Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (10 page)

“We read that the whales are beaching themselves and we wonder why. Scientists tell us that the leader whale may have parasites in its brain, goes crazy and leads the others to the beach. Millions of people read this story and find it logical, because their knowledge of whales is confined to the length, weight, mating habits, breeding grounds, commercial uses, and optimum sustainable yield. And yet, the Solomon Islanders have long descriptions of whales and dolphins beaching themselves every year for thousands of years. The islanders say it is a human-animal communications ritual, part of a cycle which is obscure to us. I don’t know if
they
are right either. I do know that whales don’t have leaders—they operate in groups—and given their brain size they are probably the most intelligent mammals on Earth. I don’t believe it’s a parasite problem.”

She concluded by saying that we have “put all of our eggs into a single basket; we have assumed that empirical objectified processes produce knowledge equal to what the environment offers as information. We have assumed our knowledge is growing. I’m not so sure.”

Her speech was received with polite interest. There was general agreement that her statement was both moving and inspired—she was a grand old lady—but there was also considerable embarrassment at the silliness and romanticism of the idea that the environment—whether windowless walls, or rivers—itself teaches. Teachers teach. Education is cerebral not sensory. It was our role to help the teachers know what to teach. We were the ones who know.

The participants agreed it would have been better if the conference had been in a location nearer to nature. It would have been more
pleasant
that way. (That’s what nature is: pleasant!) But as long as we were here on this important mission, we might just as well get on with the work and cease with the diversions.

One year later, I received a 548-page bound volume called an “instrument” which summarized the “emerging issues in environmental education” with details of the findings of the “experts” at this landmark meeting. The instrument was submitted to the Office of Environmental Education which, for all I know, may still be using it today.

If so, then I suppose we all will have furthered the process of moving knowledge away from natural sources and deeper into the realm of the expert. This, in turn, makes it easier for government and industry to expropriate it, alter it, and feed it back to us through the media in techno-jargon explicable only to techno-minds. With nature obscured, nearly everything we know comes to us processed and it may be right or it may be wrong. We know only what we’re told. For most of us the TV news is now our source. Without any basis of comparison, as the news report changes, our understanding changes.

Mother’s milk is unsanitary. Mice like cheese. Mars has life on it. Technology will cure cancer. The stars do not influence us. Nuclear power is safe. Nuclear power is not safe. Mars has no life on it. Food dyes are safe. Saccharin is safe. Technology causes cancer. Columbus proved the world was round. A little X ray is okay. The Vietnam War was not a civil war. We will have an epidemic of swine flu. Mother’s milk is healthy. Technology will clean up pollution. Preservatives do not cause cancer. Economic growth is in the offing. Red food dyes are not safe. Swine flu vaccine is safe. The Vietnam War was a civil war. Hierarchy is natural. Humans are the royalty of nature. Saccharin is not safe. Swine flu vaccine causes paralysis. We have the highest standard of living. Hormones in beef cause cancer. Touching children is good for them. Too much sun causes cancer. And so it goes.

V
ADRIFT IN MENTAL SPACE

M
ANY
people who experiment with mind-manifesting drugs report that while under the influence they begin to “see” the world, especially the human-made technological forms that dominate cities, as absurd and alien. People who take LSD commonly “freak out” in the presence of heavy traffic, sterile environments, abrasive sounds, or mechanical things and smells. They often describe these experiences of everyday life as “unreal.”

It is part of the LSD literature that “bad trips” are more likely to occur in urban than in natural environments. Setting is critically important. People are urged to keep objects around from which they gain feelings of comfort, to play music which has been familiar and friendly in the past, or to have close friends nearby and to stay in physical contact with them. Hugging is highly recommended if the friend is deeply trusted. So are warm baths and personal conversation. These elements can accomplish what is called “grounding,” meaning contact which is undeniably real, not abstract, not interpreted, not artificial, not open to question.

The radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing, among others, has said that the growing incidence of mental illness these days may be explained in part by the fact that the world we call real and which we ask people to live within and understand is itself open to question. The environment we live in is no longer connected to the mix of planetary processes which brought us all into being. It is solely the product of human mental processes. It is real, but only in the way that a theatrical play or a fun house is real. Our artificial environment is there and we can experience it, yet it has been created on purpose by other humans. It is an interpretation of reality, it no longer reveals how nature works and it cannot provide much useful information to human beings who seek to see their own lives as part of some wider natural process. We are left with no frame of reference untouched by human interpretation.

Living within this environment ultimately foists upon us a bizarre choice between two equally disconnected realities. We may decide to accept as real our artificially reconstructed human environment, ignoring that it is an arbitrary re-creation, and accepting this interpretation of reality as our own. Or we may recoil from it, allowing ourselves to see our new environment as a stage set or a series of false fronts. This is the way the schizophrenic often describes the world. Those who make the latter choice risk the dangers inherent in trying to understand the world solely through their own isolated internal mental processes.

Either choice, acceptance or rejection, separates us from the possibility of interacting with and learning from the organic reality which exists outside of human conception. But what we call sanity lies in the first choice, acceptance of the arbitrary as real.

Laing proposes, therefore, that the schizophrenic of today is not suffering a psychological problem with a personal cause so much as he or she is making an apt response to a true condition of the modern world that has a political or technological cause. The so-called sane are holding on by our teeth to an extremely flimsy and arbitrary framework of reality.

