Texts:Rom-E-68b-E-Pur-2

Purposes
Eight Reflective Essays

2—A Message on the Media

2:¶1

We have at our command great new tools of communication; and when we learn to use these intelligently, we can perhaps realize man's recurrent dream of culture and anarchy.

2:¶2

Power is fickle. We are witnessing one of its slow, historic shifts; yet the grandiose scale of contemporary institutions blinds us to these events, and we advance without foresight. Our imagination balks before the difficulty of conceiving alternatives to the given, so great does it seem. Dazzled by the immediate, we forget to meditate on how the Delphic Oracle was once the most powerful institution in Greece, and we fail to wonder at the way that enthusiasts of an other-worldly, subversive religion slipped between the legions and by the frail power of conversion took command of the Roman Empire. History is a hidden continuity embedded in continuous change; in it, particular patterns of power always prove temporary. The continuity of our history does not stem from the perpetuation of established institutions; it arises instead from the protean recurrence of living intelligence, of reasoned action. Wherever intellect in operation is present, men preserve their past by shaping their future.

2:¶3

Beneath the current competition for command, changes are underway that may transfer the very power to command from the established offices to novel ones. In the recent past power has been possessed by the recognized representatives of significant political and economic interests. Representation has been the fundamental principle of the established system. Whether the system is communist or capitalist, totalitarian or democratic, it is a system of representation by which a few can make decisions that the many will have an interest in implementing. Since our forefathers shouted that there would be "no taxation without representation," political progress has been primarily a matter of dispossessed groups winning adequate representation. The form of the representative nation-state has almost reached its optimum development throughout the industrialized world; and hence the quest for representation is beginning to give way to a new demand, a call for participation. Should this demand prove capable of sustained development, it will lead to fundamental changes, not to mere adaptations of an established form.

2:¶4

A shift in political organization from representation to participation would involve the basic transformation of the means by which group decisions are made and support for them is mobilized. Such a shift has been made possible by widespread education and pervasive systems of communication. The state may well be forced to wither. The rationale for a representative government has been that intelligence and information were scarce qualities and that a means of concentrating these was necessary for the sake of the common good. In recent years, however, this rationale has been challenged. A worldwide network of journalists, commentators, writers, artists, and educators has been making it less and less likely that the functionaries of the state will be significantly more intelligent or better informed than many of its subjects. A sign of the times is the frequency with which prominent personages first learn of important events from the radio, television, and press that are open to all. The suspicion grows that the reason for state secrets in a "free society" is not so much national security as it is professional security for the officials who are hard pressed to preserve their claim to superior wisdom in matters of policy. In short, the ubiquity of intellect dissolves the authority of the state. Hence, other forms of social power are becoming possible.

2:¶5

A perfect polis, men have usually thought, would need no government; it would be a harmonious anarchy, a spontaneous order in which external government and law had been made unnecessary by the internalization of principle: politics should merge with ethics. Whether one interprets one's gospel according to Plato, Augustine, Voltaire, or Marx, one holds that the state should wither away. The sin of our politicians—a sin born of desperation—is their belief that their mastery of statecraft and the uses of force in the service of policy is a sign of their political competence. In truth, their practices signify an incapacity to govern, for governing is the art of making recourse to force, physical or psychic, unnecessary in human affairs. Long ago, Plato somewhat stodgily explained in the Republic that the prescriptive regulation of conduct was an undesirable way to rule a community. Legislation was at best a stopgap: "the bent given by education will determine the quality of later life, by that sort of attraction which like things always have for one another, till they finally mount up to one imposing result, whether for good or ill." Where men were well educated, there would be no need for prescriptive regulation, for such men would "soon find out for themselves what regulations were needed."

2:¶6

Men have recurrently hoped that a politics of principle can make unnecessary a politics of force. To date, men have at best merely approximated this hope, for their education has never been sufficient to make legislation superfluous. Thus, even Plato had to turn from his Utopia to the world of flesh and blood, and in the Laws he reluctantly proposed multifarious regulations over the conduct of life. But note how even the enthusiastic exponents of the state thought that it was a surrogate for the yet impossible politics of principle. At most, the state was an orthopedic aid that would help men strengthen their minds arid learn to live freely in harmony. Thus, Matthew Arnold wrote not about culture or anarchy, but about culture and anarchy. In the ideal community, men would live together without the crutch of external restraints; but unless men fully realized their cultural capacities, they would be unable to live harmoniously in anarchy. Certainly, as Arnold saw it, nineteenth-century Englishmen were unable to do so, and to bring themselves closer to a level of culture at which they could, they should give allegiance to the state, to the representative structure that symbolized the best self of each citizen. But now for many, the established state no longer symbolizes their best selves.

