Usually when I preach a sermon I am pretty sure what I'm talking about and where I want to go with it. This time I'm not even sure if I'm asking the right question. I do know that there is a question to be asked, but perhaps it is several questions, and the connections and patterns that I see are not entirely genuine. Nevertheless, I find myself confused and worried, and sometimes utterly disgusted and revolted by much in our modern culture. I find myself hoping that I am wrong, that all these matters are isolated and essentially meaningless, that there are no significant conclusions to be drawn, that my alarm is simply that of an old fogy who just doesn't like the changes that she sees around her. After all, each generation has pointed with alarm to the degeneration of the next as long as we have had records of such things. I suspect that the hunters who killed their prey by throwing rocks at it were disgusted by those effete wimps who used sharpened sticks, removing much of the sporting element from the hunt. Nevertheless, if I am right, it seems to me that we should look very carefully at what is happening and find some ways to counter it or direct it toward something better.
What triggered all this, of course, is reality TV. I did not watch "Survivor," nor do I know very many people who did - or at least not much of it - but I understand that it was one of the most popular shows on television, and that its final episode was watched by a record crowd. Those who didn't watch it dismissed it as simple voyeurism, but I'm not sure that such a huge percentage of our populace reveling in voyeurism is that simple. I think, too, that there is more to it than that, but in its cousin, "Big Brother," I don't know what other motivation there could be. In "Survivor" people imagined the possibility, at least, of danger, of primeval living, even though everyone knew that in fact there were cameras on them at all times, and what was actually shown were carefully selected and structured incidents which would make it all more exciting. In "Big Brother," my informant tells me, it's just gossip. One assumes that the interest there, if interest there can be, is in the expected rawness of emotions generated by isolated living conditions. I have read about it, you understand, though I haven't been able to bring myself to watch it, having a very low boredom threshold.
However, in "Big Brother" I have found myself with other concerns. One is the very title of the show. When I hear it my skin crawls. I will not say that it is entirely inappropriate. It is based, of course, on the tyrant in the book 1984, who was able to maintain a 24-hour surveillance of every soul in the country in order to keep absolute control. "Big Brother is watching you," we used to say in jest when we would hear of some obtrusive governmental invasions of privacy. This show is simply 24-hour surveillance that its subjects voluntarily and eagerly submit to for the sake of money and notoriety. One of them said that his greatest desire was to have the National Enquirer reporters searching through his garbage for a story. Then he would know that he had arrived. Calling the show "Big Brother" trivializes Orwell's vision, of course, but I think it also shows a terrible gap in understanding and an indifference to human dignity. Well, they probably haven't read the book.
These shows are just the present examples of something that's been going on for a while now. Reality TV, we're told, began with MTV shows where the participants, I understand, were discussing questions of some philosophical or psychological interest. I didn't watch that either, and know very little about it, but I think the real precursors of these shows are the talk shows in which people are willing to disregard any shred of pride and dignity for the sake of telling the most sordid details of their lives for national television. They got paid, of course, but there are some things that we used to consider not for sale - like the honor of our families or our own integrity. What is worse, people watched these shows - watched them regularly, excitedly, obsessively. It reminds me of my feeling about prostitution. I've always felt some sympathy for prostitutes. It is a sordid and dangerous way to survive, but sometimes it seems to be the only way. What I never understood was the johns. Why in the world would anyone patronize a prostitute? (Don't bother to try to explain it to me. I've gotten explanations even from people who have done it themselves, and although I certainly understand it on a surface level, the psychological quirks that think sex for money is ok are ones that will never make sense to me as anything but a failing of the human spirit.)
That's the way I feel about the voyeurs who get their kicks out of watching people talk about their experiences of unfaithfulness, abuse, incest, betrayal, pedophilia - all the ways that human beings suffer themselves and bring suffering to others. We need to know about these things, but when they become a popular form of entertainment, it becomes enormously troubling to me. I remember the demands of the Queen of England that she come out and bare her emotions to a slavering public when Princess Diana was killed. When I expressed my distaste, it was suggested to me that the Queen has a particular role in which her emotions can no longer be private. I hold no brief for the English royal family, considering the younger generation vulgar and the older one perhaps merely too inbred for intelligence, but they were, in fact, modeling the appropriate way to respond to personal tragedy with an admixture of sordidness - with silence and dignity. The public was robbed of the entertainment value they were expecting. The real tragedy in this whole incident was that the public believed that they had any vested interest in it at all - that they would mourn so extravagantly for someone they did not even know and condemn any behavior less extravagant than their own.
There is another phenomenon which seems almost unbelievable to me, and that is those personal web pages whose owner has set up cameras and sound equipment to record and post every moment - well, I suppose and trust not really every moment - of his or her day, from brushing teeth to eating, to doing the dishes, or homework, or whatever, and these web pages get thousands of hits every day. I don't know whether it is harder for me to believe that people would be willing to display the details of their lives to thousands of strangers, or that those thousands of strangers would be even mildly interested. Yet they are. Really!
