cause and the newspapers

As a sage, LI is tickled by causal statements that are casually put out by newspapers, since they beg all the great philosophical questions about causes, while collectively they show us exactly how ideology works. The New York Times would not, for instance, publish a headline like: “400 murders happen across US – poverty blamed.” But the NYT headline about the daily doings of the stock market are invariably couched in causal terms. Today, for instance, it is: Stocks Fall After Disappointing Earnings. Day after day a story about the stocks rising and falling has been woven, a story in which a big, broad, rough, easily seen causality is spotted to explain rises and falls. It is always, of course, local. Thus, the fall today comes about because of this:

“Wall Street retreated moderately Tuesday after disappointing reports from aluminum producer Alcoa Inc. and chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. raised concerns about weaker-than-expected first-quarter earnings overall.”

Now, of course, that begs the question: do the traders on Wall Street suffer from complete short term memory loss? Have they read a paper in the last six months? Have they seen that we are entering into, or in, or coming out of, etc., etc. a recession?

Having established the convention of attributing some local cause to the rises and falls of the stock market, the newspapers then stick to it even if, at a certain point, to do so means they have to trip over themselves – even if the news they present is ‘novel’ in the causal chain only if you haven’t read a newspaper in the last six months.

In fact, the newspaper reader is continually finding him or herself in this bind, especially on stories that continue for a long time, such as the occupation of Iraq. We are presumed to know enough about it to want to know about the news there, but are treated, at the same time, as if we have forgotten so many details that we need specialists to give us causal diagnoses. And, of course, these specialists are always: a., non Iraqi; b., entrenched in a position which depends on their adhering to one or another ideological line; and c., as anxious that we forget what we know about Iraq. Thus, the NYT that reported about the huge ammunition dumps which were merrily raided by guerillas, insurgents, militias and what have you in 2004 has moved on to the idea that the only supplier of weaponry has to be the Iranians, because the military said so – thus forgetting the fact that the military case, made last year, for the provenance of weaponry from Iran was almost funny, it was so laced with contradictions, wishful thinking, cherrypicking and lies.

The problematic relationship between the new and its causes – one of Bergson’s major concerns – is embodied in the standard newspaper story, which tries to skim the causal surface, as it were, to show how emergents – new events – can be generated by old conditions.

It often turns out that the new emergents never existed in the first place – which then becomes news. For instance, today the NYT pretty much erases a scare story from 2004:
“Fears of Iraq Becoming a Terrorist Incubator Seem Overblown, French Say

“After the Paris police smashed a cell suspected of sending insurgents to Iraq early in 2005, French authorities predicted a new and dangerous threat: young Muslims lured to the Iraqi battlefields who would return, radicalized, to use their newfound battlefield skills in terrorist acts inside France.

Dominique de Villepin, then the interior minister, singled out the cell in a speech two months later as proof of a risk that Iraqi-trained jihadists would “come back to France, armed with their experience, to carry out attacks.”

Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière, France’s senior counterterrorism magistrate at the time, later warned that Iraq was a “black hole sucking up all the elements located in Europe.” Some of them were coming back to Europe, he added, and some of those were armed with chemical and biological weapons training.

Now, as members of the cell are awaiting a verdict in their case, French and other European intelligence and law enforcement officials are saying those fears appear to be overblown. The logistical challenges and expense of reaching Iraq has been one deterrent, they said, particularly with Syria’s making episodic efforts to halt the use of its territory as a transit route. Compared with the thousands of European Muslims who joined the fight in Afghanistan in the 1990s through organized networks in Britain, the number of fighters going to Iraq has been extremely small, according to senior French intelligence officials.”

Of course, when a story is erased, the fact that it has been engrained in the stories since is ignored. Because the past is officially flat, for the newspaper – yesterday’s jigsaw puzzle – that one of the puzzle pieces was jimmied into place – or even that all of the jigsaw puzzle pieces, when you look back on it, don’t fit together at all – is of antiquarian interest only. But of course the past is not flat, and the news the newspaper reports, with the reports always incorporating the controlling voices of experts so that the reader will know what to think, enshrines a choice about the past. Bertrand Russell once asked how we would know if the world was created yesterday if that creation included our memories of the past and all the elements that make us deduce that there was a past - which is an elaboration of Philip Gosse's theory that God created Adam with a navel for the same reason that the art forger browns the paper on which he proposes to create a seventeenth century drawing by Rembrandt. Russell's puzzle is at the dark heart of journalism.