10.13125/CH/3715
In this paper I will be dealing with two major arguments: a) an emancipated thinking is not just one that liberates itself from the baseless authority of others, but also and fundamentally one which is known to subject itself to patient self-criticism, persistent deepening and intricate dialogue with different perspectives; such a way of thinking is menaced by the impoverishment of the use of language in contemporary media b) along with the technical question of how to transmit information products more and more rapidly, we need to develop a symmetrical concern for the development of critical points of view, of reasonable approaches to the problems, of prudent scepticism, illustrated pessimism and meditative prudence.
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Luís António Umbelino
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Critical Hermeneutics
To End All Good News: Emotive Opinionatores,  Arrogant Experts, and Group Ideologues
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Luís António Umbelino
2019/06/01
10.13125/CH/3715
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urn:nbn:it:unica-24857
To End All Good News: Emotive Opinionatores,  Arrogant Experts, and Group Ideologues
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/ecch/article/download/3715/3327
Critical Hermeneutics, special (2019)                     Articolo presentato il 21/5/2019
Biannual International Journal of Philosophy              Articolo accettato il 21/5/2019
http://ojs.unica.it/index.php/ecch/index                  Articolo pubblicato il 1/6/2019
ISSN 2533-1825 (on line); DOI 10.13125/CH/3715


      To End All Good News: Emotive Opinionatores,
           Arrogant Experts, and Group Ideologues1


                              Luís António Umbelino




Abstract
In this paper I will be dealing with two major arguments: a) an eman-
cipated thinking is not just one that liberates itself from the baseless
authority of others, but also and fundamentally one which is known to
subject itself to patient self-criticism, persistent deepening and intri-
cate dialogue with different perspectives; such a way of thinking is
menaced by the impoverishment of the use of language in contempo-
rary media b) along with the technical question of how to transmit in-
formation products more and more rapidly, we need to develop a sym-
metrical concern for the development of critical points of view, of rea-
sonable approaches to the problems, of prudent scepticism, illustrated
pessimism and meditative prudence.
Key words: Information; Language; Meaning.




1. The emotive opinionator, the arrogant expert and the group
ideologue
The famous Portuguese contemporary writer Gonçalo M. Tavares cap-
tured quit well a crucial feature of our contemporary media:




1
  A first version of this paper is to be publish with the title “Para acabar de vez com
as boas notícias. Elogio das pequenas coerências e da justa complexidade” in João
Figueira & Sílvio Santos (org.) Fake news, redes sociais e a nova ordem
(des)informativa na era da pós-verdade, Coimbra, IUC (accepted for publication).
Luís António Umbelino, To End All Good News




      It is not the discourse of thought (to reflect before conclud-
      ing) that it is an event and something newsworthy. It is the
      opposite: the discourse that concludes, and much so, before
      thinking. Why think if I can conclude? Ninety-five per cent of
      the language of public space that is reported could today have
      this motto (Tavares, 2018: 7).


I would like to start by arguing that this state of affairs seems to me
favoured by three standard figures who tend to colonize ‘the language
of our contemporary public space’ with quick and childish opinions (‘like
it’ / ‘don’t like it’; ‘), with fast conclusions silencing the complexity of
all problems (‘in fact, it all comes down to…’), and with the inability to
recognize at what point it may be good to suffer the consequences of
truth (or the search for truth). I would name these three type-figures
as follows: the emotive opinionator, the arrogant expert and the group
ideologue.
      The emotive opinionator is the type-figure that represents all
those who just care about ‘spontaneous’ opinion and scandalized or
euphoric synthesis based on an impoverish use of language. The emo-
tive opinionator is thus someone convinced of his own importance, or
better yet, of the importance of his own feelings and emotions. These
feelings and emotions are to him (or her) the only way suitable of look-
ing of looking for the ‘truth’ in events and actions, not reason or rea-
sonable arguments. There is, of course, a scale of emotive opiniona-
tors. At the bottom we have the internet hater; on the top we can find
those who comment on everything and everybody based on the single
bases of how something ‘was lived’ by themselves. The emotive opin-
ionator is someone convinced of his own wonderful sensibility and col-
ourful interior. For him, empathy is the most important value as it rep-
resents the path to wisdom. What is felt is therefore the only needed




