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chapter 3 Skeptics of Faith or Faith in Skepticism? Enlightening the Journalistic Mind Samuel Johnson was once asked what he thought of the philosophy of Bishop George Berkeley, who, as a “subjective idealist,” believed that reality was lodged only in the mind of God and that matter did not exist apart from its being perceived in the God-given human imagination. Johnson, in a demonstration of disdain,kicked a nearby stone and declared,“I refute it thus.”1 In this famous gesture, Johnson, the eighteenth-century journalist and lexicographer , conveyed exactly what we recognize today as the journalist’s pragmatic ,commonsensical stance toward the great questions of life.We can argue about “reality” forever as the world passes by, Johnson believed, but the sensation in his foot was proof enough for him that objects exist independent of our perceptions of them and that to engage in metaphysical reasoning beyond that was a waste of time.2 The eighteenth century is best noted for the triumph of the Enlightenment, a philosophical movement characterized by rationalism, an emphasis on practical learning, and a spirit of skepticism and empiricism in intellectual thought. But the eighteenth century is also the period when the business of commercial newspapering and the profession of “journalism” first flowered in England and the United States. The influence of the Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason as it has been called, on the development of journalism has been considerable. Journalists today see themselves as connected in virtually a straight line of philosophical kinship with the Enlightenment rationalists who hoped to banish forever the arcane metaphysical reasoning of church theologians and postmedievalists such as Berkeley and to hold up scientific accomplishment and inductive analysis as the way to human progress. The deductive reasoning of the medieval church scholars—done by applying first principles dictated by church doc03 .47-60/Unde 1/15/02, 9:40 AM 47 48 from yahweh to yahoo! trine to the world’s phenomena—was anathema to the Enlightenment mindset ,as it has become to journalists who have come to value facts over philosophical or theological ideas and who believe they operate by a methodology that is empirical at the core. But,as we shall see,the Enlightenment philosophes’ commitment to reason is really still very much about faith, particularly if one sees faith in skepticism as almost a faith in itself and the Enlightenment as not just a movement to banish religion but as something of a substitute religion. Although Johnson is best known as a great essayist and literary critic, he also was immersed in the life of the early commercial newspaper.Johnson published three broad sheets of periodical essays, The Rambler, The Adventurer, and The Idler, all of which can be seen as precursors to today’s newspaper commentary; he spent much of his time in coffeehouses and Grub Street taverns, where these early newspapers circulated and from which they extracted their mix of gossip, satiric prose, and social commentary; and he was an early version of the celebrity figure the mass media have thrust on the human scene. “I believe there is hardly a day in which there is not something about me in the newspapers,” Johnson once remarked to his equally renowned biographer, James Boswell.3 In certain respects, Johnson can be seen as the quintessential figure symbolizing the influence that the Enlightenment had on practical people of learning and letters who were breaking away from the hold that church dogma and speculative philosophy had exercised over intellectual life throughout Europe. Johnson grandly conveys the spirit of this era of new freedoms and a new humanism . In this respect, he can be seen as the English counterpart of Voltaire, the wit, bon vivant, and great Enlightenment-era journalist, whose utilitarianism and gibes at dogmatic thinking characterize both the Enlightenment and the mood of modern journalism.(Historians have referred to the eighteenth century as both the “Age of Voltaire” and the “Age of Johnson.”)4 Johnson’s gesture toward the stone appears, in this context, perfectly in the spirit of Voltaire; it embodies all the frustration, the contempt, and the liberating experience of the eighteenth-century mind breaking free from the chains of an obscure form of theological thinking that had cramped the human spirit for far too long. But Johnson, in reality, was very different from Voltaire, particularly in his attitudes toward religion.Johnson’s brand of Enlightenment humanism proved quite distinct from that of the irreverent Voltaire. While...

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