BreadandCircuses

BREAD & CIRCUSES

Advice on Television

by Roald Dahl, 1964

The most important thing we've learned

So far as children are concerned,

Is never, NEVER, NEVER, let

Them near your television set ---

Or better still, just don't install

The idiotic thing at all.

In almost every house we've been,

We've watched them gaping at the screen.

They loll and slop and lounge about,

And stare until their eyes pop out.

(Last week in someone's place we saw

A dozen eyeballs on the floor.)

They sit and stare and stare and sit

Until they're hypnotized by it,

Until they're absolutely drunk

With all that shocking ghastly junk.

Oh yes, we know it keeps them still,

They don't climb out the window sill,

They never fight or kick or punch,

They leave you free to cook the lunch

And wash the dishes in the sink ---

But did you ever stop to think,

To wonder just exactly what

This does to your beloved tot?

IT ROTS THE SENSES IN THE HEAD!

IT KILLS IMAGINATION DEAD!

IT CLOGS AND CLUTTERS UP THE MIND!

IT MAKES A CHILD SO DULL AND BLIND

HE CAN NO LONGER UNDERSTAND

A FANTASY, A FAIRYLAND!

HIS BRAIN BECOMES AS SOFT AS CHEESE

HIS POWERS OF THINKING RUST AND FREEZE!

HE CANNOT THINK --- HE ONLY SEES!

"All right!" you'll cry. "All right!" you'll say,

"But if we take the set away,

What shall we do to entertain

Our darling children! Please explain!"

We'll answer this by asking you,

"What used the darling ones to do?

How used they keep themselves contented

Before this monster was invented?"

Have you forgotten? Don't you know?

We'll say it very loud and slow:

THEY....USED....TO....READ! They'd READ and READ,

AND READ and READ, and then proceed

To READ, some more. Great Scott! Gadzooks!

One half their lives was reading books!

The nursery shelves held books galore!

Books cluttered up the nursery floor!

And in the bedroom, by the bed,

More books were waiting to be read!

Such wondrous, fine fantastic tales

Of dragons, gypsies, queens, and whales

And treasure isles, and distant shores

Where smugglers rowed with muffled oars,

And pirates wearing purple pants,

And sailing ships and elephants,

And cannibals crouching round the pot,

Stirring away at something hot....

Oh, books, what books they used to know,

Those children living long ago!

So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,

Go throw your T.V. set away,

And in its place you can install

A lovely bookshelf on the wall.

Then fill the selves with lots of books,

Ignoring all the dirty looks,

The screams and yells, the bites and kicks,

And children hitting you with sticks ---

Fear not, because we promise you

That, in about a week or two

Of having nothing else to do,

They'll now begin to feel the need

Of having something good to read.

And once they start --- oh boy, oh boy!

You watch the slowly growing joy

That fills their hearts.

They'll grow so keen

They'll wonder what they'd ever seen

In that ridiculous machine,

That nauseating, foul, unclean,

Repulsive television screen!

And later, each and every kid

Will love you more for what you did.

**************************************

I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision --we shall discover either a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television -- of that I am quite sure. E. B. White

"Without our television, we would not be a family."

London schoolboy, age 10

"Think what we would have missed if we had.... never watched television, used a mobile phone or surfed the Net."

Queen Elizabeth II at a luncheon celebrating her 50th wedding anniversary to Prince Philip, on the virtues of modernity.

"Researchers have been trying for years to determine.... to what extent does (televised) violence, when depicted so vividly and on such a scale, induce violence in children? Although this question is not trivial, it diverts our attention from such important questions as, To what extent does the depiction of the world as it is undermine a child's belief in adult rationality, in the possibility of an ordered world, in a hopeful future? To what extent does it undermine the child's confidence in his or her future capacity to control the impulse to violence? Neil Postman

Our irrational contemporary Western impatience and our blind adulation of speed for speed's sake are wreaking havoc on the education of our children. We force them as if they were chicks in a pullet factory. We drive them into premature awareness of sex even before physical puberty has overtaken them. In fact we deprive our children of the human right of having a childhood. Arnold Toynbee

There is more to life than increasing its speed. Mahatma Gandhi

In living in the world by his own will and skill, the stupidest peasant or tribesman is more competent than the most intelligent worker or technician or intellectual in a society of specialists. Wendell Berry

Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good. Mahatma Gandhi

Choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil. Jerry Garcia

Many of the commonest assumptions, it seems to me, are arbitrary ones: that the new is better than the old, the untried superior to the tried, the complex more advantageous than the simple, the fast quicker than the slow, the big greater than the small, and the world as remodeled by Man the Architect functionally sounder and more agreeable than the world as it was before he changed everything to suit his vogues and conniptions. E. B. White

"It seems to me there are very dangerous ambiguities about our democracy in its actual present condition. I wonder to what extent our ideals are now a front for organized selfishness and systematic irresponsibility. If our affluent society ever breaks down and the façade is taken away, what are we going to have left?"

