Conservatives

The numbing origins of modern conservatism

  The influx of so much preconcious information through electric media may be at the root of popular conservatism and it’s urge to turn away

    by michael nenonen

In 2004 I cut off my cable access. The only shows my TV picks up these days are those I get at the local DVD outlets, and I’m happier for it. Even so, whenever I go to the dentist, I ask for the headphones and the remote control for the overhead television. As my enamel crumbles beneath the drill, the channel-surfing anaesthetizes me nearly as well as the novocaine. 

Several months ago I stood on the deck of a ferry and looked upon the ocean, but the ocean didn’t soothe me. Disturbing thoughts kept rising up from the depths of my mind. I thought about the noise our ships create, and the many whales this noise is deafening. I thought about the chemicals polluting the water, and about how rising ocean temperatures are harming sea-life. I thought about how little I know about these subjects, how little I really know about any of the systems supporting life on this planet. These thoughts led to others, and to others still. My mind was like a maze of broken mirrors, an infinite regress of reflected fragments in which I was inescapably lost.

Last week, after watching The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), I decided to learn more about exorcism’s appeal. Michael Cuneo’s American Exorcism: Expelling Demons in the Land of Plenty (Broadway, 2002) taught me that there’s an exorcism subculture among conservative Christians in the United States. Members of this subculture perform exorcisms to deliver people from such “demons” as rebelliousness, religious error, and other expressions of social dissent. What’s more, many people in this subculture undergo multiple exorcisms. During each ritual they express forbidden thoughts and feelings in stream-of-consciousness performances, only to have these wayward emotions theatrically bound and banished into outer darkness, where they remain until the next time around. By the end of the book I was struck by how threatened we are by the workings of our own minds, and how desperately we try to simplify and sanitize ourselves.

As I read Frank Zingrone’s The Media Symplex: At the Edge of Meaning in the Age of Chaos (Stoddart, 2001), these disparate experiences configured themselves into a startlingly coherent pattern.

Much like his mentor Marshall McLuhan, Zingrone, a professor of communication at York University, examines the way that electric media shape our consciousness. Zingrone uses the psychoanalytic concept of the preconscious to build his case. The preconscious is made up of mental contents—ideas, feelings, and so forth—that exist outside of conscious awareness, but not so far outside that they can’t be brought into consciousness with a little effort. This distinguishes the preconscious from the unconscious, which lies so far beyond consciousness that its contents can’t be easily retrieved. 

We’ve all experienced the emergence into consciousness of preconscious materials. Through their work, artists chart the geography of their preconscious minds. Whenever we meditate, trying to focus all of our attention on a single point, preconscious materials start flooding our awareness. When we smoke a joint, the insights that come so easily to mind are really nothing more than preconscious materials exposed by our drug-induced sensitization to internal stimuli.

Our preconscious minds have an intimate relationship with electric media. Zingrone references research demonstrat-ing that the brain processes radiant light—the kind of light emitted by television and computer screens—differently than it processes the kind of reflected light we see on the printed page. Reflected light engages our verbal intellects; radiant light engages the parts of our brain that deal with nonverbal, intuitive processing. Reflected light stimulates our conscious minds; radiant light downloads straight into our preconscious minds. This is why it’s almost impossible to read entire e-books on-screen: reading requires critical awareness, the very thing that radiant light subdues. For this reason, activities like watching TV have more in common with dreaming than with deliberative thought—and thus channel-surfing makes dental appointments so much easier to endure.

At the same time, electric media—the nervous system of the global economy—bombard us with fragments of information too numerous, too stimulating, and too contradictory for our conscious minds to begin making sense of. This information falls into our preconscious minds, which become thickly cluttered with shards of information capable of becoming conscious at any moment—like when I’m trying to enjoy the ocean’s beauty. We’re left with a sus-picion that there are infinitely complex layers of reality beneath even the simplest phenomena—as, of course, there are. Unfortunately, because of the suspicion’s origins in electric hyper-stimulation, this hidden complexity seems chaotic and threatening, echoing the cacophony of paranoid psychosis or the torments of demonic affliction.

Our senses respond to hyper-stimulation with inhibition. Our pupils constrict in bright sunlight, and our hearing becomes less sensitive during hard rock concerts. Similarly, we respond to information overload by trying to reduce the complex-ity of our mental environment. We use a number of strategies to blot out this torrent of information, even as we become addicted to its sources. One of the most common strategies is to shut down our critical minds, perhaps through intoxication or sleep, through television or video games, or through the varieties of group hysteria found in such places as revival halls and sports arenas. We can also use ideologies to screen out unwanted information and erect comforting illusions in its place. Psychological denial is another form of inhibition. So is “compassion fatigue,” that empathic numbness brought about by constant reminders of human suffering.

Widespread information-overload leads inevitably to widespread inhibition. Zingrone suggests that this is contributing to the rapidly growing appeal of conservatism, which he describes as one of inhibition’s foremost cultural expressions. This would explain why so many conserva-tives despise Hollywood and the so-called “liberal media,” while ignoring such dangers as climate change, resource depletion, and the growth of corporatism at the expense of democracy and social justice. If so, then exorcism, with its authoritarianism, its literal “demonization” of dissent, its rejection of critical analysis, and its ritualized suppression of preconscious materials, may express conservatism in its purest form. 

If Zingrone is correct, then modern conservatism uses wilful ignorance to keep madness at bay. While we may deplore the strategy, we mustn’t ignore the threat of preconscious chaos that it’s designed to address. To more effectively respond to this chaos, Zingrone advocates the develop-ment of a far more sophisticated media literacy educational program than any currently in existence. Such a program would help children develop the skills needed to process the complexities of electric media. Having said this, Zingrone also allows for the possibility that our species has reached the limit of its information-processing capacity. If we can’t increase our awareness, the only other option is a radical constriction of consciousness. Progressives place their faith in the former, and condemn conservatives as brutes; out of despair, conservatives choose the latter, and condemn progressives as fools. Watching our collective consciousness collapse beneath the weight of preconscious obesity, I honestly wonder who makes the better case.