Entertaining Ourselves To Death Quotes

Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.

[It] is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. […] The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining. (87)

If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be impossible to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan and listen to the wails of their parents, we would not be able to repeat clichés we use to justify war. This is why war is carefully sanitized. This is why we are given war's perverse and dark thrill but are spared from seeing war's consequences. The mythic visions of war keep it heroic and entertaining… The wounded, the crippled, and the dead are, in this great charade, swiftly carted offstage. They are war's refuse. We do not see them. We do not hear them. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled. The message they tell is too painful for us to hear. We prefer to celebrate ourselves and our nation by imbibing the myths of glory, honor, patriotism, and heroism, words that in combat become empty and meaningless.

Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore -- and this is the critical point -- how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails. (92)

In America, everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different roder from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. 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 world 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--misplace, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information--information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?

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. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.

I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed.

enchantment is the means through which we may gain access to sacredness. Entertainment is the means through which we distance ourselves from it.

...On television, religion, like everything else, is presented, quite simply and without apology, as an entertainment. Everything that makes religion an historic, profound, sacred human activity is stripped away; there is no ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and above all, no sense of spiritual transcendence.

television’s way of knowing is uncompromisingly hostile to typography’s way of knowing; that television’s conversations promote incoherence and triviality; that the phrase “serious television” is a contradiction in terms; and that television speaks in only one persistent voice—the voice of entertainment

There is nothing wrong with entertainment. As some psychiatrist once put it, we all build castles in the air. The problems come when we try to live in them. The communications media of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with telegraphy and photography at their center, called the peek-a-boo world into existence, but we did not come to live there until television. Television gave the epistemological biases of the telegraph and the photograph their most potent expression, raising the interplay of image and instancy to an exquisite and dangerous perfection. And it brought them into the home. We are by now well into a second generation of children for whom television has been their first and most accessible teacher and, for many, their most reliable companion and friend. To put it plainly, television is the command center of the new epistemology. There is no audience so young that it is barred from television. There is no poverty so abject that it must forgo television. There is no education so exalted that it is not modified by television. And most important of all, there is no subject of public interest—politics, news, education, religion, science, sports—that does not find its way to television. Which means that all public understanding of these subjects is shaped by the biases of television.

IT’S HARDLY a coincidence that “Shipping Out,” Wallace’s most well-known essay, appeared only a month before Infinite Jest, his most well-known novel, was published. Both are about the same thing (amusing ourselves to death), with different governing données (lethally entertaining movie, lethally pampering leisure cruise). In an interview after the novel came out, Wallace, asked what’s so great about writing, said that we’re existentially alone on the planet—I can’t know what you’re thinking and feeling, and you can’t know what I’m thinking and feeling—so writing, at its best, is a bridge constructed across the bridge of human loneliness.

The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether. To

Contemporary culture encourages us to make islands of ourselves for the sake of self-fulfillment, of career advancement, of entertainment, of diversion, and all the demands of the sovereign self. When suffering and death come for you--and it will--you want to be in a place where you know, and are known. You want--no, you need--to be able to say, as Mike did, "We're leaning, but we're leaning on each other.

Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot-high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.

Of course, in television's presentation of the "news of the day," we may see the Now...this" mode of discourse in it's boldest and most embarrassing form. For there, we are presented not only with fragmented news but news without context, without consequences, without value, and therefore without essential seriousness; that is to say, news as pure entertainment.

Many people in this room have an Etsy store where they create unique, unreplicable artifacts or useful items to be sold on a small scale, in a common marketplace where their friends meet and barter. I and many of my friends own more than one spinning wheel. We grow our food again. We make pickles and jams on private, individual scales, when many of our mothers forgot those skills if they ever knew them. We come to conventions, we create small communities of support and distributed skills--when one of us needs help, our village steps in. It’s only that our village is no longer physical, but connected by DSL instead of roads. But look at how we organize our tribes--bloggers preside over large estates, kings and queens whose spouses’ virtues are oft-lauded but whose faces are rarely seen. They have moderators to protect them, to be their knights, a nobility of active commenters and big name fans, a peasantry of regular readers, and vandals starting the occasional flame war just to watch the fields burn. Other villages are more commune-like, sharing out resources on forums or aggregate sites, providing wise women to be consulted, rabbis or priests to explain the world, makers and smiths to fashion magical objects. Groups of performers, acrobats and actors and singers of songs are traveling the roads once more, entertaining for a brief evening in a living room or a wheatfield, known by word of mouth and secret signal. Separate from official government, we create our own hierarchies, laws, and mores, as well as our own folklore and secret history. Even my own guilt about having failed as an academic is quite the crisis of filial piety--you see, my mother is a professor. I have not carried on the family trade. We dwell within a system so large and widespread, so disorganized and unconcerned for anyone but its most privileged and luxurious members, that our powerlessness, when we can summon up the courage to actually face it, is staggering. So we do not face it. We tell ourselves we are Achilles when we have much more in common with the cathedral-worker, laboring anonymously so that the next generation can see some incremental progress. We lack, of course, a Great Work to point to and say: my grandmother made that window; I worked upon the door. Though, I would submit that perhaps the Internet, as an object, as an aggregate entity, is the cathedral we build word by word and image by image, window by window and portal by portal, to stand taller for our children, if only by a little, than it does for us. For most of us are Lancelots, not Galahads. We may see the Grail of a good Classical life, but never touch it. That is for our sons, or their daughters, or further off. And if our villages are online, the real world becomes that dark wood on the edge of civilization, a place of danger and experience, of magic and blood, a place to make one’s name or find death by bear. And here, there be monsters.

Entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television. No matter what is depicted or from what point of view, the overarching presumption is that it is there for our amusement and pleasure. That is why even on news shows which provide us daily with fragments of tragedy and barbarism, we are urged by the newscasters to “join them tomorrow.” What for? One would think that several minutes of murder and mayhem would suffice as material for a month of sleepless nights. We accept the newscasters’ invitation because we know that the “news” is not to be taken seriously, that it is all in fun, so to say.

But what I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. Our television set keeps us in constant communion with the world, but it does so with a face whose smiling countenance is unalterable. The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether. To

Through the substance of human flesh flows life. Life is more than matter. Religions that attempt to keep the body sacred while denying the Creator's hand are in the same boat as skeptics who try to protect life while saying it is nothing more than matter. All the desacralizing that has engulfed our culture lies in this very struggle to understand the place and sacredness of the body. The right to every individual life, even the one still in the mother's womb; the pleasure and consummation of sexual delights, reserved for the sanctity of marriage; the injunction against suicide; the care and protection of one's health; the injunction against killing; and the command to love others more than we love ourselves and to work for their good-all of these flow from the fact that this body is a dwelling place for God. Our world would be a different place if we comprehended this sobering privilege. Having lost this truth, what we are left with? Pornography and the cruel degradation of men, women, and children; death in the womb in the name of personal rights; the breakdown of the family for myriad reasons; the profanation of sex in our entertainment industry; violence in unprecedented proportions. One can only weep for the bleeding and loss. In losing the high value that God has placed on the body, we are in free fall, at the mercy of greed, cruelty, and lust.

Where people once sought information to manage the real context of their lives, now they had to invent contexts in which otherwise useless information might be put to some apparent use. The crossword puzzle is one such pseudo-context; the cocktail party is another; the radio quiz shows of the 1930's and 1940's and the modern television game show are still others; and the ultimate, perhaps, is the wildly successful "Trivial Pursuit." In one form or another, each of these supplies the answer to the question,"What am I to do with all these disconnected facts?" And in one form or another, the answer is the same: Why not use them for diversion? for entertainment? to amuse yourself, in a game?

Censorship, after all, is the tribute tyrants pay to the assumption that a public knows the difference between serious discourse and entertainment—and cares. How delighted would be all the kings, czars and führers of the past (and commissars of the present) to know that censorship is not a necessity when all political discourse takes the form of a jest.

We may go to the house of mirth, to a party, where we have fun, kick back, have a good time, and enjoy entertainment. Parties are not all that serious; we don't have to be contemplative in order to enjoy ourselves there. Certainly there is a time to laugh, a time to dance, a time to celebrate-a time to have a party. But how much do we learn in those circumstances? Times of mirth do very little for the good of our souls.

Those who run television do not limit our access to information but in fact widen it. Our Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian. It does everything possible to encourage us to watch continuously. But what we watch is a medium which presents information in a form that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment. In America, we are never denied the opportunity to amuse ourselves.

But what I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. Our television set keeps us in constant communion with the world, but it does so with a face whose smiling countenance is unalterable. The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether.

all television news programs begin, end, and are somewhere in between punctuated with music...It is there, I assume, for the same reason music is used in theater and films - to create a mood and provide a leitmotif for the entertainment...as long as the music is there as a frame for the program, the viewer is comforted to believe that there is nothing to be greatly alarmed about; that, in fact, the events that are reported have as much relation to reality as do scenes in a play.

Rites–of–passage stories…were cherished in pre–literate societies not only for their entertainment value, but also as mythic tools to prepare young men and women for life’s ordeals. A wealth of such stories can be found marking each major transition in the human life cycle: puberty, marriage, childbirth, menopause, death. Other rites–of–passage, less predictable but equally transformative, include times of sudden change and calamity such as illness and injury, the loss of one’s home, the death of a loved one, etc. These are the times when we wake, like Dante, to find ourselves in a deep, dark wood — an image that in Jungian psychology represents an inward journey. Rites–of–passage tales point to the hidden roads that lead out of the dark again — and remind us that at the end of the journey we’re not the same person as when we started. Ascending from the Netherworld (that grey landscape of illness, grief, depression, or despair), we are ‘twice–born’ in our return to life, carrying seeds — new wisdom, ideas, creativity and fecundity of spirit.

