It is not our affluence, or our plumbing, or our clogged highways that grip the imagination of others. Rather, it is the values on which our system is built. These values imply our adherence not only to liberty and individual freedom, but also to international peace, law and order, and constructive social purpose.
—William Fulbright, speaking in the U.S. Senate in 1961
I expressed, in chapter 3, the confidence I share with so many other Americans in the general form of government established by the American Constitution, and my preference for this form of government, with the various checks and balances and assurances against distortion into oppressive rule that it contains, over other forms of government that do not provide comparable safeguards. To have this confidence and this preference is not, however, to assume that this form of government could not be affected by radical changes in the technological and social environment in which our society is called upon to function; and it is not to say that to meet these changes successfully would not call for adjustments in existing governmental outlooks and policies. When problems arise in the life of a nation of such seriousness that they seem to jeopardize its very future and to undermine the confidence of a great many of its citizens in the soundness of its political institutions, and when the government confesses itself, explicitly or implicitly, unable to cope successfully with these problems, then one has no choice but to question the adequacy of Western democracy itself, as we know it, for responding successfully to the changing environmental conditions in which it is obliged to exist.
That there are a number of American problems that meet this description seems to me to be beyond question. The list would include such things as environmental deterioration; the decline of educational standards; crime; drug abuse; in general, the dreadful conditions in the urban ghettos; the national budget deficit; the continued inability of our government to meet its financial obligations without massive borrowing at the expense of future generations; the decline of personal savings; and, in general, the excessive dependence on credit to sustain both governmental and personal activity. And beyond these, there are also troublesome societal conditions: attitudes of hopelessness, skepticism, cynicism, and bewilderment, particularly among the youth—that have led many observers to characterize this society (and, I think, not unjustly) as a “sick” one.
Some of these problems have an obvious relation to governmental responsibilities, federal and local, in the sense that their possible solutions are ones that would lie within the traditional competence of public authority to bring about. Others are rooted in social conditions for which public authority has not traditionally been seen as bearing any responsibility. These latter are ones that have their existence in the assumptions, the aspirations, the expectations, and the habits of thought of great portions of the citizenry. It is with them in mind that I ventured, earlier on, to call us a people of bad social habits.
I could not undertake to examine all these problems in detail within the limits of this literary effort. There are some with regard to which I would not be competent to do so, in any case. But I am selecting two of them that stand out, to me, as particularly serious examples of our present helplessness; and I shall venture, again for purposes of illustration, to suggest the sort of measures that might be required for their correction. I do this because I think they are situations that threaten not only American democracy alone but also, in one degree or another, other democratic societies across the globe.
The two problems I have in mind, as examples, are ones that have arisen, first, from the absence of any serious energy and transportation policies on the part of American public authority and, second, from the extensive abandonment by our government of much of the process of public communication, in education as in entertainment, to the good graces of the advertisers, to people, that is, who have no public commitment, educational, intellectual, aesthetic, or otherwise. In both instances, the problems have developed in face of, and largely in consequence of, the indifference of public authority to their development, and its readiness to leave this to the uncontrolled workings of a free-enterprise system.
Transportation
At no time in its entire history does the United States appear to have had anything in the nature of a rational and sustained governmental policy on transportation. The government, with public approval, seems to have been content to leave developments in this field entirely to the chaotic workings of the free-enterprise system, allowing those workings to carry us where they might, regardless of the growing evidence that they were having profound effects on the social and economic conditions of our society.
Thus there was a time, in the 1840s and 1850s, when speculative calculations appeared to favor the building of canals. The result was that great quantities of capital and of backbreaking labor were poured, with the government’s blessing, into such enterprises, only to find most of them suddenly and wholly overtaken, a few years later, by the development of the railroads, leaving a great part of the canal investment and its results wasted and abandoned. Society, one way or an other, was the loser. The same thing happened little more than half a century later, when what was by then the world’s greatest railway network, constructed at vast cost and representing a veritable triumph of American engineering and technology, was sacrificed, with equal abruptness, recklessness, and abandon, to the compelling commercial intrusion of the automobile. In each case not only were enormous capital investments and material values lightheartedly sacrificed, to the ultimate detriment of society as a whole, but the trends of urban development, sensitive as these are to the available means of transportation, were whipsawed mercilessly by these abrupt and profound changes. Government, in each case, remained indifferent.
