The New World Reader An Electronic Magazine of Future, Fiction, and the Human Condition June 1995 Vol. 1 * No. 7 This month's quote: "I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts." -- Orson Welles Contents- From the Editor: The Open Connection and Open Democracy Communications: More Reasons to Colonize Space--the debate continues Feature Article: The Vast and Violent Wasteland by Jack Lang Diagnostic Commentary: The Novel Experience by Thomas Newland Books: Danford Hall reviews "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television" ___________ From the Editor: THE OPEN CONNECTION In last month's editorial, I argued that globalism could never lead to a desirable World Government. Such authority concentrated in a single body or even a sprawling bureaucracy would not be conducive to the well-being or happiness of individuals. The idea that World Government can be just a bigger goverment, one that unites and governs nations, is not an innovative view of the world of the future. So, if the world will not be governed by some body analogous to a congress or even a three branch governing system, then what might the global community be like in the 21st or 22nd century? Democracy has proven itself to be the most humanitarian form of government, albeit not perfectly so. The problem with democracies today is that they are psuedo-democracies or republics in which representatives govern instead of the body of citizens itself. A true democracy, where everyone participates in the governing, may seem only possible in a small group. Perhaps, democracy today only works at the community and organization level. When we get into complicated relationships of thousands of people, true democracy becomes intractable. A true democracy involving the total population of a nation seems an impossibility. A republican form of government, where a few are given the power to make decisions for the many, is a pragmatic compromise of democracy. It is simply not possible to consult everyone on every issue in order for some consensus to be reached. We delegate authority to a handful of people and they spend their time worrying about how to vote on issues which come up. The populace lives by those decisions, at least until they elect new people to come in and over turn what was done by a previous batch of lawmakers. But would it be possible to somehow implement a true democracy with the assistance of today's advanced telecommunications and information technology? This is an interesting question to entertain in the abstract, but a more gritty question begs asking: do people want to be bothered with the responsibility of a true democracy? If a true democracy could be instituted, would people be involved in it? Certainly not everyone would be involved all the time, but enough people would probably participate that decisions could be made and the country could run itself. More importantly could the entire world be governed in such a way? What I have been calling a true democracy, let us call Open Democracy. The central idea of Open Democracy is that everyone may participate in the decision making of the world on any level through the medium of the Open Connection. The Open Connection is a network of computers much like the Internet hooked together by the most advanced broadband telecommunications links. It connects everyone in the world to everyone else. The Open Connection is much more; it is also an information system complete with all the data that anyone would want or need to know about any subject in the world. The information is classified, indexed, and arranged for ease of use. If there is something you want to know, within seconds the fact will be available. Most importantly the Open Connection is a decision making engine. At the community, town, county, state, national, and global levels people can be involved in all the governing decisions which affect them. Voting and submission of ideas and suggestions can be done via the Open Connection. Though the details of Open Democracy need to be worked out, it would seem that in the future such a method of self-government is possible. When we look to the next century, perhaps it is misguided to look toward the United Nations or NATO for the assurance of world peace. The realization of Open Democracy begins by looking first at our communities and tending to their well-being. Those communities are not necessarily our neighborhoods anymore. In the Open Connection communities transcend time and space. Trevor Austin, Editor of NWR __________ Communications GOOD INTENTIONS BUT ALL THE WRONG REASONS A response to Randal Duff's article "The Final Frontier" in NWR 1.6 by Aston Goodenough A senior scientist at the American Biotechnic Institute Mr. Duff's article which appeared in the May issue of NWR addressed an important topic--the pragmatic reasons why we should invest in a full program of space colonization. He quite correctly pointed out that it is not the scientists, by in large, who need convincing, but it is the public we must convince if such ambitious and expensive programs are going to be brought about. We can fully expect the public to ask the question: "What are we going to get for our investment?" Several arguments have been used to answer this question when justifying big science projects, one of which is the "spinoff" argument. Duff employs an interesting approach when trying to convince the public that it needs an active space program with a clear goal of colonization--he uses scare tactics. He implies that the world will come to an end as we know it unless we do something quick to ensure the availability of resources and to avoid the devastation associated with overpopulation. Nice try, Duff, but your argument won't stand up to the facts. On the question of the availability of resources, Duff states that "our technology is based on the consumption of natural resources for its sustenance. The Earth does not hold an unlimited supply of resources, thus eventually all Earth's available resources will be consumed." I must strongly take issue with this statement. Had Duff taken the trouble to look up some facts before making