"Many small, fragile lights in the dark"

 “Many small, fragile lights” – thoughts on War Games, Wendell Berry, Stratford Caldecott, and the mechanization of humanity

“General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don’t act like one.”

- Dr. Stephen Falken in War Games

When I suggested the 1983 film War Games as our next family’s movie night pick, I wasn’t expecting an a-ha moment connecting Wendell Berry, Stratford Caldecott, Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye. I had only suggested it because we generally enjoy 80s movies (my husband and I for the nostalgia and our kids for the campiness and weird looking cars/clothes/hair), and part of this one was filmed nearby, in Seattle and in our small town’s very own ferry terminal. But it makes sense that a film about artificial intelligence and its effect on people would feel very of-the-moment. AI seems to be everywhere lately, in the news and online and combined with my own study and reading about language and meaning, it seemed like something here might be worth exploring. *

I am out of my depth in this subject. I make no claims to be an expert or to have anything new to contribute. Articles aplenty* have been written about it, studies* have shown it is making us dumber* and lazier* but this piece will focus on the connections between the film and two essays I’ve read recently: Wendell Berry’s essay, ‘Health is Membership’ and Stratford Caldecott’s article, ‘The Rise of the Machines.' I recommend reading both of these as well as all the authors and articles linked in the footnotes for a more in-depth consideration of this topic.

I’m structuring this piece on the quote I referenced at the beginning from War Games, finishing with a final section of synthesis. This is because in two sentences, the quote demonstrates that not only do we act and react to the information we take in, we mirror the media through which we receive information.  As William Blake said, “We become what we behold.” 

“General, you are listening to a machine.”

For those of you who haven’t seen the film, a quick recap with spoilers: a smart high school kid named David is very into computers and this new thing called “the Internet”. He sees an ad for cutting edge computer games made by a company in SoCal and decides to hack into the system to play. While David is “war dialing” (randomly dialing numbers to start a hack)*, his computer connects with another system which he thinks is the game company. Eventually he realizes it’s a government agency, figures out a way in anyway, and starts playing a game called “Global Thermonuclear War.” He could have chosen anything from Checkers to Poker, and the computer even suggests “a nice game of chess,” but David sticks with the pretend Armageddon.

When he starts playing, he knows it’s a game, and he and his friend Jennifer (played by Ally Sheedy) talk glibly about blowing up America, since they decided to play the game as communist Russia. Meanwhile, the US government thinks it is an actual nuclear threat and responds accordingly. David is taken into federal custody and eventually has to track down the creator of the super-computer so that he can figure out how to stop it. The computer is playing a game, but the government agents don’t believe it’s just a game. The threat in the film comes from this ignorance on their part. Once they reach Defcon 1, America will retaliate against the perceived threat with real missiles, and their real-life response to the war game will start World War 3 actually and decisively.

This whole plot is given in miniature in a scene at the very beginning of the film. Two men in are in a high security missile launch bunker. They get a sudden notification to launch the missile. They go through all the proper procedures and checks, but the leader of the two-man team is clearly uneasy. He breaks protocol and tries to reach an authority outside to confirm that he is suppose to launch this missile. In the end, he can’t do it. He can’t launch the missile without definite assurance from another human being that he is in fact supposed to push the button and “kill all those people,” as he says. This motivates the lead scientist on the super-computer project to recommend, “We get the men out of the loop. We all know they’re fine men. But in a nuclear war, we can’t have those missiles sitting dormant in silos because they refuse to turn the keys when the computers tell them to... [Their} only problem is that they’re human beings. […] But in thirty days we could replace those men with relays, get the men out of the loop […] We’ll keep control, but we’ll keep it here… at the top, where it belongs.”

The pivotal moment of the movie is when the creator of the super-computer, Dr. Stephen Falken, arrives and tells everyone that it’s just a game. Just don’t react, he says. Don’t respond and it will all go away. No one believes him, of course, because the screens and flashing lights and blaring alarms are all saying this threat is very, very real and very, very imminent. Falken then turns to the General in charge, who is on the brink of launching all kinds of weapons, and asks him if “any of this makes sense.” The General pauses. The scientist then leans in and says, “General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don’t act like one.”

