URSABLOG: Becoming A Fox, Again

I am seriously thinking about changing my daily and weekly reading matter, I mean how I collect and absorb news and opinion. I consider this to go to the root of who I am and what I think. It has changed once, and I think I have to do it again.

Back in the mid-1990s, for reasons of business and self-enlightenment, I found I did not know what was going on in the former Yugoslavia. I had been brought up on a daily diet of BBC Radio Four, The Guardian, and The Observer and The Sunday Times. I considered myself – even as a teenager – as up to date and well informed. But something was missing. I had no time for the journals of the right or left, because I resisted (and continue to) being informed about what I should think, however eloquent, funny and wise the writers appeared to be.

This was not the same for books. As regular readers of this blog will know – as well as colleagues, friends, family and frustrated ex-lovers – I carve out and insist on some time, daily if I can, to read books. As reading is essentially a lonely and quiet activity it does lend itself to sociability. I never understand why people – when they see me reading a book – think it’s ok to interrupt me, as though I am bored and just reading because I have nothing better to do, and would much rather prefer to be having a conversation with them about some trivial matter than concentrating on what I am doing. Hint: if I am reading (especially if it’s a book) it’s because that is what I want to do, and the contents of the book are far more interesting to me than anything else at that time.

I also consider books essential because apart from enjoying reading, the range of thought, ideas, feelings, knowledge, emotions they provide – whether fiction or non-fiction – essential to learning about, and living in the world. I sometimes sit on my sofa and look at all the books on the shelves in front of me – those I have read, and those I have yet to read – and wonder “What’s the point? Is it all just a waste of time? Shouldn’t I be doing something with my time instead?”  This feeling became worse when a friend visiting me recently took down one book after the other and asked me for each specific book what was it about, and why I had read it, or why  wanted to read it. It was an interesting – if challenging – exercise. The only answer I could give to was that it’s because I want to, I think it’s a good idea, and whether by design or accident my life has, and will continue to be, better because of what I have read.

But books are for medium to long term use; I do not know when or where their contents will prove useful to me but I trust in the process because I know that it has worked for me in the past. But in the meantime, I have to live in the world I find myself in at the moment, and therefore have to understand what’s going on. Back in the mid-1990s I felt that the Yugoslavian conflict was very important, both in terms of the suffering of the people living and dying there at the time, but also for Europe and the world, at a time when although the Cold War had ended, peace was evidently not on everyone’s mind.

I was frustrated because the news was what mostly about what people thought – politicians, diplomats, commentators, and representatives of various non-governmental organisations – and not about what was actually happening. I was living in Liverpool at the time, and for some reason was able to access a wide range of printed daily newspapers at the newsagent around the corner from my office. I bought and read all of the daily broadsheet (remember them?) newspapers one by one, and being dissatisfied with most of the British, i.e. London, papers I settled on two which served my purposes: the Financial Times and the Irish Times. Both of them, at least as they appeared to me at the time, seemed to be what used to be called ‘papers of record’, ones that were concerned, deeply concerned, about unbiased reporting of the truth, without trying to steer the reader to one point of view or another. Sure they had opinion articles, but it was the news, what was actually happening, that was important to me. The papers treated me like a grown-up, able to make their own minds up. The truth, as far as they could know it, was important, and finding out and reporting the truth was their main motivation.

The Irish Times, then at least, took its reporting seriously. News reports were printed without a byline, as though the news itself didn’t need to be identified with a particular reporter. It was as though the paper thought of itself as an institution that could be trusted and was therefore respected. The Financial Times, then at least, also took its reporting seriously but the motivations were, I think, because it was read by people who needed an unbiased view of the world because they were making their own decisions – for their businesses or institutions – that needed the facts first. Opinions were important of course, but it was not the primary focus.

In shipping, when I first started at least, also in Liverpool, I was hungry for facts. The company took Lloyds List every day, and when the directors had read it it was left in the lobby of the building where it could be read by any employees that so wished. Most did not wish to, but I did, whether out of curiosity or boredom (the internet did not exist then, and it wasn’t done to be seen reading a book at one’s desk). My work was not taxing, and my evident boredom – and my  my disruptiveness too – was probably why I was transferred to their associate ship sale and purchase division. The rest, as they say, is history.

But Lloyds List was also boring. There was little in there to inform me about the world of shipping, or where I fitted into it, even though it was, then at least, the world’s oldest daily printed newspaper. It was mostly filled with a series of unedited press releases. I found amusement – and some knowledge – in the daily casualty reports. TradeWinds was not made available to us. I imagine the directors found it scurrilous and gossipy, and not suitable for the servants.

I woke up this week to a new world. This should not have been a surprise to me as I wake up every morning in Athens in a new world: I live in an area of Athens called Νέος Κόσμος. But as the results of the US elections came in, I found myself surprised, and if I am honest, relieved. The surprise was how emphatic the victory for the Republicans actually was, and the relief was because it was so emphatic there would be no riots or court cases – or any of the other stuff – that could have occurred if the results had been different.

But my feelings since then have been – let’s say – poignant. I feel that we are at an inflexion point in history where things will never be the same again. This is different from President Trump’s first term, where I, like many I suspect, could not believe what was happening, that a lot of it was stupid and misguided and after this experiment, and having got it out of their system, the American people would go back to normal. And on the face of it they did, by electing President Biden, but now that seems to be have been an aberration. It is now business as usual: a majority of the US electorate want what President Trump has to offer. All of it. And the signs were there for all of those that we willing to see.

How did I miss this? I blame myself. It turns out that the Financial Times, which is still my primary source of non-shipping news (its coverage of shipping is restricted to what Maersk thinks, and various uninformed speculation concerning the oil industry and ‘supply chain bottlenecks’) is not a paper of record any longer, but a paper of the ‘liberal elite’ and all of its obsessions. This is, of course, a reflection of its readership – big business has changed, and its concerns are different – but as news media has moved online, and the popularity of articles is tracked and fed back into the system, I am getting what the readers of the FT want to read, not what I should read. I have become part of the echo chamber.

My approach to reading books may help me find a way out of this unfortunate place I find myself in; I had thought – liberal elite that I apparently am – that I would never fall into the trap of ‘lesser informed people’. I should diversify my reading and not rely on a daily diet from two or three media sources, and be open to what the world has to say, whether I agree with it or not. I have an open enough mind – at least I thought I did – to consider different points of view. If an artist – per F. Scott Fitzgerald – can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional, then surely a ship sale and purchase shipbroker can too.

After a rather disastrous early academic life – I was never a good student, in thought or deed – I now realise that the books I read at that time, usually those not on any syllabus I was supposed to be studying from at the time, helped me in later life, without knowing they would. Better to be a fox than a hedgehog (“a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing”, attributed to the Ancient Greek poet Archilochus). In the times to come, knowing one big thing may come to be a handicap rather than a strength, and we will need our wits about us – in the small and the big things – to adapt to change. Just don’t ask me to make any forecasts right now: I am still getting over what I now know I not only didn’t know, but what I apparently didn’t want to know. It is a rude awakening.

Simon Ward