The most irritating thing about speaking at conferences is having your photograph taken. You would think that taking a photograph of the speakers should take about three seconds. In fact, it invariably takes the best part of an hour of standing in the cold, chatting unnaturally to people you are often expected to go back into the hall with and tear lumps off.
Photographers always know what they want. First, they want everyone standing together, discussing the conference brochure, looking seriously at each other as though chatting spontaneously among themselves. Then they want everyone sitting down, discussing the conference brochure, smiling at each other as though chatting spontaneously among themselves. Then they want everyone looking at the camera, discussing the conference brochure while talking out of the sides of their mouths. The end result is invariably a murky, nondescript image of a group of people pretending to talk about a conference brochure.
Last Tuesday at the Céifin conference in Ennis, the procedure was not rendered any less crazy-making by virtue of my certainty throughout the procedure that none of these photographs would see the light of day. I was there to speak about the media, to the title, The Myth of Free Speech: How Mass Media Suppress the Truth of the Human Heart. Since one of the points I was about to make was that the media never, if it can avoid it, gives space to criticisms of itself, there was an added sense of futility about the two, yes two, photo sessions that preceded the talking-shop.
I had been invited, I think, because last year I had a go here at the Céifin conference and its seemingly relentless parade of public figures and clerics telling us that we should tiptoe back to poverty, with our shopping bags in one hand and our consciences in the other. Last Tuesday I expanded a little on this analysis, but mainly concerned myself with giving an insider's understanding of how the media operates, without thinking about it, to create the mainstream of public thought. My starting point was that what appears on the front page of today's newspapers is not an objective summary of the significant things that happened yesterday, but an ideological selection based on the prejudices, agendas and assumptions of a relatively small group of people.
I tried to explain how this might work, how it is not so much a conspiracy as a spontaneous cultural process in which people participate without conscious forethought. I also talked about how modern life, in the way it compartmentalises things - here economics, there the arts, and over there a little bit of religion - increasingly resembles a newspaper. I attempted to identify the core ideology of this symbiosis, which I summarised as the idea that "progress will one day meet all our needs". I talked about language and how it is used to keep thought on the correct tramlines, about the clubbable, consensus-hugging culture of journalism, and about the media's cultivation of necessary error to create a gracing aspect for its imposition of ideology.
Since the media is equally committed to demanding accountability from other institutions and rejecting scrutiny of itself, you would want to be mad to be saying things like this in the expectation of being reported. So, although I received a tumultuous response from the floor, no mention of anything I said was published in any of the newspapers purportedly reporting on the conference. This newspaper briefly referred to my presence at Céifin, but unfortunately due to an editing error, a quote from another speaker was ascribed to me.
I did, however, talk about how matters of faith and religion are reported in the media. As with other forms of thought that deviate from the core ideological view, such perspectives are frequently reported at some length, but in a manner that serves to reinforce the mainstream ideology. Clerics, for instance, who obligingly propose an opposition between religion and modernity/prosperity, are certain to be reported in depth. This, I explained, has two benefits. It reinforces the prevailing ideology's insistence that religion is obscurantist, life-denying and intrinsicically antipathetic to modernity, and also affords journalists an opportunity to illustrate that, despite the imminent obsolescence of the religious outlook, it is continuing to provide a tolerant and indulgent coverage of these outmoded superstitions.
On the train home, I read the talk which was about to commence as I was leaving, by the Bishop of Limerick, Dr Donal Murray. It was an illuminating discourse on the human rummage for meaning between the material and the infinite. Next day, however, all subtlety and rigour were lost in a flurry of headlines about the bishop slamming wealth, celebrity and power. The headlines over the report from the conference in this newspaper was "Power and wealth harder to resist, says bishop: Dr Murray highlights urgent need to avoid worshipping affluence and prestige".
My case rests.