Television: The Soul at Risk
PART 5
This is the fifth 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). The series will continue every month in The Angelus.
Television and the Will
Information, knowledge of the world, and instruction are often only pretexts to justify the purchase of a television set, and even if this motive is genuine on the part of most families, what ought to be a tool of learning and culture, an indispensable object that will enable the children to participate in classroom discussions, very quickly becomes something else. It is used, not for self-improvement, but for relaxation, pleasure, euphoria. The use of television is generally for leisure rather than learning.
The Church teaches us that leisure is legitimate since we need recreation, but certain conditions are necessary for our leisure activity to be morally good:
Can audiovisual entertainment, and television in particular, be ranked among indifferent and harmless pastimes along with cards, golf, or board games? We ought to acknowledge that, if the activity in itself is morally indifferent, the risk of dependence and the concrete circumstances (the programming) dictate a negative response. This leisure-time activity quickly becomes a drug one cannot do without and for which one readily sacrifices one’s duties of state, the attention one should pay to one’s neighbor and to God, and one ends up by watching everything (and anything) provided that one finds the desired pleasure.
Dangerous pastimes have always existed. The circus games were dangerous because the spectacle was unworthy of a Christian soul, and the games unleashed the spectators’ passions. A terrible riot took place in Thessalonica in 390 over a gladiator adulated by the public. Emperor Theodosius commanded the army to put down the riot: there were 7,000 deaths, and St. Ambrose forbade Theodosius to go into a church. Secular literature (Dostoyevsky, Schnitzler) describes passionate gamblers who lose their fortunes and ruin their families.
St. Francis de Sales distinguishes three types of leisure activities: lawful and praiseworthy pastimes and recreations (tennis, chess, dancing, singing, hunting), prohibited games (dice and cards1), and games and pastimes that are lawful but dangerous:
For cards or dancing to be licit we must use them as recreation and at the same time not have any affection for them. We may engage in them for a short time but we must not continue until tired out or stupefied. We must engage in them only on rare occasions for if we indulge in them constantly we turn recreation into work.2
With television, one passes insensibly from a lawful recreation to a dangerous pastime, and from a lawful but dangerous pastime to a pastime that is dangerous for the soul (either because of the content or because of one’s affection for it). What should be a recreation quickly becomes an occupation, and what should be rare becomes regular.
At the time of St. Francis de Sales, good Christians and decent people abstained from improper pastimes under pain of sin. They might overstep the measure in their use of indifferent pastimes, but this excess had natural limits imposed by persons or circumstances: golf cannot be played day and night; in winter it is too cold, partners are not always available, the game is expensive, and you have to go out. Casinos are closed at least some of the time, and you cannot play bridge while half asleep and your partners absent.
Movie theaters, videos, and DVDs also have some limits. For the theater, you have to go out and pay for a ticket, and thy are not open 24 hours a day. For DVDs and videos, people normally make reasonable purchases: we hesitate to buy the latest trashy movie. One would be ashamed to display a collection of idiotic DVDs or videos. One is reluctant to download anything that is not worthwhile. We tend to build our DVD or video collection as carefully as our library.
Everyone can keep bad books, bad magazines, or bad DVDs, and many Catholic priests deplore with reason that our Catholic families are not sufficiently vigilant over the content of their video collection. However, when one has a DVD set on the art of flower arranging, its use will not be abused. One cannot over watch the classics one knows by heart, or a documentary on the history of aviation. One only watches it when one has decided to think about it or study it.
For television, things are otherwise. There is no natural limit: one can watch it all day long and see all kinds of spectacles or news reports without stirring from one’s house, without making any effort, even when one is tired, without choosing or by choosing something easy to digest. In most families, from the programs available, one chooses to watch sitcoms, dramas, sports no one plays, or a B film rather than a cultural program (which will not win a very big audience share in the ratings).
Once one has begun to watch, it is difficult to limit one’s viewing. Even well-balanced people admit as much: “If I had a television, I would watch it all the time, and I would watch the stupid programs,” a researcher for a nuclear research company confided. A teacher said, “At night when I get home from work, I sit mesmerized in front of the television.”
Can television watching remain a simple pastime or a cultural tool without becoming an occupation or, still worse, a drug? It takes a will of iron to use it only as a lawful pastime, constant vigilance if you do not live alone, and strict rules and resolutions, which unfortunately are easily broken.
Very often, television use resembles drug use. What are the ingredients of this drug? And what are the symptoms of a state of dependency?
Television as Drug
Many television viewers recognize it: they watch television because they experience an irresistible need to watch something. They would suffer from withdrawal symptoms if they did not turn on their set.
The Ingredients of the Drug
A documentary on the raising and milking of goats or how tractors work has little chance of seducing TV viewers: to glue them to the set, an injection of action, and especially of violence, is required. But the violence must not be constant: some relief is necessary. Mel Gibson told an interviewer that he inserted flash-backs in The Passion of the Christ to afford the viewers some respite from the overwhelming scenes: that’s a film-maker’s trick, he explained.
