Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] When I was originally asked to make this presentation, I was planning on focusing it more particularly on.
[00:00:11] The challenge of Christian apologetics in a post Verbal Culture.
[00:00:17] And my wonderfully provocative title that I was going to work with was How Many Words Is this Picture really Worth?
[00:00:26] But over time I decided that we needed some background so we could get to the real meat of it. So I spent the last lecture yesterday and the workshop this afternoon trying to get across some of the idea of the role of our concern for cultural sensibilities as apologists and what that means. It's not something that's as easily graspable as thinking about presuppositions in worldviews and ideas.
[00:00:56] But in this lecture I'll talk particularly about television to some extent about film.
[00:01:04] I would like to say by way of introduction for those of you who are involved in any kind of visual arts, that this is not a brief against visual communication.
[00:01:18] Some of my friends who are artists sometimes are suspicious of people who are such devotees of the word.
[00:01:28] I have a friend who's a sculptor who's always a little edgy when I start talking about the difference between visual and verbal communication because he's afraid, I'm going to say, that what he does isn't very important and is dubious.
[00:01:42] And I don't want anyone to go away from here and say, Ken Myers doesn't like film or something.
[00:01:49] It's precisely because I do love visual communication as much as I do that I think it shouldn't be confused for verbal communication or what it does shouldn't be confused for what verbal communication does.
[00:02:05] One picture is not worth a thousand words. It is, in a sense, more priceless than an infinite number of words.
[00:02:12] But I would also say simultaneously that one sentence can be more priceless than an infinite number of images, because you could say more with a single sentence than you could say with countless pictures.
[00:02:26] That's because images and words communicate different things and communicate in a different way.
[00:02:34] And I'll talk more about that in the heart of the lecture.
[00:02:38] But I would like to say first, just to again drop something in your mind to hold onto throughout, that I think what images communicate best has to do with the realities of living in space and time.
[00:02:57] And when images are used artfully, I think what they do is celebrate the reality of living as a creature in this three dimensional or four dimensional, if we include time world that God has placed us in.
[00:03:13] And I think that that is really one of the most Christian aspects of an art form like film, which. Which can communicate the reality of the created Order as over, against worldview or religious traditions such as Hinduism, which would deny the reality of the created order.
[00:03:34] There's a scene. There's a shot in Hitchcock's film North by Northwest that I remember so vividly because. Partly because I watched the film about 30 times when I was working on a paper on it. But this scene, there's a scene where Cary Grant is climbing up into this house to rescue Eva Marie Saint. I can't even remember what was going on.
[00:03:57] But it's. It's the house where all these nasty guys had their headquarters. And there's one shot, or Hitchcock shows an exposed beam that's supporting a deck or a porch in the back of the house. It's jutting out.
[00:04:16] And it was always such an overwhelming shot to me, and because of the way he caught the massiveness of the beam and the angle of the beam and the height of the porch and everything else. And I remember it because of such a profound sense of the reality of space that is communicated.
[00:04:38] That may sound kind of spacey to say that, but that is what really hit me. Now.
[00:04:47] Another memory I have on early reflections about a Christian view of film is watching a number of Christian films, including the series How Should We Then Live?
[00:05:06] Which seemed to deny the continuity of time. There are ways of editing film using what's called a jump cut, which can really fragment space, fragment time and space in such a way as to suggest that there are no real continuities and in fact, to suggest that what we perceive as continuity in space and time is actually an illusion. And I've seen more Christian movies that are put together that way, partly because the editor didn't know what they were doing.
[00:05:38] And the great irony to me in watching How Should We Then Live? Was this incredibly fragmented visual style in a film that was trying to communicate the continuity of ideas, the continuity of truth.
[00:05:52] Whereas I watched Jacob Brunowski's series the Ascent of Man, which came out at about the same time, wonderfully put together.
[00:05:59] If I had to choose between which of those worldviews was most coherent, I would have to choose on the basis of the film, on the basis of the effect of the film, commentary notwithstanding, I choose Brunowski's. The experience of watching Brynowski gave me the sense that his worldview was the more coherent, even though on the verbal level it was less coherent.
[00:06:23] I just want to give those examples to keep in mind as I talk about the role of television in our culture.
[00:06:34] There was in the New York Times, in the Tuesday, March 7, 1989 edition, I'm sure you all remember it was one of those moments in journalism where the real story was a matter of collage rather than reportage.
[00:06:53] One of those moments where you have to tear out the whole page and save it because of the juxtaposition of things that were on the page.
[00:07:00] In the fourth and fifth columns of page eight, there was a story on what was then had become a rather familiar controversy.
[00:07:08] The headline was, news Shows with Ads Are Tested in six Schools.
[00:07:13] The story was about the first broadcast of a pilot for a short daily television news show designed to be used in junior and senior high school classrooms.
[00:07:22] The pilot was produced by a company called Whittle Communications Bank, Tennessee. It was distributed by satellite to six schools. And the company at that time hoped to have the show, which was called and is called Channel One, placed in 8,000 schools within 18 months.
[00:07:41] Now, while there's nothing new about classroom use of television, the hook here was that this show had commercials and that was making a lot of people upset.
