Art Meets Science and Spirituality in a Changing Economy

A summary of:

Wijers, L. (1996). Art Meets Science and Spirituality In A Changing Economy: From Competition to Compassion. Wiley-Academy: London.

In 1990, leaders in art, science, spirituality and economics met to discuss how in the world these various disciplines might come together to make a) a more unified sense, and b) a positive change for our culture. Physicist David Bohm summed up the conference’s mission: “I think, as is implicit in this conference, that there are three basic components of culture, which are art, science and spirituality. These are the centre of culture and culture, which I say, is shared meaning. Now, if we separate art, science and spirituality, as they are today, we have a tremendous incoherenece in our culture. Of course, as I said, the purpose of this conference is to start something that might make our culture more coherent” (25). This is not unlike the mission of HighWire, and my project in particular. I suppose like them I see the separating of these disciplines, and the separating out of spirituality, as a major source of confusion for us. How can we understand the bigger pictures in the world? Mother Tessa Bielecki says, “What interests me most is the spiritual welfare of the world; that is spirituality as the foundation for every other way in which we might talk about the welfare of the planet. Part of our problem is that we are compartmentalised and we relegate spirituality to a department that can easily be dismissed as irrelevant. We need to re-awaken to the fact that we are fundamentally spiritual beings and that art flows out of our spirituality, science flows out of our spirituality, economies flow out of our spirituality. Everything has its foundation in spirituality” (120). And F. W. Christians argues that it is the imbalance between these elements of culture that is dangerous: “It is a fact that there is already a huge discrepancy between what science and technology are offering and what the human soul or spirituality is digesting. This imbalanced situation might produce an increasing potential for conflict. Therefore we have to find the appropriate balance to make beneficial use of the products of technology and science. Regarding what you just explained to us about spirituality; in my opinion we have to cultivate those sensitivities and foster spirituality” (104).

The other problem with relegating the spiritual to the fringes is that we have to wonder what we are rooted to. If we were rooted to values like those of all spiritual traditions – compassion, being one of them – then our society would be more compassionate, and we’d all be better off: “If we were truly compassionate individuals, we would have a compassionate society and vice versa. Compassion, in the dictionary definition, is ‘a fellow feeling’. The real meaning of the word compassion is ‘to feel together’. If people have the same feeling together, and are responsible for one another, then there is compassion” (David Bohm, 58). So this would suggest the value of working on technology that can foster compassion in individuals – because it will in turn lead to a compassionate society, which is to say a change in our selfish worldview. The point I’m trying to make is that the key to helping to shift a worldview is to begin with individuals; perhaps by changing the nature of the technology they engage with on a daily basis that encourages the formation of this worldview.

So what is compassion? We have a definition from David Bohm already. The Dalai Lama has much to say on this as well: “Community, friendships, harmony, these are the basic factors. That you have compassion, affection, respect for the other’s view, a concern about the other’s right. That is the basis of harmony and friendship. And in family and married life, one should also not only think of oneself, but also be concerned about the partner’s rights, feelings, and opinions – again, mutual respect. That is also the basis of a longlasting marriage. All these things have very much to do with human compassion, human affection and gentleness. Therefore these are the basics of moral ethics” (45). For the Dalai Lama, compassion requires us to be responsible for each other: “I always feel that compassion is not just a mere warm heart, but in genuine compassion there is some sense of responsibility. With that kind of compassion you try to lead and serve, as much as you can” (58). A major question discussed at the conference was what this means for a capitalistic society, which is competitive by nature. The Dalai Lama says, “there may be some kind of competition, but that, I don’t think, causes opposition” (58). He suggests that it is possible to have an Economy of Compassion, a subject taken up in earnest by economist Stanislav Menshikov, who believes that the key to achieving this is that, “People have to understand each other’s motives” (49). This would suggest that people have to foster their empathy skills. And I do wonder how easy this is done with our current technology, which separates us and shields socially relevant information that we might use to understand each others’ subtler signals.

The general consensus at the conference is summed up by scientist Francisco Varela: “‘Our world needs a different understanding if we are to survive’, Francisco Varela says. ‘Instead of self-interest, other-interest would change our world.’ In his view a basic principle in evolution is cooperation and the acceptance of the groundlessness of our existence” (114). He bases his thinking on Mayahana tradition, which is centrally concerned with groundlessness/emptiness and compassion (115): “Thus sunyata, the loss of a fixed reference point, is said to be inseparable from compassion like the two wings of a bird. Our natural impulse is one of compassion, but it has been obscured by habits of ego-clinging like the sun is obscured by a passing cloud” (115). It does seem that technology is at least partially responsible for eroding just these compassionate impulses. The question is, how can we foster “an attitude of non-egocentric concern”?: “It obviously cannot be created merely through norms and rationalist injunctions. It must be developed through letting go of ego-centered habits. Individuals must personally discover and admit their own sense of ego in order to go beyond it” (115). This is the value of interacting with a technology that purposely designs for selflessness: through engagement, it reinforces different – more positive – behavior and modes of thinking.

(As a side-note: this groundlessness is an interesting way of justifying the spiritual potential of cyberspace. Varela says, “When the two planetary forces, science and Buddhism, come genuinely together, we might no longer need and desire foundations and so can take up the further tasks of building and dwelling in worlds without ground” (116).)

One of the issues discussed at the conference was how to define spirituality. Economist JM Pinheiro Neto says: “by spirituality I would mean, all the various forms of belief in something bigger than we are” (135). Spiritual leader Raimon Panikkar says, “…without some spirituality, which makes me aware of my infinite dignity, and of my intrinsic value, and of the importance of love, real joy and happiness, without all that I am but a machine. As the Taoists said, if you are good at handling a machine, it is because your heart has already become a machine” (197). Panikkar also suggests that spirituality is in direct tension with contemporary Western society: “‘The Contemplative Mood radically challenges some of the basic assumptions of modern Western society. Its stress on spontaneity, desirelessness, delight in the momentary, indifference to wealth, prestige, success, sets it at odds with the modern labour pathos. To be a contemplative in this day and age is to be à rebours, against the grain.’” (194). Artist Marina Abramovic echoes this sentiment: “Now to come back to ‘less is more’. What we need is to empty our house. We are polluted with information, with everything we get in all the time. Our concentration span is not more than five minutes on any subject. So I can imagine how difficult it is for us to be here. What we could do is simply to clean the body, so that it can finally receive something else” (208). And she also says later, “The sad story here is that we cover our houses with carpets and we cover our streets with concrete. We use telephones instead of telepathy. With all the progress, we exchange computers for our sensitivity. We don’t use our intuition or our creativity at all. Even if we have free time we switch on our television and will just be hypnotised by the programmes. …There is this incredible problem that we are completely disconnected from the flow of nature” (209).