Thomas Merton

W. H. Auden's great poem "September 1, 1939" has these lines: "Faces along the bar / cling to their average day: / the lights must never go out, / the music must always play." I was very moved by that when I read it in college, and I've thought in recent years how, with television, we've perfected the state of mind Auden describes: "the lights must never go out"! Now we can click the remote and numb ourselves perpetually....

A young writer I once interviewed said that he and his friends didn't get into drugs or alcohol while growing up. "Instead, we abused entertainment," he said. They rented lots of videos and played video games and kept the television on constantly. As a result, he had a hard time concentrating on anything for more than an hour. Dan Wakefield

"We gotta throw our televisions away. It's all trash.

It's like talking about how cocaine might have some vitamins."

David Mamet

"The venerable tractor, already transformed from a bucking, gasping, dirt-clogged endurance test into an air-conditioned entertainment center on wheels, is due for another update. On-board computers, informed by field-specific databases...."

"O Brave New Farm" Newsweek, November 24, 1997

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture.

Just get people to stop reading them." Ray Bradbury

In a consumer society, there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy. Ivan Illich

There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go. Tennessee Williams

"There are two ways of lying, as there are two ways of deceiving customers. If the scale registers 15 ounces, you can say: 'It is a pound.' Your lie will remain relative to an invariable measure of the true. If customers check it, they can see that they are being robbed, and you know by how much you are robbing them: a truth remains as a judge between you

But if the demon induces you to tamper with the scale itself, it is the criterion of the true which is denatured so that there is no longer any possible control.

And little by little you will forget that you are cheating."

Denis de Rougement

"If on television, credibility replaces reality as the decisive test of truth-telling, political leaders need not trouble themselves very much with reality provided that their performances consistently generate a sense of verisimilitude. I suspect, for example, that the dishonor that now shrouds Richard Nixon results not from the fact that he lied, but that on television he looked like a liar. Which, if true, should bring no comfort to anyone, not even veteran Nixon-haters. For the alternative possibilities are that one may look like a liar but be telling the truth; or even worse, look like a truth-teller but in fact be lying."

Neil Postman on the 1981 firing of news anchor Christine Craft after "research indicated that her appearance 'hampered viewer acceptance.'" Excerpted from "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in an Age of Show Business" (Viking Penguin Inc., 1985)

"Anything that can't be disproven is true."

Dick Morris

Campaign strategist and political advisor to Bill Clinton

"If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not meant, then what ought to be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and arts will deteriorate; if morals and arts deteriorate, justice will go astray; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in hopeless confusion.

Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said.

This matters above everything."

Confucius

I tell you naught for your comfort,

Yea, naught for your desire,

Save the sky grows darker yet

And the sea rises higher.

G.K. Chesterton

Ballad of the White Horse, 1911

COMPULSORY GOVERNMENT SCHOOLING AS CUSTODIAL CARE

or

THE STATE IN LOCO PARENTIS

For 31 years my sister Janet has taught at Rochester, New York's least favored ghetto school. She has enjoyed extraordinary success, initially as a third grade teacher, and later as founding-teacher of a High Intensity Language Program serving immigrant Mexicans, Turks, Puerto Ricans, Cambodians and several East European ethnicities.

Janet has long observed that public instruction is essentially custodial care. However, since she also believes that Lincoln School #22 is the only dependable glimpse of "light" that many of her young charges will ever experience, she resists any polito-economic change that might affect the status quo. For example, Janet believes "vouchers" will scatter resources necessary for public instruction.

My own experience as a public school teacher coincides with Janet's. Despite middle-class wishful thinking to the contrary, public instruction distills to custodial care --- a dependable mechanism whereby both parents (or single parents) may join the workforce while surrogates raise their children.

Unlike Janet, however, I believe that the supposedly "benevolent" function of school-based custodial care is a sop which The State supplies to kind-hearted educators to insure Compulsory Government Schooling's more fundamental purpose, the perpetuation of The Official Story and the maintenance of traditional hierarchies. (Footnote 1)

While many public school graduates - even those in the nation's worst ghettoes - become self-sustaining workplace participants, Janet has the uncanny ability to predict (by grade 3) which of her students will "make the news" at one end - or another - of a smoking gun. (Footnote 2)

We have created a system of public instruction that boasts numerous micro-advances in an enveloping context of macro-disaster. This curious combination of heart-rending success and catastrophic failure mirrors the larger life of the body politic. (Footnote 3)

Recently, the New York Times (11/3/97) published a tabloid insert dedicated to education. In a review of instructional milestones over the last 100 years, it was mentioned that resistance to "school choice" arises from the fear that if public schools ever escape public orbit "they will not be accountable to 'The Public'."

Whether this alleged lack of accountability proves true in the event substantive "school choice" is ever tested, public schools are not now -- and probably never have been -- accountable to "The Public." The widespread assumption that public schools are democratic - in either form or function - is an accurate measure of our blinkered conditioning. (Footnote 4)

The rank failure of Public Schools to imbue the populace with "deep literacy" - indeed the failure of public schools to halt the erosion of "deep literacy" ever since compulsory government schooling began in the mid 1800s - contributes significantly to the chest-thumping jingoism that typifies American politics.

Lacking an astute citizenry that "can re-write books while reading them" (to borrow Paolo Freire's definition of literacy) our anemic political instincts are satisfied by the seductive ritual of biennial ballot-casting, an exercise which "involves" -- at most -- half the voting age population. Despite the populist glaze attached to putative suffrage, the chief function of these ballot box rituals is to validate the manipulative intent of plutocracy.

Since the universal quest for "GOOD JOBS" (or, better yet, white collar "CAREERS") has eclipsed all other public and private concerns, America's increasingly obsequious Public genuflects at any corporate altar promising the creation of "JOBS."

Compulsory government schooling has lulled The Public into such unwakeable stupor that few Americans perceive - and even fewer question - the relationship between the automazation of work and the downsizing of the workforce except, of course, in the burgeoning service sector with its insatiable appetite for menials. Only "oddballs" and Amish continue to create their own work in the world. (Footnote 5)

THE CONFLICT BETWEEN SYMBOLS AND IMAGES

Battle lines are clearly drawn. We will either focus on the printed word and spoken discourse - means of communication which require thoughtful symbol management - or, we will surrender to media-crafted imagery that elicits visceral responses antithetical to deliberation.

I have learned the futility of trying to persuade "true believers" on the "left" or "right" -- the two wings of The Capitalist Party -- that public instruction contributes to surging rates of social and personal pathology even though the United States imprisons a greater percentage of its citizens than any society in history, including the Soviet Union at the height of the Gulag. Increasingly, first-time felons perceive prison as a sort of "graduate school" sequel to K-12 Public Instruction. In 1990, while teaching at C.W. Stanford Middle School in Hillsborough, North Carolina, a forlorn youngster confessed his growing fear that "there won't be room in prison for me when I get out of school."

Although bi-partisan support for public instruction bolsters the status quo, I have discovered one deviant suggestion that appeals to many adults.... and would appeal to more if it were enacted.

It is this.

Let every future school bond debate be linked to the creation of at least one K-12 educational sequence (perhaps charter schools or choice schools could embody this alternative) in which participating students - and their families - agree to banish television from their lives. No cables, no aerials, no satellite dishes, no TV sets, no excursions to "little Johnny's for Saturday morning cartoons."

Whenever I make this proposal, the response is twofold. Initially, I hear, "It'll never work." Then the same naysayers ask: "Where can I enroll my kids?"

"DON'T TELL ME TV HARMS CHILDREN.

WITHOUT TELEVISION I COULDN'T HAVE RAISED MY KIDS."

Over the last 25 years, several indigenous communities in Canada's far north suddenly "got" television. In all such communities the result was the same. Measures of malaise, personal dissatisfaction and social alienation soared. Ominously, these indicators rose identically in an indigenous community where the only available television channel was the Canadian equivalent of PBS.

The evidence is overwhelming: regardless television's "content," its "context" re-weaves the fabric of human consciousness in ways that erode social and personal integrity.

Many will protest these conclusions, declaring "It didn't happen to me!"

My response is twofold.

I know several families which prohibited television during child-rearing years. Public school teachers who taught these "tubeless kids" never failed to ask parents if their home was television-free since 1.) "your children are fully engaged in learning activities" and 2.) "your children enjoy conversation." (Footnote 6)

Clearly, a few anecdotal references do not comprise a statistically valid sample.

Nor does consistent engagement in classroom activity - or unfailing willingness to converse with adults - prove that these characteristics (even if causally linked) are superior to the television-conditioned traits that have replaced them.

However, there may be something to gain, and surely nothing to lose, by conducting a nationwide experiment to determine the psycho-social profile - the character and capability - of students who graduate a K-12 curriculum in which television is absent from youngsters' homes. (Footnote 7)

My personal interest in foregoing television was piqued by physician Andrew Weil's "Spontaneous Healing."

Here's what happened...

In the late '80s, I relocated from Managua, Nicaragua to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. When we made the move, my wife and I did not own a television. Years later a friend gave us an unwanted unit. We attached the set to an aerial, and soon I was feeding a "news" habit with regular doses of MacNeil/Lehrer, Peter Jennings and "television magazines" like "Frontline", "20/20", "48 Hours" and "60 Minutes".