Nearly seventy years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Princeton, there appeared on that campus a gentleman, whose name and identity I could not possibly now recall, but who left a lasting impression upon me by pointing out, in an evening lecture, that the railway and the automobile exerted diametrically opposite and conflicting disciplines on the development of the urban community—and that this, to the extent that one form of transportation was allowed to exclude or replace the other, was bound to have profound effects on American life.
The railway, this gentleman pointed out, was capable of accepting and disgorging its loads, whether of passengers or freight, only at fixed points. This being the case, it tended to gather together, and to concentrate around its urban terminus and railhead, all activity that was in any way related to movements of freight or passengers into or out of the city. It was in this quality that it had made major and in some ways decisive contributions to the development not only of the great railway metropolises of the Victorian age—particularly of such inland cities as Moscow, Berlin, Paris, and Chicago—but even certain of the great maritime turnover ports, such as London and New York.
The automobile, on the other hand, had precisely the opposite qualities. Incapable, in view of its own cumbersomeness and requirements for space, of accepting or releasing large loads at any concentrated points anywhere, but peculiarly capable of accepting and releasing them at multitudes of unconcentrated points anywhere else, the automobile tended to disintegrate and to explode all that the railway had brought together. It was, in fact, the enemy of the concentrated city. Thus it was destined to destroy the great densely populated urban centers of the nineteenth century, with all the glories of economic and cultural life that had flowed from their very unity and compactness.
This, at any rate, is what one undergraduate recalled gathering from this gentleman’s remarks; and the impression has never left him.
Well, there have, of course, been great changes over the intervening decades in the modalities of urban and nonurban life—changes that neither the lecturer in question nor anyone else could at that time have foreseen. These changes have no doubt modified at one point or another the force of the gentleman’s observations. But his view of the effects of the automobile on the great Victorian railway metropolis have certainly been mainly substantiated by the intervening decades. And indeed, in some respects these effects have gone beyond what he predicted. For not only have they damaged the center city, but they have exploded with equal violence the suburban settlement which, once connected with the center primarily by the “inter-urban” trolley line, had begun to consolidate its own life as an independent community.
The automobile, in short, has turned out to be, by virtue of its innate and inalterable qualities, the enemy of community generally. Wherever it advances, neighborliness and the sense of community are impaired.
One might have thought that this alone, much of which was surely becoming evident in the 1920s and 1930s, would have sufficed to cause Americans of that day to pause and to ask themselves whether they really wished to junk 99 percent of the great railway system that then existed and to confer upon the automobile and the truck the sort of near monopoly on transportation which (together with their later companion the airplane) they have now achieved. And the wonder as to why this question was never asked is enhanced when it is considered that this, the effect on community, was by no means the only drawback from which the automobile, as an alternative to public transportation, suffered (and continues to suffer).
There is, in the first place, its extreme unsociability. Just as it destroys community in human residence, so it destroys community in travel. Surely there has never been a lonelier means of moving great masses of people about. This writer has found himself obliged to drive, on countless occasions, either alone or accompanied only by his wife, the 150 miles between his regular place of residence and the family farm in southern Pennsylvania. The compulsion to do this has arisen because the nearby Pennsylvania village, once connected with the world around it by a small branch railway line, now has, like countless other such villages, no public transportation of any sort to link it to the outside world. In the course of these hundreds of journeys between the two points in question, six or seven hours’ round-trip in each instance, the writer cannot recall that he ever met personally, or communicated with, another person, unless it be the toll collector at the exit point from the turnpike, who sometimes said hello. Time after time, he found himself comparing this lonely and dreary journey with the color and sociability of the English highway of Chaucer’s time, as reflected in The Canterbury Tales, or with the congenial atmosphere of the railway compartment of the Victorian novel.
Second, there is the automobile’s extreme wastefulness. It is wasteful of material, of energy, and of space. The very idea that for the displacement of one or two human bodies on their daily comings and goings there should be required something upwards of a ton of metal, the power of something like a hundred horses, and some ninety square feet of paved highway, is in itself an absurdity of the first order. The railway is in all these respects far more economical. All this is well known to public authority; and it is at this point that the lack of a national transportation policy transects the similar lack of a policy in the field of energy. And because the automobile is more wasteful, it is also more expensive—to the individual owner and to the economy at large.
Third, the automobile is, as everyone knows, a major polluter. So, no doubt, was the steam locomotive, but in a different way, and in far less volume. The source of energy for the electrically driven train also involves pollution; but it involves far less of it than do the many automobiles required to replace it; and even this pollution could surely be further curtailed by other expedients.