Brian Redhead, the conference moderator, asks some interesting questions about spirituality: “is spirituality nostalgia for the past? Is it escapism for another world? (103) Will it be the reward when we get everything right? Or is it something far more important than all of those?” (104) Religious Studies expert Houton Smith provides an excellent response worth pasting here whole:

“Spirituality is one of these primitive concepts, perhaps like ‘matter’ or ‘mind’ that is not easy to define, but I’ll make an attempt. I think that human beings are in nature – the technical word is homo religiosos – religious animals. Anthropologists have found no society that doesn’t have religion. Beyond our finite selves, I think every man and woman senses what the mystics call ‘the ground of our being’, something that is greater within us than our finite selves. When this ultimate component in our being breeds through our intellect, it is genius. When it breeds through our will, it is virtue. And when it flows through our hearts, it is love. It is real. It is not nostalgia. If we have lost the power to sense it, that is a brutality that somehow modernity has inflicted on us. / …a fundamental feature of the wisdom traditions that one finds right across the board is that, in Christian terminology, he who seeketh his or her light in egotistic grasping loses it, and those who can step out of their won light and cease to identify themselves simply with their private interests, find light. One of the most beautiful, succinct descriptions comes from the mystic Angelos Celisios: ‘Oh God, whose boundless love and joy are present everywhere, he cannot come to visit you unless you are not there.’ That is what spirituality is – a tropism within us towards the one, the unity, the coherence that life seeks, the more which is greater in value and worth than we have ever yet experienced, and finally, the mystery. So yes, if we learn the lesson, the reward will be there.” (104).

Another way the panelists understand spiritiuality is in terms of human wellbeing. Physicist Fritjof Capra says, “Human wellbeing is a very vital term here. The purpose of development is to increase human wellbeing” (217). He also conceded that human wellbeing is defined differently in different places – perhaps it has to do with what Hick was talking about in terms of the levels of meaning that are appropriate to one’s situation – but it does seem that ‘happiness’, although a bit wooly, is getting close to the definition. On the Moral Maze program (19/1/11), Professor Layard defined happiness this way: “Happiness is feeling good and wanting to go on feeling that way; the opposite, unhappiness, would be feeling bad and not wanting to go on feeling that way.” Notice the similarities in what the Dalai Lama suggests we aim for (i.e. happiness, even though he doesn’t use that word here): “Those materials which bring us suffering, and which we consider poisonous, we try to get rid of. Similarly, the different thoughts or the different minds are equally important for our joys and pains. Therefore it is worthwhile studying closely and analyzing the different kinds of mental states. We should then make an effort to increase the mental states which help us and do us good; and we should minimize the mental states that bring us fear or suffering” (23). At the same time, he states, “This is not a religious concern; it is our daily life’s requirement” (23). Later, he suggests that this is the key concern of secular ethics: “Moral ethics means: refrain from all activities which are harmful to humanity or the environment. This, I feel, is the explanation of secular moral ethics” (45). But the Dalai Lama complicates this picture by offering different kinds of morality: “I think, first, we have to make clear: what is the meaning of morality? I think there are two types of morality. There is one type which is related with religion; which is something different. Then I think there should be another kind of morality, which I usually call ‘spiritual development’. And also, whether one is a believer or non-believer, a very important thing in the day-to-day life of the community and the family, which I call ‘the basic human quality’ – that is, human affection. Regarding morality in that sense, I think the best teacher is our mother. Every human being knows motherly affection; a mother’s milk is a symbol of compassion. Affection is the fundamental point for the survival of humanity” (66).

Redhead also asks the panel why the conference participants are using the term ‘spiritual’ and not ‘religious’. Smith’s response is a familiar one for many: “Oh good, this takes me back home, to California, where spirituality is a good word and religion is a bad word. Religion is spirituality institutionalised; and every institution is a flawed reality” (104). Consider this study reported recently by the BBC (see chart towards the bottom).

It is easy to stop there, to just be freaked out by the word religion. But Smith makes the very important point that religion “is the only way spirit can get traction into history. Otherwise lovely ideas die with the people who have them.” (104). The message for this project, then, is that we ought to keep the gifts that religion have given us and continue to be inspired by what’s good about them.

Finally, I shall end this long post with some of the more inspiring points from the panelists. Fritjof Capra says, “What you are changing is people’s perception. That is where you can help. Because this crisis is a crisis of perception. We need to perceive the world differently to act differently. That is where art can be of tremendous help” (211). This is about designing real alternatives that embody different worldviews. My mission doesn’t need to be helping people practice meditation, for example (though many participants thought this was the job of the education system); but rather it is to cause a shift in attitude. As spiritual leader Sogyal Rinpoche explains, “Often people think that meditation is technique, but it’s not, it is attitude” (169).

This book also suggests that art is perhaps the most powerful way of facilitating fundamental change. But art and artist should be defined loosely, and could and should include technology developers. As Wijers writes in the book’s introduction, “[Henning Christiansen’s] sentence was: Everyone is an Artist. One can understand this only if one replaces artist with creator” (12). Marina Abramovic defines the good artist, the ideal to strive for: “It is important that we have this openness and see art as a possibility of transforming. Who are the good artists? In every century you have one or two, you are lucky if you have three good artists. The ones who can through their work change the way society thinks and have in their work a prediction of the new developments of humankind, these are the good artists and they inspire you and everyone to be good artists as well” (208). In other words, applied to my research, my goal should be to inspire others to be good creators of technology.

And this is my favorite quote from the whole book, again by Abramovic: “We need people to put their money in dreams, in concepts which have a prediction that may change society” (211).

Do Nothing

Check this out:
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/01/24/do.nothing/

Interesting idea! I get the spiritual intentions of this. But my objections to this are the same as my objections to any attempt to design spiritual/religious practice into technology. Is this our place? More importantly, why can't people do this without technology??? It's a sad state of affairs if the only way we can meditate is through our computers.

How is this any different from the truly non-spiritual Wii Fit meditation module, where users stare at a flame and sit perfectly still? Who are we kidding? This is not the path to a fundamental shift in our orientation to technologies. It is simply using existing (highly flawed) technologies for spiritual purposes. This goes back to the Bell post, very early on. We can always appropriate our technologies for spiritual/religious purposes. But I propose we try to do more.

Wrapped Attention

A summary of:

Walker, S. (2011) The Spirit of Design: Objects, Environment and Meaning, Earthscan/James & James Scientific Publishers, London.

Chapter 10 – Wrapped Attention: designing products for evolving permanence and enduring meaning

Stuart Walker provides a different 4^th bottom line to consider in the sustainable design debate: “personal meaning”. It is important to note, firstly, that it seems specifically to exclude culturally shared meanings. This seems intentional, to supplement the current triple bottom line: “What is missing from the triple bottom line is explicit recognition that human beings are not only gregarious creatures, but also individuals. Further still, we are individuals who are meaning-seekers” (10.3). In other words, this 4^th element absorbs a bit of the ‘spirituality’ that Inayatullah and others have proposed, in that it “[acknowledges] that sustainability has to be relevant and meaningful to the individual person, as well as socially responsible” (10.3).

But at the same time, Walker’s assessment is a cultural one, and this fourth element addresses (perhaps secondarily) a shared worldview that he sees as being increasingly devoid of genuine meaning, and worse, erodes our commitment to shared social obligations: “The relevance of this fourth element becomes evident in light of research that suggests multitasking and partial attention, as are common in the use of electronic devices, can have detrimental effects on behaviours and values related to social responsibility, environmental stewardship and substantive notions of meaning” (10.2). Walker’s goal as a designer and academic is to show that “more localized, more flexible, more enduring, and less socially and environmentally damaging” designs are possible, which are also “in closer accord with ideas of personal meaning” (10.2).

In this chapter, Walker identifies some worrying behaviors made possible by – and de-elevation of traditional values brought about by – current technological designs. In particular he highlights information overload and dissolving social bonds:

1) “information overload and multitasking can adversely affect our ability to be empathetic, ethically responsive, compassionate, and tolerant and to develop emotional stability—all traits that, traditionally, have been associated with the term ‘wisdom’. Our capacity for empathy, to be inspired, or to be ethically concerned has been linked to the slower acting parts of the brain that require time to reflect on the information received, and it is these parts that appear to be circumvented when we engage in multiple activities simultaneously. Prolonged periods of multitasking via technological products have also been linked to an increase in anxiety and depression and a reduction in attention, intellectual ability, and workplace productivity” (10.5).

2) “Despite offering ‘connection’, they have the effect of separating us from a direct interaction with, and awareness of, our world, which serves to add to our ‘blindness’. This separating effect also applies to our interactions with other people. Caller identification allows us to choose with whom we talk, and e-mail enables us to control when and with whom we communicate; this control increases the distance between ourselves and the other—whether a friend or a stranger” (10.5).

Walker criticizes the irresponsibility of designers, and he questions whether making ‘stuff’ is itself a meaningful activity for designers to pursue. He argues that “if industrial design is to address these considerable challenges [e.g. sustainability], it needs to be reinvigorated through a new sense of purpose” (10.6). This is my criticism exactly of technological developers: the mission seems devoid of purpose if it is just to create cool stuff to distract us from reality.

This means, though, that we have to ask ourselves some difficult questions. We have to challenge ourselves to step outside our familiar ways of thinking and doing; or in Walker’s words, ‘challenge our embedded notions’. In this chapter, Walker shows how this can be done in relation to the mobile phone. We are all too familiar with the mobile phone being a certain thing: a pocket-sized, plastic coated device that we will dispose of in a few years when it becomes outmoded. But we are tacitly accepting a number of shortcomings: “We cannot select a phone that is capable of being incrementally modified in terms of its parts as our needs change, or that we can update aesthetically from locally made, culturally relevant components. And we cannot choose among phones that are conceptually diverse in terms of how their functional benefits are manifested” (10.10). Phones, we accept, are not sustainable. But hey – we want them. In order to become sustainable, the mobile phone as we know it would have to undergo considerable changes. It would have to:

1) evolve continuously

2) be maintained, repaired, and upgraded locally

3) foster more considered, less distracting use patterns

4) internalise impacts

Walker understands the naïveté of proposing we simply must all exchange our mobile phones for these completely reconceptualized phones. But the point he is making is that one of the fundamental flaws is that designers do not provide consumers with Choice. There are some for whom an assemble-it-yourself-as-needed Pouch Phone is appealing because it allows them to foster mindful practice. (This model was

probably inspired by Borgmann’s notion of focal practices – the idea being to make using the phone “a focused activity” (10.14)). But the key to providing Choice is that this choice is Real, which is to say viable. As Walker shows in this chapter, it is possible: “The concepts presented here suggest a different relationship with technological goods by proposing a direction that is not only more compatible with the principles of sustainability but also facilitates a more considered use - one that is in accord with notions of inner meaning” (10.17).

Just for fun, here are some interesting alternative mobile phone designs. These are aimed at increasing privacy, but some, like the Pentaphone, must accidentally produce focused attention when using.

Fourth Bottom Line

A summary of:

Inayatullah, S. (2009) “Spirituality as the Fourth Bottom Line,” Tamkang University, Sunshine Coast University, Queensland University of Technology, Australia, available at: http://www.metafuture.org/Articles/spirituality_bottom_line.htm, accessed 25^th January 2011.

