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Seducing America: How Television Charms the Modern Voter

by Roderick P. Hart

Roderick P. Hart argues that television causes wrong “feelings” in viewers, feelings that are bad for individuals and nations alike, though viewers enjoy having these feelings. His broad definition of feelings includes general thoughts.

TV makes politics intimate in ways that it should not be and creates a gap between being informed and feeling informed: “Television miseducates the citizenry but, worse, it makes that miseducation attractive.”

Television makes cynicism attractive. Hart asks, “Why do [citizens] feel so righteous when not voting?” The retreat from the public realm is seen as a badge of virtue. The tube helps us like talking about politics, but keeps us from having valuable knowledge and a political will—and makes us feel good about lacking knowledge and a will. Television makes us feel intimate, informed, clever and busy but does not get us properly involved.

Citizens think they do not have time or energy for policy issues, but they have time and energy to spare to examine the personal lives of politicians. Personality politics begets “[c]harm begets adoration begets disappointment begets cynicism.” Personality politics builds enemies for the sake of having enemies, and it creates enemies based on personality quirks. Politicians spend most of their time fundraising, crafting their images, hyping trivial battles, and promoting dubious prescriptions. Television politics is the world of nice, friendly people who are also terrible people.

Studies suggest the better educated are even more likely to choose candidates based on personality traits than others. It does not surprise me that “educated” people love empty blather. Considering the appalling state of American universities, I am tempted to put the word educated in scare quotes. People with college degrees are easy to manipulate. They think that smarts and credentials alone make them automatic truth and goodness finders.

Nor are most educated experts much better. One study claims that when 199 political experts were given either-or predictions, they were right only a little more than half the time. If their confidence in an answer was at or above 80 percent, they were right on a mere 45 percent of answers. A six-year-old who guessed could have done as well. As someone once said, “[t]he narrow specialist—cowardly, arrogant, dull, pedantic, and whining—is certified to be sent forth as a professor.”

Then there are the educated pessimists. One book I saw said something like “When I was younger, I had opinions on unimportant issues such as foreign policy. Now I’ve grown and don’t concern myself with such things.” Growing for them means memorizing Kepler’s equations, writing biographies on lesser poets of 18th century Wales, or analyzing business trends in mid-sized cities.

Some of the many reasons why the better educated are more likely to choose candidates for personality and vague, lofty rhetoric include:

· Schools and colleges stink. The have not learned how to understand and weigh an argument and they do not care whether they learn.

· Laziness, arrogance, heredity, group influences.

· So much psychobabble and mind reading fills the cultural landscape that it becomes an easy habit and passes for wisdom. Rhetoric, and gossip and psychoanalysis of candidates, are more entertaining than policy.

· The well educated are better insulated from the consequences of their faulty citizenship.

Hart reports that in the political landscape interesting, marketable and important are for practical purposes synonymous. It is a place where the only perceived wrong is wrong spin. Ephemeral scandals get more attention than fifty years of macro policies.

The moral expertise of many comes from the popular media, which makes about as much sense as calling someone an automotive engineer because he reads the automotive section of the newspaper.

Hart claims that television encourages a laundry list of bads: absurdity, spectacle, escapism, infotainment, cynicism, miseducation, passivity, melodrama, demoralization, cocooning, servility, oversimplification, cleverness, fetishization, nowness habits, phony familiarity, and imitation intimacy, self-abandonment, destructive images, biased samples, small samples.

Television discourages: action, sacredness, commitment, care, vision, goodness, ordinary experience, distinction making, important propositions and awareness of larger trends.

Television is fantastic at keeping unwanted info out of the mind and unwanted thoughts from arising in the mind, especially unwanted thoughts about oneself.

Television wallows in:

· Avoidance of anxiety.

· Nowness and newness.

· Horse race reporting.

· Undeserved feelings of righteousness.

· Wrongs covered up by friendly personalities.

· “That which appears is good.”

· Assembly lines of nothing.

· Manufactured competitions.

· Mass exposure that accomplishes little.

· Bad emotions such as self-pity.

· Relentless banality.

· Moral Equivalence.

· Constant petty facts.

· Self-worth via feeling informed.

· Infotainment.

· Slogans and buzzwords.

· Technophilia.

· The petty historical: old conspiracy theories, reruns of

· 20-year-old basketball games, and the biography of Sonja Henje.

· Moralless and pathosless history.

· History as a mere story of wealth, fame, power, success, innocence.

· Phony victimization.

· Emotivism.

· Human disagency.

· New techniques equaling salvation.

· Emotively loaded garbage, especially anecdotal and peripheral rubish.

· Familiar and habitual issues.

· Simple issues or issues that appear simple to viewers.

· Anything that can be marketed.

· Issues seemingly having only two sides.

· Issues that give some a high feeling of certainty.

· Three C’s: creeps, crime and collisions.

· Melodrama.

· Novelty.

· Sex scandals.

The TV viewer wants: Newness, hipness, teasing, suspense, glittering rhetoric, trivial controversies, a sense of intimacy, pseudo-connection with strangers, and violations of phony or actual taboos.

The TV viewer does not want:

· Claims that criticize the viewer.

· Claims that require viewer to act as a moral agent.

· The big picture.

· Claims by non-team members unless they are official enemies.

· Complexity, clarity and serious analysis.

Seducing America is a far from great version of essentialism. Hart calls for a “New Puritanism” so dissimilar to the old Puritanism that the author should have used a different word. At the very least, he would avoid the attacks that will come with the word Puritan.

Unfortunately this New Puritanism is not much of anything. Like TV, it is big on rhetoric, short on policy. His prescriptions will not change bad media habits. He recommends reading more newspapers? Why? Sports, weather, crimes, collisions, anecdotes, entertainments and perfidious pundits—what type of vision is that? Most op-ed pages are awful.

Most of the criticisms that can be delivered against television can also be delivered against radio, magazines and newspapers. The chasm between important knowledge and newspapers is nearly as great as the chasm between important knowledge and television. Newspapers are beginning to look like television with 1000 one-minute channels. Being played is common to all popular forms of media. Almost everything in the media gets sanitized for someone's protection.

TV land, Newspaper land, radio land and magazine land are all on the same continent. One difference between newspapers and television is that newspapers get respect they do not deserve. At least with television its more difficult to sustain the illusion that something important is going on. News and entertainment is turning into a redundant phrase.

It matters little whether people are ahistorical when the history being peddled is nearly always infotainment. If there is one thing that nearly always seems to be popular, it’s tokenism masquerading as great virtue and that includes this book.

The prescriptions here will not change the habits of voters. Seducing recommends major personal and environmental changes, but lacks details.

Hart’s arguments are often rambling and sloppy. Many of the wrongs Hart lists were probably caused more by bad policy than by television ignoring policy.

More than the great American novel, I am waiting for the great American savaging of television, one with a high epistemic value. Seducing America is worth reading for the excellent ideas sprinkled throughout. Hart is at his best when quoting others. For example, Peter Sloterdijk: “The media are the descendants of both the encyclopedia and the circus.” Worth skimming. I reviewed the 1994 edition. 230p (H) 1998

—Book review article by J.T. Fournier.

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