[00:07:50] Quote, in return for thousands of dollars of free equipment, including the 25 inch color television sets, video cassette recorders and satellite dishes, the Times reported the schools agreed to make the 12 minute program required viewing for all students.
[00:08:05] And it was the prospect of students being coerced to watch commercials for Levi's and Snickers and other teen consumables that had many critics, including, quote, a number of leading educators, really upset. And they were announcing press conferences and calling reporters and denouncing capitalism and everything else.
[00:08:24] Less than a week later, Chris Whittle, who no doubt has already made some serious money on this because it has gotten off the ground.
[00:08:33] Chris Whittle defended Channel One in a piece published in the op ed page of the Times.
[00:08:39] And he essentially said that if government funds couldn't meet the requirements of schools who want to provide information about current events for classroom use, then the private sector would help.
[00:08:47] So he basically was saying, look, these kids are illiterate about current events.
[00:08:52] Government can't provide the funds. We're doing this, you know, everybody's breaking, everybody's making a profit on it. We make a financial profit. The schools reap educational profit.
[00:09:03] Now, directly underneath this story was a shorter and much happier report which was accompanied by a photo of a smiling Barbara Bush and a young black girl and young white girl on her lap.
[00:09:13] And the headline here announced, Barbara Bush Announces Formation of Literacy Foundation.
[00:09:20] Apparently, the report said 23 million adult Americans are functionally illiterate, lacking basic skills beyond a fourth grade level.
[00:09:29] According to experts in the field and another 35 million are semiliterate, meaning that they lack skills beyond the eighth grade level. That's 58 million adults incapable of grasping, for example, the meaning and consequences of most of the prose on the op ed page of the New York Times in which which Chris Whittle is defending his use of television.
[00:09:50] The Barbara Bush foundation for Family Literacy, which was being announced, would stress intergenerational activities and target the family as the key to establishing literacy. Literacy being a universal value in the nation, Mrs. Bush said, hence the kids on her lap. Now, the story between the stories is that while the first lady is raising funds to teach almost 60 million adults how to read, the people who should have been taught, the people who should have taught them to read in the first place have wholeheartedly accepted the dominance of television in education, an instrument which, according to its advocates, encourages illiteracy not just according to its critics, but according to its staunchest advocates. And I'll cite some of them in a moment.
[00:10:35] But what amazed me was that none of the leading educators that were cited in this story or any other story I could find raised any questions at all about the suitability of relying on television as a means of education as the primary means of providing information. What bothered them was the commercials.
[00:10:55] I was particularly struck by this because in my memory of my own high school experience with current events education during my senior year, we were given the option, but we were actually strongly encouraged by our social studies teacher of subscribing to the New York Times, delivered to the school at special rates.
[00:11:15] And the administrators and faculty, the leading educators in my day, apparently felt that the best way for us to help stay informed was to get us to read.
[00:11:24] Now there were advertisements in the editions of the Times we received, but nobody objected to our being pressured to read it every day.
[00:11:32] But today television has become the assumed medium for just about everything. It is assumed that television is a proper medium for almost anything.
[00:11:46] It is no longer problematic.
[00:11:49] It once was. Critic Mark Crispin Miller, in a book of his called Boxed the Culture of Tv, suggest that one of the most important facts about television today is that no one complains about it anymore.
[00:12:03] There have been protests about television almost since its invention and jeremiads about radio, mass journalism and advertising before that.
[00:12:11] But by the late 70s, Miller says, there were virtually no more public outcries from a critical IntelligenceSia, but only TV's triumphal continuous.
[00:12:24] Miller suggests that the critics had been silenced because television quote was no longer a mere stain or imposition on some pre existing cultural environment. But television had become the environment.
[00:12:37] Of course, one could argue that Miller's own book disproves his thesis, as does the book called Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, which appeared in 1977, written by the man with the rather implausible name Gerry Mander, And the book 1985amusing ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, the book the Plug In Drug by Marie Wynn, and several other titles. But these are really voices crying in the flickering shadows of a vast wasteland.
[00:13:08] None of the leading educators seem willing to endorse arguments such as Neil Postman's or Marie Wynn's, or even Mark Crispin Miller's, and neither do many political or religious figures.
[00:13:18] The educators are trying to teach children raised on Sesame street, which is really a program that teaches more about being entertained than it does about the Alphabet.
[00:13:27] The politicians can't get elected without television's assistance, and religious leaders are as interested in ratings as anyone else.
[00:13:35] Perhaps that's too cynical. Perhaps they're all motivated more by a sense of common good, and they realize that television is the only thing that holds our culture together. After all, there's a sense in which television is our culture.
[00:13:46] Miller reflects on how ignoring television is the modern equivalent of monasticism.
[00:13:53] Certainly you could choose not to own a television set, but such refusal would condemn you to a life of touristic ignorance. For TV has now become the native language while variously emulating TVs look and tempo. The other media, films, books, magazines, newspapers were also Referring endlessly to TV's ephemeral content, the only reference of our public discourse in the 1980s, when TV finally became the 1 subject of stand up comedy, the context of rock music, a frequent news item, a common talk show topic, the scene and arbiter of politics, and the major source of political rhetoric. Where's the beef? How. How do you spell relief? We make money the old fashioned way, et cetera.
