The voice of the Curmudgeon . . .

Can you visualize what it was like to live as an average person before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution? Let’s say you were not among the very few who had wealth. Maybe you were an artisan in a town but chances are you would have been on the land; cities were as yet fairly small, most people farmed. No matter what series of actions you went through each day or each season to feed yourself and your family, you had almost no leisure time. People cooked, spun, milked, washed, cared for children, plowed, hauled, cut wood, sowed, harvested--all of these things and much, much more filled the day from the moment of waking until an exhausted sleep. In the evening sitting near the fire, no hand was idle, there was always some handwork to be done, it was unheard of and considered unhealthy, a deviation, to sit and think with idle hands. Sitting in church for three or four hours on Sunday was a welcome respite for weary bodies—it was literally the only time all week anyone could just sit and let their mind wander. There was no such thing as Entertainment, at least not in our modern secular sense.

So—we should be very grateful for the progress of science over the past 150 years that has made our lives so much easier. In many ways we seem to have come out of a dark tunnel into the light of a new world where people no longer have to slave to survive, where people have leisure and time to spend as they choose. Of course, as soon as people had one moment of free to time and/or money to spend, others appeared out of nowhere to take their money and provide them something mindless to do to occupy their time—the modern Entertainment Industry was born. Now most of us can manage to put food on the table with only 8 hours of work a day, often less. After work, what? Movies, TV, sports, a few do community work—all good healthy human activities which satisfy our tribe-of-apes bonding needs. But who takes any of this wonderful bonus time to think, to meditate on What it All Means? Does anyone read any more? If they read, do they think about it? When Herman Melville’s Moby Dick was published in 1851, it became a best seller immediately (although Melville never made any money on it). The literacy rate was high and it was not read by just the upper class, all sorts of people bought it, farmers, laborers, housemaids, apprentices. And these people understood what they read and took time to think about it. Moby Dick is not an easy read, there are many layers of meaning and implications that cannot be expressed in the Classic Comic version. You have to read it slowly and think as you read. Does anyone outside of college English departments read at this level any more? Thinking is creative, a thinking person builds on the information taken in by the senses, synthesizes it, and comes up with something no one has ever seen or heard before, a newborn thought or feeling that contributes positively, in howsoever small a way, to our mutual evolution.

But 99 percent of our leisure time today is spent in passive activities which have no creation involved. These activities exhaust the spirit by making us experience fictional stories and plots and emotions vicariously and at a breakneck, real-time speed that allows no time for thought. How many times have you stopped the DVD player while watching a movie to think about and digest what has just taken place on the screen? No one does that—we all need to get to the End, to find out What Happens. We take our entertainment like we are getting on a roller coaster—can’t get off until it’s over and the cathartic release of having screamed all the way down the hill is really what we’re after, not thinking about how the tracks are put together and whether the bolts are loose.

What is passive entertainment doing to the human mind? We have evolved to this amazing stage where most of our material needs are easy to obtain and we have been blessed with a leisure unique in human history. We have this gift of time which could be used to think deeply, creatively, to plot our course, to gain a reflectivity which might avert us from calamity. These are dangerous times and the clock is ticking, the earth is filling up. Instead we numb our senses by plugging into the entertainment industry, by dancing the night away. At no previous time have humans needed deep thinking more and mindless entertainment less. We have the time if we use it, if we want the dawn to be a pleasant one.