Television the new optium of the people

Title

Creator

Woods, Maurice

Language

English

Source

Volume XV (Issue No.1) January 1963

Year

1963

Subject

Television -- Social aspects

Television viewers

Television -- Psychological aspects

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Abstract

As an instrument for suppressing thought, other than the thoughts doled out for public acceptance, TV has the advantages of an established and unchallengeable Church

Fulltext

As an instrument for suppressing thought, other than the thoughts doled out for public acceptance, TV has the advantages of an established and unchal lengeable Church. - TELEVISION: THE NEW OPTIUM - OF THE PEOPLE ♦ Maurice Woods Much has been said about the influence of TV on peo ple, not enough about the in fluence of people on TV. People get the TV they de serve, just ast they get the Government they deserve. In future they may get both in the same parcel. For TV is an all-purpose drug. It can wake people up and .it can send them to sleep. It could be the most power ful political awakener since the bicycle took revolution to Africa, or it could turn us into pigs and let Circe rule the island. The dangers advertise themselves as loudly as any commercial. Among the most insistant is the possility that TV will enable the majority to tyrannise even more effect ively than now. The very fact that men own TV sets enlarges this fear.* Hungry men do not make a thought ful opposition, but at least they make an opposition: those who are having it good can be persuaded to praise God from whom all consumer goods flow. But a TV set is not merely a possession; it is part of the apparatus of persuasion. It is a powerful preacher of the doctrine that material prosperity is an end in itself. Too firm believers in this doctrine are not trou bled by Lenin’s question “Who, whom?” So long as ' it pays them they are content to be whom, leaving the busi ness of being who to the ma jority their votes keep in po wer. It is not, of course, a new problem. Only the TV is JANUARY 1963 55 new. The problem is at least as old as the Greeks. In our time it is at least as old as John Stuart Mill, who might have been foreseeing televis ed culture when he grew per turbed at the power of col lective mediocrity. What you may ask, is wrong with col lective mediocrity? Has there ever been a time when po pular culture rose above the mediocre? The point is that the culture purveyed by the TV set is not popular culture in the sense of having sprung from the people. It has been given to the people as the lowest common denominator of their fantasies. Men’s attitudes are immea surable. Their opinions do not change as visibly as lit mus paper. It must be many years before anyone can make even a guess at the extent to which TV alters the political life of a nation. Its effect on the adult mind can at pre sent only be inferred from the more precise work done with children. The report brought out by H. T. Himmelweit in 1958 on "Television and the Child” made the positive as sertion that TV influences the way children think and the judgments they make. It is safe to assume that the adult does not go wholly un scathed. Assuming, then, that thoughts and judgments are affected, it is permissible to guess that thoughts become compressed within limits set by the communicators, ana judgments brought into line with those favoured by the majority. The tendency, in fact, is to produce conformity of thought and feeling in a so ciety which can be democra tic only so long as a fruitful interplay of conflicting thoughts and feelings is en couraged. The moment the original thinker becomes a laughing-stock, or the rebel an outcast, tyranny is on the way in. This is not conjec ture, but experience. The brief but bateful triumph of McCarthyism in the United States is a case in point. Gal loping conformism brought American democracy almost to its death-bed. The patie n t ’ s constitution was sound, and it survived: would its recovery have been so swift if thoughts and feelings had lain'congealed in a na tional mould for several de cades? If there had been se tt Panorama veral decades, instead of seve ral years, of TV? Less spectacularly, the ha bit of conforming with con ventional attitudes could give conservatism virtually perpetual ascendancy in any country. Conservatism de mands no thought, simply obedience. As an instrument for suppressing thought, other than the thoughts dol ed out for public acceptance, TV has the advantages of an established and unchallenge able Church. There are gleaming exam ples of the immunity of pre TV democracies to unseen propagandists. One of the distinguishing marks of a de mocracy is its willingness to allow its citizens to listen to any half-truhts from any source, knowing that the mental sinews strengthened by debate will be strong enough to resist. It was not only confidence in the pat riotism of soldiers and civi lians which gave Lord HawHaw the freedom of the war time air. Hearts were judg ed to be right, but heads were also known to have been screwed on firmly