On Anecdotes, Images and Rationality

I want to pursue the subject of my last column, i.e. an image-oriented versus a print-oriented culture. Among the pervasive influences of our increasingly image oriented society is the ascendancy of the anecdotal at the expense of the rational account of things.

There was a pre-scientific time in which the explanation of events was basically anecdotal, that is, a story or anecdote concerning the actions of individuals, either imaginary or actual that was the reason things happened as they did. Thus things happened because one god was angry with another or angry with the behavior of humans, act. With the development of science it became apparent that things happened basically because of properties inherent in the material that was interacting. This led to a broader and testable conception of things in which classes of things had the same properties and members of the class all behaved the same. Thus our explanations of things were no longer in terms of anecdotes of human behavior or of the gods.

I believe that television has done much to revive the anecdotal approach to our problems. It does this by visually dramatizing events; the extent of the dramatization is unlimited. Abstract understanding, e.g. global warming and the globalization of the world’s economies, are not amenable to anecdotal explanation. Issues of this sort require sustained thinking and concepts not images or stories. Thus these fundamentally important human problems are not being understood in their actual dimensions. If they were, public policy would be very different. When we speak truth to power it has little effect if the truth is too abstract for people raised on television to understand. This is why we are driven to the effects of complex processes rather than the processes themselves when we attempt to bring people to their senses in a democratic society. Examples are the images of melting glaciers or poverty stricken African children in the presence of American oil rigs. But the effects are not an explanation, which is why malmotivated individuals and institutions can get away with half truths, e.g. global warming is a natural process, not man induced, because it happened before humans inhabited the earth. There is a basic need for the populace to understand the increasingly complex world they inhabit if we are to rely upon them as the source of power in a democratic society.

Bob Newhard