The word “media” describes a mode of intermediate communication between the people and events deemed most worthy of our attention by those in the media. Noble aims have often been associated with the task, telling the truth being the foremost task. Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal recently praised Danny Pearl as a martyr for journalistic integrity. But he praises his colleague to uphold the importance of truth precisely in a climate of frenetic distrust of the class of people we also call “the media.” The mode of mediation, now mostly digital, and the members of this class, are also sometimes called “the press.” The convergence of these words themselves — media, press, politics, truth — should remind us that we are in the midst of a revolution in communication we have not seen since the advent of the printing press.
It’s obvious, or it should be, that our “media crisis” is inseparable from our “political crisis.” We might ask: “Why is the president, an office holder of one of three co-equal branches of the federal government, calling the media ‘out of control’? Why are senators and congressman lined up outside cable news green rooms on North Capitol Street for much of the year? Why buy national ads to promote a perfectly qualified and admirable nominee for the Supreme Court?” The blue-checked class on Twitter is dominated by journalists and politicians. Our political life is now inseparable from the media.
The problem of mediation is not a modern one. In Athens, Platonic thought faced the problem of mediation between the One (the Supreme Good, God) accessible only to those lovers of wisdom, and politics. The Platonic political solution was the philosopher-king, who could bring the fruits of wisdom and virtue to common good of Athens. The difference between the ancient problem of mediation and ours is that our problem of mediation is entirely immanentized. We expect our mediators, in the press as well as in politics, to communicate truth and virtue quite apart from any transcendent account of either.
This somewhat helps to explain why the same group will argue, against all biological evidence, for dozens of genders at the same time as they passionately lament a “post-truth” presidency. When Bret Stephens argues for truth and journalistic integrity, as important as this is, there is not even a mention of eternal truths. This is not a criticism of Stephens, but only a reminder that it is extremely difficult to make competitive appeals to truth without any transcendent standard. Which brings us back to the way in which our mediators mediate nothing but preferences, desires and wishes: turbulent passions dialed down into rationalized prose.
The French political philosopher Pierre Manent also argued we have problems with mediation. His argument is that we are political by nature, and that our mediators have increasingly worked to detach us from our political nature, and from our desire to participate in agreements about common goods of the city and the nation. His prediction, now working its way out, is Aristotelian in nature. Manent’s prediction is that people can only be detached from the realities of nature for so long, including their political nature. This is why he thinks there are mass global trends toward strengthened borders around the common good of nation.
But the longing for transcendent truth is also making a comeback, and it can’t come too soon. As St. Augustine says in the ninth book of the City of God, his magisterial response to a self-destructing political order, “Only truth and virtue can offer a center of resistance against turbulent and degraded passions.” Not simply my truth or your truth, not simply an appeal to honesty, not simply the ability to make distinctions between fact and opinion are needed. These are important things, as is the very basic ability to discern truth from falsehood. But we need more than even these modest essentials for good mediation.
Liberty requires that we recover faith in an intelligible, discoverable transcendent truth which raises us above the fray. Without transcendent truth; without the virtues of temperance, prudence, fortitude and justice; and without any who are wise and seek to mediate wisdom, we will not be a free people, but wrapped up in a knot around our turbulent and degraded political passions.
C.C. Pecknold (@ccpecknold) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is an associate professor of Theology at The Catholic University of America, located in Washington, D.C.
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