Television and Plato's Cave
By Sam Keen
Philosopher Sam Keen, a featured speaker at Mythic Journeys 2004, is the author of dozens of books, articles, and recordings, including Hymns to an Unknown God, To Love and Be Loved, A Fire in the Belly, Your Mythic Journey, and more.
 These days, television has more than its share of critics. The tube, they tell us, bombards us with images of unreal life. It chooses our news for us, presents it in bite size packages that give equal time to children starving in the Sudan and the rise and fall of hemlines. It reduces complex events to cliches, turns our national elections into a circus in which the candidates perform for the cameras and sell their souls for photo opportunities. For 6 or 7 hours a day it seduces the average American into a fantasyland: soap operas where airbrushed heros, vamps, and villians encounter more drama in an afternoon than most of us experience in a lifetime; cop shows that have made us more aware of the streets of LA than our own neighborhoods; sitcoms with can laughter; cartoons about sadistic woodpeckers and gallactic shootouts.
And commercials, commercials, commercials, ad nauseum interrupt us every few minutes, and like secular evangelists promise us happiness and freedom from pain if only we eat the right cereal, drive the right car or drink the right beer. Its unreal. We are entertaining ourselves to death, living the vicarous lifestyles of the rich, the famous, and the violent. With scarcely a protest we are becoming passive consummers of prepackaged meanings and simplistic solutions -- a manipulated mass.
Of course, the critics are right enough. But they miss the real issue by a country mile. Our danger lies less in the media world and the images that engulf us, than in the failure of individuals to think about what they are shown. To give us a little perspective on the problem of image and reality, I suggest we listen to a philosopher who praciced the art of social criticism in Athens 23 centuries before television was invented.
Plato, in the parable of the cave, suggests that the human condition is like the situation of men who have spent their lives in a cave chained in such a way that they can see only the dark wall in front of them. In back and above them a fire burns. Between the fire and themselves is a walkway with a parapet built along it like the screen in a puppet show which hides the performers while they show their puppets over the top. Behind this parapet walk people who carry artificial objects, such as figures of men or horses made of wood or stone, which cast shadows onto the wall of the cave. Since the prisoners have never seen anything except these shadows of imitations of things their opinions about "reality" are nothing but illusions, but they, of course, do not know this. Imagine what would happen, Plato says, if one of the men should manage to get free and turn around and see the artificial objects. At first the light from the fire would blind him, but then he would be amazed to see the "real" objects and would know that his previous opinions based only on the shadow images were mere illusions. Suppose, further, that someone were to drag this man out of the cave into the full light of the sun and there, for the first time, he saw living men and actual horses. He would now know that what he previously supposed to be real objects were only plastic copies of "real" men and horses". Finally, suppose this man, now partially enlightened, were to see in his mind's eye a vision of the essential natures of manhood or horseness. With what clarity he would finally understand the difference between illusion and reality, the images and the things themselves.
Plato's cave is a parable for all ages because it tells us that it has always been difficult to separate shadow from substance, blind prejudice from reasoned conviction, data from meaning, folly from wisdom. Every culture since the beginning of time has had its imagesmiths, propagandists, mythmakers,gossips, and newsmen. The first storytellers sitting around ancient fires fascinated their audiences and convinced them without evidence that floods were a sign of the wrath of god and rainbows a symbol of divine favor. In Medieval times the perils of sin and the pleasures of the good life were advertised for all to see in the stained glass windows of cathedrals. Crusades and holy wars were promoted by song and sermon long before the printing press invented yellow journalism or television helped politicians convert a struggle between haves and have-nots into a battle between heros and evil empires. The manipulation of public opinion is as old as civilization and as inevitable as the lust for power.
And that is precisely why the joyful burden and responsibility of thinking rests like a crown on the head of any man or woman who wants to be free from the tyranny of the opinion makers. Each of us has a moral obligation to reason, to deliberate, to weigh evidence, to evaluate, to make judgments. The very mark of our freedom is our ability to question the authorities, be critical of our institutions, talk back to advertisers and propagandists, say no to the seductions of the image merchants. Newspapers and television can do a better or worse job of presenting us with information and a variety of opinions. But they can never do our thinking for us, make our decisions, or choose the values by which we will live.
A wise old man once told me never to go to sleep immediately after going to bed. "Simmer" he said. "Lie quietly and review the events and experiences of the day and sort out what has been important and what has been trivial" It may be the best advice I ever got. Our society, already flooded with information, might act with greater wisdom if we individually developed the habit of simmering.
We need a discipline for dealing with media. At each day's end, turn off the television, put the newspaper in the trash, and return to the sanctuary of silence within yourself. There, without distraction, sift through the images and experiences of the day and judge for yourself what is real, what is important, what is true.
Plato knew better than our modern critics that without silence and time for deliberation we are condemned to live in the darkness of the cave without the light of private reason or the hope of enlightened public opinion.
Sam Keen
16321 Norrbom Rd.
Sonoma, Ca. 95476
(707) 996-9010
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