Given that one of the major tasks in my research is defining the term ‘spiritual’, it is useful to compare my evolving definition with other people’s definitions. Inayatullah breaks it down into 4 separate but interrelated factors:

“1. A relationship with the transcendent, generally seen as both immanent and transcendental. This relationship is focused on trust, surrender and for Sufis, submission. 2. A practice, either regular meditation or some type of prayer (but not prayer where the goal is to ask for particular products or for the train to come quicker). 3. A physical practice to transform or harmonize the body - yoga, tai chi, chi kung, and other similar practices. 4. Social – a relationship with the community, global, or local, a caring for others. This differs from a debate on whose God, or who is true and who is false, to an epistemology of depth and shallow with openness and inclusion toward others.”

It’s strange how differently people can understand the same word. I don’t see the first point as relevant, at least in the sense I think he intends it. I do think transcendence is a crucial component of spirituality, but it is in the hope for salvation/liberation that this is vital to my mission (see previous post); I don’t see how trust or submission factors into this, except if it is to mean that we trust our fate, as it were, to deliver us toward salvation/liberation.

Secondly and thirdly, I have purposely avoided including “practice” in my definition of spirituality. This is not because I don’t think it’s important, but I think that once we talk about practice we begin to blur the boundaries between ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’. And anyway, spiritual practice is a personal matter, and I don’t think it is up to us to meddle in others’ practice by making it a design aim. (Nevermind the fact that externally imposed practice would be resisted and probably ignored.) I have asked myself whether technology should at least be an aid to spiritual practice, e.g. whether the role of ‘spiritual technology’ could be to create the “silence” necessary for meditation. Inarguably, technology is in conflict with “‘inner stillness’ of spiritual life”, as Muller et al. (2001) rightly pointed out. But the solution to ‘inner stillness’ is not – and should not be – a technological one. Why create a technological solution to a problem that essentially prescribes disengagement from technology? Why not turn off your computer and take a walk in the woods if you want stillness and contemplation? How odd it would be if in order to meditate one had to get ‘plugged in’, as it were, to a laptop! And consider the absurd design implications if our goal is to facilitate silence: we would have to strip back all functionality until we were left with nothing but rocks and sticks; indeed to the point that we would no longer recognize it as technology at all.

The final factor, though, is closely aligned with my own definition – a kind of community orientation (egolessness), being a good person, doing unto others as one would do unto oneself; do no harm (to others or environment).

The point of Inayatullah’s paper is that discussions about sustainability tend to boil down to practical discussions about Bottom Lines. Firstly, this shows that what people value in this discussion – above the ideological arguments – is “measurability and profit”. Secondly, though not surprisingly given this, the bottom line that is always neglected in these discussions is The Spiritual.

What’s odd about this paper is that the author then spends to much time trying to identify ways of measuring spiritual impacts that you could then placate these Bottom Liners with: “for spirituality to become associated with the quadruple bottom line, the bottom line will be finding measures. Measuring the immeasurable will not be an easy task.” He mentions the case of Bhutan, which has developed a gross happiness index. He also quotes: “In the UK, the Cabinet Office has held a string of seminars on life satisfaction ... [publishing] a paper recommending policies that might increase the nation’s happiness (wwww.number-10.gov.uk/su/ls/paper.pdf). These include quality of life indicators when making decisions about health and education, and finding an alternative to gross domestic product as a measure of how well the country is doing – one that reflects happiness as well as welfare, education and human rights.”

Happiness is something that we have some idea of how to measure. But then happiness is subjective, as was the main objection to the teaching of happiness presented on the Moral Maze (19 January 2011, available from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00xhj84/Moral_Maze_19_01_2011/). Professor Layard, of the London School of Economics made this controversial remark: “Oh well that’s a different point, and the first point is whether the subjective is the most important thing in life, and it seems to be perfectly obvious that it is. [Really?] Actually, our experience, as we experience it, is the most important thing.” What I love about this statement is that it perfectly embodies Heelas et al.’s Subjectivization Thesis.

I think the point is, and Inayatullah finally gets around to it: “more measurement burdens should not be the purpose of a fourth bottom line. It must be deeper than that.” But to some extent this glosses over the difficult problem that anyone trying to promote design aims with non-measurable outcomes is that this does not appeal to our contemporary notions of meaning. Similarly, when I am talking about designing spiritual technology, not only will it be hard to measure the inherent ‘spirituality’ of this technology (or its alternative); but more importantly, it could not be conventionally successful. In other words, technology that fits our current worldview and/or appeals to our base instincts, tends to sell. Technology that attempts to shift our worldview, and asks us to rise above our base instincts, is probably less likely to sell. What this means for my project is that part of it must involve articulating new metrics of success. Not how well it sells. But qualitative change over a century of use, perhaps?

The good news is that Inayatullah claims that the interest in spirituality is growing: “As anecdotal personal experience, workshop after workshop (in Croatia, Pakistan, Malaysia, Australia, Thailand, Germany, Taiwan, New Zealand, Hawaii, for example) the spiritual future comes out as desirable. It is generally constructed as having the following characteristics. 1. Individual spirituality. 2. Gender partnership or cooperation. 3. Strong ecological communities. 4. Technology embedded in society but not as the driver. 5. Economic alternatives to capitalism. 6. Global governance.” And even more excitingly, the author reports: “the spiritual (gaian) vision of the future confirms the qualitative and quantitative research work of Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson. They document a new phenomena, the rise of the cultural creatives. This new group of people challenge the modernist interpretation of the world (nation-state centric, technology and progress will solve the day, environment is important but security more so) and the traditional view of the world (strong patriarchy, strong religion, and strong culture, agriculture based and derived). Ray and Anderson go so far as to say that up to 25% of those in OECD nations now subscribe to the spiritual/eco/gender partnership/global governance/alternative to capitalism position (www.culturalcreatives.org). However, they clearly state that cultural creatives do not associate themselves a a political or social movement. Indeed, they represent a paradigm change, a change in values.”

And finally: “It is this change in values that Oliver Markley, Willis Harmon and Duane Elgin and others have been spearheading (www.owmarkley.org). They have argued that we are in between images. The traditional image of “man” as economic worker (the modernist image) has reached a point of fatigue, materialism is being questioned. Internal contradictions (breakdown of family, life style diseases) and external contradictions (biodiversity loss, global warming) and systemic contradictions (global poverty) lead to the conclusion that the system cannot maintain its legitimacy. The problem, especially for the rich nations, has become a hunger for meaning and a desire for the experience of bliss.”

