A Newsfeed of Fear

I GREW UP terrified, my childhood catechized by the violence in Northern Ireland, each week a litany of murder. I grew used to the idea that killing was the story of our lives. This, of course, was not true—there was also beauty and friendship all around us, all the time, not to mention eventually a peace process that has delivered extraordinary cooperation between former sworn enemies.

But the way we learned to tell the story—from political and cultural leaders, religion, and the media—emphasized the darkness. It’s been a long and still ongoing journey for me to discern how to honor real suffering while overcoming the lie that things are getting worse.

Today, many of us are living with a fear that seems hard to shake. Horrifying, brutal videos, edited for maximum sinister impact, showing up in our newsfeeds are only the most recent example of how terror seems to blend into our everyday lives.

But things are not as bad as we think. What social scientists call the “availability heuristic” helps explain why we humans find it difficult to accurately predict probability. In short, we guess the likelihood of something happening based on how easily we can recall examples of something similar having happened before. Because of this, folk who get a lot of “information” from mainstream media may tend to overestimate the murder rate: Most of us have seen vastly more killing on TV than would ever compute to an accurate estimate of real-world rates of killing.

Globalization and cyberspace bring more images and stories than our brains can handle, blending them with our lives to the extent that we consciously have to work to create boundaries between our screens and our psyches. One consequence is that people are skeptical when told that violence has been declining over time, and we are living in what is probably the most peaceful era human beings have ever known. But it’s true.

While the posture of ancient communities toward each other was often kill or be killed, now most of us are peaceable, if distant, neighbors. Animal cruelty was a popular form of entertainment until not very long ago: Today we prosecute animal abuse. The roughly 40 executions every year in the U.S. are each an indictment of the legal codification of vengeance, but show progress compared to the hundreds of crucifixions in a day in some parts of the Roman Empire. And the anti-capital punishment movement is bringing us closer to achieving abolition.

Terrible things still happen, of course, but, according to psychologist Steven Pinker, they are happening in fewer places to fewer people than ever. In his extraordinarily important book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Pinker suggests that we believe things are worse than they are because of the availability heuristic and our tendency to see only the immediate circumstances around us, because traditional storytelling forms have evolved to emphasize drama or crisis as the hook for an audience, and because we are not trained to think contextually about our own lives. All this leads to a situation where the countless people worldwide who experienced the benefits of peace processes yesterday will not make spectacular headlines, but a school shooting will—even though overall violence is declining.

Such decline has occurred, argues Pinker, partly because of social factors such as the rise of the nation state, the empowerment of women, and the emergence of the novel as a storytelling form that contributed to the growth of empathy for the lives of others. In short, humanity is growing up. While the full implications of human rights revolutions have not yet been achieved, and sometimes stumble a step backward, the path seems, overall, irreversible.

Yet the news does not usually tell us this. Crisis rules. Television news, radio bulletins, front pages, tweets, and status updates alike teach us that violence is typical, not an exception. This is not to advocate pretending that violence does not exist—but today’s horrifying headlines do not contradict the long-term positive trend lines.

The news media’s addiction to spectacular violence might not be so insidious if it were accompanied by the kind of empathy and compassion that serve to reduce violence in the real world. Editors may feel caught in a system that has to balance public interest with public lust—photos of nip slips will sell more papers than a cover-page investigation about how sexual violence is decreasing. But that system depends on consumers like you and me for its sustenance, so part of the solution is an audience that is willing to switch off and demand better.

A MODEST proposal for engaging the news without being eaten by it might include choosing not to consume its most obvious and egregious proponents of dehumanization. Last year I abstained from reading news websites unless there was something I consciously decided to learn about. Tuning out reduced my fear, and I think made me a more effective activist, because my body and spirit were not being driven by the spectacle-driven agenda of clickbait. Instead, I was beginning to be still long enough to hear the call to long-term preventive action to reduce violence, the kind of bearing witness that offers dignity to those who suffer rather than vengeance or tabloid garishness, and the sound of real hope overcoming the noise that falsely claims that the darkness is winning.

But there’s also a fine line between disciplined listening (or refusal to listen) and self-righteousness. Switching off ranting anchors or ignoring Islamophobic gossip columnists may be a step in the right direction, but it’s hardly Gandhi’s salt march. We need to engage deeper questions about how our participation or nonparticipation in infotainment can impact the world. And we need to support good journalists who bring more light than heat—who often feel isolated in their attempts to do something other than repeat yesterday’s snark or color within our culture’s lines of moral opprobrium, condemnation, and revenge. We should read and listen to them, thank them when they do well, and offer encouraging critique when they don’t.

For example, mass shootings should be an occasion for investigation of an ill-functioning mental health care system, the erosion of community, and economic inequality, because we know that strong social bonds correlate with violence reduction. The amount of sexual violence likely will not be decreased by sensationalizing it, but real progress might be achieved if more reporting was focused on prevention and healing. Shaming gossip about the public mistakes of famous people can be replaced by a humane conversation about how celebrity depends on the audience propping it up. But these are only symptoms of a wider malaise.

Our culture has been hoodwinked by the idea that we’re living in the center of crisis, when actually we’re in the midst of the evolution of hope. It is true that each killing is a universe of loss to the victim’s loved ones, and solidarity with the suffering of others is not only part of the privilege of being human but a step on the path to the world in which no one will have to suffer that way again. But whether it is the misstatement that the 20th century was the bloodiest in human history (World War II is only the ninth-most-lethal conflict per capita in history and the others of the 10 worst all preceded 1900), or the latest hate crime being read as part of an epidemic, falsely interpreting the present creates inertia about the future. And those of us who are suffering will not be removed from harm’s way or helped to heal by sensationalist retellings of only the most horrific parts of our stories. The stories we tell will heal us, or destroy us.

Catering to (and nurturing) fear and pessimism is a function of one of the most dangerous beliefs: that violence can bring order out of chaos, cleansing the world for the righteous (what Walter Wink called the myth of redemptive violence). Instead, violence merely generates more fear, pessimism, and conditions from which more violence may grow. Our journalism—and our personal social media use—needs to be resourced to deal in context, compassion, detail, and pause. More important, healing the world requires reframing the story as one in which, while we lament real wounds and work to prevent them, things are getting better, and we can make them better still.

This is as true for the creative arts of television, cinema, literature, and music as much as it is for their nonfiction counterparts. But the news does not begin with the flashing red strip across the bottom of the screen. It begins in your mind, and the story you’re telling about yourself. It catalyzes with your loved ones and neighbors to create a bigger story. It connects everywhere you go, on foot or chair or online. It is immensely powerful, although most of us aren’t conscious of this, most of the time. The way you tell the story about your world will actually co-create that world. The myth of redemptive violence needs to be replaced. Imagining a new myth is a privilege. It is also our responsibility.