There are actually some similarities—though
one should not overstate them—between current conditions and World War II. This
might provide readers with a bit of distraction from the Covid situation. Then,
people were desperate for news about the unfolding military situation, and they
had to wait for hourly news bulletins that were often bland and uninformative.
Today, we often find ourselves “doom-scrolling” through social media, and
although news reporting is virtually instant nowadays, it can be just as hard
as it was in the 1940s to find facts and analyses that actually meet our emotional
needs.
I would also like the book to provoke
thought about the relationship between the media and politics. There are many examples
in the book of how Churchill overreacted to press criticism; during World War
II, he was even getting close to shutting down the Daily Mirror. I don’t
give these examples in order to suggest that he was a bad person or even
especially unusual—he was under a lot of stress, especially during the war, and
many other politicians were equally thin-skinned. The interesting question is
why, when he banged the table and started suggesting that the press should be
silenced, he tended not to get his way. I think it’s in part because there were
robust institutional restraints and in part because different sections of the
media stuck together. The Mirror was not much liked by many other
papers, but they saw the implications, if one newspaper could be arbitrarily
shut down—and rallied round. So, when we see politicians lashing out at the
media, we should perhaps think less about condemning them as individuals and
more about the collective steps we can take to help preserve press freedom.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
Lastly
There are actually some similarities—though one should not overstate them—between current conditions and World War II. This might provide readers with a bit of distraction from the Covid situation. Then, people were desperate for news about the unfolding military situation, and they had to wait for hourly news bulletins that were often bland and uninformative. Today, we often find ourselves “doom-scrolling” through social media, and although news reporting is virtually instant nowadays, it can be just as hard as it was in the 1940s to find facts and analyses that actually meet our emotional needs.
I would also like the book to provoke thought about the relationship between the media and politics. There are many examples in the book of how Churchill overreacted to press criticism; during World War II, he was even getting close to shutting down the Daily Mirror. I don’t give these examples in order to suggest that he was a bad person or even especially unusual—he was under a lot of stress, especially during the war, and many other politicians were equally thin-skinned. The interesting question is why, when he banged the table and started suggesting that the press should be silenced, he tended not to get his way. I think it’s in part because there were robust institutional restraints and in part because different sections of the media stuck together. The Mirror was not much liked by many other papers, but they saw the implications, if one newspaper could be arbitrarily shut down—and rallied round. So, when we see politicians lashing out at the media, we should perhaps think less about condemning them as individuals and more about the collective steps we can take to help preserve press freedom.