The News

In my post last Friday, I provided a link to a column by Peggy Noonan in which she suggests that discontent in the United States (e.g., a recent "Gallup had a poll showing only 24% of Americans feel we're on the right track as a nation") is not strictly about the economy.  It is not even more broadly discontent with the culture.  It is, most basically, discontent with national character.  As evidence, she highlighted news stories from the past week.  These stories were variously alarming, shameful, embarrassing, and contemptible.  Her use of news stories as evidence for character evaluation brought to mind comments by James Q. Wilson.

Mr. Wilson's opens his book The Moral Sense by inquiring into the intuition that humans have which leads them to respond with moral disapprobation -- and heightened emotion -- when they hear of the bloodshed, swindling, violence, and cruelty in the daily news.  This prompts him to wonder about the viability of the thesis of Thomas Hobbes:

A person who contemplates this endless litany of tragedy and misery would be pardoned for concluding that man is at best a selfish and aggressive animal whose predatory instincts are only partially and occasionally controlled by some combination of powerful institutions and happy accidents.  He would agree with the famous observation of Thomas Hobbes that in their natural state men engage in a war of all against all. (1)

This is a reasonable position, Mr. Wilson admits; however, he is not convinced:  "But before drawing so bleak a conclusion from his daily newspaper, the reader should ask himself why bloodletting and savagery are news" (2).  Here, then, is the main point of connection with Ms. Noonan's column:  What is it about disconcerting news stories that, well, disconcerts us?  Ms. Noonan locates her present litany of examples in a flawed or devolving national and personal character.  Or she questions, at least, whether it is flawed and/or devolving.

The thesis of Mr. Wilson's book is that we humans have a moral sense.  Sometimes we try to "talk ourselves out of it" (ix), but we all have an innate disposition that "shapes human behavior and the judgments people make of the behavior of others" (2).  Ms. Noonan herself might be Exhibit A in evidence that Mr. Wilson could marshal in support of his argument.  And I think that, in the main, Mr. Wilson is right.

I am interested in noting briefly the two reasons that Mr. Wilson suggests answer the question why objectionable acts -- those involving some misery that we generally judge to be worthy of disapproval and condemnation -- are news.  The two answers are (i) that they are unusual and (ii) that they are shocking.  Regarding the second (that they are shocking), he writes:

We recoil in horror at pictures of starving children, death camp victims, and greedy looters.  Though in the heat of battle or the embrace of ideology many of us will become indifferent to suffering or inured to bloodshed, in our calm and disinterested moments we discover in ourselves an intuitive and powerful aversion to inhumanity. (2)

Mr. Wilson's point is that "[t]his intuition is not simply a cultural artifact or a studied hypocrisy" (2).  It is, instead, something basic to human beings qua human beings.  To use an older term, it might be referred to as a trace of the imago Dei, the image of God.  This is the idea that humans possess inherent value because they were created by God and reflect key aspects of God's character.  Not least of these aspects is a zeal for justice, righteousness, and the cultivation of loving relationships.  Whatever one may call this intuition and whatever may be its ultimate source, Mr. Wilson seems correct to connect it to our revulsion to inhumanity in the news.

Although I agree with Mr. Wilson's other reason that news of inhumane acts strikes us as news (because it is unusual), I do so from a slightly different angle.  Before explaining that concurring opinion, I wish to comment on his rejection in this connection of Hobbes's famous observation about a war of all against all.

For Mr. Wilson, news of alarming events is news because it is not only shocking but also unusual, which he takes as prima facie evidence that Hobbes's claim is too sweeping:  "If daily life were simply a war of all against all, what would be newsworthy would be the occasional outbreak of compassion and decency, self-restraint and fair-dealing" (2).  Although I have great respect for Mr. Wilson, I believe that he has too quickly decontextualized Hobbes in order to serve his larger thesis about an innate, shared moral sense in humans.