The information we take in is important, but as Marshall McLuhan pointed out, often the medium through which the information is delivered is ignored. And that is too our detriment, if not our peril. It shouldn’t be ignored. The medium delivering the message is in itself a message of meaning communicated, and it can be a more motivating message than we realize. That’s not to say the medium can’t be overcome. I think this quote shows that with conscious effort a person can focus on the meaning communicated over and above the medium. There can be a separation. But it is difficult. We respond to information and meaning as it is delivered to us, and that includes the medium.* 

Etymology.com’s history of the word ‘media’ is helpful here:

Media: "newspapers, radio, TV, etc." 1927, perhaps abstracted from mass-media (1923, a technical term in advertising); plural of medium (n.) as "intermediate agency," a sense attested in English from c. 1600. 

Medium: 1580s, "a middle ground, quality, or degree; that which holds a middle place or position," from Latin medium "the middle, midst, center; interval," noun use of neuter of adjective medius "in the middle, between; from the middle" (from PIE root *medhyo- "middle").. 

The medium is what comes between you and the meaning and connects. Christ is called a mediator because he comes between the person and God the Father, making himself the point of connection. According to etymology.com, the word “mediator” can also be traced back through Latin to the PIE root medhyo- "middle”.

We can’t get rid of the medium. Language itself is a medium. I am attempting right now to communicate something in my mind to your mind, but the only way this is remotely possible is through the medium of language, in this case the written word. If we had to label every level of in-betweenness, it would be my eyes, a computer, the printed word, your computer/my phone, your eyes. When I start thinking about all the things in-between your mind and my mind, it seems a wonder if not a miracle that anyone ever understands anyone else. And yet because language is such a powerful and able medium, we do.

Stratford Caldecott in his excellent essay “The Rise of the Machines” writes, “’The medium is the message’ (McLuhan), and a technology is not simply a technique that may be employed for good or ill purposes. It carries within its very structure a value system and a world view – perhaps even a metaphysics and a theology.” Quoting Pope Bendict’s Caritas in Veritate, Caldecott goes on to say, “’Technology enables us to exercise dominion over matter, to reduce risks, to save labor, to improve our conditions of life’ (n. 69). On the other hand, it can become ‘an ideological power that threatens to confine us within an a priori that holds us back from encountering being and truth. Were that to happen, we would all know, evaluate, and make decisions about our life situations from within a technocratic cultural perspective to which we would belong structurally, without ever being able to discover a meaning that is not of our own making.’” “It may be helpful,” Caldecott writes, “to look at what some of the more extreme critics of technology have said on this point… Michel Henry sums up this line of thought in the most vivid terms:

‘Technology is alchemy; it is the self-fulfillment of nature in place of the self-fulfillment of the life that we are. It is barbarism, the new barbarism of our time, in place of culture. Inasmuch as it puts the prescriptions and regulations of life out of play, it is not simply barbarism in its most extreme and inhumane form that has ever been known – it is sheer madness.’ 

“… Benedict’s language is necessarily more moderate, though its implications may be every bit as radical once they have been thought through. His critique rests on a profound Christian anthropology, a sense that we receive our own existence from God, that truth is given and that our true freedom lies in respect for the “call of being” (n.70) …he argues that we have come to rely on ‘automatic or impersonal forces’ to improve our lot, but this is a mistake. “When technology is allowed to take over, the result is confusion between ends and means, such that the sole criterion for action in business is thought to be the maximization of profit, in politics the consolidation of power, and in science the findings of research’ (n.71).”

There is a lot worth mulling over and like I said at the beginning, I recommend reading Caldecott’s essay at least once. I think Caldecott is absolutely right here. Technology, the favored medium of communication – even this communication, “carries within its very structure a value system and a world view – perhaps even a metaphysics and a theology.” “In other words,” he writes, “technology always has purposes of its own, or (if you prefer) an implicit logic that we accept when we buy into the machine for our own purposes.” The film did a good job showing this in action. The people making all the decisions were locked in a bunker with only themselves and dozens of screens. What they thought was true was portrayed on the walls of monitors. They had quite literally locked themselves in a room with “‘an ideological power” that kept them “from encountering being and truth.” They were left to “know, evaluate, and make decisions about … life situations from within a technocratic cultural perspective to which” the government belonged “structurally, without ever being able to discover a meaning” that was not of their own making.

Quoting Caldecott again: “Technology represents an entire world-view, an organizing myth for our culture, and increasingly it is coming to shape the way we view and experience our own bodies and those of our children.”

I don’t know how anyone can argue with this assessment. Maybe the argument comes down to whether that is a bad thing or not, as this article shows. There are people who think AI and computerized humanity are the next stage of human evolution. To them I would say, go read That Hideous Strength.

Do the world a favor and don’t act like one.

