Reflections on Pop-Culture (Part 2): How the Brightest are becoming the Dumbest--- Amused to Death

"You cannot do philosophy on television. Its form works against the content...our discourse has become shriveled and absurd."
-- Neil Postman

"He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore."
-- Isaiah 2.4


I am afraid that the smartest generation is on the brink of becoming the stupidest, in part, because of media. 'Media' is a wide ranging term encompassing all kinds of areas: print, broadcast, electronic, news. The existence of such a thing as media has not made us dumb--in fact the opposite is true--but the decline in the quality of media has helped add to our cultures present and prevailing shallowness. Again, we are the most educated generation the world has ever seen, and yet we consider CNN and FOX News to reflect our many-sided and complex opinions. The debates we see and hear are 5 minutes long in totality, one side screaming about some issue: always extremists, representing the extreme sides of issues, and then commercial. Is that what has become of the sacred institution of public discourse? Two animals not listening to each other yelling about absurdities because it gets ratings. Because this is all people can handle?

This fact contradicts the myth of 'progress' that makes up the Western narrative that media, schools and religious institutions tell Western societies day in and day out. You know the myth: civilization keeps progressing to a more civilized state with the advancements in technology etc. This is untrue. Humankind simply changes the way it packages itself, but are our atrocities any worse then the Mayans? Are our depravities any worse then Rome's? Let's remind ourselves that it was the Western world that dropped a nuclear bomb on innocent civilians less then a generation ago killing hundreds of thousands of people in a matter of days. Have that amount of people ever died so fast in all of human history? So blindly and without remorse, guilt or conviction? We continue to fight the ancient barbarian battles of centuries ago, but unlike the prophet Isaiah had hoped, we continue building swords instead of ploughshares. But our swrods have become much more dangerous and less personal. And we have not grown frightened of using them.

But what of media and progress together? Though we have progressed, we have not. We are educated, have degrees--send ourselves to the moon--and yet, as "entertainment" we watch the kind of stuff at one time only a twelve year old boy would covet. So, what happened?

Acclaimed writer and thinker Neil Postman argues that it was a change in our epistemology (the way we learn and find meaning). He says the major epistemological change was our cultures move from a word-based culture to an image-based culture (Amusing Ourselves to Death, 61). At one time politics, theology and philosophy were about ideas, and words. They have now become about image. "It is quite likely that most of the first fifteen presidents of the US would not have been recognized had they passed the average citizen on the street" (60). Such reliance, indeed, dependence on image has caused us to sacrifice content at the expense of being amused and titillated. Postman does not believe in an epistemological relativism. He says

Some ways of truth telling are better than others, and therefore have a healthier influence on the cultures that adopt them. Indeed...the decline of a print-based epistemology and the accompanying rise of a television-based epistemology has had grave consequences for public life...we are getting sillier by the minute. (24)

Interestingly enough Postman was writing in 1985, a decade before the image saturated society that was pushed even further by the invention of the Internet--where for instance the latest Presidential hopefuls launched their announcements to run for President--sitting comfortably on sofas in warm rooms. All of which is part of what Noam Chomsky argues to be the case in Manufacturing Consent--that the corporations and the media control the discourse because they control the medium.

I close with a reflection from Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, in light of the sound-bite messages we have become accustomed to to inform our thinking. When Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas were getting into politics they debated each other as follows:

On August 21, 1858---Douglas would present his views for one hour/ Lincoln would take an hour and a half to reply/ Douglas a half hour to rebut Lincoln's reply. On October 16, 1854 Douglas delivered a three hour address, Lincoln sent people home for dinner and they returned for his four hour reply. What kind of people were these to give themselves to seven hours of oratory? They were regular farmers who were attending state fairs in the middle of Illinois (where the two aforementioned stories took place). Note: these two were not even senate or presidential candidates when speaking, they were just political educators. (44-45)

My point is this: Something has changed. We perceive ourselves to be smarter then all other civilizations and yet our level of discourse, I fear, has been lowered to that of an introductory class on tenth grade sociology. What makes up the landscape our discourse? Friends, the OC, "24"----do we have reason to celebrate our intellectual "arrival" or are we to lament our descent?