Reunions & Events

Watch video: Part 1 and Part 2

Triumph of Information and Death of Meaning
By Ralph Williams

Ralph Williams spreads wisdom at the KWF reunion. Photo by Phillip Dattilo

The danger to which my title points is not yet fully realized, but is real nonetheless. The scope of the danger is global, for the passage of information knows no boundaries, and information is limited in quantity only by the (vastly enhanced) capacities of the machines of our beyond-Gutenburg world. The threat is that the chaotic superfluity of information rapidly transmitted arguably so distracts and exhausts the attention of even the diligent and morethan- usually intelligent that little time and mental space are available for the creation and testing of meaning.

The fundamental threat is to the possibility of principled and rational consensus in our democracy-as-Republic. What was envisioned in this radically Enlightenment undertaking was a union of citizens with equal rights, in which governance was to be by the will of the people, a corporate will determined by the consent of the governed. The word “consent” operates today within an impoverished field of meaning in relation to Enlightenment usage, often entailing now a simple “yes” or “no,” as in a survey, rather than an agreement reached through deliberation, whose characteristic forms were then the essay, tract, treatise, or letter, and (when not written) the extended debate or oration. From the eighteenth to the later twentieth centuries, the newspaper was, alongside the forms mentioned above, a principal site for the elaboration and discussion of the consensus sufficient for corporate peace and progress.

Especially from the early 1960’s onward, the media of “image”— television and “moving pictures,” with their enormous power of giving the impression of immediacy—progressively relocated the site for the creation of a public sense of things. Information transmissible by electronic means flooded the World Wide Web, where it is linked to further sites of information endlessly. “Meanings” themselves often arrived (and arrive) as information in the shape of a survey: “x% of the American Right (or Left) agree, disagree, or have no opinion about the following issue….”

At its most distracting, news is now transmitted in clipped units accompanied by visual clips; debate about opinion arrives split-screen, the “host” on the left, with two or more hostile experts talking atop each other’s statements on the right of the screen.

Print-on-paper journalism in this country is going through an agonizing death, with electronic versions readable on one’s Kindle, each article to be ordered up. A screen on a Kindle is importantly different from a page of the paper version of the New York Times, though here there is neither time nor space to parse out these differences and their significance.

The debilitating volume of information available; the rapidity with which information is revised—deleted, augmented or reworded; the pre-sorting of opinion into “Left,” “Right,” “LGBT…,” as in the scores of channels on Sirius-XM radio; the reduction of debate to the debased form of querulous controversy: such forces and more are in danger of paralyzing the formation of the consensus on which the Republic relies.

Even initiatives of noble intent—as with the “Fairness Doctrine” of 1947, finally repealed some forty years later, have had, in their application, an unintended vicious consequence. It is often supposed, for example, that “fairness” dictates that if there is a program on developments in evolutionary biology, a creationist must be given equal time to refute “Darwinism.”

The distracting and diffracting forces acting against public consensus are enormous. In the absence even of an effective site for coming to consensus, our tendency otheris to refer all major issues to the courts, with the inevitable consequence that the citizenry is divided into cliques of triumphant winners and incensed losers.

The urgent need, as we slip further into a functional plutocracy, is to find a site for the negotiation of a civic consensus where information is sifted and tested, and where meaning is debated with special regard for sustained chains of inference. Beleaguered journalists, in whatever medium, must be allowed time (and space) to find in issues under consideration the spots of deep ethical and political consequence, and to expose the logics which sustain them.

Whether we can save or retrieve— or truly develop—a Republic of consent/ consensus/common sense is itself debatable. If we are to do so, we desperately need a site and appropriate practices for the redevelopment of a civic consensus, especially in the face of the tensions attending the rapid decline of the American hegemony.