I think I’ve quoted Wendell Berry’s essay before, but if you haven’t read “Health is Membership,” please do. 

Berry is fair and honest about the benefits of machines in healthcare. He writes about a severe heart attack his brother had and says, “He and those who love him have a considerable debt to the medical industry, as represented by two hospitals, several doctors and nurses, many drugs and many machines. This is a debt that I cheerfully acknowledge. But I am obliged to say also that my experience of the hospital during John’s stay was troubled by much conflict of feeling and a good many unresolved questions, and I know that I am not alone in this.”

I’m not attempting a critique of modern industrialized healthcare, though the temptation is strong.** I’m bringing this essay into the consideration because Berry makes some excellent points of distinction which can help us think about what is involved in mechanization. Is anything worthwhile at stake? 

“In the hospital, what I will call the world of love meets the world of efficiency – the world, that is, of specialization, machinery, and abstract procedure. Or, rather, I should say that these two worlds come together in the hospital but do not meet.” 

I want to focus on the phrase “abstract procedure.” Oxfordreference.com says that procedural abstraction is “The principle that any operation that achieves a well-defined effect can be treated by its users as a single entity, despite the fact that the operation may actually be achieved by some sequence of lower-level operations.”

“The world of efficiency,” Berry writes, “ignores…loves, earthly and divine, because by definition it must reduce experience to computation, particularity to abstraction, and mystery to a small comprehensibility. Efficiency, in our present world, allies itself inevitable with machinery… To reason, the advantages are obvious, and probably no reasonable person would wish to reject them out of hand.” 

“And yet love obstinately answers that no loved one is standardized. A body, love insists, is neither a spirit nor a machine; it is not a picture, a diagram, a chart, a graph, an anatomy; it is not an explanation; it is not a law. It is precisely and uniquely what it is. It belongs to the world of love, which is a world of living creatures, natural orders and cycles, many small, fragile lights in the dark.”

I love that Berry uses the image of lights for people. We are small, fragile lights in the dark. Contrast that with the constant artificial light surrounding us. In War Games, every close up of the super-computer involved it’s bright, blinking orange and read lights. 

Machines and systems have their places and their uses. I’m not advocating for the destruction of these things, and neither is Caldecott or Berry. But these things must be used, as Caldecott says, “at the service not of our desires and intentions, but of truth, and in particular the truth of the human person who is made for love.”

It comes back to love, to the world of love, again.

“A given piece of technology,” Caldecott says, “should be judged not just according to the end it is being used for, but the ends implicit in the technology itself as ‘means.’ A computer, says [Adrian] Walker, processes information, which seems harmless enough, but this means that it carries within it the idea that meaning can be broken down into packets of electrical signals; thus necessarily treating a whole as if it were what Aristotle called a ‘heap’ (soros).”

See how the medium is itself a message, how it is delivering a message almost undetected and unknowingly accepted as true?

In a lecture by Neil Postman***, he relates the story of a (poor) car salesman trying to sell Mr. Postman on a new car’s cruise control. Postman asked him, “What is the problem to which cruise control is the solution?” The salesman was flummoxed. No one ever asked him this before he said. He answered, “The problem of keeping your foot on the gas.” Postman replies this had never been a problem for him. This exchange – almost a sort of humorous technology catechism - was repeated with the salesman’s mention of electric locks and again with power windows. Postman ended up buying the car simply because he didn’t have the option to buy the older, less-improved model. 

It's an interesting story and the question he asks is one that I wish was more a part of our culture’s warp and woof, or at least of my own personal thinking. “What is the problem to which _____ is the solution?” This is the question a person ought to ask of any new technology or advance in progress. This is the question, to paraphrase and combine Caldecott and Berry, that comes from the world of love and from the human person made for love. 

It’s a question, too, that keeps boundaries firmly in place. In the movie, David sees a news report that a nuclear strike nearly happened as a result of the game realizes he has started playing this game and is justifiably freaked out. In the middle of his panicked trashing of printouts and other evidence linking him to the hack, the super-computer initiates communication and calls David. It wants to continue playing the game. Indeed, it has to continue. It can’t not play once it has started. This becomes a key point in the resolution, but it’s fascinating that in the flow of the story, the computer reaches out, and David, once he realizes the computer won’t quit, rips the cord from the phone. He unplugs, staring at his dull reflection in the black monitor.

