"We can put television in its proper light by supposing that Gutenberg's great invention had been directed at printing only comic books"
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Hutchins lands his punch by treating television not as a neutral technology but as a misused revolution. The Gutenberg comparison is a deliberately unfair fight: printing conjures the birth of mass literacy, religious reform, scientific exchange, and the long, grinding project of public reason. Then he yanks the rug out by imagining that this world-changing machine was spent cranking out nothing but comic books. The jab isn’t at comics as such; it’s at squandered capacity. A medium capable of enlarging the civic mind gets narrowed into a pipeline for diversion.
The line also smuggles in a moral hierarchy of culture that midcentury educators felt was slipping away. Hutchins, a champion of liberal education and the “Great Books” tradition, is speaking from a moment when television was rapidly becoming the household hearth and the new common language. His subtext: a democracy can’t outsource its attention. If the dominant storyteller is optimized for spectacle, advertising, and lowest-common-denominator consensus, the public’s habits of thought will be trained accordingly.
What makes the sentence work is its precision. “Proper light” sounds measured, almost modest, but the image is scorching. He doesn’t argue about programming choices; he reframes the entire enterprise as a category error: we built a printing press and decided the point was cheap thrills. The intended sting is institutional, too: broadcasters, sponsors, and regulators are implicated as caretakers who chose entertainment over enlightenment because entertainment scales.
The line also smuggles in a moral hierarchy of culture that midcentury educators felt was slipping away. Hutchins, a champion of liberal education and the “Great Books” tradition, is speaking from a moment when television was rapidly becoming the household hearth and the new common language. His subtext: a democracy can’t outsource its attention. If the dominant storyteller is optimized for spectacle, advertising, and lowest-common-denominator consensus, the public’s habits of thought will be trained accordingly.
What makes the sentence work is its precision. “Proper light” sounds measured, almost modest, but the image is scorching. He doesn’t argue about programming choices; he reframes the entire enterprise as a category error: we built a printing press and decided the point was cheap thrills. The intended sting is institutional, too: broadcasters, sponsors, and regulators are implicated as caretakers who chose entertainment over enlightenment because entertainment scales.
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| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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