The passionate advocacy that had accompanied the Reformation

From The Invention of News: How The World Came to Know About Itself by Andrew Pettegree.

The real transformation of the news market would come from the development of a news market in print. This would occur only haltingly after the first invention of printing in the mid-fifteenth century. For half a century or more thereafter printers would follow a very conservative strategy, concentrating on publishing editions of the books most familiar from the medieval manuscript tradition. But in the sixteenth century they would also begin to open up new markets – and one of these was a market for news. News fitted ideally into the expanding market for cheap print, and it swiftly became an important commodity. This burgeoning wave of news reporting was of an entirely different order. It took its tone from the new genre of pamphlets that had preceded it: the passionate advocacy that had accompanied the Reformation. So this sort of news reporting was very different from the discreet, dispassionate services of the manuscript news men. News pamphlets were often committed and engaged, intended to persuade as well as inform. News also became, for the first time, part of the entertainment industry. What could be more entertaining than the tale of some catastrophe in a far-off place, or a grisly murder?

The transition from news purely as a source of data to news as a source of emotional entertainment. Elsewhere in these notes, I have quoted some writer, perhaps Dickens, relating his observation of the neighborhood execution of common criminal somewhere in Italy. Yes, here it is: A rumour got about, among the crowd, that the criminal would not confess. This was in 1846 -

Nobody cared, or was at all affected. There was no manifestation of disgust, or pity, or indignation, or sorrow. My empty pockets were tried, several times, in the crowd immediately below the scaffold, as the corpse was being put into its coffin. It was an ugly, filthy, careless, sickening spectacle; meaning nothing but butchery beyond the momentary interest, to the one wretched actor.

A tumble of thoughts. In various places, there has been speculation that perhaps social activities of the 15th-19th centuries might have had some real evolutionary pressure on the biology of the human species. Specific instances I recall include the prevalence of mortal dueling in Europe and the mass utilization of capital punishment for crimes that to our eyes seem trivial. Dickens catches that sense of trivial execution. Another young man dead and it is no more than a neighborhood entertainment that will be repeated many times in the year. I can't readily find the data but I seem to recall the annual toll from dueling in Paris alone being in the hundreds.

Small populations, high death rates for activities that were contrasocial - might they actually have winnowed the gene pool and helped shape a population more biologically inclined towards prosocial behaviors, tolerance, cooperation, etc.?

Theoretically possible I suppose. Certainly it seems an element behind Gregory Clark's work.

Here is another stray element. Saved by the book. Another form of evolutionary pressure, this one towards literacy.

From Ben Jonson, Britain’s first literary celebrity? by Brian Vickers. In much of Europe through at least the 18th century, if you could read, you were excused from capital punishment.

In his turbulent career Jonson had many scrapes with the law, including prosecution for manslaughter, having killed the actor Gabriel Spencer in a duel in Hoxton Fields. Jonson escaped the gallows thanks to the old law excusing those who could read the so-called “neck-verse” from Psalm 51 as a test of literacy. In several plays, Jonson echoes his own experience with allusions to characters being “saved by the book”.

Trying to organize the tumble of thoughts. In the period of 15-19th century Europe, there is a mass spread of literacy. There are practices (dueling and profligate capital punishment) which put pressure on winnowing out genes towards violence and genes that might inhibit self-control. Possibly also genes that obscure the capacity to discern the cognitive state of others.

Into this mix we throw the emergence of news as a mechanism for inflaming emotional responses to news, thus likely increasing the rate of casual capital punishment and possibly improving the targeting of capital punishment to those low in self-control. Newspapers were concentrated in cities where there was an especial need for greater societal cooperation.

I guess the question becomes - Did the desire for emotional/advocacy news entertainment inadvertently lead to a culling of the population in such a fashion as to increase prosociality and literacy?

Hugely speculative. But entertainingly so.