Editors note: Not only is our readership rich in diversity, even our editors dont always agree. We print these two reviews with an invitation to our readers to join the conversation. How do you deal with the question of television and the larger question of popular culture in your lives? This is our first attempt at a readers roundtable.
Book Review of Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman Viking Penguin, 184 pages.
Unplugging the Brave New World
A few years back I was visiting one of my more radical friends, Jeannie, with a somewhat less radical friend, Jim, who was meeting her for the first time. I thus found myself in the rare role of the Voice of Moderation. Jeannie was going on in her (to me) delightfully fiery way about television: And can you imagine?! I have friends good, serious Christians who actually own a television?!! Jim, I knew, owned a television and even in his own estimation watched too much of it. He was squirming uncomfortably.
The Voice of Moderation spoke up: Now Jeannie, it cannot be said to be objectively sinful to own a television.
No, of course not, I wouldnt say that. No, no. Its not necessarily evil to own a television. But to plug it in!!! I mean if you need an extra end table or something...
Such an attitude among radical Christians is, of course, not a new one, though Im afraid it is a minority viewpoint. Another friend, jokingly (I hope) sketching out the scenario for a Catholic revolution, said First we bomb the abortion clinics, then the television stations. Or as John Senior once put it, somewhat more responsibly, you cannot be serious about the restoration of the Church and the nation if you havent the common sense to smash the television set.
But even most religious critics of television tend to focus solely on the content of television programming and rarely turn to an examination of the medium itself. The assumption of most of televisions critics seems to be that all would be well if we could just clean up the TV (and this seems to refer mostly to sexual and anti-religious content; one study showed Pat Robertsons CBN to carry a heavier percentage of violent-acts-per-hour than the major networks). There is little reflection on the effect of the medium on both human consciousness and on the content being presented. Here again one of our cultures fatal errors surfaces: the belief that technology is neutral.
Neil Postman has no such illusions and his book Amusing Ourselves to Death is one of the most cogent (and funny) indictments of the television age since the writings of Marshall McLuhan. His approach, though there is a chapter on TV and religion, is epistemological rather than religious, but religious critics would do well to read and heed his warnings. If he is right and I think he is one might end up worse off watching six hours a day of religious programming than six hours of loony sitcoms. Television, Dr. Postman argues, by its very nature trivializes serious content and destroys the capacity for sustained thought in its viewers. Entertainment, he says, is the supraideology of all discourse on television. No matter what is depicted or from what point of view, the overarching presumption is that it is there for our amusement and pleasure. That is the bias of the medium and any attempt to use it as a carrier of coherent linear thought is to struggle against that bias. It is, he says, like featuring a ventriloquist on the radio.
This bias is contrasted with the bias of the print medium and the typographic mind formed by the book. Print, it is lucidly argued, encourages rationality. To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning. Video, however, is aimed at emotional gratification and entertainment and must, to sustain interest, by its nature rely on an ever-shifting onslaught of images and sound. (It is pointed out here that the average length of an image on network television is 3.5 seconds.) The passivity and dullness of mind this induces in the populace ought to alarm us. It is one of the great revolutionary changes in history, yet, for the most part, we dont think it strange, for television has become the lens through which all is viewed.
Dr. Postman does think it strange and his chapters on this revolutions effect on religion, politics and education are brilliant analyses of the erosion of serious discourse in the video age. 1984 came and went, he says, and the West congratulated itself that Orwells prophecy had failed. But there was another dark vision from the past alongside Orwells: Aldous Huxleys Brave New World, where people are not controlled by pain but by pleasure, where it is not what we hate but what we love that destroys us. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours... When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby talk, when, in short, people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk: culture death is a clear possibility. Some of us would take it further: death has already occurred and we are now in the first post-cultural era in history, in the sense that what is now called culture is in fact divorced from cult and agricultureworship and livelihood the foundations for natural human society. And while Neil Postman dismisses as preposterous and Luddite the position outlined in Jerry Manders Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, because large numbers of Americans are unlikely to simply stop watching television, I think his own more modest proposals of education and damage control just as unlikely to be implemented and not as curative. And to those of us intent on building alternative Christian culture the question of what large numbers of people are likely to do or not do is secondary. If the focus is on building cells of right living families and communities living at least an approximation of sanity and sanctity then the question is: how can we best build the kingdom of God? If we can only transform the world by being transformed ourselves then what is the next good step to take, here and now? In the context it seems clear to me what that is: unplug the damned thing. It may make a good end table.
DN
Abstinence or Moderation?
One thing at any rate seems clear: that you might as well invite Satan himself into your home as watch most of what is broadcast on television. I agree with most of Dr. Postman's book. And I agree with most of what Daniel says. Yet I own a television, and watch it now and then (its too small, ugly, and expensive for an end table). My difference with Daniel here arises not from a disagreement in principle but from a different sense of strategy for coping with this nutty society.
Before I get into that, though, I have a few remarks to add about the Postman book. His condemnation is really not extensive enough to suit me: his blasts are directed at televisions destructive effect on rational discourseand I dont know how anyone could argue with himbut he considers the entertainment which has no pretensions of being anything weightier to be harmless. I disagree. There is such a thing as harmless entertainment, but you wont find much of it on the schedule of the average television station. Most television entertainments and their accompanying commercials are nothing less than a continuous propaganda for evil of both subtle and blatant varieties. And I dont mean only their obvious offences against Catholic sexual morality. Virtuous pagans of my acquaintance acknowledge them as evil for their sheer mendacity if for nothing else.