2:¶7

So be it; there is nothing sacrosanct about the state. Developed under particular historical conditions, the state was an effective system for concentrating scarce talent and knowledge and for bringing these to bear on the community's practical concerns. The value of the state to human life was not in its formal structures, but in the fact that for a time it helped intellect operate in human affairs; the state permitted men of reason to act on significant problems of importance to all. If in the future, other systems can perform this function more effectively, so much the better; historic continuity depends not on the structure of the system but on the performance of the function.

2:¶8

In any community and in every community, the problem of judgment is inescapable. If there is a common life, public decisions must somehow be made, for life consists in making decisions about vital problems; and these decisions must be sufficiently wise not to lead the community to destruction. In the last century, the conditions under which community decisions are made have changed profoundly. The combination of widespread education, high literary sophistication, growing leisure, and instantaneous global communications greatly enhances the individual's claim not merely to be represented in community deliberations, but to participate actively. Only time will tell whether this enhanced claim will prove sufficiently strong to prevail against the state and to win the allegiance of men to a new system. But notwithstanding Hegel's hopes, the performance of the state has not been so consistently rational to make us shun putting potential alternatives to the test. This test will be possible only if we do our best to make both the principle of representation and that of participation function as well as they can; and here we arrive at the message on the media.

2:¶9

In times of disorientation, mistakes are often made by those who try to go beyond outworn assumptions to divine the new dynamics of power. A dangerous mistake of this sort is the myth of hot and cool media, the myth that pits electronic media against those of print. Neither moving images nor static ciphers necessarily conduce to either spontaneous emotion or abstract rationality. Emotion and reason are qualities of human activities, not human artifacts; it is a pathetic fallacy for a rhetorician here to commit the pathetic fallacy. Certain minds, not certain media, are perhaps hot or cool, depending on the thinker's character, mood, and intention. The touchstone for all communication is the problem of judgment, the continuous need of man to choose, consciously or unconsciously, to act this or that way in this or that situation. No matter how much man extends himself through mechanical and electronic artefacts, there is no way to discover the qualities of his prospective actions by studying the characteristics of his artefacts, for the qualities of his actions reside not in the artefacts but in his performance with respect to the situation. The original critic of pop culture, Heraclitus, is as acute today as he was 2500 years ago, for he observed that "of all those whose discourse I have heard, none arrives at the realization that that which is wise is set apart from all things."

2:¶10

Technological determinism in the realm of mind is pernicious, and the particular determinism that suggests that print conduces to an individualistic rationalism and that electronics induce a tribal emotionalism is a serious threat to political progress. By so misunderstanding media, one simply serves the old order, the representative state, by giving it a wedge by which it can divide and rule. For too long, men of good will have feared mass communications, seeing in them only powerful agencies for manipulating the thoughts and inclinations of uncritical multitudes. The myth that particular human qualities are the inherent result of the media themselves, not the way in which men choose to use them, encourages some to use the media mindlessly, and it confirms in others their original fear of these media. These reactions will feed one another, and appearance will seem to validate the myth. Hence, such a self-fulfilling prophecy helps to isolate the media from individualistic rationalism; and so isolated, the media may merely be a terrible tool of tyranny. To the degree that the media are used mindlessly, they will simply help perpetuate the state. But the media need not and should not be used in isolation from intellect.

2:¶11

Participatory politics cannot escape the imperative of intelligence; unless a participatory system proves in practice to be wiser than the representative, the state will not wither. The electronic media are an integral feature of the conditions that may make a new form of human organization possible. But in historic matters, conditions are merely the material cause of events; the efficient, formal, and final causes depend on how men act on the conditions. Despite claims to the contrary, the myth of the media is a reactionary bulwark of the status quo, for it discourages men from seeking to act on the media so as to serve intellect. If mass communications can manipulate the mindless, they can equally stimulate critical awareness. Those truly seeking an alternative to the power state should resist every effort to pit print against the picture; both forms should be brought into an ever more varied effort to provoke men, all men, to sharpen their intelligence, discipline their faculties, and furnish their minds. We have at our command great new tools of communication; and when we learn to use these intelligently, we can perhaps realize man's recurrent dream of culture and anarchy.

Robert Oliver
Teachers College Record (vol. 70, no. 2, November 1968)