A Little Introduction
This is the inaugural entry in what I hope to make a weekly, or at least occasional, feature. I have taken the title for the feature – basically a book review segment – from a reference I believe that C.S. Lewis made to the contemporary period. Somewhere in the past, I think I remember reading him referring to his own time (with literature in mind) as ‘the abyss of the present.’ In Lewis’s introduction to Athanasius’ work On the Incarnation, he argues briefly but convincingly for the study of old books on the basis that previous ages do not have the same blind spots as our own. Therefore writers from the past may serve as correctives to some of our own underlying misconceptions and preconceived notions about the world we live in. Lewis wryly observed there that ‘to be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.’
In the spirit of modern trendiness, I have titled the feature ‘ABYSS’ in capitals to indicate that I have an acronym in mind. The acronym is ‘About Books You Should Study’, and in the spirit of Lewis I will try to prefer older books to the new. Nevertheless, I already know that I will need to make a few exceptions, so bear with me. I intend to bring to your attention literature you may never have come across in the hope of prodding you toward the leisure of reflective study with profitable works.
Down to Business
The first book under consideration has brought me nearly into agreement with one of its recent reviewers (advertised on the back cover): ‘a book every American needs to read every few years.’ I have read it a few times now, and each time through it has been a remarkable refresher. The book is historian Daniel Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America.
It almost qualifies as an ‘old’ book even now, having been published over half a century ago in 1961. Boorstin lived through most of the radical transitions of the 20th century (1914-2004) and remains one of my favorite writers of history. His career saw him teaching at various prestigious universities and working as the twelfth Librarian of Congress (1975-87). His trilogy on the forming of the American nation is fascinating and worth the time if you have it.
The Image is one of his shorter works, and arguably one of his greatest. The organizing principle of the book is his observation that American people have ‘Extravagant Expectations’ – that we expect to receive from the world more than it has to offer us, and that we expect to have an almost limitless power to shape our world. Boorstin develops this main idea along several lines to show the effects our desires have had on the shaping of modern culture; the effects might be summarized in his words from the introduction: ‘We have become so accustomed to our illusions that we mistake them for reality.’
Each very readable and engrossing chapter (and I don’t say that about many books from heavyweight thinkers) documents a transition that took place alongside what Boorstin calls the ‘Graphic Revolution’, a period roughly corresponding to the development of mass printing and image-distributing technologies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These cultural sea changes he refers to as ‘From News Gathering to News Making’, ‘From Hero to Celebrity’, ‘From Traveler to Tourist’, ‘From Shapes to Shadows’ (referring to art forms), ‘From Ideal to Image’ (referring to the paradigm of our thinking), and ‘From the American Dream to American Illusions’, the last of which he hesitatingly terminates with a question mark, as if to say that he hopes we aren’t so far gone that there isn’t any turning back.
In this book, Boorstin is recognized as having coined the term ‘pseudo-event’, referring to an ‘event’ that is not actually a spontaneous happening in the world, but a ‘happening’ of ambiguous origin orchestrated by someone for the consumption of others. He first describes these events in their most simple form as he briefly recounts the history of the institution of ‘the news’ in American society. Where newspapers in the colonial era generally reported things that happened in the world, and thus might not have an edition for a month or two when world events slacked off, the gradual transformation of the ‘news’ into big business and entertainment fostered the development of events made up, by journalists or others with an interest at stake, purely for the purpose of being reported. This is the origin, for example, of the modern press conference. These pseudo-events, as Boorstin ably demonstrates, tend to spawn other pseudo-events ‘in geometric progression’, giving us the sense that something is ‘happening’ out in the world around the clock when all that is happening is the churning of the news machinery in the creation of its constantly obsolescing product. Pseudo-events ‘arouse news hunger in the very act of satisfying it.’
Boorstin also observed in this book that while a hero was known for his exploits, his character, his towering virtues or his outstanding flaws, a celebrity is someone who is ‘known for his well-knownness’, a living tautology, the human pseudo-event. While we used to respect the ‘big man’, we now look for the ‘big name’. Real heroes cannot survive long in the memory of our present society because in order to do so, they have to acquire the qualities of celebrities to hang on to the spotlight for more than a few minutes of air time. We, as a people, no longer have heroes that serve as external sources to fill us with purpose. ‘These new-model “heroes” [celebrities] are receptacles into which we pour our own purposelessness.’
In the remaining chapters, the author has written a number of insightful passages on tourism – modern ‘travel’ making the world a stage for pseudo-events: ‘The tourist gets there without the experience of having gone’; on art – ‘as never before in art, it has become possible for the great, the famous, and the cliche to be synonymous’; and on the patterns of our thinking – ‘paradoxically, too, the more we know about the tricks of image building, about the calculation, ingenuity, and effort that have gone into a particular image, the more satisfaction we have from the image itself.’
At the root of the modern manifestations Boorstin examines in The Image is the problem stated in the introduction: our expectations of what the world offers and what we can make of it are extravagant. In order to satisfy them, we have transformed our lives in this society. We have traded spontaneous reality for an ever-multiplying parade of illusions and replaced ideals with images. In the process, we seemed to have gained control of the governance of what we now perceive as ‘reality’, but at what cost? Is it possible for us to see things as they are anymore?
If it is, the first step is to properly see the illusion. Boorstin’s work is the most helpful set of lenses fit to the purpose of which I am aware.
Happy reading!