Inventions We Can Patently Do Without?

On a list of inventions that we would be better off without, nuclear weapons would surely come first.

Not that they don’t have their champions. It is argued that nuclear weapons have been a boon to mankind by making war among the great powers too horrible to contemplate.

At a subnuclear level, most readers who have written me on the subject think the most pernicious of inventions is television; the automobile comes in second.

Helene Marshall of Camarillo says that we have been dehumanized by TV. “I well remember life without television. We used our imagination while listening with bated breath to the different serials, laughed with the comedies, listened to Bing, Perry, Frank, visualizing in our own minds what we were hearing. No one has to use his mind at all anymore. . . . We seem to choose our leaders by the way they come through on the small screen, not particularly by what they say, what they do, just how they look. . . . If television had never been invented we would be better off. . . .”

Television perhaps never had a more dedicated enemy than the late Robert Hutchins, the educator who won fame by discontinuing football at the University of Chicago. Donald McDonald of Santa Barbara sends me a quotation from Hutchins’ farewell address to Chicago students back in 1951:

“The horrid prospect that television opens before us, with nobody speaking and nobody reading, suggests that a bleak and torpid epoch may lie ahead which, if it lasts long enough, will gradually, according to the principles of evolution, produce a population indistinguishable from the lower forms of plant life. Astronomers at the University of Chicago have detected something that looks like moss growing on Mars. I am convinced that Mars was once inhabited by rational human beings like ourselves, who had the misfortune, some thousands of years ago, to invent television.”

In 1951 television was in its infancy, on the threshold of its golden age, and had not yet degenerated into the wash of sex, violence and trash that it is today. Hutchins’ dire prophecy appears to be coming true.

Writing on “Visions of Tomorrow” in Life magazine (February), Gregory Jaynes wonders whether the automobile is such a good thing: “Would you be in favor of an invention that is responsible for 50,000 deaths a year in the United States, as well as 2 million injuries, and $20 billion in property damage, and urban sprawl, and the decline of the inner cities, and the deterioration of public transportation, and a pollution that causes unknown thousands of deaths from emphysema, lung cancer and heart disease, and the conversion of thousands of acres of farmland and scenic countryside into asphalt?”

We can’t put the genie back in the bottle, of course; but if the internal combustion engine had never been invented our air would be pure, our cities would be crisscrossed by electrified rapid transit, and 50,000 fewer people would be killed each year in violent collisions.

Of course courtship would be returned to the front porch swing, thousands of automobile workers would be out of work, Japan would still be mired in feudalism, and we’d be up to our hips in horse manure.

If television had never been invented one-third of our people might not be illiterate; we would all go out more, with the result that restaurants, bars and movie theaters would prosper; everyone would get more exercise; we might have improved the art of conversation; and Geraldo would have to make an honest living.

On the other hand, if we did not have television to occupy our time after dinner, the divorce rate might be even higher than it is: Wives would be bored, husbands might be inclined to drift down to the neighborhood bar for a beer; and children would sulk and turn recalcitrant.

While television has seduced us away from reality, deprived us of self-awareness and growth, given us ersatz excitement and vicarious adventure, fantasized our sex life for us, brutalized our consciousness with violence, stolen our time, homogenized us and turned us into zombies, couch potatoes, slobs and mindless consumers, it has also made God available to us through evangelism, educated us on such social and natural phenomena as drug addiction, prostitution and the mating rituals of the tsetse fly, and given us such heroes as Joe Montana, Orel Hershiser and Ollie North.

It ain’t all bad.