Thanks be, Alain de Botton has come among us again, as he does so often when we’re perplexed. Anxious about whether you understand art? Do you appreciate sex properly? What’s religion about? How can you be happy? Fear not, De Botton can tell you, quickly and easily. Not since Moses went up a mountain and came down carrying a couple of slabs of granite reducing life to 10 commandments has anyone been able to reduce the complex enigmas of existence down to simple injunctions. The man has a solution for everything.
And now he has turned his elegantly groomed brain to the news, which, he tells us early on, “now occupies a position of power at least equal to that formerly enjoyed by faiths.” This is a claim to get mere mortals scratching our heads. Admittedly Huw Edwards can come across like some evangelical preacher on a wet Sunday morning in Wales, and indeed, most of the earnest prophets of news claim merely to be passing on a greater truth. But the plain fact is the news is nothing like religion. It does not propose the existence of a supernatural being. It does not lay down rules for life. When it comes to it, news is just some things that have happened, as chosen by some not-very-interesting people running newspapers and television.
These people have rather predictable tastes and rather obvious blindspots. But they’re worried. Which makes them shout a bit too wildly: after all, their jobs are on the line. The other day the Daily Telegraph ran a picture story showing how a boulder had rolled down a mountainside in Italy, adding “incredibly ... no one was injured”. Incredibly? It reads better than “unsurprisingly, since there was no one in its path,” I suppose. And was it Liz Hurley or Thora Hird who denied she had had an affair with Bill Clinton? The madder everything gets, the less anyone needs to read any of it.
So on the torrent comes: 24-hour news channels on radio and TV, and Web sites, too, each one trying to make a little knowledge go slightly further than its rivals, the whole enterprise judged for the few minutes when a channel may, perhaps, claim to have something that no one else has got. The rest of the time the machines clank away noisily but not necessarily to any great purpose. It matters not very much whether anything important has happened, the TV and radio bulletins will make their self-important appearance at the designated hour and at the designated length. The newsreaders’ ponderous sobriety demands our attention. But why should we give it?
Alain de Botton’s solution to this very 21st-century problem is to prescribe a new role for news. The News: A User’s Manual is a nicely produced little tract, rather resembling an old Everyman edition. And De Botton is on to something. Perhaps it is time to question the nostrum that many of us have lived by, that the healthy democracy is the well-informed democracy, that knowledge sets you free. The sheer ubiquity of news must have an effect on us, and it cries out for some proper analysis. But unfortunately, this is not it.
De Botton thinks the news ought to have a higher purpose than merely what is new. Flogging away at an attempt to draw an analogy between news and religion, his book is larded with much use of the word “should,” as if the job of those in the editorial priesthood is really not to ask what is new and significant, but rather what is going to make our readers and viewers better people. He even joins the crusade — begun by Martyn Lewis, author of Dogs in the News and that other unjustifiably neglected masterpiece, Cats in the News — for more “Good News.” I fear De Botton the Sage rather misses the point. There is nothing so silly as a very clever man, and his prescription is as fruitful as arguing that a prawn should be a giraffe.
De Botton’s cure for the indifference that afflicts so many of us when confronted with tidings of some awful human tragedy far away is for the news to be less preoccupied with accuracy and more with advocacy. Fine if De Botton is the advocate-in-chief. But just supposing that George Galloway, David Icke or Abu Hamza got the job?
If you have ever wondered how this noisy, self-important carousel got going, read Andrew Pettegree’s recently published The Invention of News. But rest assured, there is a lot more shouting to come. My advice? Find a good novel and go to bed.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would