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                Imprimis, On Line -- February 1992
        
        Imprimis, meaning "in the first place," is a free
        monthly publication of Hillsdale College (circulation
        360,000 worldwide). Hillsdale College is a liberal arts
        institution known for its defense of free market
        principles and Western culture and its nearly 150-year
        refusal to accept federal funds. Imprimis publishes
        lectures by such well-known figures as Ronald Reagan,
        Jeane Kirkpatrick, Tom Wolfe, Charlton Heston, and many
        more. Permission to reprint is hereby granted, provided
        credit is given to Hillsdale College. Copyright 1992.
        For more information on free print subscriptions or
        back issues, call 1-800-437-2268, or 1-517-439-1524,
        ext. 2319.
        
                       -------------------------
        
               "Television: The Cyclops That Eats Books"
                 by Larry Woiwode, Best Selling Author
        
                       -------------------------
        
                          Volume 21, Number 2
              Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan 49242
                             February 1992
        
                       -------------------------
        
        Preview: Once, radio was called "the treadmill to
        oblivion." Novelist Larry Woiwode reminds us that
        television has even greater potential for harm. On
        campus last February for Hillsdale's Center for
        Constructive Alternatives seminar, "Freedom,
        Responsibility and the American Literary Tradition,"
        Woiwode, best-selling author of The Neumiller Stories
        and other contemporary fiction, vividly described the
        profound changes wrought by this modern "Cyclops."
        
                       -------------------------
        
        What is destroying America today is not the liberal
        breed of one-world politicians, or the IMF bankers, or
        the misguided educational elite, or the World Council
        of Churches; these are largely symptoms of a greater
        disorder. If there is any single institution to blame,
        it is, to use the cozy diminutive, "TV."
        
             TV is more than a medium; it has become a full-
        fledged institution, backed by billions of dollars each
        season. Its producers want us to sit in front of its
        glazed-over electronic screen, press our clutch of
        discernment through the floorboards, and sit in a
        spangled, zoned-out state ("couch potatoes," in current
        parlance) while we are instructed in the proper liberal
        tone and attitude by our present-day Plato and
        Aristotle--Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw. These television
        celebrities have more temporal power than the teachings
        of Aristotle and Plato have built up over the
        centuries.
        
             Television, in fact, has greater power over the
        lives of most Americans than any educational system or
        government or church. Children are particularly
        susceptible. They are mesmerized, hypnotized and
        tranquilized by TV. It is often the center of their
        world; even when the set is turned off, they continue
        to tell stories about what they've seen on it. No
        wonder, then, that as adults they are not prepared for
        the front line of life; they simply have no mental
        defenses to confront the reality of the world.
        
        
                           The Truth About TV
        
        One of the most disturbing truths about TV is that it
        eats books.
        
             Once out of school, nearly 60 percent of all adult
        Americans have never read a single book, and most of
        the rest read only one book a year. Alvin Kernan,
        author of The Death of Literature, says that reading
        books "is ceasing to be the primary way of knowing
        something in our society." He also points out that
        bachelor's degrees in English literature have declined
        by 33 percent in the last 20 years and that in many
        universities the courses are largely reduced to
        remedial reading. American libraries, he adds, are in
        crisis, with few patrons to support them.
        
             Thousands of teachers at the elementary, secondary
        and college levels can testify that their students'
        writing exhibits a tendency toward a superficiality
        that wasn't seen, say, ten or fifteen years ago. It
        shows up not only in the students' lack of analytical
        skills but in their poor command of grammar and
        rhetoric. I've been asked by a graduate student what a
        semicolon is. The mechanics of the English language
        have been tortured to pieces by TV. Visual, moving
        images--which are the venue of television--can't be
        held in the net of careful language. They want to break
        out. They really have nothing to do with language. So
        language, grammar and rhetoric have become fractured.
        
             Recent surveys by dozens of organizations also
        suggest that up to 40 percent of the American public is
        functionally illiterate; that is, our citizens' reading
        and writing abilities, if they have any, are so
        seriously impaired as to render them, in that handy
        jargon of our times, "dysfunctional." The problem isn't
        just in our schools or in the way reading is taught: TV
        teaches people not to read. It renders them incapable
        of engaging in an art that is now perceived as
        strenuous, because it is an active art, not a passive
        hypnotized state.
        
             Passive as it is, television has invaded our
        culture so completely that you see its effects in every
        quarter, even in the literary world. It shows up in
        supermarket paperbacks, from Stephen King (who has a
        certain clever skill) to pulp fiction. These are really
        forms of verbal TV--literature that is so superficial
        that those who read it can revel in the same sensations
        they experience when they are watching TV.
        
             Even more importantly, the growing influence of
        television has, Kernan says, changed people's habits
        and values and affected their assumptions about the
        world. The sort of reflective, critical and value-laden
        thinking encouraged by books has been rendered
        obsolete. In this context, we would do well to recall
        the Cyclopes--the race of giants that, according to
        Greek myth, predated man.
        
