I’m reading Great Books by David Denby, about his year attending Columbia and taking, as a 48-year-old film critic for New York magazine and a contributing editor at The New Yorker, the “great books” courses he first took in the 60′s as an undergraduate. He embarks on the yearlong courses and writes about his experience because of his exhaustion in being a part of the media society, “the sheer busyness of it all, the constant movement, the incredible activity and utter boredom, the low hum of needs being satisfied. Not my needs, however. The media gives information, but information, in the 1990′s, has become transitory and unstable. Once in place, it immediately gets pulled apart, the fragments upgraded, the rest hustled off the stage. No one’s information is ever quite adequate, which is one reason among many that Americans now seem half-mad with anxiety and restlessness… I possessed information without knowledge, opinions without principles, instincts without beliefs.”
Denby’s comments capture beautifully how we, as a modern people, have become divorced from a crucial capacity to discern what we trust and believe, and to make these discernments based on facts, reasoning, historical perspective, and emotions, intuition, and bodily wisdom. The media has made us accustomed to bits and pieces of the truth, jazzed up and selected for maximum entertainment (read: profit). They pull apart the facts and call attention to the bits and pieces that seduce and sell, and in turn, as passive consumers inundated with such fragments, we lose the capacity to see the whole, to distinguish how the pieces connect. Add to this the frenetic onslaught of information, and it’s no wonder we are willing to either decide “I believe this and that’s the end of my thinking about it” or we give up and become depressed anti-political ostriches.
What do you think?
Related posts:
