News?
There are many benefits to travel, but one of the most important is the new perspective you gain on where you live. Away from the familiar, you are able to review and re-examine what you know. Spending time in Asia certainly offers a very different vantage point on both America and Australia. At the same time, it also encourages you to re-examine the sources of news and ideas on which you usually rely. [Before you read on, I must provide a warning: I am going to say some critical things about both the New York Times and The New Yorker.]
By now, we have become quite familiar with the world of lies, fake news and fact checking, to the extent it is increasingly difficult to remember what the world was like BT (Before Trump). There was a time when we could read a respected newspaper and feel comfortable with the information it contained: the facts would be there, and it was easy to separate those facts from the perspective the news medium offered. For many years, I have recommended The Economist on exactly that basis: whatever is published as ‘news’ is already well after the event, and it’s journalists have a well-deserved reputation for getting the basics of a story straight. The Economist is unapologetically a weekly that offers a free market, capitalist approach to the world, but it consistently makes its biases and its politics transparent. I still regard it as my best source of news.
Here in Hong Kong, I read the New York Times (NYT) to find out what has been happening, and The New Yorker (TNY) for commentary, and I’ve found both look a little different away from home. It was an article about Hannah Arendt which triggered these reflections – in the New York Times! [1] The article was examining the contemporary relevance of much of what she had said, and included this quote: “what convinces masses are not facts, not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably a part”.
Both NYT and TNY have an interesting approach to many articles. They personalize. They hold out attention through focussing on individuals, and capture our emotional interest. The New Yorker has long offered a standard shape to an article: begin with a contemporary issue, preferably a pressing concern, and examine the way in which someone is attempting to deal with that situation, or is in trouble, or has done something dreadful. Once the scene has been set, we switch to even greater focus on the personality(ies) involved, and read a generally fascinating backstory about childhood, interests, education, other activities. As the biography is developed, so, slowly, more elements of the issue at hand are explained, and what is being done. Eventually, we end at the place where we began, back examining the issue with which we started, but now telling us about the possibility of success or resolution, while quite often leaving us with a cliff-hanger – almost there but not yet at a solution!
‘The sun has only been up for just over an hour, and the unrelenting heat, humidity and humming of insects is almost overwhelming. But Jeanette’s enthusiasm is infectious. Suddenly, she stops, put a finger to her lips and points ahead. Less than twenty yards ahead of us is a huge pale shape, hanging from a branch. Trebikoff’s Two-toed Sloth, one of the rarest creatures of the Amazon. Jeanette has been tracking and studying these strange, rare creatures for two years now, seeking to make sense of their survival, avoiding extinction at the hands of the human predators of the upper Amazon who prize parts of the animal for various medicinal and other uses.’ [New para] ‘Jeanette didn’t set out to be a biologist. As a child, she was fascinated by engines and motors, and her family was convinced she would end up working with railway engines, her first love. Her father was …’ [Many paras later after we have learnt about Jeanettes triumphs and disasters, a failed relationship, studying wild horses in Australia, her first trip to the upper reaches of the Amazon, theories of animal diversity, etc, we are at the end of the article] ‘The sloth has seen us. Apparently moving at a leisurely pace, but actually quite quickly, it hauls itself along a branch, climbs and within a few minutes has disappeared. “It’s not just the sloth”, she explains. “The ecology of this region is important. Plants, birds and wildlife: they are different and I believe we will find they hold some of the important keys to dealing with the challenges we are facing to our survival as a species.” She could be right.’
You get the idea? In a strange way, it seems the issue itself has become personalised. The story of the activist, research or writer moves to the centre, while the broader problems serve as the context for a fascinating individual history, an engaging biography. We are reading about people: dogged, clever, dangerous, beautiful, puzzling, devoted, or crazy. Why is so much I am reading about the lives of others, often intimate life stories? For sure, the approach holds us emotionally; it is as if the underlying issue is too dry, too boring to be enough. So what, you might say? My concern is that if the core of these stories is not so much about just the facts, (or even invented facts), then what do these personal journeys reveal about Arendt’s ‘system’? About what are we being convinced, or what are we failing to see?
This is much broader than one publication. I used to think that The New Yorker’s approach was unique to the magazine, their signature style. However, three weeks of the International New York Times, and I can see I am wrong. Here are a few of the stories that took up at least half a page in the paper over that time. The desire for peace in Afghanistan focused on a small group of men marching towards Kabul, mainly about two of them. An (old) story about the return of various early manuscripts focussed on the researcher who did the work. A review of Swan Lake turned out be be mainly about the principal dancer. Economic challenges in Italy are woven around the story of a brother and sister and the business they have set up. Yet another story, about Trump and his supporters, is really a series of short quotes from a number of people, accompanied by a series of candid photographs. The World Cup in soccer: that turns out to be an account of the adventures of a young Mexican supporter.