My point is that we are by now so thoroughly adjusted to the "Now . . . this" world of news—a world of fragments, where events stand alone, stripped of any connection to the past, or to the future, or to other events—that all assumptions of coherence have vanished. And so, perforce, has contradiction. In the context of no context, so to speak, it simply disappears. And in its absence, what possible interest could there be in a list of what the President says now and what he said then? It is merely a rehash of old news, and there is nothing interesting or entertaining in that.

A conversation that took place between two American women describes this intimate relationship between physical and immaterial forms of dying. One of these women came to see me soon after her only child, a twenty-year-old son, died from an accidental drug overdose. We spoke of ways to help her live with this tragic loss. About two years later, this woman’s best friend found herself struggling through a very painful divorce. The first woman explained to her friend: My son is never coming back. I entertain no fantasies about this. My relationship to myself and to how I relate to the world has changed forever. But the same is true for you. Your sense of who you are, of who is there for you and who you will travel through life with, has also changed forever. You too need to grieve a death. You are thinking that you have to come to terms with this intolerable situation outside of yourself. But just as I had to allow myself to die after my son’s death, you must die to a marriage that you once had. We grieve for the passing of what we had, but also for ourselves, for our own deaths. The profound misfortune of the death of this woman’s son opened her heart to an exploration of impermanence and death that went far beyond her own personal story.

When Bindi, Robert, and I got home on the evening of Steve’s death, we encountered a strange scene that we ourselves had created. The plan had been that Steve would get back from his Ocean’s Deadlist film shoot before we got back from Tasmania. So we’d left the house with a funny surprise for him. We got large plush toys and arranged them in a grouping to look like the family. We sat one that represented me on the sofa, a teddy bear about her size for Bindi, and a plush orangutan for Robert. We dressed the smaller toys in the kids’ clothes, and the big doll in my clothes. I went to the zoo photographer and got close-up photographs of our faces that we taped onto the heads of the dolls. We posed them as if we were having dinner, and I wrote a note for Steve. “Surprise,” the note said. “We didn’t go to Tasmania! We are here waiting for you and we love you and miss you so much! We will see you soon. Love, Terri, Bindi, and Robert.” The surprise was meant for Steve when he returned and we weren’t there. Instead the dolls silently waited for us, our plush-toy doubles, ghostly reminders of a happier life. Wes, Joy, and Frank came into the house with me and the kids. We never entertained, we never had anyone over, and now suddenly our living room seemed full. Unaccustomed to company, Robert greeted each one at the door. “Take your shoes off before you come in,” he said seriously. I looked over at him. He was clearly bewildered but trying so hard to be a little man. We had to make arrangements to bring Steve home. I tried to keep things as private as possible. One of Steve’s former classmates at school ran the funeral home in Caloundra that would be handling the arrangements. He had known the Irwin family for years, and I recall thinking how hard this was going to be for him as well. Bindi approached me. “I want to say good-bye to Daddy,” she said. “You are welcome to, honey,” I said. “But you need to remember when Daddy said good-bye to his mother, that last image of her haunted him while he was awake and asleep for the rest of his life.” I suggested that perhaps Bindi would like to remember her daddy as she last saw him, standing on top of the truck next to that outback airstrip, waving good-bye with both arms and holding the note that she had given him. Bindi agreed, and I knew it was the right decision, a small step in the right direction. I knew the one thing that I had wanted to do all along was to get to Steve. I felt an urgency to continue on from the zoo and travel up to the Cape to be with him. But I knew what Steve would have said. His concern would have been getting the kids settled and in bed, not getting all tangled up in the media turmoil. Our guests decided on their own to get going and let us get on with our night. I gave the kids a bath and fixed them something to eat. I got Robert settled in bed and stayed with him until he fell asleep. Bindi looked worried. Usually I curled up with Robert in the evening, while Steve curled up with Bindi. “Don’t worry,” I said to her. “Robert’s already asleep. You can sleep in my bed with me.” Little Bindi soon dropped off to sleep, but I lay awake. It felt as though I had died and was starting over with a new life. I mentally reviewed my years as a child growing up in Oregon, as an adult running my own business, then meeting Steve, becoming his wife and the mother of our children. Now, at age forty-two, I was starting again.

In courtrooms, classrooms, operating rooms, board rooms, churches and even airplanes, Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other.

And, in the end, what will the students have learned? They will, to be sure, have learned something about whales, perhaps about navigation and map reading, most of which they could have learned just as well by other means. Mainly, they will have learned that learning is a form of entertainment or, more precisely, that anything worth learning can take the form of an entertainment, and ought to.