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criteria on which to ground a worldview. Such a figure-type thus sym-
bolizes all those who disregard the importance of rational conflicts of
interpretations, of critical, decentralizing and heterodox arguments, of
subtle, nuanced and complex interpretations. In this sense the views
of the emotive opinionator represents an impoverish point of view that
tend to ignore the complexity and temporal long significances of the
world we live in.
    In fact, reality is always distorted by the monotonous and simple
projection of fears, interests, resentments, ‘sensations’ and uncritical
convictions. The opinion of the emotive opinionator is founded in an
endless capacity to feel shocked and in the strong ability for impulsive
reaction. Such a figure thus stands on the opposite field of those en-
gaged in consistent and alternative narratives of meaning, in patient
interpretations and long term research of new horizons of meaning. For
the emotive opinionator, the only valid ‘narratives’ are those that rein-
force his own sense of felling outraged. This is why reality becomes,
for the emotive opinionator, an atomized sum of ‘shocking situations’
(real or manipulated, it does not matter), of ‘ferocious injustices’ and
of episodic and liquid ‘scandals’ that are ‘felt within’ and, because of
that, always ‘lived’ as an irrevocable appeal to activism and immediate
reaction.
    The first victims of the emotive opinionator are almost always the
complexity of truth and the importance of emancipated thinking. An
emancipated thinking is not just one that liberates itself from the base-
less authority of others, but also and fundamentally one which is known
to subject itself to patient self-criticism, persistent deepening and in-
tricate dialogue with different perspectives. To some extent, the emo-
tive opinionator represents the attitude of reducing all questions to just
one ‘How to immediately react to ...?’




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Luís António Umbelino, To End All Good News




      The second type-figure I would like to refer to is the one I would
call the arrogant expert. By this designation I mean to refer to a para-
digmatic figure that summarizes how specialized expertise tends to
function as a powerful means of bureaucratic control of information.
The arrogant expert (or ‘expert-priest’ as referred to by N. Postman
[1993: 85]) can be identified by two main features: first, he tends to
be ignorant of many issues that do not relate to his area of expertise,
not suspecting that such ignorance can lead him to misrepresent reality
by over-simplification; on the other hand, when the recognition of the
limits of a specialized field would advise caution in extrapolations, the
arrogant expert is the one that claims the authority to extend the pre-
suppositions and methodologies of his own field of expertise to an ever
larger set of domains of intervention (social, psychological, ethical,
moral) that he mistakenly understands to be subsumed in the same
way and to the some logic of his field of specialization.
      The contemporary public space is full of these experts who intend
to teach us a set of technics that supposedly will enable us to unveil all
the secretes on, for example, how to educate children, how to be kind
and empathetic, happy and sure of oneself, how to be healthy and
beautiful, how to make love, how to influence others, how to lead them
and also how to make friends, seduce, feel good in one's body, eat as
one should, compete, succeed, take control, be virtuous, etc. In our
days there does not seem to be any aspect of human relations and
actions that escapes the control of one or another arrogant expert.
      It is true that the ‘expert’ is an important creation of modern
times. Modern times are an age of exponential increase of information
and knowledge, with the consequence of having become impossible for
a single person (as happened with encyclopaedic sages of the past) to
hold more than a tiny part of the total set of human knowledge. To a
certain extent, it is comprehensible that the expert would arise as a
key figure of such times. He will be at the vanguard of a new way of


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searching for knowledge that is now the only one possible and suitable:
a specialized and compartmented way. The expert exhausts a deter-
mined and well circumscribed field of research and, in this sense, the
way of working of the expert could be summarized in this way: scan
all data; eliminate what does not relate to the set of questions in your
specific field; use what's left to solve the problems of one specific field
of research. This procedure has resulted well in many fields of
knowledge, and the immense successes of specialized knowledge are
not to be questioned. But there’s a problem here:


     This process works reasonably well in situations where only a
     technical solution is required and there is no conflict with hu-
     man aspects (...), but less well in cases where technical re-
     quirements may conflict with human problems (...) as in the
     case of laws, family life (...) personal development problems
     (Postman, 1993: 85),


     or, indeed, any situation or decision that crosses the world of hu-
man meanings.
     What is an expert on ‘well-being’? What is an expert on ‘empathy’,
or on a ‘good live’, or on being virtuous, or in ‘making love’? Are such
questions part of any (and just one) ‘specialized field’ of expertise? Are
those questions solved by any technical solution? What is experienced
as a ‘problem’ in such contexts? Is it just a technical difficulty? In fact,
as in other similar cases, these are particularly complex problems that
are born of even more complex phenomena that involve the very roots
of a human way of being; in face of such problems, any attempt at
technical simplification immediately represents an adulteration. The ar-
rogant expert is precisely the one who better endorses such simplifica-




