Does society have a brain? If so, does it suffer from some unspecified damage which prevents it from operating in a manner conducive to rationality and the general good?
In the lives of sane individuals, harmful behaviours may recur on a number of occasions before conclusions are drawn. Characteristics like selfishness, greed, amnesia, denial and hypocrisy can intervene to prevent necessary connections being made. But most human beings could not long manage their lives if they did not rapidly face certain hard facts about themselves.
Society, however, appears to conform to the pattern of the most derelict and incorrigible of individual cases. In whatever strange process we come to collective conclusions, the rule appears to be that nothing will be faced, accepted or changed until the situation has gone far beyond acceptable limits.
Shooting the messenger may be appropriate. The media provide, if not the brain of society, at least part of its memory. And since this is a vital element of the thinking apparatus, society's failure to think coherently can be laid at the door of those whose job it is to observe and inform.
The media present themselves as neutral conduits of information and opinion, but in fact the media tell us, most of the time, a combination of what we want to hear, what their owners would like us to believe, and what corresponds with the predominant political and/or cultural outlook. Truth is another story.
Two news stories of the past week illustrate the point graphically. One is criminality, following the publication of the annual Garda report; the other, drunkenness, the subject of a Prime Time special on RTÉ.
For many years, Garda crime figures have been published to much trumpeting of the "downward trend" they purported to demonstrate. To anyone with one eye half-open, it was obvious that these figures were the result of inefficient statistic-gathering, reduced reporting, massaging, air-brushing or a combination of all these. Now, with the introduction of a new Garda computer system, the truth emerges. Serious crime increased by 18 per cent last year, armed robberies by 14 per cent, murders by one-third, and sexual offences almost doubled. These revelations have been the subject of much fretting in newspapers which for years published details of Garda reports as though they were the television schedules.
The problem with being reliant on media for vital information is that the primary purpose of media is not to inform but to sell a product. Commercial imperatives can just as readily be served by headlines which claim crime is dramatically decreasing as news that we are under imminent threat of social anarchy. This points up the limitations of the purely news model of journalism in supplying the cognitive system of society with accurate information.
The picture with regard to alcohol is still more telling. The national media have been utterly derelict in drawing attention to the national drink problem. All of sudden, as we face the imminent prospect of a national wet brain, they have become exercised on the issue, and the breathless delivery might lead a stranger to conclude that, whatever else might be said about Irish society, its journalists cannot be faulted when it comes to laying the hard facts before the public at the earliest possible moment.
But the facts about the national alcoholism epidemic have been available for years. On Saturday last, an Irish Times editorial claimed: "Recently, Ireland moved from twelfth to second place in the world ranking for alcohol consumption." In fact, this occurred midway through the last decade.
Nearly six years ago, I challenged a Department of Health document on alcohol policy which claimed to present evidence that "the description of the Irish as a particularly alcohol-prone race is a myth", pointing out that this assertion was refutable on the basis of the Department's own statistics.
One reason for the journalistic failure in this area is the inappropriate commercial relationship existing between the media and drinks industries. Fear of lost advertising has created subtle and not-so-subtle pressures on journalists who might be disposed to telling the full truth. Another factor is the nature of the journalistic profession itself. Although the traditional macho-alcoholic stereotype of the newsroom journalist has generally been eliminated, the attitudes which underpinned it survive, making journalism highly susceptible to denial in this connection. It is not a coincidence that much of the recent reporting on this subject has been done by female journalists.
Another factor is that, when the drink and crime problems first became acute, the boom was just getting into full swing, and the cultural climate had become inhospitable to any attempt to look at the dark side of progress.
Any politician who contemplated putting a penny on the pint became the target of a populist media campaign, as newspapers outdid each other in championing the cause of the honest pint-drinker. Now, the same newspapers wring their editorial hands and publish searing indictments of what they would have us believe is our sudden plunge into the alcoholic abyss.