It is my object in the rest of this book to make the epistemology of television visible again. I will try to demonstrate by concrete example that television’s way of knowing is uncompromisingly hostile to typography’s way of knowing; that television’s conversations promote incoherence and triviality; that the phrase “serious television” is a contradiction in terms; and that television speaks in only one persistent voice—the voice of entertainment

Our television set keeps us in constant communion with the world, but it does so with a face whose smiling countenance is unalterable. The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether.

This perception of a news show as a stylized dramatic performance whose content has been staged largely to entertain is reinforced by several other features, including the fact that the average length of any story is forty-five seconds. While brevity does not suggest triviality, in this case it clearly does. It is simply not possible to convey a sense of seriousness about any event if its implications are exhausted in less that one minute's time.

I will try to demonstrate by concrete example that television's way of knowing is uncompromisingly hostile to typography's way of knowing; that television's conversations promote incoherence and triviality; that the phrase "serious television" is a contradiction in terms; and that television speaks in only one persistent voice-the voice of entertainment.

Our Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian. It does everything possible to encourage us to watch continuously. But what we watch is a medium which presents information in a form that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment.

When a population is distracted by trivia,” wrote Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death, “when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk. Culture death is a real possibility.

The result of all this is that Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.

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. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result.

My point is that we are by now so thoroughly adjusted to the “Now ... this” world of news—a world of fragments, where events stand alone, stripped of any connection to the past, or to the future, or to other events—that all assumptions of coherence have vanished. And so, perforce, has contradiction. In the context of no context, so to speak, it simply disappears. And in its absence, what possible interest could there be in a list of what the President says now and what he said then? It is merely a rehash of old news, and there is nothing interesting or entertaining in that. The only thing to be amused about is the bafflement of reporters at the public’s indifference. There is an irony in the fact that the very group that has taken the world apart should, on trying to piece it together again, be surprised that no one notices much, or cares.

Along similar lines, Neil Postman, the author of the 1980s classic Amusing Ourselves to Death, wrote, “Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities, and commercials.

We spoke of ways to help her live with this tragic loss. About two years later, this woman’s best friend found herself struggling through a very painful divorce. The first woman explained to her friend: My son is never coming back. I entertain no fantasies about this. My relationship to myself and to how I relate to the world has changed forever. But the same is true for you. Your sense of who you are, of who is there for you and who you will travel through life with, has also changed forever. You too need to grieve a death. You are thinking that you have to come to terms with this intolerable situation outside of yourself. But just as I had to allow myself to die after my son’s death, you must die to a marriage that you once had. We grieve for the passing of what we had, but also for ourselves, for our own deaths.

In courtrooms, classrooms, operating rooms, board rooms, churches and even airplanes, Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.

We live today in the grand age of diversion, and the reasons why are obvious. With our economic prosperity, our high-tech devices and the cornucopia of entertainment pressing for our attention, we can surround ourselves with diversion from the cradle to grave. We do not focus our attention on anything for long. We do not ask what 'the good life' is and what it requires. Happiness is a small circle, and it is no surprise that the last thing on most people's minds at any moment is the question of the meaning of life, the coming of death and the priorities that are needed to choose wisely. What Socrates call the 'unexamined life' that is 'not worth living' now seems to be the life more people have slipped into than ever before.

The back of the church was raised up from the ground. Tossed in among its supports were what looked like moldering bones. My heart ached so much for these poor souls, neglected even after death, I turned away to head back, but managed only a few burdened steps. I drew up abruptly and froze. An old, worn marker, standing off by itself, grabbed at my heart. It was Edgar Alan Poe. He fit in so perfectly there. Maybe I did, too. His sorrow and pain ate through me as I stood, head lowered. Can’t even death let us step away from our darkness? It was like he was scratching a warning into the dirt with his finger, and meant it specifically for me. Don’t wait around for sermons to wash you clean, he seemed to say, for death or drugs to close your eyes. God won’t come roaring in with fresh troops to drive away the darkness we’ve walled our own souls up in. He didn’t put us there; we’ll have to dig ourselves out. I looked at my own life as I stood there, feeling buried alive, like some of his characters. But unlike his characters I had caught a flash of hope.

We don't like facing either when there are so many other entertaining or enjoyable distractions at our disposal in an affluent culture. Evangelicals have tended to focus on vision retreats, growth, and mission, which can be fine in their proper places. However, a regular, sustained reflection on suffering and death simply isn't on the radar for many evangelicals who are concerned with preserving their own spiritual growth and the growth of a movement that remains anxious about its effectiveness. Why would we face the darkness of death and the uncertainty of suffering when we can easily justify our affluence as God's blessing or busy ourselves with God's work?

Television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations.