The only honest purpose of unearthing and publicizing error is to make it less prevalent. Faced with corruption, idiocy and mediocrity, rather than remaining stuck at the level of gleeful fault finding in the present, the news should seek instead always to nurture greater competence in the future. However satisfying and important it can be to bring down the powerful, journalistic investigation should start with a subtly different and not invariably overlapping goaclass="underline" the desire to try to improve things.
Received Ideas
The relentless march of three-dimensional printing continues … [The process] uses exotic ‘inks’ based on silver and carbon nanotubes … Carbomorph, because of its polyester component which melts when heated, is a suitable raw material for this process. It is also a useful one, for among its electrical properties is piezoresistivity.
The Economist
1.
THE NOBLEST PROMISE of the news is that it will be able to alleviate ignorance, overcome prejudice and raise the intelligence of individuals and nations.
2.
BUT FROM SOME quarters it has intermittently been accused of a contrary capacity, that of making us completely stupid. One of the most uncompromising versions of this charge was levelled in the mid-nineteenth century by Gustave Flaubert. Flaubert belonged to a generation that had experienced the rise of mass-circulation newspapers at first hand. Whereas in his childhood news had been dispersed randomly throughout the population by rumour and via badly printed single-page news-sheets, by the time he was in his thirties the invention of the steam printing press, the development of railways and the relaxation of censorship laws had together enabled the proliferation of well-capitalized, authoritative newspapers which now laid claim, across France, to a combined readership of millions.
Flaubert was appalled by what, in his estimation, these newspapers were doing to the intelligence and curiosity of his countrymen. He believed that the papers were spreading a new kind of stupidity – which he termed ‘la bêtise’ – into every corner of France, an idiocy that was far worse than the mere ignorance it replaced, for it was actively fuelled by, rather than just passively filling in for, knowledge. So contaminating was the effect of the press, in Flaubert’s eyes, that only entirely illiterate and uneducated Frenchmen now stood a chance of being able to think properly: ‘Peasants are less idiotic than three-quarters of the middle classes of France, who are always getting themselves into a frenzy over something they’ve read in the papers and spinning like weather vanes according to whatever one paper or another is saying.’
The most loathsome character in Madame Bovary, the pharmacist Homais, is introduced early on as an avid consumer of news who sets aside a special hour every day to study ‘le journal’ (Flaubert keeps the word in italics throughout, to send up the neoreligious reverence in which this object is held). In the evenings, Homais heads for an inn, Le Lion d’Or, where the local bourgeoisie gather to chew over current events: ‘Afterwards, they discussed what was in “the newspaper”. By this hour, Homais knew it all practically by heart, and he would report on it in full, including the editorials as well as the many individual catastrophes that had occurred across France and around the world.’
3.
FLAUBERT HATED NEWSPAPERS because of his conviction that they slyly encouraged readers to hand over to others a task that no honest person should ever consent to offload on to someone else: thinking. The press implicitly suggested that the formation of complex and intelligent opinions on important matters could now safely be entrusted to its employees, that the reader’s mind could leave off its own particular peregrinations, enquiries and meditations and surrender wholesale to conclusions deftly packaged up by the leader writers of Le Figaro and its ilk.
It is hardly surprising that a writer so sensitive to cliché and the mentality of the herd should feel outraged by the constriction of independent enquiry that this mass development represented, by the ironing out of local eccentricity and individual difference in favour of an all-encompassing, monocultural set of assumptions. Here was a homogenizing force in danger of stamping out all the productive oddities of interior life and of turning the rich, idiosyncratic, handcrafted kitchen gardens of the mind into rolling, mechanized, insipid wheatfields.
4.
IN THE 1870S, Flaubert began keeping a record of what he judged to be the most idiotic patterns of thought promoted by the modern world in general and by the newspapers in particular. Published posthumously as The Dictionary of Received Ideas, this collection of bromides, organized by topic, was described by its author as an ‘encyclopédie de la bêtise humaine’ (an encyclopedia of human stupidity). Here is a random sampling of its entries:
BUDGET Never balanced.
CATHOLICISM Has had a very good influence on art.
CHRISTIANITY Freed the slaves.
CRUSADES Benefited Venetian trade.
DIAMONDS To think that they’re nothing but coal; if we came across one in its natural state, we wouldn’t even bother to pick it up off the ground!
EXERCISE Prevents all illnesses. To be recommended at all times.
PHOTOGRAPHY Will make painting obsolete.
It is worth noting how many of the Dictionary’s clichés touch on sophisticated disciplines such as theology, science and politics, without, however, going anywhere very clever with them: the ‘received ideas’ consist of exotic or intricate facts married to a stubborn narrowness of mind. In the past, Flaubert implied, idiots had had no clue as to what the carbon structure of diamonds was. Their shallowness had been entirely and reliably evident. But now the press had made it very possible for a person to be at once unimaginative, uncreative, mean-minded and extremely well informed. The modern idiot could routinely know what only geniuses had known in the past, and yet he was still an idiot – a depressing combination of traits that previous ages had never had to worry about. The news had, for Flaubert, armed stupidity and given authority to fools.
5.
THE NEWS ORGANIZATIONS of our own day would be unlikely to mollify Flaubert in the least. They continue to hammer their audiences’ opinions into some highly standardized shapes:
3D PRINTING In future, everything will be 3D-printed. Express surprise and awe at the prospect.
INTERNET Has made concentration impossible. So hard now to read long novels.
WORK–LIFE BALANCE More difficult than ever before. It may soon be necessary to make an appointment to see one’s own spouse.
CARBON-FIBRE AIRCRAFT WINGS Flex amazingly; but sure to cause a crash one day.
MANDARIN The language of the future.
6.
HOW DOES THE news manage to enlist us in its sometimes hackneyed or wrong-headed conclusions?
Primarily because it succeeds, by a variety of means, in coming across to us as extremely authoritative. For a start, we don’t entirely grasp who decides on what counts as news and by what criteria – and therefore bulletins have a habit of seeming as if they had been generated by nature or some higher necessity to which we are not privy and which it would be impudent to question. We forget the highly contingent and human dynamics underlying the choice of what ends up being picked as a ‘story’.