Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (42 page)

POSTSCRIPT

IMPOSSIBLE THOUGHTS

XVII
TELEVISION TABOO

A
CCORDING
to librarians I have asked, approximately six thousand books have been written on the subject of television. Of these, I have been able to locate only one—a slim and superficial novel,
The Day Television Died
by Don McGuire—which even contemplates the notion that television could or ought to be eliminated. What makes this such a difficult idea?

In the three years this book was in preparation, at least one hundred people must have come up to me at parties or in cafes, and after expressing their support for a book which deals harshly with television would ask, “Are you really going to advocate its elimination?”

“Yes,” I would say, “once you really pay attention to it, you see that it’s a totally horrible technology, irredeemable; we’d all be much better off without it.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more,” would be the invariable response, “but you don’t really expect to succeed, do you?”

This last question always filled me with the most uncomfortable feeling. The people who asked it had just admitted to hating television and yet I was left with the impression that they also hated the idea that I might actually believe it possible to get rid of television. It made me seem weird to them in some way.

Well, it’s a point, I suppose. How can I expect to succeed when even those people who loathe television find the idea of eliminating it so utterly impossible? But
why
is it so unthinkable that we might eliminate a whole technology?

If the arguments of the preceding pages are even partially correct, then television produces such a diverse collection of dangerous effects—mental, physiological, ecological, economic, political; effects that are dangerous to the person and also to society and the planet—that it seems to me only logical to propose that it should never have been introduced, or once introduced, be permitted to continue.

It is not as though Americans have no precedent for action against things that are proven dangerous. We have seen various levels of legal control put upon tobacco, saccharin, some food dyes, certain uses of polychlorinated biphenyls, aerosols, fluoro-scopes and X rays to name a few. These have all been thought too dangerous to allow and yet their only negative effect is personal, they seem to cause cancer. It is at least possible, judging by some of the material in Chapter Nine on the potential effects of the narrow spectra of television light, that television also causes cancer. But is it only on the basis of cancer that we are able to think of banning something? Consider a few of television’s other effects:

Television seems to be addictive. Because of the way the visual signal is processed in the mind, it inhibits cognitive processes. Television qualifies more as an instrument of brain-washing, sleep induction and/or hypnosis than anything that stimulates conscious learning processes.

Television is a form of sense deprivation, causing disorientation and confusion. It leaves viewers less able to tell the real from the not-real, the internal from the external, the personally experienced from the externally implanted. It disorients a sense of time, place, history and nature.

Television suppresses and replaces creative human imagery, encourages mass passivity, and trains people to accept authority. It is an instrument of transmutation, turning people into their TV images.

By stimulating action while simultaneously suppressing it, television contributes to hyperactivity.

Television limits and confines human knowledge. It changes the way humans receive information from the world. In place of natural multidimensional information reception, it offers a very narrow-gauged sense experience, diminishing the amount and kind of information people receive. Television keeps awareness contained within its own rigid channels, a tiny fraction of the natural information field. Because of television we believe we know more, but we know less.

By unifying everyone within its framework and by centralizing experience within itself, television virtually replaces environment. It accelerates our alienation from nature and therefore accelerates the destruction of nature. It moves us farther inside an already pervasive artificial reality. It furthers the loss of personal knowledge and the gathering of all information in the hands of a techno-scientific-industrial elite.

Television technology is inherently antidemocratic. Because of its cost, the limited kind of information it can disseminate, the way it transforms the people who use it, and the fact that a few speak while millions absorb, television is suitable for use only by the most powerful corporate interests in the country. They inevitably use it to redesign human minds into a channeled, artificial, commercial form, that nicely fits the artificial environment. Television freewayizes, suburbanizes and commoditizes human beings, who are then easier to control. Meanwhile, those who control television consolidate their power.

Television aids the creation of societal conditions which produce autocracy; it also creates the appropriate mental patterns for it and simultaneously dulls all awarenes that this is happening.

Taking into account all these effects and the dozens of others described in the body of this book, is it really necessary to show that television causes cancer in order to get rid of it? Is it not possible to outlaw a technology based on its political or economic or psychological effects? For if even a small portion of these arguments are valid, then in the long run they are surely more important than the fact that a percentage of people get sick. Why does banning such a technology seem bizarre?

One answer to this question lies with the absolutely erroneous assumption that technologies are “neutral,” benign instruments that may be used well or badly depending upon who controls them. Americans have not grasped the fact that many technologies determine their own use, their own effects, and even the kind of people who control them. We have not yet learned to think of technology as having ideology built into its very form.

