The experience of television—the act of watching it—is more significant than the content of the programs being watched. Television viewing by children is addictive, it is turning a generation of children into passive, incommunicative “zombies” who cannot play, cannot create, and cannot think very clearly. It is a horrifying picture, a generation of children are growing up without the basic skills that many earlier generations have used to get through life, children who cannot even solve the problem of dealing with free time. Television even has an impact on family life, in which communication and even direct affection and participation in each other’s lives are being processes through television experience, to the extreme detriment of everyone. The nature of the viewing experience itself, the technology of fixation, the biological effects, together with discoveries about the power of implanting imagery, combine to create a pattern in which the newly diminished role of the human being is more and more apparent. Television is watched in darkened rooms. Some people leave on small lights, daylight filters in, but it is a requirement of television viewing that the set be the brightest image in the environment or it cannot be seen well. To increase the effect, background sounds are dimed out just as the light is. An effort is made to eliminate household noises. The point, of course, is to further the focus on the television set. Awareness of the outer environment gets in the way. Many people watch television alone a substantial amount of the time. This eliminates yet another aspect of outer awareness. Even while watching with others, a premium is placed upon quiet. Talking interferes with attention to the set. If you like to look at people while talking, turning your head actually breaks attention. So other people are dimmed out like the light, the sounds, and the rest of the World.

Dimming out your own body is another part of the process. People choose a position for viewing that allows the maximum comfort and least motion, that is, the least awareness of the body because like awareness of external light, sound or other stimuli, awareness of your own body can detract from the focus on the television. Positions are chosen in which arms and legs will not have to be moved. One may shift weight from time to time, or go for a snack, but for most of the experience, the body is quiet. This dimming out is also true of the internal organs. The heartbeat slows to idle, the pulse rate tends to even out, the brainwave patterns go into a smooth and steady rhythm. The consequences of all this will be examined later. For now, let us just say that thinking processes also dim. Overall, while we are watching television, our bodies are in a quieter condition over a longer period of time than in any other of life’s nonsleeping experiences. This is true even for the eyes, which are widely presumed to be active during television viewing. In fact, the eyes move less while watching television than in any other experience of daily life. If you sit at a distance from the set, or if your set is small, this is particularly so. In such cases you take in the entire image without scanning. Even with huge television screens, the eyes do not move as much as they do when seeing a movie, where the very size of the theater screen requires eye and even head movement. Even when you are working in an office, or reading a book, the eyes move more than they do while watching television. In offices there are always interruptions. While reading, you vary the speed at which you read, go over material and raise your eyes off the page from time to time.

In the wider Word outside of the media, the eyes almost never stop moving, searching and scanning. For humans, the eyes are “feelers”; they are one of our major contact with the World and are forever reaching and studying. While you are watching television, in addition to the non-movement of the eyeball, there is a parallel freezing of the focusing mechanism. The eye remains at a fixed distance from the object observed for a longer period of time than in any other human experience. Ordinarily, the process of focusing, defocusing and refocusing engages the eye nonstop all day long, even during sleeping and dreaming. However, while you are watching television, no matter what is happening on the screen, however far away the action of the story is supposed to be inside the set, the set itself remains at a fixed distance and requires only an infinitesimal change in focus. As we shall see, the result is to flatten all information into one dimension and to put the viewer in a condition akin t unconscious staring. However idle the eyes are during television watching, they are absolutely lively compared to other senses. Sound is reduced to the extremely narrow ranges of television audio, while smell, taste and touch are eliminated altogether. Images on television are not real. They are events taking place where the person who views them is sitting. The images are taking place in the television set, which then projects them into the brain of the viewer. Direct response to them would therefore be more than absurd. So whatever stimulation is felt is instantly repressed. While it is correct that seeing the images stimulates the impulse to move, the impulse is cut off. The effect is a kind of sensory tease, to put the case generously. The human starts a process and then stops it, then starts it again, then stops it, vibrating back and forth between those two poles of action and repression, all of it without a purpose in real life.