sweeping generalizations such as this, he would have realized that this argument is not very convincing. If the threat of the depletion of all of Earth's available resources is to spur us into a new era of space exploration and conservation, then we should ask the obvious question: "When will those resources be depleted? How much time do we have?" If the clock is ticking, we should read the dial and see what its telling us! I did a quick little search for some numbers to see if Duff's concern about resource depletion was warranted; this is what I found. Aside from a few notable exceptions (which I will discuss) we do not need to worry about running out of nonrenewable resources for another four million years at the present rate of consumption. Supplies of carbon, silicon, calcium, and nickel will be seriously depleted two hundred thousand generations hence. I could rattle off a long list of other elements important to our present technology, but I assure you that at present rates of consumption these other elements will be with us on the order of another billion years. Now, let's look at some resources that will be gone much sooner. I assume that Duff had in the back of his mind that the Earth's oil reserves would be depleted very soon, and perhaps it is this that he was thinking about when he made his sweeping statement. But even oil is not something that our children need to concern themselves about. At the present rate of consumption the world's oil reserves with be depleted in approximately 2,500 years. Does Duff expect us to rush out immediately and start building space stations because we might run out of oil in two and a half millenia? Perhaps Duff was concerned with our supply of phosphorous, which is important as an agricultural fertilizer; it will be gone in approximately 1,300 years. One would think that by then we might have some obvious alternatives to the shortages which we will encounter? Duff makes another slip; he discounts the "economic" argument of space colonization as he balks at the all too incredible price tag. What possible gains could we make that would offset the gigantic investment which space colonization represents? Duff comes so close here to the answer, but he can't seem to swallow it and opts for another scare tactic. He asks if a good enough reason to venture into space would be "to avoid the possible extinction of the human race?" I must assume that Duff is anticipating his fears about overpoplation which he addresses at the end of his article. I will say a few things about our extinction and the problem of overpopulation. The two problems are unrelated. The extinction of the human race is inevitable even if we managed to postpone it until the heat death of the universe. I will be proud of our species if it does endure that long. The best way to avoid extinction is not to build weapons of mass destruction. Our consumption of resources will never lead to our extinction. Duff misses the obvious probable cause of the end of the world and substitutes his pet crusade for it. Next, Duff's fears about overpopulation are unfounded. It has been shown in more places than one that these neo-malthusian arguments just don't hold up to a thoughtful analysis of the causes of overpopulation. Briefly, let me state what the cause is. Currently, there is a disparity between human instinct and technology. Medical science has progressed so far that we now live in a healthier world where the average life expectancy is increasing. In underdeveloped nations, the ones with the population problems, they have simply not learned yet that they do not need to over-produce children to replace the existing generation. The problem of infant mortality and death from disease is on the decline. Once, perhaps in a few generations, these nations have realized that it is not in their best interest to over-produce children, they will stop doing so. Even if it is well into the next century before we see a turn around, we need not worry about feeding a population of 10 billion. Given the world's supply of arable land and present day farming techniques, this planet could easily support 50 billion people. Yet again, Duff's alarmism is unconvincing. Lest I be accused of tearing apart another's argument without contributing to the debate, I will suggest an argument that would have been convincing. Duff did not mention one particularly important resource that will actually be scarce by the middle of the next century. If the Earth is to support 10 billion people and ensure them some standard of quality of life, we need to supply the world with electrical power. How can we supply power to the world of the next century? If you are thinking fission or fusion, then think again. It has been shown by scientists such as the late Gerard O'Neill, that we simply cannot build enough fission power planet and if we could, we simply wouldn't want to because of the potential health hazard. There are arguments against relying on fusion that I won't go into here, but the most convincing one is that the technology is still not developed enough to build our future hopes on it. The answer to the up-and-coming power problem is solar power satellites. These satellites would orbit the Earth, convert solar energy into microwaves and beam it down to rectennas where it could be converted into electricity and distributed. The construction of the satellites will require the presence of space colonies to house the people who will build them in Earth orbit from resources collected from the moon. It would be impossible to run such an enterprise from the Earth's surface. The launch costs would be prohibitive. I don't have enough room to go into all the details but if anyone is curious about this topic I would direct them to an article by Gerard O'Neill in Physics Today in the September 1974 issue. There is also a very nice book by T. A. Heppenheimer entitled "Colonies in Space" which gives a relatively non-technical overview of the solar power satellite project. I agree with Duff that we should get our space colonization program going, but I agree with him for a completely different set of reasons than he