The Epistemology of Disconnection

By Robin Phillips - January 2003

“Stand therefore, having girded your loins about with truth…”

Ephesians 6:14

“…casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ…”

2 Cor. 10:5

What Is Epistemology?

‘Epistemology’ is a term more associated with academic disciplines than with the ordinary man on the street. I have even heard it suggested that when having a conversation with a person who is not of an academic ilk, this word is particularly effective if one wants to scare the other person away.

My intent is not to scare anyone with this essay. Certainly there is nothing scary about the word epistemology. The best way to explain what epistemology means is to compare it to other words that end in ‘ology.’ Zoology is the science of animals, anthropology is the science of man, technology is the science of inventions, geology is the science of the earth, biology is the science of living things, and similarly epistemology is the science of knowledge. Each of these ‘ology’s’ can also be used to describe a specific theories or orientations towards that science as well as the science itself, as I might say, “the professor’s geology is very unscientific”, or “I don’t go along with that kind of anthropology.”

Questions pertaining to how we use our minds, how we think, reason, form conclusions about things, are all questions of epistemology since they relate to the science of thinking. Another way to put it is that epistemology has to do with thinking about our thinking.

Although epistemology has been extracted into a philosophical subject, the questions it addresses are actually those that undergird all of life. For all of life involves thinking. Whatever we do in life, wherever we are, we have to use our minds to survive. Whether we make a particular effort at it or not, we still think like we breathe. It’s just part of being human to think about the world around us and the part we play in it, even if we do so on a very unsophisticated level. Although everyone is a thinker, not everyone is an epistemologist. Epistemology happens when we take the next step and begin thinking about our thinking. And that is something of which we need to do more. Thinking about our thinking is just as important as thinking.

But what do I mean practically by ‘thinking about thinking’? I will say first what I do not mean. I do not mean some kind of academic game or a situation whereby the mind inverts on itself and becomes lost in a labyrinth of speculative abstractions. I simply mean asking ourselves questions like the following:

· Why do I form the conclusions that I do?

· How do I know that what I believe is true? Can I know this?

· Is there any objective basis to trust my thinking?

· What is the relation between my thinking and my feeling or intuition?

· What are the influences that have shaped my ideas and are they reliable?

· Are there any criteria by which correct thinking can be distinguished from incorrect thinking?

These questions, and others like them, are very profound and important questions. Unlike thinking itself which, though it involves volition, does come naturally like eating comes naturally, asking questions about our thoughts involve effort, cultivation and vigilance on our part. One of the greatest dangers is for people to think of these kinds of questions as the domain of specialists that have nothing to do with ordinary life. No doubt the way we express these questions will depend upon our educational background and intellectual ability, but the questions themselves are basic to human existence. Anyone who is capable of thinking is also capable of thinking about their thinking…and should.

The Importance of Epistemology

But why? Why is it so important to think about our thinking? For the same reason that it is important to think about what we eat. If I give no thought to what I eat and just consume whatever I find growing in front of me, it may not take very long before my carelessness leads to my death. In the same way, those who are mentally careless and give no heed to the thoughts they allow to take root within them, may also find that their carelessness has led to death – in this case, the death of their soul. Unlike poisoning through careless eating that has an immediate and observable result, the suicide of the soul involves a gradual corruption and is therefore easier to ignore. In many people it will be only after they are physically dead that the death of their soul becomes apparent. It is then that every person will be called to give an account.

Thus we find the apostle’s enjoining us to “{bring} every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5). One of the ways to do this is through epistemology: not just thinking, but analysing, challenging, measuring, taking constant account of our thinking. In short, thinking about our thinking.