[00:14:42] Television is thus not simply the dominant medium of popular culture. It's the single most significant shared reality in our entire society.
[00:14:51] Christendom was defined as a region dominated by Christianity.
[00:14:56] Not all citizens of Christendom were Christians, but all understood it. All were influenced by its teaching. All institutions had to contend with it.
[00:15:03] Christianity was the one great assumption of Christendom.
[00:15:07] I can think of no entity today capable of such a culturally unifying role except television. Because in television we live and move and have our being.
[00:15:19] Media guru Tony Schwartz, who I mentioned last night, describes the electronic media as the second God. Of course, Schwartz has a vested interest in hawking this metaphor, because if radio and television are a God, then Tony Schwartz is the second Moses. He's largely regarded as one of the most able practitioners in radio and television ever to live. But there's something sound about that analogy. If it's not omnipresent, the electronic media are at least anywhere we want them to be.
[00:15:49] If not omnipotent, they certainly have substantial social and political power.
[00:15:54] If not omniscient, they are nonetheless the source of all sorts of knowledge for most people.
[00:16:00] And if not eternal, they do, thanks to oldies stations and reruns on cable, have a certain timelessness.
[00:16:07] But more consequential than these superficial analogies is the fact that the media, and especially television, serve in our culture a role once reserved for God, the role of defining reality.
[00:16:18] According to biblical Christianity, it is God's will and God's word that establishes the meaning and significance of all things.
[00:16:25] In Christendom, God was publicly recognized, even by hypocrites, as the ultimate arbiter and judge of all things.
[00:16:33] Now, television as a cultural force doesn't really have a will, and it says only what programmers want it to say.
[00:16:41] Or so they think.
[00:16:42] But the form of television, the way it communicates, predetermines what is and what is not communicated.
[00:16:50] The form of television, the way it communicates, predetermines what is, and more significantly, what is not communicated.
[00:17:00] Schubert's Trout Quintet, played by a kazoo band, is not really the same piece of music that Schubert composed.
[00:17:10] And if you lived in a place where the only musical ensemble that was allowed to play in public was a kazoo band, the reality of Schubert's music, and of both music, would be significantly redefined.
[00:17:24] It would not be perceived as it ought to be.
[00:17:27] Its nature would be obscured by the medium of presentation.
[00:17:32] And in a somewhat analogous way, television limits the publicly available definitions and perceptions of reality because of the way television works.
[00:17:43] Even if the content of every television program was consistent with a Christian worldview, but television was still as pervasive as it is today, I believe it would still pose some serious problems for Christians. Culturally, the dominant form of communication in our culture is now, I believe, visual rather than verbal. The image rather than the word is the basic unit of communication.
[00:18:09] More people rely more often on images for knowledge about the world than ever before, thanks in large measure, but not exclusively, to television.
[00:18:17] This fact may seem innocuous, but it has profound consequences. Consider the history of magazines. For example, Jacques Eliol, the noted Christian critic and theologian, notes that Sometime in the 1950s, a dramatic shift began to take place in magazines. Quote previously Images were mere illustrations of a dominant text. Language was by far the most important element. And in addition, there were images to make the text content more explicit, hold the reader's attention. This was their sole purpose. Now the situation is reversed. The image contains everything.
[00:18:52] And as we turn the pages, we follow a sequence of images making use of a completely different metal operation. It's a bit overstated, as much of what I say today will be a bit overstated, but bear with me. Billboards, packaging design, industrial design, films, newspapers, photographs, all of the modern objects present.
[00:19:13] All of these modern objects present a continual procession of images that was not available to pre modern society.
[00:19:20] We have more things to look at in a day than people in pre modern society had to look at in a lifetime.
[00:19:30] Nature provided most of the images. In pre modern cultures, the design of man made objects followed natural principles of practical necessity and aesthetic beauty. They were not designed to communicate something, except those images produced for ecclesiastical use and the accoutrements of the wealthy, which were intended to display social status.
[00:19:50] But it's increasingly difficult now to communicate only using words.
[00:19:55] Much of the money spent by businesses on computer software and hardware is not for the processing of information, of ideas, text, but for improving its visual display. Color monitors, sophisticated graphics programs, desktop publishing and presentation graphics generators are all used to communicate visually. You just can't tell someone anymore. You have to show them.
[00:20:16] And television is also a big part of the corporate world.
[00:20:21] Mark Crispin Miller in his book points out that over 8,000 US businesses operate their own TV networks within the business.
[00:20:29] He quotes a person at Pacific Bell who said, most of our employees are used to getting information off the job, off the job from television. So we're seeing it as a natural way of communicating inside the company.
[00:20:42] And a training director at Tab Products said they'll watch anything, they're conditioned to tv.
[00:20:50] Now, images are a means of communicating knowledge, just as words are. But they communicate two different kinds of knowledge, as I suggested at the beginning. And images communicate immediately and intuitively and are scanned in a subjective pattern.
[00:21:09] There are splendid forms to communicate, communicate concrete, quantitative information to communicate narrative, to communicate aspects of physical reality, superficial reality.