Yes, there are some reports on social and economic issues – the success of Recep Erdogan, an assessment of how US businesses are already looking for suppliers outside China or even moving some production offshore. Like the New Yorker, the NYT also has its little sections devoted to humor (quite apart from the comic strips I devotedly read every day). ‘How to get out of a hammock’, I loved it; an article on lesbianism and astrology, crystals and similar was equally intriguing (was I meant to take that seriously?). But did I really need to read about Alessandro Ventura’s views about the future of her steel business, or be horrified by John Westling in Minnesota explaining Trump’s triumphs?
One day I picked up the Weekend edition of the Financial Times. My attention was caught by an article about the promotion of MFA graduates’ work, giving them a chance for recognition soon after graduation. The approach was based on a website, which had been developed to show and sell graduates artworks (aucart.com). However, when I read the article, I found most of the piece was about the creator of the site. Despite that, it did make me want to see what was there, and fortunately the website itself was about the artists, not the founder!
I don’t want to be misunderstood. Both the New York Times and The New Yorker do have great investigative articles. Massacres in Guatemala, or Atul Gawande (one of my favorite writers) on issues in health care. Just today (Thursday) the NYT had a excellent two page article on China’s takeover of Sri Lanka. It might be that I am getting tetchy, but despite these contributions, I think the ‘personal’ is taking over more of the space as compared to hard hitting analyses. What’s missing? Perhaps I should ask ‘what’s not getting as much attention as it should?’.
As I see it, America and several other nations are oligarchies, countries ruled by a small number of powerful people, whose primary interest is in serving their own, selfish purposes. There is a thin veneer of excuses (trickle down economics; or suggesting that in a free market the rich drag everyone along as they need consumers, pay wages etc.; that we are living in an era of benevolent capitalism), but little time is devoted to digging behind these largely meaningless nostrums.
The truth, despite living in a fake news world, is still there to be seen. Rich corporations and very rich politicians make decisions to benefit themselves and their enterprises. Taking support away from healthcare and education to fund tax cuts. Negotiating trade deals to maximise business returns to senior managers and stockholders. I do read article after article by left-wing analysts and Democrats explaning the consequences of what is happening (we need immigrants because they rule the economy; America’s wealth has grown as a result of diminishing trade barriers and tariffs and current moves will kill that). The commentators are great at offering opinions, but speculation is easy (I should know, I do it all the time!).
What I want to read is the kind of analysis we saw in the UK fifty years ago, showing the ways in which Britain was under the thumb of big business and affluent politicians. Anthony Sampson first wrote about that in 1962 in ‘Anatomy of Britain’, and a few books later produced a chilling expose on the international armaments business, ‘The Arms Bazaar’, published in 1977.
The personal grabs out attention, snags our emotional tendrils, and makes us feel. The impersonal is rather drier, facts and explanations can easily leave us less personally involved. But it is facts that will change the world, analyses that wake everyone up: facts before feelings! And facts can be excitingly presented. How about this as an example:
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations. The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.”
I know that was the beginning of a pamphlet. But Marx and Engels were writing about serious matters based on a compelling analysis. Agree with them or not, at the time that made people sit up and think! One hundred and fifty years later, ‘The Communist Manifesto’ still says enough to make it essential reading.
When you are travelling, you can see things in a different light. But I want more than just ‘in a different light’. Mr Westling of Minnesota on Trump offers little: there are millions like him, and I know the depressing character of their views. I do understand Ms Ventura’s challenges in getting her steel business off the ground after the reimposition of sanctions on Iran. Yes, I feel for her, and some stories do bring tears to my eyes.
But I want more. I do want to see more of the kind of analysis that Anthony Sampson provided about the workings of society sixty years ago, analyses aimed at America today. And I want it written in the way Marx and Engels wrote: vivid, clear, commanding. We need critics who examine and focus on the system, rather than on personalities. There is a danger in this ‘selfie world’ that spending so much time on individual stories is providing us with today’s version of bread and circuses, distracting us from looking at the harder questions.
And I want still more! To my delight, the Financial Times had a great article last weekend on Adam Smith. The content wasn’t a surprise if you have ever read what he had to say, but clearly and concisely Jesse Norman explained how Smith has been misused as the justification for a free market without government interference in business. Yes: there’s a place for that kind of analysis, too.
As I see it, right now there is a “revolutionary reconstitution of society” taking place, a fundamental change, one in which the obnoxious Donald Trump is playing a part (even unwittingly some of the time?). If we don’t wake up we will find we are living in a ‘new’ society, with “new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle”. It’s almost too late to stop what’s happening.
[1] New York Times, international edition, 22 June, 2018: pages 9-10