Having been a student at the University of Toronto during Marshall McLuhan's heyday, I knew how he analysed electronic culture through careful attention to commercial television. Invoking McLuhan's name, I justified my TV habit by claiming to "take the pulse of the nation", by scrutinizing the phosphorescent glow for intimations of socio-political change.

Before long my wife noticed that television was hampering our relationship.

You're probably familiar with the routine: "Shhh! I'm trying to watch this."

About a year ago I came upon Weil's recommendation that people undertake television "fasts" to purge the system and "cleanse the palate." In Weil's estimation, "The News" is a mental contaminant, which, like any uncontrolled pollutant, accumulates in the environment until a critical threshold is passed, at which point breakdown occurs.

Raised a pre-Vatican II Catholic, I knew that most religious traditions viewed "fasting" as a way to cultivate personal discipline, to assert mind over matter, and, supposedly, to expunge certain intractable "demons."

Hmmm.....

PULLING THE PLUG

Whether or not television was responsible for eroding my spousal relationship, Denise's stridulous resistance to the tube was clearly undercutting the quality of my life.

In the end, I concluded that no harm could come from detaching the aerial.

Immediately I noticed curious differences. For example, when I visited the bathroom, I found myself under no compulsion to hurry back to "the program-in-progress." As a consequence, I grew suddenly conscious of after-flush hand-washing --- the appearance of my hands, the warmth of the water, the texture of the soap.

Furthermore, I was peculiarly conscious of how I had unwittingly "erased" many of life's fine details from awareness, pressured by my "programmatic" urge to get back to the tube. Real elements of my life had been replaced by carefully controlled "programs" produced by strangers bent on commercial profitability.

Within days the quality of my spousal relationship was palpably improved. Suddenly, I was reading and writing more; I penned poetry for the first time in years; I began to write song lyrics. I joyfully joined my four year old daughter for bed-time story-telling.

I soon realized that the voyeuristic quality of television is the cornerstone of the epithet: "Get a life!"

We cannot --- like "Being There's" Chauncey Gardner --- "like to watch" other people "living" (or, pretending to live,) and, simultaneously, live our own unique lives. There is simply not enough time to do both. We can either be voyeurs who watch surrogates "live" life for us, or, we can seize the day and, perhaps, become who we are.

Television is the great "time bandit," the ultimate pre-occupation that saps communal vitality and reduces populist politics to the biennial ritual of ballot-box idolatry.

Many readers will allege that I am over-reacting, that the pleasurable content of television 1.) distracts the young, 2.) provides companionship for the old, and 3.) keeps the economically active well-informed.

I argue that most people are under-reacting, failing to ask several essential questions.

1.) What is the relative importance of the informational and recreational content of television compared to the contextual re-weaving of one's life and outlook?

2.) Are we as well-informed - and entertained - as we think? (Footnote 8)

3.) What does it mean that the gap between information and entertainment is narrowing?

4.) Does the nature of television impart a deluded sense that our needs have been met, when in fact we are wasting away like couch-bound opium addicts dreaming of consumer splendor in the midst of communal squalor?

To argue on behalf of television's harmlessness recalls the tobacco industry's decades-long assertion that cigarette smoking was harmless since many 3 pack-a-day smokers live to ripe old age with no visible sign of tobacco-induced pathology.

After 50 years of such brazen deceit, we now know that many people are naturally immune to the same health threats that kill "John Doe". For example, in parts of Kenya where HIV infection rates approach 20 per cent, epidemiologists "enjoy" a large enough statistical sample to prove that one per cent of those infected never manifest any sign of disease.

It is very difficult - if not impossible - to determine how many lives have been sacrificed on the altar of tele-voyeurism, or, at minimum, have been truncated by television's Procrustean bed.

Whatever the statistics, a K-12 educational system comprised of television-free students would be a simple, cost-effective way to run an invaluable psycho-social experiment.

But beware.

"The powers that be" --- the same plutocratic elements whose survival necessitates a populace dulled by a steady diet of bread and circuses --- will fight "tube-less schools" with the ferocity of mothers protecting their young. Furthermore, tube-less schools will be vilified as "un-democratic," since, allegedly, they create undue burden by forcing people to relinquish one of life's "essential" pleasures.

Do not be mislead. Tube-less schools will prove so successful at forming artistic, intellectual, social, political and economic leaders that many parents - initially threatened by the elimination of TV - will be unable to resist the demonstrated capability of schools that actually banish "The Monitor."

My father --- a man equally skeptical of tele-vassalage and cyber-serfdom --- is among the legions who believe that the restructuring of televised "content" is sufficient to redeem the whole medium.