Abstract Thinking

If we consider what the practice of epistemology involves it will soon become apparent that it often involves thinking abstractly. Abstract thinking is not in vogue at the moment. In other historical eras (i.e., nineteenth century America, fifth century Athens, various societies in the middle ages) the abstract questions of philosophical debate were enjoyed by all walks of life. I fear that our culture, however, is becoming increasingly lazy intellectually. No, it is more than just a fear, it is an observation. Often when I talk to people I find that though they are quite ready to share their views, discuss ideas or to answer questions about their opinions, they are quite unprepared for any of the fundamental abstract questions applied to their thinking. Yet these questions are of utmost importance for every human being since they effect how we respond to the concrete.

Understanding the inseparable relationship between the abstract and the concrete reinforces the importance of keeping our minds active in both these departments. With regard to epistemology the relationship between the abstract and the concrete is seen in the way that our thinking is influenced by the concrete modes used to communicate our thoughts. To appreciate this it is necessary to first make some preliminary observations about communication.

How We Communicate Affects How We Think

Being able to communicate is essential to being human. Communication is so vital to our lives that it is easy to take it for granted. We communicate with each other in many different ways: words, email, facial expressions, gesticulations, cassette tapes, and on and on. Although these various ways of communicating for so different, they all share a common element. They all involve the use of symbols. All communication occurs through the use of symbols.

To explain what I mean by this let me take a very basic example. Consider words. We have words such as ‘chair’, ‘house’, ‘flower’, and so on, to describe certain things in our world. Now the symbols we use to describe things go beyond merely affecting the language that we use. Our very concept of a thing can actually be affected by the symbols we use to describe it. If we used the same word to describe a table that we use to describe a chair, we would unconsciously think of chair in a different way, perhaps in a way that de-emphasized the separateness of the chair from the table. This may be hard to conceptualise, so let us take an example where something similar has actually happened in real life.

There was a time when the word ‘art’ described creative human activity in all its forms. Whether one worked as a farmer, physician, merchant or soldier, this labour was called art just as much as if one worked as a painter of sculpture. In the Enlightenment period there was a distinction made between the fine arts and the mechanical arts, so that from then on the only things that were considered art were things like painting, sculpture, music, drama, poetry and architecture. This new way of talking about art led to a new way of thinking about arts. Gradually, people began to think about the arts in a different way than they thought about other disciplines. The fine arts began to be viewed as something superior to the mechanical arts - something that brought social prestige.[1]

So you can see, communication is not just something we use to describe our thoughts; the way we communicate actually affects how we think. Another good example of this is time. What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of time? If it was not a clock, it was probably an image that owes its allegiance to the clock, for the clock has become for us the symbol of time. I find it very interesting that in researching clocks Lewis Mumford discovered that the clock has created the illusion of 'moment by moment'. The clock has served to disassociate time from actual events. Mumford shows how from the advent of the clock in the 14th century people became time-keepers, then time-savers and now time-servers. Before the clock became time's symbol, time was rooted in things eternal like the seasons, the moon and the stars. Our conceptual image of time is affected by using the clock rather than the sun as the medium by which time is communicated to us. Similarly, to communicate the year through a calendar gives us a different conceptual image of the year than if we were to use the seasons to communicate it.

This is not to say that one way of communicating time is better than another, but simply to say that our concept of reality is shaped by the mode through which it is communicated. I am told that in African culture where the principle mode of discourse is oral rather than typographic, wisdom is defined in terms of how many wise saying you are able to recite from memory. That is because oral communication lends itself to wise sayings just as printed text lends itself to continuity and liner argument.

In this way we can see that any communication mode will favour or exclude certain things. That is why we need many different modes to communicate. Orally communicated literature favours poetry and excludes sophisticated footnoting. Communication through smoke signals favours brief messages of warning and excludes iambic pentameter. Communication through the printed page favours prepositional sequential reasoning and excludes melody. Communication through melody favours singing and excludes effective description of visual colour. Communication through visual art favours the communication of colour and light but excludes the communication of a business’ pay role. And it would be damn hard to communicate a recipe in couplets, though Homer did manage to do it in hexameters.