proposes. Randal Duff Responds-- I am glad that Mr. Goodenough agrees with me on my aims at least. In response to his complaint that I employ scare tactics to convince my readers that my arguments should be attended to, I must decline to comisserate. My position, simply put, is that we should look into alternatives to our present course. I believe that a thoughtful review of my aritcle in last month's NWR will show that I was more interested in demonstrating that a consequence of our present technological growth will result in negatives effects. As to the ambiguity of the time scale which governs the advent of these negative effects, I make no apology because regardless of whether we deplete our resources or pollute the biosphere, we will need to move in a new direction by the middle of next century. We might have plenty of oil in fifty years, but will we have clean air to breathe? Will we have an ozone layer to protect us from the sun's harmful rays? Will global warming melt the polar ice caps enough to cause catestrophic flooding? These are questions which cannot be ignored. As for Goodenough's implication that the global population problem will take care of itself, I answer that this is not so. He is forgetting that even before the advent of modern medicine the population growth in nineteenth century Russia was incredible and completely due to overproduction of humans. We cannot simply ignore population growth and trust that it will straighten itself out. Something must be done and done quickly. Some estimates show that even if we implement birth reduction techniques now, the worldwide population will not level off until the middle of the twenty-second century at somewhere around 15 billion souls. This is some serious population inertia that we have built up, and if we don't start applying the brakes, we will suffer. Also, there is an inaccuracy in Goodenough's conclusion that Earth can support 50 billion people by employing all of the available arable land and modern farming techniques. The fact is that we are only using about 25% of our arable land and even with modern farming techniques we cannot prevent crop failure, drought, and disease. I estimate that we will be pushing our ability to feed the world if the population reaches 15 billion. As the world gets more crowded, we can only lose more of our arable land mass. People will not live in deserts. The available energy question is a good one. Goodenough only mentions one possibility. He contends that a good economic argument can be made for building solar power satellites, but there is a technological limitation to how cheap such energy can be. When we factor in economics, we find that people want to pay the lowest price possible for something. Beaming energy from the Sun in the form of microwaves to the Earth is a charming idea, but people won't pay for it. If we are going to convince people to invest in space, then such an "economic" argument is a weak one. People must be enlightened to the greater good before they can make such sacrifices. I am convinced that my article demonstrated that pure self-interested pragmatism can have devastating effects on generations to come. *****One more thought on "The Final Frontier"***** In response to the statement-- "The Earth does not hold an unlimited supply of resources, thus eventually all Earth's available resources will be consumed." NWR Reader, Chris in Dallas, writes: For 3 BILLION years life existed on this planet with "limited" resources. Now, man in a hundred, is arrogant enough to look at other planets for resources instead of pausing to reflect on the devastating and avoidable destruction of the only really worthwhile thing in the whole universe. __________ Feature Article: The Vast and Violent Wasteland By Jack Lang If you have watched television recently, you are more likely to engage in an act of violence. Last night, I watched a report on the effects of watching television on the PBS news show Frontline. The report made a very good case that the violence depicted on television does encourage aggressive behavior in young children who watch many hours a day. The Frontline producers installed (with permission) video cameras in several homes in order to observe the viewing habits of typical families and individuals. What I saw was startling. Certainly, the shows which these people watched were violent, but I was more shocked by their use of the television than by the shows they actually watched. In most homes, the television is on whenever someone is in the house whether they are paying attention to it or not. The Frontline reporter aptly described the television as a fireplace in a winter cabin: it was always on. Not having anything else to do with their lives, people search in vain for some diversion on the television; all they find is a vast and violent wasteland. What has this technology done to the lifestyle of the typical American? Simply put--these people are waiting to die. I am no enemy of television. My personal viewing consists of four weekly, hour long dramas. So I will not make an impassioned appeal for the elimination of television. Rather, I wish to present a few rules for the proper use of television. If television is violent and leads to a lifestyle degradation when abused (by viewing too much and too casually), then why isn't the answer to this problem the quick and speedy elimination of television. Aside from the practical impossibility of this suggestion (namely, the television industry generates copious amounts of revenue) television can be used in a healthy, productive, and regenerative way. The key to understanding the positive side of television is noting the difference between active and passive forms of entertainment. Any pastime which is experienced passively is dangerous. Television is not necessarily passive entertainment; the Frontline documentary showed, however, that it is not uncommon that television viewing is done passively. To experience anything in a passive way is to leave the higher reasoning faculties of the brain idle while the senses and emotions are stimulated. The most basic reason why passive entertainment is bad