Science Quote by Ashley Montagu

Television, in Montagu's hands, isn’t a gadget; it’s a social solvent. The line lands because it flips a cherished mid-century promise on its head: TV was sold as domestic glue, the warm hearth you could plug in. Montagu exposes the trick. The family can be physically clustered, even ritualistically so, while each person is psychologically elsewhere, tethered to the same broadcast and yet severed from one another. “Gets together” in scare quotes is the tell: he’s puncturing a cultural slogan, not describing a neutral habit.

His target isn’t simple “screen time,” but the way a mass medium restructures attention. Conversation is messy, reciprocal, full of risk and repair. Television is frictionless; it asks almost nothing back. That asymmetry turns the living room into a kind of quiet auditorium, where intimacy is replaced by synchronized distraction. The subtext is moral without being pious: loneliness isn’t just the absence of company, it’s the erosion of participation.

Context matters. Montagu, a scientist and humanist best known for arguing that cooperation is as central to human evolution as competition, is making a cultural-evolutionary claim. Postwar America built the suburban home around consumption and privacy; television completes that architecture by piping a shared national narrative into isolated units. His phrasing captures the paradox that still defines modern connectivity: you can share a space, even share an experience, and still fail to share a life. In 1960s terms it’s TV; in ours, it’s the same logic scaled down to a device in every palm.