Ian Jack - Our age lacks gravitas. That’s why we cannot deal with crisis
.... In their irreverence
and sentimentality, and their interest in celebrity and the sensational,
British newspapers and the broadcast media are now much closer to the audiences
they pursue. News – including political news – has become a kind of
entertainment. How many ministers will resign today? Did you see Corbyn mess up again? It
may be no less informative, but in the telling a formal style of address has
almost vanished, to be heard occasionally and eccentrically in the
announcements of royal birthdays that come before the early-morning bulletins.
And sometimes formality is desirable, as a way to dignify our grief or
apprehension: not for nothing do undertakers wear black.
The present crisis
will shrink soon enough. Compared with other crises circling in the stack and
waiting to land – species extinction, human population growth, mass migration,
resource exhaustion – Brexit is small stuff, a pointless distraction. But how
can news bulletins cope with these things? How should they be ranked? A bearded
man carrying a sandwich board – “The End is Nigh” – was once a familiar
character in cartoons, but now the joke falls flat. “Collapse of civilisation is on the horizon” was how the Guardian
headlined its report of David Attenborough’s speech this week to the UN’s
climate summit in Poland. It appeared on the front page, though it was not the
lead item.
If we want to see the
world differently and, just possibly, avert the collapse, we need different
kinds of information. What has mattered until now is money. The indices that
appear without fail – fixed on the printed page and changing on the screen –
show the fluctuations of the FTSE 100, the Nikkei, the Dow Jones, Nasdaq and the currency
exchange rates. Imagine if instead the same little boxes showed the average
global temperature, the extent of Arctic sea ice, the rise in sea level and the parts per million of
CO2 in the atmosphere. Day by day, the changes would be tiny –
consoling in their minuteness. Comparison with the same set of figures for the
same day 20 years before would be needed to show their ominous development...
There they would be:
sober, factual, grave and rarely consulted; but always warning against the
ultimate crisis, like an old-fashioned sermon on hell... read more
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/08/age-lacks-gravitas-brexit-coverage
