How Our Culture, Century, & the Media Affect Our Judgment
In one brief moment in time on an insignificant planet in a minor galaxy, we unaccountably presume that we are the center of the universe, the measure of all things wondrous and fair, the epitome of creation, the Alpha and Omega of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Ours is the only true way of being human, of living life, and of viewing the world. We have divined the meaning of existence, the purpose of the universe, and the answers to the Eternal Questions.
The problem is that every culture also believes that it alone has been singled out by Fate or the gods to be the keeper of the innermost secrets of this and the other side of the grave. Each believes that the less fortunate peoples of the Earth drag out their benighted existence in the Stygian darkness of delusion and error, not having been vouchsafed what has been revealed from on high to that one culture alone.
Plato presents this panoramic vision for our contemplation in his celebrated Allegory of the Cave, as one solitary individual comes to the shattering realization that everything his culture has taught him — its absolutes and certainties, its sacred truths and orthodoxies — is wrong. In our pious conceit we equate the homespun myths of our particular tribe with the austere truths of the cosmos, whereas they are but illusory shadows that dance on the wall of our cultural cave. So, it always has been and ever shall be, world without end.
What are we to make of this curious tale in Book Seven of Plato’s Republic? What is he saying to us and how is such Greek metaphysics in any way germane to our modern Technological Age? Surely, our beliefs are infallible verities, not nursery rhymes that soothe and beguile our loneliest hour. But even if they were fairy tales, what would it matter as long as they kept us safe and warm from the bitter cold and howling wind outside our cave?
Yet are we creatures of a day made for truth? Do we need illusion to soothe and sustain us? Can weak human nature deal with what’s real? How much truth can flesh and blood bear? Do we secretly wish to be lied to? Do our myths deceive us to make us happy? Is this Allegory meant to disillusion or liberate us? Or is disillusion the first step toward liberation? Plato never answers these questions; he doesn’t even pose them directly, but simply sets us to wonder — the reason the Republic and his other Dialogues have thrilled generations for 24 centuries.
The Republic is a Rorschach with different meanings. Is it a masterwork of social engineering, a utopian dream of Arnoldian Sweetness and Light that rapturously marches with bugles blaring and banners unfurled toward some dazzling Brave New World?
To our troubled times, however, is it a master blueprint of a Gestapo State, with its Allegory of a totalitarian educational nightmare that brainwashes its young into doing the bidding as serviceable cogs of a faceless bureau-cracy that controls them from the dark recesses of some Kafkaesque Ministry?
Is it some sort of byzantine Labyrinth that the youth of today must traverse to march in cadence with the only drummer who matters, the regimental drummer of some anti-intellectual Gulag that cripples the spirit?
However, in defiance do some “recalcitrant” children refuse this lobotomized instruction of Standardization that passes for learning and escape to the real world to take their chances of educating themselves?
Or is it an eerie forewarning from the past of what is happening in America today as government unconstitutionally takes over the curriculum by standardized testing of public schools, those last valiant vestiges of dwindling democracy, then closes them, which then reopen as charters, many of which will later be shuttered for fraud?
There comes a time in every culture in its search for answers when it doesn’t need more and more arguments for why it is right, but more and more air, more breathing room, a broader perspective to reconsider the answers it already has. It needs to step back to calmly reconsider what purports to be true for which it needs distance, detachment, and quiet reflection.
The question is how do we do this? How do we get out of our cave, the Cave of our culture, with its frenetic sick hurry to see ourselves with this needed perspective, unless we think that our culture with its myths and delusions needs no getting out of? And for this we must interpose a change of scene.
Would a Roman legionary in the time of Julius Caesar and a 12th-century Japanese peasant have the same view of the world as an 18th-century aristocrat before the French Revolution at the Palace of Versailles?
Would the same things be true and false, good and bad, important and unimportant to all three of them? Would they be typical of those in their same social class?
If you were their friend, would you also share their same view of the world? Would all three be creatures of their own particular time and place, their Century and Culture?
And what about us? Are we also creatures of our particular time and place, imprisoned within our historical period, or century, or box, and find it impossible to think outside of that box because it is the only “reality” we know, whereas it is only one particular stage set among thousands?
How would we get outside of this box, this “reality,” or cave to see ourselves, our time, our world and our culture itself in perspective?
Are we, too, prisoners sitting there chained in place viewing a wall with its shadows and myths which we too mistake for “Reality”? If we’re lucky, can we also escape and discover the real world outside our cave and realize that everything we thought was true was actually false? Is this what Plato is asking or slyly implying? Do we even realize that we are in a cave because we are all so close to the immediacy of being in our world that we cannot get detachment from it to see it for what it really is — a cave in which we and our contemporaries are also “chained” or conditioned by the way we think and feel?
There is a famous quotation by the Roman author Aulus Gellius that states, Veritas filia temporis or Truth is the daughter of time. Every age has its own view of truth. We could also extend this quotation to read Virtus et veritas filiae temporis or Morality and truth are daughters of time. Every age has its own view of what is moral and true.
