What's the greatest single influence on society today? Surely, it would have to be the media; and then tele­vision in particular. Its influence is exerted at all levels: social, economic and cultural. It's an influence largely exerted irresponsibly, arbitrarily, and without any reference to any moral or intellectual, still less spiritual, guidelines whatsoever.

As the death of Christendom has seen Western civili­zation continue to disintegrate before our very eyes, the media are playing a major role by carrying out a mighty brainwashing operation, even though, perhaps, unconsciously. All traditional standards and values are being denigrated to the point of disappearing, leaving a moral vacuum in which the very concepts of good and evil have ceased to have any validity. As Christians we ought to know that kind of world is clearly a fantasy. But do we? Stop and think for a moment.

The civilization in which we live is one which believes in progress, the pursuit of happiness. It's a world in which human beings are urged to find ever greater contentment by being given in ever greater abundance the means to satisfy their material and bodily hopes and desires. What's the purpose of our brief existence on earth? The answer given by the media — and by that we mean television, the colour supplements, the magazines, the newspapers; all the different organs of this huge apparatus of persuasion which has been developed in our time — is given with the utmost clarity and gusto. It's about being successful in terms of money, sex and fame, with violence thrown in for kicks. As trendy, sexy, affluent children of our time we want to live life to the full. By the same token, if we are out of the swing, physically unattractive and poor, we must consider ourselves as outcasts and deprived. That's pretty much it.

Anyone who has lived at all in the real world will have understood that this answer by the media is a total fantasy, an absurdity. In fact, the very opposite is true. Rather than it being paradise, it's a world, a civilization possessed by a singular death wish which so assiduously and ingeniously seeks its own extinc­tion. It does so physically by devoting so much of its wealth, knowledge and skills to creating means to blow itself and all mankind to smithereens; economically, by developing a consumer economy whereby more and more wants have to be artificially created and stimulated in order to take up an endlessly expanding production; morally, by abolishing the moral order altogether and pursuing happiness through satiety; spiritually, by abolishing God Himself and setting up Man as the arbiter of his own destiny.

Indeed, this age is by no means a happy age — not even for its so-called greatest beneficiaries. The parts of the world where, according to the media, the means of happiness in material and sensual terms are most plentiful — like, for example, California and Scan­dinavia — are also the places where despair, mental sickness and other twenty-first century ills are most evident. Sex, fanned by public erotica, under-pinned by the birth pill and legalized abortion, is nothing but a primrose path leading to satiety and disgust. The rich are usually either wretched or mad, the successful plod on relentlessly to prove to the world — and themselves ­that their success is worth having; and violence, collec­tive and individual, attempts to destroy us and all that remains of our civilization.

Now the irony of the human situation is, sadly, that we ardently pursue ends which we know to be worthless. Even the saintly Augustine, with years of holiness behind him and with one of the finest minds of his own or any other time and so passionately enrolled in the service of God and his Saviour, even he could still be dragged with a silk thread into the blind alleyways of the senses.

If you don't believe it, read his Confessions.

Today society has got to the stage where even some of its unregenerate are asking the question: "The madness must stop! Is there an escape route?" Many are recom­mended. For instance, the one called Protest, an escape through mere destruction and lawlessness. Down with everything and everyone, including us! Another variety is to escape on the plastic wings of drugs and erotica. Another is to escape through inertia — just refusing to join in lying inert in the bottom of the boat with the bilge water, indifferent to where it's going or who holds the tiller. However, they're all cul-de-sacs and lead absolutely nowhere. When lawlessness and destruc­tion have been achieved, the only choice that remains is chaos or tyranny. Moreover, the plastic wings soon break and those who relied upon them to be lifted into the sky fall like dead weight onto the ground; and the drop-out in the end becomes a bore to himself and to everyone else.

A more promising route seems to be the notion of social or collective regeneration. You know, it's the kind where we join forces with whoever to agitate for a more just, more equitable, more caring society in which wicked things like economic exploitation, racism, war, abortion, indeed, all forms of unnecessary suffering and grief, are eliminated. We march through the streets holding up placards and chanting in unison, fondly supposing we can help put a stop to these things and we clap when a speaker we don't know says something we like. This sort of approach, say some, has the great advantage that it is the soft sell. But ... alas. How desperately difficult is it to curb one's insistent ego to do something, to put aside pride and vanity and instead follow the way of the cross! Perhaps because the pursuit of collective virtue is so easy, its ardent activity over the last half century has been singularly disappointing. Who can seriously maintain that the world is moving forward? What about the wars, numerous revolutions, millions killed or uprooted from their homes, and so much political endeavour directed towards humanizing our economic and social arrangements, preventing its collapse? Has this really been the century of the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth? Oh, many have been its prophets and high priests and the Kingdom has been presented under various guises: the Australian Way of life, the Welfare State, the New Civilization, the New World Order. But what has it brought about? It is better described as the Kingdom of Hell on Earth soon to pass into oblivion, it's piled-up radio-active dust one more monument to the folly of man when he supposes that his destiny is in his own hands.

Living then in the twilight of a spent civilization, amidst its ludicrous and frightening shadows, what is there to believe? Who can deliver us from this world of media-created fantasy? Curiously enough, these twilit circumstances provide a setting in which the purpose which lies behind them stands out in dazzling light and with particular clarity.

The apostle Paul, when he first met the Roman Chris­tians, quoted words from the prophet Isaiah that he had to pass on to the recalcitrant children of Israel :

Hearing, you shall hear and shall not under­stand, and seeing, you shall see, and not perceive, for the heart of these people is waxed gross and their ears are dull of hearing and their eyes they have closed, lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and under­stand with their hearts.

Paul went on to explain that the Christian revelation is the only means of making eyes truly see, and ears truly hear; of, as it were, bringing into sinc the crazy world of Nero's Rome. Similarly, the only antidote to the media's world of fantasy today is the reality of God's Kingdom proclaimed in the Bible.

References:⤒🔗

• Facing the Nation, Television and Politics 1936-76, by Grace Wyndham Goldie
• Christ and the Media, Malcolm Muggeridge, Regent College Pub­lishing, Vancouver, BC. Canada,
• The Gods of the Antenna, by Bruce Herschensohn.