OUR KIDS AND WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP
Wingspread Journal, Winter 1996

THE MEDIA AND OUR CHILDREN: WHO IS RESPONSIBLE?

by John Silber

John Silber, a past Wingspread conference participant, is president of Boston University. This article was excerpted from his May 1995 commencement address, with permission.

Seventy-five years ago, John Fletcher Moulton, Lord Moulton, a noted English judge, spoke on the subject of "Law and Manners." He divided human action into three domains. The first is the domain of law, "where," he said, "our actions are prescribed by laws binding upon us which must be obeyed." At the other extreme is the domain of free-choice, "which," he said, "includes all those actions as to which we claim and enjoy complete freedom." And in between, Lord Moulton identified a domain in which our action is not determined by law but in which we are not free to behave in any way we choose. In this domain we act with greater or lesser freedom from constraint, on a continuum that extends at one extreme from a consciousness of duty "nearly as strong as positive law," through a sense of what is required by public spirit, to "good form" appropriate in a given situation and so on up to the border with the domain of free choice, where there is no constraint whatever on what the individual may choose to do.

Obedience to the Unenforceable

Lord Moulton considered the area of action lying between law and pure personal preference to be "the domain of obedience to the unenforceable." In this domain, he said, "Obedience is the obedience of a man to that which he cannot be forced to obey. He is the enforcer of the law upon himself." This domain between law and free choice he called that of Manners. While it may include moral duty, social responsibility, and proper behavior, it extends beyond them to cover "all cases of doing right where there is no one to make you do it but yourself."

The Erosion of the Domain of Manners

In America today the domains of choice and of law have eroded the domain of manners. As the realm of manners and morals has been diminished by those who claim that whatever they think or do is right if it feels good to them, the central domain loses its force. And despite the expansion of the domain of law, the consequent weakening of the central domain has resulted in a diminution of the authority and effectiveness of the law.

It is against the law to deface public property, to steal, to swindle, to drive while intoxicated, to rape, to bomb, and to kill. But our public and private buildings are regularly defaced by graffiti and the territorial markings of juvenile gangs. In our cities many feel imprisoned in their homes, and our persons are at risk on our streets and in our parks. There are twice as many murders a year in New York as in England, and twice as many in Boston as in Argentina. Rape is epidemic and deadly assault by drunken drivers is commonplace. Nor is the crime wave confined to the streets: The Wall Street Journal estimates that stock swindles and other forms of white collar crime cost Americans $100 billion every year.

We live in a deeply flawed society and are moving rapidly toward the state of nature that Thomas Hobbes chillingly described: "No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." This sounds just like Pulp Fiction.

We must not attribute all our social ills to a single cause, however, for the causes are many. If families had not broken up, if churches had not lost much of their influence, if there had not been an extensive spread of secularism and materialism, if the quality of our schools had not declined despite substantial increases in financial support, if drugs had not become easily available, if some or all of these factors had not been present, we might have withstood the degenerative effects of television and its indiscriminate advocacy of pleasure.

The Impact of Television

Prior to television and to the breakup of the family, parents typically tried to preserve and extend the ceremonies of innocence in the lives of their children by shielding them from the sordid dimensions of human life, from filthy language, premature exposure to sex, and mindless and indiscriminate violence. But that is now the common experience of children: by age four or five they speak the language of the gutter and teenagers enlarge their experience of violence, obscenity, and sex in all its varieties through television, watched on the average for 25 hours a week, through the movies, and occasionally even in the schools.

Television is the most important educational institution in the United States today. Since the beginning of human history, mankind has known what Aristotle later set down as the fundamental fact about education: that we learn by imitation.

Common sense alone tells us that violence endlessly enacted on television serves as a model for imitation. Even if most youths do not imitate the violent acts they have witnessed, the deluge of television violence infects their sensibilities. Revulsion and abhorrence, our natural reactions to violence, are suppressed. We become reconciled to violence as though it were a normal part of life, as indeed it has become.

And now new opportunities are open for our youth as the Internet makes available to those accessing it simple straightforward directions for the manufacture of bombs. But our government, which has found it necessary to regulate the formula for ice cream and peanut butter, is reluctant to prohibit the distribution on the Internet of handbooks for terrorists. It may be technically impossible to control terrorism on the Internet, but that difficulty should not be confused with a constitutional protection.

The level of insensitivity engendered in many of our youth in the last few years is not due exclusively to television and the entertainment industry. On the other hand, it cannot be explained in the absence of television, for there are no other factors adequate in themselves to account for it. Nevertheless, if the influence of television and films were countered by a strong family, a first-rate educational system, or good job opportunities in inner cities, the impact of television would be far less significant and perhaps even negligible.

It has not had an equal influence on all children by any means. Children from strong homes, children attending vital churches and deeply nurtured in religious traditions, children who have developed sound study habits and who in consequence have little time for television, children who have developed a moral center to guide their choice seem remarkably immune.

As television has ravenously consumed our attention, it has weakened the formative institutions of church, family, and schools, thoroughly eroding the sense of individual obedience to the unenforceable on which manners and morals and ultimately the law depend. Obviously, we need to rebuild our families, our schools, and our churches. But we cannot complete these reforms until something is done about television, for in both its advertising and its programming it has created demands that appeal, not to the best in our natures, but to the worst.

A Challenge for Media

Alarmed by the deterioration of standards, and recognizing one clear source of this decline, we may be tempted to enlarge the domain of law by regulating television and the entertainment industry. But this should give us pause.

I do not advocate altering the First Amendment, nor do I advocate congressional limits on what television stations can program. But isn't it time for those who own television stations and networks and those who own motion picture companies that supply material for television to demonstrate their obedience to the unenforceable.

Let the First Amendment stand as it is. But the moguls of television and movies should recognize that they are contributing directly to the erosion, not only of morals and manners, but of the rule of law itself. Are they going to show obedience to the unenforceable by asserting their moral responsibility for the good of our society, or is the pursuit of profit their only guide?

If the television and the entertainment industries do not control themselves in obedience to the unenforceable, we shall reach the point in the not too distant future where programming on television threatens the life of the Republic. But will the American people recognize that it poses a clear and present danger calling for decisive, corrective action?

There is still time for self-correction. But those with positions of responsibility in these industries should understand that we cannot continue indefinitely to tolerate their trashing of our and our children's sensibilities without endangering our survival.

The barbarians television has nurtured and continues to nurture are not at our gates but in our midst. Recognizing that by its nature, obedience to the unenforceable cannot be enforced, W. Edwards Deming observed, "You don't have to do it-survival is not compulsory."

But if our youth recognize the importance of the domain of manners and morals, and if each is obedient to the unenforceable, we shall see a diminution of license and a renewal of freedom and civilization in this country. If this moral vision strikes fire in the younger generation, our future is secure.

The crisis we face will not be solved by higher or lower taxes, by more or less welfare or Medicaid, by the increase or decrease in the budgets of the military or the police. Our crisis, like that confronting the peoples of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is, as Solzhenitsyn observed, a crisis of moral decay.

Determine to Govern Ourselves

We face a crisis of the spirit. Its resolution far transcends the power of the state; it is too important, too far-reaching, to be resolved by mere governmental action. Rather, it lies within the grasp of each of us. When we determine to govern ourselves-when each is obedient to the unenforceable-we shall have regained control over ourselves and thus regained as a nation our capacity for self-government.

This will never come to pass, however, without faith in the importance of honor and truth and in the essential role of duty and obligation in our lives.

The future of our country, our future happiness, and that of our children depends decisively on whether we as individuals and as a people practice obedience to the unenforceable.