"Thought only works if it is unplugged"

That, hilariously, is the concluding line of a proudly Luddite piece from the American Conservative. Oddly, it's available online.

Writes the director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism of the Free Congress Foundation, William S. Lind:

"The image is substituting itself for the Word, the Logos. The West spent three thousand years struggling to substitute the Word for the image. The war of the Word against the image is perhaps the most basic theme of the Old Testament. Thousands of Christians gave their lives in that fight. Now, thanks to the video screen, history is running backwards because on video screens images are far more powerful than words. Not surprisingly, paganism is on the rise, beyond and within the Church."

One might have thought such an olde-tyme conservative would have railed against print culture, which destroyed memory and was but an halfway house to the current hellish situation of not just video, but video on demand. In any case, Lind seems to be one more con who would vote for a flag-burning amendment.

Comments

[Zoom Zoom]

I think instead of celebrating with fireworks on the fourth of July, the press should print mass copies of the constitution and the entire American citizenry can all take a simultaneous dump on it at a predetermined time in the evening. It may sound like just bad behavior but who are YOU to judge me? The king of Siam?

P.S. Christianity rots, if it wasn't for them we'd be living like the Jetsons right now...

[Steve]

I'm pretty sure that Luddism isn't solely the province of Christians...or even the very conservative kind. In fact, most of your anti-technology crowd is severly in tune with Atheism and/or Paganism. Go talk to a PETA member, or Greenpeace, etc, etc. and find out what their religious views are.

[buzz harsher]

"Old Testament...thousands of Christians..."

Uh, what? There are no Christians in the Old Testament!

[Bob Normal]

Hey I'm Christian and Conservative BUT THIS GUY IS WAAAAACKY!!!! sorta like osama bin christian or something

[Brad S]

I think Lind is oversimplifying things a bit. The problem with his argument is that he presupposes that all "Word" is good while all images are bad. The key thing to recognize is that there is a good "Word" (God's Word) and there are many bad/false words. And there are good and positive images as well as evil and corrupting images. The goal in both realms should be to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative.

[David]

Well, check out what sort of group Lind finds it acceptable to speak to, "a major Holocaust denial conference put on by veteran anti-Semite Willis Carto in Washington, D.C.," :

http://www.splcenter.org/cgi-bin/goframe.pl?refname=/intelligenceproject/ip-4w5.html

Also note that Lind's article lamenting the South's losing the Civil war has gotten a Republican operative (who sent the piece to people) in trouble out in California.

Here's a link:

http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2003/01/06/bush/index.html

[fyodor]

Pagans 666,000
Christians 0

Competition is Hell!

[Mark]

If you go to Atrios' weblog (atrios.blogspot.com), you'll see that this man is not just a harmless conservative crank. While this particular article is amusing and not very disconcerting, his other work is. Here are some links:

http://atrios.blogspot.com/2003_01_05_atrios_archive.html#90149969

http://www.freecongress.org/centers/cc/950430.asp

[scott]

And all this time I thought words were PICTURES REPRESENTING SOUNDS....

[Steve]

Life wouldn't be nearly as interesting without nutjobs.

[Steve]

Cph, keep in mind that Liberals don't want you thinking for yourself either. Just different ways of looking at it.

[Justin Raimondo]

The American Conservative may be politically incorrect -- god forbid that some left-wing nobody named 'Atrios' should disapprove of it -- but it is still 100 times more interesting than the always-boring Reason. How many times must we read the SAME damn article on why cloning, drug legalization, and Eminem are the gateways to a "libertarian" utopia? I say: Bring back good old Bob Poole! At least HIS particular monomania was more interesting.....

[Cph]

If this is the quality of "journalism" one can expect from Pat Buchanan's new magazine... count me out. I especially like this question: "is information itself all that wonderful?" This is the sort of "conservative" who made me hate conservatives when I was growing up--the sort who denied my ability to think for myself. The sort for whom the pursuit of inquiry ended when the Bible was written.