There may be hope afterall.

An Interpretation of Religion

A summary of:

Hick, J. (1989). An Interpretation of Religion. Yale University Press: New Haven.

Hick’s book attempts to trace a common thread between the world’s religious/spiritual traditions, and while he admits “there is no such essence” of religion, there are distinct trends and commonalities; primary among them being that “nevertheless most forms of religion have affirmed a salvific reality that transcends (while also usually being thought of as immanent within) human beings and the world, this reality being variously conceived as a personal God or non-personal Absolute, or as the cosmic structure or process or ground of the universe” (6). Hick’s argument is that religions universally offer what he prefers to call by the hybridized “salvation/liberation”: “for they both speak of the transformation of our human situation from a state of alienation from the true structure of reality to a radically better state in harmony with reality” (10).

The important feature of this transcendental aspect of religion is that it begins with a recognition of our imperfection, mythologically speaking, our fall from grace. As Hick writes, “Each of the great post-axial streams of religious experience and belief has been shown to exhibit a soteriological structure: a recognition of our human moral weakness and failure or of the pervasive insecurity and liability-to-suffering of all life; the proclamation of a limitlessly better possibility arising from another reality, transcendent to our present selves; and the teaching of a way, whether by ‘own-power’ spiritual discipline or the ‘other-power’ of divine grace, to its realisation" (56).

But the other feature is hope; or a faith in the belief that things can be improved: “It is the affirmation that human life is in reality more than the harsh experience that has always (68) been the lot of so many; and it offers a hope of salvation or liberation or fulfillment which can even now suffuse our life with a positive meaning and value” (69). What is interesting, though, is that this hope is a specific characteristic of post-axial religion: “What however we do not find in archaic religion is the hope, central to the post-axial movements, for a radically new, different and better existence, whether in this life or in a further life to come” (28). And I would argue that this hope has become embodied by technology – technology will save us from our burdens and make our lives livable and happy, etc.. In a sense, then, technology is a contemporary manifestation of the soteriological worldview. And my research, too, draws on this same salvation/liberation thinking; so long as we get ourselves oriented properly to our technology, we shall be saved! That does not detract from its value, as will be discussed soon in relation to the purpose of myth. The point is that technological development, and even the development of an alternative technological development, draws on the “soteriological structure” that we have become familiar with through exposure to Christianity, Judaism, etc.: “The great post-axial traditions, as we have seen, exhibit in their different ways a soteriological structure which identifies the misery, unreality, triviality and perversity of ordinary human life, affirms an ultimate unity of reality and value in which or in relation to which a limitlessly better quality of existence is possible, and shows the way to realise that radically better possibility” (36).

Now for the second crucial contribution from Hick (the first, again, being that the common theme of religions is salvation/liberation), namely his nuanced discussion of ‘meaning’. Hick identifies three levels of meaning – physical, ethical, and religious (13) – which fulfill different needs in different contexts (and corresponds nicely with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs). Furthermore, the different meanings are only appropriately contemplated relative to the context. When the physical is challenged, say in a food shortage, we see how quickly ethics goes out the window – people revert to an every man for himself mentality. Similarly, think how impractical it would be for a starving person to worry about how spiritual his technology is! It is a luxury to be able to contemplate the religious meanings of one’s situation. Nonetheless, religious meaning is hugely important.

Hick elaborates these three levels of meaning: “There are of course very many, indeed innumerable, different forms of non-linguistic meaning corresponding to the different characters that we find objects to have; and there are also, I shall suggest, various orders or ‘levels’ of meaning, namely the physical or natural, the socio-ethical and the religious. In terms of the natural meaning we inhabit the physical world, moving about in it as animal organisms. In terms of ethical meaning we inhabit this same world as an environmental mediating personal relationships and moral claims. And in terms of religious meaning we inhabit this same world again, with both its physical and its ethical significance, as an environment either mediating or manifesting the ultimately Real. Thus meaning, as the perceived character of an aspect of our environment which renders a particular type of response appropriate, occurs at various levels: all cognition is a tentative grasping of meaning on the basis of which we act, thereby confirming, developing or refuting our cognitive hypothesies. And at each level of awareness – natural, ethical and religious – we exercise a cognitive freedom which is at its minimum in relation to the immediate physical environment and at its maximum in relation to that ultimate environment of which the religions speak” (132).

Later in the book, Hick addresses the issue of the truth of any religious tradition. Firstly, it is important to note that Hick refers to ‘God’, the ‘Divine’, whatever you want to call it, as “the Real.” And the Real, he insists, is “the ultimate mystery” (349). There is no way of answering questions about its truth. But the importance of religion is in its function as myth:

“But nevertheless such literal and analogical language about the objects of religious worship or meditation always intends to be about the Real itself. And as such it functions mythologically: we speak mythologically or analogically about its phenomenal manifestations. We have seen (in Chapter 8) that all human awareness is in terms of meaning and that meaning always has a practical dispositional aspect: to be aware of a thing or a situation as having a particular meaning or character is to be in a dispositional state to behave in relation to it in ways that are (believed to be) appropriate to its having that character. And the function of mythology is to express the practical meaning of its referent by evoking in us an appropriate dispositional response. Thus although we cannot speak of the Real an sich in literal terms, nevertheless we live inescapably in relation to it, and in all that we do and undergo we are having to do with it as well as, and in terms of, our more proximate situations. Our actions are appropriate or inappropriate not only in relation to our physical and social environments but also in relation to our ultimate environment, the Real. True religious myths are accordingly those that evoke in us attitudes and modes of behaviour which are appropriate to our situation vis-à-vis the Real” (351).

The point is not whether there is actually a God, in other words. What matters is what believing in that God compels us to do. It orients us towards an ideal. And in fact, this ideal is itself always unattainable. So too, for example, is the notion of Sustainable Design – it is a contemporary mythology – and while we likely will never become completely sustainable, does that mean we should not strive towards being as sustainable as possible?

