The News-Media: Moving from Sports to Entertainment to Horrible Crises

In those same weeks, Harper’s Magazine featured an evening-long conversation between two professors, Neil Postman and Camille Paglia, about the meaning of television for persons and for polities. Yes, the stakes were raised by the technology of TV: was it a social good, or not? 

At that time, Postman was the most honored and widely read observer of technology and its meaning for who we are and how we live; Paglia was a celebrated feminist philosopher with sometimes surprising views of the way the world is and ought to be. 

He was critical of television, and she was not. The magazine gave them a glorious meal together, a multicourse dinner—and recorded every word of their conversation. 

…Toward the end of the meal, Postman made an observation that summed up his criticism: “How is it possible to watch the evening news, and in five minutes hear about a plane crash in India, an earthquake in Chile, a rape in Central Park, that the Mets beat the Cardinals, and finally an ad for hemorrhoids medicine—and somehow take it all in?” He argued that as human beings we cannot do so, and we choose to step back, unable to respond to the torrent of information, poignant and horrific, playful and commercial as it is. 

Paglia responded, “But Neil, that’s the way the world is. Buddha smiles at it all.”

When I read her words, I recoiled, knowing that was not an adequate response to my friend’s murder. How could it ever be? There was a profound moral and metaphysical equivalency in her judgment, and it seemed completely out of touch with the painfulness and evil of cold-blooded murder. 

But I realized she was not alone in her conclusion. Reflecting on what I knew of the world and the worldviews of it, I knew that one of the deepest streams in the human heart is stoicism, and that its vision of life under the sun is manifest in both the East and the West, in pantheism as well as materialism….