The Mythology of Causation

One of the greatest disservices that our MSM have done over the last 30+ years (and probably much longer) has been the replacement of news gathering and dissemination with news stories, ie "narratives" which purport to frame and explain the news for ease of ingestion by the public.  The problem with this kind of reporting is that it always over simplifies and distorts complex situations.  This occurs not only because the reporters and editors believe the public needs a "lowest common denominator" approach but, to an even more significant degree, because the reporters and editors themselves often do not have any particular expertise in understanding the topics they are covering.

Part of my education in college and Medical School involved learning how to read, interpret, and understand scientific papers.  Early in my career I noticed that whenever I read a newspaper account of a scientific paper that I had read myself, the news account invariably over-simplified the research results in ways that made them unrecognizable and often completely inaccurate in meaningful ways. (I wrote about a recent example here.)

With the advent of the blogosphere and the availability of truly expert analysis by talented amateurs and professionals in various spheres, it has become possible to approach the news with greater depth and greater appreciation of  complexity.  The MSM has failed, in most cases, to keep pace with these changes in the world and prefer to use their (rapidly fading) authority to shape the news. 

There is an important and fundamental axiom of Psychoanalysis that is germane to any discussion of behavior causation and should be emphasized more often when discussing why events occur the way they do; it is the antithesis of over-simplification.  In November, during the French Intifada, when many people were writing about the "causes" of the uprising, I wrote a post which included this:

In Psychoanalytic thinking, there are two crucial concepts which can offer useful ways to organize one's thinking.  They are the idea of multiple determination, and a corollary to this, compromise formation.  What these ideas encapsulate is, essentially, that any and every behavior can be best understood as the result of many different forces coming together (the multiple determinants, such as various desires, drives, and wishes, along with prohibitions, fears, and anxieties, conscious and unconscious) with the ego or executive machinery of the mind, finding a way through the maze of competing wishes and fears, internal and external, to arrive at a behavior (the compromise) which can successfully accomplish what the person desires.

In so many areas, especially when emotions are running high, this concept is lost:  The Iraq war was about oil, the Dubai Ports deal was about having an Arab country allied with terrorists run our ports, the nuclear agreement with India will increase the pressure around the world for proliferation, abortion is about a woman's right to choose...

Wherever you come down on all these questions, the most important point is that with all difficult problems there are multiple determinants.  The Iraq war was about oil!  But it was also about ending support for terror, about the probable existence of WMDs, about changing a culture of fascism in the Middle East, about freeing people from tyranny, and many other points as well.  Were some of the related issues more important than others?  Of course, but ultimately the decision to go to war involved a multitude of difficult determinations, which included assessments of the risks involved, including the known risks, the "known unknowns and the unknown unknowns" in Donald Rumsfeld's exceptionally apt locution. 

It is so much easier to package news in ways which support a simple narrative.  It requires much less work and skill than trying to understand complex situations and then endeavoring to write clearly about the situation in ways that convey that information to a reading or viewing audience. 

Perhaps one of these days we will see the MSM recognize the incredible expertise available to them from the blogosphere.  Then the reporters could go back to gathering the news, their editors could concentrate on helping make the reports understandable, and they could refer to the multitude of experts available to deepen their readers understanding of complex problems.   Of course, this would require our MSM to recognize where their own best long term interests lie, and expecting them to concentrate on the long term and their own long term best interests depends on them recognizing a level of complexity that has never been their forte.