It begins to emerge that truth must take a certain shape, must be cast in a certain light, in order for it to fit whichever communication medium we are using. The truth about the Grand Canyon must be cast in a different light if I am an artist communicating it on canvas than if I am a geologist communicating it through the medium of scientific language. Neither description is more accurate than the other (though one may penetrate closer to the heart of the matter) since each draws out a different truth about the Grand Canyon or, if you will, casts the same truth in a different light.

It should be evident by now that the multiplicity of communication mediums gives scope for richness and allows us to view reality in a myriad of different ways.

Epistemological Orientations

I have suggested that the modes by which we communicate a thing effect the way in which we think about it. This applies as much to the communication of our own thoughts and ideas as it does to the Grand Canyon and Time. Take typography as an example. In order for a page of text to make sense and be worth reading, it has to have some degree of continuity and context. The ideas communicated in print have to flow in a linear way. It’s epistemological orientation, therefore, is towards prepositional and sequential reasoning.

Even passages of texts that do not conform to this orientation still must do so in pretence or in a limited degree. It is hard to imagine typography ever taking the direction art has taken. Art has come to the point where one can throw any collection of objects together and call it art. People may even pay £30,000 for an exhibit of firebricks arranged in a rectangle and named Equivalent VIII. But who would want to read a book that was simply a collection of words thrown together at random? In typography at least, some vestige of contextual meaning, sequential arrangement and ordered connection will always remain.

The Epistemology of Disconnection

In a minute we will be asking these same questions about the television. As a preliminary, however, it is helpful to see the television’s epistemological pedigree. The television is the descendent of the telegraph and the photograph, and this is true in an epistemological sense as well as a technological sense. Let’s look at the telegraph first.

Before the telegraph information could travel no faster than the speed at which a human could travel, and the fastest way for a human to travel was by train. Facts were generally collected and arranged before they were transmitted. They were given a context. By saying that facts were given a context I mean that information was collected and collated in such a way so that bits of information were not isolation but you could see how the specific fitted into the whole and how the whole effected the specific. In his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman shows that after the invention of the telegraph little bits of disconnected trivia began to fly across the nation. The telegraph’s ability to instantaneously transmit facts from nation to nation “gave a form of legitimacy to the idea of context-free information…”[2] The result was that information became a commodity and people began to desire this commodity even when it had no relevance to their lives. The strength of the telegraph, Postman argues, was its ability to move information, not to collect, explain or analyse it as print had done.

It is of more than trivial interest that after the invention of the telegraph the public conversation in newspapers began to become sensational and fragmented. By this I mean that news stories began to be presented as isolated dramas to catch people’s attention and imaginations rather explaining the context and the background to give a full understanding of the story. Each headline stood alone as its own context. Postman observes that understanding of things was replaced by mere knowing of facts, the later being possible without understanding implications, background, or connections. The discourse that the telegraph wrought lost a sense of historical perspective, a sense of knowing about things. Intelligence began to be conceived quantitatively, knowing of lots of things.

Of course, this was all a very gradual and, for the most part, an imperceptible shift. Even so, there were some people in the nineteenth century who noticed this shift and were alarmed.

The Epistemology of Image

The telegraph was quickly followed by the invention of the photograph. In terms of its sociological effect the photograph should not be viewed in the wake of the other visual reproductions in which mankind as engaged, from cave paintings to oil on canvas. Right from its invention the photograph was used differently than painting ever was, and as such carried with it an epistemology akin to that of the telegraph. Immediately the photograph began to be used to give people a knowledge or description of the world; a particular kind of knowledge in which images were isolated from context and needed only to be recognized, not understood as did words.