Thus far, political theorists have failed to make very much of the effect our modern environments have on us. Failing to grasp that the physical world we live in is itself arbitrary, and thereby likely to be confusing to masses of people who seek solid ground on which to stand, political observers have not made some critical deductions. Primary among these is that when people cannot distinguish with certainty the natural from the interpreted, or the artificial from the organic, then all theories of the ideal organization of life become equal. None of them can be understood as any more or any less connected to planetary truth. And so the person or forces capable of speaking most loudly or most forcefully, or with some apparent logic—even if it is an unrooted logic—can become convincing within the void of understanding.

Where political theorists have overlooked these phenomena, others have not.

Looking at today’s worlds from the outside in, as it were, and extrapolating from here into the future, science fiction writers have often been politically visionary. In their analyses and uses of the relationships between artificial environments, high technology, sanity and insanity, and, therefore, the inevitability—or more accurately—the
fact
of human mind control, some science fiction writers produce work that merges with political criticism.

A second category of people who have noticed the modern human relationships with the environment is the leadership of the new popular philosophical-religious movements, such as Scientology,
est,
Arica, Mind Dynamics and others. Unfortunately these leaders do not warn us of the consequences of the confusion, but instead take advantage of it.

Noting that reality and its definitions have now entered the realm of game and are up for grabs, they become better at the game than anyone else, exploiting it, reshaping disordered, unrooted minds and tilling a new bed of mental soil from which monsters will inevitably grow.

By looking at science fiction and the new philosophical-religious movements, we can develop a model which may indicate the likely result of the technological processes that are already very far along in our world.

Science Fiction and Arbitrary Reality

A widely misunderstood Soviet film,
Solaris,
directed by André Tarkovski from the book by Stanislaw Lem, depicts problems faced by some astronauts in a space station that is orbiting the planet Solaris in a faraway galaxy.

Of an original group of eighty-five astronauts, only two are left. Most have fled, others have gone mad and been shipped back to Earth. Several have killed themselves.

The surface of Solaris is one vast ocean, which is also a single living mind. This planet-ocean-mind is playing some kind of awful mental trick on its visitors.

Back on Earth, puzzled space officials send a psychologist, Kris Kelvin, to investigate. Before leaving the planet for outer space, Kelvin spends his final weeks visiting his father in a small house deep in some woods. He immerses himself in the forest and takes long, silent walks through meadows. The film moves exceedingly slowly at this point. There are long sequences in which nothing but natural events of the forest pass by the camera lens. Nature-time.

Sometimes the camera follows Kelvin’s eyes as they absorb the surroundings. It rains. He is soaked. Back at his cabin, his body is warmed by a fire.

Finally it is time to leave. Now the camera is in the front seat of the car, sitting where Kelvin is sitting. We see what he sees.

Slowly the terrain changes. Winding wooded roads give way to straight, one-lane roads. The foliage recedes from the highway. Then we are on a freeway. The environment has become speeding cars, overpasses, underpasses, tunnels. Soon, we are in a city. There is noise, light, buildings everywhere. The natural landscape is submerged, invisible. Homocentric landscapes, abstract reality prevail. From there it’s a fast cut to space.

Kelvin is alone in a small space vehicle, heading toward Solaris. Earth is gone. His roots have been abandoned. Grounding, by definition, is impossible. His whole environment is abstract. His planetary home now exists only in memory.

Arriving at the space station, Kelvin understands Solaris’ trick. It enters visitors’ memories and then creates real-life manifestations of them. This begins to happen to Kelvin. His long-dead wife appears in his room. At first he believes it is an image of her; then he realizes it is not just an image, it is actually she. And yet, they are both aware that she is only a manifestation of his mind. So she is simultaneously real and imaginary.

Other people from Kelvin’s life appear in the lab. He encounters the re-created memories of the other two astronauts; relatives, old friends, toys, scraps of long-abandoned clothing, technical equipment, potted plants, dogs, dwarfs from a child-hood circus, fields of grass. Things are strewn wildly about as the visitors from Earth try to figure out what to do with all the real/unreal stuff that keeps appearing from their memories. The space station takes on the quality of a dream, a carnival, a lunatic asylum.

The scientists consider returning to Earth as the others have. Kelvin favors this move as he feels his sanity slipping, yet he realizes that to leave means “killing” his rediscovered wife. Back on Earth she will be a memory, much as Earth has become in this space station. She understands this, and it is a source of anguish for both of them.

No one among the scientists or their mental creations can control what will happen. Without concrete reality, which is to say, contact with their planetary roots, they are adrift in their minds: insane. All information has become believable and not believable at the same time. It has become arbitrary. There is no way to separate the real from the not-real. Although the astronauts know this, since there is nothing that is not arbitrary, except each other, all information is equal. It is impossible to determine which information to act on.

Solaris has made the astronauts its subjects. They cannot defend themselves from the images the planet makes concrete. In the end, the men have no choice but to accept all information as real. Kelvin goes through a long cycle of Earth images, from childhood to his present space-station life. He is in his father’s house again, but he is also in space. It rains again, but now the rain is indoors. It might as well be. He cannot distinguish. He accepts.