The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge by Peter B. Kaufman

Author:Peter B. Kaufman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sociology;education;world history;sociology books;history books;history;political books;politics;teaching;learning;education books;gifts for history buffs;historical books;history gifts;history buff gifts;history teacher gifts;history lovers gifts;business;economics;culture;journalism;communication;statistics;technology;work;business books;globalization;marketing;leadership;language;music;social;innovation;management;writing;social science;critical thinking;internet;creativity;strategy;math
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2020-12-23T14:59:56+00:00

Brett Samuels, “Trump Rally Crowd Chants ‘Send Her Back’ About Ilhan Omar,” The Hill, July 17, 2019, https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/453633-trump-rally-crowd-chants-send-her-back-about-omar.

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The struggle was waged not only outside of the television business. Hopes shone within as well. In the 1950s, NBC executives—led by Sylvester L. “Pat” Weaver, father of actress Sigourney Weaver—carried on full-force efforts within the industry to show, in essence and as they called it, “enlightenment television”: art, music, science, things to build the mind and spirit, and in prime time. Weaver wrote long memoranda—there were forty bound volumes of memoranda and manifestos of his in his office at the time he left his job177—almost all with invocations like this one: “Let us dare to think and let us think with daring.”178

For Weaver, the potential of television as a transport of the mind, as one of his biographers put it, was staggering, and he saw it as his mission to extend the vision, experience, and imagination of every viewer in the goal of “upgrading humanity.” He wrote, of the viewers he wanted his network to reach:

Every man will walk the craters of the moon, look into the churning lava of Vesuvius, sit in the ruins of Magna Lepta, be present at tribal dances, and range down the corridors of antland. . . .

A new age of enlightenment is upon us. . . . The articulation of a new positive humanist philosophy is coming in the next five or ten years. The new understanding of the cosmos—the new cosmology—has tremendous implications for all of us. . . . I want to get the writers and producers to shed their cynical hucksterism and think.179

The memos come down to us today in extraordinary detail. Davidson Taylor, the head of public affairs at NBC, helped address the network from within about Weaver’s plans. As one of the television historians of the period writes, Taylor and Weaver’s September 1951 manifesto on “enlightenment via television” involved “implementing an enlightenment philosophy at three levels”:

The first level involved programs conventionally accepted as public service, which would be overtly informational, educational or cultural. This would include news, documentaries, special events, educational programming, discussions, talks, actuality and religious programming. . . .

The second level of enlightenment programming would involve the inclusion of elements “which are not only entertaining but instructive as well” in regularly scheduled shows primarily devoted to entertainment: This plan requires that producers . . . bear in mind . . . the fact that the real world is fascinating in itself. Examples of such programming would be the Philco Playhouse’s presentations of documentary dramas, the incorporation of educational or “cultural” segments in such series as Kukla, Fran and Ollie and Milton Berle’s Texaco Star Theater, and the human interest interview series We the People.

The third level of programming represented “the plan formerly referred to by Pat Weaver as Operation Frontal Lobes.” (After this point, the entire range of “enlightenment program planning” was referred to as Operation Frontal Lobes.) Anticipated as being the most controversial among advertisers,

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