Fourth, the automobile, insofar as it replaces walking for the displacement of human bodies over short distances, is a distinctly unhealthy innovation. Walking, the experts tell us, is the most useful and readily accessible form of exercise available to the average human being. In an earlier age, adult people walked for a great many of their comings and goings. They walked to and from church, the trolley stop, the corner emporium, the houses of friends. Today, most of these movements are performed, expensively, awkwardly, and at the cost of considerable nervous strain, in the automobile. The vast majority of children, similarly, once walked to and from school. Today they sit, passive, bored, and inactive, in the family car or the school bus. And at the slightest sign of inclement winter weather, the schools have to be closed, because His Majesty, the automobile, dislikes snow and ice. In the pre-automobile age, this, at least in my native city of Milwaukee, was unheard of. I find it hard to believe that these changes have constituted “progress.”
We have, again, the almost immeasurable boon that the automobile has been to crime and to juvenile delinquency. This scarcely needs elaboration. In the pre-automobile age, the criminal had a limited potential radius of escape. Even within the town where he committed his crime, he had to walk or to take a streetcar to distance himself from the scene of it, in either of which cases he could easily be observed by others, and not just his head and neck but his full head-to-foot appearance. To get out of town he had to pass through the bottlenecks of the railway station, the ticket window, the waiting room, the platform. Today, conveniently anonymous at the wheel of his car, he can within an hour’s time be forty or fifty miles away, in any direction, from the scene of his crime, and buried among a mass of many thousands of other vehicles and poorly visible drivers. And as for juvenile delinquency: any parent can confirm that the varieties of mischief and of self-destructive (sometimes tragic) behavior open to the youngster who can escape from parental observation and control in the family car are far greater than those that were open to the teenager of earlier decades who, to call on his girl, had to walk down the street and sit with her in the family swing on the front porch or escort her, walking, to the movie.
And finally, the automobile suffers from the fact that, enticing as are its services to the able-bodied, it leaves essentially unserved whole great categories of persons—the very young, the very old, the sick, the poor, and the handicapped—who for one reason or another cannot safely and successfully place themselves at the wheel of a car, but who, so long as the automobile retains its monopoly, have no way of getting around unless they can persuade someone else to drive them. The railway, on the contrary, was capable of accommodating, and normally did, all such people.
It is not the intention to argue, with these observations, that there is no proper place for the automotive vehicle in American life. Of course, there is such a place; and it is a prominent one. For fire prevention and control, for police and medical services, for the lonely country dweller, living far from everywhere, for taxi services, and for the movement and delivery of freight within major urban areas and between neighboring ones, it would obviously be silly to reject the advantages the motor vehicle offers. But beyond these and other necessities, there is no reason why that vehicle should be allowed to retain the virtually total monopoly of transportation that it has now generally achieved. There is a large area within which public ground transportation, given even a fraction of the public and private financial support that for many years has been poured out to the automobile, the truck, and the airplane, could provide a healthier, cheaper, more comfortable, socially preferable, and environmentally less destructive manner of moving persons and goods around. It should, surely, be the task of public authority to determine what should be considered the proper balance among these various modes of transportation, and then to see how pressure could best be brought to bear to steer development in the desirable direction.
It would be wrong to suppose that any adjustment of that sort could be carried through in any short space of time. It has taken seven or eight decades to bring about the present, unhealthy dependence upon the automobile; it would presumably take nothing less than several further decades to reduce it to its proper place in modern American life. This would be true if only for the fact that the personal financial and other interests of millions of people would be affected. Even more important would be the psychological adjustment this would imply. But every useful process has to have a beginning; and in this instance the beginning is far overdue.
The power of the automobile, as a revolutionizing factor in the life of practically every country, worldwide, has been extraordinary. Let no one underestimate it. There appears to have been no place in the world that has been able fully to withstand it. The automobile’s apparent liberating effect: the feeling of enhanced power it conveys to the person at the wheel; the sense of personal freedom it allows; the ability it promises for instantaneous changes of plans, for escaping from awkward places or situations and for seeking out preferable ones, for expanding the scope of one’s activities, and for avoiding the delays of movement to or from the railway station or the trolley stop: all these contribute mightily to the illusion of freedom that this vehicle embodies and constitute enticements few can withstand if the possibility of acquisition presents itself. The fact that much of this sense of freedom is illusory, that the automobile’s needs often demand the waste of much time as well as the saving of it, that its expense and its mechanical requirements often simply add to the strains of an already overcomplicated and nervously exhausting modern life, and that it bears the various social disadvantages listed above: all this retires before the force of its attraction. Small wonder, in these circumstances, that countless millions of people, devoid of any public or social restraints, have placed the apparent personal advantages of driving an automobile ahead of the less easily perceived social disadvantages, and have thrown themselves into a dependence on this vehicle that has assumed the dimensions of an extremely serious and not readily curable mass addiction. It will not be easy to wean them from it.
