not learn in order to do the only things that real learning off ers: to
acquire virtue and wisdom.
There are other kinds of “knowledge” that current culture pur-
sues: there is “the news” and knowledge of “the news.” We are con-
stantly bathed in fl ashing images of events from around the globe;
where there is war, famine, revolution, religious upheaval, there the
camera goes. We are briefed on the international situation as often
as a head of state—or we can be, if we wish. We are regal in our need
to know and our power to be informed.
What is the covert message of this fl ood of news? Perhaps the
most signifi cant is that everything is changing constantly and that
nothing stays the same. We live in a vertigo of wars and devasta-
tions. Since this is so, since change is constant, there is no reason
to stop and to think and to try to arrive at values that will tran-
scend the pressure of the moment. It’s OK not to think too hard,
the news tells us, for no complex thought could possibly keep up
with the fl ood of change—it would be obsolete the moment it was
articulated.
The spray of events the news shows us demonstrates that we need
to think in a manner that is mobile, strategic, pragmatic; we need to
“deal with the situation.” And then move on to the next pressing
matter. Things are so diff erent from moment to moment and place
to place that we could never arrive at a theory to encompass all of
human life. So drop that wish— replace it with the desire to be in-
formed, to be in the know. We must be aware that what counts as
knowledge today will probably be irrelevant tomorrow. Tomorrow
it will possess the value of yesterday’s paper, but today the current
information is all in all. One said once that the great cultural quarrel
was between philosophy and poetry. If so, the quarrel was rich. The
current quarrel is between au then tic thought (which barely exists,
if it exists at all) and journalism, which is everywhere. Journalism
In the Culture of the Counterfeit 251