So, if you had been one of the thousands of Attila the Hun’s horsemen raiding and looting your way across 5th-century Europe. how would you have defined right and wrong, truth and falsehood?
Living in the Box of Our Culture
Depending on when and where we were born, would we have different ideas not only about right and wrong, truth and falsehood, but also be very different persons living in the reality of that time and place?
It’s easy to see outside the box of other cultures because we have distance from them, but what of our own? If it does have failings, we may not even perceive them, but foreigners would. We would have to step back and make a conscious effort to look at our world from outside the box of our time and place.
But why has this allegory captured the imagination of readers of a hundred generations? Because those who have read it have never viewed their own time and place in the same way again as they too began to escape from their cave, but escape in what way from their historical stage set?
Escaping One’s Cave
Every culture has a number of beliefs designed to reassure its members that whatever happens is, alas, for the best. These beliefs may not be true, but as long as those within that cave or culture believe that they’re true, that is all that matters. Like a fairy tale, everything has a happy ending, at least some of the time when they may hope that there may be a larger, more inscrutable Purpose at work.
People have to have hope that things will get better, for hope is the poor man’s bread needed for sustenance and sanity. Anthropologists call such beliefs “the myths of the tribe.” These myths make people feel safe that there is some overall plan and purpose to whatever may happen for there is a certain comfort in myths and mystery.
However, there are also those in every culture who don’t believe in these myths. They have already escaped from that cave and are called “cultural critics.” They used to be called “heretics” and were burned at the stake, but that was a long time ago when people took ideas and beliefs very seriously.
Other critics keep their culture informed about what is happening behind the scenes by corrupt officials and politicians who are profiting financially while violating their oaths of protecting the people.
Still others wake people up to the structural wrongs embedded in their culture’s institutions, wrongs that have existed so long that they have become invisible until the suffering they cause is at last all too apparent.
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They study that culture’s government, universities, religions, medical and legal professions, business, advertising, the media, and the military/industrial complex, for example, noting their strengths, weaknesses, and possible corruption, and reveal what they find. These may be “investigative journalists,” or sociologists who keep their culture honest by pulling back the veil of secrecy about what is undermining the Common Good. These critics may also be prophets, writers, artists, public intellectuals, the clergy, private citizens, and even young people.
An example of a present-day young crusader and activist would be Greta Thunberg, who is trying to wake up the world to the dangers of Global Warming. Some world leaders and politicians, however, deny the existence of this danger because they have been bribed by powerful corporations to remain silent and do nothing. They do this against the expressed will of the people, and especially the youth, for it is they who will have to deal with the horrors of those leaders’ inaction.
But why are those leaders and their enablers and bribed politicians, not also alarmed? Because they’ll all be dead when the catastrophe comes and have gone on to their eternal damnation!
Critics are a culture’s Early Warning System against catastrophes. But these kinds of critics share the same fate as the prophets of old by being voices crying in the wilderness, forlorn and unheeded.
If you’re a young person reading these lines you know and feel deeply about what I’m saying, because you and your children and grandchildren will be the victims of this global catastrophe. You are beside yourself with alarm at what is not being done to head-off this cataclysm. You and your entire generation know that you must vote these climate-change deniers out of office if you are to have a future.
Comparative Anthropology and Cross-Cultural Studies are another way of escaping the cave of one’s culture. These disciplines offer insights into other cultures, assuming that they are studied by outsiders, who can examine those cultures with detachment.
In fact, it may require moral courage even to listen to how one’s own culture is described by these prescient outsiders who can decipher the Handwriting on the Wall. However, if one were willing to read their books and reports, one would also have begun to reject the fairy tales of one’s culture.
What is considered right and wrong, true and false may differ from culture to culture, whether past or present, so that the question arises, which culture is right, or are they all right, or only one? Which one? And they would all answer in unison, “Why ours, of course!”
This kind of thinking is called “ethnocentrism” (ethnos in Greek meaning “tribe” or one’s own tribe as the center of everything) or “xenophobia,” (xenos meaning “stranger” or “foreigner” and “phobia” meaning “fear” or fear or distrust of foreigners and their ideas).
Every tribe or culture is self-centered since it sees itself as beyond criticism and distrustful of other nations. Sometimes this distrust becomes hatred because of a history of warfare between two cultures. This doesn’t mean that everyone in that culture thinks this way, since they would view this way of thinking as primitive and narrow-minded. They see themselves as more cosmopolitan in outlook or as “citizens of the world,” who view tribalism as a suffocating outlook. However, there is also something intriguing about such ethnocentric hatred that needs to be noted.
It has to do with the role of Chance about the culture into which one is born. What if someone who was born in Culture A was raised to hate those of Culture B, and then realizes that it was only by chance that he himself wasn’t born in Culture B? What would he then do with his hatred? See it as an irrational prejudice since no one can choose the culture into which one is born? Or would he still keep on hating because this hatred had now become an addiction that gave his life meaning and purpose to have his heaven on Earth by hating Jews or Muslims, Blacks or other people of color, Asians, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, and so on?
