"The power of the consensus narrative in journalism is all but impermeable to reason or evidence.
The right understands this and the left does not.
That’s why the right worries little about nuance or getting the details straight; it’s the story that matters. Once you’ve defined the story, journalists struggle to make the facts fit the narrative rather than vice-versa."
The power of the consensus narrative
(Originally here.
Sorry, I can't seem to narrow down the link
any closer than the page as a whole.
Scroll to 07 MAR 2006 or text search for "consensus".)
Post by Eric Alterman to Altercation,
07 MAR 2006
"Western culture has not survived this century; we float and make our lives, says Steiner, from the surface wreckage, the post-culture, and in the depths the largest fragments anchor vast, proliferating reefs of coral scholarship. ...
The death of the culture is not just the breaking of the chain of tradition, of reference. The confidence of the culture has been shattered as well. The automatic, unself-conscious elitism it once possessed is gone --- Western culture is unique for its assaults on itself --- and the unforced ease with which it distinguished and evaluated, created hierarchy and gave itself a high place therein is lost to all but the fatuous. That the great events of our century --- the ``Thirty Year's War'' of 1914--1945, the genocides, the bureaucratization of terror and torture and death, the real possibility of deliberate human extinction at the press of a button --- that these were even possible would have struck those of prior centuries as ``nightmarish jokes.'' The optimistic beliefs of those centuries, of the prior tradition --- that there is progress, that the humanities make one humane, that ``the future is holy'' --- in their turn begin to seem like nightmarish jokes."
"The great reward of Western causal logic has been technology and the manipulation of the environment.
The loss has come about because we consider every act as a closed system with short range predictable consequences. The result is therefore a loss of meaning to the act."
The Parable of the Beast
by John N. Bleitreu
page 33
"... knocking wood (for luck) is only one example of a class of notions, so comforting and so productive of feelings of security, that men (sic) will seize upon them on the slightest provocation or on none at all. ...
I have come up with six very broad Security Beliefs that, I think, blanket the field ..."
"... during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.
We Americans are the only ones who didn't get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books any more, though we are literate. We seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it's explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.
A huge, rich, nuclear-tipped culture that propagates its core values through media steepage seems like a bad idea. There is an obvious risk of running astray here. Words are the only immutable medium we have, which is why they are the vehicle of choice for extremely important concepts like the Ten Commandments, the Koran, and the Bill of Rights. Unless the messages conveyed by our media are somehow pegged to a fixed, written set of precepts, they can wander all over the place and possibly dump loads of crap into people's minds.
To traditional cultures, especially word-based ones such as Islam, this is infinitely more threatening than the B-52s ever were. It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences. The basic tenet of multiculturalism (or "honoring diversity" or whatever you want to call it) is that people need to stop judging each other -- to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful, that God exists and has this or that set of qualities.
The lesson most people are taking home from the Twentieth Century is that, in order for a large number of different cultures to coexist peacefully on the globe (or even in a neighborhood) it is necessary for people to suspend judgment in this way. Hence (I would argue) our suspicion of, and hostility towards, all authority figures in modern culture. As David Foster Wallace has explained in his essay "E Unibus Pluram," this is the fundamental message of television; it is the message that people take home, anyway, after they have steeped in our media long enough. It's not expressed in these highfalutin terms, of course. It comes through as the presumption that all authority figures -- teachers, generals, cops, ministers, politicians -- are hypocritical buffoons, and that hip jaded coolness is the only way to be.
The problem is that once you have done away with the ability to make judgments as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there's no real culture left. All that remains is clog dancing and macrame. The ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire point of having a culture. I think this is why guys with machine guns sometimes pop up in places like Luxor, and begin pumping bullets into Westerners. ... When their sons come home wearing Chicago Bulls caps with the bills turned sideways, the dads go out of their minds.
The global anti-culture that has been conveyed into every cranny of the world by television is a culture unto itself, and by the standards of great and ancient cultures like Islam and France, it seems grossly inferior, at least at first. The only good thing you can say about it is that it makes world wars and Holocausts less likely--and that is actually a pretty good thing!
The only real problem is that anyone who has no culture, other than this global monoculture, is completely screwed. Anyone who grows up watching TV, never sees any religion or philosophy, is raised in an atmosphere of moral relativism, learns about civics from watching bimbo eruptions on network TV news, and attends a university where postmodernists vie to outdo each other in demolishing traditional notions of truth and quality, is going to come out into the world as one pretty feckless human being. And -- again -- perhaps the goal of all this is to make us feckless so we won't nuke each other.
On the other hand, if you are raised within some specific culture, you end up with a basic set of tools that you can use to think about and understand the world. You might use those tools to reject the culture you were raised in, but at least you've got some tools."
-- emphasis and links are mine -- ed.
You will also want to read / "Jihad vs. McWorld" / and comments from David Brin.
Really. You will.
