Journalism, Belief, & Belonging
The crisis in democracy is not just about information
I increasingly come to see that we are not in a crisis of information and disinformation or even of misguided beliefs, but instead of belonging. I wonder how to reimagine journalism to address this plight.
Belonging is a good. The danger is in not belonging, and filling that void with malign substitutes for true community: joining a cult of personality or conspiracies, an insurrection, or some nihilistic, depraved perversion of a religion.
What role might journalism play to fill that void instead with conversation, connection, understanding, collaboration, enlightened values, and education?
Hannah Arendt teaches us that amid the thrall and threat of totalitarianism, some people belong to nothing, and so they are vulnerable to the lure of joining a noxious cause manufactured of fear. In The Gutenberg Parenthesis, I quote her:
“But totalitarian domination as a form of government is new in that it is not content with this isolation but destroys private life as well. It bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.” For Arendt, to be public is to be whole, to be private is to be deprived; to be without…