Another gap in Postmans book is the absence of the question why do people watch it so much? Postman takes it for granted that most people do and will watch it continually. Apparently he is right, but we ought to investigate the phenomenon. Television was less than a decade old before even the poorest household had one. What is the craving which that flickering tube seems to feed? (This is where Jerry Manders Luddite Four Arguments has something very interesting to say about the physical and psychological effects of watching a television screen, independent of the image it displays. Anyone interested in this should read him as well as Postman.)
One of the things we want to know here is whether the medium of television is inherently harmful, or so likely to prove harmful as to make its presence in a Christian household imprudent at best. When we speak of the medium, do we mean the raw technologyimages transmitted electronically and reproduced by an electron gun scanning a phosphor screen at sixty cycles per secondor do we mean the technology as it is used by the television industry as we know it? Postman distinguishes the two in this way: A technology...is merely a machine. A medium is the social and intellectual environment a machine creates. I almost agree with this, but balk at the implied inevitability of machine creates. Though a machine is obviously capable of some things and not others, it cannot create a social and intellectual environment, which can only arise through the efforts and choices of people. Television as we know it is what it is because of two things: the tendencies inherent in the technology itself (which explain much but not everything), and the economic and cultural environment in which the television industry developed and which it serves and exploits. I have no use (to put it mildly) for the television industry, but am not so hostile to the technology that I am unwilling to allow it in my home and to use it carefully for certain small pleasures.
Such as? Well, I like to watch an occasional movie, but its nearly impossible for my wife and me to go out to a theatre (four times in twelve years). So our TV is a substitute theatre. We have a VCR, and sometimes (once or twice a month) we rent a movie. For obvious reasons, we are wary of contemporary films, and generally were too tired and nerve-wracked to take on Serious Cinema. So our choices run to black-and-white mystery and sci-fi classics such as The Big Sleep, which is our idea of an adult movie, to be watched after the children are asleep. Sometimes we tape commercial-free PBS shows such as Mystery and Dr. Who. I make no claims for the enduring value of most of what we watch, but these interludes are refreshing and, I think, harmless.
It could almost be said that we dont watch television at all, since we watch almost none of the stuff that comes to mind when one hears the word. The popular shows and personalities of commercial television are to me no more than names on the covers of the crazy magazines whose headlines I read while waiting in the checkout line at the supermarket. We have never seen The Simpsons or Roseanne. In short, the television industry could not exist if most people treated it as we do. And it is the industry which is the real enemy. There is nothing in the nature of the technology which requires, for instance, that television broadcasts be composed entirely of rapidly shifting images, any more than there is in film (which of course is where the technique was introduced).
Thoseand they seem to be manywho find it impossible to own a television without watching too much or watching the wrong things should certainly not have one. But it is possible to exercise control over what one watches, though I dont mean to pretend that I have no difficulties with it. A few years ago we subscribed to cable so we could get Mother Angelicas broadcasts of the Popes visit. What happened was that I wanted to watch MTV and sleazy movies and the kids wanted to watch Nickelodeon (commercial-ridden and infected with a snotty anti-parent attitude). We hardly ever watched EWTN at all and didnt much like it when we did (in my opinion religious television simply does not work and may, as Postman suggests, be harmful). So we dropped it.
I havent yet addressed what is for parents the most important issue: television and children. There is much to be said in favor of a total prohibition. We decided against it on the grounds that a small and controlled exposure might, in the long run, result in their being more disciplined in their approach to it once theyre out of the nest. We allow them to watch a certain number of non-commercial showsthe PBS science show 3-2-1 Contact, for instance. Weve gone back and forth about such things as Saturday morning cartoonsat times weve allowed them to watch one or two of those, but recently (and partly as a result of my reflections while writing this article) we and the children decided to stop that. I think the children agreed because they had gotten bored with them. They get to see movies from time to time; not long ago we had the enjoyment of introducing them to the Marx Brothers. Ordinary commercial TV is not an option for any of us.
Theres a very common syndrome in the South in which the children of teetotaling Protestants set out deliberately to become drunkards; it is their voices that you hear bragging of their drunkeness in country songs. We hope our policy of limited TV watching will help our children avoid a similar attraction to TV. We have known people who were never allowed to watch it as children who vegged out for a while after leaving home and are now more or less typical viewers. It is this sort of reaction that we hope to avoid with our policy of limited and very selective viewing.
For most of us it is impossible to totally isolate our children from television. To do so would require cutting them off from all or most of their relatives and friends. We can dream of and work toward a Christian culture, or at least a thriving sub-culture of enough size to provide those relationships outside the immediate family which everyone needs. But in its absence children are going to be exposed to a certain amount of television, just as the children who are fed wisely at home are going to be exposed to junk food, or the children of teetotalers to alcohol. We judge it more prudent to teach a moderate use of these things. It will be argued that our near-total prohibition of commercial television may provoke the reaction were trying to avoid. Thats a reasonable objection, but this is a line we arent prepared to cross. We certainly make no claim that our approach is guaranteed to work; as with most decisions about raising children, one uses ones best judgement and prays. MH
