The Sacred Texts Around Which We Shape Our Lives

At the Christian Scholars Conference I attended a couple weeks ago, Barbara Brown Taylor presented a talk on, “The Power of Narrative in the Age of Twitter.”  She talked about the need to privilege certain narratives,  saying, “I was attending to so many other narratives, I was losing track of the thread of my own.”  We must be careful in choosing the narratives we absorb, because, ”the plots we privilege shape the plots of our own lives, and if they aren’t beautiful, we won’t be either.”  She quoted Milosz from Striving Towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz, as saying, “I feel the heavy illness of American society, and feel its root is mass media.”

I thought of her talk last night while reading Neal Postman’s Conscientious Objections.  In the essay The Conservative Outlook, he has this to say:

“…[Y]ou have seen how commercials stress the values of youth, how they stress consumption, the immediate gratification of desires, the love of the new, a contempt for what is old.  Television screens saturated with commercials promote the Utopian and childish idea that all problems have fast, simple, and technological solutions.  You must banish from your mind the naive but commonplace notion that commercials are about products.  They are about products in the same sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales.  Which is to say, they aren’t.  They are about values and myths and fantasies.  One might even say they form a body of religious literature, a montage of voluminous, visualized sacred texts that provide people with images and stories around which to organize their lives…  Commercial television adds to the Decalogue several impious commandments, among them that thou shalt have no other gods than consumption, thou shalt despise what is old, thou shalt seek to amuse thyself continuously, and thou shalt avoid complexity like the ten plagues that afflicted Egypt.”