Logo DBNL
On Growth (1974)

On Growth

(1974)–Willem Oltmans–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

22. Edmund Carpenter

Professor Edmund Carpenter teaches anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York City. He has done field work in the Arctic, Borneo, Siberia and New Guinea. His two most recent books are Eskimo Realities, and Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me!

Would you say that Limits to Growth, the concern about ecology, about population, about pollution, is a new kind of awareness that might gear humanity, as Skinner1 says, to its main goal: survival?

 

My own feeling is that we must understand exactly what is taking place before we even attempt these questions. Often the questions have been answered without any serious investigation of the problems and the processes that exist at this moment.

In the field of anthropology, the records that are now being released belong to an Alice-in-Wonderland2 world. They have nothing to do with what is really happening. I worked both with the media in our culture and then in other cultures where electronic media are coming in. We find that if you want to destroy a culture, the strongest weapons you have, more deadly than diphtheria, are electronic media. They are cheaper than rifles and far more effective. You can wipe out a culture in no time at all with electronic media. This is exactly what's happening. The irony of it is these media turn back on us and wipe out our own culture and everything that represents Western civilization. Electronic media obliterate culture. They replace cultural environments with media environments. It's no longer Captain Cook stepping in and out of different cultures; we now step in and out of media. A simple illustration: I often placed cameras in the hands of natives and taught them how to make films.

 

In New Guinea?

 

In New Guinea, among the Eskimos and in other areas.

I always obtained the same results. I had hoped, at the beginning, that the native would use the camera in a way that reflected his culture, his perceptions and values. But this was never the case. On the contrary, what they made were films. The answer is that media swallow cultures. The native left his culture totally behind and stepped into the world of the camera. The films he made were indistinguishable from films we make.

If you visit Indian reservations in the United States, American Indians will often say to you: The land-agents stole our land, the traders took our furs, and now the missionaries want our souls. And they laugh. The implication is, they lost their land and furs, but they won't lose their souls. I heard an Indian say that on television. Missionaries had not stolen his soul, but television had stolen it in a way no missionary ever dreamed. Television now controlled his spirit! It gave him identity, denied him identity.

Culture becomes an automatic victim of media. The media become new environments and we step in and out of many of them in the course of a single day. There is no place left for culture. It goes. Culture is now a myth maintained by anthropologists and others, a thing of the past. Where do you find it?

 

What is the importance of losing culture?

 

To me, culture is where you have spirit in flesh. With electronic media you have just spirit, pure spirit.

 

How essential is culture to a man's life in your view? Or to his creative possibilities, to creating a life of his own?

 

I don't know, other than the fact that there seems to be everywhere in America a hunger for culture as it disappears. We suddenly sense what we have lost. Electronic media have made angels of us, not angels in a sense of having wings or being good, but spirit divorced from flesh, capable of instant transportation anywhere. The moment you pick up a telephone, you are everywhere in spirit and nowhere in space. Nixon on television is everywhere at once. This is Saint Augustine's definition of God: ‘a being whose borders are nowhere, whose center is everywhere.’ Today pure spirit takes precedence over spirit in flesh. You may be waiting in a line to have a clerk serve you, but if the phone rings, the clerk answers the phone. We accept this. No one protests.

We recognize that pure spirit is primary. But the danger is that as people become pure spirits and enter media, they can only enter without their bodies. They go in as purely ephemeral things. Young people in America, sensing this, turn back and try to rediscover their bodies. They drink wine, they want rich or spicy foods, they are interested in the land, they go barefoot, they try to put the spirit back into the flesh. But the media have no place for flesh.

 

The radio created Hitler.3 Now what are we creating with television on a worldwide scale right now?

 

Radio under Hitler was just a beginning of what's happened. Today the real drug trip, the real inner trip, is television; and for many people it's primary. They regard the world outside as messy, disorderly, unrewarding, and they step into media and live in them. To them, that is the reality. I've done some simple tests with students. I took the movie Patton and showed it to a class -

 

General Patton?4

 

The film about General Patton. Then I had them read two books, one by A.J. Liebling, which is very uncomplimentary to Patton and points out that Patton was honored for battles he didn't fight. Then I had them read a book on Field Marshal Rommel, his opponent, who was a restrained man, concerned with the welfare of his troops and an anti-Nazi who died trying to kill Hitler.

Now, the fascinating thing was the students enjoyed all three. Not one student raised the question of historical accuracy. No one asked: Which version was true?

Then I took the old Charles Laughton movie, Mutiny on the Bounty. As a boy, I had loved that film. I showed it to the class and then had them read an account of the mutineers, who were murderers, rapists and alcoholics. Of the fifteen, only one survived; they murdered each other. Then I had them read an account on the administration of Australia by Captain Bligh, who turned out to be, not only an able administrator, but a pioneer in the human treatment of seamen. The students enjoyed all three and saw no need to raise the question: Which version was true?

Young people have stepped away from outer reality, the notion of historical truth or of physical reality. Their parents wanted to see a thing. They wanted to see movie stars. They wanted to see the real Joan Craw-

ford. They wanted to hear authors read their works. They wanted to see the man to bring an image down to a thing that could be touched, seen, observed.

If they had seen a picture of the Mona Lisa, they went to the Louvre to see the original. They wanted to see the Eiffel Tower exactly as they had seen it in reproduction. Young people don't. They have no interest in this. I think this is one of the most monumental changes in human history. People have given up this primary characteristic of Western civilization in which all experience, all truth, was synchronized to a visible, observable universe. The young people don't care. They accept many universes, many realities. To them, television does not reflect the world outside. It is not supposed to. They are not at all disturbed by the fact that our news reports have nothing to do with reality. They don't expect them to. There is no longer any urge to look at the record.

