Sight Unseen?

"Some Things You Can't Unsee"

Such was the tag-line for a recent movie just released in theatres.  It caused me to think again on an ever-present reality for contemporary American society; that of audio-visual exposure.  It is undeniable that media overload is a daily ritual for many around the world.  From cel phones capable of everything from making calls to downloading text, music and video via mobile internet connection to thinner, lighter and more highly defined television screens in almost every establishment it seems that whereas in years past the struggle was to "find a signal",  these days to remove yourself from media is the real coup de etat.  So, in the current culture of media immersion, does this statement really mean anything?  Further, as this site is dedicated to Biblical Christians thinking about current topics, what are the implications, if any for the believer?

Visual Assault

I'm not a history "buff", but my grandfather was well versed in military strategy as he was an Army man and lost several brothers in war.  I remember him telling me of some of the exploits of Patton and MacArthur in particular.  So, while no expert by any means, I am aware that from minor skirmishes to full campaigns there are numerous methods of assault.  One of the most effective that comes to my memory is where a group of soldiers was extended too far, and their enemy gained their flank and successfully cut off their supply lines.  They were soon overtaken due to a lack of those munitions necessary to wage war on their opponent.

Malcolm Muggeridge wrote what I believe to be the masterpiece on media for Christians in his Christ and the Media.  I'll refer to his work often throughout this post and strongly recommend it to all who read, not just for the content specific to the topic, but also as an example of great writing style which is not present here.  In his first lecture, Muggeridge writes:

"The prevailing impression I have come to have of the contemporary scene is of an ever-widening chasm between the fantasy in terms of which the media induce us to live, and the reality of our existence as made in the image of God, as sojourners in time whose true habitat is eternity.  The fantasy is all-encompassing; awareness of reality requires the seeing eye which comes to those born again in Christ."  (p. 30, first full paragraph)

Interesting language that, media induced fantasy versus Godly reality.  In the example of military strategy one could say that humankind has been enticed by media to move ever farther from reality, and being so estranged from its moors is ripe to have the supply line of truth cut off.  Ultimately that is what is at stake, truth.  There are several terms to describe truth as the accurate description of reality (correspondence theory, et. al.).  As the propagator and distributor of fantasy, it is only logical that the more engrossed we become in the world of the fantastic the more the mere notion of reality is bludgeoned by the blunt instrument of media until truth has been beaten to death.  Is that language too harsh?  Is all this just an overreaction?  Consider a contemporary example in the fictional Bourne series.  Many read the books in sequence and enjoyed the stories, following the character through memory loss, a gradual discovery of who he really was and ultimately living on his own terms again deciding who he would be.  Then came the movie trilogy.  Who, after having seen the movies could thereafter ever read the books and see the name Jason Bourne without seeing with their mind's eye the actor who portrayed the character on the big screen?  Could this be anything short of a violation of the imagination, anything less than the foisting of an image onto the mind of the reader, ultimately not providing a tacid and temporary sensory experience but instead a deliberate and permanent shackling of thought?  It's even worse than thought at first blush.  Not only is the reader no longer able to exercise the freedom of imagining any figure he wishes through the course of the book, but the image that has been seared into his mind is not even the actor as he exists in reality but only a fantastic caricature.  Reality is replaced with artificial appearance through stylists and make-up artists; classes in martial arts and foreign languages project an expertise in physical and linguistic areas that quickly fade following the final day on set; choreographed chases in various vehicles with the use of stunt doubles, quick shots from many camera angles and carefully planned scripts portray genuine acumen in driving and wit; all this to form a single image that is completely true neither of the character viewed in the writer's mind nor tethered to the reality of the actor.  Complete fantasy that sweeps the viewers away, luring them further and further into the world of make believe until they no longer want to live in this dreary world of reality, but would rather remain in a field of the fantastic.

So we see the chasm of which Muggeridge spoke, the all-encompassing fantasy of which he warned.  But what of the seeing eye that allowed some to remain aware of the real world, that vision that comes to those born of Christ keeping them fixed close to their line of supply?  Was it not William Blake who said,

"This life's dim windows of the soul
Distorts the heavens from pole to pole
And leads you to believe a lie
When you see with, not through, the eye"

As Ravi Zacharias so eloquently stated, "We were created to see through the eye with the conscience, we are living now in a world where we see with the eye, devoid of a conscience." (my paraphrase).  With the introduction of computer aided graphics, high definition cameras and three-dimensional graphics we are fast approaching the day in which human actors are no longer needed for film or voice.  Many times animals, species, even cultures die out through various circumstances, but we may be witnessing the unfolding before us the extinction of the human actor and for the first time the creature being annihilated is applauding his own demise.  Such is the fate of the one engulfed in fantasy, reduced to seeing with the eye, not through it, and imprisoned by the replacement of free, independent, rational, real, true thought and imagination with forced, lock-step, irrational, fantastic, disingenuous regurgitation and replication.

