Television: The Soul at Risk
CONCLUSION
This is the seventh and last installment of a series on television. It was originally published as a book by Clovis in France (Clovis is the publishing house of the French district of the SSPX).
Charity Towards Our Neighbor
To what extent does television constitute an obstacle to fraternal charity? The Church teaches us that charity towards one’s neighbor has two aspects: patience and service. Patience consists chiefly in bearing with one’s neighbor–his weaknesses, faults, and infirmities; service consists in putting one’s time, money, and person at the service of one’s neighbor.
Telephobic Catholics are often reproached with being uninterested in others and of being withdrawn. Do they lack charity towards their neighbor by deliberately choosing to ignore the necessarily dramatic televised news? No, for a vague and fleeting compassion experienced at these times rarely results in true charity. At the most one gives the alms of a few prayers or some spare change when the catastrophe was really spectacular and widely reported. To be interested in distant events shown on television under pretense of taking an interest in others is ultimately a caricature of charity: in most cases there is no patience and no service.
This interest may even be an easy justification for being uninterested in one’s actual neighbor, the one who lives with us, whose faults and failings one must bear and whom one must serve actively, otherwise than with some spare change. Let us take the case of parents who install their child in front of the television, declaring: “Now I have peace; I don’t need to look after him.” Such parents are refusing both aspects of charity: patience–“I have peace”; and service–“I don’t need to be looking after him.”
Over time, these parents may feel a slight sense of guilt about their child “glued” to the television, so they attempt to maintain some contact, some bond of affection: they awkwardly try to do something, that is, to serve their child in some easy way that reassures them in their role as parents and keeps the child dependent on them. The service rendered consists in doing the child’s chores, bringing him his meals and drinks in front of the television, preparing a tray so that he can watch a program alone in his room.
I recently heard the following statement: “You’re lucky that your children help you. My children don’t do anything. When they come home from school [or college] they sit down in front of the television, and if I tell them to do something, they don’t want to. They never set the table, never make their bed, never tidy their room, and make me do three washes a day and iron their things! I have to do it or else no one will.”
For the author of this statement, any thought of suppressing television is out of the question because the children like it. Since this mother of a family makes no connection between their addiction to television and their poor academic performances, their inability to care for the common good of the family or to set their hand to a task, their great immaturity, it is unlikely that things will improve.
These parents are lacking in charity in another manner: they deprive their children of a normal childhood. The dedication of the book by Liliane Lurçat, Les Enfances volées [Stolen Childhoods] is addressed “to the children without a childhood, whose only memories will be of television series....” For “the children’s free time was annexed by television: it was prison time. And their childhood passed too often without the projects and events that make a childhood from which one will later draw one’s most precious memories.” Moreover, by the time spent before the little screen and by the content of the programs, the child is victim of a triple and even a fourfold abandonment:
The physical abandonment of the child seated or lying too close to the set in a receptive attitude masks other forms of abandonment. He is abandoned morally, since he is entrusted to the seducers of childhood whose task is to retain his attention as much as it is to entertain him and so many other children. He is abandoned emotionally: he is afraid sometimes, left alone with the villains he is shown, and tells no one; he may not even be able to express his fear. He is abandoned intellectually: between what is unreal and what is incomprehensible, how can he understand, how can he account for what he sees?
If no one is there to accompany him, to tell him to stay far enough away from the screen, to choose with him, to diffuse the drama if need be when fright overcomes him, to give him an understanding of what he is watching; if no one is there to speak to him, to listen to him, to suggest something else to him–then he will become accustomed to his solitude. He will adapt to it, and soon he will no longer want the other relationships his parents would like. He will change; he will become progressively someone else, perhaps one of these too numerous children who have acquired the hazardous freedom that street children used to have, confronted by multiple dangers and leaving childhood too soon.
Books, comic books, and magazines can also play a negative role, and parents can abandon their children to bad reading, but the deplorable aspect is less evident, less seductive, and less constant: one is more unwilling to dive into an absurd book; the special effects are not there to compensate for the absurdity or cruelty of the story. One more readily gives up a book that is frightening. How many children have watched a nightmarish film (Planet of the Apes) with their family just so they could be with their parents, while they would never have begun to read such an absurd and frightening story?