 

What would be the influence? What shift do we observe here, supposedly caused by this stultifying addiction to television?

 

Right now,5 in the United States, we are getting ready for an election, clearly a confrontation between print and television realities. McGovern6 is saying: Cities are collapsing, the economy has reversed itself, people are dying. He is talking about a physical, historical reality, but no one will listen. Nixon7 is putting on a superb television performance about something that exists only in television.

 

And nobody asks what the effects in the reality are?

 

No one. People are laughing at McGovern because it's a bad television performance. What a horror the thing is! Look at the reality. Look at the city. Let me ask: Have you ever, in any city in the world, seen as many walking schizophrenics as you see here?8 Not in Calcutta, Bangkok, Rio. Here we are on the sixteenth floor and the sound level is so high, it is difficult to do a tape recording. This is the reality. The sound level in New York City has reached the point where people are going insane. You see it on the streets. If you walk five blocks, you'll see insane people shouting at cars, shouting in the paper bags, screaming down sewers, talking to themselves. I have never before seen a culture where the environment is driving people insane. Freud worried about the dangers that arise from human relations, but no one ever warned us that the sound level would reach the point where you could not think.

Nixon, of course, is not addressing himself to those questions. He is talking about an Alice-in-Wonderland world, and an entire nation is enjoying it. McGovern is a literate, rural, essentially nineteenth-century man, who believes that all he has to do is to tell people that they are sick and hungry and can be helped.

 

Are you aware of Skinner's theory of changing the environment in order to change, to make life more livable for individuals?

 

Pavlov9 found he could get nowhere with dogs until he controlled their entire environment. Then, when he controlled the environment, the slightest change changed behavior, a discovery not lost on the Marxists.

Pavlov was immensely popular with them precisely because he taught them how to control people by controlling the entire environment. But the moment people begin to talk about controlling the environment, they leave this environment. Leave it behind and step into another environment. They step into the environment of the media. I can show you some of the most remarkable things in this city. You will see people walking the streets here with their ears plugged, listening to transistor radios. I know a man who, when he goes walking with his daughter, is electronically rigged so that each is tied into a radio system with a mike so they can talk. He's been psychoanalyzed by telephone and by radio.

 

Where will this power of the media lead us?

 

Anthropologists have never dealt with media.

 

You made special studies?

 

But these studies have been wholly unacceptable to anthropologists who are concerned with culture. To them, media have no existence. But they find nothing disturbing about putting a culture in a book.

In New Guinea we entered one village where people knew what cameras were. They had seen government movies and were interested in film. When we arrived, they were about to initiate some boys in a very sacred ceremony where woman are forbidden on penalty of death. They erected a great ceremonial structure, twenty-five feet high, to prevent anyone from looking in who was not an initiated male. Just before the ceremony began - I didn't dare ask if we could film it - they came to us and asked us if we would film it. We said we would be delighted

to. Then they came to us and asked about a woman who was in our party. Was she a cameraman? I said she was the best of the three cameramen with us. So the elders met and said, ‘We want her to film as well.’ Not only did they invite her, but they stopped the ceremony to help her reload, to show her how to position the camera, to help in every way. At the end, they asked us to play back the soundtrack so they might listen to it. Then they made us promise that we would bring the movie back for them to see. They planned to erect another sacred enclosure and project the film. Then they announced there would be no more involuntary initiations and they offered to sell the most sacred things they had, the water drums. They said that with the film there would be no further need to initiate boys. Media takeover.

About a year ago I was invited to participate in an open seminar at a Canadian university on Eskimo life, and on the program were various Eskimos. I talked about what I knew and loved about Eskimo culture and the experience I had had with Eskimos in the past. Some young Eskimo men present were furious. They said, ‘This is not true.’ They then began to tell me what Eskimo culture was like as they knew it through the media, having never experienced it, you see, except through the media. They knew their art only through movies and books, through government propaganda, through the world of Walt Disney. Finally one Eskimo said, ‘Don't tell us who we are or what we are. That's a white man's lie. We know.’

The angry American Indian today knows nothing of his own heritage. All he knows is his media image. He plays that and is exploited in a way that makes even his ancestral exploitation pale.

 

And the blacks in America?

 

They know nothing of their background except its exploitative aspects. When they encounter the great music and art of their heritage, they don't recognize it. They don't even know their own heroes. Ask blacks on a college campus who Paul Robeson10 was and they wouldn't know. The only thing they know is the identity that they see from television and that's what they believe in and that's who they are.

 

Professor Carpenter, how would you sum up the impact of the electronic media on survival for the planet? I know it is a big question, but what would be the impact of television in, say, the next thirty years, when satellites school Indian villages, satellites that are programmed in the United States or elsewhere?

I am not as worried about the content of media as I am about the media themselves. To me, the real effect of television is that it separates spirit from flesh in a way that print did not do. I think there are certain very involved reasons why, with print, though you have an image divorced from flesh, nevertheless there is an urge always to refer back to the flesh, to the physical thing. With television and the other electronic media, this is not true. Today we are witnessing this shift, in which we abandon the very essence of Western civilization. The synchronization of the senses and the synchronization of all experiences, was a lockstep, in which everything was directed toward a single purpose, a single goal - it permitted the organization of large numbers of people. You could mass-produce things, have assembly lines, armies and bureaucracies. This was possible under literacy because it produced a type of person who used his sense and his mind in this highly restricted, synchronized, directed manner.


Vorige Volgende