David knows it’s a game, but he soon learns that the government does not know and simply cannot believe that their computer is wrong or their interpretation of the information on the monitors is wrong. (Just like the super-computer, it can’t not respond.) Everything seems right! Even when the computer locks the government out, they are still responding to its information as though it is accurate and reliably true. There are assumptions of the medium being made there, and no one realizes it until it’s almost too late.

Caldecott writes, “Telephone, television, and the internet, for example, change our sense of space and time, and have a variety of effects on the relationships within the family and the wider social community. Some of these effects will be humanly beneficial” – like in the case of Berry’s brother – “others less so, but an assessment of the technology is not possible without paying attention to the overall pattern of these effects, and to the purpose or function of the technology in relation to the purpose of human life itself. In what respect is a given tool actually serving the true end of man?” (emphasis mine)

“The distinction between the physical and the spiritual is, I believe, false,” says Berry. “A much more valid distinction, and one that we need urgently to learn to make, is that between the organic and the mechanical. … In The Idea of a Christian Society, TS Eliot wrote, ‘We may say that religion, as distinguished from modern paganism, implies a life in conformity with nature. It may be observed that the natural life and the supernatural life have a conformity to each other which neither has with the mechanistic life.’ …Out of [this distinction] comes our confusion about the body’s proper involvement in the world. People seriously interested in health [I believe Berry means more than just physical health] will finally have to question our society’s long-standing goals of convenience and effortlessness. What is the point of ‘labor-saving’ if by making work effortless we make it poor, and if by doing poor work we weaken our bodies and lose conviviality and health?” (emphasis mine)

What is the problem to which ____ is the solution?

In what respect is ____ actually serving the true end of man?

What is the point?

The Role of the Imagination

In War Games, the pivotal moment is when the General thinks outside the war room, beyond the monitors and their digitized missile trajectories, and regains communion with his humanity. Caldecott says, “The healing of our souls and of our society will only come with an opening of vision. But the vision we are talking about – the blossoming of the spiritual senses – depends on purity, or rather purity of heart… What I mean by purity is openness to truth. It has to do with being like a mirror, and we recall that a mirror is only able to reflect when it is turned outward. Folded in on itself it can see only reflections of reflections, and ultimately, locked in darkness, it sees nothing at all. The struggle for purity is thus the struggle for light, the struggle to let nothing get in the way of the light except things that the light wishes to reveal.” (emphasis his)

The mirror doesn’t reflect itself. When it does, you get apparent infinity, but it’s an illusion. A circus funhouse is a room of “reflections of reflections,” which is disorienting at best and terrifying at worst. It’s a labyrinth of images, a maze of medium. In the scene where everything turns from crisis to catharsis, the general reflects and makes a decision. I mean that word “reflects” in both its actual and its metaphorical sense – the general looks inward (considers his own experience and what he knows that the machine does not) while looking outward, outside of himself and beyond the world of efficiency into the world of love of which he is a member. I’m not sure if the director would agree with that terminology, but ‘the world of love’ as Berry means it is present from beginning to end in this movie.

As Caldecott writes, “The self turned in upon itself is living in a coffin, and a civilization that worships the self is what John Paul termed a ‘culture of death.’ In such a culture, the real is what can be measured. Human life has no value but the going market rate, and if we animals have any purpose on earth it is to maximize our pleasure while prolonging our existence. We are here to consume – or to be entertained. As one pundit said, ‘We have moved from a world in which we define ourselves by work to one where we define ourselves – and, in many ways, discover our meaning – through consumption: leisure, expenditure on material goods and other things outside work.’” 

(Have you read Why Literature Still Matters by Jason Baxter? This is the essence of chapter one in a single quote. I highly recommend reading what he writes in that chapter.)

With screens in our pockets and in our faces, we are constantly being told that rather than becoming what we behold, we become what we consume. It’s not incorrect. Basic biology backs it up. But is the goal to become better at consuming or beholding? Do we behold in order to consume? Or do we consume so that we might behold? Do we fuel our minds and bodies and orient our lives so that we might see better? Does our consumption move us in the direction of purity of vision, as Caldecott says?

Caldecott ends his essay with a thought-inducing phrase: “the dreams that define our direction.” He asks, “What goals are we setting for ourselves?” Do we even know?

The literary critic and colleague of Marshall McLuhan, Northrop Frye, in his book The Educated Imagination, explains how it is that our dreams can define our direction:

“When you stop to think about it, you soon realize that our imagination is what our whole social life is really based on. We have feelings, but they affect only us and those immediately around us; and feelings can’t be directly conveyed by words at all. We have intelligence and capacity for reasoning, but in ordinary life we almost never get a chance to use the intellect by itself. In practically everything we do it’s the combination of emotion and intellect we call imagination that goes to work.