So we finally arrive at the great legacy of religious/spiritual traditions (whether or not we agree with the specific tenets): they teach us how to be human in this world. And very often, this is communicated in terms of how to relate to our fellow man. For example, Hick identifies the universality of The Golden Rule. Also universal is the “moral ideal of generous goodwill, love, compassion” (316), also known as “agape”.

Now is a good time to recap. The major commonalities of traditional spirituality are the following:

1) Salvation/liberation

2) Some conception of The Real

3) Providing meaning

4) Valuing Selflessness/Egolessness

a. Agape/love/compassion (14)

b. The Golden Rule (316)

c. Orientation toward The Real (rather than self) (40-1)

d. Self-control (317)

e. Giving (317)

5) Valuing Stability (rather than change)

6) A sense of mystery (67)

In comparison to now, in earlier ages these religious meanings were much more highly integrated with daily life: “Whereas in the thinking of modern technological people ‘the spiritual’ is generally relegated to a margin of private fantasy or ‘faith’, it seems that for pre-literate people it has always been part of the everyday world” (24). But meaning has undergone a profound transformation in the post-industrial age. Meaning is associated with progress (see Taylor). Hick writes: “Love, compassion, self-sacrificing concern for the good of others, generous kindness and forgiveness – which we have seen to constitute the basic ethical principle of the great traditions – is not an alien ideal imposed by supernatural authority but one arising out of our human nature (though always in tension with other aspect of that nature), reinforced, refined and elevated to new levels within the religious traditions” (325). Clearly, too, these values can be de-elevated, and have been, by the more aggressive (and so much cooler!) technological values.

I believe that the selflessness promoted by all religious traditions is adaptive, i.e. it has evolutionary benefit to us, as explained by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene. We are better off in the long run if we are community oriented. I fear that the reason we have only recently begun to live so unsustainably is because we’ve lost touch with our community-orientation. Technology promotes individuality.

So we come back, finally, to the mission of this research project. It is worth addressing this loss of religious meaning within our technology. Hick ends his book with this sentence: “Ethically its central theme should be the love/compassion to which all the great traditions call us; and in our sociologically conscious age this is likely to be increasingly a politically conscious and active agape/karuna which seeks to change the structures of society so as to promote rather than hinder the transformation of all human life” (380). Applied to this project, technology should be promoting these positive behaviors and values handed down to us by traditional religion/spirituality.

BBC calls for Information Diets

A summary of:

BBC News Magazine (2011). A Point of View: Does more information mean we know less? BBC News Magazine. 14^th January. Available from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12191104. [Accessed 22nd January 2011]

Postman’s first point about technological change is echoed in this recent article from the BBC, which argues that improvements in information technology have in turn caused a decline in knowledge.

First of all, the article rightly points to our declining concentrations as the first hurdle to knowledge. This very problem is probably the reason I got interested in this topic in the first place. In basic terms, I think we’re getting dumber. A lightbulb went off when I saw Ellen Degeneres’ standup in 2003 in which she said: “We have all these buttons: speed dial, redial; you program numbers in so you never have to remember them anymore, and so you don’t, you know? Use it or lose it, I’m losing it. I don’t remember anything anymore because of the buttons that are remembering things for me.”

But I suppose this is more to do with the destruction of our mental capacities; whereas the article is getting at another worrying thing about our technologies, which has to do with the very nature of the medium; namely that it is not a path to knowledge. Knowledge has no place in a space dominated by the idolization of information.

One of the problems pointed out by the article is that we can never actually keep up with the stream of information. Ellen had another insightful comment on this predicament (see around 5:15 – 6:45):

The article points out that once upon a time, a person was not knowledgable because of how many different things he knew (i.e. the breadth of this knowledge) but how well he know one book, like the Bible (i.e. the depth of his knowledge). It seems odd to us today to think of reading one book over and over again. Who has time, first of all!? But then we don’t see this as the way to knowledge. We constantly search for it by consuming as much information as we possibly can. And if the goal is to learn it all, we are doomed to fail. Perhaps we need a new goal, then?

But then of course this gets back to Postman’s point, that the purpose of information technologies is not to inform so much as to entertain. The article here talks about information being exciting because of its novelty. Yes, this is the other reason we don’t read the Bible over and over again: because it’s so boring! The article suggests we ‘elevate’ ourselves by aiming for a depth of interpretations of a smaller set of books, developing “our intelligence and sensitivity.” Wisdom, they argue, does not come in reading more, but in reading better. (But this is a common confusion is a consumer society: isn’t More the same thing as Better???) This is their suggestion:

“The need to diet, well accepted in relation to food, should be brought to bear on our relation to knowledge, people, and ideas. Our minds, no less than our bodies, require periods of fasting.”

And if this isn’t a call for spiritual technology, I don’t know what is (and it’s from the BBC!!!): “It is then we might realize that – in attempting to follow the narrative of man’s ambiguous progress towards a state of technological and political perfection – we have sacrificed and opportunity to remind ourselves of eternal, quieter truths which we know about in theory, and forget to live by in practice.”

5 Things About Technological Change

A summary of:
Neil Postman: Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change. Presented at: The New Technologies and the Human Person: Communicating the Faith in the New Millennium. Denver, Colorado, March 27, 1998.

Postman makes 5 very important points about the nature of technological change, which are worth bearing in mind if one's aim is to make such changes. It also helps us reflect upon how we have been changed.

1) The first is similar to Newton's Third Law of Motion, that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Well, perhaps not equal in this case; but the point is that technology is a trade-off, and perhaps aptly described by Postman as "a Faustian bargain". "Technology," he says, "giveth and technology taketh away." Consider things like some of our favorite labor/time-saving technologies - the vacuum cleaner, the microwave oven, the dishwasher. I'll take each in turn.

The Vacuum Cleaner: a device advertised since the 1950s as something that makes women’s work easier, relieving them from the burdens of taking the carpets outside and beating the dust out of them. Whereas before, this was usually a two-person job, now thanks to the vacuum cleaner, the woman should be able to do this on her own. The reality of this technology in the home is that, yes, the act of cleaning the carpets was made easier, but this only raised the expectations for women’s responsibilities around the house. And the vacuum cleaner was only one in a range of technologies aimed at women around this time ostensibly to make doing housework easier. As this trend continued through the decades, the effect of bringing these devices into the home was to make individual tasks easier, but to make the job of doing housework on the whole much bigger for women, i.e. their remit expanded to meet growing expectations about their ability to perform tasks in less time. The number of things a modern homemaker is now single-handedly responsible for far exceeds that of the pre-technological home, and these added pressures have been linked to increased rates of anxiety for the modern woman.