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Luís António Umbelino, To End All Good News




tions as he is unable to recognise the true rage of specialized and tech-
nical formulations, on one hand, and the non-technical fabric of the
reality those questions point out, on the other.
      The third type-figure who tries to control information by means of
excessive simplification of human phenomena is what I would call the
group ideologue. In my view, this is the representative of a new form
of postmodern bureaucratization of thought, better characterized by
the following twofold characteristic process: a process of establishing
as a basis for dealing with any subject not the investigation of its root
and foundations, of its complexity and incidences, but rather the state-
ment of a point of view that is established, first and foremost, as a
theoretical trench that urges to protect against all enemies; a process
of impoverishment and simplification of phenomena and worldviews
that follows directly from the inability to recognize that, on the other
side of the trench, at least some points of view, opinions, theses,
knowledge could eventually be useful to discover and think subtleties,
nuances and heterodoxies of human phenomena.
      The group ideologue is everywhere in our public space. This type-
figure can easily be identified in all approaches, ideas and doctrines
that strive to silence any points of view of instable equilibrium among
different perspectives and interpretations. For such a ty-figure, it all
comes down to a more or less blind defence of a single perspective,
the rightful one that is one’s own; such a defence is taken to be a kind
of ‘moral’ defence of ‘our good ideas’, against the evil others that do
not understand them and so are to be seen as a menace. The group
ideologue is always an extremist, even if he is not prepared to see
himself as such; in fact, he will always think of him as a kind of cham-
pion for pure ideas, when in reality he represents the censorship of in
between perspectives, of complex and heterodox perspectives – those
that are strengthen by the hermeneutic model of reading (see Ricoeur,




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1986: 153 ss.). The group ideologue is then someone that makes ‘cer-
tainty’ depend on a perspective (his own) that is supported not on its
merits or its compatibility with reality, but on the fact that it is neces-
sary to protect it (by moral imperative) from insidious critics. The the-
oretical barricade of the group ideologue is thus strengthened by a
process of victimization, which sees the opposite view as an attack. His
prevailing sentiment is that of constant indignation, an essential fea-
ture of his impoverished mode of control over information and thought.
Resentment becomes his way of life and utopia the only escape when
reality contradicts the ideas seen as unique. That is why around the
group ideologue it is impossible to think – even less to think differently:
all those who call into question the ‘beliefs’ and ‘ideas’ of the group
ideologue are immediately tagged as agents of evil; it is therefore not
necessary to examine what they say and to evaluate any possible rea-
sons they may have on common issues or concerns. Thus, the group
ideologue's perspective on the world will always be marked by the in-
ability to expose itself to the particularities, details and sensible alter-
natives that other ‘views’ can always convey.
     Such a perspective will therefore always be too simplistic; its first
victim will therefore always be the complexity of the problems and af-
fairs of the human world, inevitably subject to a silent process of forced
simplification and partial approaches.


2. The problem with sharing information
By making their hurried concluding schemas predominate over ever-
widening areas of public space and, in particular, by colonizing the
news media, such figures tend to amplify and reinforce the very same
dismal symptom that causes them to have an audience: more and
more people are losing their natural aptitude - their virtue, in fact - for
scepticism, more and more people are letting their desire not to be
deceived to became weaker and weaker, more and more people seem


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Luís António Umbelino, To End All Good News




to be forgetting the importance of informed and cosmopolitan citizen-
ship, of vigorous knowledge, of up-to-date reasoning, of strong and
beautiful ideas (the only ones that cam truly frame an broadly give
sense and grounds to that knowledge and that reasoning). Here lies a
second problem that needs to be analysed.
      I would like to argue that, in order to meditate on such a state of
things, we must face a fundamental problem which, more than ever
before, calls us to think and not to conclude. Such a problem could be
formulated in this way: is the only objective of ‘information’ to ‘trans-
mit’ ‘media contents’? Is ‘information’ only just another ‘product’, a
desirable ‘thing’ one wants to have, a ‘thing’ without any connection to
its possible uses, meanings, purposes and extended meshes of signifi-
cance?
      This problem has, in my view, a history that explains it: the history
of an epistemological change that, during the nineteen century, will
replace the central problem of information and communication, as it is
inherited from the grand siècle of the enlightenment, by an essentially
technical difficulty. That ‘problem’ was this one: how can information
promote a critical, enlightened, sceptical, and innovative world view?
The change occurred when, as it came to be forgotten the range and
implications of that first problem, the ‘problem with information’ was
exchanged by the ‘technical problem’ of how to transmit ever more
quantity of information in an ever more rapid way to more and more
people.
      I want to argue that this change has serious repercussions, first
and foremost, on the way we use language in the public sphere. When
efficiency and rapidity becomes the only value surrounding infor-
mation, language becomes less important in the sense that it must also
respond to needs of rapid information. In order to serve this new pur-
pose, the uses of language became increasingly simplified and impov-
erished; and as we simplify and impoverish language, we do the very


