Lenten Thoughts: The Boob Tube?

Will Rogers famously quipped that television was "chewing gum for the mind?"  Robert Hughes has a more biting critique:  

TV favors a mentality in which certain things no longer matter particularly: skills like the ability to enjoy a complex argument, for instance, or to perceive nuances, or to keep in mind large amounts of significant information, or to remember today what someone said last month, or to consider strong and carefully argued opinions in defiance of what is conventionally called “balance.” Its content lurches between violence of action, emotional hyperbole, and blandness of opinion. And it never, ever stops. It is always trying to give us something interesting. Not interesting for long; just for now.

Commercial TV teaches people to scorn complexity and to feel, not think. It has come to present society as a pagan circus of freaks, pseudo-heroes, and wild morons, struggling on the sand of a Colosseum without walls.

Thomas Merton writing in Cistercian Studies Quarterly ("Inner Experience: Problems of the Contemplative Life" 1984) brought this criticism further:

The life of a television watcher is a kind of caricature of contemplation:  Passivity, uncritical absorption, receptivity, inertia.  {It is] the nadir of intellectual and emotional slavery.

Strong words these but not without elements of truth.

I say this with three things in mind:

Firstly, I have been gratified to have been able to attend and spiritually benefit from four lectures recently  on "Spirituality and the Movies" featuring such titles as The Butler, Titanic, Magnolia and Walk the Line, all of which, ironically, I watched on my television.  The unfolding of practical spiritual themes in these films have tremendously impacted on my experience of Lent this year.  Secondly, a couple of days ago, I finished watching an enthralling, five-part PBS series titled, The Story of the Jews.  Finally, I am quite painfully aware that yes, even during this Lent, I have spent too many hours uncritically and  unprofitably watching and half-watching the boob-tube.

Television, like anything else I suppose, can serve good or evil and, like anything requires a capacity to be prudent, set limits and curb our thirst (and at times blood-thirst) for the titillating.  Most important, television should never draw us away or deter us from our obligations to our  families and our various communities.

When that happens television watching certainly does become what Thomas Aquinas called an apparent, rather than a real good, becoming, "the nadir of intellectual and emotional slavery."