Go to the source

There seems to be a great deal of outrage online about a supposed Brexiteer boycott of a performance of Beethoven's Ninth. You can find coverage of it in the Observer (Brexiters boycott choral festival over EU’s Ode to Joy) and of course over at Slipped Disc (here and here).

Yet when one actually reads the articles the true scale of the boycott quickly becomes apparent. The headlines and rhetoric would lead one to believe a group of ardent Brexiteers are leading a campaign against the performance. But tucked away in the middle of the Guardian article one discovers:

A spokeswoman for the Three Choirs festival, which is held in Gloucester every three years, alternating with Hereford and Worcester, said that an email and a phone call had made the feelings of a small minority of local people very clear.

One email and one phone call. Both may well have been by the same person -- the article refers to only one complainant. One wonders why a national Sunday newspaper thought the story deserving of an article. Were the Observer all too eager to take up a story that fitted so well their worldview? Were the festival organisers desperate for some publicity in light of disappointing ticket sales?

One of the Slipped Disc articles, written by the festival's chief executive, says they have sold one hundred more tickets since the story broke. She also admits that 'all I can say with certainty is that two people are not attending this event because of a perceived connection with Brexit politics'.

I despair at how gullible people are. One constantly finds stories like these, massive exaggerations based on scant evidence, designed to encourage the blindest and phoniest outrage. They are stories written for those who love to be appalled and indignant, which is almost the entirety of the human race, bar the occasional saint. We are always told that people don't trust the news anymore, but I'm afraid this is only true insofar that people do not trust the news from sources they regard as 'on the other side'. Most blindly trust news that comes from their 'side'.

One thing that would make our public life infinitely richer is if every schoolchild is taught four vital words 'go to the source'. Do not really on secondary sources, do not rely on accounts, analysis, opinion, quotations, retellings. Find the earliest accounts of an event, find what those closest to the event had to say, find the core facts and ignore the many reactions and afterthoughts. Find what it was before it became a 'story', a process which invariably changes its nature. If it is a controversy about what someone said, find what they said -- not merely the quotations but the whole thing. If, like the Beethoven story, it is a controversy about a boycott, find out who is boycotting and why, look up who broke the story, who supplied the story, and form your own judgement.

I fear that the people who should be most aware of all this -- supposedly educated people -- are in fact the most gullible. Academic students are entirely reliant on secondary literature. Papers are mostly tedious documents overburned with hundreds of footnotes -- compilations of recycled thought as an exercise in exhibitionism and memorisation. They constantly reference other people's judgements -- absolutely everything has to be 'backed up' by some book, article, quotation or argument. Original thought seems to be mostly absent. Anyone who goes to university (at least most unversities) will likely come out knowing what to think but not how to think.