"Meaning, not raw facts, is what humanity seeks, and society is a collection of kits or codes for processing raw facts into meaning. Ordering is one of the simplest and most durable human methods for finding or making meaning. Take a variety of things and put them in some kind of relationship, a simple sequence, a taxonomy, a hierarchy, or a cause-and-effect pattern, say, and they make sense, apparently for no better reason than the tautological one that order and relationship are felt by human beings to be meaningful."
Alvin Kernan. "The Death of Literature"
Quoted
here
"His striving is for order, predictability, understanding, for which chess master Capablanca serves as a model;
but he keeps discovering chaos, ambiguity, stupidity."
Raymond Chandler
by Jerry Speir, Page 49
"Religiousness has historically been thought to achieve some combination of the following four things for people. It explains (the cosmos, the nature of life and so on). It consoles (in the face of illness or death, say). It provides moral guidance and it inspires (with feelings of exultation, awe, etc).
In the field of explanation, I take it you would agree that science has the greater claim to be true, where there is any conflict.
In the field of consolation, science has little to offer except pain-relieving drugs, etc. Religion can sometimes work as a placebo, so long as you manage to sustain belief, even if what you believe is false. But some of us would scorn to be consoled by a falsehood.
In the field of moral guidance, science doesn't pretend to have anything ultimately to offer, though it can clarify our moral reasoning on questions such as abortion and euthanasia. Religion claims much in this field, but most of the great advances in moral thinking through history owe at least as much to secular, liberal, humanist philosophy.
I need hardly say that it is in the field of inspiration that science really comes into its own. There is no shame in loving both, but why bother?"
"Although hardly anyone is terrified by lightning or eclipses anymore, by failing to discover a moral purpose to call their own, many people still look to “the great beyond,” hoping to find a “higher” purpose to latch onto. Hence, even today, divine favors are still being sought from powerless idols, knowledge of the future from those who lived in the past, and moral advice from magicians. Some people follow these vain pursuits with religious zeal, others seek them out as an amusing diversion, but for Epicureans, it is most amusing of all to look upon these matters with uncompromising sobriety."
"This evolving narrative has the possibility of delivering chapters that will be bolder, more daring, more surprising and unless we actively and creatively interpret these blinding events for ourselves, they will also be simply, starkly and unbearably senseless and inevitable."
"... Coca Cola, CIA, schedules for the London Underground. At first light we broke camp and made our way South along the border. Carbon-14 and messenger RNA, radio telescopes in Arecibo. It seems we're getting something here, Inspector. Taps on the telephones. Requiescat in pace. The delicate pastels of morning, hieroglyphic scarabs, clockwork toys. Aurora borealis over microscopic islands of gallium arsenide. SETI coming up empty, shutting down. But what do you make of this? Every 200 minutes, it repeats. Must be some kind of code. Jaguars in the windows on the 45th floor. You can see them if you shade your eyes. Right there, across the ravine. Quantum geography? Yes, we've been meaning to check. And in Cairo tonight, a fire, 12 deaths. According to our latest intelligence, the moon has permanently disappeared. Deadlines and bloodlines, lapis and turquoise in Chiapas. So many sorties. So many stories. Getting harder and harder to keep track. ..."
Thanks, Locke-san
07 APR 2003. "What Love's Got to Do With It"
Thanks again.
"Most interpreters of postmodernism assume that there is a clearcut difference between the modern era and the postmodern era. The modern era is the period that began (in western Europe) in the late 17th century and ended some time in the 1960s; the postmodern is the last 30 years or so.-- Jameson is a Marxist. I am not. -- ed.
... we are still taught that we ought to have a feeling of wholeness in our lives; that we ought to have an image of the world as a place where all the pieces fit together; that we ought to have some overarching consistency in our cultural behavior. When the pieces of our experience don't fit together, we naturally feel disappointed and deprived, as if something absolutely central were missing in our lives. Perhaps we even feel personally responsible, as if we have failed to live correctly. And there are plenty of "self-help" books to tell us how to correct our failure and get the wholeness we want."
"The modern world is held to be the deliberate creation (with some unintended consequences) of the modern philosophers -- namely, the Enlightenment, which gave birth to both scientific- technological progress and the liberal ideology of social-political progress. The Enlighteners argued (though still covertly) that instead of hiding philosophy, philosophers should reform society to make it more hospitable to philosophy: in particular, by undertaking the "project" of modern science, by which reason masters nature and provides material gratifications -- safety, health and wealth .... Physical science and technology would provide the know-how, while a new kind of regime, liberalism, would provide the conditions of liberty and equality enabling men to pursue their self-interest. ...Links are mine -- ed.
(But in so doing) philosophy inadvertently exposed men to certain hard truths, truths too hard for them to bear: that there are no gods to reward good or punish evil; that no one's patria is really any better than anyone else's; that one's ancestral ways are merely conventional. This leads to nihilism, epitomized by the listless, meaningless life of bourgeois man, or to dangerous experiments with new gods -- gods like the race and the Fuehrer."
"So the forces of capitalism really have crushed the individual will?"
"Yes, mon ami, it is the perverse culmination of the Western struggle for freedom. There is no escape.
Another glass of wine?"