What we see, we do To imitate is human, so watch what you watch
Callahan, Sidney
SIDNEY CALLAHAN WHAT WE SEE, WE DO Violence & the media Monkey see, monkey do, cor- rect? The fire-setting and burning of a subway token- booth clerk in New York City replicates in real life a...
...When we are bombarded continually with images of violence, brutality, sexual immorality, and betrayals of trust, our minds and spirits suffer...
...These "games" were the thrilling entertainments of that pagan culture...
...But on second thought, why not rehabilitate this church effort to influence the media by using the more acceptable method of petition...
...Suddenly it hit me: Good grief, you're trying to reinvent the Legion of Decency...
...Can anyone still honestly doubt that violent and criminal images in the media or in music incite aggressive behavior...
...Anything we notice and process gets put into the information programs in our minds and memories...
...Granted/some civil libertarians who are worried about the dangers of censorship will admit we have a problem, but stoutly maintain that the price of curbing "free expression" is too high...
...In the Joe McCarthy era, liberal Catholics hated being pressured into loyalty oaths like a bunch of obedient puppets...
...We used to loathe and despise being commanded to stand up in church and repeat an oath not to go to immoral movies...
...So what if conservatives would have to be allied with liberals in this enterprise...
...Our only hope may be in the fact that altruism is also innate and can also be imitated easily...
...Good images and good thoughts and benevolent feelings become good deeds...
...Can't liberals and conservatives cooperate as fellow citizens without endorsing each other's total platforms...
...it can happen here...
...I'm with the radical feminists on the pornography question, even if I'm ardently prolife and they ain't...
...What we pay attention to, becomes us, as surely as we become what we eat...
...Imitation, after all, is an indispensable way that an intelligent species like ours learns...
...And who is...
...When the input (horrible word but highly infectious), consists of a violent or sexually shocking act, two lessons are learned at once...
...Eventually I mustered enough courage to endure the torture of social nonconformity and remained seated in protest...
...I began to wonder whether Catholics couldn't be organized in order to collectively boycott the offending media and thereby exert social pressure...
...And if good guys are doing horrible things in order to fight the bad guys, then the behavior is all the more permissible...
...If we just passively stand by and don't try to do anything, we are surely guilty of letting our country decline and fall without a struggle...
...Mindlessly we automatically imitate and follow the leader...
...And why the human fascination with blood, gore, and violence in the first place...
...Heroic rescuers just plunge into action without a second thought...
...Homicide rates increase in a country after its wars, whether it's a "just" or "unjust" war...
...The second lesson is more subtle: one learns that this kind of behavior exists...
...Defenders of the sorry state of our media will usually claim that (1) real life is violent, so why not be honest and show it...
...And alas, the opposite is also true...
...Recently I was mulling over this question and meditating on possible nonviolent campaigns or applications of Saul Alinsky's tactics...
...Athletes will watch videos depicting images of excellent moves to increase their own proficiency...
...The fire-setting and burning of a subway token- booth clerk in New York City replicates in real life a movie incident in a recent action thriller...
...Is it the media's fault if unhinged people get set off on some rampage by what they watch or hear...
...Children will beat Bobo dolls into the ground if they have seen grown-ups do it first, and even those children who do not immediately enact the aggression learn the behavior and remember how it's done...
...Signing petitions along with promises to selectively boycott and protest might make a difference...
...In another part of the forest, similar arguments go on among feminists about the effects of pornography...
...Teen-agers do it...
...and it is permitted in the universe as we know it...
...Saint Augustine noted sadly how eagerly people were drawn to view mangled corpses, and how easily his noble and good friend Alypius was first persuaded by peer pressure to go the Coliseum and once there, became addicted to the murderous displays of gladiatorial combat...
...Maybe even truer since we may have a built-in tendency to regress into infantile rages and paranoid anxieties...
...So what to do when your culture is being corrupted and poisoned...
...and (2) only a few vulnerable aggression-prone persons will be negatively affected, so why keep everyone else from the innocent entertainment of having a few thrills-whether of an aggressive or sexual nature...
...Violent images on TV or in the movies have inspired people to set spouses on fire in their beds, lie down in the middle of highways, extort money by placing bombs in airplanes, rape people in particularly disgusting ways, and who knows how many other kinds of shootings and assaults...
...As the brainy heroine of Norman Rush's great novel Mating puts it: "The conviction that the world is secretly corrupt is dangerous to certain temperaments because it rationalizes cutting corners and being selfish, an impulsion I was not in need of...
...Who hasn't found herself repeating phrases recently heard...
...Grownups do it...
...Most psychologists who have studied the question of how aggression operates are convinced that everyone learns violent behavior by seeing it enacted, ready or not...
...So modest altruists do deserve their medals...
...Well now, thinking of all these things, what's to be done...
...Fads sweep societies-from slang to games to foods to clothing to intellectual paradigms (and the use of words like "paradigm...
...There's the act and then there's the permission to do the unthinkable...
...Scores of such copycat crimes are regularly reported...
...What an irony...
...At this point I am willing to risk the dangers of censorship because I'm absolutely convinced that what you put into the imagination creates the person...
...Or humming mindless TV commercials...
...Children do it...
...Often they don't even want to accept praise or reward afterward because their altruistic behavior seemed to them "the only thing to do...
...Taboos lose their inhibitory force...
...One is the behavioral sequence, how, for instance, to go about setting fire to a vagrant sleeping on a park bench...
...Only those making mints of money purveying violence to the great American public even try to defend the practice...
...Of course, their sense of what was "obviously necessary" had been nourished by countless prior acts of attention and good behavior...
...The more prestigious the person modeling aggressive behavior, the more likely it is to be imitated by observers...
...Saint Paul writes to the Christians at Philippi, "Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things...
Vol. 123 • January 1996 • No. 1