The task of public authority, in promoting any adjustment of this nature, will be all the harder for the fact that it will have to involve the employment of both the carrot and the stick. Any attempt to reduce the ubiquity of the automobile will be self-defeating unless attractive alternatives are provided in public transportation. On the other hand, no improvements in public transportation will be effective unless serious disincentives are created to the use of the automobile. Because the automobile is now coming up against its own inherent limits in a number of our great cities, where traffic congestion and the cost of parking space are beginning to inhibit its use, certain of these disincentives are already coming into existence. But such self-imposing limits will have little beneficial effect—they will, in fact, only promote the further disintegration and decay of the city centers—unless they are balanced with compensatory improvements and expansions of public transportation. And this last will not occur without the determined and enthusiastic involvement of public authority.
It is plain that the federal government has traditionally viewed the providing of freight and passenger movement within the country as a field of activity to be left for exploitation by private enterprise. The assumption seems to have been that so lucrative was this field of activity that private enterprise could be counted on to assure that the needs of all communities and of all classes of society would at all times be met by the private entrepreneur.
If the experience of many decades proves anything at all, it is that these expectations were quite unrealistic and have not been satisfied. Instead, we have today a situation where thousands of smaller communities have been left without any public transportation at all, where the movement of freight has been largely abandoned to the expensive, destructive, and heavily polluting trucking industry, where the longdistance movement of persons has been left almost exclusively to the automobile or to the inordinately and, for the poor, almost prohibitively expensive device of the airplane, and where the only fast and reasonably priced public passenger service over even a moderate distance—the rail service between New York and Washington—is one that recent administrations have made no secret of their desire to destroy if they can.
The only hopeful approach to the correction of these conditions would require the recognition by public authority, at long last, that the assurance of reasonably priced public transportation facilities, serving not just the rich but the poor and not just the great urban area but the small community as well, is a proper responsibility of public authority, no less than are those other facilities, such as the sewage system and other public health arrangements, that are commonly and traditionally recognized as such.
The Advertiser
I had thought of adding a few words on the subject of television, and not so much on its evils, which are widely recognized, but rather on the extreme difficulty of the problems it presents. But then it became evident that television was actually only a part of a much larger problem—that of the growing substitution of the visual image and spoken voice for the printed word; and that this, in turn, was only a part of a problem larger still: namely, the extensive domination of almost every kind of public communication by the advertisers. In the light of all this, I see no choice but to treat all these problems under a single heading; and I apologize in advance for whatever confusing of ideas this may involve.
Let us start with some words about the advertising industry and its role, generally, in public communication throughout the country.
The advertisers provide, or so one must suppose, the main and (many would say) indispensable source of financial support for practically every form of public communication in the United States, with the partial exception of the book and the publicly funded radio and television. Is there anything wrong with this? Whence, if not from the advertisers, could this support possibly come? The question is a reasonable one. And there would seem to be no answer to it. As things stand today, without advertising presumably very little of the communications industry would survive.
In part, this would not be a bad thing. We would live very well without a good part of what this industry produces: without the drugstore trash, the comic books, the video games, the pornographic filth, and their equivalents on the screen and over the air. The continued prevalence of this unsavory stream owes itself to the insistence of the advertisers on reaching every part of the public whose pocketbooks can conceivably be tapped, however unattractive or pernicious the means this seems to necessitate. But there is, of course, another great part of the produce of the communications industry that is quite beneficial, if not essential, to the advance of the cultural and intellectual life of the country; and for this, too, as things now stand, the advertiser’s support seems indispensable.
Is this bad? Is the advertiser’s influence reprehensible?
