The Odyssean Mute Command

THE ODYSSEAN MUTE COMMAND

The accomplishment from which I derive the most pride is my weaning myself from television and the news media. I am currently so weaned that it actually costs me more energy to watch television than to perform any other activity, like, say, writing this book. But this did not come without tricks. Without tricks I would not escape the toxicity of the information age. In the trading room of my company, I have the television set turned on all day with the financial news channel CNBC staging commentator after commentator and CEO after CEO murdering rigor all day long. What is the trick? I have the volume turned completely off. Why? Because when the television set is silent, the babbling person looks ridiculous, exactly the opposite effect as when the sound is on. One sees a person with moving lips and contortions in his facial muscles, taking themselves seriously—but no sound comes out. We are visually but not auditorily intimidated, which causes a dissonance. The speaker’s face expresses some excitement, but since no sound comes out, the exact opposite is conveyed. This is the sort of contrast the philosopher Henri Bergson had in mind in his Treatise on Laughter, with his famous description of the gap between the seriousness of a gentleman about to walk on a banana skin and the comical aspect of the situation. Television pundits lose their intimidating effect; they even look ridiculous. They seem to be excited about something terribly unimportant. Suddenly pundits become clowns, which is a reason the writer Graham Greene refused to go on television.

I had this idea of stripping people of language while, on a trip, I listened (while brutally jet-lagged) to a speech in Cantonese, a language I do not understand, without the benefit of translation. Since I had no possible clue about his subject, the animated orator lost a large share of his dignity. The idea came to me that perhaps I could use a built-in bias, here prejudice, to offset another built-in bias, our predisposition to take information seriously. It seems to work.