“It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning. I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help…A great many people (not you) do now seem to think that the mere state of being worried is in itself meritorious. I don’t think it is.” 

C. S. Lewis, 1946

Modern America — and perhaps modern humanity more broadly — has taken it as a kind of civilizational project to pursue uncertainty with a confidence bordering on hubris. We assume not only that the world is fully intelligible, but that if we could simply know enough, we would be able to sort the right from the wrong, the just from the unjust, the true from the false. Having largely discarded the historical frameworks that once answered these questions, we have let loose an arsenal of empirical philosophies in their place. The natural world is measured, quantified, modeled, and projected until it becomes, at least in our own telling, predictable.

But what we seek is not understanding in the classical sense. We are not asking why things are as they are or even whether why is a fitting question to be asked. We are asking how they might be managed, controlled, optimized. Knowledge, once ordered toward wisdom, has been reoriented toward power. The highest form of knowing is no longer contemplation, but manipulation.

This project works tolerably well when applied to stable systems. It falters badly when confronted with phenomena that are moral or human. What happens when we are faced with problems that produce inconsistent, contingent, or even contradictory outcomes? One might expect that our response would be to question the adequacy of our tools—to concede that not all things submit themselves to empirical mastery. Instead, we double down. We gather more data. We demand more information. We insist that the failure lies not in the method, but in its incomplete application.

Nowhere is this impulse more visible than in our relationship to the news.

In an ever-intensifying effort to bring the world under our control, we have convinced ourselves that we must know everything about everywhere, at all times. This belief rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature. It assumes that there exists some threshold of information beyond which a person may finally arrive at a correct worldview. It also stands largely alone in history. Most civilizations accepted epistemological limits, submitting themselves to something — often a central myth — that accounted for their failures to understand. This was not a crude “God of the gaps” maneuver, but something altogether different: an acknowledgment that why precedes how, and that not all explanations are technical.

It would be imprudent to attempt a full account of how our society lost this hearth. What may be more useful is to observe what a civilization looks like in its absence, and how the news has come to occupy the vacancy.

Movie theaters are dying. Phone usage is soaring. People increasingly ask what there is left to do. In response, entertainment industries have chased spectacle, sensation, and intellectual property — known quantities stripped of risk and, too often, of genuine creativity. News media has followed a similar path. The modern, perpetually accessible news machine does not direct our attention toward the real, the local, or the felt. It pulls us instead toward the imagined, the sensational, and the national, toward events that feel urgent but over which we exercise no meaningful agency. We are trained to live in unrealities.

This displacement is not confined to entertainment. People increasingly leave their hometowns in search of “opportunity.” Fraternal organizations, churches, and local businesses wither, while multinational corporations and bureaucratic institutions step into the void, seizing upon abstract “markets” and rootless populations. Traditional models of charity and neighborly obligation make little sense when they are economically inefficient — and when one has never even met the person in need. 

In sum, the things which once led us to step outside and enter into a community have lost their shine. Faith, justice, and community cease to matter when one has no reason to understand them.

But nature abhors a vacuum. What, then, substitutes for this forgotten civilizational core?

Facts.

Much has been written about the aforementioned decay of community life— about empty bowling alleys, social atomization, algorithms, and ideologically slanted outlets pulling us apart. Far less attention has been paid to a more basic question: whether we are even equipped to consume the news at all. We have “fact-checkers” and “the most trusted name in news,” but what are we meant to do with this information, these facts? Can they be acted upon?

Here the modern mind reveals its disarray. A fact, properly understood, is a fragment, a particular severed from context, hierarchy, and meaning. Truth, by contrast, is integrative. It orders facts within a moral and metaphysical frame. As Richard Weaver observed in Ideas Have Consequences, the elevation of fact over truth is not a mark of intellectual rigor but of philosophical impoverishment. Facts tell us what happened; truth helps us discern what matters.

Yet, let us grant, for the sake of argument, that facts are not a bastardized substitute for truth. Even then, a problem remains. How is one to know what to do with them? More importantly, if one is presented with an endless stream of facts, is it even sensible to expect neutrality toward all of them? Selection, emphasis, and interpretation are unavoidable. To pretend otherwise is to misunderstand both cognition and judgment.

This is not merely a matter of taste; it is formative. News trains. It habituates its audience to a particular way of seeing the world: as a succession of crises to be reacted to rather than realities to be understood. It feeds anxiety while flattering the illusion of moral engagement. One feels informed, even righteous, without having acted, understood, or loved more deeply.

Modern psychology is poorly equipped to absorb what modern news demands of it. Consider the typical reader of a major national paper. If we assume, and this is no small assumption, that there exists such a thing as meaningfully discerning right from wrong, how would a contemporary American go about doing so?

We live in a society that prizes gross income over wisdom, specialization over vocation. From an early age, individuals are trained to locate a narrow competence and remain within it. Even our universities, once structured around the idea that all knowledge points toward the same ultimate being, have fractured themselves into increasingly granular disciplines that pursue vastly different means. The result is, unsurprisingly fragmentation. We are a population highly skilled in parts and profoundly confused about wholes. It’s no wonder that Duke students are designing technologies like Optifye.ai that use AI to “boost efficiency” on the shop floor, that is, reducing humans to mere “production targets.”

In such a condition, it is difficult to imagine the news performing any function other than stoking fear, anxiety, and desire. If people lack the intellectual and moral formation necessary to interpret what they see, there is little justification for showing it to them in the first place. There is a reason children’s books begin with the concrete and the familiar before moving toward abstraction. Formation precedes understanding. We have reversed the order.

What, then, is to be done?

Without coyness, I propose that we treat the news as we treat our closest friends. A healthy friendship does not require omniscience. You need not know every detail of your friend’s life, every passing thought, every transient anxiety. What matters are those things that bear directly on the relationship — those moments when attention is necessary, appropriate, and loving.

So too with the news. It should come to us rarely, deliberately, and with restraint. It should arrive when natural circumstance makes its arrival prudent, when reconciliation is possible and responsibility is real. To know everything is not wisdom. It is, quite literally, fruit of the wrong tree.

We were not made to carry the sorrows of the entire world each morning. The belief that constant worry is a moral achievement is nothing more than confusion. And until we relearn the difference, the news will remain less a public good than a daily exercise in alienation

by Sherman Criner