The advertisers are not bad people—not worse than the rest of us. I have nothing against them personally. We cannot blame them for the nature of their motivation. We all have to live. They do what is profitable for them to do, and what is permitted. I must absolve them, too, of any tendency to influence the partisan-political inclinations of the public they reach. They have normally no interest in appealing to that public in a partisan way when to do so might be to alienate one part of it while it gratifies another. If there are any objections that can reasonably be raised to the sort of influence they exert, these probably center on two points. The first is the intense consumerism they stimulate—the subtle suggestion pervading so much of their effort, and repeated endless times, that people’s problems could be solved, and a happy life assured, just by their buying this or that. The advertisers’ efforts tend to inculcate, in other words, false values, because it lies in their interests to do so. And the second of the two points relates to the peculiar sort of blandness they inflict on those—the publishers, the editors, the producers—who are dependent upon their support.
Where the influence of the advertisers makes itself most prominently felt is surely in the pressure they exert on their clients, particularly those in the publishing world, to achieve at all costs greater popularity and wider circulation. This, of course, is a motivation the editors have anyway; it is in their own interest. But the fear of losing the advertising if they fail to make progress in this direction intensifies the motivation; and the results are often achieved at the expense of quality. This puts a premium, in particular, on entertainment rather than on serious content—again a premium to which the editors would be sensitive even without the advertiser, but one which is simply intensified by the pressure the advertiser brings to bear. One can see the effects of this in almost all forms of periodical publishing and screened communication.
Another significant consequence of the interests of both advertiser and client is the curtailment of the period of time that the attention of the reader or the viewer is demanded for any particular item. Not only are there the frequent interruptions of screened material by insertion of the advertisements themselves, but there is also the tendency to shorten all offerings lest the attention of the viewer or the reader or the listener be lost by the tedium of being asked to concentrate on anything longer. The result is the markedly staccato nature of a great deal of what is served up to the public on screen or printed page or over the airwaves. Attention is constantly being abruptly yanked from one thought or image to a wholly different one.
In the cases of movie and television, this effect is inherent, anyway, in the very nature of the media, the images of which flick instantaneously on and off the screen. And some of this is also inherent in the newspaper, with its wide variety of small news items. But the rule seems to be that never, if this can be avoided, must the attention of the viewer-reader-listener be drawn to any single image or thought for more than two or three minutes, and never must he or she be asked or encouraged to undertake the effort to stop and analyze the interrelationship of any of these images or thoughts. It is hard to escape the conclusion that this, well meant as it may be, constitutes a massive abuse of the capacity for concentrated thought on the part of countless millions of people.
Nor is this all. Most of the material, journalistic or literary, with which the advertiser is impelled to associate himself is material which would normally be credited in the eyes of the reader-listener-viewer with a certain underlying integrity, in the sense, at least, of an absence of any specific ulterior motive in its authorship and presentation. It normally is what it purports to be. Let me refer to this as the “legitimate” material.
The same is not true of the advertising. It would be going too far to label it as “untruth.” Most advertisements contain some elements of truth. But the advertiser has no commitment to the truth as such. Advertisements could be best defined as “not necessarily truth, and largely something else.”
Now, the difficulty comes in with the immediate proximity to each other, on the screen or on the printed page, of these two kinds of communication—one kind, let us say, intended or pretended truth, the other, not necessarily even that. It is clear that the public, well aware of the difference between the two, dislikes being confronted with pure advertising, devoid of any legitimate material.1 The advertiser, therefore, finds himself obliged to accept some admixture of legitimate material as a companion and a lure for whatever he himself has to offer. But he also finds it in his interests to reduce the legitimate material to a minimum in order to make more room for the advertising. A glance at the New York Times for the day on which this passage is being written reveals that of the thirty-five pages of the prestigious first section of that estimable journal, thirteen are devoted exclusively to advertising, whereas on each of a further seven pages a single column of legitimate material, occupying only a small part of the page, is squeezed in among the advertisers’ far more strident demands for attention. A majority of the pages of that section, in other words, consist overwhelmingly of advertising material; and most of the remaining ones partly so. Thus the naive reader looking for news in what is ostensibly, by its own definition, a news- paper comes away with decidedly the smaller pickings; the advertisers had the greater ones. A similar situation would be found to exist, I am sure, in a high proportion of newspapers across the country.
