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In Defence of Reality
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I was thinking about what to write today for ‘Today’. I am working on eight pieces for other ‘destinations’ and am enjoying that. But the purpose of my website’s ‘Today’ is to spawn a piece that comes to me on that day, spontaneously. That has worked and it’s fun.
But today all I could think of was what I don’t want to write about. Which was a lot: Covid, Jan 6, Putin (and other madmen in charge of the world), inflation, terrorism, sex trafficking, climate change, abortion, ….
Then I realised that was it. I want to write about how much I don’t want to write about certain things. And why.
This goes back. I have a private, one-person, campaignless campaign against the stance that no good news is news. Not front page news. Only bad news is front page news. Sure good news counts when someone gets a Nobel Prize, but how often is that? And yes, good news is headlines when a war ends after 20 years (but quickly it becomes about how badly it ended), or when a national revered team wins against a national enemy team (but only after nearly a century of trying).
There are a few more, but precious few. Go ahead. Dig into media archives and see if you can find eight days in a row when any news source presented good news first. FIRST. ‘Above the fold’. Eight. In a row.
The reason for this is simple and everybody knows it. Good news doesn’t sell. In fact, most of us won’t subscribe even to the best ‘good news’ sites such as: https://www.positive.news. Not enough groan and grrr and OMG and told-you-so.
Good news doesn’t sell because (and this is the alarming point) humans crave bad news. Apparently we want to be furious and afraid, and we will pay to get that way. First thing. Everyday. (That whole phenomenon deserves about eight pieces in itself just to cover the basics.)
So, fundamentally good news is boring. And we won’t pay to be bored.
What makes me furious and afraid is the pervasive assumption that reality consists of only the bad. The good part of reality doesn’t count as reality. And that is stupid. It is ignorant. As in it ignores the truth that reality consists of both the good and the bad. In fact, there is more good in reality than bad. I did a calculation once and found that out.
So I think news needs to face reality and present it truly. Otherwise, it should stop calling itself ‘the news’ and just call itself ‘the world’s outstanding soul-battering, emotionally manipulative obfuscator of reality and seller of distortion’.
if it were up to me, the good news would come first for quite a few articles, and only then the bad. In addition to being more real that way, it would allow the reader to think better about the bad news following. Humans think best in a ratio of approximately 5:1 positive points to negative. Someone else did a calculation and found that out.
But it isn’t up to me (sadly, so much isn’t), but I can link you to a twenty-minute New Yorker version of it. It is an attempt to present the good reality first. They struggle a bit, but it is encouraging:
https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/politics-and-more/year-end-special-dont-despair
One more thing: the philosopher Nassim Taleb is one of two philosophers who warn people against watching or reading the news. Taleb says that the news makes us stupid. Specifically he said to Christopher Lydon, 2017, ’Supplying [people] with news reduces [their] understanding of the world.’
The other is Rutger Bregman in his masterpiece, HumanKind, starting on page 391: ‘One of the biggest sources of distance these days is the news. Watching the evening news may leave you feeling more attuned to reality, but the truth is that it skews your view of the world.’
Exactly.
That’s what I wanted to say. Today.
First
I love to analyse.
I also love to notice. And to ponder. They seem inseparable. A kind of Trinity. I notice; I ponder; I analyse. And I sing.
So I was bewildered this morning when, captive of Kathleen Jamie’s book, Findings, a rapturous paean about spectacular birds, I read this:
This is what I want to learn: to notice, but not to analyse. To still the part of the brain that’s yammering, ‘My god, what’s that? A stork, a crane, an ibis? – don’t be silly, it’s just a weird heron.’ Sometimes we have to hush the frantic inner voice that says, ‘Don’t be stupid,’ and learn again to look, to listen. You can do the organising and redrafting, the diagnosing and identifying later, but right now, just be open to it, see how it’s tilting nervously into the wind, try to see the colour, the unchancy shape – hold it in your head, bring it home intact.[1]
Not to analyse? Is that a worthy thing to learn? Is it possible that truly to notice, truly to ponder, I must not analyse? And truly to analyse I must not analyse? At least until I ‘get home’?
I balked. Then braved. Then bowed.
That’s what the vexing experts have been telling me for years, the Thích Nhất Hạnhs, the let-go-let-god cognoscenti, the Friends, Christopher: be first; first be. A sacred chiasmus.
I want to learn this. I do. Maybe the way is delicate. Maybe it’s not even one day at a time. Maybe it’s one second and only then one more, then charily a full minute, of just being-with before figuring-out. Maybe it is not disengagement as I fear. It is not piecemeal, or shoddy. It is not waiting either. It is climbing fully inside and perusing and smiling and wondering. Wondering is all right. Even peering. Even discerning. That distinction, though, is fine; filigree.
Now I see. The sweet centre of analysis, the juicy, heavenly thing it is to me, depends on its coming later. It needs first to be safe. To be home. Its very completion into being needs the being first.
