The Englishman Alain de Botton is certainly not the deepest thinker of our day, but certainly the most transparent in his manner of expression and definitely one of the most relevant. His amazing ability to deploy all his pumped philosophical erudition in such a way as to say something unusually accurate and important about the "here and now" has no equal in the world.
Alain de Botton is a writer and television producer who lives in London and aims to make philosophy relevant to everyday life. He is a writer of essayistic books, which refer both to his own experiences and ideas- and those of artists, philosophers and thinkers. It's a style of writing that has been termed a 'philosophy of everyday life.'
If earlier de Botton practiced mainly in the interpretation of things intimate and, so to speak, internal - such as, for example, the art of enjoying a journey or the role of religion in the life of an atheist, then this time he turns his gaze to a social phenomenon, namely to news. The original thesis of the author - we are all slaves of the news, and in today's world, they, as predicted by Hegel, have replaced religion - looks obvious to the point of banality. However, its specific implications turn out to be burningly interesting. De Botton skilfully shows why the imperious and irresistible flow of unfiltered news, which today is thought of as one of the great achievements of a free press, can be worse than any censorship. Deprived of context, torn off from prehistory, fragments of a long and socially significant plot outright lose to short stories without continuation in the spirit of “the housewife killed and ate her roommate” - thereby scattering the reader’s attention and focusing on things that are frightening, but piece, to the detriment of things important and universal. Analyzing specific texts from the BBC news sites and the Daily Mail, De Botton explains how the news systematically creates fear, insecurity, despair, anger and hope in us, causing addiction and becoming both the source of the disease and the only remedy for it.
One should not think that de Botton seeks to find and expose the guilty or to mark himself in the glorious field of scourging public vices. He hardly thinks in such categories at all - his manner is much more similar to the calm and clear style of a drug addiction doctor talking, say, about the dangers of heroin. No pathetic cries, hand-wringing, accusations or curses - just pharmacodynamics, brain chemistry, blood pressure, dopamine, serotonin, that's all. And it is precisely this way of speaking that surprisingly turns on in the reader's head all those mental mechanisms that much more alarmist texts often fail to include; it makes us see in habitual and deceptively innocent everyday practices the germ of madness and danger. And although the methods proposed by De Botton of discursive, as the late Umberto Eco would say, resistance to news terror look beautiful-hearted and naive - feasible abstinence, semantic analysis of the incoming stream and control of one's own emotions for the reader, changing the editorial policy to a more analytical and conceptual one for journalists, changing business -models for media managers - awareness of the problem in this case is very timely. Chemical compounds have long ceased to stab like social phenomena, including news, and De Botton speaks about this in an exceptionally sweet, understandable and human way, but at the same time based on a centuries-old philosophical tradition.
In a word, excellent, comforting reading for the urban neurotic - and not only for him. The only thing you can't help but warn the Russian reader about is the quality of the translation. De Botton's thought is so transparent and clearly spelled out that even such a master of literary fanaticism as Victor Weber (known for his categorically unreadable translations of Stephen King) could not completely mutilate it. However, it will not be as easy, light and clear as in the original, no. And you should be prepared for this.
This article was sponsored by Michael Rumpf
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