.us
Glad to see you cited John Sommerville's book. John was actually my advisor for my Master's in history at the University of Florida before I moved on, and his thesis was what originally got me into history. Although you ought to read the more academic version of the book you cite, "The New Revolution in England." It tells the story in a little more detail, and how not new this problem really is.
Makes me think of there being nothing new under the sun...
Excellent commentary Joe.
Infotainment transmits a lot of "knowledge" but very little of it is beneficial and almost zero is actually applied in a way that produces wisdom.
After 54 years of reporting, we are not sure he always told us the truth....
Important insights and great closing line.
One of the things I learned on recent 2+ week mission trip to Kenya is that I really don't need to have multiple daily updates - or even daily updates - on the news. So much of it is guessing at the truth. I've cut way back on news consumption and blogging since I've returned, and with no ill effects!