Typical U. S. commuters in the 1950s
The purpose of newspapers is to paper over what’s new. News-casts—whether over the radio, on TV, or through the internet—are a great way of casting the new away. In general, processing information, however it’s done, can always be relied upon to keep us blind and bewildered. Staying connected to our cell phones and computers is especially effective for fostering our disconnection.
Diversion is everywhere to be found.
Diversion from what?
From ourselves—and from one another.
Wherever you go, be sure to take numerous selfies. Then post them on Facebook, to make sure all your FB “friends” feel jealous. How entertaining!
What’s more, taking pictures of yourself on your cell phone when you are in Venice or Prague or at the Eifel Tower in Paris keeps you from having to be wherever you are, connecting with that place itself. What a pleasure!
That way you can even visit Auschwitz and pretend to remember the millions who were murdered in the Holocaust, without having to concern yourself with doing anything to bear witness to their suffering or to change the underlying societal conditions that produced genocide then and continue to produce it today—perpetrated especially by the United States of America, as has always been our country’s wont. Who needs connection with such horrors, when posturing ourselves before the cameras of our cell phones is such a painless and self-inflating way to divert our attention from anything that really calls for attention? Is it any wonder that everyone does it?
* * *
A simple sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the paper. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted.
That line is one Albert Camus puts in the mouth of Jean-Baptiste Clamence, the fictional and always ironical narrator of The Fall, published in 1956, the last novel Camus completed before his death in an automobile accident in 1960 when he was only 46.
Reading newspapers is so exhausting of attention that it puts readers to sleep even when their eyes stay wide open, just as fornicating also tires one out while saving one the bother of loving.
In They Thought They Were Free: The German 1933-1945, first published in 1955, Milton Mayer quotes a German scholar he interviewed as speaking to him about “those who understand what is happening—the motion, that is, of history, not the reports of single events or developments”. In fact, though neither Mayer nor his interviewee make note of it, devoting oneself to the latter is an effective way of keeping oneself ignorant of the former: the more informational “news” one processes, the less one has to bother with such a messy thing as history.
After all, if one allows oneself to come to an understanding of history, one will not be able to avoid experiencing the call to take part in history. Any Germans who made the mistake of letting themselves experience such a thing in the 1930s and 1940s either had to protest against the Nazi regime, which was a dangerous thing to do, or experience the shame of failing so to protest, which was humiliating. It was much easier for them just to read the papers, losing themselves in the plethora of “reports of single events or developments.” A model to be followed!
Günther Anders, who escaped Nazi Germany with his then wife Hannah Arendt, captured well the advantage of such life lived in the oblivion of history, when he wrote in the first volume of his work Die Antiquitertheit des Menschen, which I would translate as “the antiquation of humanity”: “When the world comes to us, rather than we to it, then we are no longer ‘in the world,’ but rather no more than its consumers, denizens in a dreamland of milk and honey.”
Sweet deal!