The Microwave Oven: also designed to save us time. Not only that, but it removes the need for expertise in the kitchen. Anyone can cook their own food. But while people can now cook their own meals, they cannot do so at the same time. This means that meals are no longer ready at the same time for all. People begin to get used to the notion of eating meals alone, when their own plate is ready. It sets the stage for families to eat separately, on trays in front of the television; rather than sitting down together to eat a meal and talk. Of course the microwave is not to blame for this trend all by itself. But the point is, while the microwave makes it easier to heat up meals, it also makes it easier for us to forgo the important social ritual of eating together, thus potentially weakening family bonds.

The Dishwasher: I have a similar critique of the dishwasher. Or it's a blend of the two above critiques. That it makes the job of washing the dishes a single-person job, thus removing opportunities for discussion and teamwork that was previously provided by dishwashing - one person washing, one drying. Now one person chucks the dishes in the dishwasher, and discussion need not occur at any point.

The thing Postman wants us to take away from this point is that, while we tend to ask, 'What will technology do?', it is equally important to ask, 'What will technology undo?'

2) Postman's second point is that "the advantages and disadvantages of new technology are never distributed evenly among the population." There are, in his words, winners and losers. The winners tend to be those whose business and/or lifestyle is most closely aligned with the values of technology, e.g. people who rely on information, speed, etc.. The losers are those who would never have asked for that technology in the first place, but of course no one would have asked them their opinion (because they need to be converted anyway, surely).

Postman asks: "But to what extent has computer technology been an advantage to the masses of people? To steel workers, vegetable store owners, automobile mechanics, musicians, bakers, bricklayers, dentists, yes, theologians, and most of the rest into whose lives the computer now intrudes? These people have had their private matters made more accessible to powerful institutions. They are more easily tracked and controlled; they are subjected to more examinations, and are increasingly mystified by the decisions made about them. They are more than ever reduced to mere numerical objects. They are being buried by junk mail. They are easy targets for advertising agencies and political institutions."

I think in many ways this is no different from Westernization/Colonization - there are winners and losers in that classic game. But the savages need to be civilized, no? They'll thank us later.

Because of this, Postman suggests we ought to question the motives of those that enthusiastically promote various technologies - not because they are evil, but because they will win; and they may not necessarily be thinking of how others might lose.

3) The third point is: "To a person with a pencil, everything looks like a sentence. To a person with a TV camera, everything looks like an image. To a person with a computer, everything looks like data."

And the important point for me is that the internet changes us. Carr says: "The most revolutionary consequence of the expansion of the Internet's power, scope, and usefulness may not be that computers will start to think like us but that we will come to think like computers. Our consciousness will thin our, flatten, as our minds are trained, link by link, to 'DO THIS with what you find HERE and go THERE with the result.' The artificial intelligence we're creating may turn out to be our own" (Carr, 2008).

4) The point point is: "Technological change is not additive; it is ecological." This means, simply, that adding a technology into an environment changes that environment in a more complicated way than it being simply environment + technology. Of course, this is what makes the consequences of technological development so difficult to predict. One can never be certain of the unintended consequences of their development - hence the word, 'unintended'. But that does not absolve our responsibility! We must try the best we can to understand those environments we are designing for, as well as those we are not but may in turn become influenced by the technology, and try to figure out how the addition of a given technology will change those environments.

This, I suppose, is part of the design ethnographic mission.

5) And finally, Postman argues that, "media tend to become mythic," in the same sense he wrote about the mythologization of television in his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. This is to say that we "[tend] to thin of our technological creations as if they were God-given, as if they were a part of the natural order of things."

I think this is another way of saying what Lanier warned about, which was Lock In. That we become unable to see any other possibility for the Internet, because it is starting to feel like this is exactly how it always should have been. This is The Internet.

I also think this is worrying: we tend not to question the quest of ubiquitous computing, which is basically that technology should pervade our lives to such an extent that we no longer recognize it as such. Essentially UbiComp aims for this mythologization... and need we ask why? Because those who make that technology will benefit from its proliferation. But again, who loses in this scenario?

Postman leaves us with this wise advice:

"What I am saying is that our enthusiasm for technology can turn into a form of idolatry and our belief in its beneficence can be a false absolute. The best way to view technology is as a strange intruder, to remember that technology is not part of God's plan but a product of human creativity and hubris, and that its capacity for good or evil rests entirely on human awareness of what it does for us and to us."

Amusing Ourselves to Death

A summary of:

Postman, N. (1985). Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Methuen London Ltd: London.

Take a look at this truly creepy advertisement for Apple’s Macintosh computers in 1984:

This preys on our very rational fear that our society could easily succumb to Orwellian control. But while our eyes are peeled for the signs of Big Brother’s takeover, a more insidious villain has been operating behind the scenes. The main thesis of Postman’s book is that it is Huxley’s vision that has come true:

“Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think” (vii).

“What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours” (160).

In other words, we are lining up to be imprisoned in our self-made iron cages. We are dazzled; and we stumble willingly to our own spiritual and cultural destruction.

How did this situation come to be? The first step, according to Postman, is the trivialization of information, beginning with the telegraph. He quotes Thoreau, from Walden:

‘We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate…. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough’ (66).

The point is that information, in its new abundance, became divorced from relevance, as well as from context (69). Information became a commodity; and its acquisition became the goal. This has led to today’s information pleonexia, as Schultze described it – where we pathologically consume information. Meanwhile, what are we meant to do with this information? As Postman rightly points out,

“…most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action. This fact is the principal legacy of the telegraph: by generating an abundance of irrelevant information, it dramatically altered what may be called the ‘information-action ratio’” (69).

