Amusing Ourselves To Death

In 1985 Neil Postman wrote the book Amusing Ourselves To Death in which he stated that “America [and I would add the world] is in danger of amusing itself to death by transforming every significant issue into a matter of cultural amusement”, he was just taking about television, if he lived in this internet age I believe this indictment would be jacked up tenfold. Albert Mohler commented that he Postman was probably responding to the election of men like Ronald Ragan, an actor, as US president. South Africa is not different. The reason we (the youth) like Julius Malema is because he is an entertainer. In my opinion not a single sane young person looks up to him as some form of a role model.

We are amusing ourselves to intellectual death   

Entertainment doesn’t require one to reflect on anything, it presents itself as relative and not authoritative, funny, engaging but not demanding, educational but not forceful. Propositions are not always supported with convincing arguments but are masked with creative humour so that people receive them without thinking. My generation doesn’t think and it baffles me that we call ourselves the enlightened generation when we don’t even examine to “light” itself. Sitcoms are a perfect a perfect examples of this; they communicate messages but very few of us take time to decipher those messages. We receive them as they are or we dismiss them as merely humour, but I think no content is meaningless because behind everything there are presuppositions and those manifest themselves in art. Therefore all forms of art a vehicle of ideas. Failure to recognise this is a sign of intellectual death.

We are amusing ourselves to illiteracy

Van Schaik recently published statistics showing that 60% of all SA university graduates never read a book after their last exam, 80% of families in SA do not own a single book other than the Bible. Even though 91 % of all South Africans on Facebook claim to love certain books; only 13% of the SA population will buy a book December. Why is this? One may ask, the answer to that question is that people like an easy way out and as a result a large population of our country is illiterate.  I think there is wisdom in the fact that most professions are qualified for through long and strenuous hours in the study. Books are a very effective way of conveying ideas. Not that other forms of media are not effective in communicating information but I think they should not usurp traditional methods of learning.

We are amusing ourselves to insensitivity

Even when television communicates serious issues, like the rape of a school-girl, the death of a tourist in Gugulethu, human trafficking ect. These are levelled out by KFC commercials 5 minutes later as if they are giving the reader a break from seriousness and emotion. Violence in movies desensitises to real violence, preachers feel the need to be intertwining as well because people have an average 5 minutes attention span. It seems like the only way to modify behaviour is ‘edutainment’. The danger of this is that people may perceive the very education as some form of joke and not respond accordingly. Our culture makes it hard to present big ideas without minimizing their significance. Television makes it particularly hard because of its bias toward entertainment.  

Evangelism Pick Up Lines/Conversations

Most of us, I more than anyone else, struggle to move from first base to second base in relationships. I am not talking about dating here but I am talking about something harder than that; when you have made contact with a target, befriended her, laughed at her not-so-funny jokes and have made a comments on Julius Malema’s latest outburst on Helen Zille. When in a sense you cannot talk about something else because you came to this person with a mission-mission CDR (Christ’s Death and Resurrection).

I sat next to a lady on the plane on my way back from Jhb on the 10 of July 2010. She was on her mid 30s, not married from what I could tell and she told me she works for a company that gathers statistics for the government, other compnies and advertising agencies. I asked her if she was flying to or from and she said “no one goes to Johannesburg for a holiday”. At this point we had that long pause where I thought she would ask me something as well lest this conversation end up being an interrogation, but she didn’t. I noticed that she was carrying a book that had lot of birds on the cover, I presumed that she was some  kind of a bird fanatic and I was not sure if I should ask her about them- my mind was thinking ahead (I know nothing about birds except the ones I eat, ie chicken) against my judgment I asked her about the book and she told me she is bird watcher, I asked her what her favourite bird was and she told me, 5 sec later I had forgotten because I was thinking of a way to steer this conversation to a lecture on Divine things (me lecturing her and occasionally asking questions).

Within ten minutes I realised that this was going to be one of those flights, a long awkward 2 ½ hrs. Some airlines offer an escape for this by having a tv with movies, this is not so with Mango. The back of peoples’ heads and clouds that look the same is all the entertainment you will get for R350. So I went on to plan B (I always have a plan, even if it means writing things down prior to a phone call so as to avoid wasting money listening to each other inhale precious airtime) so I took out a book Desiring God by J Piper-it’s a big, hard to miss orange soft cover, I gave it to her and said “this book changed my life when I read it in 2006, would you like this copy? Perhaps it would change yours as well”. She took the book and put it in her handbag. Maybe she threw it away  at the airport parking lot or she read it or she gave it someone else or she is keeping it on her book shelf and its covering dust, there is no way of knowing. But all of this had me thinking...we spend so much time learning about the content of our faith and very little time on how to share it. Even though I have answers to a million questions that can possibly be asked by an unbelievers; those answers are useless if I can’t get past the “Hello” part of the conversation.

Maybe you are not like me. If you aren’t praise God.  I have met people in my life who have told me about Jesus in this way; I would say “Hello” and he would say “hi there” and I would go and say “it’s a beautiful day” and they would say “Yes! It’s a great day. Its a lovely day. In fact it remeinds me of a day in Nazareth when a child was born who would take away the sins of the world. He died 2000 years ago on a beautiful day like this so that you might have life and I don’t mean just life but life in abundance. Gerald, if you put you trust in him you will be saved on a day when he will come back to judge the world. Will you choose this day then, this beautiful Day to put your trust in Him?”

This would be unnatural for me to do. How do you open gospel conversations?