If you happen to catch the afternoon programming, while visiting a hospital, for instance, you can observe the alternation of violence (invariably dramatic news broadcasts: war, fires, natural catastrophes; police or action movies) and vacuity: B films, silly games, car racing, stupid jokes, soap operas, and sitcoms.
Of course, it is not always the same car race, the same match, or the same episode, but the sequence is rather standard: one goes from violent and anguishing spectacles to filler scenes without much interest. One surmises that behind all this lies a calculation, a manipulation: to what end? “I spend my days imagining how to hook families to the TV and I spend my evenings thinking up ways to unhook my children,” revealed Nicolas de Tavernost, the first assistant of the Bertelmann Group on M6 (Paris-Match, 2007).
According to Michel Lemieux, a Canadian author, the relationship between violent scenes and filler has been carefully calculated, reduced to a formula, by the directors of TV stations, the goal being to lengthen the advertising segments to satisfy the advertisers.4 But TV viewers get tired of the advertising, so they have to be offered sufficiently interesting programming so that they don’t walk away, a scientifically dosed mix of violence, action, and filler.5 This author’s analysis is certainly true to a point; it is obvious that the programming is calculated and dosed by experts. As for the reasons why they do it, one may dare think it is not simply for the sake of product advertising. One may reasonably think that behind these calculations, these manipulations, lie political and even religious motives.
When we watch television, we are being manipulated by people who want to compel us to stay put. The danger is less with DVDs and videocassettes, but one can still be caught in the combine by preferring to watch action movies or trite films and comedies, by always seeking to find pleasure and relaxation.
The Symptoms
Drug addicts themselves make comparisons between drugs and television: on drugs, they relive the state of pure awareness they had experienced watching television. The state of pure awareness is described by a specialist on drug use:
...the person is completely and vividly aware of his experience, but there are no processes of thinking, manipulating, or interpreting going on. The sensations fill the person’s attention, which is passive, but absorbed in what is occurring, which is usually experienced as intense and immediate. Pure awareness is experiencing without associations to what is there.6
It is not an exaggeration to say that the majority of television viewers watch television in a state analogous to that of pure awareness. The mind does not work, does not think, and does not interpret. Besides: the programs chosen and watched, in most cases, do not lend themselves to thought.
The drug experience is intense and immediate, like that of television, especially when watching programs like the ones described above: one need only press a button on the remote. It may seem paradoxical to speak of an intense, immediate experience when we have seen that the relationship with the real has been mediatized, and we shall see that the relationship with others is equally mediatized. For, with television, one is no longer connected to reality: one’s perceptions are not of real life, which is rather uniform and which leaves much room for reflection and obliges us to pay attention to our neighbor. In real life, sensorial shocks are rare. Thus the experience the viewers get from television is of a different kind than that provided by real life. It is an experience similar to that obtained by the use of drugs and which introduces the television viewers, especially children, into the logic of a consumer society: having everything, and having it now, while a relationship with the world or other people is not immediate. What is immediate is emotional experience and pleasure.
Another analogy with drug use is dependence. We all know people (adults or children) who cannot bear to go anywhere, to leave on vacation or stay somewhere unless they are sure of having a television set at their disposal, or people who cannot bear it when their television set is not working.
We also know people whose conversation mainly revolves around the television program watched the night before, not really to discuss, analyze, or critique it, but to attempt to relive the scenes and the emotions: “Did you see him fall?”–“It was awesome.” “Did you see when X punched Y in the head?”– “It was a boring.” “It was awesome.”– “Did you see the towers blowing up?”
For many children, teenagers, or elderly people, the main preoccupation and the only important question of the day is “What are we going to watch today?” and the only reading that finds acceptance in their eyes is the television guide.
We have all experienced persons in a hospital room who, without a word, have inflicted their favorite programs on us as soon as they arrived in the room. Many adults recognize the fact: “We need to turn it on and watch something.”
Television has often been presented as an opening to the world, but the addicts very nearly always watch the same thing: sports, variety shows, soap operas, made-for-TV melodramas, reality TV, and sitcoms. They do not watch classic films, serious documentaries, or cultural broadcasts because they do not find the sensations they are looking for, and they especially do not want to have to think.
A TV addict needs to increase the dosage in quantity and intensity to obtain the same effects; for a teenager today, a big consumer of movies and TV series, “it’s boring” when there is not enough violence or special effects.
Interestingly, the remakes of classic films always include a larger serving of violence and strong emotions. The Chorus (Les Choristes), a kind of plagiarism of the 1945 film A Cage of Nightingales (La Cage aux Rossignols), provides a good illustration of this progression towards violence: the producers introduced some crude language, a brief verbal suggestion of sexual impropriety, a few violent scenes, a mean and dangerous boy; the children and all the other characters are hard and cruel; the fire at the end is deliberate and no longer an accident; the ending is not really happy (no more marriage at the church). The remake terribly lacks a sense of humor.
We also observe in TV lovers, as in drug users, a disinterest in real life (too simple) and in volunteer work (too constraining, not enjoyable enough): school principals complain of the absenteeism of parents from school programs. Everyone deplores how hard it is to stimulate participation in different groups and choirs for lack of volunteers, available and efficient people even if working hours decrease.
