Too Much News?

There seems to be too much “news” these days.  However, it takes some thought to decipher if, in fact, it is the news that increased or more the need to tell it.  It is as though we must consume more and more of a less and less nutritious broth.  But be it either one or some other, clearly missing is the significant review article bringing the detail and a comprehensive mature reality into perspective.  Not that we are wanting for opinion writing: there is more warrantless “analysis” than even warrantless wiretapping; and just as cloaked in secrecy as to where the real value might lie in the activity.

I am sure that in previous times, even quite recently previous, the level of analysis would be considered adequate, if not fully satisfactory, but our degrees of freedom (in a quasi-statistical sense) have been reduced to the lowest limits: we can no longer leave out of our considerations the salient influences of our world.  There are no longer political considerations or economic designs that can avoid a full and deep recognition of our best understanding of human nature and biophysical reality. 

These most difficult areas of interest have, throughout our history, been running “naturally” in the background, like a beating heart or cell metabolism.  But we are today consumed with an illness of global proportion; a species illness attacking human structures that most of us never even knew existed, and a biospheric illness in which humans have become a pathogen in the Living Earth.  Unless we understand these things in their proper context, we can make no sense of John McCain’s lobbying troubles, Hillary’s slide from political grace or Obama’s oratory.