The Worst

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A daily sampling of the worst that humans can do is not good for us. 

If I told you there is a media outlet anxious to report the very worst examples of inhuman conduct, you’d probably be thankful to stay clear of that source.  Who needs a daily reminder of the most vile acts persons can perpetrate on each other?  There are surely better ways to sustain our sanity and hope.

But of course what I’m describing is a simple operating assumption for legitimate and mostly well-intended news organizations.  News is the unusual: events that are not only out of the ordinary, but sometimes sadly brutal or cruel. We readily know the kinds of emotional and physical violence that violate the most elemental norms of human decency.  It’s also obvious that only the weakest society would turn its back on entrenched problems that it must resolve.  But there are limits to what we can process on a daily basis.

I was reminded of all of this on the first day of June when National Public Radio and many other outlets reported on a hangman’s noose left by a visitor in an exhibition space at the Museum of African American History in Washington. It was an ugly act perpetrated by an anonymous thug and, as on any given day, it was the kind of dark non-sequitur that made our hearts sink a little lower.  Racist instances like these are frequent enough to remind us of America’s original sin of racial intolerance.  It rarely recedes from the nation’s collective consciousness.  There can be no doubt that we need reminders that we still have a long way to go.

But here’s the thing. Something odd happens with humans when given a single horrific example of almost anything.  Something inside wants us to search for its place in a larger and perhaps growing trend.  We have a natural compulsion to generalize upward, turning any event into what rhetoricians call a synecdoche, where a single case stands for all cases. By definition a synecdoche is a representative case.

The defense is simple enough; we sometimes need to take a vacation from the journalism of atrocities.

Few thoughtful Americans could believe that racism across the culture has mostly subsided.   On the other hand, we can give too much publicity to a sick act by an individual who must cover their deviance with anonymity.  With these kinds of daily reports of aberrant single-agent behaviors we have to decide how big of a marker we will allow them to be.

To be sure, synecdoches often help us make sense of the world.  Bull Connor’s dogs used against civil right marchers in Birmingham are a perfect condensation of what the movement was up against in 1963.  And another contemporary case of a police shooting of an unarmed African American man is another.  Each instance stands as reminder of a serious and embedded problem.  But different cases can also be false markers.  If a one-off hostile act is allowed to stand as a representative case it can have the effect of making us all the victims rather than beneficiaries of synecdoches, extinguishing our interest in valid and significant trends.

And so in the interest of our mental health we should heed a common reminder about accepting a daily dose of news featuring the latest and the worst.  One defense is simple enough; we sometimes need to take a vacation from the journalism of atrocities.

The Appeal to Fear

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                                commons wikimedia

For our times we can update Samuel Johnson’s famous remark about patriotism: fear is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

If historians were looking for a label to characterize the dominant theme in our public discourse these days they could do no better than call it “The Age of Fear.”  It may be true that crime rates in most parts of the country have generally fallen, and that the chances of being the victim of terrorist attack are less likely than getting struck by lightning.  Nonetheless, we live in an age where too many voices in our political and news-gathering systems depend on fear as their most reliable theme. Acts of terrorism like the recent attack in Manchester England are sufficient for cable news networks, among others, to go into narrow and repetitive coverage.  Jerky cell phone videos add all of the video they need to endlessly mull  the imagined ghosts in the room, with the added effect of overstated  conclusions that we are not safe and terrorism is rampant.

The same thread is endlessly recycled by the President, who uses much of his public rhetoric to focus on threats allegedly coming from undocumented immigrants, Syrian refugees, Muslim extremists, Mexican drug smugglers,  Chinese banks, Australia, Germany, to mention just a few from his long list. We learned that we were in for a three-alarm Presidency when Donald Trump broke tradition in his inaugural address to rehash warnings that were endlessly recycled to his followers on the campaign trail.  He talked of the “American carnage” of too few jobs, insecure borders, abuse at the hands of our allies and more.  The speech was significantly out of the norm: less a ritual celebration of the transfer of presidential power than a victim’s list of grievances against others. And it surely resonated then as it does now with too many Americans with who have little patience to deal with the complexities of modern life. They do not know that the world is generally more understandable and actually less threatening if understood in 2000-word clarifications rather than 20-word rants.

Because we are hardwired first for survival, we look for threats before opportunities; self-preservation before self-actualization.

We can update Samuel Johnson’s famous remark about patriotism and reset it in our times: fear is the last refuge of a scoundrel.  It’s easy if not responsible for a demagogue to conjure malevolent ghosts in our midst.  This is the rhetorical thread that connects figures from the margins of our civil life as diverse as “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, Huey Long, Joe McCarthy, George Wallace and any number of public figures who built a political base by motivating concerns about “Them.”  Using this thread usually provides an unearned advantage. Those nameless others inside and beyond our borders are almost always portrayed as  immoral, unclean or dangerously powerful.  The irony is that most Americans have no right to claim a nativist ideology.  Our ancestors came from somewhere else.  Even so, it thrives.

Fear appeals gain a natural advantage from the human impulse to fantasize about what we do not fully know or understand.  Fear always builds from the predicate of potential harm we can imagine. Because we are creatures hardwired first for survival, we look for threats before opportunities; self-preservation before self-actualization.  As any lover of film-noir knows, another person’s shadow is all we need to envision the worst.  It follows that verbalizing threats against survival is easily rewarded.  The beneficiaries may be political scoundrels, cable news companies, and various agents who have seemingly simple solutions to sell: everything from home security alarms to firearms to grotesque projects like a massive border wall.