Those who need to hate, some claim, are beyond help for they have contracted an incurable mental disease, while others hold out some hope that a few may be cured if they want to enough.
What these haters all have in common is the delusion of being among some special Elect, from whose lofty heights they can look down upon those whom they hate even though they, too, could have been born into that same group, an irony which is lost on them as well as how absurd and unworthy of the dignity of a human being their lives had become because that hatred has so deranged them!
Is Plato insinuating that if we realized the role of Chance in our lives, we would already have begun to escape the cave of our culture by outgrowing the delusion that it is the center of the universe but is only one culture or cave among many, and not take any of one’s cultural myths all that seriously, but to live in peace and harmony with ourselves and all of our neighbors?
To High-School Students Reading This Essay
You are now at an age when being open-minded and tolerant would be easier because you’re still developing your mind and wouldn’t have to unlearn years of mental habits that older readers might have to.
Let’s suppose that you’re an excellent student or aspire to be. I’m talking about bing a critical thinker, an expert in Fallacy Detection and knows their technical names; an expert in Statement Classification and can tell in an instant what kind of statements make up an argument: whether they’re facts, value judgments, explanatory and metaphysical theori, the last of which can neither be proven nor disproven, and why; and an expert in Undermining Arguments.
You’ve mastered these skills, so that you’re a Samurai warrior in critical thinking and can see through all kinds of myths because you’ve taken high-school courses in critical thinking, the humanities, and the social sciences.
There remains, however, another skill, an acute awareness of Social Conditioning Factors, those powerful influences on how we think, judge, and see the world that may interfere with our critical thinking unless we’re on our guard against them. There are several of these influences we aren’t even aware of that can influence our thinking; our age, habits, gender, inationality or national character, the century and culture in wthich we live, our race, religion, social class, marital status, political party, temperament, education, profession or occupation, physical appearance, childhood, living in urban or rural environment, the media, and an array of emotional and psychological factors about which I’ve written elsewhere.
The Media: To what extent have the following taken over one’s life: TV, soap operas, game shows, situation comedies, cable, fluff news, “trash talk” radio, celebrity gossip magazines, computers, the Internet, Facebook, Twitter (X), YouTube, texting, smartphones, iPads, DVD’s, CD’s, and video games?
Does the corporately-owned media have a vested interest in indoctrinating the public into a prevailing conservative outlook? Liberal intellectuals claim that they are routinely excluded from TV programs of political commentary, notably the Sunday talk shows, lest they challenge the conservative assumptions on which these discussions are based.
By refusing to invite these liberal thinkers to participate in these discussions, it is argued, the public is systematically taught a conservative viewpoint, whereas if liberals were allowed to take part, the public would be exposed to a diversity of opinion never before heard on American television, something which the media will never allow.
The result is that many Americans never hear an opposing viewpoint; indeed, some may have no idea that one even exists. Instead, since political discourse is so tightly controlled in this country, viewers are offered only minor variations of conservative opinion by conservative spokesmen. This does not lend itself to the free exchange of ideas or public debate, but rather censorship and indoctrination that create the impression that no other viewpoints exist. Or is this simply left-wing propaganda?
Psychological Factors that May Also Affect One’s Judgment
Although we might want to be a critical thinker, we might also be afraid that this could undermine our need for authority figures to tell us what to think. Or we might secretly want to believe whatever would bring us comfort, security, attention, power, status, or advancement; or would allow us to belong, be rejected or persecuted; or justify our behavior, impose our beliefs on others, judge or condemn them, or escape emotionally stultify-ing ideas; or appear respectable, outlandish, intellectual, fashionable, superior; or believe in something new, exciting, or dangerous.
Concluding Reflections
Are we dispassionate observers of the human condition in seeing everything objectively, or are we subject to all sorts of subliminal influences and biases without our even being aware of them, all the while thinking that we are supremely autonomous? Should we be aware of these influences lest they distort our judgment about ideas and people? Not that all of these conditioning factors would affect us, but some of them might, in which case we might want to guard against them.
If, on the other hand, we feel that these factors don’t affect us, or that, if they do, we would prefer to accept ourselves as we are, then no more need be said on the matter. If, however, we are surprised, embarrassed, or even ashamed of how they may have been unwittingly affecting our thinking and behavior toward others for years, we might want to consider the following questions:
Are we concerned about the common good, wanting everyone to get ahead in life and be treated with respect? Do we wish everyone a life of dignity and happiness? Do we see life as an opportunity to show kindness and consideration to everyone, no matter their race, religion, social class, or lifestyle? Do we show compassion for the less fortunate and sacrifice our convenience to help them wherever we happen to be?
If we feel a desire to do these things, we have only to begin. For by doing this, we have already begun to escape the Cave of ourselves by realizing that we are not the center of the universe and doing whatever we can to help our fellow human beings.
This is a far more onerous and essential task than escaping the Plato’s cave of our culture, for no matter how long and how hard we try to escape our own inner cave, we are always but beginners in this most important of all human endeavors.
Frank Breslin is a retired high-school teacher in the New Jersey public school system.