[00:21:28] Words, on the other hand, communicate through abstraction and analysis.
[00:21:32] Words communicate in a linear and logical form.
[00:21:36] Something communicated in words can thus be judged to be true or false.
[00:21:41] But an image cannot be true or false. It can be fabricated, it can be phony. But it would be technically wrong to say that an image was false, because false is a logical category that depends on propositions.
[00:21:58] Now some media theorists, recognizing the fact that an image cannot be true or false. Have declared that the very concept of truth is an outdated concept.
[00:22:07] Since we are not dominated by print culture any longer, since we're dominated more by television and other visual means that truth is something.
[00:22:21] Tony Schwartz says truth is a Gutenberg ethic.
[00:22:25] It has nothing to do with truth.
[00:22:28] Images can present a story but not an argument. They can establish a mood, but they're incapable of articulating even the most simple distinctions of verbal language. Let me give you an experiment with some sentences.
[00:22:43] The cat is on the mat.
[00:22:45] Not a terribly profound concept or statement.
[00:22:50] But try imagining an image, a picture that would communicate without ambiguity the intent of the sentence the cat is on the mat. How would you do it?
[00:23:02] I could show you a picture of a cat on the mat, but you might not even notice that the mat was there, depending on how interesting the cat was. If I asked you to give me a verbal equivalent of that image, that is, if I ask you for a literal caption of what that image was, you might say a cat.
[00:23:22] That is a noun without a sentence.
[00:23:25] You might say a brown cat. You might say a pretty brown cat reclining and about ready to go to sleep.
[00:23:32] There was a lot of connotation.
[00:23:36] The image of the cat would denote cat more directly than the word cat denotes a real living cat.
[00:23:46] So it denotes more directly. But it also has all sorts of ambiguity about it.
[00:23:51] And that very simple act of predication, of linking a noun to a verb, to a prepositional phrase, the cat is on the mat, is very difficult to do. Early film theorists wrestled with this in trying to figure out how the metaphoric abilities of film worked. And there are a lot of horrible experiments, horrible in the sense that they were terrible failures of trying to use literary and verbal metaphors in a filmic form does not work.
[00:24:31] Now, what if I took the sentence the cat is not on the mat and tried to communicate that? We had trouble with simple predication. What about a simple act of negation? I could show a cat next to a map and you would probably say, the cat is next to the mat, if we were lucky.
[00:24:48] But not a terribly significant word when it comes to expressing metaphysical truths and spiritual truths and historical truths is difficult, very difficult to communicate. Now, you could try with two pictures. You might show one with a cat on a mat and the next with the cat that is not on the mat.
[00:25:15] Now, how would you read the juxtaposition, that montage of those two images?
[00:25:20] You might read it as the cat has moved off the mat.
[00:25:24] That's dynamic. All I wanted to say was the cat is not on the mat, not that the cat moved. I just want to state that statement of negation.
[00:25:35] What about the cat was on the mat, or the cat likes to be on the mat, or the cat should not be on the mat?
[00:25:44] Try to imagine images that's going to communicate infallibly, as infallibly as the simple statement in verbal language. What about an imperative, as in get off the mat, cat?
[00:25:59] Imperatives are absolutely imperative in communicating the Gospel because there are commands in Scripture.
[00:26:06] And yet suddenly we find that visual language has a hard time communicating commands except by some means of extension. You can use visual language in a narrative form in which a command is indicated, but it does not have the kind of precision that language has now. What about a conditional clause? If the cat does not get off the mat, I shall kick it.
[00:26:32] And that's at that point I don't even try to imagine how you would do that using images alone.
[00:26:42] And yet all of those linguistic devices, predication, negation, an expression of the past tense, an expression of a like or dislike, the subjunctive, the cat should or should not be on the mat, the imperative and the conditional clauses, all of those things which are simple in verbal language, are very, very difficult to communicate with precision in visual language.
[00:27:21] Images are especially inadequate to express what ought to be or what not ought to be, or conditions under which something will or will not happen.
[00:27:29] In images, everything is in the present tense and the indicative mood.
[00:27:33] Images are very non judgmental and undemanding, which poses some serious problems for theology and ethics if we try to communicate purely through images, or if we rely on image based forms of communication. Remember last night the quote I had from the guy who founded mtv? He watched the same newscast as his parents. He was anti war, they were pro war, they were listening to the narrative, he was watching the pictures.
[00:28:02] Even when you put a narrative, a verbal narrative along with the pictures, as modern people grow more and more accustomed to and more and more focused on image perception, as literacy becomes less and less significant culturally, as verbal language becomes less and less prominent culturally, even inserting a verbal message along with pictures is going to become difficult.
[00:28:34] That poses some serious problems for the culture at large.
[00:28:38] And it may well be that one of the reasons there is so little is in the way of shared norms in our society is because that our shared mode of knowledge, television, works against the communication of norms.
[00:28:52] A culture that's rooted in images more than in words will find it increasingly difficult to sustain any broad commitment to any truth, since truth is an abstraction that requires language. I think of this every time I see these end of the year retrospectives that the Network's put on January 31st. There's a lot of football, no news being made. The guys in the editing room have had a lot of time to play with video. And they show us all these images, images that tell us who we are, so we're told. These are the pictures of our lives. This is our world.