Parish life is reduced almost everywhere to the minimum: even parishioners who live near the church do not bother to go to monthly events in the evening if it conflicts with the time of a film or evening television broadcast.
One summer camp director confided: “It is hard to keep the young people occupied nowadays; trail games don’t interest them the way they did 20 years ago. What they want are strong emotions: rafting and trips to night clubs in the evening.”
“Once they get television, it’s over for the movement, the struggle….They doze, they think they’re happy,” a leftist priest complains in a novel by Michael Saint-Pierre.
The celebrity TV host Jacques Martin declared in 1992: “I’m a TV man; I do television. And I know that the best way to extinguish reading, to kill genuine curiosity, to give up travel plans, or to refuse to go out in the evening, is to turn on that rubbish” (quoted by the newspaper Présent).
What are the effects of television on sensitivity? The studies are formal: television dulls people’s sensitivities to real events. The verdict may be more complex than it seems: on the one hand, researchers observe that murderous children are abnormally insensitive. In our society, the words abortion and euthanasia are bandied as if these things were banal, natural; on the other hand, many people have an overly sentimental, emotional reaction in circumstances in which they should be especially circumspect and lucid. Everything depends, no doubt, on what they watch: for some it is horror movies, for others romances: the effects are not the same on the sensibility, yet they are real. This admixture of indifference, egotism, cruelty, sentimentality, and emotionalism so typical of our society resembles the behavior typical of alcoholics, drug addicts, and even the yogis.
Another effect resembling that of drug use or alcoholism is the depressive state affecting the habitual users of television, who display addictive behavior: like the alcoholic who first drinks to forget his cares and then drinks to forget he’s an alcoholic, the TV addicts [“telephages”] first turn to television to relieve a real suffering: boredom, solitude, or fatigue, and end up by watching to forget their inactivity. The TV addicts, moreover, never boast of spending their time in front of the tube: it is rather something shameful that they hide. They will never say: “I had an excellent week: I watched television eight hours a day.” Those who say “I really enjoyed myself watching this program; I had a fine time last evening watching a movie” are not television viewers with an addictive behavior, but rather infrequent viewers.
This bulimic consumption of images does not preclude the consumption of tranquilizers, and most likely aggravates the depressive state: watching television does not bring any real help.
As with drugs and alcohol, the consumers of television know that television watching does not bring them happiness. Of course, it is necessary to distinguish between habitual consumers with an addictive behavior from the occasional user (but are there really occasional consumers?), just as it is necessary to distinguish between the alcoholic and the moderate consumer and fan of good wine. The consumers of television know that television does not make them happy, just as alcoholics or drug addicts know that their vice does not make them happy. In questionnaires focusing on moments of happiness, television is always ranked last by people who use television a lot.
The Effects of TV on Daily Life
It is very difficult to establish scientifically the negative effects of television on daily life and behavior: one can always object that the anomalous behavior has nothing to do with television. To verify the effects of television on daily life, the best procedure is to make a comparative study of life with and without television.
In the United States and in Germany, volunteers are regularly solicited to participate in experiments to study life without television for a given time. The experiments are always encouraging: the volunteers are very satisfied with life without television. They have more time to talk, to get together as a family, to play. They spend more of their time working or pursuing a hobby. The family members help one another, read, and listen to music.
In the work by Marie Winn cited above, the families that had participated in the 1974 Denver experiment were all overjoyed by the positive effects of life without television. Yet, once the experiment concluded, they all went back to their former habits of frantic consumption. They regretted losing the benefits of a life freed from television, but nonetheless preferred to return to their former state of dependence, passivity, and regression procured by the silver screen.
“It’s like with cigarettes,” explained one of the volunteers who participated in the experiment; “once the habit is acquired, it is hard to break.”
(To be continued.)
1 When, of course, the games are played for money. Cf. St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life, Third Part, 31–34.
2 Introduction to the Devout Life, tr. by John K. Ryan (New York: Image Books), Third Part, 34, p. 212.
3 Editor’s Note. There would be much to say about the movie Monsieur Vincent, which, despite its undeniable cinematographic quality, gives a false impression of St. Vincent de Paul. The man who founded a women’s congregation and a men’s congregation, giving to the latter three main ends (the sanctification of its members, evangelizing the rural poor, and sacerdotal sanctity), and who was a tireless apostle and a man of prayer, becomes, in the image the movie creates, almost uniquely a temporal benefactor of the needy.
4 Michel Lemieux, L’Affreuse Télévision (Guérin, 1990), p. 31.
5 After all, the “soaps,” or soap operas, the popular melodramatic television series peopled with stereotyped characters, were at the origin of works produced to be interrupted by advertisements for soap products, whence their appellation.
6 Marie Winn, The Plug-in Drug: Television, Children, and the Family (New York: Viking Press, 1977), p. 99, quoting from “The Effects of Marijuana on Consciousness,” in Charles Tart, Altered States of Consciousness (1969).
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