in large quantities is that if the brain's higher reasoning faculties are not used they will atrophy. The most alarming reason (which was the main concern of the Frontline documentary) is that when acts of violence are experienced passively as entertainment, the violence looses its horror and reality. To employ a buzzword, people become desensitized to violence. When they see injustice, they are not outraged, they are merely entertained. The emotional and physical pain of death is trivialized. With a little work, it is possible to get the higher reasoning faculties of the brain going even while watching television. This takes some concentration at first, but once you get the hang of it, it should come as second nature. The active viewer demands more from television than sensory and emotional stimulation; they want meaning. Not every show is designed to be viewed actively. This means that the viewer who desires to actively engage their entertainment must choose shows carefully. The vast amount of trash television which is broadcast is depressing, but I have found a large number of shows which can be engaged actively. When viewing actively, a person asks questions of the show and the characters which the show presents. What are the motivations for the actions of this character? What truth does this demonstrate about human nature? How could have this situation been played out differently to avoid the necessary conflict of the drama? Or should this conflict be avoided? Are higher principles at work? The active approach to television could be called the literary approach inasmuch as it resembles and approaches the level of activity a reader must put into a book. One thing that television will never teach us is how to use our imaginations. A criticism of television is that it shows us the images, and we do not need to manufacture them in our heads. Again, the less we use our imagination, our ability to form sharp, clear mental images of things diminishes. Perhaps our ability to image is connected with our use of language and thus to our humanity. To engage the mind in a television show is to participate actively with the artists who created the show. Active participation requires concentration. I have found that it is best not to eat while watching television (for one reason my wife says this leads to obesity). Ideally, one should not be interrupted by commercials. Advertisements are the enemy of an active viewer; they are distracting nonsense. I have instituted the practice of never watching a television show when it is broadcast, even if I am at home. I record the show on my VCR, then watch it at my leisure. In this way I am able to fast forward through all the commercials with a maximum of fifteen seconds delay in the action of the show. This provides a semblance of continutity in the action. Since most hour long shows on commercial television are a maximum of forty-eight minutes in length, recording the show saves me at least twelve minutes which would have been wasted otherwise. I began this article by pointing out that television on the whole is the medium of violence. The television brings violent acts into our homes in a safe and controlled manner. This is not an evil in and of itself. The evil of television violence only surfaces when it is combined with passive viewing habits. An active viewer will never become desensitized to the violence, because the active viewer remains humane while watching and is capable of judging what is terrible and horrible about what he sees. The passive viewer simply sees dispassionately and without empathy for the suffering and pain which attends violence. Passivity leads to the degradation of humanity. To be a passive viewer is to become willfully sub-human. The solution to the problem of television violence is not letter campaigns or censorship, but the education of viewers in the art of active viewing. __________ Diagnostic Commentary: The Novel Experience by Thomas Newland The novelist writes from experience. The font in which the writer dips his pen is the wealth of personal experience. Many years ago when I was working on a degree in philosophy, I had the opportunity to spend some time in Greece. My plan was to travel the rural part of Greece and end my trip in Athens. Not wanting ever to forget this experience, I recorded my journey in a composition notebook. Each night I would describe in fantastic detail what I saw, smelled, felt, and thought. I traveled alone and had much time to myself and my thoughts. The sharp landscape and ancient surroundings awakened in me a dormant imagination. I tried to imagine the ruins, remnants of an ancient civilization, as being alive and populated. When I walked the streets of ancient Delphi, I could see, smell, and hear the presence of the people. My newfound poetic imagination allowed me to understand the gods. I came to a promontory above the city: below me was Delphi and further down gleamed the ruins of a temple, and still further below that a deep blue green valley stretched miles to the sea. Thrusting up on my left were two grey mountains separated by an immense cleft. Above it, the eagles circled. Instantly, I knew why the Greeks had proclaimed that Delphi was the center of the world. Being there, it made perfect sense to me. In a few days I returned to Athens and began a two week, whirlwind tour of Europe. I couldn't get Delphi out of my mind. The experience grew. Meaning layered upon meaning. I felt compelled to try to capture what I had experienced in Delphi. It took me another year or so, but I turned my journal of my trip through Greece into a piece of fiction. I suppose this fictionalized account of my journey could be called my first unpublished novel. The events of my novel hardly bear any real resemblance to my actual experiences in Greece, which were pretty boring in themselves (consisting mostly of walking around and staring a toppled down buildings). But the experience of Greece is what brought this spontaneous creative effort out of me. In the meetings of the Diagnostic Society this summer, I have been reading my Greece novel to the group. In the discussions, I have