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Imprimis, On Line -- February 1992
Imprimis, meaning "in the first place," is a free
monthly publication of Hillsdale College (circulation
360,000 worldwide). Hillsdale College is a liberal arts
institution known for its defense of free market
principles and Western culture and its nearly 150-year
refusal to accept federal funds. Imprimis publishes
lectures by such well-known figures as Ronald Reagan,
Jeane Kirkpatrick, Tom Wolfe, Charlton Heston, and many
more. Permission to reprint is hereby granted, provided
credit is given to Hillsdale College. Copyright 1992.
For more information on free print subscriptions or
back issues, call 1-800-437-2268, or 1-517-439-1524,
ext. 2319.
-------------------------
"Television: The Cyclops That Eats Books"
by Larry Woiwode, Best Selling Author
-------------------------
Volume 21, Number 2
Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan 49242
February 1992
-------------------------
Preview: Once, radio was called "the treadmill to
oblivion." Novelist Larry Woiwode reminds us that
television has even greater potential for harm. On
campus last February for Hillsdale's Center for
Constructive Alternatives seminar, "Freedom,
Responsibility and the American Literary Tradition,"
Woiwode, best-selling author of The Neumiller Stories
and other contemporary fiction, vividly described the
profound changes wrought by this modern "Cyclops."
-------------------------
What is destroying America today is not the liberal
breed of one-world politicians, or the IMF bankers, or
the misguided educational elite, or the World Council
of Churches; these are largely symptoms of a greater
disorder. If there is any single institution to blame,
it is, to use the cozy diminutive, "TV."
TV is more than a medium; it has become a full-
fledged institution, backed by billions of dollars each
season. Its producers want us to sit in front of its
glazed-over electronic screen, press our clutch of
discernment through the floorboards, and sit in a
spangled, zoned-out state ("couch potatoes," in current
parlance) while we are instructed in the proper liberal
tone and attitude by our present-day Plato and
Aristotle--Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw. These television
celebrities have more temporal power than the teachings
of Aristotle and Plato have built up over the
centuries.
Television, in fact, has greater power over the
lives of most Americans than any educational system or
government or church. Children are particularly
susceptible. They are mesmerized, hypnotized and
tranquilized by TV. It is often the center of their
world; even when the set is turned off, they continue
to tell stories about what they've seen on it. No
wonder, then, that as adults they are not prepared for
the front line of life; they simply have no mental
defenses to confront the reality of the world.
The Truth About TV
One of the most disturbing truths about TV is that it
eats books.
Once out of school, nearly 60 percent of all adult
Americans have never read a single book, and most of
the rest read only one book a year. Alvin Kernan,
author of The Death of Literature, says that reading
books "is ceasing to be the primary way of knowing
something in our society." He also points out that
bachelor's degrees in English literature have declined
by 33 percent in the last 20 years and that in many
universities the courses are largely reduced to
remedial reading. American libraries, he adds, are in
crisis, with few patrons to support them.
Thousands of teachers at the elementary, secondary
and college levels can testify that their students'
writing exhibits a tendency toward a superficiality
that wasn't seen, say, ten or fifteen years ago. It
shows up not only in the students' lack of analytical
skills but in their poor command of grammar and
rhetoric. I've been asked by a graduate student what a
semicolon is. The mechanics of the English language
have been tortured to pieces by TV. Visual, moving
images--which are the venue of television--can't be
held in the net of careful language. They want to break
out. They really have nothing to do with language. So
language, grammar and rhetoric have become fractured.
Recent surveys by dozens of organizations also
suggest that up to 40 percent of the American public is
functionally illiterate; that is, our citizens' reading
and writing abilities, if they have any, are so
seriously impaired as to render them, in that handy
jargon of our times, "dysfunctional." The problem isn't
just in our schools or in the way reading is taught: TV
teaches people not to read. It renders them incapable
of engaging in an art that is now perceived as
strenuous, because it is an active art, not a passive
hypnotized state.
Passive as it is, television has invaded our
culture so completely that you see its effects in every
quarter, even in the literary world. It shows up in
supermarket paperbacks, from Stephen King (who has a
certain clever skill) to pulp fiction. These are really
forms of verbal TV--literature that is so superficial
that those who read it can revel in the same sensations
they experience when they are watching TV.
Even more importantly, the growing influence of
television has, Kernan says, changed people's habits
and values and affected their assumptions about the
world. The sort of reflective, critical and value-laden
thinking encouraged by books has been rendered
obsolete. In this context, we would do well to recall
the Cyclopes--the race of giants that, according to
Greek myth, predated man.