A second explanation is that once any technology of a certain scale is introduced, it effectively becomes the environment of our awareness. While we may imagine life without X rays or aerosols, we cannot imagine life without concrete or cars or electricity. These are so ubiquitous that they literally spread themselves around our awareness. We are contained within them, and as McLuhan puts it, “the fish is the last creature which is capable of understanding the water.” So it is the most pervasive of the technologies that become invisible to us. Television is an extreme example of this pervasiveness and confinement. It becomes not only the external environment for an entire population, it also projects itself inside us. Television has so enveloped and entered us, it is hard for most of us to remember that it was scarcely more than a generation ago that there was no such thing as television, or that four million years of human evolution somehow took place without it.

A third reason we don’t believe it possible to control technological evolution is that, in fact, for most of us it is
not
possible to do so. The great majority of us have no say at all in choosing or controlling technologies. These choices, as I’ve described, are now solely within the hands of this same technical-scientific-industrial-corporate elite whose power is enhanced by the technology they create. From our point of view the machines and processes they invent and disseminate just seem to appear on the scene from nowhere. Yet all life adjusts accordingly, including human systems of organization and understanding. We don’t get to vote on these things as they are introduced. All we get to do is pay for them, use them and then live within their effects.

On the very rare occasions when we do perceive a technology’s negative effects, we find it takes a herculean organizing effort to do anything about it. I have given the example of the SST. Though that is a technology which is surely among the most absurd, wasteful, useless and elitist ever invented, it took thousands of people years of effort to ban its production in this country. Despite this, foreign-made SSTs are being permitted to land in American airports.

I have also used the nuclear power example. This technology is so dangerous, not only for our own generation but for the next several thousand, that it should not be its banning that is unthinkable but its existence. Yet, just as I was completing work on this book in mid-1977, Dr. James Schlesinger of the National Energy Administration was saying, “If Californians wish to eliminate nuclear power, then we’ll have to find a way around this desire of theirs, our need for that energy is too great.”

Similar stories could be told about genetic engineering, satellite communication systems, microwave technology, neutron bombs, laser technology, centralized computer banks, and a thousand other processes, including many about which we may not even have heard.

We believe ourselves to be living in a democracy because from time to time we get to vote on candidates for public office. Yet our vote for congressperson or president means very little in the light of our lack of power over technological inventions that affect the nature of our existence more than any individual leader has ever done. Without our gaining control over technology, all notions of democracy are a farce. If we cannot even think of abandoning a technology, or thinking of it, affect the ban, then we are trapped in a state of passivity and impotence hardly to be distinguished from living under a dictatorship. What is confusing is that our dictator is not a person. Though a handful of people most certainly benefit from and harness to their purposes these pervasive technologies, the true dictators are the technologies themselves.

David Brower, president of Friends of the Earth, has argued that unlike human beings accused of crimes, all technologies should be assumed guilty of dangerous effects until proven innocent. No new technology should ever be introduced, he has said, until its ultimate effects are known and explained to the population. This is necessary, he feels, because once it has been introduced, getting rid of any technology is practically impossible—so much of life gets reorganized around it and so much power and vested interest attaches to its continuance.

Of course what Brower envisions is itself practically impossible. Many technologies are too technically complex for the average person, like myself, not technically trained, to understand them. Also, in many instances it is impossible to identify all effects of a technology in advance of its introduction, especially those which do not lend themselves to scientific proofs and evidences. But where does this leave us? Since it is impossible fully to grasp or explain many technologies, do we then go ahead with them? Do we trust our industrial leaders? Do we merely let them shoot craps with our existence? And if we do foresee undesirable effects from a technology, what means exist for then getting rid of that technology? Are there any? And what does all of this mean to the ultimate control of our lives?

In Chapter Four I raised the possibility of an alternative way of thinking about the problem. If we believe in democratic processes, then we must also believe in resisting whatever subverts democracy. In the case of technology, we might wish to seek a line beyond which democratic control is not possible and then say that any technology which goes beyond this line is taboo. Although it might be difficult to define this line precisely, it might not be so difficult to know when some technologies are clearly over it. Any technology which by its nature encourages autocracy would surely be over such a line. Any technology that benefits only a small number of people to the physical, emotional, political, and psychological detriment of large numbers of other people would also certainly be over that line. In fact, one could make the argument that any technology whose operations and results are too complex for the majority of people to understand would also be beyond this line of democratic control.