THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE 1986

On Friday, The Times will award its annual Book Prizes in five categories--biography, history, fiction, poetry and current interest--along with the Robert Kirsch Award for a body of work by a writer living in or writing on the West. This week we publish excerpts from some of the books nominated in the category of current interest. Not excerpted, but also nominated, are: “Home: A Short History of an Idea” (Viking) by Witold Rybczynski, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” (Summit) by Oliver Sacks and “Arctic Dreams” (Scribner’s) by Barry Lopez.

“Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public

Discourse in the Age of Show Business” (Viking) by Neil Postman.

Neil Postman is more chagrined than most of us when he hears TV newscasters say, “Now, this,” for in that seemingly benign transition, he sees evidence of our growing fondness for fragmented thinking. Postman’s notion that the message is determined by the medium harks back to Marshall McCluhan, but Postman is more distressed by the trend than McCluhan, for he believes TV’s messages to be as evanescent as smoke signals, and “You cannot use smoke to do philosophy.” Writing, on the other hand, “freezes speech,” giving birth to “the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian (and) the scientist--all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading.”

There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first--the Orwellian--culture becomes a prison. In the second--the Huxleyan--culture becomes a burlesque.

No one needs to be reminded that our world is now marred by many prison-cultures whose structure Orwell described accurately in his parables. If one were to read both “1984” and “Animal Farm,” and then for good measure, Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon,” one would have a fairly precise blueprint of the machinery of thought-control as it currently operates in scores of countries and on millions of people. Of course, Orwell was not the first to teach us about the spiritual devastations of tyranny. What is irreplaceable about his work is his insistence that it makes little difference if our wardens are inspired by right- or left-wing ideologies. The gates of the prison are equally impenetrable, surveillance equally rigorous, icon-worship equally pervasive.

What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.

In America, Orwell’s prophecies are of small relevance, but Huxley’s are well under way toward being realized. For America is engaged in the world’s most ambitious experiment to accommodate itself to the technological distractions made possible by the electric plug. This is an experiment that began slowly and modestly in the mid-19th Century and has now, in the latter half of the 20th, reached a perverse maturity in America’s consuming love affair with television. As nowhere else in the world, Americans have moved far and fast in bringing to a close the age of the slow-moving printed word, and have granted to television sovereignty over all of their institutions. By ushering in the Age of Television, America has given the world the clearest available glimpse of the Huxleyan future.

Those who speak about this matter must often raise their voices to a near-hysterical pitch, inviting the charge that they are everything from wimps to public nuisances to Jeremiahs. But they do so because what they want others to see appears benign, when it is not invisible altogether. An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan. Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us. . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture’s being drained by laughter?

“Move Your Shadow: South Africa,

Black and White”

(Random House) by Joseph Lelyveld.

On his first visit to South Africa in 1966, Joseph Lelyveld, now London bureau chief for The New York Times, found a nation torn between two polarities--the “huge evasions of the whites and the helpless knowledge of the blacks.” Known for unemotional, fair reporting, Lelyveld was nevertheless expelled from the country a year later, honored “beyond my deserts” by the label, “one of South Africa’s most notorious enemies.” He returned in 1980, but as he writes below, he was reminded of 1966, for the changes he hoped to find turned out to be piecemeal.

In the 14 years after my expulsion--the headlines in the Afrikaans press had proclaimed that I had been uitgeskop (“out-kicked”) as if it were a triumph for patriotism and morality--I had lost much of the feel of the place, remembering mainly my own tautness and alertness when I lived there; forgotten, too, its physical and cultural scenery and most of its political rituals and arguments. What had lodged near the surface of my mind, available for ready excavation along with a wad of yellowing clippings, was a series of stark images and, because reporters remember quotes, small shards of dialogue. Two in particular involved blacks in courtrooms.

One was from a visit to a pass-law court, where black men were prosecuted for the crime of being in a “white area” without a stamp in their reference books, the domestic passports they all had to carry, to show they were “authorized to seek work.” Then, as now, the “white areas”--as opposed to the former tribal reserves known as homelands--accounted for slightly more than 86% of the land.

These trials, which have been taking place in South Africa, one way or another, since 1708, when the first passes were issued to Malay slaves, were fundamental to its way of life, the balance wheel of the political mechanism. The rationalizations could change from decade to decade, but the trials went on. Few blacks could go through a lifetime without an experience of these courts, as either an accused or a relative of an accused; fewer whites cared to know where they were or how they worked, let alone to visit them. The trials themselves could be, still can be, measured in minutes or sometimes seconds. An hour could be long enough to get through 30 or 40 cases in open court. The context was something I would have to learn all over again, but one brief exchange was graven in my memory. “Why were you in Johannesburg?” asked the presiding officer, a white civil servant in black robes known in those days as the Bantu commissioner.

“I was looking for my child,” the accused replied.

“Where is your child?”

“Lost.”

“Fourteen days,” the commissioner ruled.

“The Moral Life of Children” and

“The Political Life of Children”

(Atlantic Monthly) by Robert Coles.

“I am not a survey social scientist,” writes psychiatrist Robert Coles. “I claim no definitive conclusions about what any ‘group’ feels or thinks.” Indeed, Coles confesses that his own assumptions were often challenged by the children during the 10 years of talks chronicled in these two volumes--discussions about race, ideology and prejudice in “The Political Life of Children,” and about fate, religion and the struggle to find love in “The Moral Life of Children.” The following comes from a chapter in the latter volume about two very courageous, resilient and poor children--13-year-old Marty, the American child of migrant workers, whose father and brother were killed in a car accident, and 10-year-old Eduardo, who, in roaming the streets of Rio de Janeiro, has learned both “to master a modern city (and) to spar with death.”

Tragedy is instructive, playwrights help us to realize. Tragedy can blind, can drive some to madness and acts of desperation. For these two children, as for others, tragedy becomes a handle for vision, for personal examination, for the momentary dissipation of fearfulness through bold moral confrontation. Eduardo observes the greedy nihilism of both the rich and the poor, and out of such a moral nightmare realizes his small daily victories by achieving distance. Marty will never forget that automobile accident: it sealed in her a sense of life’s fragility and absurdity worthy of existentialists. Accidents can become moral incidents, as can the accident of fate. When a boy such as Eduardo thinks (in response to reality, not neurotic fantasy) that his odds for survival in any week are “maybe fifty-fifty,” then a species of gambling fever may well be a psychological outcome: heads I must try something with all possible exertion, or tails I most certainly do lose. Such urgency turns moral, however, in our Eduardos and Martys.

They have both acquired from others, and made their own, the commanding authority of God, or Christ, of His priestly representatives on this earth, of family members, of neighbors, of strangers, even--a nurse, a teacher, a person walking down the street whose casual remarks can evoke a sense of wonder or worry. Is it odd that children who may well be near taking the last breath, ask the questions we of our world know to be asked by our elderly, our terminally ill? Is it odd that children who are on the move a lot, and never seem welcome for long anywhere, may develop a habit of looking closely at the world, seeing through many of its duplicities and pretenses; or develop a habit, also, of seeking solace in another world, that offered by a religion or (also) by a drug?

For Marty, “we are here to prove ourselves to God.” For Eduardo, “we are here to stay for a while, and if we’re lucky, we’ll leave people behind who like us, and when our name is mentioned, they smile and clap.”