MAY 20 2017
AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH.
For years I had a book by Neil Postman with the above title. The book was written in 1985, thus 32 years ago. I usually put my name on the inside cover and the date and place where I bought it. Not this time, so I am at a loss where and when I got it. I know that it has been in my library for years, if not decades, and, to my shame perhaps, I never read it until this past week. But then I have a lot of unread books.
The reason why I grabbed this paperback with some 180 pages was the TRUMP presidency. I am searching for the reason why so many Americans voted for him, suspecting that it had something to do with TELEVISION, the medium that has gained prominence in the last 6 decades.
I grew up in a very conservative household where even radio was barely tolerated. This changed during the war when the BBC was the only reliable source of information, but by that time even having a radio was punished by deportation to Germany and an almost sure death. It’s then, devoted patriots we were, when we did get a radio complete with short band the only option for listening to London.
The first time I saw TV was in the mid 1940’s when our physics class visited a technical center in downtown Groningen, not far from our school, where PHILIPS, the large Dutch firm then mainly engaged in the manufacture of electrical light bulbs, had installed a prototype. The screen was small and showed a blurry picture of something I don’t recall.
Little did I realize that its successors would immensely influence the entire world, and become the major election tool for politicians everywhere.
I saw TV again in 1953 when we, just married, had a basement apartment – $25 per month rent, including all utilities – and our land lady invited us to watch the LEAFS, then in their glory time.
We finally got a set – second hand – in 1966, but, when the volume switch failed, our family now grown to 7, my wife and I plus 5 kids ranging from 1-12, voted not to repair it.
So our young family grew up without the Boob Tube. Instead our family became addicted to reading. I now think that their later success can be traced to that crucial vote.
Now everybody has TV, and viewing it has become hazardous to our physical and spiritual health.
Here follow some ideas I gathered while reading an article called CARPE DIEM REGAINED: “The Vanishing Art Of Seizing The Day”, by Roman Krznaric.
Television takes up a full 50 per cent of our leisure time, more time than we spend doing any other single activity apart from work or sleep. Persons who live to 75 will have spent around nine years of their lives watching television.
Not me, because basically I dislike TV. I especially loath the commercials, the smiling faces, the phony gaiety, so, if nothing else, that alone makes me squirm when I watch TV.
I am pretty sure that this artificiality has made TV watching folk immune to Trump’s fake counterfeit promises. His campaign boasts remind me of the Devil promising Jesus the world if he only would honor Satan. Not Jesus, but yes, American Christianity did fall for him.
I know, computers and the Internet are TV’s greatest competitors. I admit I spend a lot of time each morning looking at newspapers on line, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Toronto-based Globe and Mail and other sources. My excuse is that I have a blog to write and without these news outlets I simply cannot function. Also I am a news freak: at breakfast at 8 a.m. I never fail to listen to CBC’s World Report on radio.
Yes, I admit, these days I follow the TRUMP tragedy on TV, actually quite fascinating: a classical example of what Solomon once stated, recorded in Proverbs 16: 18: “Pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.”
‘Newscasts’ now are called ‘shows’ and have to be entertaining. Robert MacNeil, a Canadian who, together with Jim Lehrer ran the PBS MacNeill/Lehrer NEWS HOUR, wrote. “The idea is to keep everything brief, not to strain the attention of anyone but instead to provide constant stimulation through variety, novelty, action, and movement. You are required to pay attention to no concept, no character, and no problem for more than a few seconds at the time.”
That sort of news-casting has mangled the minds of the masses, no longer able to think for themselves. Oceans of commercial soundbites have dulled our brains, have disabled us to think coherently and have paved the way for such brainless people as Trump who speaks the TV language and so can communicate to the brainless on their own level of understanding or lack of it.
Trump: I utterly disliked him even before he did politics. Watch Trump speak: he breathes TV with its short sentences, exaggerated claims, switching swiftly to another topic because his attention span is short: the perfect TV personality, shallow, inarticulate, untrue.
Yet even in our digital world TV remains by far the dominant force. According to one of the most detailed studies of how much time US adults spend using different electronic devices, 12 per cent of the daily total is using a smartphone, 9 per cent on a PC, 4 per cent with a tablet and 18 per cent listening to the radio. And the figure that dwarfs them all? Television, at 51 per cent, which we watch at scheduled times and for which we increasingly use “on demand” or “catch-up” services.
TV is to reality what watching a garden show is to getting your hands dirty planting potatoes and petunias, and braving black flies and mosquitoes, as I do daily this spring.
We in Canada and the USA have become the first culture to have substituted secondary, mediated versions of experience for direct experience of the world. It had become normal to sit in front of a screen and spend a substantial portion of each day watching other people live their lives – or actors pretending to be other people – instead of living our own.
