And Frankenstein. “…Jesus is approached with the offer of a worldwide TV network, and “The Dead Sea Videotapes,” in which archaeologists centuries hence discover a cache of tapes, films, and other evidence of our contemporary society, and reach shocking conclusions.

“Future historians,” says Muggeridge, “will surely see us as having created in the media a Frankenstein monster which no one knows how to control or direct, and marvel that we should have so meekly subjected ourselves to its destructive and often malign influence.”

And what would he say today? In 1977 Malcolm Muggeridge wrote,

“One of the numerous pleasures of old age is the realisation that everything has to be just as it is, making what Blake called a ‘Fearful Symmetry’, whose meaning is transparently clear if only one has the code book and knows how to use it —the code book being, of course, the Gospels and Epistles and other related literature.

Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us; and the art of life is to get the message. In the same sort of way, listening to great music, or reading great literature, or standing before great buildings, an inner rhythm is detected, and the heart rejoices, and a light breaks, which is none other than God’s love shining through all his creation. ‘How delightful,’ Jean-Pierre de Caussade writes, ‘the peace we enjoy when we have learned by faith to see God in this way through all creatures as through a transparent veil. Darkness becomes light and bitterness sweet.’

Thus, when I had the job of attempting a tele-anatomy (sic) of [Sir John] Reith not long before he died, I came to realise that in some weird way he was the perfectly appropriate first compère or anchorman for the great media harlequinade; groaning and suffering, as he did, while the show was being got on the road, and then cursing it heartily for its subsequent ribald performances.

As it happens, I saw him on his death-bed, when a marvellous peace at last descended on that troubled spirit. At the same time, I found myself remembering the words he’d had inscribed at the entrance to [the BBC] Broadcasting House, and even seemed to hear him pronouncing them with great unction and emphasis:

“This temple of the arts and muses is dedicated to Almighty God by the first governors of broadcasting in the year 1931, Sir John Reith being Governor General. It is their prayer that good seeds sown may bring forth a good harvest, that all things hostile to peace or purity may be banished from this house, that the people, inclining their ears to whatsoever things are beautiful, honest and of good report, may tread the paths of wisdom and righteousness.’

Wikipedia: “In 1960, Reith returned to the BBC for an interview with John Freeman in the television series Face to Face. When he visited the BBC to record the programme, work was being undertaken, and Reith noticed with dismay the “girlie” pin-ups of the workmen…

In the interview, he expressed his disappointment at not being “fully stretched” in his life, especially after leaving the BBC. He claimed that he could have done more than Churchill gave him to do during the war. He also disclosed an abiding dissatisfaction with his life in general. He admitted not realising soon enough that “life is for living,” and suggested he perhaps still did not acknowledge that fact. He also stated that since his departure as Director-General, he had watched almost no television and listened to virtually no radio. “When I leave a thing, I leave it,” he said.”

Muggeridge continues, “Among the writings on the media, too, there are inevitably numerous studies, as they are called, relating to particular aspects of TV like violence and eroticism. Ten thousand blameless housewives in Minnesota will be asked whether their tranquillity has been disturbed, their erotic impulses stimulated, and their nights disrupted by scenes of violence and debauchery on the television screen. The result is then punctiliously monitored, fed into a computer, tabulated and analysed.

… I remember reading in The New Statesman about an experiment which, it was claimed, ‘proved conclusively’ that pornography does not have a corrupting effect. It seems that a Doctor C. Elthammer of the Stockholm Child Psychiatric Department arranged for some children between the ages of eleven and eighteen to see a film of a woman being raped by a group of intoxicated louts, then forced to have intercourse with a dog. None of the children, Doctor Elthammer triumphantly reported, were frightened during or after the film.

A proportion of the older girls did admit to being shocked, while two adults, also present, needed psychiatric treatment for a month afterwards. One idly wonders what, if anything, happened to the dog.

I find it fascinating that credulity about scientifically stated absurdities should thus exceed the wildest examples of religious superstition.

I have often thought it would be a very good idea to bring an African witch-doctor or medicine-man to London, and let him have an intensive course of looking at television advertisements. The good man, I fancy, would be green with envy as he recalled all the weary slogging he had done carrying his love-potions and ju-jus from African village to African village, when here in the West, with ostensibly the most civilised, the best educated and certainly the richest population in the world, there was this fathomless reservoir of credulity for all who cared to avail themselves of it.

Anyway, it would seem clear to me that, if edifying scenes on television uplift the viewers, it must also be true that unedifying scenes degrade them. Furthermore, when very large sums of money are paid for advertising at peak viewing periods, as they are, it can only be because the often quite ridiculously convincing advertisements shown in such expensively purchased time do have sufficient drawing power to justify the expenditure

Every performer knows that television appearances impact all, for good or ill. How can it possibly be doubted, that spectacles of carnality and violence likewise affect the viewer? As far as I am concerned, there are no studies that could be mounted capable of convincing me that the eight years normal life-span that an average Western man spends looking at the television screen have no appreciable influence on his mores or way of evaluating his existence.

— from Christ and the Media

~~~

+ More than 60% of US abortions in 2023 were done by pill, study shows