In 1946, the Reverend Dr. Carl McIntire, a fundamentalist Presbyterian minister from Collingwood, New Jersey, editor of The Christian Beacon newspaper, radio preacher on The 20th Century Reformation Hour, and a pioneer of sorts in the field of Christian ecumenism – he tried to build an orthodox, Protestant, alternative to the mainstream, liberal, ecumenical movement, although his separatism and his personality both frequently got in the way of his efforts – published a book entitled The Author of Liberty. Through his entire ministry, McIntire combined his fiery, fundamentalist version of Scottish Calvinism with American political conservatism and was, most admirably, a fervent opponent of totalitarianism, in both its Nazi and Communist forms. I disagree, of course, with his tendency to equate freedom with American democracy and republicanism, holding instead to the views of John Farthing, son of the Anglican Bishop of Montreal of the same name (1), expressed in his posthumously published work Freedom Wears a Crown. Nevertheless, I do very much agree with McIntire’s having identified God as the author of liberty or freedom. God created man in His own image, as a rational being with moral agency, and initially the only limit placed on that agency, outside of those built into the very structure and order of the universe itself, was a single negative command (the positive command to multiply and fill the earth can hardly be said to constitute a limitation). When man’s disobedience enslaved him to his own sinfulness, further commandments were added out of necessity, but the entire plan of salvation revealed in the Scriptures and centred in the Incarnation, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, is about setting men free from slavery to sin. That is why the term redemption – literally, purchasing the freedom of a slave – is so frequently used to describe the saving work of Jesus Christ.
If God is the author of liberty, and He is, then obviously
the ultimate enemy of freedom is Satan.
It is worth noting, in this regards, that the traditional theological
explanation of Satan’s origin is of an angel who got too full of himself and
tried to usurp the place of God. The
ancient term for the opposite of freedom, tyranny, is a term that originally
had strong connotations of usurpation.
Satan is traditionally and Scripturally depicted as a tyrant who holds
men in bondage through his lies and their own sins.
All that having been said, it is not Satan himself that I
wish to focus on in this essay, since I have already basically covered that
topic in a previous and quite recent one. (2)
I shall instead be looking at what is most evidently his chief means of
deceiving people and attacking their freedom in the day in which we live.
This instrument, like the sinister being whose purposes it
presently serves, goes by many names.
Earlier this year, I used one of its oldest names, the fourth estate, in
making the observation that while, under this label, it presents itself as the watchdog
policing the powerful on behalf of our rights and freedoms, the answer to
Juvenal’s famous question of quis
custodiet ipsos custodes in its usual broader application (3), the
question, in fact, needs to be asked of it as much as of any other watcher. Here in this context, however, I prefer the
term “The Great Stereopticon” used by Richard M. Weaver in his Ideas Have Consequences (1948), because
it emphasizes the inhuman, mechanical nature of that which is most often simply
called the media.
The Great Stereopticon is both the title and the subject
matter of the fifth chapter of Weaver’s book.
This chapter ought to be read in the context of the work at a whole by
anyone who really wants a grasp on the nature and purpose of this
perception-generating machine.
Weaver’s book, originally written as a contemplative response to the
invention and use of the atomic bomb, traces the decline and decay of Western
civilization over the course of centuries starting with the abandonment of the
unifying, integrated, worldview of the ancients and Medievals in which the
temporal world and the passing things of it were perceived as subordinate to
the greater and permanent reality of an eternal order. The
decay of civilization is the result of a process of literal disintegration that
removes the individual from his place in the larger order which gave him
meaning and purpose and throws him onto his own resources to invent these for
himself. While he is told that this is
liberating, it in fact makes his existence less human and more mechanical, and
thus less free rather than more.
Weaver’s insights closely harmonize with the parallel observations of
other Anglican Christian Platonists such as C. S. Lewis and George Grant about
the way in which Modern thinking has reversed the ancient concept of liberty,
both personal and political. Whereas to
the ancients, personal liberty consisted in mastering the inner appetites which
strive to dominate us, to the Moderns personal liberty consisted of the
emancipation of such desires and thus, by the standards of the ancients, our
own enslavement. Furthermore, in
Modern thinking political liberty is when the laws of the civil order assist in
the cause of the emancipation of desire even from the constraints placed upon
it by the order of reality itself. To
obtain such “liberty”, Grant frequently warned, required a technological
mastery of nature which, ironically, in turn required an increased degree of
social control, that would have been recognized as tyranny by the
ancients. Political liberty in the
older and traditional sense, of laws that secure to each person his life and
his property, would be lessened rather than increased.
