Entertained to Death

In high school, like so many other students from that time, I was intrigued by George Orwell’s short novel 1984. His vision of Big Brother seemed more to cast aspersions on the dark Soviet Empire of my youth than anything else.  But Orwell (his real name was Eric Arthur Blair) was too smart for that.  Dying of tuberculosis, he worried that the Western world he was leaving was giving too much power and sway to its political leaders.  By time he died at 46 in 1950, many began viewing his writings as prophetic.1984’s nation of Oceania was a dystopian nightmare in which citizens traded their freedom for the empty promises of security and material goods, and ended up in a modern kind of slavery.  Big Brother used Newspeak to create its own form of “fake news” in an effort to stop creative thinking and force compliance.  Privacy wasn’t tolerated, surveillance was everywhere, and citizenship was diving into a state of fear and atrophy.Certain elements of Orwell’s vision have endured and even been proved true.  In some regions of the globe, authoritarianism is making a comeback, spearheaded by a grouping of ineffective leaders more bent on grabbing power than in sharing it.  Unnecessary conflicts in which nobody really wins are becoming the norm.  Average citizens, especially the vulnerable, lose everything.  Women’s empowerment is left behind, and economies inevitably decline.  Even in many prosperous Western nations there has been a growing sense that the path towards a more equitable future has somehow been lost.Writing in 1985, Neil Postman took another read of Orwell’s classic and began wondering if we weren’t coming to the same end but by a different route.  In his Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, he envisioned, like Orwell before him, a present and future where citizens were disempowered – not through authoritarian might but personal distraction.  His son Andrew Postman recently reflected on his father's view in the Guardian.  His dad frankly pondered whether we were permitting ourselves to be entertained to death, growing increasingly distracted as the decline of our democracies proceeded apace.  And so he wrote:

“While Orwell feared those who would ban books, Aldous Huxley, in his Brave New World, feared that there would be no reason to ban a book for there would be no one who wanted to read one.”

This is troubling, yet largely true.  Low voter turnouts, a growing disinclination towards politics and public policy, a populism more angry than contemplative, economies increasingly out of touch with average citizens, a decline in faith towards institutions – all this has meant that we have largely turned away from the vehicles required if we are to reverse the warnings of the two authors.But we haven’t just been turning away from such responsibilities.  We increasingly veer towards entertainment; we display tendencies to read less and be entertained more.  Long thought or policy writings bore us, while we remain enamoured with quick “in and out” reflections on our political estate.  We want everything to be new, instead of taking time to dig deeper into truths and patterns that have survived millennia and require adaptation to a new age.  Thus, we can learn about citizenship without ever really living it – or truly understanding it.  We grow quickly disinterested in the complexities of modern policies, thereby permitting others who don’t have our best interests at heart to rule from an isolated place of power.If anything, the experience of the last few decades – when so much money abounded yet couldn’t be channeled to tackle our major challenges – have taught us that it is citizens alone who can transform our societies.  Our politics and our economies have lost their way, leading us to a kind of future that mixes the two visions of both Orwell and Huxley.  That is a confluence threatening to undo us all.  As Nikki Giovanni would put it: “We have a world to conquer … one person at a time … starting with ourselves.?  It is time to stop being distracted and disenfranchised and find new ways to re-engage in the ancient role of active citizenship.  The starting point for each of us must be the potential of our own minds and values.