The advertiser would like, of course, wherever he can, to borrow some of the legitimacy of the nonadvertising material by the very intimacy of the physical association of the one with the other on the page or on the screen. Who has not seen, for example, on the television screen, the use of such things as policemen’s uniforms, doctors’ gowns, nurses’ uniforms, and even priests’ robes, with a view to attracting to the advertisement something of the credibility these garbs are generally taken to imply? Who has not heard, in the advertising of drugs, the claim that “doctors say”—an obvious and cynical attempt to exploit for commercial purposes the public’s confidence in the medical profession. The most egregious of these subterfuges is the frequent use of children’s figures and voices, introduced in the obvious calculation that people will think that “kids don’t lie”—in reality, a shameful abuse of the innocence and dignity of the child. And something of the same can be occasionally found on the printed page, where what is in reality advertising is sometimes made to resemble one form or another of the legitimate material carried by the organ in question.
Again, it may be asked, Does this matter? People are not easily fooled. Even children become adept at spotting advertising where they see it and arriving at their own assessment of the credence it deserves.
True. And yet it is hard, once again, to avoid the impression that this systematic association of “truth” with “not necessarily truth” on the same pages and the same screens, together with the obvious effort to confuse the two, does not constitute another abuse of the human intelligence. Aside from which, it represents an egregious abuse of the public’s confidence in the professional groups—the doctors, the clergy, the police, and the like—whose names and figures the advertisers appropriate to their own uses. This is particularly regrettable, because the abuse of confidence ultimately ends with the denial of it; and the public’s confidence in precisely those professions is essential to the very strength and health of society.
The Junk Mail
Before we leave the subject of advertising, there is one more aspect of this question that should be mentioned; and it is one that concerns the U.S. Postal Service.
Mention was made above of the tendency of the advertisers to appropriate to themselves the dominant place in whatever medium admits their involvement, crowding the legitimate material into a smaller space and reserving the larger one for their effusions. We have a curious illustration of this proclivity, by analogy, in the use the advertising industry makes of the Postal Service.
As we all know, the common citizen, desirous of dispatching an ordinary private letter, is now asked to pay twenty-nine cents. The dispatcher of a piece of “junk mail,” and in the first instance advertising matter, pays roughly one-half the price of “first-class” mail for his missive. The result, as millions of us are daily reminded, is that our mailman arrives overburdened, and we find ourselves deluged with great masses of material we have never asked for and do not want, most of which we throw away unlooked at, thus passing the problem along to the trash collectors, and adding our little bit to the national problem of waste disposal, not to mention the wild and environmentally pernicious wastage of paper this involves.
What reason can there be for this monstrous distortion of burdens? The Postal Service was intended to be one of the ordinary amenities and conveniences that the government owed to the common citizen; and, in strange contrast to public transportation, it has normally been so regarded by our government. Surely, the normal needs of the individual citizen should have been given first priority, and not only should the desire of others to exploit this great distribution system for commercial purposes have received second priority, but these others should have been asked, since they expected to profit by the exercise, to make the higher payment. Clearly, it is the ordinary citizen who should be asked to pay the lesser junk-mail rate and the junk-mail patron who should pay the first-class rate. One might note in this connection that aside from the motives that lie behind its dispatch, the junk mail is the bulkier, the heavier, and the harder to handle of the two categories, and ought logically to bear the proportionately higher costs, anyway.
One can assume only that this is another instance in which what is “not necessarily truth” is given the higher priority in the eyes of the government over the legitimate needs of the populace because there is more money to be made by private enterprise in the distribution of it, and because the people who make that money are better organized to bring political pressure to bear upon Congress than is the common citizen, who sees no choice but to submit, with a sense of resigned helplessness, to whatever Washington decrees.
Television
This is perhaps the point at which something should be said about the device which is both a favorite outlet for the advertisers and the most intimate occupant and companion of the American home: the television set. Of all the questionable habits of the American people, this device ranks only with the automobile in its power as an addiction. And like the automobile, it disguises its domination under a promise of liberation.
To say this is not to deny that there is a legitimate place for this device in the home. For the old, the helpless, the house bound, the ill, and the weary, it can, depending on their needs and its content, be a blessing. Even for those who suffer none of these handicaps, it can, used sparingly and with discrimination, render useful and unique service. There could be no question of its complete removal from the home; nor is anyone suggesting it.