The “Great Stereopticon”, Weaver told us, is a “wonderful
machine” constructed by the “vested interests of our age”, the function of
which is “to project selected pictures of life in the hope that what is seen
will be imitated.” The intent behind
this is to fill the vacuum of an orderly, unifying, vision that was left by the
disintegration of the ancient “metaphysical dream”. “The Great Stereopticon”, Weaver wrote,
“like most gadgets, has been progressively improved and added to until today it
is a machine of three parts: the press, the motion picture, and the
radio.” Obviously, that is in need of
an update. Indeed, it arguably needed
an update even as it went to press, for that was about the time that televisions
were becoming standard household items.
Today, of course, computers and the worldwide web that connects them
together are the dominant part of the latest model of the Great Stereopticon.
Weaver proceeded to go part by part through the machine,
eviscerating each piece in turn. The
newspaper, “a spawn of the machine” and “a mechanism itself” he wrote, “has
ever been closely linked with the kind of exploitation, financial and
political, which accompanies industrialism.”
It is evidence, he suggested, that Plato was on to something when, in
the Phaedrus, he presented arguments
that he invention of the written word led to the propagation of false
knowledge, forgetfulness, and the fossilization of accounts of truth. “Faith in the printed word”, he said, “has
raised journalists to the rank of oracles”, but added that they were better
described by Plato’s words “They will appear to be omniscient and will
generally know nothing; they will be tiresome, having the reputation of
knowledge, without the reality”.
While Weaver’s negative appraisal of the Great Stereopticon
went much further than the threat it posed to freedom, this threat was raised
within his criticism. The danger, as
Weaver saw it, was that rather than facilitating the discussion and dialogue
upon which freedom depend, as it presented itself as doing, the machine limited
and minimized dialogue. He wrote:
There is much to
indicate that modern publication wishes to minimize discussion. Despite many artful pretensions to the
contrary, it does not want an exchange of views, save perhaps on academic
measures. Instead, it encourages men to
read in the hope that they will absorb.
For one thing, there is the technique of display, with its implied
evaluations. This does more of the
average man’s thinking for him than he suspects. For another, there is the stereotyping of
whole phrases. These are carefully
chosen not to stimulate reflection but to evoke stock responses of approbation
or disapprobation. Headlines and
advertising teem with them, and we seem to approach a point at which failure to
make the stock response is regarded as fairly treasonable, like refusal to
salute the flag.
Today we have gone far past that point. Think of how everyone who has failed to make
the stock response of shaking with fear, curling up in the fetal position,
sucking one’s thumb, and hiding under one’s bed, waiting for some big
pharmaceutical company to save them from the Bogeyman of the bat flu, that the
newspapers and television news stations, aided and abetted by the social media
companies, have been working so hard to evoke this year, has been treated. They have indeed been treated as if they had
committed a form of treason. The message
of the Great Stereopticon has been that everything that our governments have
inflicted on us has been necessary for our own good and safety and that
therefore “we are all in this together”.
By opposing the government measures, saying that it is not right to
suspend everyone’s constitutional civil rights and basic freedoms just because
a virus is circulating, and that the harm done by lockdowns has exceeded any
harm the virus had potential of causing, those who dare to take this stand are
putting the lie to the Great Stereopticon’s message by saying “we are not in
this together with you.” When faced
with such contradiction, those saying “we are all in this together” show that
despite their warm and fuzzy slogan, what they really mean is “dissent will not
be tolerated, so put up and shut up.”
Sixteen years after Weaver wrote about the Great
Stereopticon, Marshall McLuhan, a convert to Roman Catholicism who taught at
the University of Toronto and had made communications theory his primary field
of interest, published Understanding
Media: The Extensions of Man. This
was not his first book, but it would become his best known work. Indeed, a short five word meme that
summarizes the thesis of the book, is what he is most remembered for today. (4) That meme is “the medium is the message.” What McLuhan was saying here was that communications
media are not what the convention wisdom of his day took them to be, neutral
means of transmitting information that did not matter as much as the content of
the information they conveyed. Against
this conventional wisdom, he argued that the opposite was in fact the case,
that the nature of the medium itself was what shaped what people heard and saw
and thought and, therefore, shaped culture, society, and civilization. By contrast, the content of what the media
convey was relatively unimportant and almost irrelevant. Thus, when new media replace old, as with the
invention of the movable type printing press in the fifteenth century, and
broadcasting technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the changes
that were effected were largely the inevitable result of the new media and
would have been more or less the same had the content of what was printed and
broadcast been completely different..
There are many parallels between McLuhan’s thesis and George
Grant’s response to the idea that technology is morally neutral. Indeed, since for McLuhan “the media”
included not just the parts of the Great Stereopticon identified by Weaver, or
even all the extra parts that we would recognize today, but “any new
technology”, their arguments are even closer than what would be the case if
McLuhan’s “media” were merely a subcategory of Grant’s “technology”. While
Grant dealt with this subject throughout his entire corpus of writing, it is
his answer to the assertion made by a computer scientist that “the computer
does not impose on us the ways it should be used” in his essay “Thinking About
Theology” that I have in mind here. (5)
This sentence, Grant maintained, although it is incontrovertible at one
level, the identification of the computer as an instrument that serves human
ends, good or bad, is misleading, because it separates the computer from the
paradigm of thought that produced it and that paradigm is a destiny which does
indeed impose itself upon people. Machines
have been moving us towards universal homogeneity, both because there is a
tendency for societies that use the same kind of machines to resemble each
other (here Grant used the automobile as an example) and because of the
additional homogenizing factor of the “vast corporate structures” needed to
produce and maintain them.