Protecting the Flank

If it is common knowledge that one strategy in war is to move around an opponents flank and cut off his supply line, then a prominent feature of logistics in a campaign must be diligence and persistance in protecting one's flank.  In our case we must be ever cognizant of the maneauverings of our enemy.  On this point we must be clear, the battle is real and the truth is at stake.  In his second lecture, entitled The Dead Sea Video Tapes, Muggeridge again gets to the heart of the issue and provides a salient and striking description of the necessity of being persistant in maintaining our watch:

"Good and evil, after all, provide the basic theme of the drama of our moral existence, and in this sense may be compared with the positive and negative points which generate  an electric current; transpose the points, and the current fails, the lights go out, darkness falls, and all is confusion.  So it is with us.  The transposition of good and evil in the world of fantasy created by the media leaves us with no sense of any moral order in the universe, and without this, no order whatsoever, social, political, economic or any other, is ultimately attainable.  There is only chaos." (p.46 paragraph 4)

Should we become so entranced by the visual effects and imagery before us, we run the risk of being swallowed up by the ideas of "good guys" wearing black and "saving the day" through murderous revenge; of the interchangability of loathsome characters and supposed innocents through surprising situations; of the overpowering feelings of yearning for the termination of all "happy endings" as they have been done to many times and no longer has any appeal.  Is it possible that through certain script maneauvers, camera angles and choreographed facial expressions and childhood flashbacks a group of filmmakers might convince an audience that they should feel sorry for the villian and actually desire to see him get off scot free? 

In his second lecture, Muggeridge examines the troubling question of what archeologists might say years from now when looking back on the video evidence left behind.  He writes:

"What, may we wonder, would the archeologists make of us?  Materially so rich and so powerful, spirtually so impoverished and so rear-ridden, having made such remarkable inroads into discovering the secrets of nature and into unravelling the mechanisms of our material environment, beginning to explore, and perhaps to colonise, the universe itself, developing the means to produce in more or less unlimited quantities everything we could possibly need or desire, to transmit swifter than light every thought, smile or word that could possibly entertain, instruct or delight us, desposing of treasure beyond calculation, opening up possibilities beyond envisaging, yet seemingly haunted by a panic fear of becoming too numerous, to the point that there would be no room on earth for its inhabitants and an insufficiency of food to sustain them...Never, the archeologists will surely conclude, was any generation of men, ostensibly intent upon the pursuit of happiness and plenty, more advantageously placed to attain it, who yet, with apparent deliberation, took the opposite course, towards chaos, not order, towards breakdown, not stability, towards death, destruction, and darkness, not life, creativity and light.  An ascent that ran downhill, plenty that turned into a wasteland, a cornucopia folded.  This, as it seems to me, cannot but be the archeologists' general conclusion from the material available to them."  (pp. 53,54)

and more pointedly,

"The archeologists will surely marvel at the high hopes placed in this educative process, seemingly regarded in the society under examination as a panacea for all ills, material, mental and spiritual; at the proliferating campuses, the ever-multiplying professors and teachers instructing more and more students in more and more subjects; at the vast sums of public money expended, and at how the pundits of the classrooms and lecture theatres were held in the highest esteem, to the point of being invited to hold forth in the television and radio studios, and even to participate in government at the highest levels.  More books published, plays produced, building erected in a matter of decades than heretofore in the whole of recorded time; the scene set for the greatest cultural explosion of history, a Venice or a Florence on a continental scale.  And the result?  Instead of sages, philosopher-kings and saints, pop stars, psychiatrists and gurus.  Looking for a Leonardo da Vinci or a Shakespeare, the archeologists find only a Rolling Stone.
     Surveying and weighing up the whole scene, then, will not their final conclusion be that Western man decided to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought down the walls of his own city tumbling down, and, having convinced himself that he was too numerous, laboring with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer, until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over, a weary battered old Brontosaurus, and became extinct?"  (pp. 57,58)

I wonder again if many will read these lines and think to themselves, "what a gross exaggeration, we're not going extinct we're making progress, changing all the time."  I wonder if maybe we have been fooled of late that any change is good simply for the fact that something has changed, never questioning if the thing proposed to be changed ever really needed to be changed in the first place, never imagining that there might be such a thing as a detrimental change, a change for the worse.  Could it be an exaggeration, all this talk of doom and gloom coming from something so innocuous as a television set?  I mean, we're only talking about amusement, right?

