Television, fundamentalists, and cocaine – thoughts of an educator
For the last 30 years, television has been basically
something I sample only from morbid curiosity while in motels on business
trips. I have to agree with Islamic
fundamentalists, among others – this is a degenerate society. The degeneracy is not a simple matter of
failure to adhere to the moral code of any chosen belief system. It is a matter of wholesale intellectual
degeneracy. Television was touted at its
inception as a great tool for education and information. Not long thereafter, in 1961, Newton Minnow,
chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, cited TV as a “vast
wasteland.” Such a loss! Einstein, referring to a broader range of
phenomena of our technological society, opined that we have today the
perfection of means and the confusion of ends.
As a scientist who teaches students who watch TV much more than they
study, I see the consequences. I am
horrified to realize, time and again, that anyone who can accept television as
it is cannot possibly have a grasp of reality, an ability to think criticially,
a way to escape addictive stimulation of some tiny
part of the brain. I sometimes daydream
that a TV executive sits next to me on a flight and I can ask him how it feels
to be the largest-scale drug dealer. True
addiction to cocaine appears to run at about 10%. From what I see in my fellow citizens, TV
addiction appears to be well past 90%, in the sense that people cannot function
without it. It is also more destructive
to personal life than is cocaine, in ways well documented by persons more
capable than I in that regard. The
acceptance of television goes a long way toward explaining our equally
appalling (subliminal) choice of leadership, our generic unconcern for the
global consequences of our consumerism, and other ills; our problems tie
together well in a package that’s tight but not tidy, much as cesspool walls
confine equally unattractive, if more functional, elements.
We’re in the end-game of American hegemony as other nations rise, and
television functions as the analog of bread and circuses in the late
Defenders of TV, for its remnants of education, cite shows on nature or history and the like, simply for addressing a real-world topic. I find this unconvincing. A nature show, for example, strikes me as interminably slow, having a “low bit rate,” and little development of context. The latter is necessary in television, because the viewer must be able to join in at any random segment without needing to know anything that transpired even 30 seconds earlier. This is not the way to develop an intellectual construct. Reading a book, and, more so, writing one’s thoughts, is many times more effective for the purpose. The argument is also made that images are compelling syntheses of ideas, the old “thousand words” cliché. I give this partial credit, seeing images’ efficacy in scientific communication. However, images are, at best, necessary but not sufficient. No one strings images together as rational thought. Richard Mitchell, the Underground Grammarian, put it succinctly as “Language is medium in which we are conscious.” Discursive prose in a sine qua non of thought. As Mitchell says in another passage, and as we all experience it, “The mind is a rudderless wanderer blown here or there by any puff of breeze.” The discipline of active verbal expression is a necessity. In World War II, Churchill could have had images of Nazi aggression circulated, but the result could readily have been a chaos of fear and anger without direction. He used words, “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, ..,” and he prevailed. I await the Churchill of television.