Tony Curzon Price (London, oD): I have discovered with great pleasure Julian Jaynes' rather controversial "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown fo the Bi-cameral Mind". A theory of consciousness it may not be, but its account of the disappearance of primitive religion is gripping. Jaynes suggests that ancient Gods literally talked to their devotees---their devotees heard the voice and obeyed it. Primitive societies had a well-ordered constellation of voices to order life, much like the ant-heap has a good constellation of chemicals.
But as complexity grows, the tribal voices stop making sense, and, Jayne argues, some self-correcting mechanism, an interruption of the auditory hallucination, becomes more and more frequent. Complexity breaks down the uniformity of the totem and the self-controlling consciousness emerges.
So what's new? The organs of the press are the voices of groups. But maybe the process of breakdown can go into reverse.
When the FT, the newspaper that speaks of the cacophony of businesses, of the 1000 different interests and angles that each sees in a situation, starts to write articles in which business appears as a the singular monolith, we might think that we are reverting to a Jaynesian primitivism. Look here, in this article on the third runway at Heathrow: on three occasions we have the appearance of the business deity: "the party's position that threatens a serious rift between David Cameron and business.""This uncompromising stance will dismay business""The issue is set to be the first serious flashpoint between a Conservative government and business." So there it is, the singular noun---business. There is no notion that the businesses that would benefit from the alternative plans for London's airports have their own voice. Pick your favourite alternative plan, and I will show you a bunch of winners and losers.
But the FT's world has become simpler, it seems. We have reverted to a corporatist primitivism. The business god talks; the government god talks ... there is a great confrontation in heaven; a victor and a myth arise.
Is it too much to ask for the voice of business to resist denying its own diversity? The FT is more interesting than its own journalists seem to imply.
