Perception and reality in press and politics

There is an interesting comparator from Buzzfeed which is currently circulating on social media. In a survey carried out by Ipsos MORI last year, 1,015 British adults aged 16-75 were asked questions about population and social issues in Britain. These perceptions are then compared with national statistics and the results show that everything we think we know is wrong.

Why might that be? Some will argue that national statistics don't reflect reality. There may be an element of this, for example, unreported crime is (understandably) not included in national crime statistics but is nevertheless real for all those affected by it. However, the inadequacies of statistical measurement (of which there are many) are unlikely to explain the fundamental mismatch in perception that a comparator like this indicates.

For me, media and political debate in the UK plays to our perceptions (and, therefore, prejudices) far more than it does to the reality revealed through the statistics we collect locally and nationally. We need to remember that our press is not balanced or neutral but, taken as a whole, predominantly right-wing. All opinion mediated to us by press and politicians is edited opinion reflecting (consciously or not) the editor's perceptions and stances. Where our press is predominantly right-wing, that also means that the majority of mediated news is presented from a right-wing perspective. This is in addition, to the more evident manipulation of statistics for which a politician like Iain Duncan Smith has rightly been criticised.

The result is that political policies are formed, not by the closest thing we have to reality on the ground (which is, for all its inadequacies, the statistical information we possess), but the discussion of this by press and politicians who are coming at this not from a neutral perspective but from a specific party political perspective. This means, ultimately, that many political policies are not evidence-based and address perception rather than reality; this being a primary reason why they don't deliver what the politicians introducing them say they will deliver.

The gap between perception and reality forms a significant part of Owen Jones' Guardian piece at the weekend entitled It's socialism for the rich and capitalism for the rest of us in Britain. This, before you point it out to me, comes from a left-wing perspective - it is, therefore, an important counter-balance to the overall right-wing bias of the press.

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The Jam - News of the World.       

The whole world is in cataclysmic disillusionment

"The whole world is in cataclysmic disillusionment. There's a sense of grieving going on for the loss of clarity over what's acceptable and what's not. People don't trust in the concept of goodness, or in the authorities defining it for us. Religion in general has been dismantled in western Europe. All systems – socialist or capitalist – are crashing."

Brendon Gleeson

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Villagers - Nothing Arrived.

Cecilia Vicuña: Precarious prayer

Cecilia Vicuña’s exhibition at England & Co begins with a series of paintings from the 1970s in which religious icons are replaced by personal, political and literary figures.

Vicuña learned this technique in the late 1960s from the Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington and was initially inspired by the naïve and subtly subversive images made by 16th Century indigenous artists in Latin America after the Spanish conquest when they were forced to paint angels and saints for the Catholic Church.

Salvator Allende, Fidel Castro and Karl Marx simply replace the Christian saints in these images; a reversal of the images indigenous artists were forced to paint by the Catholic Church and an acknowledgement that the Marxism of Latin America in the ‘60s and ‘70s was, for Vicuña, more compelling than Catholicism. Yet, as these works are also deliberately naïve with their subjects depicted within a utopian setting, they also indicate the fragility of the freedoms which had been won and which the Chilean coup d'état of 1973 - when Allende’s life was lost, along with 43 years of Chilean democracy - brought to an end.

Vicuña writes that her artistic practice changed as a result. Prior to the coup d'état she had each day made an object in support of the Chilean revolutionary process. Post coup d'état her objects supported the resistance against the dictatorship.

These objects, composed of feathers, stones, sticks, and other found materials, are known as ‘Precarios’ because they are literally precarious - “they can’t endure, they may fall apart by themselves.” They show their socialist character through their poverty and by the fact that “they can be done by anyone.”

Not only are these objects beautiful in and of themselves but they also reveal the beauty of what is thrown away and ephemeral. As such, they are also deeply spiritual. Vicuña has explained that: “Precarious is what is obtained by prayer. Uncertain, exposed to hazards, insecure. From the Latin precarius, from precis, prayer”:

"These materials are lying down and I respond by standing them up. The gods created us and we have to respond to the gods. There will only be equality when there is reciprocity. The root of the word 'respond' is to offer again, to receive something and to offer it back. 'We are made of throwaways and we will be thrown away,' say the objects. Twice precarious, they come from prayer and predict their own destruction. Precarious in history, they will leave no trace. The history of art written in the North includes nothing of the South. Thus they speak in prayer, precariously."

Vicuña finds deep personal connections between Taoism and Andean culture but her art of exile and its spirituality also resonate strongly with aspects of Christian understanding and practice, for example, Peter Rollins’ interpretation of St Paul’s claim that Christians are the refuse of the world. Rollins suggests that “Christians are the de-worlded … the part of no part, the community of outsiders … learning from, leaning toward and reaching out to the people who live day to day as the trash of the world … [who] lay down the various political, religious and cultural narratives that protect us from looking at our own brokenness and allow it to be brought to light.”

Would that we genuinely lived in the way Rollins suggests! Vicuña’s art provides an object lesson in visualising such praxis.

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Rob Hallingan - Another Fine Mess.