[00:29:28] But most of them are. Both of them depict events of some significance, but they're televisable events.
[00:29:39] There are other things that happen in history and that happen in our own times that are not terribly telegenic, but they're ruled out.
[00:29:51] They don't matter. In a sense.
[00:29:54] Words offer commands and prohibitions. Images establish feelings of resonance.
[00:30:00] Images remind us of things.
[00:30:02] They involve recognition more than cognition.
[00:30:05] Tony Schwartz argues that television works because it strikes a responsive chord in us. That is, it works best when it resonates with something already in us.
[00:30:15] And a quote from Schwartz, the critical task for media producers, whether entertainers, advertisers or educators, is to design a package of stimuli, I.e. programming, so that it will resonate with information already stored within an individual and thereby induces the desired learning or behavioral effect.
[00:30:36] Don't try to teach anybody some new precept strike at something they already know.
[00:30:45] Television discourages reflection.
[00:30:48] It tells us what we already know. It relies on instant accessibility. It. It reminds us of something else. It reflects the desire of the self. These are all attributes of our popular culture at large, and they are enhanced in television.
[00:31:04] Before going on to discuss some other attributes of television, I want to look at an earlier debate about the propriety of image based culture.
[00:31:12] At the time of the Reformation, there was a controversy over images in the churches and the Protestant iconoclast. Those who destroy droid, statuary and other religious art today are regarded as fanatical philistines.
[00:31:23] And without condoning all that they did, I think it would be helpful to consider some of the rationale for their vigorous antipathy to images.
[00:31:32] The principal biblical argument for iconoclasm, the destruction of images, was the prohibition in the Ten Commandments against graven images and Eliul. Jacques Eliul, in his book the Humiliation of the Word, notes that painters, sculptors and architects whose works were destroyed may certainly have worked with all their faith, consecration and service in order to praise and glorify God.
[00:31:55] They were marvelous artists and dedicated Christians, and the destruction of their work is a great tragedy. But Ayul argues that there were church leaders and theologians who were inclined to make the Church's presence in the world more visible in the interest of efficiency of communication.
[00:32:16] The purpose of the proliferation of images in churches, which really accelerated rapidly in the 14th century, was essentially a marketing device.
[00:32:25] It was an effort to attract the interest of illiterate peasants toward the Gospel.
[00:32:33] The images were, in a sense, the church controlled mass media of the day.
[00:32:39] After all, it's much easier to look at paintings than to try to understand preaching.
[00:32:43] But there was a price for that ease of communication, just as there is a price today for the ease of images over words.
[00:32:49] Images and seeing began to assume a central place in both piety and theology.
[00:32:56] Mystical theology, which emphasized an inward vision, began to supplant systematic theology, which involved reflection verbally on God's revelation.
[00:33:10] The ideal is to contemplate God himself, and in order to do so one must begin by contemplating pious images. This is a quote from Eliul.
[00:33:20] As a result of those changes, Eliul said, the word was repressed.
[00:33:24] It didn't matter whether anyone understood what it was said. What matters is, is to see what is done and thus to participate physically.
[00:33:32] It is much less important to live one's faith than to mime it. Participating with one's body.
[00:33:39] Knowing revealed truth matters less than being involved in a corporeal imitation of it.
[00:33:45] For some, gesture is the main thing. For others, seeing replaces everything.
[00:33:51] And Whewell makes the connection between the medieval Christian piety and and the effort of modern artists and scholars to recover a quote, more intuitive, more physical and less rational form of knowing. This point I want to stop and point out that in the 1950s and 1960s the emphasis on recovering the anti rational emphasis in many cultural spheres is overwhelming.
[00:34:20] This is a time when Charles Reich's the Greening of America where He talks about Consciousness 3 and achieving a new state of consciousness that's based on ecstatic knowledge, on intuitive knowledge, on inner knowledge, and which eschews all efforts at reason, at analysis.
[00:34:42] Someone mentioned LSD last night as being a part of the picture of the 60s that I hadn't mentioned. And LSD was attractive precisely because it was an answer to this search for a way of knowing that was not analytical.
[00:35:00] Now Elyule looks at these modern ideas to recover this intuitive physical way of knowing.
[00:35:11] He says, when I hear serious scholarly presentations of the pedagogical role of images, I remember that all this was precisely what was stated by clerics and friars in the 14th century.
[00:35:21] I often think about the utterly convinced, impassioned look of those who talk about the new theater and its unheard of discovery of direct participation in which the spectator enters into the act and the pride of the specialists and young people who rediscover the body, struggling against this abominable Christianity that's covered over in restraint and eliminated the body, and tell us pompously about corporeal expression which will replace useless spoken language. It is through the body, mind, and the contagion based on visual stimulation that one transmits. That one transmits what?
[00:35:57] No, we no longer transmit anything. We only participate.
[00:36:01] Just listen to all these innovative, revolutionary statements, these discoveries of things never before known in the west, since of course the peoples of the Third World have retained this authenticity of corporeal expression, spontaneous theater and ceremony, carnivals and bodily participation in the mass. When I hear all this, I suddenly find myself right back in the 14th century, when all this talk, exactly the same thing, was already being heard. And from Christians Tony Schwartz and Jacques Eliul seem to agree on the essential differences between print based and image based culture.