Do parents who watch television habitually lack charity towards their neighbor? Yes, because they show that their children hold a reduced place in their hearts. Numerous are the families in which the conversation at dinner is limited to, “Keep quiet, I’m watching TV.” For the child, this means that his person, his cares, his problems, do not amount to much in comparison with the silly soaps, the B films, the sitcoms, the incessantly repeated news. It is enough to make one doubt parental love.
A responsible father or mother of a family is constantly confronted with the various facets of his duty of state: one must incessantly organize, prepare, address, intervene, check, answer, correct, support, explain, listen, speak, reflect, and so on. One cannot at the same time slouch in front of the television several hours a day, devoting to it one’s thoughts and dreams, extinguishing one’s mind and will, and have the promptness, diligence, and attention to others which makes one apt to organize, support, listen, or answer.
In so doing, one places many obstacles in the way of the graces that could wake us up or keep us alert.
In the eyes of children, a parent who habitually watches television is a bit like a parent who takes drugs or drinks. If the parent is incapable of sacrificing his favorite series or sitcom to spend time with the children, if he is dependent to the point of having no self-restraint in the matter, he gives a very bad example: he shows himself to be a passive, pleasure-seeking, selfish being, little likely to inspire respect and love.
This also holds true for priests, those who should take care of our souls. Some justify their time spent in front of the little screen: “You have to know what everyone is watching; you have to live in the same world as they do in order to be on the same wavelength.”
Haven’t they something better to do, these priests who prefer to watch the world rather than look at God and His saints? Is it by polluting his mind, his heart, and his soul that he can bring unbelievers to God?
Television and Evil
The first argument given by telephobes is often that television programming is too violent, morbid, and immoral; the proposed models often call in question or ridicule family models. Inversely, the violence and the morbid images do not seem to trouble other families, some of which even go so far as to justify them as being a part of life. Television violence, it would seem, has a cathartic effect.
About the cathartic effect of violence and morbid images, everything has been said for and against. Usually, people endowed with common sense wonder whether it is a good thing for children to be watching all this violence, while the “intellectuals” assert that watching violence helps viewers to dissipate their aggressive impulses. If it is true that violent, morbid spectacles do not always have tragic or spectacular consequences, one can nevertheless observe that violence overall has not diminished in society. Ergo, the alleged cathartic effect has not occurred.
It has been said that this need for violence is an effect and not a cause. That may be, but it is never good to feast one’s eyes on horror and violence. In the United States and Canada, there are groups organized against televised violence; in these countries serious studies on the connection between media violence and aggressive behavior have been conducted. The American Academy of Pediatrics officially considers that repeated exposure to media violence increases violent tendencies and passivity in its presence. One recent study conducted by the University of Illinois concluded that the best indicator of violent behavior in children over ten years old is, not the goodness of their parents nor their social rank or economic status, but simply the content of the television programming viewed around their eighth year.
Do violence and the sight of morbid spectacles really make up a part of life? Yes and no. Of course violence has existed since original sin. Anger, hatred, and envy lurk in the heart of man. The unleashing of the forces of nature, blunders and human error still cause innumerable violent deaths. However, the parents of previous generations for the most part carefully shielded young children from violent scenes, since the little ones lacked the maturity or the capacity to be useful at the sites of these dramas.
For example, in the novel by Elizabeth Goudge, Island Magic, published in the 1930’s, a mother tries to protect her children from the sight of victims of drowning. In antiquity, violence was not present 24/7 for days and days. During the Hundred Years’ War, scenes of violence and pillaging certainly were not lacking, but they did not occur day in and day out, and people derived no pleasure in beholding them.
In real life, when someone comes upon a scene of violence, he is in a certain sense protected from it: one flees, one intervenes, one is caught up in the action, one does not really comprehend what is happening; perhaps one even receives graces to be blind to the nature and scope of the act. It is only on television and at the movies that the viewer has a right to full view of the particularly unbearable scenes. In real life, one is half anesthetized.