by the democratic habit of weighing and selecting argu ments. Totalitarian regimes can not expose their people to opposing views, because the beliefs sustaining totalitarian ism are mere lodgers in the individual’s mind. They have not grown there: they have been put there. So long as nothing disturbs them, the regime is safe. The attitudes likely to be built up in the democratic citizen by years of watching TV bear some re semblance to the beliefs of a totalitarian society. The un critical assimilation of ideas presented on behalf of the majority could wither the fa culty of judgment and pre vent that radical re-examina tion of society on which de mocracies rely for their per iodic rejuvenation. We can still doubt whether TV is having this effect on the electorate. We cannot doubt that it is having an uncanny effect on politicians. They regard it as a potent means of enticing voters on to the hook. It has never mattered much to politicians how the voter is hooked, so long as they can land him. If reason serves, reason will be employed: if not, promis January 1963 57 es, flattery and fervour will do as well. These ancient devices are a legacy of the hustings. TV has devices of its own. What worked well on a platform with a brass band, with mass emotion, op portunist oratory and spon taneous repartee, does not work at all when the sup pliant is in a box by the fireside, addressing a family trapped between the cowboys and the quiz. A policy or a party image must be sold, as other merchandise is sold. The politicians now have schools to teach them slick ness. The cardinal rule is to di vert attention from hard facts to delectable fancies. Hair-cream is not sold by mentioning its popularity among dustmen. It has to be associated with ambition. The young man with the shining mane has a car which he could only have bought out of an enormous salary, he is pestered by beautiful girls, and his social status is rising. What they are selling is not hair-cream but a lucky charm. The appeal is not to reason, but to a submerged reverence for magic which is inimical to democracy, yet is now being played upon more forcefully than was possible before TV was invented. Cleverly handled, the me dium is capable of confering a halo on the shoddiest con sortium of careerist nobodies. The party likeliest to win in an election would be the one with the least respect for the truth. At best, a television campaign could so befuddle the voter that he failed .to distinguish the honest men from the knaves. Not that there would be much incen tive to honesty, when rewards went to the underhanded. Yet even this is not the great est peril. A party which mere ly used the screen to hypno tise the electorate into ac cepting its policies might still have sound policies to offer: the real fear is that the-par ties might grow to look like their own picture of them selves. That is the pessimistic prospect. There is also an optimistic prospect. For TV could yet have precisely the opposite effect. The free mind has surely not outlived centuries of subversion and intimidation to be ensnared so easily by this new instru ment of conformism. Once 58 Panorama the public learns the rules, once discrimination sets in, the individual is just as capa ble of using the communica tors as the communicator of using the individual. The world’s agonies are delivered daily to the living room. Statesmen who were once blurred photographs in newspapers squat in the cor ner and are scrutinised. Science has hopped out of the unopened text-book and displays itself as a living force. Art imposes itself on the notice of people who never entered a gallery. There are few human acti vities concerning which some inFormation, however proces sed, does not percolate to minds hitherto unreceptive. Are we to be so misanthropic as to deny that the public will make good use of this information? By making two blades of knowledge grow where only one grew before, TV has the power to enlarge the mean ing of the phrase “informed public opinion”. Hitherto only a small section of the electorate could lay claim to independence of thought, for independence rests on knowl edge. The more knowledge the ordinary man acquires, the greater' his capacity to question the opinions and at titudes forced upon him. TV thus has the paradoxical abi lity to defeat itself, at its own game, to keep at bay the ma jority dictatorship which threatens to arise in a self satisfied and unthinking de mocracy. Indeed, instead of being the new opium of the people, TV will probably turn out to be a political alarm-clock. The gloomy view is tempt ing in this first decade of its reign, but if we remember that the viewers are matur ing all the time, absorbing unfamiliar* facts, seeing through false personalities, detecting the aces hidden up sleeves, the next decade looks promising. Whatever its ulti mate effect on social and poli tical attitudes there can be no hating an invention which makes people interested in the world’s affair.—Contempora ry Review. JANUARY 1963 59

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