From the book “Viewing Violence”: “Violence on television is damaging to children. Forty years of research conclude that repeated exposure to high levels of media violence teaches some children and adolescents to settle interpersonal differences with violence, while teaching many more to be indifferent to this solution. . .
Children who are heavy viewers of television are more aggressive, more pessimistic, weigh more, are less imaginative, less empathic, and less capable students than their lighter-viewing counterparts.”
These are not speculation, but facts, to the extent any general statement about a human social system can be. Why is this issue not considered to be of vital importance? Quite literally, our future is being shaped by forces we do not control–except to the extent we turn the TV off–and which are pernicious.
I think most people who have travelled will agree with me that when you return to this country, one thing you note is how superficial people seem, how little emotionally engaged they are with the big issues of life. How impervious, in some ways, to poetry, and a capacity to “get” big works of literature.
This is not universal, obviously, but it is certainly something I noticed. The reason for this “fact”–which I am positing as subjective judgement–is that our media consumption patterns differ from other nations. Clearly, we are infecting other countries, exporting our own worst cultural impulses, but that virus can be contained with better programming, and/or less TV use.
What is the political impact of this? It seems to that anything that makes people pessimistic, less empathic, and more violent is going to create a pool of people vulnerable to recruitment in a “grand cause”, of precisely the sort the Left has in mind.
From that basic framework, you have people who are isolated socially. They know people, but not deeply, since their training has been in superficiality and an inability to express or even feel deep sentiments. Lacking compassion, they don’t develop deep attachments. Using violence as a solution, they push people away. Just look at the patterns of internet use by our young: aggressive, brash, stupid, inhuman in many ways. Their “connection” is striking out, preferably within a “community” of like-minded simpletons.
They are uncreative. They don’t have practice working through complex issues of profound importance. They are used to constant stimulation, not being the ones doing the stimulating.
All of this goes far beyond asking if movies showing explicit scenes of sadistic torture should be legal. This is not a First Amendment issue. What should be an issue is if we CARE what our future will look like. If we do, then such movies, when made, will not sell. That they do sell should be a cause for much concern.