Yesterday, The Times carried an interview with two university lecturers whose household includes two teenage sons and no television. Reading it, I experienced the same high level of irritation I do when hearing about parents who refuse their children all access to sweets and who cater for birthday parties with things made out carrots, muesli and brown bread instead of icing sugar and Smarties. They need to be told that depriving their children of these fundamentals of childhood does more harm, both temporary and permanent, than cartons of Jelly Tots and hours of cartoons.
These particular parents are very smug about their decision never to have a television in their home. They see it as a very good thing and that it makes them better parents than the rest of us, who think that television is an excellent and useful device and that every home should have at least two to avoid rows.
They think that their sons have reaped tremendous advantages by being brought up in a house without a television. Well, they can take it from me that they are wrong and that their sons probably resent their decision but will not tell them so for many years yet. They will probably grow up to fill their own homes with enormous flat-screens or whatever the latest might be in 2030, in the same way that children who are refused sweets grow up to eat them constantly.
These two, Maria and Michael Zammit, are both in their 50s and so were not raised on a childhood television diet of Sesame Street, The Monkees, Road Runner, the Banana Splits and Tom & Jerry, as I and others in our 40s were just a decade later, when televisions came into wider use and Malta began its own broadcasting service. So they probably think they are bookish and that they read a lot as children because they weren’t distracted by cartoons. In an attempt at replicating the same results with their sons, they have deprived them of television and think that this has been a successful move because one son reads four books a month.
What is surprising about this false logic is that one of them teaches philosophy and so should have been able to work out that the presumed correlation between television and reading is a fallacy. I did not make the same mistake myself, because my own experience taught me that enjoyment of television and reading are not mutually exclusive. Both television and reading were celebrated as equally worthwhile pursuits in the household in which I grew up, and I have loved both from the earliest age. I read a great deal and I also watch a lot of television. It is not necessary to live in a house without television so as to read four books a month. This is like saying that you don’t sew because you garden, or vice versa. Or that you don’t cook because you play golf. The two have nothing to do with each other. Nor does the absence of a television necessarily make a person a reader when he or she is otherwise inclined. This ‘either television or reading’ business is nonsense.
The assumption that television is a negative thing is equally silly. Michael and Maria Zammit are so busy telling themselves they can live without television that they have not stopped to work out how there is more to be gained than lost from having one in their home. They can make their own choices but where their sons are concerned, they have made the wrong one for the simple reason that the more children and teenagers are exposed to in terms of general knowledge and contemporary culture, the better. Television keeps you current. The Zammits know this at some level because, by their own admission, when there is a big world event they rush round to their own more enlightened parents to watch their television.
Not having a television because you never got round to buying one is one thing. But making a virtue and a religion out of not having a television is another thing altogether. When people get obsessive like that, I begin to wonder exactly what it’s all about. Just buy one of the ruddy things, I want to tell them – go on, what’s the big deal? But they’ve made it into a big deal. Not having a television ends up becoming a bigger deal than having one.
Much was made of the fact that the Zammit household is full of books of all sorts. This fact was directly linked to the other fact that the household contains no television. This, as the philosophy lecturer in the household should know, is called a non sequitur. Our household is full of books of all sorts, too, but it also contains a large flat-screen television and, until I removed it because I hated its shape, my own personal television which I kept on most of the day while I worked, switching between channels, and which will be replaced forthwith because getting rid of it was a bad mistake. Some people like to play music while they work, but I find the television more interesting.
I cannot bear it when intellectual snobs speak ill of television and talk as though it is the preserve of the mentally challenged while all others read books and have intelligent conversations or play Scrabble. The minds of the truly intelligent take them down all sorts of roads and they will never shut off available options. To shut off the option of television, with its myriad benefits for relatively little outlay, is by definition an unintelligent decision. It is quite possible to be intelligent in some areas but at the same time not intelligent generally – to be very academic, for instance, but then not be able to see the wood for the trees.
Alfred Sant is a notorious example of this, and I mention him because he is another one who always wore like a badge of honour the fact that he never had a television. It was one of the things that marked him out for failure as a politician: not having a television flags up your sense of disengagement from the world around you, your lack of interest in contemporary culture. If you can’t see why a television is essential, then you’re a political non-starter.
The essence of intelligence is curiosity. When somebody tells me that they have no television and that they can’t see why they should have one, I mark them down as not being particularly bright even if there are all sorts of other evidence that tells me they are. Intelligent people keep an open mind about things. The curious thing is that these two people clearly feel superior in saying that they do not have a television because they do not need one. Their misplaced intellectual snobbery prevents them from seeing that their reasoning is no better than that of people who do not have books in the house because they think they are pointless.
“It started through indifference, a decision of carelessness,” the woman of the house, who teaches Latin, told her interviewer. “We were so busy with setting up home and with our studies and work that it was a decision we left pending. However, we later realised what a great benefit it was.”
She does not explain exactly how or why not having a television has been such a great benefit, or why she thinks that the great benefits which accrued to her household would not have done so had she and her husband taken time out from their busy schedule to buy a television set, plug it in and ring GO or Melita. Mrs Zammit did say that she doesn’t like the way the television is the focus of many homes and that people always seem to have the television on as a sort of background noise. “I was very apprehensive of that, which is why it became a choice to do without,” she said.
I thought this astonishing. She almost certainly knows that televisions come with an on/off switch. The choice is not between not having a television at all and having one that is the focus of the home and on all the time. The choice is between switching it on and switching it off. Another thing: it is not television which prevents people from talking to each other, but people who put on the television when they don’t want to talk. If they had no television, they would still not talk. They would go off and do something else.
In a flood of non sequiturs, Mrs Zammit found the space to include another two or three, saying that her household is more in touch with reality than those with televisions because it is always full of newspapers of all sorts, and that newspapers engage one’s intelligence while television manipulates viewers and feeds them what it wants to feed them. That’s more ‘either or’ thinking: this time, either television or newspapers. Our household is knee-deep in newspapers and magazines – you could say that I have a professional interest in the medium – but this does not mean that I don’t watch the television news. In the ongoing Libyan crisis, for example, newspapers have been no substitute for the immediacy of news footage on the international networks. And why should it be either or, in any case? Why not reap the benefits of both?
We’re speaking here of people who say that they are not against technology because they have embraced the Internet and personal computers. This makes their hostility towards television even stranger. I think it is all based on misconceptions about what television really is. “At best, television informs you, whereas reading forms you. At worst, television informs you badly. Reading doesn’t have any cons; if it doesn’t engage you, then you stop. It’s hard to do that with television. Because it’s a passive act you can sit and watch and daydream at the same time,” Michael Zammit told his interviewer. This reasoning can be torn to shreds by any one of his undergraduate students, but still the Zammits persist in thinking that they are one up on everyone else. Their friends, they say, think they are “courageous” because they want to be like them and do away with television, but they are addicted and can’t.
What tosh. We’re speaking of adults here, adults with free will and a remote control. If they don’t want to watch television, they can just switch it off. If they want to watch it, they switch it on. There’s no need to talk like recovering alcoholics who can’t have a can of beer in the house in case they can’t resist the urge to drink it.
www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com