This week has kicked off the lovely time
of year known as March Madness. It is a time when those that may regularly care
nothing for college basketball are drawn into cheering for teams to which they
have no real ties, other than they may have picked them in a work bracket pool.
I have watched more college basketball in the last 72 hours than I care to
admit. Of course, along with the watching of hours and hours of television comes
the undesirable reality of sitting through hours of commercials, advertisements,
and promos for fabric softener, beer, life insurance, cars and one that
included Michael Jordan and a man wearing a shirt made of kittens.
There is nothing quite as maddening as
watching commercials, except maybe watching the same commercial again and
again. Niklas Luhmann, author of The
Reality of the Mass Media, which I read recently, astutely observes that “advertising
is one of the most puzzling phenomena… How can well-to-do members of society be
so stupid as to spend large amounts of money on advertising in order to confirm
their belief in the stupidity of others?” Most of us may roll our eyes when a
commercial contains the shameless ploys of a sexy girl, a hilarious catch
phrase, or a blatant questioning of the viewer’s adequacy without such and such
a product. The baffling thing is that it works. Luhmann goes on to say that
“advertising has already achieved success when people even ask themselves the
question whether or not a new kitchen ought to be bought, since initially it is
more likely that the mind is not preoccupied with one’s kitchen but with something
else.” In other words, advertising creates a situation in which a decision on a
need must be made. It also initiates very natural questions relating to self-inspection.
Would this improve my quality of life? How am I being perceived by others?
How can I take advantage of more of my time? What is missing in my life? These
are all very fine self-examining questions to ask of ourselves on a regular
basis. However, it may be helpful to take it a step further by asking what
realities are influencing you to ask these questions of yourself.
Again in Luhmann’s book, he describes the
complications that arise when we have allowed too many sources to influence our
reality. “The more complex the system becomes and the more it exposes itself to
irritations, the more variety the world can permit without relinquishing any
reality - and the more the system can afford to work with negations, with
fictions, with merely analytical or statistical assumptions which distance it
from the world as it is.” We exist in the most complex, media saturated, and media
driven society in the history of the world. That may sound dramatic, but we
live in a time in which the majority of the world is connected through little
devices through which anyone in the world can share an opinion, a story, a
picture, etc., with nearly anyone else. That has never been true before in the
history of our planet and most clearly magnifies the onslaught of perspectives
and alternate realities we can interact with, billions of times over. While
this is in some ways a positive experience, it leaves the door wide open to
have one’s self completely affected by dozens of smaller, fictional, more
hidden and potentially more destructive influences on our reality.
We are surrounded by an unlimited amount
of other realities. Between the phone, television, or internet, we can even
create our own catalog of many different identities and forms of interaction.
However, we risk solidifying an authentic reality by participating in so many
fractured and manufactured ones. We also risk overloading our ability to
seriously examine the legitimacy and the detriment of participating in various
micro realities. The frequent and dangerous result is that we live in so many
manufactured realities that we cease to understand our own.
This phenomena can result in individuals
feeling divided, isolated, and unsure of who they really are. I realize this
may sound self-appeasing coming from a blog, but the technology of dissemination
is not the problem. The problem is not Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or any other
form of social media. The problem is the deliberately edited profiles, the hand
selected pictures, the crafted comments that embellish or craft a careful image
of ourselves. The error is in being concerned with our perceived selves rather
than who we really are. I speak from far too much experience studying what I
should identify myself with that would gain me the most approval from those I
wished to draw attention from. I played off much of this falsehood under the
cover of “humility”, when it could have more accurately been titled
“insecurity”. In many ways, we can easily become spectators of our own lives, watching
our lives happen almost as if watching someone else. We can live in the pockets
of insecurity that are naturally created in our own minds and are exemplified
in the exaggerated explanations of our professions, the fantasies of numerous
shallow relationships, or embellishments of our perceived selves. We can continually
do this rather than ever really living.
If I may return for a moment to the March
Madness, perhaps this is why we are so attached to these different forms of entertainment,
whether it’s the Indiana Hoosiers, the Boston Red Sox, the reality show Survivor,
or Downton Abbey. We have become accustomed to feeling pain and triumph through
being spectators of someone else’s living and dying. Maybe it’s easier that
way. But it is a sad existence if we can call it that at all. Frederick
Buechner proposes some litmus test questions to discern whether you’ve been
living your own life.
“Have you wept at anything during the past
year?
Has your heart beat faster at the sight of
young beauty?
Have you thought seriously about the fact
that someday you are going to die?
More often than not do you really listen
when people are speaking to you instead of just waiting for your turn to speak?
Is there anybody you know in whose place,
if one of you had to suffer great pain, you would volunteer yourself?
If your answer to most of these questions
is no, the chances are that you’re dead.”
I love this excerpt. However, I think it’s
possible to answer “yes” to all of these questions and still be “dead” in the
sense that Buechner means. Let’s look at some examples.
Have you wept at anything during the past
year? Yes, I started
tearing up as I watched Peyton Manning give his farewell speech to the
Indianapolis Colts. Also, when Sybil died in that Downton Abbey show.
Has your heart beat faster at the sight of
beauty? Why of course. If
you mean beauty in nature, I watched this fantastic display of lightning on a
time lapse video that was breath taking. Oh and if you mean human beauty,
following the Knicks game a commercial aired featuring Diane Lane. She is so
pretty.
Have you thought seriously about the fact
that someday you are going to die? Yes, and I often wonder if people will write post mortem messages
on my Facebook wall.
More often than not do you really listen
when people are speaking to you instead of just waiting for your turn to speak? Yes, but I have so much to say and want
people to know how brilliant I am!
Is there anybody you know in whose place,
if one of you had to suffer great pain, you would volunteer yourself? Yes, my wife. Except for child birth,
that looks like too much pain.
In the examples I’ve given, the detachment
from the integrity of these questions is obvious. The questioner is seeking an
authentic and personal reflection and answers like these take the seriousness
of life too lightly or perhaps welcome the distractions from true reality too
easily. Both tendencies point toward similar limitations of living true life,
feeling true pain, and experiencing true joy. Let us not be constantly waiting
for one distraction or another to end before we can get down to the business of
really living our lives. Let’s seek to have the maturity, authenticity,
transparency, and shrewdness to examine what we allow to influence and distract
us from our own reality.
