Spiritual Pitfalls of Media-Driven Mimesis

It seems fair to say that man pulled himself up by his own mimetic bootstraps, leaving behind his animality and creating culture, religion and economy to subsist on. As well as the various media, which are both his products and extensions. They serve now as  tools with which to change his world – by propagating their contents and enabling (the pulling in of) more and more people into the mimetic dance.

The varieties of mimesis that are effected by the media tend to be by and large negative. With a medium’s growing incidence the negativity snowballs – within man’s heart and soul to begin with, and eventually enveloping societal institutions. It pushes out the good, right-brain mimesis of empathy, closing or hardening one by one all the outlets in man’s heart that enable man to act on the impulse. It also hardens man’s outlook on how societal institutions should embody empathy.

Every instance of empathetic mimesis, of being actuated by empathy, works miracles in the heart, hardwiring us all the more for love. So the question is as follows: could it be that such mimesis does not have any media to be channeled by, enlarged and communicated? Must it really be relegated to spur-of-the-moment individual reactions of effective or at least relative powerlessness? Hardly. So why is it then that the media cannot be used as virtual extensions into the wider and wider expanses of the world of man’s  empathy-channeling mirror neurons? The answer is that bad, left-brain violence-prone mimesis has been found to pay by far more handsome dividends to the media masters. 

But what about the religion of brotherly love, Christianity, apparently founded on sentiments of empathy? Are not both its teaching and practice supposed to be mediating empathy and love? Why is it failing in its task, functioning not unlike any sacrificial religion of the past? Failing to see as its calling the unceasing empathy with all the underprivileged, as shown by Jesus? So, what kind of medium into man’s heart religion actually is? Why are we not able to live out of the abundance of love that God is, naturally harmonizing with and favoring empathetic mimesis? Why even Christianity seemingly cannot resist the pull of bad mimesis? Is it because its abundant love does not seem abundant any more? But has it ever felt like that for large proportions of its adherents?

Every medium has its proper realm within man’s heart to work upon, affecting eventually societal institutions. That is an important realization, especially in view of the fact that much of media‘s insidious work is effected by the – purposeful more often than not – creation of a scarcity situation, shown and  perceived as such. Scarcity in the heart, then in society.

Scarcity moves one from an appetite-like position of craving for things necessary for one’s survival, affection and control needs, with jealousy as a spiritual danger – about choicest things around to be had or to enjoy; gluttony, lust and avarice being jealousy’s companions here – and onto the place in the heart where bad mimesis reigns, where the danger of mimetic rivalry that could degenerate into violence becomes real.

It all leads to media-instigated envy, whose “scarce” object has been created or propagated by the media. But now, depending on the type of media and one’s position relative to it (consumer or tout, including of oneself), we either stay with envy, and anger or despondency, as the case may be depending on how successful we perceive ourselves in the pursuit of the object, or we might yield to sentiments of narcissistic vainglory or hubris.

Narcissistic self-love represents a move from external to internal mediation, best in evidence when two opponents are vying for control in a mimetic dance; whereas hubris more often than not is the pitfall or actual sin of those who ostensibly surrender to innermost mediation in their hearts while aiming to be or considering themselves spiritually perfect. Even if their innermost model epitomizes charitable love, what they actually exercise then is only prideful love of self.

Radio and TV are the media of external mediation, for those on their receiving end – consumers of whatever wares, physical, spiritual, political, tempted into exercising their imagination, while celebrities as well as politicians are allowed to wallow in vanity. Everything engineered by the media masters.

And what about radio’s and TV’s empathy mediation? It is their masters’ choice to effectively block those two media, but especially TV, despite their evident capabilities, from being used in that capacity, at least on a sustained, meaningful basis. And the chief reason thereof has already been mentioned above: for the media masters another medium comes into play, drawing them into their own mimetic mediation and rivalry: money. 

Money properly belongs among the media (medium of exchange, including of societal “information” about the relative “worth” of its members ). In fact it is the most powerful among them, and one with probably second-longest history (language is first, writing follows closely).  And just as any medium, it has undergone massive changes – lending and credit, empty-money creation by governments, derivative instruments, etc. Other media fall by the wayside and disappear or become mere “figures” against a newly ascendant medium’s “ground,” money seems indestructible.

Money thrives on scarcity, in fact it is preeminent among them in that respect. Where the other media would use an adroitly tailored content to convey an impression of scarcity, for money it is enough to make itself scarce for the targeted “audiences,” so to speak, to accomplish the task. With money figure and ground fully blend.

Now digital media are already – and will be even more so in the future – a stage for vainglorious self-love, with precariousness of this narcissism showing when internal mediation all of a sudden and unexpectedly changes its polarity. But they are also a powerful undifferentiator, in a manner that neither radio nor TV have been, with all its inherent – as predicted and described by Rene Girard – dangers. They are also the undifferentiator of the traditional media preceding them, all of them – printed books, radio, TV – just figures or content of digital media’s ground, allowed varying and changeable degrees of importance by the users (a better description here than “consumers”). The big deal about digital media is their role in enhancing and extending their users’ memory function.

The transition from radio to TV represents also a move from the local or tribal to the global, whereas the current transition to digital media is a move from mere receptivity to apparent creativity, as well as to mimesis-enhancing networking, signifying a seemingly global empowerment. But what it also actually does for the moment is fanning the flames of narcissism.

Yet when and if it is truly internalized in the depths of one’s heart, when it transitions from the precarious internal mediation to innermost mediation, it might yet become truly creative. Whether it is going to be Luciferian creativity or one guided by the Holy Spirit is another matter, though. As we know Lucifer is the epitome of hubris, whereas Holy Spirit-imparted charitable love can only thrive on humility, on denial of self-love.

Digital media with their plenitude of information and networking as well as mimetic potential are a double-edged sword. They are capable on the one hand of “dividing soul and spirit asunder,” of imparting to us self-understanding and facilitating spiritual discrimination in the here and now, thus enhancing our empathy capabilities; but on the other hand, of dividing our faculty of will: “for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I,” if we succumb to spiritual pitfalls inherent in them excessively exercising media-driven, bad-mimesis-prone imagination.

Only when pursuing a life of mindfulness and contemplation and approaching digital media in a spirit of humility, as well as unceasingly falling back on our gradually developing faculty of spiritual discernment can we hope that the new media will truly empower us and help us be integrated and more loving, that they help us move freely with the Holy Spirit. That they are going to be our extensions into heaven, and not into hell.

One last thing: the notion that media content does not matter, that “the medium is the message,” as famously stated by Marshall McLuhan, is deceptive. On one hand, it seems to be taking the onus off the media masters and giving them unjustifiable leeway as to content choice, which in that situation will obviously be money-driven. On the other hand, the truth of that statement in my opinion is limited and consists only in that that the media enormously widen the scope and enhance the power of any media-carried message, which phenomenon many a time outweighs the very importance of their content. But the content matters, one might even say that the widening and enhancing makes the problem of content all the more important. And that is precisely why with the media spiritual discernment should all the more be brought into play.