Stephen Miller's book, Conversation: A History of a Declining Art, is one that I keep wanting to discard, but find myself unable to do so. There's a lot of though-provoking comments in the book. He's got an annoying habit though, of bashing Christians for making "religious" comments, while at the same time his idea of good conversations seems to fit a model that I'll doubt an atheistic church (i.e. a group of individuals regularly meeting for a philosophical debate which specifically excludes - amongst a few other things - any notion of a deity). Here's one excerpt (from p. 47/48 of the book) that got me thinking:
When we talk about conversation in ancient Greece, we think mainly of Athens. If Athenians were known for their conversation, Spartans were known for being laconic. The word laconic is derived from Laconia, the region surrounding Sparta that was controlled by the Spartans. The ancient Greeks even had a verb that meant to imitate the Spartan way of talking: lakonizein. Spartan education, Cartledge says, "included a rich variety of imaginatively nasty punishments ... for failing to answer a question sufficiently 'laconically' (i.e. snappily and wittily)" One punishment was having one's thumb bitten by the teacher.
In the early years of the fifth centry, Sparta was in league with the Athenians against Persia, but for most of the second half of the century Sparta and its allies were at war with Athens. In 404 the Spartan alliance defated Athens, and the Athenians lost their empire, but in 371 the Spartan army was defeated by Thebes, and Sparta began a long decline.
Trained to be laconic, the Spartans thought men who talked a lot were not likely to be men endowed with military spirit. The Spartans, Anton Powell says, "appear to have prided themselves on avoiding, even on [an] inability to understand, lengthy and complex argument" The Spartans considered the Athenians to be a disorderly and decadent people. A Spartan in Plato's Laws says that in the cities controlled by Sparta there are no symposia and no one gets away with drunkenness. The extent of literacy among Spartans is unknown, mainly because the Spartans did not write books - only a few inscriptions.
I don't find Jon Stewart particularly amusing - more like the left-leaning counterpart to conservative talk radio. At the same point in time though, I had watched quite a bit of Stephen Colbert. While the Spartan analogy has a lot of holes - e.g. current society lacks the Spartan-style disciple noted above (e.g. no drunkenness?) - large parts of it also seem to fit quite well. While it was Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert that first came to mind given their shows being marketed as comedy, folks like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh also seem to fit in the same category. It's more the every-is-a-joke, no-time-for-deep-discussion focus on addressing the big issues of life. Colbert actually had N.T. Wright on as a guest once (alongside the Cookie Monster!), and, if you watched the clip of Wright - unfortunately no longer available in Canada - he was running about a mile a minute trying to pack as much in as possible. Can you have a serious conversation about a issue in only a tiny bit of time? I'd argue both yes and no: yes, you can have a brief discussion about serious issues; no, you won't be able to address the issues in much of any depth.
Michael Horton also had a few comments on this topic in his recent book The Gospel-Drive Life (p. 126):
Especially in TV news, the reporter increasingly becomes the news. There is now a celebrity "news show" for every ideological perspective, from one extreme to the other. News is packaged as entertainment, the success of each program made dependant on the cleverness with which the ideologue can persuade the audience of one position and mock those of his rivals. Eventually, we come to learn more about the host than the issues and the size of the audience depends on the charisma of the deliverer more than the trustworthiness of the content that is delivered. Parallels with the church today become obvious. As a result, particular churches take on the personality of the pastor, including his politics, socioeconomic location, ethnic distinctives, and consumer tastes. It is not the news, but the reporter, who shapes the identity of Christ's body.
