Section 10
HOW THE WEST WAS LOST THROUGH ITS GAINS
Barely twenty years after trying to reshape the world in the horrific aftermath of the Second World War, America was caught in a war of her own making from which she has not recovered. In the backdrop was the Civil Rights movement, guilt over the past, cultural blunders, and spiritual hungers. And in the foreground was a brewing rebellion as the young questioned why they were being sent into a war in Vietnam that they felt was unnecessary and ultimately unwinnable. It was the perfect storm for the overthrow of what had been believed and held inviolable for generations.
This was also a time of forging new horizons, nationally. The landing on the moon did not merely happen; the nation actually watched it happen on the new television sets in our own living rooms. And this same new medium allowed America’s military enemy to win because they were able to harness it and make it serve their advantage more than it served those who had developed it. The medium of viewing at home made the war cabinet room not a single location in some subterranean setting where war strategy was determined. Rather, every household was able to watch the carpet-bombing by the B-52s. Every home was able to witness the psychological breakdown of the nation’s troops. The pictures of war that could be seen and experienced at home through television changed the war from one fought just on the battlefield and brought it into each home. The burning of draft cards and the uprising from within the nation made the Vietnam War a very personal thing. More than fifty thousand individual lives were ultimately lost. And the nation returned from the war with its soul in a body bag.
The camera had won the battle of seeing and believing. The world, and America in particular, was foundationally transformed. The zeal of the young, combined with the material means that their parents had fought to give them and the invasiveness of the medium of television, made for a powerful overthrow of the reigning worldview.
There were really several wars going on. Politically, though the administration that supposedly brought “peace with honor” had inherited the war, it has been forced to carry the blame for it ever since. Conservatism became the pariah of political verbiage, and “politically correct” became synonymous with anti-traditional values. It was really the absolutizing of relativism, the new anti-values value. The Cold War was at its grimmest and weapons of intimidation and destruction were piling up, with each superpower living in fear of the other.
The battle was carried into the universities, whose own academic experts were flaying America, and the intelligentsia hit hard at political demagoguery, as they called it. At the same time, the race struggle was reaching conflagration points on many fronts. Watts became synonymous with rioting. And all this was reflected in the arts as rock stars changed the mathematical rules of music and discord became entertainment. Noise became deafened to reason. Woodstock became the stage for selling propriety in exchange for public nudity. Sexual mores were questioned as the gender exploitations of the past came home to roost. In all of these areas of debate there was just one identifiable winner.
At the time, most people failed to understand the power of the media to change their views and reshape their thinking. Instead of viewing the world through the medium of television, they allowed the medium to define the world for them. A new purveyor of truth and relevance was in the making, one that has triumphed over all and is here to stay. And from now on, whatever our view on any issue, not just war or a particular war, we cannot get away from the assault of the visual even if we don’t watch television, because of its impact on the way the rest of society makes its judgments.
There is a war raging. It is the battle for thought and belief through a weapon of mass deconstruction. In that battle, it is not firepower we need to fear as much as it is electronic power. From the conscious to the subconscious we are in its grip. From wars in different lands to battles for moral acceptability, the television set has won the day. I stress this because I believe that almost none of the New Spiritualities would be so pervasive if it were not for the genius and built-in distortion of television. It reinforces what we want to believe, and if what we want to believe is what we are told to believe through the medium, no amount of logic or argument can shake that conviction. Whichever way you want to look at it, television—and now viral media—is the shaper of everything we think and believe.