[00:36:36] They only disagree on their evaluation of it. And if Eliul sounds all too hysterical about his fear, then consider what Tony Schwartz recommends to educators about overcoming the bias of print in teaching basic skills. This is from a book called Media the Second God.
[00:36:53] He says, concentration is a valuable skill in reading, but it's really unimportant in electronic learning.
[00:37:00] In reading, the ability to learn depends on the ability to concentrate. With electronic media, it is openness that counts. Moreover, someone who is taught to concentrate will fail to perceive many patterns of information conveyed by electronic stimuli.
[00:37:16] Schwartz, who is hired often, he makes a lot of money as a consultant for educators looking at how to use media in education, says, look, don't teach them to concentrate. That's only going to get in the way of their absorbing stuff from television. And in case there's any doubt, the next paragraph should make it quite clear that Mr. Schwartz will not be offered a job as a consultant for the Barbara Bush foundation for Family Literacy.
[00:37:42] He says, a child does not have to learn. A child does not have to read in order to acquire knowledge.
[00:37:48] This is not to argue that reading is an unimportant skill. However, it is no longer an essential skill that must be acquired before a child can grow up intellectually.
[00:37:56] Schools might well adopt a task orientation approach to reading skills. A child should learn to read when he needs to read or when he wants to take a literacy trip.
[00:38:08] With a task orientation approach, the age at which a child learns to read may change.
[00:38:13] 33:52 Reading will not be the first task a child encounters when he enters school.
[00:38:20] Also he will learn to read material that relates to his life.
[00:38:23] One teacher in New Jersey applied this principle and achieved remarkable success in teaching high school dropouts to read. Instead of using elementary reading textbooks, he employed pornographic literature as source material.
[00:38:34] He was fired.
[00:38:36] Swartz seems to think that this is a great tragedy that he was fired.
[00:38:41] Let me read one more short passage in an essay called the Post Literate Society.
[00:38:49] In his book Media the Second God, Schwartz makes the claim that many college educators.
[00:39:00] That must mean at least four, because many college educators have remarked that although today's students show low reading and writing levels, they are nonetheless more informed about the world than the literate students of the past.
[00:39:13] In the words of an article on television and children In Newsweek, 1977, quote, in general, the children of TV enjoy a more sophisticated knowledge of a far larger world at a much younger age, but they are also likely to possess, and they are also likely to possess richer vocabularies.
[00:39:30] That's a nice euphemism for some things that I've heard from youngsters. Now, Schwartz goes on and says, formerly, what kind of knowledge are they receiving about the world?
[00:39:41] Now, this is just amazing to me, and this was published relatively recently. It's amazing to me because of the survey literature which indicates that people don't know basic facts about history, basic facts about geography, but what kind of knowledge do they have? Well, formerly, a city child of two or three who could not yet read had no idea of how a field of wheat sways in the breeze.
[00:40:02] Today, this urban child recognizes the field of wheat. From his experience with television, the same preschool child has some understanding of space travel, natural disasters such as tornadoes and floods, and even the terror of war. The Midwestern child knows the oceans and tides. The child in Italy knows something of how the child in China lives. The child in Istanbul can recognize the skyline of Manhattan. Little children can identify the voices of national leaders and many other public figures. And they can identify other sounds that television and radio alone have made families.
[00:40:34] So it's knowledge principally of visual experience.
[00:40:39] I seriously contend also that most kids don't know who most public figures are. I mean, I think that's absurd. But someone else has commented that how wonderful children know how a kangaroo jumps. And only people who saw kangaroos could know that. But now that they've seen it, they know the dynamics of it. They know what a kangaroo jumping looks like.
[00:41:00] Well, I think that's a nice thing to know.
[00:41:04] And I have an acre of high golden grass next to my house, and I love watching the way the wind sweeps across it. And that's a nice experience. I'm thankful for that.
[00:41:15] But I don't think that that kind of experience is sufficient.
[00:41:20] A sufficient kind of experience to make me even a good citizen, let alone a virtuous person, let alone a person who is committed to some timeless truth.
[00:41:37] Now we're running close to five o'. Clock. We're running a little late.
[00:41:43] And I think that this might be a good way, a good place to stop. Let me just add one more section.
[00:41:55] And we talk principally about space. And we talked a little bit about the perception of space. And I want to talk a little bit about time very quickly.
[00:42:07] Television. Part of the effect of television, I think, is to distort our sense of time.
[00:42:14] The ability to record an event, or more accurately, the ability to record the visual impression of event, is to something that we take for granted. But it surely is as significant a cultural development as the introduction of movable type by Gutenberg.
[00:42:28] The proliferation of VCRs, which gives television viewers more control over television, which is a good thing, also further distorts our experience of time, which I don't think is a good thing.
[00:42:39] The act of recording a program to watch it later, we know, is called time shifting. It's a lovely term.