Yet it, too, has serious drawbacks. Like the automobile, it is essentially antisocial. Occasionally, to be sure, it can stimulate discussion in the home; but more often it replaces it. The greatest disadvantage of the viewing of it is the passivity this involves and enforces. The viewer, at his best, is the passive witness, the unengaged observer. He receives; he is not asked to give, is in fact precluded from doing so. He is devoid of responsibility. None of his own muscles, mental or physical, are exercised; none of them are drawn upon. The screen diverts but does not demand. And this deficiency is enhanced by the peculiarly druglike, almost narcotic, soporific power it exerts. It draws and holds attention, even when its offerings are of the most trivial, banal, and useless. We all know this. Once the screen is illuminated, few can deny it their gaze. Scenes and images which, appearing before us in real life, would scarcely invite more than a bored flick of the eye, rivet attention when they appear on the screen. In this sense the television box could be said to inflict upon the viewer something even a bit worse than passivity and mere inactivity; a sort of induced flaccidity—a species of unhealthy withdrawal from active participation in anything at all.
In the case of many adults, this could be said not to matter very much. Many of them, it could be argued, have neither the imagination nor the incentive to make very good use of their leisure time in any event. If they were not watching television, they might, it will be said, be doing something worse.
But it is another thing in the case of the children. It is not that what is purveyed to them on the screen is always directly harmful, intentionally or otherwise. Some of it even tries to be helpful. The evil lies rather in the forfeiture of what the child might otherwise be doing if he or she were not watching television.
A child, in contrast to the resigned, nondeveloping adult, has little time to waste. It is at a stage of life when it can develop, and should be developing. Time must be allowed for school, for homework, for meals, and for play. But play, if it is to contribute to the development of the child, must be active, physically or otherwise, not passive. It must be play that requires the active participation of the child, develops muscles, exercises the mind and the imagination, strengthens and enriches. Without this, real growth will not take place. Not only is it essential that precisely this kind of play should have a part in the child’s day; but this, childhood and adolescence, is the only stage of life when it can occur. And this means that when school and meals and homework have taken their due, there is, even in the best of circumstances, little time for other things. How much of this precious time, then, can the child afford to waste on a form of diversion that is passive, physically enervating, and contributes nothing to the growth of mind or body or emotional capacity, if only for the simple reason that it exercises none of these faculties?
Let me emphasize again, the evil of television for the child viewer lies not so much (leaving the advertising aside) in what it gives to him directly, for much of this is harmless pap, if not particularly edifying. The evil lies in what it deprives the child of: the sacrifice of what the child might be doing if it were not sitting, passively and uselessly, before the screen.
Television is, of course, not the only offender in this respect. Its deficiencies are ones that it shares, in one degree or another, with the radio, the rock-and-roll cassette player, the movie, even the passive watching of sport in the open. But television bears a special responsibility because of its inviting nature and because of its very convenience and ready accessibility in the home. There it stands, the television set, ready to be flicked on with the touch of a finger, ready to divert the child that doesn’t want to do its homework, ready to relieve the harried, overworked mother of the burden of facing up, at that moment, to the question of what to do with the idle, bored child.
Particularly unfortunate, here, is the extent to which the screen takes the place of reading—and thinking. I am speaking here of all forms of the screen: the movie as well as the box. Reading, in contrast to sitting before the screen, is not a purely passive exercise. The child, particularly the one who reads a book dealing with real life, has nothing before it but the hieroglyphics of the printed page. Imagination must do the rest; and imagination is called upon to do it. Not so the television screen. Here everything is spelled out for the viewer, visually, in motion, and in all three dimensions. No effort of imagination is called upon for its enjoyment.
And as for thinking, here the question is one of language. The capacity for effective speech is, again, something that comes only through the exercise of it. Listening can be stimulating; it can in some instances invite imitation. But it is not enough. We all know the relative linguistic incoherence of the present younger generation. Very few of today’s young people can express a single thought clearly, firmly, correctly, and coherently. Nor can they write that way. Few teachers would deny, I think, that a depressingly high percentage of students go through both high school and college without acquiring the ability to produce, through their own pens or mouths, a single paragraph of straightforward, lucid English prose.
Much of this, presumably, can be laid to the deficiencies of the schools. But another great part of it comes, surely, from the failure to acquire, or the abandonment of, the habit of reading. And who is to say how much of this, in turn, is the product of the enticing, obliging, competitive presence of the television set in the home or in the student’s room, demanding nothing, providing everything, calling for no effort, linguistic or otherwise, on the part of the spoiled and lazy youngster? It has sometimes seemed to me that the child who has never had the experience of finding itself left to itself on a rainy day in a room with nothing greatly interesting but a filled bookcase, with the rain streaking down the window, with no television set, and with nothing to do but to pick up a book and read, is truly deprived.
