A discussion of the book Crunchy Cons by Rod Dreher.
Mr. Dreher loves Neil Postman. My only exposure to Postman was in a few college communication studies classes (for my major in, well, communication studies). I did not like him. I don’t remember now why, or which book of his I read. I think he may have been the one who put down SchoolHouse Rock, and man, you don’t mess with SchoolHouse Rock. But now, as a parent – and a grownup – I think Postman had a point. I don’t think children have short attention spans naturally (not as short as adults tend to think). I think they are conditioned into it by, among other things, the mass media and children’s programming.
But back to the book. I particularly liked this passage from page 33.
Neil Postman, the late media critic, was a man of the left, but he is beloved by the crunchy right for his incisive analyses of how mass media and technology undermine cultural and social institutions that make for good societies. He delivered perhaps his most radical critique of contemporary culture in his 1992 book Technopoly, which depicts American society as having structurally surrendered its soul and its liberty to technology. The word “structurally” is important, because in Postman’s view, we have constructed our economy, our society, and even our way of seeing reality to serve technology. Americans naively accept new technologies, thinking only of what these technologies can do but never, said Postman, what they can UNDO.
Consider television, and the way it conditions us to imterpret reality. Now, whenever conservatives get their dander up aout TV, it’s almost always to rant about salacious programming… Postmad said this kind of thing is a pointless distraction… He invited us to think more deeply into how the medium itself changes the way we think.
By its very nature, television technology teaches us to experience the world as a series of fragmentary images. It trains us to prize emotion and stimulation over logic and abstract thought. We are conditioned to expect quick resolution to problems, and to develop evanescently short attention spans….eventually, we learn to judge the world by essentially aesthetic criteria.
I think that last paragraph is so, so true. Television shapes the way we think, the way we see the world. Dreher carries this idea futher, even, suggesting that television teaches us to want. It shows us, in commercials and in programming, a whole world of things we should want to have, people we should want to be like, things we should want to do, etc. It makes us want things.
I can really, really relate to that. I am not so affected by products, or wanting to own things. But where television hits me is lifestyle. I want to be like those people on TV. Those people whose problems are funny, and they have witty things to say, and within an hour (or at the most, a week’s worth of hours), their problems are solved. I want to be like those people who do fabulous things, go fabulous places. Lounge in coffee shops with their friends. Eat breakfast at a diner every morning. Have great hair day after day. They’re so wonderfully perfect, those pretty TV people.
One last point that Dreher makes about television and other technology is that it is actually a time-stealer. People tend to praise technology for making our lives easier, giving us more free time. But do we really have more free time? Do our cars, televisions, vacuums, and microwaves actually give us more time? Do you have lots of free time? I know I don’t! Here are a few quotes from the book that I particularly enjoyed:
Dreher spoke with a man who moved with his wife to an Anabaptist community for a year and a half. This man said:
My hunch was that we in modern society had gotten to the point where most of our labor, time, and energy was going to deal with problems that technology itself causes us. I figured that if we scaled back on the technology, we’d have more leisure time, and have fuller and richer lives…Out there, it was completely different from what I call the voluntary quadriplegia of sitting all day in front of a computer terminal. You’re using your body the whole time, interacting with your neighbors, enjoying the beauty of nature in all its seasonal variations. You’re using your mind in various capacities. There are various skills involved…
Dreher suggests that most of us “have forgotten those skills because technology, over time, obviated the need for them. But maybe we needed those skills for reasons we didn’t anticipate; we no longer have to walk anywhere, for example, but our dependence on the automobile is one reason Americans are so fat and out of shape…”
This goes along perfectly with the Joel Osteen podcast I was listening to a few weeks ago, in which Mr. Osteen made the point that physical exericse was unnecessary in Biblical times because of all the walking and other physical labor performed on a daily basis.
The man quoted above (the one who moved to the Anabaptist community) suggested that the answer is not to get rid of technology altogether, but to use it in a limited fashion to “restore a more integrated life, where you have the physical, the social, the mental, and the aesthetic aspects of life blending as seamlessly as possible” or to limit their use “so you can restore those things that the technology is taking away from you.”
He goes on to say that the Big Three that tend to undercut integration are the Television, Computers, and Automobiles.
“Consider the television. The great gift you give to yourself and your family when you turn off the television is time together. I can’t make the point often eough that television is not the enemy of the family primarily because of its content; it is the enemy of the family because it devoures precious time.”
Something to think about, eh?
The View From Here 