Page 125 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

108 David Morgan

to how they behaved—as consumers, voters, and citizens. The link was
imagination: “The way in which the world is imagined determines at any
particular moment what men will do” (Lippmann 1922: 25). That is where
the menace of propaganda arose: as “the effort to alter the picture to
which men respond [in order] to substitute one social pattern for another”
(Lippmann 1922: 26). Visual media such as posters and film provided
pictures that were internalized as the mental medium of shared thinking,
images that occluded social circumstances to convince people en masse that
matters were otherwise.
Like Socrates, Lippmann argued that the power of images resided in their
inexorable tendency to become what they only referred to, picturing a world
“to which we are adapted…We feel at home there…it fits as snugly as an
old shoe” (Lippmann 1922: 95). However, Lippmann the social analyst,
like Socrates the wily philosopher, did not intend to leave the public in the
comfort of familiar foot-ware. Just as Socrates would induce lovers of wisdom
to abandon the shackles of delusion in the allegorical cave of ignorance,
relying on the dialectic of philosophical reasoning to move them from mere
opinion to true knowledge, Lippmann argued that scientific thinking used
hypotheses instead of stereotypes—provisional images readily admitting
falsification by actual data and critical analysis. Stereotypes forming public
opinion were fictions “accepted without question,” myths demanding belief
under the force of authority as conveyed by tradition and powerful social
institutions like church and school (Lippmann 1922: 123).
Lippmann’s critique of public opinion was enthusiastically taken up
by Daniel Boorstin in his excoriating attack on the American desertion of
Puritan self-restraint and ideals for self-indulgence in an image-culture. As
a criticism of postmodernism avant la lettre, Boorstin’s widely read book,
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, was a kind of secular
jeremiad in which he lamented the American loss of ideals, which he defined
in Platonist terms as ideas or forms for which people ought to strive but
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never reach. A copy is never equal to its prototype. Americans must seek
perfection without expecting to achieve it.

Hyperreality: the continuing menace of images

Lippmann hoped that the stereotypical features of the cookie-cutter plot and
characters of mass entertainment might be discarded and that the medium
of film would be used “to enlarge and to refine, to verify and criticize the
repertory of images with which our imaginations work” (Lippmann 1922:
166). One imagines Lippmann would have been encouraged by the rise
of documentary and experimental film in the second half of the twentieth
century, not to mention other screen media and alternative media outlets