Here is a passage from the well known classicist
Edith Hamilton's summary of the encounter between the
mythic adventurer Odysseus and the Cyclops named
Polyphemus, as Odysseus is on his way home from the
Trojan Wars. Odysseus and his crew have found
Polyphemus's cave:
"At last he came, hideous and huge, tall as a
great mountain crag. Driving his flock before him he
entered and closed the cave's mouth with a ponderous
slab of stone. Then looking around he caught sight
of the strangers, and cried out in a dreadful
booming voice, 'Who are you who enter unbidden the
house of Polyphemus? Traders or thieving pirates?'
They were terror-stricken at the sight and sound of
him, but Odysseus made shift to answer, and firmly
too: 'Shipwrecked warriors from Troy are we, and
your supplicants, under the protection of Zeus, the
supplicants' god.' But Polyphemus roared out that he
cared not for Zeus. He was bigger than any god and
feared none of them. With that, he stretched out his
mighty arms and in each great hand seized one of the
men and dashed his brains out on the ground. Slowly
he feasted off them to the last shred, and then,
satisfied, stretched himself out across the cavern
and slept. He was safe from attack. None but he
could roll back the huge stone before the door, and
if the horrified men had been able to summon courage
and strength enough to kill him they would have been
imprisoned there forever."
To discover their fate, read the book, preferably
Robert Fitzgerald's masterful translation, if you don't
know Greek. What I find particularly appropriate about
this myth as it applies today is that, first, the
Cyclops imprisons these men in darkness, and that,
second, he beats their brains out before he devours
them. It doesn't take much imagination to apply this to
the effects of TV on us and our children.
TV's Effect on Learning
Quite literally, TV affects the way people think. In
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
(1978), Jerry Mander quotes from the Emery Report,
prepared by the Center for Continuing Education at the
Australian National University, Canberra, that when we
watch television, "our usual processes of thinking and
discernment are semi-functional at best." The study
also argues "...that while television appears to have
the potential to provide useful information to viewers-
-and is celebrated for its educational function--the
technology of television and the inherent nature of the
viewing experience actually inhibit learning as we
usually think of it." And its final judgment is: "The
evidence is that television not only destroys the
capacity of the viewer to attend, it also, by taking
over a complex of direct and indirect neural pathways,
decreases vigilance-- the general state of arousal
which prepares the organism for action should its
attention be drawn to a specific stimulus."
We have all experienced this last reaction: "Dad,
it's time to--"
"Go on, get out of here!"
"But Dad, Mom just fell down the--"
"Leave me alone, can't you see I'm watching the
Super Bowl?"
How are our neural pathways taken over? We think
we are looking at a picture, or an image of something,
but what we are actually seeing is thousands of dots of
light blinking on and off in a strobe effect that is
calculated to happen rapidly enough to keep us from
recognizing the phenomenon. More than a decade ago,
Mander and others pointed to instances of "TV
epilepsy," in which those watching this strobe effect
overextended their capacities, and the New England
Journal of Medicine recently honored this affliction
with a medical classification: video game epilepsy.
Shadows on the Screen
Television also teaches that people aren't quite real;
they are images--gray-and-white shadows or technicolor
little beings who move in a medium no thicker than a
sliver of glass, created by this bombardment of
electrons.
Unfortunately, the tendency is to start thinking
of them in the way children think when they see too
many cartoons: that people are merely objects that can
be zapped. Or that can fall over a cliff and be smashed
to smithereens and pick themselves up again. This
contentless violence of cartoons has no basis in
reality. Actual people aren't images but substantial,
physical, corporeal beings with souls.
And, of course, the violence on television
engenders violence; there have been too many studies
substantiating this to suggest otherwise. One that has
been going on for 30 years, begun by the psychologist
Leonard Eron, began research on 875 8-year-olds in New
York state. Analyzing parental childrearing practices
and aggressiveness in school, Eron discovered that the
determining factor is the amount of TV parents permit
their children to watch.
Eron's present partner in this extensive on-going
study, University of Illinois professor of psychology
Rowell Huesmann, has written:
"When the research was started in 1960, television
viewing was not a major focus. But in 1970, in the 10-
year follow-up, one of the best predictions we could
find of aggressive behavior in a teenage boy was how
much violence he watched as a child. In 1981, we found
that the adults who had been convicted of the most
serious crimes were those same ones who had been the
more aggressive teenagers, and who had watched the most
television violence as children."