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same thing to thought. At the end, the result is to became less de-
manding regarding both. A time where information becomes just an-
other product of infinite and liquid entertainment, is a time of simplified
and impoverished language and thought. And in such times everything
can became easily believable…
    Let us look at this issue more in detail.
    It can be stated that one of the most relevant historical contribu-
tions from the Enlightenment (deepening a movement that takes shape
along the end of the seventeenth century) to modern and contempo-
rary culture is the defence and promotion of the value of free circulation
of large flows of information (based on the printed word). The very
possibility of such free and large circulation of information was fa-
voured by a set of new mediums with a cosmopolitan, emancipatory
and critical agenda committed to fighting the ‘spirit of lies’. Newspapers
are one of these new media. By the end of the century, newspapers
had already assumed its modern form and proliferated by the majority
of the great European cities. In this new context of the promotion of
free circulation of information it is also worth mentioning another im-
portant medium: the Salon. Along the eighteenth century the Salon
quickly becomes the social place par excellence of transmission and
discussion of information about new technological inventions, new sci-
entific and philosophical ideas, discoveries of distant shores, new ge-
ographies and social habits, agriculture, technology, medicine, philos-
ophy, history, etc. A third medium can be added to this story: the
Académies of research and teaching, which are established all over Eu-
rope (the Royal Academy, the Académie des Sciences, the Académie
de Berlin, Copenhagen, etc) along the same period. The Académies
came to provide a privileged network of exchanges for scholarly infor-
mation and communication among the great European researchers,
promoting the circulation of up-to-date knowledge. It would not be in-
appropriate to call this period ‘the information age’ (Postman, 2000).


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Luís António Umbelino, To End All Good News




But one important precision must be made regarding what was then
understood as ‘information’. In fact - and here is the point I want to
stress out - the Enlightenment concept of information was quite differ-
ent from what we know today: information was not a ‘product’; on the
contrary, it was understood as something that gained its value as it
was able to endorse and promote extended and ground-breaking con-
texts of meaning, knowledge and reasoning about the world. In other
words, information stood for the importance of gaining an ‘educated’
(an ‘informed’) socio-cultural and scientific world-view (Postman,
2000). In this sense (and in this historical context), the project of the
Encyclopedie de Diderot and D'Alembert can be understood as a para-
digmatic example of the Enlightenment’s way of understanding infor-
mation: informing is not only ‘transmitting contents’, but also, and
above all, a way to promote the virtues of scepticism and the investi-
gation of truth.
      A clear change of this paradigm happens during the nineteen cen-
tury, under the strong influence of a set of new machines that drasti-
cally increased the rapidity of information fluxes. It was, in a way, the
fascination for this new means of communication that favoured the re-
placement of the ‘problem with information’ for the technical problem
of ‘quantity’ and ‘up-to-date’ ways of sharing information.
      Among these new machines, we must point out the telegraph. As
L. Mumford (Munford, 2018: 259–260) clearly demonstrates, following
the invention of the telegraph – rapidly followed by a series of other
technological inventions dealing with information: the telephone, tele-
vision, the internet with the proliferation of social media – the act of
communication and sharing information reinstalls the idea of ‘instant
reaction peculiar to the face to face encounter between two persons’,
an idea that had been abandoned as it became clear the economizing
virtues of the printed word (a telegram was more quick to convey the
essentials of information then an emotional, long and tiring face-to-