“…The central place of the imagination in social life is something the advertisers suddenly woke up to a few years ago. Ever since, they’ve been doing what they call projecting the image, and hiring psychologists to tell them what makes the most direct appeal to the imagination. …advertising is one example…of the deliberate creation of an illusion in the middle of real life. Our reaction to advertising is really a form of literary criticism. We don’t take it literally, and we aren’t supposed to: anyone who believed literally what every advertiser said would hardly be capable of managing his own affairs. I recently went past two teenage girls looking at the display in front of a movie which told them that inside was the thrill of a lifetime, on no account to be missed, and I heard one of them say: “Do you suppose it’s any good?” That was the voice of sanity trying to get its bearings in a world of illusion. We may think of it as the voice of reason, but its really the voice of the imagination doing its proper job… The end of the process is not to reject all advertising but to develop our own vision of society to the point at which we can whose what we want out of what’s offered to us and let the rest go. What we choose is what fits that vision of society.” (emphasis mine)

“The fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life…is to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in.”

“The first thing our imaginations have to do for us, as soon as we can handle words well enough to read and write and talk, is to fight to protect us from falling into the illusions that society threatens us with.”

What is the importance of having a social vision? Shouldn’t we just accept and adopt the society as is around us? Frye again:

“If [a person] recognizes no other society except the one around him, he can never be anything more than a parasite on society. And no mentally healthy man wants to be a parasite; he wants to feel he has some function, something to contribute to the world, something that would make the world poorer if he weren’t in it. But as soon as that notion dawns in the mind, the world we live in and the world we want to live in become different worlds. One is around us, the other is a vision inside our minds, born and fostered by the imagination, yet real enough for us to try to make the world we see conform to its shape. This second world is the world we want to live in, but the word ’want’ is now appealing to something impersonal and unselfish in us. Nobody can enter a profession unless he makes at least a gesture recognizing the ideal existence of a world beyond his own interests: a world of health for the doctor, of justice for the lawyer, of peace for the social worker, a redeemed world for the clergyman, and so on.” 

A purity of vision, a reflecting outward, as a mirror reflect light. A member of a world beyond himself where intention and action are in harmony.

Frye goes on: “My subject is the educated imagination, and education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him. It doesn’t just train the mind: it’s a social and moral development too. …The society around us looks like the real world, but…there’s a great deal of illusion in it. … And just as it looks real, so this ideal world that our imaginations develop inside us looks like a dream that came out of nowhere, and has no reality except what we put into it. But it isn’t. It’s the real world, the real form of human society hidden behind the one we see. It’s the world of what humanity has done, and therefore can do, the world revealed to us in the arts and sciences.”

In other words, what Berry calls “the world of love.”

At the very beginning of his essay, Berry says, “The word ‘health’…comes from the same Indo-European root as ‘heal,’ ‘whole,’ and ‘holy’. To be healthy is literally to be whole; to heal is to make whole.’

In War Games, David is alone, isolated from his parents and with no real friends. We first see him playing an arcade game, his back is to the people and the natural world, and his face reflecting back out of the screen. Throughout the film, we his face reflected from screens. By the end, though, he is in a room full of people, directed by a mentor figure, saving the day by teaching a computer program the value of knowing when something is worth pursuing and when it is everyone’s best interest to give up – teaching what the computer can never know, that humans are members one of another. When the game ends, everyone is celebrating, looking up and out, at each other, and the computer asks Dr. Falken if he would like to play “a nice game of chess.” It’s a vision of a society in proportion and communion, rightly ordered and functioning as a society should. The kind of social vision Frye says we need to have and to teach our children to have.

Caldecott concludes his article by saying “…the direction of current research can be changed by legislation and investment that sets other priorities, priorities more in tune with our true purpose on this earth and with the dignity of the human person. It is a vital aspect of this dignity to which we now turn. It is essential that we reclaim our humanity in the face of the Machine, and to do this we must understand the human body as more than a machine.”

This easier said than done, and Berry explains why:

“The theory of the relative unimportance of physical reality has put itself into action by means of a metaphor by which the body (along with the world itself) is understood as a machine. … The problem is that like any metaphor, it is accurate only in some respects. … When a metaphor begins to control intelligence, as this one of the machine has done for a long time, then we must look for costly distortions and absurdities. Of course, the body in most ways is not at all like a machine.” 

