“The statesman’s task,” said Otto von Bismarck, “is to hear God’s footsteps marching through history, and to try [to] catch onto his coat-tails as he marches past.” According to Jeffrey Bilbro’s masterful Reading the Times, Christians who read the news – statespeople or not – ought to do something similar. The danger is that we are caught up in the shallow, attention-grabbing, individualistic, and ephemeral news cycle. Instead we are to ‘subscribe aspirationally’: to put away partisan instincts and prejudices; to root our consumption of the news in thick and stable communities; to reach out across space and time to enrich our understanding of topics; and to anchor our perception of the world to the horizon of the gospel rather than the front page. He wants us to make news as well as to consume it – to avoid becoming ‘passive thoroughfares’ down which news magnates and advertisers can ride their own discourses and agendas.
Central to this book is a forceful and convincing examination of the problems with news consumption, or at least with its dominant manifestations in our culture. As we scroll through Twitter or glance at our favourite broadsheet, we feed the adversarial, scorecard-reading devils of our nature, we fixate on unsatisfying and ultimately unimportant titbits of information, and we are distracted from the needs of our communities close at hand. I am an incorrigible side-taker in political issues, such that I often know what I’ll think of an article as soon as I read the headline, and I found much in these sections to convict me of my own unhealthy and subpar engagement with the news. I’m sure many would be similarly affected – Bilbro’s diagnosis is deep, far-reaching, and highly culturally attuned.
Not satisfied with mere identification of the problem, Bilbro dispenses some cautious prescriptions for the alleviation of these symptoms. Find, in God’s Providence, a compelling reason to temper your emotional investment. Entertain a ‘figural imagination’ that sees God’s redemptive hand in, and an eschatological horizon to, human history, so long as you don’t presume to trace out His paths. Walk around your neighbourhood. Read meaty essays and books from years ago. Attune yourself to the seasonal rhythms of this world. Join a book club.
Of course, Bilbro is not trying to build a to-do list, still less to solve exhaustively the deep and manifold problems which news consumption poses. He does, however, set out to make constructive suggestions in order to guide the reader towards counter-formative practices with the aim of overcoming them. Perhaps, if enough of these become habits, we will gradually lift ourselves out of the mires of ‘mental dyspepsia’, myopic views of history, and disconnected individualism which our modern news cycle engenders. I found myself frustrated by the narrowness and emptiness of some of his suggestions. It is doubtless true, for example, that walking around a neighbourhood gives a truer and richer sense of its needs than driving. But there is nothing magical about walking, and the basic problems of human selfishness and inattention won’t be solved by even the most assiduous walks around our parishes.
But the fact that Bilbro doesn’t provide an exhaustive solution needn’t be seen as a weakness of the book. We read things to tell us what to think, and sometimes to tell us what to do. I definitely read Christian books expecting to be given a list of things to change about my life that will solve some of the shortcomings of life, both devotionally and practically. But the hidden complications of the world and the inscrutability of God’s hand mean that this is not a realistic or helpful expectation. Cultivating a reliance on Him won’t happen immediately, and neither will repenting of sins of various kinds. Perhaps it is exactly the modern inattention to complexity and depth, and habit of instant gratification (both of which Bilbro decries!) which led me to want that sort of easy solution, and therefore to read his book as though that’s what it’s for.
There is a time for meaty essays and a time for witty tweets, a time for book clubs and a time for chuckling on the bus. Wisdom is indeed better than folly. It is a good thing: a shelter and a preservative (Eccles. 7:12). Perhaps in general there is more wisdom to be found in sustained reflection than in the high-churn, pithy world of Twitter. Bilbro suggests that we aim for 2 or 3 minutes of deep reading for every 1 of trivial scrolling. This is, I think, helpful and constructive, if slightly arbitrary. But that minute of scrolling is beautiful in its time too, and so long as it is suitably balanced by profundity and effort, the occasional indulgence of it needn’t be distortionary or problematic.
Our deep reading, even of meaty things to which we ‘subscribe aspirationally’, has an elder sibling, too. The ‘eternities’ which Bilbro (after Thoreau) would have us read might be legible in those forums to which we subscribe aspirationally, but are surely revealed primarily in Scripture. What Augustine found in the Neoplatonists I have glimpsed in the New Statesman, but like him I don’t find there anyone who says ‘Come to me, you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.’
Yikeiatry 