PostItsPostItsPostItsPostIts
PostIts is a new column which brings you some snippets of general media comment which may get bypassed in readers’ busy routines, but seem to us to help put this increasingly hurried and complex world into a commonsense perspective.
The Pope and the Monarch
Benedict XVI’s visit to Great Britain engaged such potent symbolism one suspects that the best liturgical brains of the English monarchy and the Vatican were put on the job.
Holyroodhouse in Scotland was Queen Elizabeth’s venue for the first encounter between a Pope and a British monarch for more than four hundred years.
The falling out occurred before the first Queen Elizabeth chopped off the head of her half-sibling, the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots in 1587, but what better place to meet in 2010 than Scotland?
And the name of the British monarch’s Scottish residence Holyroodhouse, makes a definite point that this was a meeting not only between two heads of state (see Paul Collins comment under Eureka Street below), but also an encounter between two heads of churches.
There was so much brouhaha in Britain about the Pope’s visit that the solemnity of this reunion between two leaders of the most enduring institutions in the western world went almost unnoticed in the media.
Peter Scally SJ, writing for Eureka Street on the Pope’s UK tour noted that Alex Salmond, the Scottish First Minister enthusiastically took part at the Bellahouston Mass, in spite of weeks of negative publicity in the British media.
Scally wondered if this meant that there were more votes in welcoming the Pope than in opposing him and went back to the September letter to The Guardian. Out of fifty-five signatories arguing against a state visit by the Pope, not one was an active politician.
British MPs have a much better sense of ordinary people’s views than most academics, commentators and journalists because it is part of their job to listen to those views, Scally wrote.
So if British MPs think that, on balance, dissing the Pope is a vote-loser, they are probably right, and that tells us a great deal about the views of ordinary British people.
While Britain is often described as a ‘secular’ country, it is by no means an aggressively secular country. Secularism holds that religion’s place in public life should not be a specially privileged.Aggressive secularism tries to drive it out of public life completely (see Gary Bouma’s article page 5).
Ironically, it was precisiely these ‘more aggressive forms of secularism’ that Pope Benedict warned against in the first address of his visit at Holyroodhouse.
In the Public Interest?
Dr Helen Young, School of the University of Western Sydney, wrote in Crikey, the on-line news service, in October: When WikiLeaks published the Afghan War Diaries earlier this year, the site was criticised by the free press association Reporters Without Borders for bad journalistic practice. In an open letter to the site’s founder, the Australian Julian Assange, the association said “journalistic work involves the selection of information”.
There is no question that digital technologies have changed the face and the capabilities of the media industry; at no point before the rise of the internet could such a leak of classified documents have taken place.
Publication of information that is “in the public interest” is a key goal of journalism, and in an increasingly globalised and information-hungry world, precisely what this means is becoming ever more complex.
In the case of the WikiLeaks publication of such huge numbers of US government secret document relating to Iraq and Afghanistan, the real issue is how could it be possible for one organisation to select all the material that was in the interests of the various publics around the world?
The good of the US public is different to the good of the UK public, the Iraqi public, the Australian public and so on, and to group even along national lines is also to make sweeping generalisations.
The story or stories that matter to one media outlet’s readership has no necessary relevance to that of another.
The Iraq War Diaries document 109,000 deaths, including those of 66,000 civilians, 15,000 of these were previously unreported.
The full stories of each individual killed, wounded, or otherwise involved in each event are not told in the documents published by WikiLeaks, and identifying material including but not limited to names and places has been excised.
One, two, even a few media outlets working in a conventional way could never tell the stories of those incidents, either on a small or large scale
– and have the relevance to the public interest and good that making the censored whole available can.
How could WikiLeaks select the material that should be available once the premise that releasing classified documents might be in the public good is established?
The ultimate argument of Reporters Without Borders was that the mass, indiscriminate publication will give democratic governments around the world a justification to increase surveillance of the internet.
What WikiLeaks has done is make use of the capabilities of the online world, and if this gives governments a reason to increase surveillance, it is one among many, and not one that has been deployed at this point. www.crikey.com.au
God’s little State
Paul Collins writes in Eureka Street: The Holy See is the oldest state in Europe.The popes first administered Rome during the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century.Then in the 680s several able popes were obliged to take political leadership in the protection of central Italy.This led to an independence movement that resulted in the formation of the republica Sancti Petri, the forerunner of the Papal States.This was later recognised by Pepin the Short, Charlemagne’s father.
The Papal States survived as a geographical and legal entity until 1870 when Rome was absorbed into the Kingdom of Italy.The popes never surrendered their territorial claim and in the three Lateran Treaties, a series of agreements between Mussolini’s Italy and the Vatican Secretary of State, Pietro Casparri, the Holy See was recognised as a sovereign entity with a tiny territory,the Vatican City State.
Australia recognises the sovereignty of the Holy See.The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in its Holy See Country Brief correctly defines the Holy See as “the central government of the Catholic Church”. It says that “The Vatican City State was established … [to provide] the Holy See with a small territorial base and consequent recognition as an independent sovereign entity in international law.”
The DFAT Brief says that the Holy See maintains diplomatic relations with 176 countries (Australia has relations with 127) and that all Vatican territory is protected as a world cultural heritage site. (11/10/10 www.eurekastreet.com.au)
Other ways of Life In The Guardian Weekly George Monbiot bewails the fact that in eighteen years of promise and bluster nothing has happened at government level to confront climate change.
But Micah White reports that in São Paulo, the seventh-largest city in the world, outdoor advertising has been banned.
Meanwhile, artists in New York City and Toronto are launching blitzkreig attacks on billboards, replacing commercials with art.Their efforts have put one visual polluter out of business.
Grassroots organisers in the US are pushing for an amendment to the constitution that will end corporate personhood while others are fighting to revive the possibility of death penalties for corporations.
The second international conference on degrowth economics met in March in Barcelona.
In Ithaca, New York, a local, time-based currency is thriving.
Buy Nothing Day campaign is celebrated in dozens of nations and Adbusters upped the ante with a call for seven days of carnivalesque rebellion against consumerism during November.
And, most important of all, across the world everyday people are unceremoniously spending less and living more. (The Guardian Weekly 24.09.10)
Green consumerism a ‘mistake’
In the 22/10/10 edition George Monbiot commends the report Common Cause, written by Tom Crompton of the environment group WWF which examines a series of fascinating advances in the field of psychology.
Our social identity is shaped by values that psychologists classify as extrinsic or intrinsic. Extrinsic values concern status and self-advancement. People with a strong set of extrinsic values fixate on how others see them.They cherish financial success, image and fame.
Intrinsic values concern relationships with friends, family and community, and self-acceptance.
Few people are all-extrinsic or all-intrinsic. Our social identity is formed by a mixture of values.
But psychological tests in nearly seventy countries show that values cluster in remarkably consistent patterns.These values suppress each other: the stronger someone’s extrinsic aspirations, the weaker his or her intrinsic goals.
The more (advertisers) foster extrinsic values, the easier it is to sell products. Margaret Thatcher famously remarked that “economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul”.
Social justice campaigners have tried to reach people by appealing to self-interest (but) this tactic also strengthens extrinsic values. Green consumersim has been a catastrophic mistake.
Common Cause proposes that we stop seeking to bury our values and instead explain and champion them.
