Rejane Xavier
Television has come to threaten democracy through the excessive power it has gained and because, according to Popper, it corrodes the basic foundation of the rule of law, which is the rejection of violence.
The exaggerated proportion of scenes of sex and violence on television at times when children and teenagers form a large part of the audience has aroused in increasingly wider sectors of society a call for some kind of control measures on the part of some kind of responsible authority.
A similar situation in the USA has brought about a strong social reaction fuelled by a broad-reaching discussion on the code of ethics of the culture industry, the authority of parents to choose the type of psychological and moral influence they consider suitable in bringing up their children, and the most effective ways of ensuring the freedom of choice of everyone within a society that recognises and accepts ethical and cultural pluralism.
In Brazil the topic unleashes two opposing but converging types of reaction. On the one hand the unbending paladins of free enterprise feel it is absurd to impose any kind of interference, whatever its origin, with the "freedom of creativity and information" exercised by telecommunications companies. On the other hand, genuinely democratic and well-intentioned intellectuals and artists, scarred by the experience of the dictatorship, tremble before anything that seems to them to evoke the odious ghost of censorship, and rise up with one voice against the faintest shadow of a "threat to freedom of expression". In the face of this double, solid barrier, rational discussion on the influence and role of the mass media becomes an extremely delicate matter.
It was surely a concern with bringing this debate into the field of rational thought that the London-based Viennese philosopher, Karl Popper, wrote the essay Television: a danger to democracy.
Popper is well known for his works defending political and social liberalism (The Open Society and its Enemies, among others) as well as those on logic, psychology and the biology of knowledge. It is in the name of liberalism and rationality that he questions the inertia of society in general and of political institutions in particular, in the face of the power of television. Television has come to threaten democracy through the excessive power it has gained and because, according to Popper, it corrodes the basic foundation of the rule of law, which is the rejection of violence.
Television calls on violence, sex and sensationalism to a far greater extent than those elements actually exist in social life and in the experience of each of us, especially of children. If education is a process of selecting the stimuli to which individuals are subjected in their formative years in order to inculcate and reinforce in their minds and feelings values that are higher than those deriving from the free development of their primitive instincts, television as it functions today is the most perfect form of anti-education imaginable. It exposes the public to a reverse selection process, banalises crime and scandal, disassociates sex from feeling and responsibility, gives excessive encouragement to consumerism and underestimates work. And it does all this in a way that is particularly damaging to the young, who perceive less clearly the frontiers between life and fiction, as their experience is so much more impregnated with the fantasies of the screen than with the realities of the world.
No society can be better than the sum of the individuals who comprise it and democracy cannot survive if it ceases to produce its basic element: the civilised citizen, who is not a random product but the result of a delicate process of education.
Popper's analysis is perfectly consistent with the conclusions that Freud pointed out in his study on Civilisation and its Discontents. Freud demonstrates that within each person there is a struggle between two major drives, two powerful sources of energy: Eros, the drive for love and life and Thanatos, the drive for death and destruction. At first sight civilisation seems to repress in relation to Eros, competing with unbridled sensuality as it demands the creative energy of sex to be used for other tasks. But as Freud's idea develops, he shows how, from the point of view of the libido, the price that Thanatos needs to pay to civilisation is much more onerous. Repressing aggression, violence and destructive instincts does not bring the rewards that the sublimation of the sex drive brings. In advanced societies, competition – be it in terms of sport, power or money – becomes the only escape valve, but it involves very complex mechanisms and imposes a level of anxiety and stress that is almost unbearable.
In the magic box of the television primitive demons are invoked and their powers set free. The repression and anxiety inevitably generated by the civilising process are forgotten in the face of the powerful catharsis that sets free the impulses that are restrained and channelled by society. As we have seen, however, the result points us more towards Hobbes than towards Rousseau. What emerges from this liberation is not the bon sauvage but the homo homini lupus, ready to plunge into a war of everyone against everyone else.
Taking refuge in the simple rhetorical repetition of principles concerning free expression or enterprise is to bypass the question entirely. These principles are themselves the crowning achievement of a secular political process involving the hard-won replacement of barbarism by civilisation, of the law of the jungle by human rights. They lose all meaning in the world where anything goes, where the strongest rule. Without an organised society and without the education that makes that possible, there is no freedom for enterprise or for expression.
Just as traffic regulations do not oppress us, but enable us to enjoy the right to come and go, or as health requirements governing foodstuffs do not undermine the rights of farmers to produce their crops and of shopkeepers to sell them, the regulation of programmes broadcast on television does not constitute any attack on the rights of the citizen. On the contrary, it is a question of survival of the very type of sociability that makes those rights possible.
Above all, as the clearest voices in this debate suggest, society itself should delineate the necessary limits in a conscious and voluntary way by means of a flexible and democratic process comprising the many interests and legitimate points of view of the different groups and sectors of which that society is composed.
-------------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment