The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
–H.L. Mencken (1880 – 1956)
As is obvious to people concerned about the socio-political malaise of the West, modern technology and media saturation facilitate the dissemination of fake news and promote lazy habits of thought. In an insightful essay, Why the News Makes Us Dumb, written some 30 years ago, C. John Sommerville, a history professor at the University of Florida, threw a lot of light on the “post-truth” phenomenon that sabotages leadership today.
Defining news as “what has happened since yesterday’s paper or broadcast”, Sommerville pointed out that it is a product that impacts the way people think about politics, society, science, religion, and everything else.
“What happens when you sell information on a daily basis? You have to make each day’s report seem important, and you do this primarily by reducing the importance of its context. What you are selling is change, and if readers were aware of the bigger story, that would tend to diminish today’s contribution. The industry has to convince consumers of the significance of today’s News, and it has to make them want to come back tomorrow for more News— more change. The implication will then be that today’s report can now be forgotten. So News involves a radical devaluation of the past, and short-circuits any kind of debate.”
In a society in which the relationship people have with news tends to be either addiction or indifference, it is hard to argue with the validity of Sommerville’s title. The news has made people dumb; not on its own of course, because Woke academia, state schooling, and the entertainment industry – everything from movies to television to video games to pornography – have contributed significantly. Dumbed down has become an easily recognisable characteristic of Western society in the 3rd millennium.
The problem is exacerbated by the fact that so few people today read any of the history, philosophy, or classic literature that would provide them with the context and insight that enables a more balanced and sagacious understanding of developments in the world they encounter outside their heads.
The decline of cultural literacy and the growth of the knowledge deficit over the past half century have led to a decay in the ability of people to relate ideas to each other in a logical manner, to see things in context, and to understand the world as a whole. Just as people tend to see events as merely one darn thing after another, so they regard government, the media, commerce and industry, the banks, the police, the health service, schools and universities, and everything else, as discrete phenomena, essentially unrelated.
The sheer complexity of the modern world and our dependency on experts, who themselves have little understanding of phenomena beyond their own special interests, have made matters worse. In the helter-skelter of modern life, few people have the inclination to look for meaning in events, distracted as they are by immediate needs or desires.
Martin Gurri, a former CIA analyst who writes about the relationship between politics and media, maintains that the unprecedented quantity of information produced by the Internet has resulted in “a general bleeding away of authority; the advent of a very angry public, and a public mired in negation”, as well as an enormous decline in levels of public trust in regard to government.
But it’s not the quantity of information; it is the quality of the information.
The fact that technology can disseminate lies and propaganda far faster and more efficiently than ever before should not be allowed to shift the blame away from the liars and propagandists themselves.
They are the problem, not the technology.
Inevitably, it all comes back to culture, that is, to the beliefs, attitudes, and aspirations that characterise a society. And postmodern Western society is as ideologically conditioned as any of the totalitarian monstrosities of the past century; that is why people tend to be fearful, suspicious, uncertain, docile, and deceitful. The pandemic of narcissism and the burgeoning mental health crisis did not arise out of nowhere.
Leaders shape culture, for better or worse, and if you have a deceitful culture, you will have lies everywhere, especially in the news media, and the descent into a new dark age will accelerate. Unless the culture changes, and there is a widespread return to virtue, tyranny will become entrenched in the West. Only leadership can pull us back from the abyss.
Leadership starts with self-leadership, which requires thinking for yourself, and that is impossible for people shackled by ideology. And the only way to free yourself from those shackles is by expanding your knowledge and growing in virtue. That makes the classic texts of philosophy, history, and literature of the Western canon as vital as they have ever been to the survival of Western civilisation.
