The immured Carthusian and the desert hermit might go decades without reading the news — without, that is, attending to the ephemera of human affairs such as wars, votes, scandals, revolutions, famines, and earthquakes. The news addict, on the other hand, might find it difficult to spend an hour of her waking life without attending to what’s new. Most of us live somewhere between these extremes.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, we define news as discourse about what’s done to or by those you don’t know in the flesh. Discourse about what’s done to or by those you do know in the flesh, those whose faces you see and whose hands you touch, is, by contrast, the subject of gossip. Most news and most gossip you already know, in broad outline. You know the constant churn of births and weddings and adulteries and divorces and betrayals; the power-grabs and defeats and violence; the heroism and love and despair; the books and music and painting; the endless restlessness of striving for achievement. And there’ll always be death and killing, the corpse-mountains and the lakes of blood. Of that you can be quite sure: the only question is how much, and where the bodies are piled this time.
The question is: how often do you need to attend to the particulars? That this person was elected, that bill became law, these millions were murdered, those other millions died of plague or earthquake or famine, that book was published to acclaim … and so on? The answer, for almost all the inhabitants of the USA, is: very much less than you do now. You, like me, attend to these things far more often than you should. Your attention is fragmented, dissipated, wasted by knowing (and soon forgetting) what you’re told by the newscrawls, the blogs, the newspapers (the few there are left), the opinion-journals, and the rants.
But complete withdrawal isn’s the answer, either. Gossip can be noxious and is never finally separable from voyeurism and schadenfreude; but it’s also a sign of interest in the people whose faces you see, and that’s an essential property of being human. News, too, shouldn’t be completely ignored. To do that would be, implicitly, to think of the pagan world, the world the news is mostly about, as a desert — which, of course, it is; but it’s not just that: it’s also an arena of grace, to which some loving attention is necessary (how hard it is to write that; still harder to assent to it). So, complete withdrawal isn’t the thing, just as complete immersion isn’t, either.
An ideal solution so far as the news is concerned: a monthly publication that would review, in brief, measured terms what’s been going on that month, nationally and internationally; that would provide sufficient depth of analysis to make sense of what’s been going on; that would lean (without quite falling over) toward eschewing advocacy; and that would be advertisement-free and free of pictures and other visual aids. What a delight that would be! So far as I know, nothing remotely like it exists.