Dad also wonders why - despite long exposure - so many people seem unaffected by television?

Without probing my wife's observation that "Everyone is affected by it!", I suggest that "deep literacy" is - to some extent - prophylactic against the psycho-social ravages of TV. (Footnote 9) The ability "to read deeply" enables us to debunk the emotional allure of sensationalism, simultaneously providing entry to symbolic - and even spiritual - of profoundly transcendental significance. At minimum, the elimination of sensationalism grounds us in our own lives -- "brings us to our senses" -- and invites us to make non-programmed choices concerning the mindful cultivation of our own unique "gardens."

In the absence of "deep reading", television-mediated culture is suffused with image and slogan promoting visceral reaction as the sole criterion of decision-making.

Having deified the elemental -- even atavistic -- primacy of pictorial imagery ("Duh... Do I have to draw you a picture?"), the presumption arises that we no longer need rational thought, orderly debate and cerebral activity to test reality. According to the new premises of perception, if we've seen the "picture," then the truth is self-evident.

Mind you: I'm not arguing that research, rational thought and deliberate debate are the only means of getting at "the truth", but that we seldom access the fullness of Truth if we fail to implement these three tools. (Footnote 10)

Circumscribed by visceral imagery, we have sacrificed depth for breadth and in the process grow unaware of our loss.

To a significant extent, all pursuit has become trivial.

CAN TELEVISION AND DEMOCRACY CO-EXIST?

At stake is the survival of democracy, and possibly, the survival of the biosphere. Television culture - in conjunction with compulsory government schooling - are incapable of developing a citizenry that can sustain meaningful democracy.

Despite television's universal "accessibility", the medium is, by nature, not democratic, but elitist. Television --- at least the sort of snappily edited programming that seduces viewers into neuro-dependent "eye-lock" --- cannot be "produced" without huge concentrations of capital. To suggest that the universal availability of television is "democratic" is to argue that Madonna and Dennis Rodman are "populists."

Underlying the discussion of democracy's survival is the real debate over democracy's survivability. Plato, for example, held democracy in low esteem, not because he was a reactionary aristocrat, but because he concluded that the political form was intrinsically unworkable.

Again, my father --- an avid Democrat who, at age 85, still pounds the pavement on behalf of ward politics --- has become persuaded that, generally speaking, people are not very bright, and that the future of democracy hinges on the hope that elected representatives will -- through the "sorting mechanism" of the electoral process -- prove to be more intelligent than the mass of humankind.

I have no way to prove my father right or wrong. Despite my innate inclination to champion the cause of enlightened populism, it may be that most wo/men are, in fact, genetically obligated to live lives of irremediable benightedness.

A point of interest.... Many readers will feel instant antipathy to my father's suggestion that humankind is incapable of direct self-government. Whether or not Dad's appraisal is accurate, reflexive antipathy to his suggestion goes to the heart of our collective quandary. Are we able to think without categorical constraints, or, has The State utilized compulsory government schooling -- and other mass media -- to erode the intellectual rigor that might otherwise challenge The Official Story?

Were we honest about our political pursuits, we would either acknowledge that elitism undergirds our pretentious "democracy", or, we would take pains to resume the Democratic experiment.

To utilize citizens stunted by Television (and Public Instruction) as a kangaroo court that rubber-stamps the foregone conclusions of plutocracy is even more cynical than Leona Helmsley's candid revelations concerning IRS tax structures.

We might consider a polity in which the abolition of TV is a voting requirement --- a sort of "polling tax" paid not by virtue of the resources one can acquire, but by self-disciplined abstention from certain forms of acquisition.

If adopting this requirement seems too Spartan, we could alternatively ask our elected officials (and their advisors) to forswear television during their term in office. (Footnote 11)

Unfortunately, we are so conditioned to view "The News" as indispensable political information that few people perceive how the "news" is saturated with dis-information, editorial bias, and spurious "objectivity" --- to mention three forms of monetarily-motivated mendacity made plausible by the iconographic manipulation of popular emotion.

Those well-coifed politicians who predicate every decision on the shifting winds of media-mediated political "discourse" insure that the body politic will eventually reap the whirlwind. Wherever imagery holds sway over print and leisurely discourse, there can be no final substance, only image-mongering.

Uncomely individuals like Abraham Lincoln -- or cripples like Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- would be unelectable in the current milieu of image dominance.

Do we believe Lincoln and Roosevelt incapable of rivaling today's politicians because television reportage, network pollsters and image-based campaigns are superior to print, discourse, debate and oratory? If history holds any validity, Lincoln and Roosevelt's print-dominated worlds were superior to the political posturing of TV-groomed politicians who re-position themselves according to the emotional caprice of their dumbed-down constituents.

