N.B. I'll get back to Pope Francis & Laudato Si after catching up on my reading.
The quotes today from Requiem for Modern Politics all concern television. When reading these quotes, ask yourself: would Donald Trump have been a candidate and then president if television as a medium didn't exist?
Television is not an informative medium at all, but a dramatic one: it transmits images, not ideas; it evokes emotions, not thoughts; and it arouses passion, not deliberation. Indeed, at its worst, it is frankly inflammatory. 81
Reading is active: the reader translates printed words on a page into mental images, which takes imagination and thought. Viewing television is passive: the viewer absorbs ready-made images, which takes neither thought nor imagination. Because reading exercises the mind, whereas television entrances and even stupefies it, citizens no longer deliberate but instead respond to events with raw emotion. Television is theIf refore antithetical to the traditional understanding of politics and citizenship in the liberal tradition. 82
Finally, if the goal of civilization is greater consciousness, a position held in one form or another by virtually everyone from Plato to Freud, then television is indeed the enemy of civilization: to use Fruedian language, it fosters more id and less ego, more unconscious emotional reaction and less of the reality principle. In effect, television is psychoanalysis in reverse. 86 [Italics mine]
"If the goal of civilization is greater consciousness": Is this the goal of civilization? If not, what is? What creates "greater consciousness"?
The breathless infotainment style of the media in modern democracies is understandable in a journalistic world operating at breakneck speed and plagued by info-glut, but it is completely inappropriate in an increasingly complex world that demands increasingly sophisticated policy-making.
[I]t’s important to acknowledge that there’s no clear boundary between human beings and their surrounding natural world— that the natural world is intimately part of us. This means that the boundary of our identity— of our “we”— must expand to encompass nature too. “To regain our full humanity,” writes the systems theorist Fritjof Capra, “we have to regain our experience of connectedness with the entire web of life.”
Bluntly put, when democracy no longer delivers the goods, it will be consigned to the dustbin of history by an angry mob.
This is an argument in what is now called decision theory in which one evaluates the preferability of decisions by looking at their payoffs under various possible “states of nature,” the states being weighted by their probabilities of being true. It is clear that Pascal realizes that he has discovered such a science, since he concludes with the phrase: “This is conclusive (démonstratif) and if men are capable of any truth this is it.” Generally, decision theory advises one to choose the decision with the highest expectation, that is, the highest product of probability and corresponding payoff.
Disputes over the best form of society and government can be interpreted in terms of the notion of “social utility.” When we are asking whether some law or economic measure or belief or war or revolution will be best for society, we are wondering if it will contribute to the community’s welfare or utility.
[C]apitalism has destroyed the estates, the corporations, the guilds, the whole structure of feudal society. It has done away with all the collective groups which were a protection for the individual and for his property, which guaranteed him a certain security, though not, of course, complete safety. In their place it has put the “classes,” essentially just two: the exploiters and the exploited.
Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor.
[Owen] Barfield, writing decades before either the New Age or the rise of the cyberworld, makes our responsibility for the phenomenal world the pivot of his insights into participation.
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