How Much is Too Much?

How much reading of newspapers, how much reliance upon the news media, is too much for our own good? Possibly even a little is too much.

Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis’ private secretary and literary executor, describes the kind of disdain Lewis had with newspapers:

‘Who is Elizabeth Taylor?’ asked C. S. Lewis. He and I were talking about the difference between ‘prettiness’ and ‘beauty,’ and I suggested that Miss Taylor was a great beauty. ‘If you read the newspapers,’ I said to Lewis, ‘you should know who she is.’ ‘Ah-h-h!’ said Lewis playfully, ‘but that is how I keep myself “unspotted from the world”.’ He recommended that if I absolutely ‘must’ read newspapers I have a frequent ‘mouthwash’ with The Lord of the Rings or some other great book.

–C. S. Lewis. Present Concerns: Essays by C. S. Lewis. Ed. and intr. by Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 7.

This might surprise many of his casual readers because Lewis wrote articles and editorials for the newspapers and magazines of his time. But the fact of the matter is that Lewis had little interest in reading those same newspapers. He would often suggest that his friends should follow his own example.

This is not to say that Lewis believed that there was no use for the news media, nor that he believed no one should be a journalist, rather, he thought that the news media manipulated the facts too much to give anyone an honest account of the events being described within them. “But don’t send me any newspaper cutting,” he wrote to Mrs. Jessup in 1952. “I never believe a word said in the papers. The real history of a period (as we always discover a few years later) has v. little to do with all that, and private people like you and me are never allowed to know it while it is going on.” C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Volume III . Ed. Walter Hooper (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2007), 252. Indeed, he was quite emphatic about the last point. He believed that people were being led by a delusion: that is, they believed that by reading the paper, they were engaging in their political freedom, and that they could influence the shape of future events by properly understanding the events of the day and responding to them in kind. However, “The real questions are settled in secret,” he pointed out to Dan Tucker, “and the newspapers keep us occupied with largely imaginary issues,” ibid., 1105.

We have much we could be doing, but we need to be honest with ourselves, and figure out what it is that we can do, and then do it. We should not be looking to the news media in order to figure this out. It can be one of many tools, but it should never be a primary one. Thus, it is one thing to read newspapers, listen to the radio, watch television broadcasts and get angry with what one has been told – it is another thing to live out our day to day life following the example of Christ whose legacy transcends the events being described by the media today, and whose example goes beyond the dichotomies placed upon us by political pundits. The news media leads us to focus our lives on current events and only them. We move from one thing to the next in rapid succession without taking the time to stop and consider what is actually happening around us (after all, isn’t that the business of the news media?).

Without knowing all of the facts, and without having the time needed to ponder them, how can we ever give a proper response to them? Of course we can’t, and the system is set up so that we do not have that power. What better way to keep a people under control than to give them a make-believe view that they have power to control and influence the events they live through, while making sure they do not? And how better to do this than to thrust people forward without the time to pause, reflect, and consider all the possibilities, and not just the ones the media and its pundits tell you about?

There is of course, a wider significance to this. We are being led to live in the moment, to do and act in the moment, without any connection to the past, and with very little connection to the future. This is why Lewis suggested one “washes down” the news of the day with “great literature,” because this connects us to a different time, a different place, and – more importantly, a different mindset, one which does not have the same errors of our time and place:

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook – even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it.

–C. S. Lewis, “On the Reading of Old Books,” pages 161-166 in Undeceptions . Ed. Walter Hooper (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1971), 162.

We can see the characteristic mistakes of that time period and not be confused by them, but by reading the thoughts of a different era, we might begin to see the characteristic mistakes, the “blindness” of our age, and find a way to think beyond them. This is at least a good step we can take to overcome the way we are being manipulated by the news media.

What are we to make of the fact that, even if we are capable of thinking outside of the box, we do not have the power to influence the world in order to fix it? Certainly there is truth in this: unless we are in a leadership position, we don’t have a direct influence on most world events. However, we have influence in the things of our life, in the people we meet, and, despite the fact that most of what we do in a day will never be “newsworthy,” what we do, the people we help, the lives we change will have an impact, and one which, given the way we are connected one to another in an interdependent world, is possibly far greater than the so-called “major events” of the day. Indeed, we must question why they are “newsworthy,” and what we do is not. Be it as it may, we must be honest and do the work which we have the power to do. We should not be discouraged over those things which are not in our power. We must not heed the media siren; we should not look for fame and publicity, but rather, we should seek to be people of character, people who are humble but free. Indeed, we should look to possess true freedom, and not the one politicians claim we seek, and this freedom is the freedom we get in Christ. We know that we do not have to follow the so-called “major events” of the day in order to live and act as a Christian. We also know that by being a Christian, by following Christ, our lives have true meaning, and one which no one can take away from us.