The chief difference between Lincoln/Roosevelt and post-TV politicians is that televideots have elevated imagery above substance so that Reagan-the-Actor will always be The Peoples' choice, while Lincoln-the-Bumpkin-Rail-Splitter and Roosevelt-the-Wheel-Chair Bound-Invalid are political liabilities.

The ongoing displacement of print-based thoughtfulness by media-manipulated imagery is epitomized in Kathleen Wendland's autobiographical lament: "It was the free-wheeling seventies, and our family had chosen to live without a television. People began talking about our new "lifestyle." Funny --- I thought of it as a life, rich in friends and careers, brimming with garden-grown food and home-baked bread and the sounds of singing around the piano. The ultimate accusation came from our pastor's wife, who said, "How dare you try to protect your children from reality?" (This same "argument" is used to cast aspersions on parents who don't send their children to public school.)

A nearly universal assumption holds that television --- and its Public Instruction handmaid --- are worthy institutions whose guiding principles should normalize the young. I hold that these two institutions --- which, in the absence of hands-on parenting, comprise the primary acculturative mechanisms for the nation's young --- are destroying democracy and exacerbating psycho-social pathology. (Footnote 12)

VIRTUAL REALITY VERSUS GROUNDED REALITY

In the mid 1800s, Chief Joseph of the Nez Pierce admonished his people: "I tell you the white man is coming, and neither you nor I have seen anything like him."

Perhaps Caucasians are unique in this regard: we live lives in which the natural environment has been completely replaced by "built-up" environments that are technological extensions of the human mind. Except on those rare occasions when we deliberately undertake wilderness "adventures", we continually divorce ourselves from the natural order, and then have the hubris to declare that our technological interventions and electronic interpositions are Reality Itself. We live in ceaseless "psychological" projection.

Wendell Berry sounds this cautionary note: "The ancient Greeks and Hebrews warned us to distrust those who think they make all the patterns."

The "realties" we have created, which is to say the games we play --- televised entertainments, computer games, sporting events, the "grading and sorting" exercises of compulsory government schooling --- recall the quip that "a successful coach has to be bright enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it matters."

Whether in stadia, classrooms, or transfixed before television screens (or computer monitors), public discourse is now conducted by "expert" cheer-leaders who presuppose the transcendent importance of diversion, entertainment, voyeurism and surrogacy. In an ideological environment that assumes we are spontaneously evolving toward ever-greater "good", no one asks where this incessant quest for "bread and circuses" might actually lead. (Footnote 13)

This much is certain: technology is leading away from humankind's traditional understanding of earth-rooted "reality" and into realms ominously denominated "virtual reality."

VIRTUAL PRESENCE VERSUS REAL PRESENCE

When I was a boy, my first fit of pique over Roman Catholic doctrine arose from Church teaching that the Sacrament of Reconciliation - what used to be called "confession" - was not sacramentally "efficacious" unless penitent and confessor shared the same physical space.

Confession-by-telephone, for example, did not fulfill the conditions of sacramentality. Unless people met face to face -- unless people were physically present to one another -- sacraments were not sacraments. Only the "incarnation" of actual, shared presence was fully sacred.

I railed against the Church's absurd distinction.

Now, 40 years later, I wonder if the Catholic notion of physical sacramentality isn't the sine qua non of socio-political salvation.

Although the technological extensions of humankind have great utility and value, they are not endowed with what theologians call "Real Presence".

"Real Presence" means that the divine Spirit can only manifest in un-mediated ways. One cannot, for example, experience The Beatific Vision at the other end of a phone line, just as one cannot make love through Orwellian "feelies", or New Age cyber-suits.

In more mundane terms, it is impossible to experience the grandeur of Niagara Falls by chatting with a friend who holds his cell-phone over the churning brink to give us a taste of cascading majesty.

In pop terminology, we might say: "Be there, or be square."

The expansion of electronic communication erodes the actual quality - the real presence - of community life.

Although communication networks are always intriguing - and often informative - the contextual impact of these networks remains discarnately (and isolatedly) intellectual.

If people are comprehensively networked, they can retreat behind electronically moated walls of gated communities and never again experience their "neighbor" except to pay the delivery man or to wave from one air-conditioned BMW to another.

The blandishments of network-facilitated "retirement" are so seductive that they persuade "retirees" that networking is not only unimpeachably good, but that electronic networking is The Ultimate Good.

From this vantage, electronically-mediated network participation becomes the exemplar of "fully" human existence, accessible only to those who immerse themselves in elecro-info grids. In the holy name of technocratic modernity, the poor of the earth are again dehumanized.