In general watching TV is a passive way of engaging with life, because most of the time we are just gazing at the screen. It might be a great way to relax, it might make you laugh or cry, and it can certainly be more informative or enlightening than scrolling through Facebook updates. But it is a poor surrogate for the pulsating sense of aliveness and active engagement that is the essence of seizing the day.
Just imagine, appearing before the Lord on Judgement Day and telling him that a good portion of our waking hours we spent on mind-murdering, body-bulging, soul-starving shows, rather than furthering our knowledge, meditating on matters eternal or visiting or praying or reading or writing a blog, which I find highly rewarding for my own spiritual development.
Take running.
There’s nothing I dread more than to get up three times a week and force myself to run. The first 500 meters is sheer murder, but then my tortured body adjusts and it’s clear sailing from there. It’s so much easier to turn on the TV which tends to switch us off from so much else. For a start, it’s bad news for our sex life: people with a television set in their bedroom have half as much sex as those who don’t. It also makes us less active: heavy TV viewers tend to do less sport or physical exercise.
High television consumption is associated with low levels of civic and political engagement, for example in volunteering, voting and protesting. And it isn’t great for kids: pre-schoolers who spend lots of time looking at screens spend less time in creative play and constructive problem-solving.
We really amuse ourselves to DEATH.
Television will kill you: it kills the mind and it kills the body: total death.
I came across a startling article in the British Journal Of Sports Medicine that concluded: “On average, every single hour of TV viewed after the age of 25 reduces the viewer’s life expectancy by 21.8 minutes.” That’s bad news for Trump, who sleeps only 3-4 hours per day, never reads, and watches TV a lot. No wonder he is what he is: basically a child in charge of a grown-up job and bad news for the USA. Ecclesiastes 10:16 warns us: Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child.
He’s a striking example how TV dumbs a person down.
Compare that to running. Each hour of running, even at a slow pace, extends life by seven hours. Thus my 2 hours of running each week, one hundred hours each year, over more than 50 years – I started running in 1961 – have added 7 x 5000 = 35,000 hours to my life span, or 35,000 divided by 8760 (annual hours) = more than 3 years.
Oh, my disciplined Calvinistic temperament!
Yet my running also infuses my mind with new ideas, new word-plays, and stops my aging process to some extent, while inactive television viewing retards everything that a person possesses: killing minds and bodies and stifles the spirit.
No wonder, based on the study of tens of thousands of people, TV viewing, and other forms of sedentary behavior such as sitting at a computer all day, go hand in hand with increased risk of death, particularly from cardiovascular disease. Experts in preventative medicine are starting to recognize that human beings simply aren’t designed for long periods of sitting still. Doing so may, for instance, have a detrimental effect on how our bodies process fats and other substances, leading to greater risk of serious heart problems.
TV is an addiction.
The curious thing about the above arguments is that they are unlikely to convince you to watch less television. The reason is that TV has powerful addictive qualities. People can have a strong sense that they should be watching less but find themselves unable to reduce their viewing time: surveys reveal that 40 per cent of adults and 70 per cent of teenagers say they watch too much TV, and 10 per cent of adults describe themselves as addicts.
Researchers in Germany found that people who try to resist the urge to watch television fail around half the time, and are much better at resisting the desire to nap or snack. Other studies show that the longer people watch, the less enjoyment they get from it – yet they don’t have the willpower to switch it off even if the program is boring. Think how many times you’ve come to the end of a program or film and thought: “Why did I just waste my time watching that junk?” It happens to me more often than I’d like to admit.
Simultaneously stimulating and relaxing, watching television develops into an almost physiological craving: we become desperate for an injection on a daily basis. The addictive nature of television makes it disconcertingly similar to the happy drug soma used to dope up the inhabitants of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
Ultimately, is it really worth granting nine years of our precious existence to the second-hand pleasures of television when we might be having more direct experience of the world?
Oh yes, there are good things on TV. Most of them are BBC or PBS originated. But even then, I prefer reading. I always have 2-3 books on the go. Nowadays books can be bought for a buck or two at two places in our village, hardcover in immaculate condition. I also buy books because I know that the time will come when through some mishap TV and Internet will disappear. Then what? That’s when our spiritual death will really become apparent. I believe that TV and Internet will disappear for extended periods, maybe forever, because our entire mode of life has FINITE written on it, and there is no PLAN B.
This is becoming more and more evident by the day with Global Heating and an economy now almost totally floating on DEBT, a true PONZI scheme, that must fail sooner than later.
Swear off TV. Read more. Start running. Extend life so that you may face your Maker with a degree of confidence.