Compromised public discourse?

PUBLIC discussion of issues and other topics of interest is a vital activity in any society. That’s how society becomes a living society, building up its unity and sense of purpose. That’s how society makes itself truly human, reflecting the character of the persons comprising it.

It’s in this ongoing public discourse that society gets to know itself better and sets its path of development.

Everything has to be done to make our public discourse vibrant, properly engaged and focused on real and not false or artificial issues. Everything has to be done to keep it going, constantly purifying it, ridding it of distorting elements.

But what do we have? A book recently reviewed by a friend claims that much of our public discourse in the world today is stripped-down, if not compromised and even trivialized. I could not agree more.

Just the other day, while stuck in traffic at a busy crossroad, a digital big screen at the corner flashed what were supposed to be breaking news. There were 4 or 5 items that were announced. I remembered or rather was stunned by 2.

One was on a certain Mother Lily keeping distance from the Kris-James marital trouble. The other was on a Kim denying she is dating with Enchong. I suppose there were people interested in those items but I asked myself whether they should really be beamed at all.

Those were pure gossips. We just had a long brown-out in the city then, and there was no explanation as to why it happened. And, of course, there were and continue to be endless screaming issues—our world economic crisis, our political stability, etc. And yet we prefer to talk about gossips!

There’s obviously a money angle to this phenomenon. Gossips hijack attention and sell like hotcakes. They can give diversion from our daily burdens. No wonder they are a regular fare even in mainstream media. But then again, should we just be riveted there?

Public debates over controversial issues are almost exclusively keyed on the practical aspects. Any reference to faith, religion and morality is taboo, considered to be not politically correct.

Worse, the discussion is reduced to clever sound bites. It’s de rigueur that they have to be entertaining to be followed and appreciated by the people. For sure, with such approach, a lot of valuable things get lost.

The process of dialogue and healthy exchanges of ideas and opinions gets truncated. Public opinion remains shallow and fails to capture the essential points needed for society to grow properly.

There’s a tendency to resort to sensationalism, to gimmicks like shock and awe, using sound and fury that signify nothing. There’s a lot of junk and bunk used in today’s journalism. Just look at the entertainment pages.

And even in the opinion pages, fallacies abound as logic seems to be abandoned in many instances of media discussions. Traditional values are left to decay as modern, sophisticated arguments are presented to replace core beliefs derived from faith. Reasonings swing from simplisms to sophistries.

Big-time media outfits can launch into massive research and reporting, but precisely because of a fundamental anomaly in their approach, they end up creating myths, fish stories and cock-and-bull tales, oozing with malice and ideological biases.

They never know how to inject the indispensable inputs of faith and religion without sounding religious or superstitious. They feel they need to avoid these sources of inspiration and even of data. They still have this aspect of their work and of the lives of those involved pretty much unresolved.

In fact, in one of the expressions of this mentality articulated by the American John Rawls in his book, A Theory of Justice, it was argued that “public reason requires citizens to refrain from invoking or acting on their deepest convictions about what is really true.

“They have to consent to work only with a scaled-down set of beliefs or methods that claim the support of an ostensible ‘overlapping consensus.’”

This is the predicament we have in our hands insofar as public discussion of issues is concerned. Talking from convictions is considered incompatible with social peace and harmony. They say it discourages conversation.

And so, there’s a drift toward relativism, as no absolute values are upheld. Or better said, what is relative is made absolute. Human consensus is the ultimate arbiter of what is good and evil, what is right and wrong. Pope Benedict calls this the “tyranny of relativism.”

We need to properly react and resolve this problem.