I’ll try. I have a better chance now.
That of course is the irony. To prevent prematurity of analysis we have to analyse it. And to analyse it, we have first to notice it, ponder it, be in it. Escher would love the cubist infinity of this, wouldn’t he?
[1]Kathleen Jamie, Findings, Sort Of Books, London, 2005, p. 42
Clear and Present
‘He is a clear and present danger.’
When we hear those words from a measured, observant, informed, fact-unearthing, experienced legal mind about a leader of a democratic country, we need to stand back and stand by. We need to take note and take time. We need to stop and think. And not flinch. Regardless of our affiliations. Regardless, most importantly, of our allegiances.
It is exactly allegiance that I have been thinking about this week. This year, these two years, these six, these forty. And I’ve been asking myself these questions:
When is allegiance smart, and when is it stupid?
When does it fuel a clear and present danger?
My answer so far is:
When allegiance is neither clear nor present, it is dangerous.
Dangerous leaders count on both. They count on their followers to be neither clear about facts nor focused on the present.
Dangerous leaders produce fervid allegiance by follow these four simple directions:
1. Amass and rally marginalised people and tell them you love them, that you understand them, that only you can restore their dignity and power, that only you can protect them and the country they love.
2. Create and repeat ‘kill shots’, labels that belittle your opponents. Use them endlessly.
3. Be first to comment on any issue, remembering that if you are first, you establish the context, requiring others to refer to you.
4. Expunge all who question or oppose you. Even family.
If we and ‘our people' have for years been systemically ignored, passed over, ridiculed or exploited, we are prey. Any person with charisma and celebrity can use us to empower themselves. All they have to do is say in public that they love us, and we will swoon. Our minds and hearts will glaze over.
We will stop clarifying facts. We will use the leader’s facts instead. Feeling seen and loved at last, we will follow, follow, follow.
As we do, we will invoke with grievance a past that denigrated us. We will embrace with fervour a future the leader claims will respect us. We will exit the present, replacing it with whatever the leader-lover-of-us says it is.
And we will sing, shout, chant, applaud, hooray ourselves into a swelling of the rebuked and the righteous. We will dance in the streets. March in the streets. Kill in the streets.
Because he loves us.
But he doesn’t.
He needs us. To love him. To raise him up.
Dangerous leaders watch; they spot us; they wait, and then they swoop. In thrall we hang from their jaws, our true selves bleeding out.
So let this be our mantra: only our self-generated dignity, credibility, grace and stride can house the love we want, the understanding we long for. Only our own seen selves can keep from danger a country we love.
Clearly, in the present.
Rafa
He is a gasp-making marvel, a legend, a force of nature. And (given the absence of the inexpressibly celestial grace, precision and power of Roger Federer) Rafael Nadal took my breath away, as I am sure he did yours, last Wednesday. Super human he was, as in above, over, beyond – a 7cm tear in his abdomen deafening his inner world beyond even the outer world screams of incredulous adorers. Above, over, beyond. Absolutely. And wonderfully.
So let all of that be the majestic context for my reflections on this glorious athlete, this hero.
I want to talk about his towel.
Did you see it? Did you see what he did with it? Did you see how he put it carefully into the perky purple waist-high metal towel box, then folded in the towel’s edges and patted it before he walked away to score another insanely brilliant point?
I loved it. I began to pray for the end of rallies, wanting him to win them of course, but also hoping he just might go back to that towel box, pick the towel up, dry his face quickly, and then take his time settling it back into its little space. And patting it.
That care – that visible regard for a thing, that gentleness in the midst of appropriately fierce competitiveness – counts. It says something about the man. About the values that accompany every aggressive, exacting, hold-your-breath execution of his prowess. Inside all of that is an aesthetically aware sweetheart.
I began to notice how everyone else dealt with their towels. Did you? Some threw them in, some smushed them in, some wadded them in the middle and stuffed them in. All of them left tendrils of towel dangling over the edges. (And then there was the player who used a different towel every single time and piled up a week’s worth of laundry by the end of the match. Climate police, where were you?)
Now you are sure to argue that a) towel behaviour does not matter one single bit in the most revered athletic event in the world and is a weird thing to notice, and b) Rafa’s towel behaviour is just another manifestation of his supposed Obsessive Compulsive Disorder that appears, for example, at the end of his breaks during his painstaking water bottle line-up ritual.
I disagree.
First of all, that OCD-ness is possibly not OCD at all. He says it is process. I think it is meditation. Same thing. Key thing: his entire consciousness is focused on those bottles. For 7 seconds he is not in the battle, not in the achievement or the loss, not in the rev-me-up or calm-me-down self-talk that surely populates most of those sit-down, hydrate-yourself breaks. He is with only those bottles and their proximity to each other. He is making a choice to be entirely present.
And that is beautiful.
The towel. The bottles. The play. The man. A coherent best-in-the-world wonder if you ask me.