To this point my only examples have purposefully been fictional in nature.  Consider now things like the news, and historical accounts in documentaries and film.  Expectations from viewing audiences are that the anchor men and women are delivering factual accounts of events that transpired during the day or in the near past.  Have we stopped to really think about what is going on during that broadcast?  First the anchor people.  It is hard to believe those we see on the newscast every evening could possibly be the same people we see on the street because of the time spent in makeup before the lights come on; because of the contrived seating, standing, and change of set design throughout the broadcast; and because of the teleprompted recounting of the days events and forced banter one wonders what a real discussion with those personalities might be like in real life.  Take next the reports.  Investigations and interviews taking hours of communication and discussion with the people involved, some having just experienced horrific or disastrous circumstances; only to produce and edit the whole of the event down to a thirty second clip of a victim becoming emotional upon recounting the nearly avoided tragedy only to be cut off by the impending advertisement; where the most time and effort recounted in the exchange took place in the alignment of the camera so the interview could take place with wreckage and flashing lights in the background.  Take the documentaries and historical movies.  Is there any greater contrivance than the disclaimer below many of these features, "Based on a true story" and "Re-enactment of actual events".  Is it possible we have come to the point where such language causes us to proceed unquestioning to the belief that the people dressed up in different clothes, moving around an open stage built on a set of varying complexity and interacting with others whose responsibility it is to deliver a set of contrived lines in an effort to evoke a passionate response "just like in real life".  It seems that experience would have shown by now that the words "Based on a true story" are a rather transparent code for "Has no bearing on reality whatsoever".  The same can be said without any further comment on those convoluded productions called "reality shows". 

Perhaps the most egregious and damning of all the network attempts to be relavent while still providing a platform of change, intrigue and entertainment occurs, ironically enough, during times of greatest catastrophy and struggle.  I speak of course of the theme music.  I remember hearing it first during the Gulf War.  Each network assigned their specific theme music whenever an update would come up to report everything from advancements of troops, new decisions being made to execute the war effort and the announcement of more soldiers killed in the line of duty.  These periods of theme music and updates with multiple windows of pictures all appearing at the same time on the screen left a bitter taste in my mouth then that lingers to this day.

Engaging the Enemy

Now we come to the point where the wound has been opened and laid bare.  We have examined, at perhaps too great a length, the dangers associated with being drawn in to a world of complete fantasy where morality is transposed such that good and evil are interchangable commodities to be manipulated on a whim.  The question becomes what do we do about it?  As happens many times in battle, the enemies numbers seem to great and ours too small; we seem to have no recourse, no solid ground on which to stand no way to even hold our own amidst such a brutal onslaught.  What elixer is available to cure those feelings, to what bulwark can we run that will provide shelter from the attacks of the enemy, what will keep us from falling victim to such a criss-cross of morality?  Muggeridge again:

"To break out of the fantasy, to rediscover the reality of good and evil, and therefore the order which informs all creation - this is the freedom that the Incarnation made available, that the Saints have celebrated and that the Holy Spirit has sanctified."  (pp. 46,47)

and later in a summary list and subsequent statement:

"1.  Seek endlesly for God and for his hand in all creation...So, looking, we find him, finding him, we love him, and realise that in every great word ever spoken or written we hear his voice...

2.  Live abstemiously.  Living otherwise - what Pascal calls 'licking the earth' - imprisons us in a tiny dark dungeon of the ego, and involves us in the pitiless servitude of the senses.

3.  Love and consider all men and women as brothers and sisters, caring for them exactly as we should for Jesus himself if we had the inexpressible honour of ministering to him.

4.  Read the Bible and related literature...These are the literature of the Kingdom proclaimed in the New Testament; words which became flesh and have dwelt among us, full of grace and truth...

5.  Know Jesus Christ and follow his Way, like Bunyan's Pilgrim, withersoever it may lead...

...it is precisely when every earthly hope has been explored and found wanting, when every possibility of help from earthly sources has been sought and is not forthcoming, when every recourse of this world offers, moral as well as material, has been explored to no effect, when in the shivering cold the last faggot has been thrown on the fire and in the gathering darkness every glimmer of light has finally flickered out - it is then that Christ's hand reaches out, sure, and firm, that Christ's words bring their inexpressible comfort, that his light shines brightest, abolishing the darkness for ever.  So, finding in everything only deception and nothingness, the soul is contrained to have recourse to God himself and to rest content with him."  (pp. 76,77)

And what do we do with the knowledge that the trailer from the movie is patently false in its statement that some things cannot be unseen?  When in fact once seen, nothing can be unseen, and moreover imprisons the mind?  Some may choose to remove the televisions from their home, vowing never again to set eyes on the screen regardless the material.  To him I would say that I understand, respect the decision and wish him well.  Some may choose to turn away from the truth, to remain indignant and continue to proclaim "it's just harmless TV" and continue to imbibe with impunity.  For him I lament and pray with the knowledge that the Holy Spirit can bring reality to bear on even one so steeped in the fantastic.  Some may understand the situation completely, continue to watch with discernment in a very limited fashion, to read more than watch, to think about ramifications and entailments even during what is sold as amusement (to deliberately cease to think).  To him I would say may God bless and protect and find a partner for accountability as temptation will come your way early and often.

I close with Muggeridge once more:

"What a Christian can do in whatever part of media he may be working, whatever his lot may be cast, is to continue to be a Christian.  Thereby, he may not be able to change the appreciably; they have their own conditions and circumstances.  Inside the media, however, he can and should sustain his Christian witness.  He may find this very hard, very hard indeed, because of the incompatibility between God and Mammon - in this case, between Christ and the media.  We are told to make our light shine before men.  That is our Christian duty; the results are God's concern, not ours." (p.83)