Where is this report? Buried in an alumni
publication of the University of Illinois. In 1982, the
National Institute of Mental Health published its own
study: "Television and Behavior: Ten Years of
Scientific Progress and Implications for the '80s."
This report stated that there is "overwhelming"
evidence that violence on TV lends to aggressive
behavior in children and teenagers. Those findings were
duly reported by most of the major media in the early
'80s and then were forgotten.
Why do such reports sink into oblivion? Because
the American audience does not want to face the reality
of TV. They are too consumed by their love for it.
TV: Eating Out Our Substance
TV eats books. It eats academic skills. It eats
positive character traits. It even eats family
relationships. How many families do you know that spend
the dinner hour in front of the TV, seldom
communicating with one another? How many have a
television on while they have breakfast or prepare for
work or school?
And what about school? I've heard college
professors say of their students, "Well, you have to
entertain them." One I know recommends using TV and
film clips instead of lecturing, "throwing in a
commercial every ten minutes or so to keep them awake."
This is not only a patronizing attitude, it is an
abdication of responsibility: A teacher should teach.
But TV eats the principles of people who are supposed
to be responsible, transforming them into passive
servants of the Cyclops.
TV eats out our substance. Mander calls this the
mediation of experience: "[With TV] what we see, hear,
touch, smell, feel and understand about the world has
been processed for us." And, when we "cannot
distinguish with certainty the natural from the
interpreted, or the artificial from the organic, then
all theories of the ideal organization of life become
equal." In other words, TV teaches that all life-styles
and all values are equal, and that there is no clearly
defined right and wrong. In his Amusing Ourselves to
Death, one of the more brilliant recent books on the
tyranny of television, the author Neil Postman wonders
why nobody has pointed out that television possibly
oversteps the injunction in the Decalogue against
making graven images.
In the 1960s and 1970s, many of the traditional
standards and mores of society came under heavy
assault; indeed, they were blown apart, largely with
the help of television which was just coming into its
own. There was an air of unreality about many details
of daily life. Even the "big" moral questions suffered
distortion when they were reduced to TV images. During
the Vietnam conflict there was graphic violence--
soldiers and civilians actually dying--on screen. One
scene that shocked the nation was an execution in which
the victim was shot in the head with a pistol on prime-
time TV. People "tuned in" to the war every night, and
their opinions were largely formed by what they viewed,
as if the highly complex and controversial issues about
the causes, conduct, and resolution of the war could be
summed up in these superficial broadcasts.
You saw the same phenomena again in the recent war
in the Gulf. With stirring background music and
sophisticated computer graphics, each network's banner
script read across the screen, "WAR IN THE GULF," as if
it were just another TV program. War isn't a program.
It is a dirty, bloody mess. People are killed daily.
Yet, television all but teaches that this carnage is
merely another diversion, a form of blockbuster
entertainment--the big show with all the international
stars present.
In the last years of his life, Malcolm Muggeridge,
a pragmatic and caustic TV personality and print
journalist who embraced religion in later life, warned:
"From the first moment I was in the studio, I felt
that it was far from being a good thing. I felt that
television [would] ultimately be inimical to what I
most appreciate, which is the expression of truth,
expressing your reactions to life in words. I think
you'll live to see the time when literature will be
quite a rarity because, more and more, the presentation
of images is preoccupying."
Muggeridge concluded:
"I don't think people are going to be preoccupied with
ideas. I think they are going to live in a fantasy
world where you don't need any ideas. The one thing
that television can't do is express ideas....There is a
danger in translating life into an image, and that is
what television is doing. In doing it, it is falsifying
life. Far from the camera's being an accurate recorder
of what is going on, it is the exact opposite. It
cannot convey reality nor does it even want to."
------------
Profiled recently by People magazine as one of
America's leading novelists, Larry Woiwode is the
author of What I'm Going to Do, I Think (Farrar, Straus
& Giroux, 1969), Beyond the Bedroom Wall (Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 1975, reprinted by Avon and Penguin
Books), Even Tide (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977,
reprinted by Noonday), Poppa John (Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 1981, reprinted by Crossway), Born Brothers
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988, reprinted by Penguin
Books) and The Neumiller Stories (Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 1989, reprinted by Penguin Books). Three of
these novels have been chosen as "Best Books of the
Year" by the New York Times Book Review. A former
college professor who lives on a working ranch in North
Dakota, Mr. Woiwode has also written numerous short
stories and poems for publications such as Atlantic
Monthly, the New Yorker, and Harper's. A new novel,
Indian Affairs, will be published in June by Atheneum.
###
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