Classicism Critiqued

Classicists cannot suffer the idea: the world of Faneuil Hall is gone. ¹³⁸ The classical scenario strives to return to this world. The classicists' love for the past infuses in them a romanticism that is at war with reality. They reach for the future by returning to the past. At this juncture, the classicists confront the paradox.

In focusing on the past, the classicists do not appreciate that the television culture that they abhor is part and parcel of a larger mass commercial culture; the ideal of the "marketplace of ideas"' now operates within a vast commercial marketplace of which television is only a part. However appealing their polemical call for the abolition of television, it cannot possibly provide an answer to the first­amendment paradox. To indict commercial television is to indict our culture­­perhaps even the entire American democratic regime. ¹³⁹ The classicist argument, when removed from the particulars of the first amendment and applied to the generalities of culture and government in America, becomes hyperbole. Its agenda, then, is intended more for shock value than as a serious proposal for change. Of course, its shock value exposes its futility.

The classical crusade to return to the past invites government action so abhorrent to the contemporary citizen as to be nothing less than despotic. The total abolition of television or even regulation approximating this goal ¹⁴⁰ would be viewed as the segue to an aristocratic (and, therefore, un­American) displacement of egalitarian and mass tastes. As the polemical Professor Postman observed in his critique of the polemical classicist:

Americans will not shut down any part of their technological apparatus, and to suggest that they do so is to make no suggestion at all. It is almost equally unrealistic to expect that nontrivial modifications in the availability of media will ever be made. Many civilized nations limit by law the amount of hours television may operate and thereby mitigate the role television plays in public life. But I believe that this is not a possibility in America. Once having opened the Happy Medium to full public view, we are not likely to countenance even its partial closing. ¹⁴¹

With a nation of Americans unwilling to budge from their television sets, the classical vision is doomed. Tersely put, we cannot get to their world from here. ¹⁴²