The only connecting point in our society is the media. The media, which should act to bring us together, serves to pull us apart: conditioning and teaching violence, nurturing our darkest instincts, and feeding the nation with violent stereotypes that foster our deepest fears.
We are most assuredly on the road to ruin, and we need desperately to find the road home from this dark and fearful place to which we have traveled.
The Road to Ruin
And in that state of nature, no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Some would claim that modern, ultraviolent movies and their video-game equivalents examined here serve as a form of sublimation that will make violence and war obsolete. “Sublimation” is a term coined by Sigmund Freud referring to the turning of unacceptable urges and desires toward something socially desirable: taking the dark, unacceptable drives of the id and diverting them toward the sublime. Thus someone with a desire to slice open bodies may become a surgeon, or someone with an unacceptable urge toward violence may channel it toward sports, the military, or law enforcement. But watching movies is
The entertainment industry is not providing a socially acceptable channeling of energy. Indeed, very little energy is generally spent in the passive reception of television and movies. And this hardly qualifies as a socially acceptable or desirable channel for energies. Unless it has become socially desirable to kill outside the authority of the law, or to murder innocent victims — which, in the twisted world of the entertainment industry, it has.
If violence in television and movies were a form of sublimation, and if it were at all effective, then per capita violence should be going down. Instead it has multiplied nearly seven times in the span of the same generation in which this supposed sublimation has become available. It is not sublimation, or even neutral entertainment. It is classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and social learning, all focused toward the violence enabling of an entire society.
When our 1992 Olympic hockey team displayed a degree of lawlessness, violence, and aggression never before seen in such competitions, we should have begun to wonder. When the mother of one high school cheerleader was convicted of hiring a hit man to murder her daughter’s competitor for the cheerleader squad, and when the “bodyguard” for one Olympic figure skater attempted to eliminate the competition by maiming an opponent, we should have begun to understand that this is a society that is increasingly conditioned to turn to violence as the answer to all of its difficulties.
And the Road Home: The Resensitization of America
Male power, male dominance, masculinity, male sexuality, male aggression are not biologically determined. They are conditioned…. What is conditioned can be deconditioned. Man can change.
So what is the answer? Which is the road home from this dark and fearful place to which we have traveled?
Perhaps it is time to begin the “resensitization” of America.
When the framers of the U.S. Constitution wrote the Second Amendment, guaranteeing the right to keep and bear arms, they never dreamed that the concept of “arms” could someday include weapons of mass destruction that can vaporize whole cities. In the same way, until late in this century, no one ever dreamed that the right to free speech could include mechanisms of mass conditioning and desensitization. During the 1930s our society began for the first time to consider the need to control access to high explosives, and today even the most rabid defender of Second Amendment rights would not argue for private ownership of rental trucks full of high explosives, artillery, nerve gas, or nuclear arms. In the same way, perhaps the time has come for society to consider the price being paid for the implications of technology on some First Amendment rights.
There is no more need to constrain the print media than there is to control bowie knives, tomahawks, or flintlock rifles, but there might just be a justification for controlling the technology that goes beyond print media and flintlocks. The more advanced the technology, the greater the need for control. In the realm of weapons technology that means controlling explosives, artillery, and machine guns, and it may mean that the time has come to consider controlling assault rifles or pistols. In the realm of media technology, that may mean that the time has come to consider controlling TV, movies, and video games.
Technology has leapfrogged in a variety of ways that change the context of violence in our society. Today technology has enabled distribution of a much wider variety of entertainment: movies, television, videos, video games, multimedia and interactive television, specialized magazines, and the Internet. The result is that entertainment is now a private act. In many cases this is good, but in many other cases it has had the potential for developing, feeding, and sustaining individual pathologies. We have a two-hundred-year-old tradition of protecting the right to free speech and the right to bear arms. Obviously, though, our founding fathers did not have these factors (let alone operant conditioning!) in mind when they wrote the Constitution.
Media critic Michael Medved believes that some form of censorship (either self-censorship or the formal, legal kind) is in the cards, and that this might not be so bad, pointing out that the age of censorship in Hollywood was also the age of greatest artistry, yielding movies such as
Censorship is external regulation and therefore professional anathema. Yet such sanction is the community’s natural response to what it feels might threaten its stability, be it adulterated food, dangerous drugs, guns or films that incite social evils. Film-makers, like all artists, claim a license from such sanction. They are observers outside of society looking in. But the license is held on lease. It is not freehold. It can be withdrawn.
But the road to resensitization is probably not through formal censorship. There may be a legitimate place for new laws and legal constraints in our future, but oppression of one sort can never truly be relieved by other forms of oppression, and in today’s video society it would be difficult to completely squelch all manifestations of violence enabling. However, we may be able to find compromises that can put us back on the road toward becoming the kind of society that most of us want, while still respecting the rights of one another. What is needed is not censorship, at least not censorship in any legal or legislative sense.
There is a sound argument for changing the way we view and apply First Amendment rights, but I do not advocate it. I do, however, believe that the time has come for our society to censure (not censor) those who exploit violence for profit. In A. M. Rosenthal’s words we must “turn entirely away from those ugly people, defeating them by refusing them tolerance or respectability.”
What we must realize is that our society is trapped in a pathological spiral with all vectors pulling inward toward a tighter and tighter cycle of violence and destruction.
The prescription for resensitization is as complex and interactive as has been the path to our current dark state. Guns, drugs, poverty, gangs, war, racism, sexism, and the destruction of the nuclear family are just a few of the factors that can act to cheapen human life. The current debates over euthanasia, abortion, and the death penalty indicate that we are divided over the ethics of life and death. To greater or lesser degrees each of these
