This Time It’s Personal

The Noble Savage Redux

by Patrick J. Shanahan
04/16/04

As I write this a major battle is underway in the War on Terrorism. Hundreds upon hundreds of Iraqi insurgents/terrorists/Republican Guards are being killed in a last-ditch desperate effort to throw the American plan off track. They know that a truly independent and even imperfectly democratic Iraq will spell the absolute for the Baathist dream, and the beginning of the end for the Islamist dream.

And yet, watching the news at home, it would be remarkably difficult to determine that there is actually a battle in progress. Watching the news reports of the combat casualties, one would be led to believe that our soldiers are tragically being killed in a series of unrelated incidents. I have not once in the past week heard a local newscast relay a description of the actual battles occurring - of what was happening, why it was happening, how many Iraqi fighters were killed, etc. No, instead we get endless interviews with high school teachers of the deceased soldiers. Why they go right for the high school teachers I can’t say, but they do. Teachers and family members of the soldier.

This is the end result of the “girlie news” I have written of before in this space. Instead of any sort of informative battle reporting, we get only stilted and cheesy bio snapshots of the dead soldiers, primarily through the eyes of family and teachers, squeezed in between the weather report and this week’s “Academic All-Star.”

A similar dynamic is at work with the 9/11 Commission coverage. Here a disproportionate role appears to have been ceded to the families of 9/11 victims. Or maybe I should say “families,” as they appear to largely be political advocacy groups disguised by the presence of certain family members. Logically, it just doesn’t make sense why the families of people who were killed on that day would be given credence over any other group of people. Although they may have an significant emotional stake in the outcome, they certainly do not have any more expertise, or wisdom, or insight than the rest of us.

So why is it that coverage of the war - from the events preceding 9/11 through the final battles of the Iraq phase of the war - focuses on families and teachers of those who died? What is going on here?

I would submit that this offers a wonderful window into the liberal mind and soul. The left has been, and remains, profoundly uncomfortable with modernity at many levels. They have a profound attachment to pre-modern “genuineness.”

This genuineness is defined in strictly emotional and romantic terms. It is Rousseau’s “Noble Savage.” It is any person who has resisted the siren call of rationality and wallows instead in the “truer” reality of emotion. If one buys into the - rather bizarre - notion that emotional energy is truer than mere logic, then by definition the person who is more emotionally agitated must be truer than the person who scratches his head and rather cold-heartedly works through logical answers to vexing problems.

One can see this reflected in the left’s fondness for “protest” as a means of political debate. What is a protest after all, if not a coordinated effort to display emotional genuineness? By definition, the more upset you get, the more genuine you must be. So those anti-globalization types who rampage through cities smashing up windows must be really on to something!

It also helps make sense of the left’s preference for “rage.” The conservative looks upon an angry feminist, loaded with spittle-dripping venom at the patriarchy, and sees someone very close to being around the bend. The leftists looks at that same person and sees the purity of emotional angst. The angrier you are, the more genuine you are. This explains the left’s support for violent radicals from Stalin to the Black Panthers. And it also helps to explain their otherwise nonsensical support for even the most backwards and un-progressive sorts of Muslims. If these folks are this angry, there must be some truth there!

This same impulse is what we are seeing on our television screens - from the local news at 9 to the "Today Show" to the 9/11 Commission coverage on cable. Facts are strictly optional, but emotion is critical. If you can find the person with the greatest emotional investment in the issue, you will find the person the closest to the truth. Find the teacher, find the neighbor, find the parent, find the second-cousin twice removed.

Find the Noble Savage in our midst, and get him on the tube!

I am not the sort of nerdy technocrat who sees all issues as resolvable through logic. Emotion matters in many important ways. But emotion is by definition a personal and not an easily sharable commodity. It is a lousy means of communicating information, and a lousy way to solve actual real-world problems. It is fine, for example, when Barbara Walters is interviewing Michael Jackson, but it is a major problem when Katie Couric is grilling Condaleezza Rice.

The fact that the search for emotional genuineness appears to have almost completely taken over our news industry is reason for great concern. And I don’t really know what we can do. Except to recognize it for what it is, pay no attention to “family members” and teachers, and search the web for actual information.

And teach our children that the Noble Savage wasn’t especially noble, was very savage, and tended to live a life of want, pain, deprivation and cruelty. That is what a rejection of rationality will get you.