There is mounting evidence that this back-and-forth action is a major cause of hyperactivity; fast movement without purpose, as though stimulated by electricity. The physical energy which is created by the images, but not used, is physically stored. Then when the set is off, it comes bursting outward in aimless, random, speedy activity. I have seen it over and over again with children. They are quiet while watching. Then afterwards they become overactive, irritable and frustrated. We believe that in extreme cases the frustration inherent in the TV experience can lead to violet activity, whatever the content of the program. Artificially teased senses require resolution. It is bizarre and frightening, therefore, that many parents use television as a means of calming hyperactive children. It would be far better to clam them with physical exercise, sports, running, playing with toys, and a lot of direct attention that gives them wide-ranging sensory and intellectual stimulation. Changes in diet would also help. The worst thing one can do for a hyperactive child is to put one in front of a television set. Television activates the child at the same time that it cuts the child (or adult) off from real sensory stimulation and the opportunity for resolution. Television is sensory deprivation. We have previously drawn a parallel between modern life and conditions of sensory deprivation. Artificial environments themselves reduce and narrow sensory experience to fit their own new confined reality. The effect and purpose of this narrowing is to increase awareness and focus upon the work, commodities, entertainments, spectacles and other drugs that society uses to keep us within its boundaries. We can consider television to be an advance on that already prevalent condition.

Sitting in darkened rooms, with the natural environment obscured, other humans dimmed out, only two senses operating both within a very narrow range, the eyes and other body function stilled, staring at light for hours and hours, the experience adds up to something nearer to a sense deprivation than anything that has come before it. Television isolates people from the environment, from each other, and from their own senses. In such a condition, the two semioperative senses cannot benefit from the usual mix of information that humans employ to deduce meaning from their surroundings. All meaning comes from this very narrowed information field. We know that it is an accepted truth about sensory-deprivation conditions that subjects have no recourse but to focus on the images in their brain. And we know that in sensory-deprivation conditions, having no resources aside from mental images, the subject is unusually susceptible to suggestion. When you are watching TV, you are experiencing mental images. As distinguished from most sense-deprivation experiments these mental images are not yours. They are someone else’s. Because the rest of your capacities have been subdued, and the rest of the World dimmed, these images are likely to have an extraordinary degree of influence. Am I saying this is brainwashing or hypnosis or mind-zapping or something like it? Well, there is no question but that someone is speaking into your mind and wants you to do something. First, keep watching. Second, carry the images around in your head. Third, buy something. Fourth, tune in tomorrow. Another source of control is the computer and the Internet. Before television and the Internet, people had far less distractions, they were able to think deep thoughts and spent more time creating things and working with their hands. There was a projected space for reflection. The contemplative mind was not overwhelmed by the noisy World’s technological business.

True enlightenment comes only through contemplation and introspection. The tension between the two perspectives is one manifestation of the broader conflict between the machine and the garden—the industrial ideal and the pastoral ideal—that has played such an important role in shaping modern society. When carried into the realm of the intellect, the technological ideal of efficiency poses a potentially mortal threat to the pastoral ideal of meditative thought. That does not mean that promoting the rapid discovery and retrieval of information is bad. It is not. The development of a well-rounded mind requires both an ability to find and quickly parse a wide range of information and a capacity for open-ended reflection. There needs to be time for efficient data collection and time for inefficient contemplation, time to operate the machine and time to sit idly in the garden. We need to work in the Internet’s World of web pages, but we also need to be able to retreat to our peaceful Victorian estate, read books, and enjoy the garden. The problem today is that we are losing our ability to strike a balance between those two very different states of mind. Mentally, we are in perpetual locomotion. As Gutenberg’s press was making headway in the 1600s, books also face backlash, much like the Internet. Some believed that having too many books was a disease that would overcharge the World because it is not able to digest the abundance of idle matter that is every day hatched and brought into the World. Ever since, we have been seeking, without mounting urgency, new ways to bring order to the confusion of information we face every day. The flood of information is swelling and the very machines we look to as a means of helping with organizing the information have further exacerbated information overload.