             Here is a passage from the well known classicist
        Edith Hamilton's summary of the encounter between the
        mythic adventurer Odysseus and the Cyclops named
        Polyphemus, as Odysseus is on his way home from the
        Trojan Wars. Odysseus and his crew have found
        Polyphemus's cave:
        
              "At last he came, hideous and huge, tall as a
           great mountain crag. Driving his flock before him he
           entered and closed the cave's mouth with a ponderous
           slab of stone. Then looking around he caught sight
           of the strangers, and cried out in a dreadful
           booming voice, 'Who are you who enter unbidden the
           house of Polyphemus? Traders or thieving pirates?'
           They were terror-stricken at the sight and sound of
           him, but Odysseus made shift to answer, and firmly
           too: 'Shipwrecked warriors from Troy are we, and
           your supplicants, under the protection of Zeus, the
           supplicants' god.' But Polyphemus roared out that he
           cared not for Zeus. He was bigger than any god and
           feared none of them. With that, he stretched out his
           mighty arms and in each great hand seized one of the
           men and dashed his brains out on the ground. Slowly
           he feasted off them to the last shred, and then,
           satisfied, stretched himself out across the cavern
           and slept. He was safe from attack. None but he
           could roll back the huge stone before the door, and
           if the horrified men had been able to summon courage
           and strength enough to kill him they would have been
           imprisoned there forever."
        
             To discover their fate, read the book, preferably
        Robert Fitzgerald's masterful translation, if you don't
        know Greek. What I find particularly appropriate about
        this myth as it applies today is that, first, the
        Cyclops imprisons these men in darkness, and that,
        second, he beats their brains out before he devours
        them. It doesn't take much imagination to apply this to
        the effects of TV on us and our children.
        
        
                        TV's Effect on Learning
        
        Quite literally, TV affects the way people think. In
        Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
        (1978), Jerry Mander quotes from the Emery Report,
        prepared by the Center for Continuing Education at the
        Australian National University, Canberra, that when we
        watch television, "our usual processes of thinking and
        discernment are semi-functional at best." The study
        also argues "...that while television appears to have
        the potential to provide useful information to viewers-
        -and is celebrated for its educational function--the
        technology of television and the inherent nature of the
        viewing experience actually inhibit learning as we
        usually think of it." And its final judgment is: "The
        evidence is that television not only destroys the
        capacity of the viewer to attend, it also, by taking
        over a complex of direct and indirect neural pathways,
        decreases vigilance-- the general state of arousal
        which prepares the organism for action should its
        attention be drawn to a specific stimulus."
        
             We have all experienced this last reaction: "Dad,
        it's time to--"
        
             "Go on, get out of here!"
        
             "But Dad, Mom just fell down the--"
        
             "Leave me alone, can't you see I'm watching the
        Super Bowl?"
        
             How are our neural pathways taken over? We think
        we are looking at a picture, or an image of something,
        but what we are actually seeing is thousands of dots of
        light blinking on and off in a strobe effect that is
        calculated to happen rapidly enough to keep us from
        recognizing the phenomenon. More than a decade ago,
        Mander and others pointed to instances of "TV
        epilepsy," in which those watching this strobe effect
        overextended their capacities, and the New England
        Journal of Medicine recently honored this affliction
        with a medical classification: video game epilepsy.
        
        
                         Shadows on the Screen
        
        Television also teaches that people aren't quite real;
        they are images--gray-and-white shadows or technicolor
        little beings who move in a medium no thicker than a
        sliver of glass, created by this bombardment of
        electrons.
        
             Unfortunately, the tendency is to start thinking
        of them in the way children think when they see too
        many cartoons: that people are merely objects that can
        be zapped. Or that can fall over a cliff and be smashed
        to smithereens and pick themselves up again. This
        contentless violence of cartoons has no basis in
        reality. Actual people aren't images but substantial,
        physical, corporeal beings with souls.
        
             And, of course, the violence on television
        engenders violence; there have been too many studies
        substantiating this to suggest otherwise. One that has
        been going on for 30 years, begun by the psychologist
        Leonard Eron, began research on 875 8-year-olds in New
        York state. Analyzing parental childrearing practices
        and aggressiveness in school, Eron discovered that the
        determining factor is the amount of TV parents permit
        their children to watch.
        
             Eron's present partner in this extensive on-going
        study, University of Illinois professor of psychology
        Rowell Huesmann, has written:
        
             "When the research was started in 1960, television
        viewing was not a major focus. But in 1970, in the 10-
        year follow-up, one of the best predictions we could
        find of aggressive behavior in a teenage boy was how
        much violence he watched as a child. In 1981, we found
        that the adults who had been convicted of the most
        serious crimes were those same ones who had been the
        more aggressive teenagers, and who had watched the most
        television violence as children."
        
             Where is this report? Buried in an alumni
        publication of the University of Illinois. In 1982, the
        National Institute of Mental Health published its own
        study: "Television and Behavior: Ten Years of
        Scientific Progress and Implications for the '80s."
        This report stated that there is "overwhelming"
        evidence that violence on TV lends to aggressive
        behavior in children and teenagers. Those findings were
        duly reported by most of the major media in the early
        '80s and then were forgotten.
        