In his foreword to, "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business," Neil Postman distinguishes between the divergent nightmares of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley: "What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the "feelies", the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in "Brave New World Revisited," the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In "1984," Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In "Brave New World," they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right." (Footnote 14)

Orwell was persuaded that Evil would have an evidently evil face, just as I was persuaded during my first marijuana adventure

--- no, Mother, I didn't inhale! --- that the astonishing changes in my field of consciousness were surely reflected in the physical features of my face. Yet the bathroom mirror at the end of the (very long) hall failed to confirm my self-evident presumption.

At the beginning of her career, political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, attended the Nuremberg trials to contemplate evil-writ-large on the visage of Hitlerian henchmen like Adolf Eichmann.

To her astonishment, she found that Nuremberg defendants were not incarnate devils, but mousy bureaucrats wearing three piece suits, eager to discharge their organizational duty within "the greater scheme of things".

Arendt coined the memorable phrase "the banality of evil" to epitomize her shocked realization that the world's real havoc-wreakers are 9 to 5 "family men."

Evil seldom appears monstrous. Furthermore, the benign face of most people who perpetrate (or perpetuate) systematic evil causes us to focus disproportionately on individual evil-doers like Geoffrey Daumer, Ted Bundy and Timothy McVeigh.

Even though these fellows "look like the boy next door," the horrifying activities of Daumer, Bundy and McVeigh validate our certainty that evil is evidently monstrous, and, in the process, we are distracted from the far more commonplace "banality of evil."

Conveniently, we are distracted from the nature of the evil we ourselves perpetrate (or enable) by dutifully "doing our jobs."

Wendell Berry observed that the structural ramifications of modern evil are so pervasive that "the only escape from victimization has been to 'succeed' --- that is, to 'make it' into the class of exploiters, and then to remain so specialized and so 'mobile' as to be unconscious of the effects of one's life or livelihood."

Typically, the root of evil is little more than an inversion - or blocking - of wholesome life processes. Usually, evil involves constipation of the creative process. Instead of surrendering to the demands of our "God-given" genius, we allow the "slow stain of the world" to subvert the power given us as birthright. (Footnote 15)

Often we choose the predictable "security" of heartless institutional superstructures. By occupying such organizational niches, we fail to express our personal "genius" and find ourselves shunted into lifelong stuntedness. Soon, our personal and political relations become saturated with the noxious vapors of truth denied. Thus dwindled and embittered, we turn to the ceaseless distraction of bread and circus. In the end, these amusements exact a toll: they "drive us to distraction" --- a phrase that formerly meant "losing one's mind."

"YOU CAN'T GET THERE FROM HERE."

In a culture dominated by distraction, we become so eager to see anything other than what is in front of us that, eventually, we no longer see what is in front of us.

We become figments of our own imagination.

This is the pathway by which our present reality is replaced by virtual reality.

Consensus reality disappears.

Virtual reality becomes whatever we would have it.

In the process, electronic networking depletes the interconnectedness of "present" community, while The Common Good is buffeted by "the invisible hand of the marketplace," a purportedly providential mechanism powered by the engine of radical individualism.

In the Brave New World, screw "women and children first."

It's "everyone for himself."

Under the crushing weight of modern techno-economies, palpable value devolves into post-modern meaninglessness. Meanwhile, atomized pseudo-citizens --- locked within electronically moated pleasure domes --- drool over the consolations of consumer culture. (Footnote 16)

In a world where famine is an urgent reality for millions of human beings, weight-losing mice make headlines in "developed" societies swollen by hollow options.

Nevertheless, America is haunted by a curious paradox.. Despite our obsession with pleasures of the flesh (the intractable downside of our puritanical inheritance) we have become a curiously disembodied people.

It's as if the premise of the fifties horror film, "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" has become the modus operandi of the northern latitudes.

With one exception.

Instead of "replacement pods" secreted under the beds of unwitting victims, Real Presence has been replaced by the virtual presence of "in-your-face" television screens and computer monitors. Admittedly, some people escape the clutches of electronic enchantment, but, in general, the ubiquity of these spirit-sapping devices is self-willed.

Even more ominous than the displacement of human life which "the cathode tube" signifies, is the missionary zeal with which devotees preach its innocuousness, indeed its needfulness.

If a mind-altering chemical were placed in the nation's water supply, the hue and cry would be universal.

Yet, mind-altering "communication radiations" saturate "the air" --- an element as basic as water (and even more difficult to replace with purified varieties) --- and we embrace the contaminant with the passion of young love.

When I was a boy, not having a TV meant you didn't have a TV.

Now, not having a TV means you're "a deserter" --- possibly a member of an "alien species". We are witnessing the rapid evolution of homo sapiens into homo phospho-vidicus, a putative step forward that replaces wisdom with information, reason with emotion.

"Video" has replaced our lived lives, converting us into spectators, reducing us to the complicit passivity of guilty bystanders.

