The Great Stereopticon

Source-n*zi that I am, I couldn’t really get very far in my comprehension while reading Chapter Five of Ideas Have Consequences until I had investigated the title and the quote. Believe me, I tried to skip that step. So, now I share with you the answers to my queries and save you some time.


Without looking it up, I thought *The Great Stereopticon* was a word made up by Richard Weaver along the lines of Tolkien or Lewis.

But I came to find out three things: that a stereopticon is a real word (a 19th century invention), that I’d seen one recently (think Frandsen‘s magic lantern show in Sweet Land), and that my family owns one (photo illustration)!!


In addition, the entire chapter made more sense , when I realized that we all have stereo vision. Each eye sees a slightly different image that then blends to create what we see. Things are becoming more clear now, huh?

Mr. Weaver states that the “vested interests of the age... have constucted a wonderful machine whose function is to project selected (emphasis mine) pictures of life in the hope that what is seen will be imitated. There are three parts to the machine which he calls the "Great Stereopticon” (think the Wizard from the Wizard of Oz). The components are 1) the press or newspapers 2) motion pictures and 3) radio.

Granted we 21st-century- types might not think much of radio, but in 1948, when Weaver was writing radio was enjoying a tremendous impact. I dont know what you think of talk radio today, but there’s a connection. However, to get a better sense of this, I asked both of my parents, who grew up in the Forties, to tell me about radio in their families. My father remembered listening mainly in the car, whereas my mother remember sitting around a large, table-top radio listening to programs like Let’s Pretend.


Now for the distasteful part of my research - the quote which is an obvious slam at the first part of the Great Stereopticon’s image-creating monster.

“Sick are they always; they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, 19th century philosopher and mental case, wrote a book Thus Spake Zathustra: A Book for All and None. It contains long passages of poetry and song, mocking Judeo-Christian morality and tradition. The most famous line from this book is “God is dead.” I read Nietzsche in college and didnt like him or his Ubermensch then or now. His Zathustra is a reference to an ancient Iranian prophet and religious poet, also regarded as a prophet in Islam.

Hmmmmm...

My final research covered “primordial synthesis.” What the heck is that? Those are the fifth and sixth words in the opening sentence of the chapter. Did you know what that is? I didnt. Most of the google searches involved physics and formulas. Thinking that didnt quite fit, I searched my Britannica (2003) and found an answer: it’s related to the study of religions.

From Britannica I gathered that the history of religions on a cross-cultural basis, though it has quite an ancient pedigree, came into its own in a modern sense from about the time of Max Müller (late 19th cent). During this period, various lectureships and chairs in the subject were instituted, being located in The Netherlands, Western Europe, Britain, and the US (Harvard and Chicago).

Bingo!

There’s our link.

Our author was a professor at the University of Chicago and this academic area of study, the Science of Religion, enjoyed popularity under Joachim Wach (died 1955), who studied how religious values tended to shape the institutions that expressed them but whose time obviously was over by 1948, when Mr Weaver talks about the disappearance of primordial synthesis (or the blending of these basic assumptions across cultural lines.)

Well, there you have the background needed to finish reading and understanding chapter five of Ideas Have Consequences.

Surely there were some things you didnt recognize right away.

Come on...tell me.