             Why do such reports sink into oblivion? Because
        the American audience does not want to face the reality
        of TV. They are too consumed by their love for it.
        
        
                      TV: Eating Out Our Substance
        
        TV eats books. It eats academic skills. It eats
        positive character traits. It even eats family
        relationships. How many families do you know that spend
        the dinner hour in front of the TV, seldom
        communicating with one another? How many have a
        television on while they have breakfast or prepare for
        work or school?
        
             And what about school? I've heard college
        professors say of their students, "Well, you have to
        entertain them." One I know recommends using TV and
        film clips instead of lecturing, "throwing in a
        commercial every ten minutes or so to keep them awake."
        This is not only a patronizing attitude, it is an
        abdication of responsibility: A teacher should teach.
        But TV eats the principles of people who are supposed
        to be responsible, transforming them into passive
        servants of the  Cyclops.
        
             TV eats out our substance. Mander calls this the
        mediation of experience: "[With TV] what we see, hear,
        touch, smell, feel and understand about the world has
        been processed for us." And, when we "cannot
        distinguish with certainty the natural from the
        interpreted, or the artificial from the organic, then
        all theories of the ideal organization of life become
        equal." In other words, TV teaches that all life-styles
        and all values are equal, and that there is no clearly
        defined right and wrong. In his Amusing Ourselves to
        Death, one of the more brilliant recent books on the
        tyranny of television, the author Neil Postman wonders
        why nobody has pointed out that television possibly
        oversteps the injunction in the Decalogue against
        making graven images.
        
             In the 1960s and 1970s, many of the traditional
        standards and mores of society came under heavy
        assault; indeed, they were blown apart, largely with
        the help of television which was just coming into its
        own. There was an air of unreality about many details
        of daily life. Even the "big" moral questions suffered
        distortion when they were reduced to TV images. During
        the Vietnam conflict there was graphic violence--
        soldiers and civilians actually dying--on screen. One
        scene that shocked the nation was an execution in which
        the victim was shot in the head with a pistol on prime-
        time TV. People "tuned in" to the war every night, and
        their opinions were largely formed by what they viewed,
        as if the highly complex and controversial issues about
        the causes, conduct, and resolution of the war could be
        summed up in these superficial broadcasts.
        
             You saw the same phenomena again in the recent war
        in the Gulf. With stirring background music and
        sophisticated computer graphics, each network's banner
        script read across the screen, "WAR IN THE GULF," as if
        it were just another TV program. War isn't a program.
        It is a dirty, bloody mess. People are killed daily.
        Yet, television all but teaches that this carnage is
        merely another diversion, a form of blockbuster
        entertainment--the big show with all the international
        stars present.
        
             In the last years of his life, Malcolm Muggeridge,
        a pragmatic and caustic TV personality and print
        journalist who embraced religion in later life, warned:
        
             "From the first moment I was in the studio, I felt
        that it was far from being a good thing. I felt that
        television [would] ultimately be inimical to what I
        most appreciate, which is the expression of truth,
        expressing your reactions to life in words. I think
        you'll live to see the time when literature will be
        quite a rarity because, more and more, the presentation
        of images is preoccupying."
        
             Muggeridge concluded:
        
        "I don't think people are going to be preoccupied with
        ideas. I think they are going to live in a fantasy
        world where you don't need any ideas. The one thing
        that television can't do is express ideas....There is a
        danger in translating life into an image, and that is
        what television is doing. In doing it, it is falsifying
        life. Far from the camera's being an accurate recorder
        of what is going on, it is the exact opposite. It
        cannot convey reality nor does it even want to."
        
                              ------------
        
        Profiled recently by People magazine as one of
        America's leading novelists, Larry Woiwode is the
        author of What I'm Going to Do, I Think (Farrar, Straus
        & Giroux, 1969), Beyond the Bedroom Wall (Farrar,
        Straus & Giroux, 1975, reprinted by Avon and Penguin
        Books), Even Tide (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977,
        reprinted by Noonday), Poppa John (Farrar, Straus &
        Giroux, 1981, reprinted by Crossway), Born Brothers
        (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988, reprinted by Penguin
        Books) and The Neumiller Stories (Farrar, Straus &
        Giroux, 1989, reprinted by Penguin Books). Three of
        these novels have been chosen as "Best Books of the
        Year" by the New York Times Book Review. A former
        college professor who lives on a working ranch in North
        Dakota, Mr. Woiwode has also written numerous short
        stories and poems for publications such as Atlantic
        Monthly, the New Yorker, and Harper's. A new novel,
        Indian Affairs, will be published in June by Atheneum.
        
                                  ###
        
        +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
          End of this issue of Imprimis, On Line; Information
           about the electronic publisher, Applied Foresight,
                   Inc., is in the file, IMPR_BY.TXT
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