From Logic to Emotion

Pastor Dave Monreal, Lead Pastor

I wrote last week about the Postmodern world that we find ourselves navigating through. How did we get here? Questions like this are fascinating but they are not easy to answer. We want to point to one thing to explain the entire situation, but typically there is a complexity to situations that does not lend itself to simple answers. If I were writing a book it would have to include philosophy, technology, world events, urbanization, economics, politics, education, modernity, secularization, radical relativism, biblical illiteracy, dominance of pop culture, rugged “individualism,” multiculturalism, and the therapeutic culture. Whew! You see, it isn’t a simple discussion.

Certain ideas take hold at one time that would be rejected at another time. What happened? We like simplistic answers, but the true answers often lie much deeper. Let me give one example, the printing press. Yes, I mean the modern printing press invented in 1450 AD by Johannes Gutenberg. For almost millennia prior to the invention of the printing press children were typically seen as “little adults.” In ancient times they had no rights until they came of age and were recognized by society and were not thought of being in a different category. There were put to work as soon as they were able, and they did not have the cherished place in society that they have in modern times. In time the printing press made the availability of books ubiquitous.

With the printed page there was a differentiation between those who could read and those who could not. Information was kept from children by the mere fact it was too difficult for them to comprehend or books could be withheld because it was deemed not appropriate for children.¹  Over the centuries attitudes towards children changed from being “little adults” to being undeveloped humans that needed to be protected and educated. In western culture we were conscious to protect children from things that were beyond them or “adult content.” We created child labor laws because children should be educated and not made to work.

We also moved from being an imaged based culture to being a word-based culture. In a word-based culture for something to be understood it has to be read and comprehended. What is read may affect the emotions, but it is filtered first through the rational mind. We THINK before we FEEL. Images are immediately ready to the mind and emotions, there is no need to think about them or interpret them. This is even more so with the advent of video and television. No longer did stories need to be read and understood, they could be seen and experienced. Printed words first affect our minds while images immediately affect our emotions. Postman wrote his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, to address how television is an image based medium compared to books which are a word based medium. He argues that with the advent of television we have moved from rational to emotional, from word to image, and from thinking to feeling. Further, the barrier between childhood and adulthood has eroded because there is no filter to images and there is no need to interpret to understand the message. Postman wrote this before the advent of the internet and video on demand. How much truer are these realities today!

Postman deftly argues that in an image-based culture everything is about entertainment, even education and religion. I bring this up because this is just one part of a multifaceted reason why we find ourselves in an emotion-based culture where there is no truth, only feelings and perspectives. This is not the whole answer. There are many other factors that have brought us to this time in history. But not only what we think about but HOW we think has changed and been shaped by becoming an image-based culture.


¹ For a full discussion of this, see the book, The Disappearance of Childhood, by Neil Postman. Postman was a sociologist at Syracuse University who wrote on the influence of technology on culture. His most popular book is, Amusing Ourselves to Death.