Computer networks have placed far more information within our reach than we ever had access to before. And some of that has been very good because it allows people to order thing, learn, communicate with others and it cuts down on traffic because some do not have to physically go out to stores and pick up items. However, with all these technological advances and all the information one has access to, the most effective filter of human thought is time. We no longer have the patience to await time’s meticulous and scrupulous winnowing. Everything that human beings are doing to make it easier to operate computer networks is at the same time, but for different reasons, making it easier for computer networks to operate human beings. If the devi would come to Earth, what place better to hide than the Internet. There is a fear that the use of the Internet could make people last and abolish or destroy something that we consider precious, fruitful, something that represents for us a value in itself, and deeply spiritual one. Because committing information to one’s mind is now becoming seen as ever less essential. The Internet has quickly come to be seen as a replacement for, rather than just a supplement to, personal memory. The magic of this age of information is that it is allowing people to know less. It provides individuals with external cognitive servants, which make actually reduce the capacity of the mind, and hinder its development because one will end up making little deep knowledge in their own heads. Therefore, memorizing long passages or historical facts may be seen as obsolete. We do not want people to think that memorization is a waste of time, however. The art of remembering is the art of thinking. Expertise in any discipline necessitates that one has a foundation of memorized facts stored in the long-term memory where there is no need to look it up, for it is always with you.

Memorization is also the foundation of learning. Our brains naturally want to gather, store, sort, manipulate or retrieve, for the working memory is limited, only able to process about seven pieces of information at a time. In order to amass this information in the long-term memory, one must repeat and repeat and repeat. Humans need to put something into their brains so they can begin to create neural pathways in the long-term memory and create an automaticity in connecting one piece of information with another. There is no substitution for memorizing math facts, for one does not always have a calculator, and having to look up basic facts is such a waste of time. The storeroom of knowledge packed into memory makes it much more likely a creative connection will occur when the next round of facts come alone. Once the fundamentals are committed to memory, research has show that retrieval practice will significantly increase learning. Having to pull the information out and make meaning is how learning occurs. We cannot let memory lost its divinity, nor its humanness. It is extraordinary that the high-class talk from what was the peak of Western intellectual life is still as natural trees growing in the forest. Reading books and learning to think is how people find their identity and learn to like themselves. Knowledge is fascinating and the intellect has an effect on history. The greatest deeds are thoughts that the World revolves around the inventors of new values, revolves silently. There are great expectations in social sciences that a new era is beginning in which humans and society are becoming better understood better than they had ever been understood before. Equality and the welfare of the people are now a part of the order of things. Psychotherapy should make individuals happy, and sociology should improve societies.  

In the fourteenth century, however, if children survived to age seven, their recognized life began, more or less as miniature adults. Childhood was already over. Most children did not survive; their mortality rate was extraordinarily high, and it was not until late fourteenth century that children are even mentioned in wills and testaments—an indication that adults did not expect them to be around very long. Certainly, adults did not have the emotional commitment to children that we accept as normal. Then, too, children were regarded primarily as economic utilities, adults being less interested in the character and intelligence of children than in their capacity for work. However, we believe that the primary reason for the absence of the idea of childhood is to be found in the communication environment of the medieval World; that is to say, since most people did not know how to read or did not need to know how to read, a child became an adult—a fully participating adult—at the point where one learned how to speak. Since all important social transactions involved face-to-face oral communication, full competence to speak and hear—which is usually achieved by age seven—was the dividing line between infancy and adulthood. That is why the Catholic Church designated age seven as the age at which a person can know the difference between right and wrong, the age of reason. That is why children were hanged, along with adults, for stealing or murder. And that is why there was no such thing as elementary education in the Middle Ages, for where biology determines communication competence there is no need for such education. There was no intervening stage between infancy and adulthood because none was needed. Until the middle of the fifteenth century.

At that point an extraordinary event occurred that not only changed the religious, economic, and political face of Europe but created our modern idea of childhood. In 1450, the printing press was invented. Gutenberg announced that he could manufacture books. To get some idea of what reading meant in the two centuries following Gutenberg’s invention, consider the case of two men—one by the name of William, the other by the name of Paul. In the year 1605, they attempted to burglarize the house of the Earl of Sussex. They were caught and convicted. Here are the exact words of their sentence as given by the presiding magistrate: “The said William does not read, to be hanged. The said Paul reads, to be scarred.” Paul’s punishment was not exactly merciful; it meant he would have to endure the scarring of his thumbs. However, unlike William, he survived because he had pleaded what was called “benefit of clergy,” which meant that he could meet the challenge of reading at least one sentence from an English version of the Bible. And that ability alone, according to English law in the seventeenth century, was sufficient grounds to exempt him from the gallows. I suspect the reader will agree with us when we say that of all the suggestions about how to motivate people to learn to read, none can match the method of seventeenth-century England. As a matter of fact, of the 203 men convicted of hangable crimes in Norwich in the year 1644, about half of them pleaded “benefit of clergy.” Childhood was an outgrowth of literacy. And it happened because in less than one hundred years after the invention of the printing press, European culture became a reading culture; which is to say, adulthood was redefined. One could not become an adult unless one knew how to read.

