The Christmas Gift; or, No News but the Good News

For Christmas, I gave myself an early gift: I uninstalled my Smart News app. Over the last six months, this app has given me news from both Democrats and Republicans, reminding me why I don’t belong to either party. It’s reminded me why Theodore Roosevelt’s Manhattan-socialite friends thought politics wasn’t a fit occupation for a person of good breeding. It’s also reminded me that the culture wars place a great strain on my meager stocks of charity and humility. Above all, it was distracting me from the true reason for the season.

Speculation and Storytelling

You might have heard of the “Gell-Mann amnesia effect.” The late Michael Crichton, who named the term after his friend Murray Gell-Mann, described it thus:

You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. (Crichton, “Why Speculate?”, 4/26/2002)

Crichton’s main theme was that too much of what passes for news today is sheer speculation. Not just about the future, but about the present facts as well. Even experts make bad predictions; Crichton mentioned Paul Ehrlich, whose book The Population Bomb is still the gold standard for authoritative wrongness. Journalists, in the main, are not experts. They are storytellers. And all too often, the story they want to sell determines what facts they accept. It’s called selective thinking, as opposed to critical thinking. Storytellers do it all the time. Even I do it.

Make a note of it: Journalists are storytellers.

Crichton gave his speech in 2002. But he erred in thinking the problem only existed in journalism. I’ve noticed many times over the years that people who are experts in one field will opine about a topic outside their wheelhouse and get many things wrong. Religion seems to invite comment from many of these experts, usually scientists. But science also gets its share of pseudo-experts, as do law and history, particularly in social media. Every one of them is pushing a preferred narrative. Politics, above all, is where the preferred narrative determines what counts as a fact.

Bombarded by Stories

Contrary to the cliché, facts don’t speak for themselves. They don’t begin to say anything until we connect them within explanatory frameworks. The framework most connatural to the human mind is the story. We are born to tell and listen to stories for entertainment, for contemplation, and most importantly for instruction. We use stories to organize our universe, to explain and make sense of our lives. History especially is story before it’s anything else. As the poet Muriel Rukeyser put it, “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”

That’s not to say all our stories are false or untrustworthy. A tale can reveal truths even though it’s composed of fictional elements. At the same time, though, a narrative can mislead even though it’s chock-full of easily verified facts. The most compelling lies tell people what they’re already predisposed to believe, giving “facts” that fit those predispositions in a narrative frame that needs not make sense to anyone else but them. It’s even more compelling if the storyteller believes their own story; for instance, Alex Jones. Skeptics, cynics, and postmodernists distrust other people’s narratives, but not their own.

So here I am in Advent, trying to prepare for Christmas, the annual celebration of the greatest story ever told. And all the livelong day, this Smart News app is buzzing my smartphone, bombarding me with people flogging tales of fear, distrust, anger, and impending doom. They’re not necessarily ill-intentioned. They’re not necessarily idiots. They’re not necessarily crackpots. They mean well, I guess, bless their hearts. But they want me to be scared, mistrustful, angry, and anxious for the future, too. Often over things I can’t do anything about or things that may never come to pass. At Christmastime, yet.

That’s not how I want to live. That isn’t living. That isn’t my story. That isn’t the Christmas story.

Born to Live and Die Like Us

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father. (John 1:14)

“The Word became flesh.” God did not put on humanity as if it were a gorilla costume. He came into the world as the rest of us do, from the body of a woman, in the meantime creating the wonderful paradox that one of His creatures should also be His mother. He came to be with us, to be one of us. Has he done so for other creatures on other planets? We don’t know, and we may never know; in a sense, it isn’t relevant. It’s enough to know that He has done so for us.

“The Word … dwelt among us.” God, in the Person of His Son, was born as a baby so He could grow into adulthood like other humans. He ate, drank, and slept. He sweated when it was hot, bled when he was cut, and no doubt his muscles ached after a long day of work or walking. He had moments of anger, tenderness, grief, and perhaps fear. And though the Gospels don’t record it, I do not doubt that he laughed, or that he danced at the wedding in Cana.

He was born not just to die like us, but to live like us as well. “One who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sinning” (Hebrews 4:10). Not just to live like us but to teach us how to live as we should. That’s the meaning of Christmas to me.

Choosing My Story

The stories I read in Smart News were often written by people who profess Christianity. Yet they don’t write like people for whom the gospel story is the most important story of their lives. They write like the Nativity, Passion, and Resurrection were “in other news,” snippets that scrolled by on the ticker while they were soaking in the latest outrages on CNN and FOX News. Other narratives have captured their attention. They write as though they’ve not only lost faith in God’s Providence but also lost interest in it.

And the more I read them, the more I begin to think like them. I don’t mean that I adopt their speculations uncritically. I mean I begin to think as though Christianity starts with worrying about election fraud, structural racism, or whether people who aren’t physicians should be called “Doctor.” I forget that Christianity starts with people, not with nations, governments, social classes, or institutions. I forget that it begins with “the Absolute in swaddling clothes and Omnipotence in bonds” (St. John Henry Newman). I forget that Christianity starts with the Incarnation and Christmas, with Emmanuel—“God with us.”

We can choose the narratives that matter most to us. The great saints and martyrs lived as if the gospel story was the only one that mattered. Some people choose stories of a world full of injustice and evil, and choose to respond to them with anger, fear, and mistrust. I choose a story of a God who loves this world despite its injustice and evil, who came to be among us because we need Him. And I choose to respond to that story with love and goodness, to the extent God makes me capable of love and goodness.

Smart News was making me dumber. So it had to go.

My Christmas Wish

My Christmas wish for you is that you unhook yourself from the news of the world, because it is of the world—a world that’s abstract, evanescent, and often irrelevant. The real world is in your home, your neighborhood, your workplace, and your church. The people who matter are the people whose lives you can change with a kind word, a good deed, or a thoughtful gesture. Be with family and friends as much as you can under the current conditions. Say a prayer every day for an angry, fearful, mistrustful world that takes itself too seriously.

And when you go to Mass, listen to the stories as if you were listening to them for the first time. Listen like a child. Learn from a master Storyteller, the Word through whom the Author of all things tells the story of the universe and brings it to evergreen life. Make the stories your own. Let them change your life. And then go change other lives by living the stories yourself. Go and proclaim the gospel of the Lord. For the world needs the good news more than ever.

Merry Christmas.

Dedicated to the memory of Sir Knight Fabio Borda, Jr. (1972 – 2020). Ve con Dios, mi hermano.