Mass-Mediation

When we think about how we know something, it's customary to talk about how everyone has biases and filters. These range from biological ones (left-handedness, colour-blindness) to more technological ones (hockey sticks, red lights) to cultural ones (tea-drinking, attitudes to Japanese films).

But the world, as altogether too many philosophers have pointed out, is what people make of it. The interpretation of dreams, and of visions, and of the perception of the real, is what gives power over what people think they know and what they feel they believe. This is the mediating role that merchants of understanding play in the ecology of the idea marketplace.

We are all both buyers and sellers in that marketplace. When you watch a movie and give an opinion of your own, you are a seller; when you pass on someone else's review of that movie, you are a re-seller; when you 'buy an idea', that is exactly what you do.

The great and powerful agents of this market, however, are the mass-media giants. When you read a newspaper, it is the selection of 'news' and its presentation that determine how you view the world. Since a lot of the 'news' is mediated through a handful of agencies and a double handful of newspaper houses around the world, this becomes the world we live in and know.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does move our knowledge of the world away from the empirical and into the mediated realm. We no longer know things immediately (that is, without mediation, without having things 'in between' the world and us) but know things through their media presentation.

That is why large-scale triumphalist or exceptionalist narratives are so greatly loved. We all love a happy ending, we all love to be on the winning side, we all would like to believe that we are special people. After all, what is new is not 'news' unless it is exceptional and peculiarly interesting.

The problem, really, is that we are now blanketed by media exposure. We read too much, there seems to be too much happening, so we accept what we are told and then counter our guilt by affecting cynicism. We say, "Oh, you can't believe everything you read." What's worse is that we can't even read in order to decide what to believe, since we've decided not to believe.

Here's a little jolt.

There is exactly as much happening in the world right now as there was 5000 years ago. It's just that you're hearing more about it from people who are making money out of you wanting to know more about things that really have nothing to do with you.

Yes, there are more people on this planet. There are also fewer of the truly beautiful and interesting animals and plants that used to share it with us. Yes, there are more buildings (and bigger ones) on this planet. There are also fewer languages, fewer cuisines, fewer styles of architecture.

The media that lie between us and the world act as a sort of collective screening. The good part is that it can bring our attention to things that matter and which we wouldn't otherwise know about. The bad part is that it can bring our attention to things that don't matter and which we wouldn't otherwise know about.

Now we all have to learn a new skill: how to mediate the media. I have this image of us all in the space between two mirrors, with our knowledge of self and the world dwindling into smaller and smaller reflections.

Belief (in) Systems (Part II)

This is a sort of thematic sequel to a previous post, in which I wrote about some fundamental underpinnings of worldviews. In that post, it turned out that the punishment-reward or scoring sub-system tended to trump the altruism sub-system in human individuals. Some people think that is natural (it's like the concept of 'original sin') and some people think it is unfortunate (it's like evolutionary biology going up a dead end).

The world today is messy, but the thing about history is that we could have seen it coming a long time ago. Right now, there are five key belief systems out of the thousands of belief systems there are. These five key belief systems may not be important to everyone, but their sheer size (in terms of numbers of adherents), ubiquity (in terms of geographic spread) and significance (in terms of people and policies affected by adherents) make them worth looking at.

The five belief systems I am referring to are (in alphabetical order): Capitalism, Christianity, Globalism, Racism and Secular Humanism. It is quite possible for a person to believe in more than one of these, but it is unlikely that any given person will believe in all five, especially since some of them don't 'play nice' with the others.

Why are these five systems so important?

Capitalism, to begin with, is the child of that long and painful era known as the industrial revolution. Descended from the merchant cartels of the 16th century, it eventually became the guiding economic philosophy of empire-building. Its assertions that people should strive to control the means of production individually, in an environment of free choice (the 'market') and thus create prosperity for all, have been tested and sometimes found wanting. Nevertheless, it has been the dominant economic belief system of the 20th and 21st centuries so far.

Christianity, an eastern religion which sprouted from Palestine about 2000 years ago, is now the world's most widespread and influential religion. Monotheistic and proselytizing, it has butted heads with almost every other belief system on the planet. Although Jesus and his followers seemed somewhat socialist (if not communist) in ideology, for some reason American Republicans seem to conflate extreme capitalism with empire-building AND fundamentalist Protestant (there's an oxymoron for you) Christianity. It blows the mind.

Globalism seems like a modern trend. But it is a venerable belief system espoused by most ancient civilisations; it believes in things like the unity of the world under a single integrated programme (philosophy, creed, religion, whatever) in which individual cultures and ideas can flourish. The Pax Romana and Pax Britannica were pretty supportive of this ideal; the Pax Americana not so much. The United Nations and other international umbrella organisations are all children of this belief system.

Racism, unfortunately, is the extreme and somewhat common response to the Other. In racism, a group of humans believes that by virtue of their narrowly-defined genetic pool, they are superior to all others. This genetic virtue, already a somewhat dubious construct, is supposed to provide intellectual, moral, and even aesthetic superiority. It often co-opts other belief systems to establish itself, and has been shown to have a neurobiological origin in terms of the way humans differentiate between like and not-like.

Secular Humanism (as opposed to other kinds of humanism) is a creed which believes that a rational human, free of all supernatural influences and ideas, is a happy human. Although there are many flavours of secular humanism, the core ideals are a) secular—i.e. without religions or non-rational constructs, and b) humanist—putting human life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness first. It is an ancient creed, often veiled by the fact that earlier societies tended to pay at least lip-service to the idea of the divine, and to frown on those who didn't.

All five of these will crop up as the shadowy or not-so-shadowy influences behind almost every piece of news you encounter, in every medium of communication. I think it is not possible to find any news source which isn't influenced by at least one of these forces. This means that an educated human must at least be able to state and understand the basics of these belief systems, whether he or she (or zie) believes in them or not.

The Book

This is Monday's post. Sometimes you press 'Save As Draft' instead of 'Publish' when you are very tired. But that's nothing compared to what happens here. Take heart, all ye who are oppressed by new operating systems. Do not let them bind you.