On the public conscience

This next article will be long and boring. If your not feeling particularly academic today please skip past. This has been something on my mind for some time now.

What is the public conscience? It is, more or less, the collective thoughts, worries, desires, beliefs and values of society. Rarely is it homogeneous and uniform in nature. The vast diversity of society creates a deeply fragmented social world-view with a multitude of varying viewpoints as you move from person to person. Yet certain issues, certain beliefs can pervade even in this mosaic of consciousness and dominate the masses. These become the infallible facts, or the articles the faith that the public rarely challenges except in the face of some new infallible fact or article of faith to succeed them.

I remember reading in an environmental article once that environmental issues dominate the public conscience behind health-care and the economy. Remember back when Al Gore released an Inconvenient Truth? Those were strong economic times (albeit illusory; strong economic gains at this time were only bubbling towards inevitable collapse) and health-care reform was nowhere on the table during the Bush years. The public conscience was free from the burdens of economic turmoil and major overhauls of the health care system. That public conscience was at that time ready to embrace environmental issues seriously. Now, in the face of economic recession, it would be rare for climate change news to make the front page, except for the occasional scandal with the IPCC (an issue I would like to touch on at a later time). It seems that our brains prioritize key issues so that certain issues will be overshadowed in the present of other overarching issues. This does not mean that now climate change is less important than the economy, only that now the economy has gained a front row seat in the theatre of the public conscious and other issues must wait their respective turn. They are less popular, but not less important by any measure.

The media plays a strong role in determining what catches the public eye and what doesn't. During the recent G20 meeting that took place in my city of Toronto I was reminded of the strong architectural power of the media to mould the public conscience. By continuously playing looped footage of masked "Black Bloc" anarchists destroying private property and lighting police cars on fire, the public, at least those safe at home and away from the action, were made angry and hungry for justice. The "facts" as reported by the media were rarely questioned during that initial broadcast. The following day, the police held a mass arrest in which over 500 people, mostly peaceful protesters, were detained. It was indeed a silencing of the publics basic human right to protest, a fundamental and guaranteed right by our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Yet the public was somewhat willing to have these rights eroded in order to catch the perpetrators of these violent acts. In the days that followed there was a break in the public consciousness. The facts as reported by our trusted media came into question. People began to wonder why police cars were left to burn for 20 minutes without a firetruck in sight, why a $2 billion dollar security price tag could not stop a few masked thugs, and why innocent people were beaten and arrested without warrant. By this time the damage had been done, the worlds leaders were once again tackling the issues of their own respective nations, and human rights had taken a step back. A call for a formal inquiry in the proceedings of the G20 summit have been denied by the Harper government. It seems we should not question what happened that day lest we be deemed unpatriotic. These acts of eroding civil liberties are reminiscent of the Patriot Act of the Bush government following 9-11. But I digress...

I guess what I am trying to get at here is this. All because something shares common belief, all because it stirs up outrage, all because it is reported by the media (or not such as the case with climate change), and all because its what's on the publics mind at that point in time does not make it any more true than anything else. Be sceptical, be interrogative, and challenge your assumptions at every moment. There are truths to be found but rarely are they found on the surface. One must dig deep beneath the layers of political rhetoric and media spin to find them deep beneath. And if these truths do not match with those of the public conscience do not cast them away in fear. It is all the more reason to hold them close and cherish them.