When the photograph gives us knowledge of a thing, person or place, this knowledge usual takes the form of an impression. This can best be seen by comparing our response when we see a picture of a person, place or thing with our response to a description of that same thing in text. If I read about a place I have the opportunity gain conscious knowledge that is explicit while a picture of the same place gives me knowledge that is pre-cognitive…even emotional. Because the photograph looks like its real it gives an illusion of knowledge. I see a picture of a thing and I feel that like I could reach right out and touch it. I see a person in a photograph and I feel a connection to the person that belongs to a mental category not accessed by reading a description of him/her, however detailed. Neither approach is good or bad for it should be obvious that the two kinds of knowledge (emotional and cognitive) are supplementary even as humans are complex beings. However, evidence shows that in practice the photograph began to be used in a way that elevated knowledge based on impressions above knowledge that relied on intellectual content. The photograph began to give people the illusion of knowledge without real depth of thinking. Because it accesses that part of the brain that we use in perceiving reality through direct experience, the photograph made people unconsciously feel as if they were experiencing the thing they viewed, that they knew the world if they accepted it as the camera recorded it. It gradually gave precedent to impression over understanding and image over knowledge. Again, this began to be felt in the newspapers of the nineteenth century which began to have an increasingly emotional appeal.

Again, this is not to wage an assault on the photograph any more than the telegraph. It is, rather, an attempt to understand the sociological and epistemological implications of these technologies. It is how they were used to describe the world that was the problem, not the technologies themselves. In a nut shell, these technologies described the world in a way that favoured an epistemology of image and disconnection. This is crucial to understand if we are to appreciate the epistemology brought to us by the television, which is a conjunction of the two described above: disconnection and image.

The Epistemology of Disconnected Images

A friend of mine recently suggested that the problem with television is that it discourages children from reading as much. That this is true there can be no denying, both because television consumes time that could be spent reading and also because it discourages reading through making the mind mentally lazy. Yet I believe this obscures the issue. It is not so much that television discourages reading, it is that it orients us with a completely different epistemology to that of typography. If typography favours ordered connection, sequential reasoning and contextual thinking, the television favours the exact reverse in every case.

To see how this is so it is helpful to look at that aspect of television that is explicitly designed to communicate something to us, namely the television commercial. Though this is not the only area of television worth considering, it serves as a useful starting point since advertisers have to exploit the medium to its fullest potential in order that they may communicate in the most effective way. Consequently, by attending to the language of the commercial we have an opportunity to glimpse how the medium of television is most effective as a communicating device.

It will be obvious to even the casual observer that the television commercial is not designed to encourage rational, analytic thought. It is the exact reverse of typography.

Which product would ever sell if a commercial appealed to the viewers detached objectivity? Rather than encouraging rational thought about the advertiser’s grounds and consequences, the commercial appeals entirely to our emotions. Advertisers will tell us that the whole purpose of a commercial is to bypass or short-circuit rational understanding to make us desire a product for reasons that are entirely alien to our rationality. For this reason we ought to all find the commercial offensive, because it does not assume that I, the viewer, am rational; rather, it assumes the opposite, namely, that I am so stupid as to want to buy a certain shampoo for all the wrong reasons.

It may be objected that my argument is entirely fallacious since these things have nothing to do with the television medium itself but, rather, have to do with the psychology of effective advertising. However, the reason such psychology works in the first place is because of the medium. Even though the shape of advertising content in newspapers has become significantly fragmented and emotional since the onset of the television, it is still useful to compare the advertisements presented on television with advertisements presented in print. When information is communicated in print we notice that something is lacking if there is an absence of context or if it is presented in a way that makes critical evaluation impossible or difficult.

That is why cultures that have been dominated by print have tended to be coherent and orderly in their public discourse and exchanging of information, even when that information is transmitted orally. Print favours the interconnectedness of things and what Walter Ong called the “analytic management of knowledge…” The television, on the other hand, favours disconnection and an absence of context since it comes to us as a series of images.

Like the photograph and the telegraph, the television is also used to describe the world. This happens explicitly every time we watch the news though we should not underestimate the extent to which other (I was going to say all) television content implicitly describes the world to us. With regard to the news, however, I find it more than of trivial interest that for many people this is their only access to the world outside their own social sphere. More mind-boggling is the fact that for many people the news is their only justification for owning a television!

