Murray Kempton, a largely forgotten American Journalist used to say he could write better than anyone who could write faster and faster than anyone who could write better.
(At least I think it was him and I think that is how he put it.)
One trick of writing each day is to try and keep things tolerably clear even as I try to figure out what I am thinking, which is one reason to write in the first place. I want to play with ideas, includeing those that deseve a writer who can get through them more quickly, or knows better where he is going.
That is not an excuse, exactly, for what follows. After all, some of you are paying for these words with money and all are paying in time (thanks on both accounts) such that whatever gets posted here ought to live up to some minimal standard.
It is, though, a way of saying that today’s post does not follow as directly from the past few days as I thought it might and does not clarify what I see as its more compelling (or most absurd) points.
Still, if some part of you being here implies a conversation, as I hope it does, then I invite you to suggest any clarification that might helps us find whatever useful blueprint exists beyond the doodles I doodle here.
--
Our ancestors could live by Paul Simon’s immortal line:
I can gather all the news I need on the weather report
We cannot.
Yes, on many days we are better off not knowing the news. Overabsorption in another Chinese crackdown does not make up for a lack of concern about how your neighbors are doing or what’s going on in your living room.
And sure, adopting an "all the news I need is on the whether report” attitude is understandable (even healthy) in the face of any one massive story--climate, American politics, avocadoes--let alone all of them.
But it will not do as a permanent stance, especially in a connected world. We cannot take every day off from knowing what’s going on.
In the first place, injustice anywhere remains a threat to justice everywhere and that truth brings with it a moral obligation to all human beings. In the second, the supply chain that connects all to all means that what I do and what I consume impacts everyone else.
Over the last few days I proposed that a “suggestion to the world” should be shown on every electronic medium. This would be like a message flashed in the Times Square of our global village.
The announcement would be directed at making us more moral consumers such that “good” would gain power. Because regrettably, while neither Tim Cook nor Xi Jinping will listen to the world speaking out against how they do business they might, were the world to stop buying products made in China, take note.
Rhetorically, anything that might occupy this Times Square space would strive to be the opposite of a commandment. No absolutes. Nothing that would cause people to trample one another. Just something gentle intended to shift behavior towards the better such that over time we start to get better news about who controls what, the heating of the planet, and so forth.
For instance:
If you fly, it is best that you not fly more than once a month.
This kind of announcement, if it were up to me, would be written each week or each month by, say, five people. Five people who meet online without knowing one another or learning who the other is. Five people selected at random from a larger group, a group made up of the best friends of recent Nobel prize winners, small-town mayors from every county, and those declared “decent” and “of integrity” by twelve-year-olds from around the world
Or whatever.
Look, this “announcement to the world” idea is as unlikely as an idea can get. And maybe crazy dangerous too. After all, a message meant to come across as “please do this, world” would lead to all sorts of unintended consequences, a kind of butterfly effect that no one could predict. Surely every half-decent economist wants to tell me why people flying only once a month would cause all sorts of economic hardship and heat up the world instead of cooling it down, as my suggestion hopes.
Still, with Times Square in operation, at least we would have a common text, a weather report everyone can talk about.
And more to the point--a point I don't fully understand yet--the key would be that no one could know exactly who it was who posted the “shopping suggestion” of this week or this month.
Because while the internet looks like a tool to become as well known as God and to scale up your sales--Look, I have a million friends and a billion customers--we should use it as a tool to disappear like God.
Anonymity, I want to argure, is where God’s true power lies and the internet is the first tool in history that allows us to mimic that.
Or so I think.
But let me pause there to think on that until a day later in this week.
Becaue tomorrow is January 6th and so demands thoughts on Democracy and Yeats.
--Ted