To experience God, one had to be able, obviously, to read the Bible. To experience literature, one had to be able to read novels and personal essays, forms of literature that were wholly created by the printing press. Our earliest novelist—for example, Richardson and Defoe—were themselves printers, and Sir Thomas More worked hand in hand with a printer to produce what may be called our first science-fiction novel—his Utopia. Of course, to learn science, one had to know how to read, but by the beginning of the seventeenth century, one could read science in the vernacular—that is, in one’s own language. Sir Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning, published in 1605, was the first scientific tract an Englishman could read in English. Alongside all of this, the Europeans rediscovered what Plato had known about learning to read—that it is best done at an early age. Since reading is, among other things, an unconscious reflex as well as an act of recognition, the habit of reading must be formed in that period when the brain is still engaged in the task of acquiring oral language. The adult who learns to red after one’s oral vocabulary is completed rarely is ever becomes a fluent reader. Now, making sense of adult leisure. What are the present goals of the philosophers of leisure, for instance, the National Recreation Association? And now imagine those goals achieved. There would be a hundred million adults who have cultured hobbies to occupy their spare time: some expert on the flute, some with do-it-yourself kits, some good at chess and go, some square dancing, some camping out and enjoying nature, and all playing various athletic games. Leaf through the entire catalogue of the National Recreation Association, take all the items together, apply them to two hundred and sixty million adults—and there is the picture. (This costs at present $560 billion a year.) The philosophy of leadership, correspondingly, is to get people to participate—everybody must “belong.”

Now even if all these people were indeed getting deep personal satisfaction from these activities, this is a dismaying picture. It does not add up to anything. It is not important. There is no ethical necessity in it, no standard. One cannot waste two and sixty million people that way. Recreation is any activity participated in merely for the enjoyment it affords. The rewards of recreational activities depend upon the degree to which they provide outlets for personal interests. However, enjoyment is not a goal, it is a feeling that accompanies important ongoing activity; pleasures, as Dr. Freud said, is always dependent on function. From the present philosophy of leisure, no new culture can emerge. What is lacking is worthwhile community necessity, as the serious leisure, the communal necessity, whether in the theater, the games, the architecture festivals, or even the talk. That we find it hard to think in these terms is a profound sign of our social imbalance. Yet we do not need, a new ethics, a new esthetic. For the activities of serious leisure are right there, glaring, in our communities, to avoid shame and achieve grandeur. However, the question is: If there is little interest, honor, or manliness in the working part of our way of life, can we hope for much in the leisure part? In order to have citizens, one must first be sure that one has produced men. There must therefore be a large part of the common wealth specifically devoted to cultivating “freedom and civilization,” and especially to the education of the young growing up. Celibacy as a permanent way of life has always been difficult to observe. We have seen how unwilling female religious, shunted into cloisters, bitterly resisted this rejection of their sensuality and the possibility of establishing intimate relationships in which they could express it. On the other hand, women who voluntarily entered holy orders as a vocation had much less of a struggle, for the rewards of celibacy far outweighed its disadvantages.

