I’m reading “Time Enough for Love,” and these quotes struck me as being more journalism-related than not.
What are the facts? Again and again and again - what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” - what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single cue. Get the facts!
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.
That is all.
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They are related, in a sense, in the same sense that I’m always at the edges giving subtle criticism. The tone I get from this (and I’m about to shoot myself down on this) is one of criticism as well. A bit too fervent to be taken at face. After all, there are no facts without context. Either in presentation or reception. A pointy-tailed micro-incarnation of Dan Blackmon is always looking from my shoulder at the outputs of journalists, reminding me to wonder what (more than even who) it came from. And I know the opinion I form from a given article is not going to be that of my neighbors, though presenting these facts to such a breadth of audience is what this business seems to be about. If consistency and accuracy of facts is the goal, it seems inhuman to expect that they’ll be taken that way, whether or not the content corresponds to the event in question. This “verdict of history” seems exactly the sort of thing journalists participate in; an indirectly reciprocal discourse about the unfolding of history in society. Different interpretations arise in different places, even from the crispest transmission of information from media outlets. The audience is human, and so are you guys. And so are the guys you’re trying to get the facts from.
“…to how many decimal places?” I think if that thread were pulled on enough, it’d start to look pretty paranoid.
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