discovered more about my trip than I ever before realized. My Greece novel is certainly a work of fiction, perhaps even an attempt at wish fulfillment, an account of the trip I wish I had had. But that is what fiction and the novel is all about: reshaping of existence and the bringing into being of novel experiences. __________ Books Review of _Four_Arguments_For_the_Elimination_of_Television_ by Danford A. Hall This book, "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television," which was written by Jerry Mander and published in 1977, is even more persuasive, after an additional 20 years of television, than the arguments were at first publication. Jerry Mander (almost certainly a pun-intended pseudonym) was a very successful executive in the area of national television advertising; therefore, he had a special vantage point from which to view the effects of television. His conclusion, strongly argued in the book, is that the effects of television are so pernicious that this medium should be eliminated. You need to understand that Jerry Mander is not arguing for some kind of government control or industry-wide self-regulation: He is making an absolutist argument for the elimination of television. If Jerry Mander believed that the situation was that bad in 1977, before MTV, the sewage of cable television, etc., then one can imagine the increased importance of these four arguments. In these dwindling days of the second millennium, we have seen "patriots" bomb the federal building in Oklahoma City, because they believed that the US government is on a path to total autocracy and one-world government. To most thinking people such paranoid ideas are foolish. I believe that Jerry Mander would side against the patriots also; he does argue, however, that television sets up "Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of Autocracy." Mander's four main arguments are solid and rhetorically sound; nevertheless, as the reviewer, I want briefly to present four of the "eight ideal conditions," and as you read them, judge for yourselves: are they more fulfilled in our society today than they were when Jerry Mander first published them? 1. "Eliminate personal knowledge." Television filters experience and gives us the sense that we have experienced many things that we haven't. If you take a group of elementary school children to the zoo, many of them will express boredom. They have already seen all these dumb old animals on TV. On an adult level, how many of us now yawn and turn away as a TV program on violence and our society, shows us for the millionth time the video of a deranged person shooting at Ronald Reagan. We respond like we have been there and seen it all first hand, but we haven't. 2. "Eliminate points of comparison." Observe how television chooses to represent regular, everyday Americans. The sitcoms (not counting the ones designed to get laughs by showing the "humor" of people living in abject poverty) and other programs show a very affluent society, where everyone lives in mansions and has several BMWs. Think of the child in the ghetto watching this display. The child has no basis for comparison, so she believes that most other Americans have fulfilled the American Dream of Materialism, and somehow her family was passed by or unfairly excluded. 3. "Separate people from each other." Television does this task effectively. First, people don't have to go out to be entertained when they can sit right at home and watch the box. But worse than that, secondly, as the family watches TV they are not interacting. They are each having a separate experience, cut off from developing social skills and a sense of community that must be in the home before we can have it again on the streets of our neighborhoods. 4. "Centralize knowledge and information." Television does this dirty deed better than most of us realize. Do you see any real differences between the stories and their slant on any of the major networks that deliver news to us? We don't hear about many instances of corporate abuse of people, resources, or the environment. Why? Because we don't want to offend the sponsors. Occasionally, when a corporate blunder like the Exxon Valdez or exploding Pinto cars occurs, the media can't turn its back. We don't hear about the mistakes and self-serving decisions of many politicians, because the news reporters don't want to loose access by reporting damaging information. Another example of this centralizing of knowledge is who owns and controls the networks. Rupert Murdock, billionaire publisher and media magnate, is interested in buying CNN. He already controls information spigots world-wide, and if CNN was added to his conglomerate, most of the world would only see, read, or hear the news that Rupert Murdock and his executives want us to receive. The real problem with Jerry Mander's book is that it would be as impossible now to eliminate television from our lives as it would be to eliminate automobiles. It simply won't happen; however, once you read this book, you will never see television the way you did before you were exposed to Jerry Mander's "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television" . __________ NEXT ISSUE: SHAPING THE NOOSPHERE--Expanding Frontiers on the Internet NWR Information Subscriptions to NWR are free via e-mail. Send a note to SubNWR@AOL.COM requesting to be put on the mailing list. Also current and back issues of NWR are available via FTP at FTP.ETEXT.ORG in the directory /pub/Zines/NewWorldReader. NWR can be read on the World Wide Web at http://goodrich.phys.lsu.edu/nwr/nwr_index.html. Contributions should be sent electronically to NEWORLDR@AOL.COM. Essays and Scientific Currents should be 1000 words or less; book and journal reviews and letters 500. Short stories up to 5000 words in length will be considered. Donavan Hall, Publisher Danford Hall, Senior Editor Trevor Austin, Editor Jack Lang, Managing Editor Adam Fisher, Religion Editor Ed Blakely, Politics Editor David Branson, Copy Editor Red Drake, Subscription Coordinator Denise Hall, Editorial Assistant Desmond Astor, Special Corespondent copyright, 1995 FMI Publishing