[00:42:47] It wreaks havoc on the effort of television people to sell commercial time. But it has other effects as well. TV critic Tom Shales from the Washington Post, in a splendid article in Esquire magazine in March of 1986 called the Re decade, Re for rerun, says we are all timeshifters now, or time shiftees. Time is for shifting. In an electronic society where every day is a broadcast day, time takes on a new relativity. Relatively speaking speaking, we're afloat in an illusory symbol world. We're not lost out here in the stars, but out here in the electrons. Television, where it's always now is almost always some other time as well. What does it do to us? You might say it gives us jet lag all the time, or at least time lag all the time.
[00:43:30] Shales suggests that the habit of watching reruns, whether supplied by the networks, by cable, or by our own VCRs, fits very nicely with the lack of a sense of time that characterized the entire decade of the 1980s, the 80s. Shales dubs the Re decade quote, had no texture, no style, or no tone of their own. Instead, they had the texture and style and tone of all the other decades, at least all those decades that were recorded on film or videotape.
[00:43:54] Of course, reruns of the Honeymooners or Leave it to Beaver are now received with a knowing sense of superiority, with a sense of ironic detachment.
[00:44:05] But that's okay. That's part of the culture. It's a perfect mood for television. And Shales concludes by saying, television is the culture. Of course, what it does and what it fixates on affects everything else. Values are being reordered, like the value of timeliness, which is itself becoming passe. The Redecade makes a mockery of a lot of things. What it may most make a mockery of is this phrase, the fullness of time.
[00:44:31] It feels like the emptiness of time now.
[00:44:37] It's not a terribly positive thing to end on.
[00:44:41] And perhaps I should draw some kinds of conclusions, Has been dominated by the preaching of a gospel of self fulfillment.
[00:44:58] And no accident that television preachers recently have been caught in episodes of rank self indulgence.
[00:45:05] I say it's no accident because I think that that fits with the medium. The nature of the medium is to encourage that and not to encourage reflection on any kind of transcendent truth.
[00:45:18] I'd like to close with a quote from an article I read last night by David Wells, and I recommend the entire symposium. It was in Christianity Today, February 19th.
[00:45:31] Wells, in this very short piece, talks about his concerns of the ways in which evangelicals are allowing Christianity to be redefined under the assault of modernity.
[00:45:42] He says modernity vitiates any appeal to tradition or a transcendent order because we cannot look outward, backward or upward, we look instead inward.
[00:45:53] The rise of this fascination with self has led to a transposing of the historic understanding of Christianity into the metaphor of healing.
[00:46:02] In society as well as in the evangelical world, we are witnessing the triumph of the therapeutic. The self becomes both the object of our concern and the source of our values. Truth is replaced by feelings and relationships. The goal is not so much to be righteous as to be whole and happy.
[00:46:20] And Wells concludes the piece by suggesting that within evangelicalism, actually it had been suggested earlier in the symposium, there are those who seem to be quite content with going with the flow and allowing redefinition of the faith based on the dominance of visual culture, the dominance of the idea of the therapeutic, other aspects of modern sensibility, and those who want to resist that tendency. And he argues that there will definitely be quite a significant reordering or coming apart and regrouping of the movement known as evangelicalism. I think that he's right. I think that that is inevitable. What kind of form it will take, I don't know.
[00:47:06] But I think that it is inevitable because of the fact that becoming increasingly obvious that there are many people within the evangelical world who are not only not troubled by the redefinition or they would say contextualization of Christian truth in forms such as visual language which no longer allow the communication of truth.
[00:47:36] They not only tolerate that, but they believe that those of us who persist in maintaining these old fashioned paradigms are a nuisance.
[00:47:48] So again, not a positive point on which to end. But I think that it does give us some tasks. It gives us a task of understanding how the nature of Christian truth requires certain cultural attributes before anything can in fact be communicated. It gives us the task of trying to understand to what extent knowledge of revealed truth requires language, print or verbal language, and also requires logic and to what extent it is possible for us to expropriate modern media and modern sensibilities without coming apart entirely.
[00:48:31] I think I'll stop there and take questions.
[00:48:36] The first remark I want to make is, you say, what can we do? What should be done?
[00:48:42] And I interviewed a person once named Richard Mitchell who goes by the name the underground Grammarian. He writes books and publishes a newsletter which is looks at jargon and various other butcheries committed on the English language.
[00:49:02] And I asked him, well, what is to be done about the problem of the crisis of the English language? And he said, done, done. Why nothing can be done.
[00:49:12] And I was kind of taken aback. And he said, well, you know, civilizations have a way of rising and then falling and I mean, these things kind of crumble, you know.
[00:49:25] Now Richard Mitchell was not a Christian and that was certainly not an expression of anything approximating Christian hope.
[00:49:33] But I don't think that we want to identify Christian hope and Christian confidence with the perseverance of Western culture.
[00:49:47] I think that the church, the church is destined to become something of a remnant culture.
[00:49:53] And my only plea as far as using television and other modern I don't want to say devices because it's more than a device. I'm not terribly concerned about television as a tool or as a device. I'm concerned about the saturation of television as a dominant medium. That's a social phenomenon, not a technical phenomenon. It's a social phenomenon that's driven by other interrelated social phenomena. And there's no way just to focus attention just on television. There's no way. I mean, if Christians want to take over all the television stations and television networks, that's not going to solve the problem, because there isn't any. The problem. I mean, it's a whole mosaic that is something that is, in a sense, irreversible. What I think we can do is to limit the amount of damage that we're doing ourselves by first of all, realizing that not everything that is worthwhile is televisable.
