Four Arguments for The Elimination of Television

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That their technological training and the language they use excludes from their frame of reference a broader, more subtle system of information and values rarely seems to occur to them.

The alternative to leaving all discussion to the experts would be to take another route entirely. That would be to define a line beyond which democratic control—which is to say full participation of the populace in the details of decisions that affect all of us—is not possible, and then to say that anything which crosses this line is taboo. Yet, the notion of taboo is itself taboo in our society, and the idea of outlawing whole technologies is virtually unthinkable.

San Francisco ecologist Gil Baillie, in a brilliant article in the 1975 edition of Planet Drum, argues that taboo systems of earlier cultures were not quite the darkly irrational frameworks we now believe them to have been. Most often they reflected knowledge taken from nature and then modified by human experience over time. Their purpose was to articulate and preserve natural balances in a given area or within a given group of people at a particular time. They were statements about when too far is too far. This sensitivity to natural balances, which was the basis of virtually every culture before our own, has now been suppressed by our modern belief that science and technology can solve all problems and that, therefore, all technologies which can be created ought to be. The question of natural balance is now subordinated. Evolution is defined less in terms of planetary process than technological process. The planet and its information are now considered less relevant than human ingenuity, an idiotic and dangerous error shielded from exposure only by the walls of previous assumption and the concrete of the physical forms within which we live.

Ivan Illich, a leading critic of the expropriation of knowledge into a nether world of experts and abstraction, argues in Medical Nemesis that professional medicine may be causing more harm than good. We go to doctors as we go to mechanics. They speak a language that remains impenetrable to us. We take their cures on faith.

Illich remarks that this may be producing more illness than cure: It has separated people from knowledge about keeping themselves healthy, a knowledge that was once ingrained in the culture. Although some of our technoscientific methods work, some do not, and the doctors who use them may not understand them or may be inexpert in their use. The doctors, Illich believes, are also taking the validity of techno-medicine on faith. Their source is usually the chemical and drug industry, which has a stake in disrupting natural healing methods. How else could they sell their chemicals?

Direct Education

As a child I wondered how human beings learned which plants were edible and which were not. How did our ancestors learn about poisons, or cures for poisons, without any doctors around? I assumed it was trial and error because that was the way it was explained to me. A group of cave people or Indians came upon a new plant. One of them tasted it and keeled over dead. That's how they knew not to eat that plant again. Doubtless this was one method, but from what I can gather this "taste method" was not the primary means for acquiring this knowledge. It certainly could not account for the finely detailed knowledge Indians have of plants.

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