Human beings are born and will die but society is the one more or less immortal thing they are connected with
Posted in General on 16. Aug, 2010
Human beings are born, and will die, but society is the one (more or less) immortal thing they are connected with.The modern versions of secularism haven’t quite followed Marx all the way. The interesting question is what the newspapers connect us with. And the answer, I think, is that they connect us with the world, with fragments of science and history in a popularised form, and above all the community we live in – the thing called “society”.According to Marx, that was basically all there was Man was essentially a social creature. All the main Western religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, in their many varieties) have been concerned with the ambiguous position of death, one of those universal facts that almost infallibly provokes a religious response For Marx, death was simply a biological accident. To be explicitly religious in the modern West, certainly in Britain, is commonly to cut against popular opinion.But this is not the end of the matter Religions can be of many different kinds.
In an important sense, all human beings have a religion – some overarching set of beliefs that explains why their daily doings have meaning for them. In our secular Western countries, then, we seem to have the remarkable – in one sense, impossible – phenomenon of large numbers of people without any religion at all.It was, I think, the German philosopher Hegel who remarked, two centuries ago, that reading the newspapers had replaced the practice of daily prayers Prayer is intended as a continuing relationship with God. Religion was attacked as bigotry and superstition, and intellectuals particularly often acquired a visceral hatred of it. They identify religion with the special characteristics of Christianity – belief in God, transcendence, miracles and so on They contrasted religion with reason. It cannot just be a department.Newspapers and television departmentalise everything, and that means that they are themselves the whole of life to which we respond.They provide us with a stream of understandings of absolutely everything we get up to. This leads us to the conclusion that the media are themselves a form of religion. They reflect and amplify our most basic impulses and beliefs.The difficulty in understanding this point results from the fact that the attack on Christianity in the last couple of centuries (by the Enlightenment, by Marx and other socialists, by positivist scientists) has named its target not as Christianity but as “religion” in general.
Now the whole point of any religion is that it is a way of understanding the whole of life. The punters would put up with almost endless repetition so long as some little sliver of novelty – a new fact, an opinion slant – could keep the river of information ever new and refreshed.The real point is that the media constitute a form of secular worship which has pushed aside the old God. Journalists are the servitors of what we most passionately worship: namely, change. The point can be easily made by pointing out that religion in newspapers, if it exists at all, is but one department among many others such as international news, travel, fashion and much else. Second, our minds become scattered and sclerotic as we learn to understand our lives in ever-changing fragments of news and opinion, two or three columns long.
It was something of a gruesome breakthrough in this evolution when Ted Turner discovered that there was an audience for news 24 hours a day.