悲観論が人気を集める理由

●Denis Dutton, “Our Insatiable Appetite for Gloomy News”（New Zealand Herald, August 20, 2003）

We love bad news. Don’t blame it on editors: our addiction to gloom, doom, and misfortune is as persistent a fact of the human psyche as our love of sweetness and fat.

It’s no use demonising Rupert Murdoch: our news tastes predate Morse’s telegraph or Gutenberg’s printing press by a million years. Journalism did not create them, it simply serves them. So herewith a basic diagnosis of the news preferences of homo sapiens:

First, we enjoy good news but pay more attention to bad news. This might have been a useful preference for Pleistocene hunter-gatherers trying to avoid danger, but it makes for distorted understandings today.

（略）

Secondly, we are more impressed by personal stories of joy and distress than by tedious facts and figures.

・・・This eye for the personal — probably a heritage of having evolved in non-literate bands where information was always communicated face to face — is well understood by astute feature editors.

Television producers, who think the zoom lens was invented for close-ups of tears rolling down cheeks, know how to exploit it. But it means that important though abstract issues are not adequately reported or understood.

Thirdly, we are persistently rational in the extent to which we prefer to see important, unexpected news events as part of large, coherent plans. When religion held sway weather disasters were seen as rational acts of God, usually punishment inflicted on us.

・・・Besides ascribing intelligible causes to shocking events, conspiracy theories also feed our desire to find someone to blame, or to extract a moral lesson from every misfortune. We feel more comfortable living in a morally just world.

We have not outgrown what were probably the tastes of our ancestors for sexual gossip, drama and morality stories in whatever counted as “news” in the Paleolithic age. Our ancestors needed accurate information to survive, and you’d think we would prefer accurate news today.

But some scientists have argued that our ancestors were none too choosy about the truth of their myths and ideologies. Even false ideas, fervently believed, can powerfully unite a people. The history of religion, down to the modern era, seems to bear this out. Why do we expect that the news values of modern media should be much better?

悲観論や暗いニュースは政治批判（あるいは社会批判）や道徳的な説教の機会を提供する。特定の出来事のマイナスの側面ばかりが強調され、また暗いニュースが率先して報道されるのも我々のモラルに対する根強い欲求*1あってこそということなのかもしれない。悲観論は「道徳的でありたい」という目的（We feel more comfortable living in a morally just world.）に奉仕する手段であり、それゆえ悲観論に対する需要はモラルへの派生需要という性格を備えているのかもしれない。

*1:平たく言えばクレーマー気質ということ