FREEDOM OF CHOICE

In recent decades the Northern Latitudes have been preoccupied by Freedom of Choice. I suspect this extraordinary concern is - in large part - a reaction to the chthonic apprehension that we have already surrendered most Real Choices to "The System". Now, in a belated effort to shut the barn door, we scour the shattered landscape, seizing shards of fragmented freedom, desperate to persuade ourselves that simulacra and residue can be re-constituted as "the real thing."

The painful truth of Choice is that conscious choice is often painful. Despite the proliferating enticements of pop culture, Choice is not an invitation to an endless smorgasbord. It is an invitation to make lasting decisions that will influence the course of life forevermore.

However, driven by a commercially-informed Value System based on the supremacy of "bread and circuses", we behave like well-conditioned consumer units, construing Choice as a facilitation of whimsy, a means of avoiding commitment rather than making it, a way to re-spin the wheel of fortune whenever our "choices" prove less pleasurable than planned.

Intriguingly, recent enthusiasm over the many options made available by Free Choice has been tempered by assertions that Free Choice is, perhaps, impossible since human responses are so easily conditioned. From sex to chocolate, from ginkgo leaves to net-surfing, we grow swiftly addicted to a vast palette of pseudo-satisfactions.

I suspect addiction has become a universal problem in recent decades, in part because "moderns" trivialize the nature of Choice.

Substantive choice braves the awe-ful fact that choosing any One Thing necessitates the simultaneous rejection of all other options. To choose a spouse, for example, requires the renunciation of other amorous interests.

At least in theory, this simultaneous selection and rejection is both exhilarating and painful. Unfortunately, moderns are seldom conscious that the committed choice of one option necessitates the denial of others. In an attempt to circumvent the consequences of Choice, we have re-defined the rules of the game through avoidance mechanisms as diverse as serial monogamy and serial murder.

Charles Manson spoke on behalf of everyone deranged by infantile notions of choice when he said: "I want it all!" (By the way, you can now visit Charlie at his web-site...)

If people choose to watch television, simultaneously recognizing that they are choosing not to read great literature, or to bake bread, or to feed the hungry, or to read to their children, well... that's a Real Choice.

May they rest in peace.

MATERIAL MANDATE

or

HOW "STUFF" GETS THE UPPER HAND

The ability to make real choices is, in fact, eroded by the presence of temptation, (what Catholic Christianity calls "the near occasion of sin.")

The other night, I ate dinner at a friends' house while several guests watched the University of North Carolina football game in the next room. ("The TV Dinner".... an ominous phrase if ever there was one!)

When I finished my meal, I moved to "The Entertainment Center", situated myself in a commodious chair, and was immediately captivated by the broadcast, even though the game was an epic blowout.

Is television nature's way of abhorring a vacuum by sucking all available attention into a gaping void?

Many people deny that mere "things" can force their "will" on human beings. One manifestation of this assessment is that "Guns Don't Kill People; People Do."

However, the debate over Free Will cannot be conducted without examining the relationship between mind and matter.

In the presence of matter, mind is always conditioned by a phenomenon called "material mandate." "Material mandate" posits that if there is a handle on an unlatched door, people will tend to use that handle even though the door can be opened just as easily without it.

Similarly, if a gun is present when an individual loses temper, there is disproportionate likelihood that "material mandate" will take "control", and that the gun will be used as a means of venting rage. (Recently, I saw a macabre bumper sticker which read: "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will accidentally kill their children.")

In an electronic context, when people are exposed to a television broadcast, they usually succumb to the material mandate of watching "it" even though Free Will remains - at least in theory - operant.

Furthermore, the degree of material mandate associated with different "things" --- "televisions", "guns", "leaf blowers" --- is never the same.

With the arguable exceptions of repercussion-less orgies --- or gourmet meals wafting savory aromas in the direction of painfully empty stomachs --- there are few material mandates as powerful as television.

I remember when my infant daughter suddenly confronted her first televised image of human slaughter. Although I immediately interposed my body between the screen and two-year-old Maria, I had to jerk rapidly back and forth to prevent her craning head from peering around my body.

A NEW MORAL ORDER?

In the Middle Ages, most moral choices were based on personal considerations. People were immersed in the im-mediacy of community life and were morally motivated by feelings of goodness, guilt or shame. In turn, these three stimuli prompted medievals to perform certain actions while refraining from others.

In the second half of the 20th century, moral behavior - and, more frequently, immoral behavior - were increasingly linked to the "autonomous" activities of social, commercial and political systems.

Nevertheless, until recently, medieval and modern morality had much in common. Whether morality ultimately rests on individuals or institutions, particular behaviors have long been qualified as "good" or "bad."

In other words, the "content" of behavior -- what individuals or "corporations" actually do -- has remained the foremost determinant of moral judgment.

However, image-based media have created unprecedented conditions suggestive of a new moral order.