[00:51:01] And I think that's the first. If the Christian church, if somebody could at Urbana or somewhere proclaim that and everyone could agree, maybe we call an ecumenical council or something and add that to the Nicene Creed or something, that not everything that is worthwhile is televisable.
[00:51:22] If that alone could permeate the consciousness of Christians, I think we'd be better off.
[00:51:27] But there is a notion, especially among Christian educators and Christian leaders and Christian Christian teachers, that if something is worthwhile, then it's got to be on video.
[00:51:37] Video is a wonderful tool, and there's a lot of good stuff on video, and I watch a lot of tv.
[00:51:45] But I think that we need to resist that temptation of thinking that the only way we can do something is by putting it on video. What that will do is teach our children and our brothers and sisters that there are other means of knowledge other than absorbing something through television.
[00:52:12] And if we can hold out for the viability of and richness of means of knowledge such as reading, that I think are absolutely essential. I don't think it's some kind of accident or mere metaphor that the Holy Spirit inspired John to call Jesus Christ a Logos.
[00:52:33] I think there's something organically related to God's redemptive work, his revelatory work, and the role that language plays from creation on in our lives.
[00:52:47] The fact that God spoke everything into existence rather than showing a video and evoking it into existence. So I would say the first thing is the church has to say not everything worthwhile is televisable. And we will not pander to the entertainment and titillation saturation.
[00:53:15] We will not pander to the demand to be entertained which characterizes our culture. That is hard, hard, hard to do, because a lot of people say nobody's going to come to church if we don't put on a good show.
[00:53:29] But I think at some point the church has got to stop and say, are they coming to church because we put on a good show, or are they coming to church to hear the word? Which is significant.
[00:53:40] Which is not to say that preaching should be the only part of the service. John Cole.
[00:53:48] Well, you can always buy my books.
[00:53:58] Something John said struck some sort of responsive chord. As Tony Schwartz would say, that might be something that is a more hopeful challenge for us.
[00:54:12] I think that there are many unbelievers in our world who aren't really terribly happy with the direction things are going.
[00:54:20] I think there are a lot of unbelievers.
[00:54:23] I have benefited immensely in my study of popular culture from people who regard many of the trends as as lamentable as any sensitive Christian ought to regard them.
[00:54:37] And the sad thing to me was the fact that these people did not immediately realize that the church was a place that they could turn to for some sense and cultural comfort.
[00:54:52] And I think that we tend to be rather negative in saying, well, if we don't pander to the cultural sensibilities and nobody's going to listen to us. There are a lot of people who are not gripped by the Zeitgeist.
[00:55:09] There are a lot of people who are as critical of it as we are.
[00:55:14] They tend to be people who are probably harder to get to come to church because they are probably a little bit more intellectually sophisticated. So there are other obstacles involved.
[00:55:24] But I think one of the great challenges for apologetics is to read, say, an Alan Bloom or to read someone like Neil Postman, who wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death, and to be able to say to people who find those critiques of the direction of our culture sound, that the church is a community that is committed to an alternative vision of reality, that our vision of reality isn't just based on ephemeral experience. It's not just based on a celebration of the self.
[00:56:01] It's based on something that is more eternal and more demanding and at the same time more comforting.
[00:56:09] I'll give you one example to close.
[00:56:13] I have a friend who works in television, was a story editor for the NBC show Hunter, which was not the most intellectually stimulating of shows.
[00:56:23] And he called me recently and we were talking and he started asking questions about the providence of God. He's not a believer.
[00:56:31] And he had discovered some 19th century Jesuit writer who had written quite a bit on the idea of the providence of God.
[00:56:41] And he was telling me how exciting it was and how refreshing it was to find somebody who believed that all of life works to a transcendent purpose that was in the mind of God and didn't believe that all of life revolved around me and my self fulfillment, as most of his friends in Southern California believe. He told me the story of going out with a young lady who was involved in various New Age ideas and before ordering, the menu was brought to them. And she took out the menu and reached into her purse and pulled out a crystal on a little chain and started swinging over the menu.
[00:57:22] And he was just aghast.
[00:57:25] And he said to me, what hubris to assume that all of the dynamics of the cosmos would organize themselves in such a way that as to vibrate this crystal so that she should know whether to have a cheeseburger or a filet of fish or whatever.
[00:57:45] Now there is a person who, and he is one among thousands and probably millions, who is not charmed by the Zeitgeist, who is not charmed by the New Age movement, who is not charmed by the constant celebration of the self that that is so constant in our popular culture.
[00:58:06] And those are the people that we need to fix our eyes on, on people who have already been stirred in some way.
[00:58:14] People whose God, in whom God's common grace, and perhaps even his special grace is working.
[00:58:22] And to take our eyes off the masses and to place them on the individuals, on those who are. Who already have some sort of hunger. And to say that we have a message that can provide the answer to that hunger.