Another part of this story seems to be those two young men in Littleton, CO, at Columbine High School, who shot as many of their classmates and teachers as they felt they could before turning their guns on themselves. One of their strongest motivations, much stronger, it seemed to me, than their sense of anger and alienation from their classmates, was their desire to obtain some kind of lasting notoriety, to have the story on every TV station, and to pass into history. I have forgotten their names. To them their lives were not real, as clearly their classmates' lives must not have been real to them, or they could not have taken them so casually, but they themselves could only be authenticated by having their names and faces on the television screen.
There is a great deal of discussion of the amount of violence in all of our arts these days, on television and in the movies and in rap music. I actually heard one of those songs the other day - snatches of it. I'm sure that is often what is playing on car radios or CD players that pass me on the road, but it has always been too quick for me to make out any of it, and despite my desire to understand what is happening in this sometimes scary world of ours, I have never sought it out. The other day, however, there was a CD blaring from a car in the parking lot of my apartment complex, and I heard far more of it than I wanted to. It was just as horrifying as I had been led to believe, packed with images of violence and misogyny and with words that I do not use and almost wish I didn't understand. Again, it is not so much that people will perform such stuff that bothers me, but that there is an audience for it. And not just a few people - a wide audience. So much of it seems extreme, extravagant, primal, with no subtleties or sophistication, just basic human urges expressed in their rawest form.
Another thing which perhaps doesn't seem a part of all this, but which I think probably is, is the popularity of extreme sports. It started with bungee jumping, but there are now many sports in which people take part which are extremely dangerous, and which take every survival instinct that the participants have. An extreme sports package was even one of the grand prizes on "Wheel of Fortune" last season, and it occurred to me to wonder what would happen if someone who really hated the idea were to win it. If you get a pair of Harleys you could always sell them, but what would you do with something like that if you were more interested in your personal safety than in testing your limits?
I think the success of The Blair Witch Project also relates at least peripherally to the kind of thing I'm talking about. Although the participants were all actors and knew that they were in an acting situation, the environment had at least the simulation of reality, and they reacted not just to the situation but to one another in their (more or less) own life roles. Method acting to the max. That I saw as an interesting experiment, but its impact, it seemed to me, was more like that of reality TV than a real artistic expression.
I realize, of course, that it has always been true that one person's artistic expression has always been another person's junk, that one person's pleasure is another's pet avoidance, and that one generation's choices seem to the previous one to be downright destructive, so why am I so concerned at this latest kink. Surely it is simply another fad which will have its day until another one is discovered - maybe playing scrabble and reading classics. Maybe, but it seems to me to be more serious than that. It is not the expressions themselves that bother me so much, although some of them like the Columbine incident, that rap song, and the reaction to poor, silly, Princess Diana's death have horrified me, but what seems to me to be the underlying significance. Most people today are filled with data, facts, quanta of information. Some of it is true, much of it is not, but it is all discrete, unrelated to anything else, and there is little to relate it to a world-view of the way things are. Conspiracy theorists are gaining adherents. People believe the unbelievable with hardly a check, but are cynical about things that it seems to me are completely within the realm of truth, or at least high probability. Things on TV that they know are not real look just as real as things that are. So how do they know they really are real? Individuals plausibly argue that the moon landing was cleverly faked and deny the reality of the holocaust while believing that they really knew Princess Diana personally. Too many of us seem to have lost the tools to think critically, to make judgments, to winnow fantasy from reality. We seem, some of us, to doubt that we ourselves are real, and so we look for verification and authentication. And we need it, because all the connections seem to be lost, in-your-face, basic, stripped of complexities and subtleties. We want reality so desperately, without knowing for sure what reality is, that we will embrace anything that gives even the illusion of it. Even if it is boring, even if it is dangerous, even if it is evil. Those people who are willing to show their most private sins and sufferings or their most mundane activities on TV are, in part, I believe, looking for authentication. Those who watch them are in part verifying the reality of their own lives. Yet, because it is not really reality, it must become more extreme in its incident and impact, and for some their own lives are only verified in the extreme experience. Day to day living, in context, is no longer real enough because the context is gone.
I think that is the problem. Our lives have lost their sense of meaning in the bombardment of unrelated facts, unrelated incidents, unrelated experiences, even unrelated relationships. We have no context for verification or authentication except the TV, computer and movie screens. If this is true, and I will admit that I am more worried about it than sure, then at least I have found the right question. How can we create a context of meaning in which the daily lives of each of us are fulfilling and significant, where the connections are clear, where we can test reality within a context that we know is real. I think I'm beginning to understand the problem. I think it really is a problem, rather than merely my personal response to my own prejudices. Now if you have any ideas for a solution....
I think that is the problem. Our lives have lost their sense of meaning in the bombardment of unrelated facts, unrelated incidents, unrelated experiences, even unrelated relationships. We have no context for verification or authentication except the TV, computer and movie screens. If this is true, and I will admit that I am more worried about it than sure, then at least I have found the right question. How can we create a context of meaning in which the daily lives of each of us are fulfilling and significant, where the connections are clear, where we can test reality within a context that we know is real. I think I'm beginning to understand the problem. I think it really is a problem, rather than merely my personal response to my own prejudices. Now if you have any ideas for a solution....