Entertaining Ourselves to Death

Entertaining Ourselves to Death

David C. Stolinsky
Tuesday, Aug. 28, 2001

Movies are fun. Like most entertainments today, they excite the emotions rather than stimulate the intellect. Movies, video games and TV try to attract and hold our attention in order to get more viewers and make more money. That is as it should be. Dramas are meant to be — well, dramatic.

Real life, on the other hand, is often dull, or downright boring. Indeed, when life becomes exciting, it is often frightening and dangerous. Auto accidents, sudden illnesses, stock-market crashes, and carjackings are thrills we can easily do without. We prefer daily life to be a bit dull, and we spice it up with exciting entertainments.

The problem is that we are spending so much time with movies, video games and TV that we tend to become addicted to exciting electronic images. Worse, we become addicted to excitement itself, and we have difficulty distinguishing artificial entertainment from reality.

As a result, we come to prefer the exciting to the unexciting in real life. Rather than judging alternatives on a rational basis, we tend to choose the most exciting ones — which are often not the best ones. The more time we spend immersed in exciting electronic amusements, the more we try to make life resemble them. Consider:

We thrill to high-speed chases and SWAT-team shootouts in movies, video games and (worse yet) on TV news. We overlook the long hours of routine police work that solve cases without such dramatic and dangerous conclusions. As a result, we encourage more high-speed chases and no-knock raids, and we hasten the decay of police into paramilitary units.

We idolize the surgeon who rushes to the hospital and saves us from some late-night emergency. We overlook the quiet internist whose careful exam discovers the problem before it becomes an emergency. As a result, we encourage insurance companies to reward dramatic interventions with higher fees, and therefore to make them more common — and thoughtful analysis less common.

We delight in technologic innovations that make front-page news. We overlook the skilled craftsmen who repair new and old devices and keep them running. As a result, we discourage people from entering this vital field.

We value stealth bombers and advanced radars that make our military second to none. We overlook those who patrol in the hot sun or cold rain in faraway places to keep us safe at home. As a result, we discourage enlistment in the armed services. And without enough dedicated personnel, all the high-tech equipment in the world won’t save us.

We applaud the actor whose affected, florid style steals the scene. We overlook the real expert whose acting doesn’t seem like acting. As a result, we encourage overacting.

We allow kids to watch sexually provocative performances such as MTV. As a result, seventh-graders do "freak dancing" and "pole dancing" at school dances, while we pretend that premature sexualization of children isn’t a form of abuse.

We cheer loudly for the showy outfielder whose diving catch barely snags the ball. We applaud quietly for the more skillful player, who always seems to be standing under the ball. As a result, we encourage "showboating" and discourage professionalism.

We admire the pretentious politician who emerges from a 2 a.m. meeting to declare that the crisis has ended. We overlook the patient statesman whose behind-the-scenes work averts a crisis in the first place. As a result, we encourage politicians to be even more flamboyant and self-serving than they are already.

We are stimulated by the flashy demagogue whose escapades entertain us. We yawn at the workmanlike public servant who gets things done without hogging the spotlight. As a result, we discourage sincere people from entering politics.

Baseball fans used to be thrilled by a home run; now fireworks must be added. Professional wrestling used to entertain with weird antics; now sound-and-light shows are required. A characteristic of addiction is that increasing doses are needed to produce the same effect. But what happens when flashy special effects and increasing violence no longer thrill movie or sports fans? Will gladiatorial combats be reinstated?

Much has been said about how exciting video games, TV, and movies induce violent behavior. This may be true, but fortunately only a small number of people become violent. More common effects are shortening of the attention span and habituation to five-second sound bites and brief, eye-catching snippets of film. But the worst effect of electronic entertainments may be an addiction to excitement itself — to adrenalin, if you will.

A large number of people addicted to excitement may be more dangerous for society than a small number addicted to violence. If we are clever and lucky, we may be able to control a violent few. But who will restrain a majority habituated to quick, thoughtless action?

Even a cursory look at the 20th century reveals that crowd-pleasing, egomaniacal dictators killed many more innocent people than all the boring, ordinary criminals combined. Going back further in history, we come to the Roman emperors, who seized all power for themselves while diverting the masses with increasingly violent and vulgar shows in the Coliseum. The more time we spend on exciting entertainments, the less time we have to notice what those in power are doing to our freedoms.

Movies, TV and video games are amusing and can be educational. But an overdose of exciting entertainment tends to inure us to grossness and violence, to make us unused to interacting with people, and — worst of all — to make us expect life to imitate art. We should consider the possibility that the massacre at Columbine High School was the last act of the violent video games that the two murderers loved to play.

Real life isn’t a video game. If we expect it to be, we encourage non-human behavior and mindless violence. Real life isn’t a TV show. If we expect it to be, we are more likely to act like hormone-drenched adolescents than like responsible adults. Real life isn’t a movie. If we expect it to be, we are likely to wind up not with a comedy or a drama, but with a tragic farce.

If we’re not careful, we may succeed in entertaining our civilization to death. But we won’t die laughing.

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