The author of these lines took down the testimony of the victim of crime, a boy of twelve, just minutes afterward. The child had not understood what had happened: someone threatened him with a gun, dragged him into a dark courtyard, disrobed; he was frightened, he fought, but he did not understand what was done to him. The witness did not understand any better.
It is effrontery to pretend that media violence heals aggressive tendencies and diffuses violent behavior. Of course, viewing violent films does not transform all spectators into murderers, fortunately, but it can brutalize them. It is unhealthy to get used to watching difficult situations be resolved by violence. In action movies, patience, goodness, abnegation, and prayer have little place, or else these virtues are treated as naïvete.
One certain effect of media violence is a greater tolerance towards violence in viewers, what the University of Illinois study terms desensitization and indifference towards real-life violence. And then, this violence can frighten, destabilize, and drive to despair. It gives the impression that we live in a terrible, hopeless world in which we are constantly delivered over to evil forces: killers, space aliens, ghosts, monsters, deadly bacteria…
What is most unwholesome in this violence is the attitude of the viewer who takes pleasure in the sometimes fictitious but sometimes real suffering of individuals. St. Augustine already made this comment about the theater:
Stage-plays also drew me away….Why does man like to be made sad when viewing doleful and tragical scenes, which yet he himself would by no means suffer? And yet he wishes, as a spectator, to experience from them a sense of grief, and in this very grief his pleasure consists. What is this but wretched insanity? (Confessions, Book III, ch. ii)
In a violent scene, there is necessarily suffering. Of course, a viewer may watch this suffering in order to understand, to compassionate, or to act, and not to enjoy the spectacle of suffering itself. But a habitual television viewer watches suffering for amusement, like the theater-goers vilified by St. Augustine.
And what would St. Augustine say about voyeuristic reality TV? The viewer enjoys real suffering staged for his viewing pleasure. A guinea pig is placed in a difficult, unusual, dangerous situation and his reactions are filmed. The film is uninteresting if all goes well. For the film to be appealing, there has to be drama: cries, tears, scenes of hysteria and suffering.
One day, a French TV station broadcaster invited us to participate in filming for a reality TV show called Live My Life. It would have involved filming our homeschooling family life, but with the involvement of someone hostile to homeschooling who would take the place of the mother of the family in daily life. The proposal was presented with reassuring arguments: “It involves the confrontation of two points of view: that of someone in favor of homeschooling, and that of someone opposed.”
After having consulted several friends who own television sets and knowing by hear-say about this type of program, we formed this opinion: “People who are interested in homeschooling do not watch this kind of program, and people who watch this kind of program are not interested in homeschooling.” We understood that the purpose was not to inform or to debate, but to enter into a game over which we would have no control. It would be our children who would bear the brunt of the experience: the goal of the broadcast was not to show well-behaved, studious children peacefully learning the multiplication tables or doing spelling exercises, but to provoke situations of conflict that would elicit extreme reactions for the greater enjoyment of the TV viewers.
Another effect inherent in the audiovisual is the encouragement of vanity, the need to appear, to make oneself stand out. People are worried about their image: politicians–and they are not the only ones–learn to sell themselves. They forget their convictions for the sake of the image they seek to convey, for political expedience, for vanity. People want to have a place in the “star system.” They let themselves be formatted by an impresario or public relations adviser to please and to seduce, whether cultivating a conformist or a non-conformist style. People are led to be more concerned about appearances than about being true in their thoughts and words.
This cult of appearance and show ends by affecting the whole of society in varying degrees. The humble virtues are despised: reserve, silence, solitary reflection, and lowly toil are no longer appreciated. Gratuitous and disinterested action is disesteemed: of what use is it if it does not earn money or glory or power?
Not only does television cultivate this primacy of appearance over content by showing us actors, singers, and spokespersons chosen for their advantageous physical appearance–their beauty, their shape, their harmonious features (moreover, their physique often takes the place of talent), but these seductive personalities often perform in sentimental stories in which the sixth and ninth commandments are scoffed and love is always selfish, acquisitive, and narcissistic.