In this way, we can see that not only is the medium the message, but the metaphor is the message, too. The metaphor as a mode of comparison involves identity – “this is that,” it says. It is a powerful piece of literature, but who is telling the story? Is the metaphor directing our thoughts, creating our social vision, or is it the other way around? This is where Literature, Art, and Sciences have a role to play. The stories we tell ourselves reflect and direct our social vision, which, I believe, is why so many modern stories are dark and angsty and dismissive of happy endings and wholeness.  We have spent a long time gazing at ourselves through our mediums of art. We are close to silencing our imaginations, in danger of lulling them to sleep with over-consumption of social illusions. It is only the voice of our educated imaginations that can cut through those loud illusions and heal us in the full meaning of the word – restore us to wholeness and humanity. 

“You are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don’t act like one.”

Footnotes:

Interview with the hacker David Scott Lewis/David Lightfoot inspiration: https://venturebeat.com/social/a-qa-that-is-25-years-late-david-scott-lewis-the-inspiration-behind-the-film-war-games/

ARTICLES:

• Forbes article https://www.forbes.com/sites/dimitarmixmihov/2025/02/11/ai-is-making-you-dumber-microsoft-researchers-say/
• https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2025/01/19/new-study-says-ai-is-making-us-stupid-but-does-it-have-to/
• Impact of artificial intelligence on human loss in decision making, laziness and safety in education - “The data analysis findings show that AI significantly impacts the loss of human decision-making and makes humans lazy." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-023-01787-8
• Ted Gioia https://idioteq.com/the-silent-takeover-ted-gioia-on-ais-threat-to-music-an-interview-with-rick-beato/
• https://www.honest-broker.com/archive?sort=new
• https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-state-of-the-culture-2024
• Paul Kingsnorth https://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=36-06-029-f
• https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/t/the-machine
• "You could think of social media platforms as parasitic. They started out providing useful ways to stay connected (mutualism) but so captured our attention that many users no longer have the time they need for human-human social interactions and sleep (parasitism)." -  https://www.livescience.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/ai-could-shrink-our-brains-evolutionary-biologist-says

*Frye has a fascinating essay called The Renaissance of Books, where he says, “If it were really true, as McLuhan and others have urged, that print is a ‘linear’ medium, Carrying the eye forward and hypnotizing all responses except the purely visual one of reading, there would be no difference between print and any other medium. But this thesis confuses the reading process with the consulting process, and overlooks the fact that print has the unique power of staying around to be read again, presenting, with unparalleled patience, the same words again however often it is consulted. It is therefore public access to printed and written documents that is the primary safeguard of an open society. … The relevant documents are, of course, difficult to interpret, and in raw form are as esoteric to most people as though they were locked up. We are brought back to the book, more particularly the book which is an expository treatise, as the ordinary means of expressing and understanding the general conflict of opinion in society, so far as that opinion is not simply a snap response to current events but a sustained and supported argument. The written expository treatise looks at first sight like a dictatorial monologue, but this is a misunderstanding. Nothing of the hypnotic rhetoric of speech to a present audience is left in it: the author is forced, by the nature of his medium, to put all his cards on the table, to take his reader into his confidence, to appeal to nothing but the evidence of the argument itself. And so, however often it may fail in meeting the standards prescribed by its own physical shape, the expository or thesis-book remains the normal unit of impersonal social vision, and the normal medium by which communication draws us together into a community. Now that society, after some years of reeling from the impact of television, is beginning to bring it under control, we can see more clearly that the book is the chief technological device that makes democracy and the open society continuously possible.” (emphasis mine)

** Though the temptation is strong. A friend recently went to the hospital with debilitating gut pain. She was tested and scanned and examined for all kinds of things, all of which came back normal, so while she was lying in the hospital bed, immobilized from pain, they told her clearly nothing was wrong and she could go home. She told them to keep looking. They found nothing. Finally one doctor suggested they try antibiotics. Within 2 days of taking the medicine she was improving. The doctor came in the third day and seeing how much she had improved, said, “I guess something was wrong after all.” This is the kind of anecdote that is almost too ridiculous to believe. It is a real life example of the system trumping the human. The machines say nothing is wrong, so nothing is wrong. Do you see how a worldview is contained in this one assumption? And maybe even a metaphysics and a theology?

I don’t know that we have brought it under control, but I agree whole-heartedly with his position. Read the whole essay (and several others worth reading) here: https://archive.org/details/spiritusmundiess00frye

*** Neil Postman https://youtu.be/hlrv7DIHllE