Again, however, we must not forget that we are dealing with a medium that favours disconnection, and this necessarily influences the shape that the news will take, and by extension it affects the lens through which we will view the world itself. Consider in this regard the way the news is not connected to any sense of a larger historical perspective. Nor is it connected to a context. Rather, every story stands alone as its own context. As for giving the observer a chance to critically analyse truth claims, interpret events, view happenings in light of a larger historical context, relate the particulars to a larger whole - all these things are virtually excluded by the very medium. Unconsciously most people’s criteria for accepting the truth of a report rests on the same grounds that they unconsciously accept political candidates, namely, the degree to which an impression of sincerity can be conveyed by the newscaster. That is why Christine Craft was fired from her role as co-anchor of a Kansas news program on the grounds that her appearance “hampered viewer acceptance.” Shocking as this is, it is hardly surprising, for Postman has pointed out that “pictures have little difficulty in overwhelming words and short-circuiting introspection.”[3]

If the medium of television short-circuits critical reflection, what it favours is certainly entertainment. That is why the music that opens the news and the people chosen to present it are entirely oriented to an evening’s entertainment. We despise the Romans who delighted in being entertained by watching the horrors of the coliseum, yet far worse horrors than these are packaged as entertainment and relished by the thousands of news-watchers who hardly realize that they are being entertained.

The Substitute For Connection

As television replaces context, connection and reason with discontinuity, disconnection and image, emotion emerges as a substitute for reason and association emerges as a substitute for connection.[4] Let’s return to the television commercial for a minute to see how associations work. Advertisers have found that it is effective to associate their products with something that is emotionally appealing to the viewer. So we find shampoo being associated with a beautiful woman taking a shower. We find telephones and telecom companies being associated with a long awaited family reunion. Beer is associated with a happy party, running shoes with Football stars, jeans with rodeos, Snapple Iced Teas with Rush Limbaugh, and Cuban cigars with Bach’s air on the G string.

What we notice about all these associations is that they are completely irrational. The mind is made to associate things that are totally disconnected. There is no intrinsic connection between vegetables and sex and yet the images of the commercial impose these associations on our consciousness in a way that is so powerful that thousands of dollars are produced by the venture.

At this point we all ask the familiar question. What sane person could honestly be persuaded to purchase an energizer battery because they associate it with a stupid rabbit beating a drum?

To answer this question we must understand the power of these associations by returning for a moment to the idea of image that I discussed earlier in relation to the photograph. The photographic image is nothing compared to the moving life-like images of the television, yet it provides a useful cameo of the effect images have on the brain. To return to the commercial as our paradigm, by viewing a product in a life-like context our image is elevated to the status of illusion in so far as we feel as if we are really there.[5] The image or impression we get of a certain association cannot be easily knocked off since the impression is addressed to a level deeper than our cognitive awareness. It is addressed to our emotions like the photograph, but with a power enormously greater to that of the photo.

Associations

One of the most striking suggestions of the extent to which the television has permeated popular ways of thinking is the fact that associations are replacing contextual thinking in almost every area of life. Take language as an example. More and more terms are being invented that make it possible to associate descriptive terms with value judgements. A value judgement is a claim of truth about something. Making such judgements should not be based on impressions derived from an emotive word, but that is just how people are manipulated today through the media using associations. As a result, one thing automatically has an image of something else associated with it, so it becomes difficult to think about the one thing without the other.

This is best understood by sharing some examples. The word ‘puritanical’, for example, used to be a purely descriptive term but now has associations that make it a value judgement. Hence, subconsciously we begin to think of the historical Puritans as being ‘puritanical’ in the new sense. Whether they were or weren’t, we are unconsciously committed to affirming a certain position about them prior to rational thought.

The word “Sexist” describes those who favour different codes or behaviour for men or for woman, yet it also carries a misogynist connotation so that unconsciously we are committed to attributing certain motives to those who oppose androgyny that may or may not exist in any given person.