St. John Chrysostom tried in his day to fight against the love of theater: “The husband returns dreaming of the pretty waiting-maid and no longer finds any charm in his faded wife.” Bossuet preached likewise:
Do not love worldly spectacles in which they strive to draw you into other people’s passions and to interest you in their revenges and mad affairs. Do not attend the theater, for everything there, as in the world of which it is the image, is either the concupiscence of the flesh, or the concupiscence of the eyes, or the pride of life. The passions are made delectable, and all the pleasure consists in arousing them….It is untrue that the Fathers found blameworthy in the spectacles only idolatry and blatant indecency. They blamed the uselessness, the dissipation, the mental turmoil, the desire to see and be seen, the decent things surrounding the evil, the play of the passions and the contagious portrayal of vice. (Traité de la concupiscence)
It would seem that good literature is not made of good sentiments. Obviously, in movies and melodramas, bad sentiments are preferred to good ones. It is undoubtedly a matter of marketing, although sometimes, quite unexpectedly, a worthwhile film meets with an unforeseen success, like The March of the Penguins, Microcosmos: The Grass People, or Winged Migration.
It is true that merely watching a film portraying all manner of turpitude is not enough to elicit our consent or for us to start practicing like turpitude. However, as with violence, telephiles have been observed to have a passive acceptance of all the vices, a greater tolerance, as if by dint of having their eyes fixed on television they finally lose their moral discernment.
Conclusion
It is wiser not to have a television set at home. Certainly, we all know elderly people who make a very limited and reasonable use of one (for instance, to watch a knowledge-based game for mental stimulation), but no one is beyond temptation from a guest who would like to watch his favorite programs or a neighbor whose set is broken and invites himself over to watch his series. If one really must see something important or useful to one’s work or apostolate, one can always arrange an invitation from an obliging telephile who, thanks to us, will have a chance to watch a program critically. This type of necessity does not arise often and does not really justify the purchase of a television set.
We should not think that the absence of a television set will eliminate all educational problems: evil can slip in in other ways, and addictive behaviors can take other forms. Replacing television with comic books or video games is not the solution. The absence of television from the home will not protect completely against its sway: sometimes it just takes a stay in the hospital, where television may be watched by the patient sharing your room. Parents’ opposition to television may be interpreted as abuse! Children may be initiated into the use of television when visiting friends or while the parents shop at a department store. It is not always possible to get the set turned off, in which case one should not hesitate to criticize and to express one’s judgment of what has been seen and to make the idols fall from their pedestals: the story was stupid, improbable; the actors performed badly; the producer falsified the subject. We should help the children think about what they have seen so that they at least profit by something.
If one owns DVD’s, strict rules must be imposed, as for comic books, according to the family and the children’s ages. It may be a half an hour per week or once every month or fortnight. It must not be allowed to become a drug, an occupation, or an obsession. It is indispensable to be vigilant over content and frequency. Most of the time, children are not interested in DVD’s about the art of flower arranging, the maintenance of farming equipment, or the mayor’s powers. The danger does not lie there.
It is important to make them understand that being deprived of television is not a punishment–it is a gift, an opportunity, which few children enjoy.
Bibliography
Berrou, Luc. Les méfaits de la télévision sur nos enfants. Avenire de la Culture, 1994.
Blindet, René and Michel Pool. La télévision buissonnière. Ed. Jouvence, 1995.
Keraly, Hugues. Les Médias, le monde et nous. Cercle de la Renaissance française, 1977.
Legrais, Michelle. Neurones en danger. Ed. Transmettre, n.d.
Lemieux, Michel. LÂ’Affreuse Télévision. Guérin, 1990.
Lurçat, Liliane. Le temps prisonnier: Des enfances volées par la télévision. Desclée de Brower, 1995.
Winn, Marie. The Plug-In Drug: Television, Children, and the Family. The Viking Press, 1977.
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