What does "Bethel" (where Jacob dreamed) mean?

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Eve Tushnet

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Last updated on: September 4, 2004 at 12:24 am by Eve Tushnet

2004-09-04T00:24:00-04:00 Eve Tushnet

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HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BLOG: Yale’s Finest Publication (“Above the Law… Beyond Good and Evil… And Somewhere to the Right of Attila the Hun”) has a pretty groovy interview with Patrick Belton of Oxblog. I encourage you all to go read it. Then go give the YFP money for booze!–I mean, for Indian food. Yes. Right.

Anyway! I had a couple comments–about theology, and the tabloid press. (Note that this post also wins the “Desperate…But Not Sirius” award for Least Justifiable Harry Potter Reference in Philosophical Debate. I want a prize.)

Patrick starts out strong, cursing the darkness of the Enlightenment: “Blogs restore a personal voice to journalism comparatively absent since the Victorian period–though it still persists in some arenas, particularly in the more conservative British press. When American newspapers adopted their contemporary form in the 1950s, they imbibed that decade’s prevailing philosophy of knowledge. The epistemology of Karl Popper and positivism were in the air, and newspapers consequently began to assume that unique, authoritative representations of reality were possible, through the proper application of correct methodology. The presence of individual journalists was somewhat an embarrassment, though someone had to be there to apply the methodology.

“This meant newspapers had to treat other newspapers with something of the disdain with which you would treat a mildly distasteful neighbor. It represents an assault on the entire enterprise that there could be different, competing interpretations, each claiming authoritative status. Meanwhile we witnessed the gradual disappearance of the ‘I’ from reporting and its subversion into the unsituated speech of page one and the editorial page’s quasi-sovereign ‘we,’ with all its affectations of power.”

Here I am purring my philosophical purr. But then Patrick cruelly disappoints! He busts out the Habermas! And children everywhere gasp in terror:

“Within the past twenty years, we have seen figures such as Jurgen Habermas trying to resuscitate and defend the promise of modernity and Enlightenment against its post-modern critiques. This, for Habermas, was done rather by grounding truth in conversations among individuals, ‘I’s, who might share their perspectives with one another, challenging each other to articulate, then defend or rebut, their tacit assumptions–with truth and the promise of progress coming out of this running conversation of humankind, centered precisely on individual voices, in dialogue to form a quite different ‘we.’

“This notion of inter-subjectivity captures what happens in blogs, where you have individual voices engaging with each other not in vitriol but in discourse. It comes quite close to justifying the project of Enlightenment and modernity, with their possibility of democratic governance, if a discourse of rational expression and communication can arrive at truth. The analogy I have been contemplating lately is scientific discussion. In science as actually practiced, you don’t have these authoritative representations stripped clean of individuals who assert them, but rather an enormous number of individuals holding a running conversation, in scholarly journals and conferences, in which the defining marker of the prose style is, indeed, the name of the speaker followed by the moment of the utterance: Feygin (2004), for instance. This seems fairly coherent with the model which structures the blogosphere, the first unique and new prose style produced by our cultural moment.”

There is, of course, a truth lurking here. The greater interactivity blogs provide does make it possible to correct errors, if you want to and you agree you were wrong, and hyperlinks are genuinely important in allowing people to determine whether a writer has accurately characterized documents to which she refers. The tech matters, and its interactivity–its throng nature–is part of how it matters.

But if Habermas-via-Belton is right… why doesn’t Oxblog have comments boxes? I know why I don’t: Cacophony isn’t chorus.

Moreover, a bunch of voices yammering is only as good as the culture(s) from which they spring. Truth is not reputation (pace Richard Rorty); there are market failures in the marketplace of ideas. Or (D…BNS warning!) to quote a certain greasy-haired, wonderfully horrible professor, “Fame… isn’t… everything.”

Those of us who uphold the reality and validity of reason (which as a Catholic I of course do) must come up with some way of distinguishing reason from conformity to culturally-defined “common sense.” Or at least understanding how reason could be distinguished from cultural conformity. This strikes me as the great problem, the atheist’s Gordian knot, that can only be sliced through by Divine communication, by God’s shaping of our natures, our languages, and our abilities to reason and discern. The crowd is interesting and sometimes useful, but very far from the essential project of regrounding reason on a non-complacent foundation–rescuing reason from the Enlightenment rationalists. That project can only succeed as a religious project based in belief in a personal (and meddlesome!) God. Of which more here.

No, what I think Patrick gets more right than this somewhat placid invoking of the crowd is his focus on the way blogging emphasizes the person behind the pen. I’ve said this all kinds of times. Blogs, when they’re doing what they should (and what they almost always, in fact, do), display a passionate response to the world: a response where politics and philosophy make up part of the fabric of daily life, where loyalties are declared and challenges thrown down, where people don’t just “opine” but growl and mull and yell and meander.

Blogs are a form of tabloid journalism; and I really, really believe in tabloid journalism. The world, as it presents itself to us, demands a passionate and personal response. Received Standard Journalism, with its assumption of Enlightenment-esque uncontested objectivity and rationality, generally ends up (like Enlightenment philosophy; I can’t remember who said, “Descartes knew only that he thought–and that he spoke French,” but it’s one of the most insightful philosophical one-liners ever) in purely reactive conformity. Tabloid journalism pushes a particular worldview, and knows it, and can have fun with it. Tabloid journalism can get in there and start punching in good conscience, without getting missish and sniffy like the New York Times. Tabloid journalism has a range of vocal tones, accents, and moods, not just a magisterial basso profundo. (Wow, mixed metaphor alert. Apparently the NYT is missish in an unusually low voice.)

Tabloid journalism often gets the world wrong. But Received Standard Journalism, as Patrick accurately describes it, simply can’t get the world right.

For closing lines I’ll steal from the speech I gave Edward G. Peeler of the New York Beacon: “The Beacon is a tabloid. I believe in tabloid journalism. Big black headlines, if it bleeds it leads, ‘Headless Body in Topless Bar.’ The Beacon glares out on a lurid world, Mr. Ware. We like our news black and white and red all over. …But we tell the truth.”

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