God on Sinai: "The medium is the message."
Sunday February 3, 2008
Again, going through my bookshelf tonight, I pulled down a copy of the late media theorist Neil Postman's 1985 book "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business" Consider this Postman passage in light of our...
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About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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Probably he was afraid of being portrayed as Marvin the Martian saying, "Sinning makes me very angry, very angry indeed!"
Maybe Laszlo Toth was on to something.
What a truly great book. Neil Postman synthesized the work of McLuhan, Harold Innis and others in his later work in the nascent field of media ecology. Going beyond McLuhan, Postman evokes a much deeper sense of moral and ethical questioning in media studies, and the questions he poses in Amusing... are just as relevant today as when he wrote them in 1985.
Perhaps on the subject of Neil Postman, Rod and I can find something to agree on.
G_d was as image-conscious as the rest of us, knowing that though the edifice of faith requireth a firm foundation, it can do without *abasement*, the latter being all too subject to Flood. Which is just as well, because in the ladder event, standard 2-by-4s proved useless: only 2-by-2s would do.
Which is why even to this day of high-tech, when threatened by flood, we still rely on NOAA's art.
"Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture"...
yes, the "God of the Jews" was a new kind...
a new invention of the imaginations of superstitious uneducated ancient men...
to this "God of Sinai", creating idols was blasphemy...
but that ancient message is only part of their invention...
they didn't give any thought to how blasphemous it was to invent such a God who would be claimed to give them the message to slaughter the innocent women and children of many of their neighbors...
the recorded action in the OT of the self-proclaimed Chosen People is much more the message than their written claims about God...
faith hope love joy peace to all...
Scott - appreciative groans
>>It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture.
Maybe it was as simple as the priests who codified the story of the ten commandments didn't want the Jewish people to fall into the heathen ways of making household idols. By making the image of their god mysterious, the priests were able to keep the power of the Mystery out of the hands of the common folk.
Scott, thou hast been buried in peanuts (a form of accolade that is healthier for the punster than some other forms).
John E. expresses politely what I've had at the core of my contempt for dogma all along: control of the message by standardizing it and punitively enforcing the standard. Please note: if the dogma being exmained does not fit that description, I don't mean to include it; also, history shows that the targets of my contempt appropriately are the people who standardize and punish, not the beliefs per se.
A book that I keep returning to is Malcolm Muggeridge's Christ and the Media, published in 1977. He had this to say about television:
"So I suggest that the cameras are our ego's eyes, our age's focus, the repository and emanation of all our fraudulence. Take them to any place of conflict and strife, and hey presto! in a matter of minutes, trouble stirs for them to register."
I see the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death has appeared in many a CC thread:
http://tinyurl.com/36j5ll
Apparently, Postman rings far *more* than twice; me, I prefer (Albert Jay) Nock - three times is his ceiling...
I'll be here, all weak: try the canned ham, there's no dietary law against it here - I'm just Zion'...
Scott L
Remember the McGinnity
(For sixteen years she kept her virginity
And that's a record for this vicinity)
Computer science gets the pipes. [Net neutrality!]
So now we've moved to God's pipes.
The tablet, the voice from the sky, the Dream, the Prophet, the oral tradition, the papyrus scroll,The Book,the wandering teacher, the healer, the apostle, the Church, the mass, the creed, the missionary, the newspaper, the magazine,the website,the commercial.
The Holy Spirit.
All conduits. All with limits and benefits of space and time. Except the Holy Spirit.
Getting the chance to look at 350 yr old registers in my work, I'm always amazed at how well The Book continues to stand the test of time.
Still I don't believe they are the message. They're the delimiters of the message. The constraints and opportunities. Not the message.
Last thought.
To look more closely at the composition of the message, check out C.S. Peirce and Semiotics. [Icon,Index,Symbol]
Peirce was the son of the first chair of Harvard's Mathematics dept and the only American founder of a school of Philosophy - Pragmatacism.
Gates and Job etc. have conferences on Semiotics from what I hear.
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