With his double starred First from Cambridge, Masters from the University of London and the beginnings of a PhD at Harvard, the young Alain de Botton looked set to tuck himself away in a cosy cloister. However, he turned his back on academia and began to write philosophy books that would appeal to the general public.

But why? It’s not because he’s afraid of a challenge: “It’s too easy to write books for a specialised public. If you’ve read a lot in your field, talking to other experts comes easily. You can speak in code.

“But at the end of the day, I believe in the therapeutic potential of culture, and once you do that, you can have no excuse for talking only to a few. If it’s therapeutic, the responsibility is to take the message as far out as possible. Ultimately, I’m interested in social change through culture - and that requires the techniques of popularisation”.

Having tackled love, sex, Proust, work, atheism, religion, art, travel and status, Alain’s latest target is news. His latest book, The News: A User’s Guide, comes complete with a set of proposals for “the ideal news organisation of the future.”
The news doesn’t immediately seem like an obvious next move for the man who tried the mammoth task of creating a religion for atheists, but de Botton is adamant that “there’s no more powerful force in modern society than the news. It shapes how we see the world, what we judge to be good and bad, important or silly, right or wrong.”

De Botton came up through several English boarding schools as a child and is sceptical about the British education system, the priorites of which he suggests lie in “the technical and economic sphere.” He describes it as “entirely uninterested in what I care about,” namely “emotional intelligence, taught through the medium of culture.”

He tells me: “It is deemed more important for us to know how to make sense of the plot of Othello than how to decode the front page of the New York Post. We are more likely to hear about the significance of Matisse’s use of colour than to be taken through the effects of the celebrity photo section of the Daily Mail.
“We are never systematically inducted into the extraordinary capacity of news outlets to influence our sense of reality and to mould the state of what we might as well – with no supernatural associations – call our souls.”

De Botton’s issues with journalism as it stands are three-fold. “Firstly, we’ve got a real problem popularising important news. Serious journalists often think that what is central to their jobs is to go out and find out ‘the truth’, then everything in society
will change.

“But in my view, in this distracted, sensation-hungry age, the real task is subtly but importantly different. A really important task for journalists is to learn how to make what’s important seem interesting – to a large audience.”

The second problem is perhaps more insidious: “It’s almost as if there were two ways to render a society supine, apolitical and resigned to the status quo: either you censor all news, or else you flood people with so much news, they can’t focus on anything. We’re in danger of this latter scenario.”

Thirdly, de Botton suggests that within journalism today there is an obsession with what he terms “looking out for crooks” when it should be focusing on “errors in more subtle, pervasive but invisible forms.”

De Botton is reluctant to blame a lack of interest in foreign news on the public themselves. He concedes that “traffic figures to websites with foreign news are very very low” but suggests that the answer might not be mere shallowness.

“What if the real reason viewers and readers don’t much care about what is happening in foreign lands is not that we are especially shallow or nasty, nor even that the events described are inherently boring, but instead simply that we just don’t know enough about most disaster zones to care about them?

“We all already understand our own country just from living there. We know what it’s like to take a train, attend a meeting, go to the shops, walk the children to school, flirt, laugh and get cross there – and this is why we immediately engage when we hear that someone has been kidnapped in Newcastle-upon-Tyne or that a bomb has exploded in Edgebaston.

“We need to learn something about street parties in Addis Ababa, love in Peru and in-laws in Mongolia to care a little more about the next devastating typhoon or
violent coup.”

Not content merely to write a book about the news, de Botton also set up the Philosophers’ Mail, a news website which combines Daily Mail-style stories with philosophical questions.

“The starting point at the Philosophers’ Mail was pure traffic: who gets the biggest traffic to a news website anywhere in the world? The Mail Online. So we decided to make this our target. We begin by being very sympathetic to what Mail readers like: beauty, glamour, murder, disaster, horror.

“But rather than ending it there, we try to move the reader on to deeper themes. We see the flotsam and jetsam of the day’s news as an opportunity to sneak some big ideas across. We’re very interested in sugaring, or at least flavouring, the pill.”
Sex is perhaps the oldest and most successful way of sugaring the pill. He says we should be “disturbed” by the fact that “the promise of erotic happiness,” even if far fetched, “makes a deep appeal to almost everyone.”

“The problem is not that sex is used to sell things. It’s that sex is used to sell the wrong things. So rather than try to ban sex from advertising, the alternative strategy is to use the power of sex to make genuinely important, but not very exciting, things attractive.”

De Botton praises George Clooney for “using his erotic allure to help people in one of the world’s most troubled regions. He has rightly grasped that human rights in western Sudan won’t naturally loom large in most people’s lives, no matter how grave the issue.

“Clooney, aware that inducing guilt is no way to get good things to happen, has wisely lent his sex appeal to sell humanit-arian activism.”

However, as welcome as Clooney’s humanitarian efforts – and services to sexiness – are, de Botton says they are “very modest in scale by comparison with the endeavours of history’s biggest exponent of this strategy”: the Catholic church in the 1600s.

“Rather than just shouting louder or getting angry, they got more generous – and a lot smarter. They asked creative talents like Giovanni Bellini to include some winsome people in their recruiting posters, also known as altarpieces. Sex was invited to do the selling. The allure of sex was being intelligently and purposefully used, so as to make things that were serious, and often difficult, more attractive – and hence more available.”