The word ‘chauvinists’ used to be a descriptive term applied to those men who followed certain codes of etiquette towards females but now is used both for that as well as an attitude of superiority towards females.

The word ‘homophobic’ is another bad word since it is popularity used as a predicate both for those who persecute homosexuals or suffer paranoia about such people, as well as those who believe homosexuality to be a sin. The word itself causes the later group to be associated with the former.

The word ‘right wing’ when used in political discourse used to be a purely descriptive term to categorize a certain grouping of viewpoints, yet it is now becoming a pejorative term that is frequently used as an insult, like the word ‘fundamentalist’ in religious discourse.

These examples should not be confused with a word simply changing its meaning over years of philological evolution like the word prevent, discriminate, pathetic, vulgar, sensibility, sublime and so forth. This is about descriptive terms carrying two meanings, one that describes and one that judges. By both senses being conjoined in the same term, one gets a pre-judicial appellation that categorizes something prior to rational inquiry.

Just as there can be a confluence in a single word of two not necessarily related concepts, the same is true of certain concepts such as prejudice or discrimination. One can now be considered prejudice not simply for such things as racial bigotry, but for holding that certain propositions are false. For example, many people consider that to believe that homosexuality is sinful means you are prejudice. Thus, a police officer may be fired from his job for discriminating against race, creed or sexual orientation, and in a surprisingly frequent number of cases this rubric includes one’s private thoughts, as if the belief that homosexuality is wrong is qualitatively equivalent to believing that blacks are inferior. Again, an association has tremendous political power.

The popular imperative not to discriminate against someone’s creed must also be mentioned in this connection. Few people want to see another religious war like the crusades, or a situation like the Spanish inquisition where one could be burned for being a Jew, etc.. When we talk about not discriminating against someone’s creed, this is often the sort of thing that we are referring to, and few today would want to dispute that people should be allowed freedom of belief. Yet I am finding more and more that this kind of discrimination is automatically associated with those who criticize other religious viewpoints and do not maintain the equality of all religious truth-claims.

The observation of politically latent associations could continue almost indefinitely. Almost whenever I read the news I observe such associations. One example I will always remember was when I was reading in Time magazine about the possibility of Bush appointing a conservative to the Supreme Court. What they wrote was, “suppose Bush appoints a Holy Roller.” By associating conservative politicians with the Holly Rollers, an association is made that immediately gives the mind an impression that is pre-cognitive. It is not merely an association, however, for the association carries an image with it. The close relationship between association and image is central to understanding the television. As a series of images it lends itself towards association and hence is a constant threat to the rational mind.

The problem with images of associations is that, whether they be gained through language, television, or something else, one does not tend to spot them and think them through since they are pre-cognitive. Yet their political potency should not be under-estimated. Long before the advent of television, even before the telegraph and the photograph, associations were subtlety manipulated to political ends. In my other essay, ‘Socrates and the Politics of Association’, I have tried to show that it was through exploiting the power of association that Socrates’ enemies succeeded in swaying public opinion against him and getting him executed.

Along a similar line, consider the example of Mary Whitehouse who campaigned against things like explicit sexual content on television. If she had of liven in the Soviet Union, the way to discredit her would have been to stage a false trial, bring forth a load of false evidence, false witnesses, etc.. The acquisition of false evidence would at least have given a show of legitimacy to the conventions of Reason even as hypocrisy is the tribute that vice plays to virtue. In our culture, however, when certain persons wanted to publicly discredit Mary Whitehouse they didn’t need to stage a false trial. Rather, they just got some comedians to start making little references to her. Eventually, an entire set of impression and associations were formed around Whitehouse that were alien to the truth and infiltrated the public mind independent of objective thought. People may have thought things about her, but they failed to think about their thoughts.

This one case would be insignificant if it did not serve as a cameo sketch for what happens every day in a hundred different ways. Though I have not had space to develop how an image-based mentality has permeated every level of society, the observations I have adduced should give the reader a framework to go on to examine these spheres.

