T A B L E++T A L K

When you play games with your children, do you let them win? Discuss the balance between praise and overindulgence in the Mothers area of Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y

Uxorious
By Kate Moses
Uxorious: Pondering the word and why it never comes up in conversation
(05/20/98)

M is for the many ways she lost it ...
The mother of all drama queens
(05/20/98)

Drowning in fairness
By Liz Gardner
Does holding back valid criticism create more confident children or praise junkies?
(05/19/98)

Where the gals are
By Laura Miller
From Ally McBeal to Bridget Jones: Neurotic pals for lonely gals
(05/18/98)

Young, black and too white
By Karen Grigsby Bates
Social clubs for black children are making a comeback among middle-class parents who fear their kids are losing their roots
(05/15/98)

BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINKARCHIVES

- - - - - - - - - -

Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

- - - - - - - - - -

BY DWIGHT GARNER | Is media violence desensitizing our children? Should filmmakers be held responsible for copycat crimes? Is there a place for censorship in our society?

Sissela Bok isn't alone in asking these difficult questions. But here's why she's worth paying attention to: She explores the potential answers with more nuance and intellectual grace than anyone out there right now. Bok's new book, "Mayhem: Violence as Public Entertainment" (Addison-Wesley), not only probes our long-standing obsession with violent images, but sets the debate within a remarkably broad cultural framework. For her, discussions of children's television habits or Quentin Tarantino movies are inseparable from discussions of Goethe, Rousseau and the Roman spectacles. She ranges freely across Western civilization, and in the process raises the bar on our public discourse.

Bok, who teaches at Harvard and is the wife of former Harvard president Derek Bok, has long been interested in how societies, and individuals, make moral decisions. It's a subject she's explored in earlier books such as "Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life" and "Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation." Bok, who spoke with Salon in a hotel cafe on Manhattan's Upper East Side, held forth on a variety of topics -- including the boom in crime reporting on television news, whether artists can be both socially responsible and creatively free and the potential uses (and misuses) of the Internet.

What's the "Mayhem Index"?

The Mayhem Index is a computation of the amount of coverage, on local news stations, of disaster, murder, assassination, war, earthquakes. It's a way of comparing different news stations. Some of them, as everybody knows, rely on very little else for news coverage.

Crime coverage is soaring, yet crime statistics are down. What's going on?

It's a curious thing. In the last three years or so, as violence has gone down in many -- but not all -- parts of the country, the Mayhem Index has risen at times by over 700 percent. I think trials such as O.J. Simpson's have something to do with that index. But even now, if you take the recent killings in Arkansas, in Jonesboro, the amount of coverage given to that is quite extraordinary.

What about these live chase scenes we're seeing now, particularly in California, that are filmed from helicopters? There was that instance a few weeks ago where a man committed suicide on live TV, and some stations cut away from kids' programming to show it.

That certainly shocked a lot of people. A man had gotten onto the highway, and he had more or less stopped traffic. He said he was going to set fire to his truck, which I think he did. Then it turned out he also said he had bombs in the truck, he was calling 911 -- and all of a sudden he did actually commit suicide. Meanwhile, several stations had interrupted children's programming with what they call "breaking news," and they did not pull away in time. A lot of people felt that this was just one more way in which children are shortchanged. And it's also not at all clear why anybody needed to see that.

Do you see any correlation between these kind of televised manhunts and, say, the Roman spectacles? There's kind of a blood chase going on.

Well, when I wrote my book I was very interested in looking back at the Romans, because the ancient Romans really were the prototype for a culture of violence -- it was a very warlike society. They had the gladiatorial games, they had wild beast hunts in their amphitheaters, beasts imported from all over the Roman Empire. And this was done to please the viewers, really -- for the thrill and pleasure of viewers. That was what interested me in writing the book. It does seem to me that there is a link to what's happening today.

In your book, you quote a critic who suggests that these spectacles were a way for the Romans to absorb all the violence in their society. Can something similar be said of all the violent entertainment and media today -- that it's a healthy absorption?

I don't agree that it worked that way among the Romans, and I also don't think it works that way today. There's been a lot of research done on this. In the 1950s and '60s, a few researchers thought that maybe if young boys saw moderately violent programs -- and that's all there was at the time -- they would be less violent. They'd somehow work things out. This has not been supported by more recent research. And I think a lot of people simply don't realize how unique the situation is for viewers today. There's never been a time when you could see so much graphic violence any hour of the night or day in our own homes.

N E X T+P A G E: Bringing up callous kids