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face talk). The quickness introduced by telegraph, then by telephone,
then by television, then by the internet will result in the separation of
information from its broad uses and context; information becomes a
‘thing,’ a ‘transactional good’, ‘something that one wants to have im-
mediately’, something that is desired as an end in itself; the only new
‘difficulty’ to be solved will thus be how to increase the amount and
speed of information and how to get it to more and more people (the
masses).
    However, the substitution of the ‘problem’ of information as a way
of sharing a worldview for the ‘technical difficulty’ of how to increase
the quantity of transmitted information and the speed of such a trans-
mission, is not without risks.
    Two of these risks seem to me to be worthy of attention: first, the
risk (in fact, a common danger of the use of all new technologies) that
represents the ‘tendency to use new technological innovations whether
the occasion demands it or not’ (Munford, 2018); secondly, the more
serious rick which constitutes the reverse side of the convenience of
instantaneous communication: ‘the fact that the great (…) abstractions
of writing, reading and drawing - the means of reflexive thought and
deliberate action – tend to be weakened’ (Munford, 2018: 260) and
understood as not important in the direct reason of the neglect of broad
contexts of deep and guiding horizons of meaning.
    Let us insist on this topic. Take the example of the news media:
when the ‘language’ of the news in the public space is predominantly
worried with speed (the quick comment, the internet post, the ‘reac-
tions’, etc.) is it not true that such a use will tend to overlooked, for
instance, long documentaries or complex investigative reports? The
way I formulate this question does not pretend to be a Manichean ap-
proach, nor do I intend to pursue here any kind of blind attack on media
technologies. That, in my view, would be a naïve and unjustifiable po-




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Luís António Umbelino, To End All Good News




sition. The point I want to make here is not to suggest a kind of re-
sentful opposition between ‘our days’ and’ the good old days’ (which
never existed); nor do I aim at any banal criticism of the ‘society of
consumption’ as the responsible for the ‘consumption’ of information
and the obliteration of a more authentic ‘lost reality’. This are, in my
view, nonsenses. What interests me here is to think about what is lack-
ing (not necessarily as an alternative, but as what is ‘missing’) to a
world seen through the impoverished and detached ‘language’ of
prompt and quantifiable fluxes of information.
      To begin with, it must first be acknowledged that the gains
brought to human communication by the new technologies of commu-
nication and information are immense: under its effect, new opportu-
nities arouse that increased the range of possibilities for human ex-
changes of knowledge, experiences and projects. Along such a process
new ways of making others closer and more familiar, of strengthening
interpersonal connections and intersubjective skills, of democratizing
access to culture and knowledge, of reinforcing the proximity between
governors and governed, of increasing civic and political awareness, of
enriching the social fabric, of creating new places of freedom in the
public space - all of this and more became possible The problem is that
one of the implications of the new information technologies, that make
information a product for fast consumerism, is the ‘creation’ of an at-
omized world, detached from any frame of deep significances, long
meanings and stable shared beliefs. Quickness and short-term con-
tents parcel and equalize all kinds of events (the ‘alignment’ of news,
the daily ‘alignment’ of ‘shares’, post, etc. are the most visible symp-
toms of this). That is to say that in such a way time becomes an ‘eternal
present’, a monotonous present, a ‘here and now’ without articulation
or reference to any enlarge and complex guiding worldview – not, of
course, in a propagandistic or ideological sense, but in the sense the




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spirit of the Enlightenment presupposed it: inform to fight the lies; in-
form to form for emancipated arguments; inform to hearten political
disbelief; inform to practise the capacity of feeling fascinated by patient
interpretations.
    Here is what, in my view, remains to be done: to reintroduce,
along with the technical question of how to transmit information prod-
ucts more and more rapidly, the need to develop a symmetrical con-
cern for the development of critical points of view, of reasonable ap-
proaches to the problems, of prudent scepticism, illustrated pessimism
and meditative prudence. Whence a possible thesis can be, in a pro-
vocative way, advanced here: maybe the true benefits of using new
information technologies will only arise when – and if – those new tech-
nologies are taken up by a refinement of culture and personality that
equates technological developments (Munford, 2018: 261) and broad-
casting of informative ‘products’.


3. Final remarks
More institutions – along school and university – should be concerned
with the need for such ‘necessary refinement’, another way of naming
the challenges of a much need new consistent model of education. All
this has, in fact, to do with education as it is becoming clear the need
to enable new generations to recognize misinformation, distinguish
true from false, disentangle the superficial from the deep, the relevant
and the irrelevant. In a word: as it is becoming clear the need to enable
new generations to suspect unfounded opinion and distrust hasty ide-
ology.


Bibliography


Mumford, L. (2018). Técnica e civilização. Lisboa: Antígona.




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Luís António Umbelino, To End All Good News




Postman, N. (1993). Tecnopolia. Quando a cultura se rende à
tecnologia. Lisboa: Difusão Cultural.
Postman, N. (2000). Building a Bridge to de 18th Century, New York:
Vintage Books.
Ricoeur, P. (1986). Du texte à l’action, Paris: Seuil.
Tavares, Gonçalo M. (2018). Futebol, palavras e ecrãs. Público,
30.06.2018, 7.




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