To bring what we have gleaned from Weaver, McLuhan and Grant
together, the downside to the development of technology has frequently by
described in terms of the mechanization of human life. While we invent machines to serve us, a
consequence of their invention is that our society itself is transformed into
something resembling a large machine in which we are human parts. Existence as a cog in a machine falls far
short of what the ancients recognized as freedom. The technological media pose a more specific
threat to this kind of freedom because this freedom consists in the exercise of
moral agency, which depends upon rational decision making, which requires
information, and the technological media exist to control the flow of said
information.
The threat the media poses to liberty, therefore, goes much
deeper than the mere “bias” which is the extent of the media criticism that you
will hear from the average “conservative” and by which is meant a partisan
slant on the part of those reporting the news.
Granted, the bias they are talking about exists, as has been even more
evident this year than previously, especially in the coverage of the American
election, but this is merely the surface problem. Ironically, although they get practically everything
else about the matter wrong, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, writing from
the liberal-left in Manufacturing Consent
(1988), displayed a better grasp on the fact that mass communications media
itself is intrinsically subversive of freedom within liberal democracy. Bias of a partisan nature is hardly the
explanation of the media’s fomenting fear so that we would accept the curtailing of our basic constitutional and prescriptive freedoms of
association, assembly and religion, and sacrifice the moral agency of making
informed, rational, decisions including calculated risks with regards to the
Wuhan bat flu.
Indeed, it is
evident in what we have been seeing from the Great Stereopticon this year, not
merely in the hysteria they have generated about the bat flu but in their
treatment of other matters as well, especially the American presidential
election and the anti-white hate fest that broke out into violent riots all
over the Western world earlier this year, that the Great Stereopticon has
undergone a complete overhaul, an upgrade in both hardware and software, that
goes far beyond the mere addition of a few new components since the time Weaver
penned his classic description of it seventy years ago. The image
the machine now projects is so disjointed from reality, things as they are,
that it warrants comparison to the Matrix.
Astonishingly, this is true even in the detail of most people being
unaware of the artificial nature of the image they mistake for reality. I use the adverb astonishingly because
unlike with the artificial world depicted in the motion picture franchise, the
Great Stereopticon is not putting much effort into convincingly hiding the
disconnect between its images and reality.
It has been telling us that the bat flu is a plague of apocalyptic
proportions and that the rising numbers are “staggering” even though the
absence of any significant amount of excess morality this year is not difficult
to discover, it has labelled the violent riots of the racist anti-white hate
fest “peaceful protests”, even using this deceptive description when describing
police officers being assaulted and showing video of cities burning, and has
told us that claims of voter fraud in the American election are without substantiating
evidence as if hundreds of affidavits of eyewitness testimony did not
constitute evidence.
The best “update”
of Weaver’s account of the Great Stereopticon of which I am aware, actually an
expansion upon McLuhan’s famous meme, is Dr. Bruce G. Charlton’s Addicted to Distraction (2014). Since I have already reviewed this book at
length (6), I shall simply say here that it explores the Matrix-like extent of
the image projected by the machine which Dr. Charlton calls the Mass Media with
capitals to distinguish it as a singular, integrated, system from the mere
plural of medium, and demonstrates that it is not merely biased towards the
Left in a partisan sense, but indistinguishable from the Left in the nihilistic
sense of the ongoing revolution that seeks to tear down all that is good, if
imperfect, in actual reality.
Since freedom as the
ancients knew it can only be found in submission to the actual reality of the
order of things as they are under God, the media machine’s attacks on that
reality and efforts to trap us in a fake one, constitute a double assault on
our freedom. This tells us, to return
in conclusion to the point made in the second paragraph, in whose hands the
Great Stereopticon is ultimately an instrument.
(1) They
had different middle names, albeit with the same initial letter, so this is not
a case of a senior and junior. The
Right Reverend John C. Farthing’s middle name was Cragg. His son, the Tory philosopher, was John
Colborne Farthing.
(2) Satan
is the Author of the New Normal
(3) Juvenal’s
immediate application was to a guard hired by a jealous husband to ensure his
wife’s fidelity. See my How
Juvenal! – The Fourth Estate.
(4)
Actually, it
is one of two memes for which he is remembered. The other is “global village”. He would be appalled at much of the use to
which the latter has been put.
(5)
This is the
first essay in Technology and Justice,
1986.