Mr. Wilson, in other words, applies (and then rejects) Hobbes's comment about a war of all against all to the present situation in which governments primarily, but also communities and other institutions (including religious ones), exist.  Their existence serves both to restrain certain impulses and actions and to foster some bonds that do the same.  By contrast, Hobbes had in view humans not under a ruling polity but "in their natural state."

In the natural state, these restraining and bonding governments and institutions are lacking.  (See Leviathan, chapter 13.)  Indeed, for Hobbes it was the disorder of humans in the natural state that provided the greatest justification for a strong government.  (This argument was also rather convenient, and perhaps understandable, for the royalist Hobbes to advance in his historical context as the English Civil War prevailed in the seventeenth century.)  My point is that Hobbes's observation about the natural state in which there is no government does not fully apply to the present state in which there is government.

In this respect, if I have understood him correctly, Mr. Wilson seems on shaky ground in rejecting an attractively descriptive inference that one might draw about the misery reported in the news.  However pervasively bad human nature and behavior may be without government, our litany of (bad) news is generated in a condition in which a civil power exists. One may very well reject a Hobbesian interpretation of the daily news, but one might better do so for a more fundamental reason than that which Mr. Wilson suggests.

Nevertheless, it is the case, I believe, that Mr. Wilson is correct in this:  one reason that these items make the news is that they are unusual.  They are, however, unusual not only in the sense that they are not ordinary or typical; they are also unusual in the stronger sense that they are not supposed to occur.  They are not the way that we believe and feel and suppose that things ought to be.  These occurrences not only deviate from the ordinary; they are also deviant.  We might use the term aberration to capture both sides of this coin:  atypical and in error.

If this is the case (and I think that it is), then when we read or watch or listen to what passes as news, how conscious are we that moral reasoning and evaluation are taking place -- that we are involved in making moral judgments?  And that this occurs not just some of the time?

We process the information of human existence -- the news -- through a moral filter.  We may deny or suppress it.  The moral aspects of this data may be more or less apparent.  But the moral filter and aspects are there.  Can we really say that the data are morally neutral?  If a news item is objectionable, why?  If it is not objectionable, why not?  Is it commendable?  If it is commendable, is it virtuous?  If it is virtuous, why is that the case?

Someone may object that some things in the news are neither vicious nor virtuous.  Some items, it will be claimed, just are; they just happened.  Maybe.  I suppose that the TV anchor could report, "Today, 503 school buses successfully transported all 26,156 children to their respective educational institutions without incident."  Or maybe, "Today a rain shower dropped 2 cm of precipitation."  These two examples may be events, but they hardly qualify as news in the conventional sense.

The former would be news if, say, the school bus were hit by a tractor trailer and swerved into a ditch causing casualties.  That would be news, and we would call it a tragedy.  Or it might be news if several of the buses were taking the children to a science fair competition in which excellence in learning and human development was on display.  That would be dubbed an uplifting success story.  The latter might be "news" if the 2 cm of rain added to an already elevated water table and prompted flooding and injury to crops or life or, alternatively, if it relieved a drought condition so that agriculture and life could flourish.

In the one set of cases, an awful outcome is something that should not happen, something, we would say, that "ought not to be the case."  The outcome is causal: it moves people or things in certain direction, toward some particular end.  An awful outcome leads to a bad end.  In the other, by contrast, an awesome outcome is a good end, something that should happen, something, we would say, that is "how it ought to be."  You see my point.  There is a should-ness or should-not-ness to news commonly considered -- a moral element -- which brings me back to Ms. Noonan's column.

She suspects that widespread disenchantment in the country is not merely political or economic or even cultural:  "I think more and more people are worried about the American character -- who we are and what kind of adults we are raising." Mr. Noonan did not say so explicitly, but she might have just said that she believes more and more people are worried about the American moral trajectory.

If our evaluation of the news and the behaviors that it reports reflect moral sense and action, and if the WSJ columnist suspects widespread popular concern about America's direction based on the litany of news stories that she cites, then it follows that to be troubled about character is to be troubled about morality.  That is a subject not always welcome in public conversation.  But she frames the importance of it well herself:  "Something seems to be going terribly wrong. Maybe we have to stop and think about this."