What a post-Brexit week it was! Accusations, recriminations, jubilation, gloom, anger, predictions of second chances, despairing comments and wishful thinking dominated the 24/7 wall-to-wall coverage on news channels such as CNN.
I could not but recall in all this the five-stage model of grief advocated by Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross noticing its relevance to a possible analysis of the dramatic Brexit post-referendum fall-out.
Kübler-Ross showed that the first reaction to a great loss is denial. During that fateful night between Thursday, June 23 and Friday, June 24, the Remain side kept on believing that “There must be a mistake”.
The realisation that there was no mistake was quickly followed by anger: someone has to be blamed. Old people, the less educated and the working classes were to blame, we were told.
But why blame the dock worker from Hull, the widow on a State pension from Leicester, the factory worker from Cardiff, the semi-illiterate lad from a slum in Liverpool? The leaders of the campaign were educated in the most exclusive British public schools and universities. They wear pin-striped suits, live in mansions, travel club class and stay in five-star hotels. These are the culprits.
The others are the victims of centuries of English jingoism and decades of anti-EU bombardment by the English press including the ‘quality’ papers written by snobs and read by stuck-ups.
Way back in 1999 Anderson’s and Weymouth’s study had found that the press’s representation of the EU was so preposterous that they described it as an insult to the public. Things have not changed. Newspapers were accused by Martin Fletcher, former foreign and associate editor of The Times of London, of offering readers an endless stream of biased, misleading and erroneous stories about Brussels. Most of it is written by the crème de la crème product of the elite public schools.
During the third stage of the Kübler-Ross model – negotiation – a hope is born that something can be done to avoid the grief. The pundits said that many had regretted their mistake, a second referendum was possible, a vote in the House of Commons could prevent the madness or that Scotland could freeze the process.
Depression follows as the fourth step when people realise that what was done cannot be undone. It seems that European leaders reached this stage describing the European Council meeting as a wake.
The final stage is acceptance. Negotiations will show us that there will be life after Brexit. This could not be the type the Remain side wished for. New trade agreements, political accords and alliances will be hammered.
But I am afraid that the socio-cultural worldview and value systems that at the end made Brexit possible will still be there. As I noted last Sunday, society has been poisoned by a relativistic and totally subjectivist philosophy where nothing is certain, truth is subjective and human nature itself a social construct.
Journalists and TV presenters should stop behaving as if they are circus entertainers
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in a homily before the conclave in April 2005 warned that “we are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognise anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires”.
Last Sunday I wrote about the effects of this attitude on politics. I noted the Brogan Morris article in Salon stating that we have entered the era of post-truth politics.
But the rot is wider than politics.
American journalist Farhad Manjoo’s book title says it all: True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society. This he describes as a believe-whatever-outlandishness-you-want-to-believe-without-regard-for-proof society. This is a society where one chooses to believe what one wants to believe irrelevant of the facts while claiming that one’s ‘I don’t care about facts attitude’ is as valid as an attitude based on facts.
On other occasions I had criticised current society as one wherein those who know very little about a subject pretend to speak authoritatively and those who know nothing about a subject abrogate the right of speaking infallibly about it.
Griffe Witte, London’s bureau chief of the Washington Post, was correct to write that a definitive loser of the Brexit campaign is the expert. Who needs an expert if all claims are valid? This culture is so widespread that Witte refers to research showing that both Remain and Leave voters don’t trust experts. “The difference between the two camps… is that Leave voters believe experts never get it right. If you’re a Remain voter, you believe that experts don’t always get it wrong.”
Once more, please note that there is no difference between the tertiary educated against the secondary educated. It is universal though the relativistic philosophy was preached by the former not the latter. Brexiteer Michael Gove, the Oxford-educated Secretary of State for Justice, a candidate for the Conservative leadership and a probable future prime minster, unashamedly and approvingly told Sky News that: “I think people in this country have had enough of experts.”
Last Wednesday Christiane Amanpour wrote a spirited screed denouncing the media for its responsibility in leaving uncriticised if not abetting this sorry state of affairs.
“Throughout the whole campaign, you could turn on any news programme and the desperation for balance, objectivity and neutrality caused highly intelligent journalists to mostly treat Remain leaders from the Prime Minister on down like criminals. While the Leave side… was mostly treated with kid-gloves and credulity.”
Amanpour is right to say that journalists cannot sit on the fence between truth and myths. They cannot treat them as if they are equally valid. Journalists and TV presenters should stop behaving as if they are circus entertainers. The race for ratings many times is a race for the bottom.
It is immoral for journalists and TV presenters to glorify the buffoons as if they are experts and place them on the same plane as the real experts. Such an attitude is not only immoral but should be deemed to be criminal.
This wind has been sown for a very long time. Now we are reaping the whirlwind.
joseph.borg@um.edu.mt