Conclusion

I hope this essay has imparted a positive as well as a negative message. On the positive side, these considerations should lead us into a deeper appreciation of the richness with which certain forms of communication provide us. We should be encouraged to explore advantages and limitations of recently invented forms of communication, such as the internet, email and mobile phone. Even language itself can be examined with a fresh appreciation when we understand its role in shaping our perception of the world, and our active role and responsibility to influence the evolution of language in a way that will be beneficial to those who live after us.

When Paul was writing to the Christians at Ephesus he gave some advice that I believe is particularly relevant to the issues we have looked at. The apostle told the believers to have their loins girt about with truth (Eph. 6:14). Strange sounding words – why should our belly be defended against falsehood? Why not a helmet of truth to guard our minds, or a breastplate of truth to guard our hearts? The clue to realizing the significance of Paul’s words comes from understanding the import of the Greek word translated ‘loins’ or, as the A.V. renders it, ‘bowels.’ The word is splanchna and was common in those days to refer to the deepest seat of the emotions. (This observation is reinforced by examining the way the word is used elsewhere in the New Testament.)

I am convinced that it is at this level – splanchna, the deepest seat of our emotions – that television is aimed. That is why television is so dangerous. Only by girding our loins about with truth will we be protected against this danger. This applies equally to those who do not watch television, or who watch it very restrictedly, for even those people live in a culture saturated in the new epistemology.

How then do we gird our loins about with truth? Simply by soaking ourselves in what is true. It is shocking and inexcusable that most Western Christians spend more time watching television than they do reading scripture! Only by soaking our minds in the truth of God’s revealed Word will we be in a position to withstand the darts that the devil, the father of lies, aims at our emotions.

Another way to gird our loins about with truth is to seek discernment on how to use information technology as a tool rather than allowing ourselves to become enslaved in a destructive epistemology. One of the best ways we can do this is through being aware of the deception that knowing lots of fragmented bits of information equals understanding and knowledge. It does not. Yet the communication technology of today is built upon information that is disconnected, fragmented and presented as an image that gives an impression of knowledge. Because people’s thinking has been short-circuited, they think they understand only because they feel they do.

Yet our responsibility is not simple to keep protect ourselves and our children, for we also have a responsibility to wake our fellow citizens up from the mental stupor into which they have fallen. If we as a culture have failed to give sufficient consideration to the role typography plays in shaping our patterns of thinking, how much truer is it that we have not given sufficient consideration to the role television plays in this process. When we consider that next to sleeping there is no activity that our culture does more of than watching the television, we must ask why so few people are considering the ways in which television is re-orienting our thinking. It would seem that the question itself contains the clue to its own answer. The way in which television re-orients our epistemological presuppositions is itself antithetic to the kinds of questions we need to be asking.

There is only one way to wake a person in a stupor. Whether a person be asleep physically or asleep intellectually the way to rouse them is to apply an action that requires, causes or encourages a response. Thus, by rocking a sleeping person their body is forced to respond to the action and rotate in the pattern we are rocking. If they do not wake up we apply more pressure, perhaps through voice which causes a response in their ear drums. Similarly, the way to wake the sleeping mind, as Jesus and Socrates well knew, is do an action that calls for a response on the part of the mind. The way to do that is through the power of the question.

In Socrates’ final speech before his accusers he defended the mission he believed God had given him. He described himself as a sort of gadfly.

I am that gadfly which God has given the state, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you… I dare say that you may feel irritated at being suddenly awakened when you are caught napping…

Certainly our society is in need of a Socrates just as much, if not more, than was 5^th century B.C. Athens.[6] Yet we can all play the role of Socrates in our own spheres…and should. Like Socrates we can expect to encounter opposition, but that should not stop us. Out of love for our fellow man, we must question, we must challenging, we must provoke, persuade and arouse.