Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin recently made some ill-considered comments about Paul Revere’s famous ride. When a reporter gave her an opportunity later to reconsider what she had said, she decided to double-down on her comments rather than just admit she misspoke and correct herself. Representative Anthony Weiner from New York did something even more ill-considered (I’ll let you discover that on your own if you don’t already know. It would make me blush to write it here). When his actions became public, he also doubled-down on his lie and claimed his Twitter account was hacked. He did later, to his credit, confess his lie (well, he did not actually say, “lie.” We hope for too much sometimes). The lives of Palin and Weiner are just two more “reality shows” on the network of our lives.
And some people actually claim there is no such thing as sin any more.
I do not think human nature is any worse now than it has been throughout history. The difference these days is that the ever-present media gets word out about our failures, lies and foibles within seconds after we make them. When George Washington confessed to his father about that famous cherry tree incident, my hunch is that it stayed between him and his father for most of his lifetime until he casually mentioned the story to a friend one day and then it got into our national story (Please no replies to me claiming the incident about the cherry tree was made up. I want to hold on to a few illusions about our history before they are shattered).
Fifty years ago, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Newton Minow warned that our media, particularly television, was becoming a “vast wasteland” of “screaming, cajoling and offending” (and this was before “American Idol” and “The Apprentice”). Minow’s warnings have gone unheeded. Reality shows in our media are examples of what sociologist Daniel Boorstin calls “pseudo-events.” They are not real. Really. I’m not kidding. Although they involve real people doing real things, they are no more real than were the gladiators in the arenas of ancient Rome. Their purpose is the same: first to titillate and then to narcotize the population.
I guess we’d like to think that we humans have grown up over the millennia; evolved into better human beings and that our “nature” would lead us to become (as Lincoln so hoped) “better angels.” That certainly has been the great project of western culture. Our modern sensibilities have led us to believe that through education, cultivation in the arts and scientific progress our natures would advance into higher, nobler ones. But that belief should have been always questioned and doubted. The German commandants at the death camps spent their evenings listening to recordings of the best opera and reading the great literature and poetry of the day and in the morning they sent Jews to the gas chambers. More than education, art and science must shape our moral sense and our moral actions. And our current appetite for that which titillates and narcotizes will only lead us to tolerate more Palin and Weiner “reality shows” in the media arena of our future.
Scott Benhase is the Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Georgia.