Information, in short, has become entertainment, rather than meaning. And indeed worse things can be said about this disturbing transformation. Once entertainment becomes the point of information, truth becomes irrelevant as well. Television, perhaps because of its esteemed position in the household’s living room, has exacerbated this condition considerably. Now: “I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theatre, it is know as vaudeville” (107).

Postman uses the Orwell vs. Huxley comparison:

“Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. / What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance” (vii).

Further: “What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this word almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information – misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information – information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing” (109).

In October of 2010, Jon Stewart (who, it should be noted, hosts the fake-news program, The Daily Show, from which 70%+ of Americans get their news) organized a Rally To Restore Sanity in Washington DC. One of the main things Stewart takes issue with is the way in which, because news has become entertainment, it has become a boxing match between mythologized characters of the Left and the Right:

"We've all bought into the idea that the conflict in the country is left and right, Republicans and Democrats." Furthermore, an insidious, attention-grabbing news media "amplifies a division that I don’t think is the right fight ... [because] both sides have their way of shutting down debate" (from Salon.com)

A similar argument has been made by Nicholas Carr as well, in relation to the Internet. He uses the phrase, “The Great Unbundling”, meaning “we are able to pick and choose with advanced selection tools what we read/consume, etc., leading to a greater symbiosis between media and advertising (news stories are selected on the basis of their ability to get individuals to click on advertisements, rather than their substantive quality) and also to greater polarization of beliefs” (Carr, 2008).

As a society, we have bought into the notion that information media shrinks the world, and in doing so, brings us together. Morse prophesied that “telegraph would make ‘one neighbourhood of the whole country’” (66). But decontextualized information sharing does not seem to be doing this: “The telegraph may have made the country into ‘one neighbourhood’, but it was a peculiar one, populated by strangers who knew nothing but the most superficial facts about each other” (69).

This exact same argument could be made about Facebook. You may call Facebook a community; but it is a community in which members share only the most superficial facts about each other. The whole endeavor is disappointing, the results banal.

This is a fault of the medium: “that the form in which ideas are expressed affects what those ideas will be” (32). In other words, not only is McLuhan’s famous phrase, ‘The medium is the message’ (“Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility. Which, of course, is what McLuhan meant in saying the medium is the message” (10)), true; but the medium delineates the boundaries of possibility for its use. For example, a medium (i.e. technology) that is at its foundation non-spiritual, cannot facilitate the spiritual. Postman uses the example of televangelists, who he rightly criticizes as not doing particularly spiritual work: “What makes these television preachers the enemy of religious experience is not so much their weaknesses but the weaknesses of the medium in which they work” (119).

The implication of this is that, given that the world wide web is not built on a spiritual foundation, we cannot expect to be able to do anything particularly spiritual with it. In other words, what we need, if we desire a spiritual internet, is a completely separate medium, built upon spirituality, thus delineating the possibility for spiritual experiences. We need an alternative that does not just tweak the old, but actually exists on a completely different historical/developmental track.

Postman makes another interesting point about media. He says,

“…television has achieved the status of ‘myth’, as Roland Barthes uses the word. He means by myth a way of understanding the world that is not problematic, that we are not fully conscious of, that seems, in a word, natural. A myth is a way of thinking so deeply embedded in our consciousness that it is invisible. This is now the way of television. We are no longer fascinated or perplexed by its machinery. We do not tell stories of its wonders….” (80).

This is exactly how power operates – once it becomes invisible, it can exert itself. And as Postman says, “the loss of the sense of the strange is a sign of adjustment, and the extent to which we have adjusted is a measure of the extent to which we have been changed” (81). We have implicitly accepted technology, and in doing so, accepted its values, meanwhile abandoning our own.

Postman emphases the questions are we must necessarily ask: “What is television? What kinds of conversations does it permit? What are the intellectual tendencies it encourages? What sort of culture does it produce” (86)? I suggest we should be asking this about all of our technology, and I will use these as a starting point for discussion about the pros and cons of various technologies. What’s clear is that “ignorance of the score is inexcusable. To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a programme for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple” (162).

So in conclusion, what are the main issues Postman raises with regards to the television:

1. Lack of context

2. Lack of continuity

And these in turn contribute to 3. Incoherence, and 4. It erodes our human mental abilities:

“In the absence of continuity and context, [Terence Moran] says, ‘bits of information cannot be integrated into an intelligent and consistent whole.’ We do not refuse to remember, neither do we find it exactly useless to remember. Rather, we are being rendered unfit to remember. For if remembering is to be something more than nostalgia, it requires a contextual (140) basis – a theory, a vision, a metaphor – something within which facts can be organized and patterns discerned. The politics of images and instantaneous news provides no such context, is, in fact, hampered by attempts to provide any” (141).

5. Age of Show Business – all is produced for purposes of entertainment

So what are the solutions? Should we just switch off? Clearly, this is not a viable option, in part because no one will do it. George Gerbner, Dean of the Annenberg School of Communication, says: “Liberation cannot be accomplished by turning [television] off. Television is for most people the most attractive thing going any time of the day or night. We live in a world in which the vast majority will not turn off. If we don’t get the message from the tube, we get it through other people” (143).

As Postman aptly summarizes, “Americans will not shut down any part of their technological apparatus, and to suggest that they do so is to make no suggestion at all. It is almost equally unrealistic to expect that nontrivial modifications in the availability of media will ever be made” (163).

So it is hopeless? Postman proposes two solutions, one he calls the ‘nonsensical answer’ and the other the ‘desperate answer’:

“The nonsensical answer is to create television programmes whose intent would be, not to get people to stop watching television but to demonstrate how television ought to be (166) viewed, to show how television recreates and degrades our conception of news, political debate, religious thought, etc.” (167).

“The desperate answer is to rely on the only mass medium of communication that, in theory, is capable of addressing the problem: our schools” (167).

He concludes his book with this appeal for educating the masses about the effect media is having on us:

“What I suggest here as a solution is what Aldous Huxley suggested, as well. And I can do no better than he. He believed with H. G. Wells that we are in a race between education and disaster, and he wrote continuously about the necessity of our understanding the politics and epistemology of media. For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking” (168).

Perhaps this is precisely what Jon Stewart was trying to do.