Ideas Have Consequences
Richard M Weaver
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The Great Stereopticon, like most gadgets, has been progressively improved and added to until today it is a machine of three parts: the press, the motion picture, and the radio. Together they present a version of life quite as controlled as that taught by medieval religionists, though feeble in moral inspiration, as we shall see. It is now our object to look at the effects of each in turn.
No one is prepared to understand the influence of journalism on the public mind until he appreciates the fact that the newspaper is a spawn of the machine. A mechanism itself, it has ever been closely linked with the kind of exploitation, financial and political, which accompanies industrialism. The press is a great scribe, possessed of that preponderance of means which technology always provides. The ease with which it muiltiplies stereotypes makes it the ideal servant of progress. It thrives on an endlessness of dissemination. Its progeny, like the frogs of Egypt, come into our very kneading thoughts. But, just because the mechanical victory of the press is so complete, we are likely to ignore the conditions on which its work proceeds.
I serve notice, therefore, that we here approach a question of blasphemous nature, a question whose mere asking disturbs the deepest complacency of the age. And that is: has the art of writing proved an unmixed blessing? The thought challenges so many assumptions that to consider it requires almost a fresh orientation in philosophy; but we must recall that it occured to Plato, who answered the question in the negative. With him it concerned the issue of whether philosophy should be written down, and his conclusion was that philosophy exists best in discourse between two persons, the truth leaping up between them "like a flame."
In explanation of this important point he makes Socrates relate a myth about the Egyptian god Theuth, a mighty inventor, who carried his inventions before King Thamus, desiring they they be made available to the people. Some of the inventions the King praised; but he stood firmly against that of writing, declaring that it could be only a means of propagating false knowledge and an encouragment to forgetfulness. Socrates adds the view that anyone who leaves writing behind on the supposition that it will be "intelligible or certain" or who believes that writing is better than knowledge present to the mind is badly mistaken.
Now Plato was disturbed by written discourse because it has no "reticences or properties toward different classes of persons" and because, if an individual goes to it with a question in mind, it "always gives one unvarying answer." And we find him making in the seventh Epistle the extraordinary statement that "no intelligent man will ever be so bold as to put into lanhguage those things which his reason has contemplated, especially not into a form that is unalterable, - which must be the case with what is expressed in written symbols." Obviously, here is the paradox, and the present writer is aware of risking another in a book which calls attention to the sin of writing. The answer to the problem seems to be that written discourse is under limitation to secure other advantages must be decided after due reference to purposes and circumstances. In the Good Society it is quite possible that man will not be so dependent on the written word.
In any case, for Plato, truth was a living thing, never wholly captured by men even in animated discourse and in its purest form, certainly, never brought to paper. In our day it would seem that a contrary presumption has grown up. The more firmly an utterance is stereotyped, the more likely it is to win credit. It is assumed that engines as expensive and as powerfuil as the modern printing press will naturally be placed in the hands of men of knowledge. Faith in the printed word has raised journalists to the rank of oracles; yet could there be a better description of them than these lines from the Phaedrus: "They will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome, having the reputation of knowledge without reality?"
If the realization of truth is the product of a meeting of minds, we may be skeptical of the physical ability of the mechanism to propagate it as long as that propagation is limited to printing and distribution of stories which give "one unvarying answer." And this circumstance brings up at once the question of the intention of the rulers of the press. There is much to indicate that modern publication wishes to minimize discussion. Despite many artful pretensions to the contrary, it does not want an exchange of views, save perhaps on academic matters. Instead, it encourages men to read in the hope that they will absorb. For one thing, there is the technique of display, with its implied evaluations. This does more of the average man's thinking for him than he suspects. For another, there is the stereotyping of whole phrases. These are carefully chosen not to stimulate reflection but to evoke stock responses of approbation or disapprobation. Headlines and advertising teem with them, and we seem to approach the point at which failure to make the stock response is regarded as faintly treasonable, like refusal to salute the flag. Especially do the journals of mass circulation exploit the automatic response. So journalism becomes monstrous discourse of Protagoras, which charm by hypnotizing and thwarts that participation without whcih one is not a thinking man. If our newspaper reader were trained to look for assumptions, if he were conscious of the rhetoric in lively reporting, we might not fear this product of the printer's art; but that would be to grant that he is educated. As the modern world is organized, the ordinary reader seems to lose means of private judgement, and the decay of conversation has about destroyed the practice of dialectic. Consequently the habit of dredulity grows.
There is yet another circumstance which raises grave doubts about the contribution of journalism to the public weal. Newspapers are under strong pressure to distort in the interest of holding attention. I think we might well afford to overlook the pressure of advertisers upon news and editorial policy. The source of distortion has been fully described and is perhaps sufficiently discounted; but there is at work far more insidious urges to exaggerate and to color beyond necessity. It is an inescapable fact that newspapers thrive on fiction and conflict. One has only to survey the headlines of some popular journal, often presented symbolically in red, to note the kind of thing which is considered news. Behind the big story thre nearly always lies a battle of some sort. Conflict, after all, is the essence of drama, and it is a truism that newspapers deliberately start and prolong quarrels; by allegation, by artful quotation, by the accentuation of unimportant differences, they create antagonism where none was felt to exist before. And this is profitable practically, for the opportunity to dramatize a fight is an opportunity for news. Journalism, on the whole, is glad to see a quarrel start and sorry to see it end. In the more sensational publications this spirit of passion and violence, manifested in a certain recklessness of diction, with vivid verbs and fortissimo adjectives, creeps into the very language. By the attention it gives their misdeeds it makes criminals heroic and politicians larger than life. I have felt that the way in which newspapers raked over every aspect of Adolf Hitler's life and personality since the end of the war shows that they really have missed him; they now have no one to play anti-Christ against the burgeois righteousness they represent.
In reviewing the persistent tendency of the newspaper to corrupt, I shall cite a passage from James Fenimore Cooper. Though Cooper lived before the advent of yellow journalism, he seemed to have stated the essential situation with a truth and eloquence impossible to improve on when he said in The American Democrat: "As the press of the country now exists, it would seem to be expressly devised by the great agent of mischief, to depress and destroy all that is good, and to elevate and advance all that is evil in the nation. The little truth that is urged, is usually urged coarsely, weakened and rendered vicious, by personalities and the schmes of the designing, find the press the very instrument that the devils would invent to effect their designs." A hundred years later Huey Long made a statement of impolitic truth when he called his tax on newspapers a "lie tax."
How, in the light of these facts, can one hesitate to conclude that we would live in greater peace and enjoy sounder moral health if the institution of the newspaper were abolished entirely? Jefferson observed at one time that it wold be better to have newspapers and lack government than to have a government and be without newspapers. Yet we find him in his seventieth year writing to John Adams: "I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid, and I find myself much the happier."
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