And the deprivation goes farther than just denial of the stimulus of reading. For language is the discipline and structure of thought. It is a question whether without clarity of language, there could really be any such thing as concentrated, persistent, and sustained thought.
Here, again, the television set comes in, and not the television set alone but all the other commercialized media as well. For it is, as I said above, the custom of the media to purvey whatever it is they have to purvey in disconnected, staccato bursts or images, never inviting the viewer’s or listener’s attention to any one thought or proposition for more than a few moments, never asking, or allowing time, for any comparison or analysis of contrasting or seemingly conflicting thoughts, and thus not only not stimulating and developing the capacity for sustained and thoughtful attention to any subject but positively debauching it. The press does this; so does television; so do the movies.
In part, of course, this tendency is connected with the cult of the visual image in the place of thought: the image as captured for the fragment of a second on the photographer’s lens; or the moving image similarly captured, but again only briefly and fleetingly, on the motion picture or television screen. And how much of the attention of old and young is appealed to in this present civilization—outstandingly in the commercial media but in others as well—by the supposed presentation of reality in images of just this sort! This writer could not count the times—they must have run into the hundreds—when he has himself been appealed to, and often in the name of “education,” to appear as a performer before one or the other of the photographic media with a view to stating all over again, usually in the form of an interview, this or that disjointed fragment of something he has already written.
Now, isolated images of this sort, like well-selected photographs in a book, can, and sometimes do, serve to make vivid one or the other of the elements in a sequence of sustained thought. In that sense they can, though they rarely do, constitute a minor enrichment of the thought process. But they cannot substitute for thought itself. A mental world dominated by fragmentary images of this nature can hardly be a thoughtful one.
The human mind—intelligence, judgment, the capacity for critical and logical thought—will not be developed without challenge. It will not be developed by passive diversion. It will not be developed by a steady diet of light entertainment. It will not be developed without a schooled sense of language, and exercise in its use. It will be not developed, in short, without trial and discipline. “I cannot praise,” wrote Milton, “a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.”2
The public of a great country that lets a large portion of its leisure time be wasted by steady exposure to media that provide none of this challenge is depriving itself in the most serious way of something that will be vitally needed if it is to retain its competitive importance in the world. There are other parts of the world where want, poverty, or the cruelty of social pressure is producing a more serious and relentless discipline of both mind and body; and this difference, if not corrected, must someday make itself felt in the “dust and heat” of international life.
Conclusions
These two devices, the automobile and television, are only examples of what appear to me to be collective bad habits—addictions, if you will, of American life. What do we see about ourselves on the basis of these examples?
We see that great masses of people, left to themselves and allowed to pursue their private pleasures and interests as the spirit of the day moves them, will spoil themselves if the requisite facilities for doing so are available to them. And the commercial interests—the advertisers and the others—will eagerly provide those facilities, because this involves consumer spending and they make money out of it.
The politicians, left to themselves, and anxious to say only what they think people and the special interests that support them want to hear, will be the last to try to halt this process. Their main concern will be not to oppose it but to exploit it.
The only visible corrective to this sad situation would be leadership—the readiness, that is, of some thoughtful person or persons in high position to look long and carefully at the above-mentioned questions and similar ones, and to say, publicly, persuasively, and persistently, what needs to be said about them, even if this has to be done to the jeopardy of such further electoral prospects as confront them.
This is not the problem of America alone. Other democracies all face it to one degree or another. But in most of the others, it is less serious than in the United States. This is so for various reasons; but among them there is the fact that as a rule the European political parties at least profess to have ideological commitments that oblige them to confront the larger questions of social development, whereas the American parties, being almost totally unideological and quite devoid of such commitments, are not so constrained.
One can contemplate only with sadness and apprehension the prospect of the American federal government intervening in problems of the habits of daily life among the citizenry. Certainly, it would be better if this could be avoided. Yet whenever public authority, here as elsewhere, has stood passively by and permitted technological innovations to be thus recklessly and uncritically appropriated into people’s lives without concern for their social effects, it has assumed, whether or not it meant to, a measure of responsibility (and who else is to do it?), it will draw a cloud—is already drawing such a cloud—over its own adequacy as a form of government for a great people in the modern age.
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I am reminded of the Berlin nightclubs in the wide-open days of the Weimar Republic. The proprietors discovered that the public, salacious as was its curiosity, did not like the dancers entirely naked. A fig leaf made all the difference.
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From the Areopagitica.