Male religious, however, often fought lifetime battles with their sexuality; their lives became ordeals against the enemies of dreams that involved pleasures of the flesh, self-love, and obsessive fantasizing. Many violated their vows, with women or each other. For them, celibacy was the most exacting religious pledge and the most often breached. Celibacy was much more than a burdensome vow, arguably the most burdensome. It was also the state that distinguished Catholic clergy from most others. Anglicanism and Buddhism, among other religions, are also served by some celibate religious, but in no other religion does celibacy dominate the moral agenda as it does in Catholicism. Centuries of thunderous theologians championed it as a supreme virtue, pleasing to God and paralleling Christ’s own chastity. Even in the 1960s, Catholic Church spokesmen lauded it. Celibacy was “far more precious to God” than matrimony, wrote one. “The objective excellence of virginity over marriage cannot be called into question,” declared another. However, some conscientious Church people reflected differently. The director of a treatment center for psychologically disturbed religious reveled that “many of the neuroses we treat are aggravated by styles of spirituality and community life that encourage religious…to try to be happy without giving and receiving genuine affection and warm love.” The Jesuit Rule 32, Noli me tangere, for example, forbade Jesuits from touching each other, even in jest. They also banned PFs—Particular Friendships—between individuals. In 1967, a majority of nuns responding to a sisters’ survey believed that “the traditional way of presenting chastity in religious life has allowed for the development of isolation and false mysticism among sisters.” Two thousand years of theology was sinking beneath the force of accumulated discontent, disbelief, and disobedience. Suddenly, long-term celibate religious had to justify their psychological depth, maturity, and integrity. This was the hopeful context in which Churchmen began their massive preparations for what came to be known as Vatican II. 

The coming explosion in the prosumer economy will make many new millionaires. Not until then will it be “discovered” by stock markets, investors and the media—at which point it will finally lose its invisibility. Countries such as Japan, Korea, India, China and the United States of America—rich in advanced manufacturing, niche marketing and highly skilled knowledge workers—will be the first beneficiaries. However, that is not all. Prosuming will shake up markets, alter the role structure in society and change the way we think about wealth. It will also transform the future of health. To understand why, we need to look briefly at rapidly converging changes in demography, the costs of medical care, knowledge and technology. Health care is where the most spectacular new technologies are matched by the most obsolete, disorganized, counterproductive and often deadly medical institutions. If the term deadly seems excessive, think again. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, as many as 90,000 body bags are filled each year with victims who ide of infections contracted in U.S. hospitals. By another count, between 44,000 and 98,000 die of medical errors committed in hospitals—in what is presumed to be the World’s best and most heavily financed health-care system. Of course, as many as 26,000 Americans die each year because of lack of health insurance. Also, in all well-off nations, from Japan and the United States of America to nations of Western Europe, health-care costs are spiraling out of control, populations are rapidly gaining and politicians are panicking. These facts are part of a bigger, deeper crisis. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, investments in physical infrastructure led to better water and public sanitation, almost wiping out some diseases that had previously devasted whole populations.

The reconceptualization of medicine led to medical specialization. Hospitals multiplied and grew into huge, bureaucratic institutions linked to even-more-bureaucratic government agencies, insurance companies and pharmaceutical giants. These changes did radically improve health conditions, essentially eliminating some of the most prevalent diseases in the modernizing countries of the West. Today, however, another change in the deep fundamental of space—a new globe-girdling transportation infrastructure—leaves nations largely unprotected against the cross-border transmission of diseases old and new, not to mention global pandemics. Public-health systems are underfunded. And the danger of biological, chemical or nuclear terrorism from religious, political or psychotic fanatics is no longer a comic-book fantasy. Medical specialization, meanwhile, has reached the point at which communication among specialties is perilously poor. Bureaucracies are on the edge of unmanageability. Hospitals go broke. And patterns of illness in countries with advanced economies have changed dramatically. Today’s main killers in affluent nations are no longer communicable diseases like pneumonia, tuberculosis or influenza. They are heart disease, lung cancer and other illnesses that are clearly affected by individual behavior with respect to diet, exercise, alcohol, drug use, smoking, stress, pleasures of the flesh and international travel. What has not changed, however, is the underlying premise that doctors are “health providers” and patients still their “clients” or “customers.” Demography may compel us to rethink this assumption.

Cresleigh Homes

Yay! You’re moving! There’s excitement in the air and plans in the works. However – the logistics of packing 📦 and transporting 🚚 your entire home’s 🏠 contents can feel overwhelming, even with the best of intentions!

Today on the blog, we’re covering a helpful moving checklist to make sure you don’t miss a thing! Click the link in bio to get all the details. linktr.ee/cresleighhomes

#CresleighHomes