Lonergan’s Levels of Consciousness & Media Literacy
By Rev. Bernard R. Bonnot
[Bonnot has been a leader in the development of Communication Theology and has published books and articles on these topics and on the priesthood.]
TV initially engages human consciousness with its colorful images and engaging sounds. Infant eyes turn to flickering screens even before they can distinguish images. Infant ears respond to the interesting noises that come with the pictures even before they can understand language. Early on, infants can distinguish between a program and a commercial. Sights and sonics make them aware that there is a difference … and the commercial gets more of their attention!
The sounds and scenes bombarding barely conscious infants and children have varied effects on them. Usually, they excite. At times they may calm. Little by little the sounds and scenes engage infant emotions and desires. They make the toddlers happy or sad. They connect the emerging and still undisciplined emotions of children to various objects. They stir these young persons to want and desire. Soon enough, children get the idea they can have these objects. Mom and Dad, Grandma and Grandpa, or their favorite aunt or uncle can deliver them. At that point the tykes can become demanding, insistent, even manipulative, to secure the object they want.
The pattern, thus established in childhood, persists in adults. The media consistently work on our senses and emotions. In capitalist economies this dynamic usually serves commercial enterprises and their products. In dictatorships, of various sorts, it serves political powers. Too infrequently media power does advance deeper cultural concerns, including those of religion. Canadian Jesuit theologian and philosopher, Bernard Lonergan, now deceased, helps us understand why. Lonergan taught for many years in Rome’s Gregorian University. A profound and original thinker, he is usually considered the theologians’ theologian. Yet his explanation of how human consciousness works gives helpful context and insight for practical media literacy.
Lonergan distinguishes five levels of human consciousness. For our purposes, they are: (1) experience (sensory data); (2) understanding (ideas and concepts about that data); (3) truth statement (judgment about which idea is valid); (4) decision-action (value judgment with emotional energy that motivates action once we have grasped something true and good); and (5) religious love (profound affect and commitment to what is judged deserving of a gift of ourselves). A brief word about each.
Sensation gets us going and is itself delightful. Human consciousness awakens through sensory stimulation. We see, hear, touch, smell, taste, and the process of knowing is underway. Without that beginning nothing else happens. Sensory deprivation shuts us down and can drive us insane. Sensory immersion delights. Consider, for instance, a child put before a large yellow object. The child marvels at that big yellow presence, keeps looking at it, follows its movements, wants to touch it, taste it. The media capitalize on this pattern. “High Production Values” describe media products that provide a dazzling sensory experience. As Marshall McLuhan taught us all, the medium is the message.
Or, as Pierre Babin notes, the “massage is the message.” We love the stimulation. We respond spontaneously to whatever provides it. We want more. It awakens, enlivens, energizes us. Media often hesitate to move beyond sensory stimulation. Consider, for instance, MTV. But human consciousness does move beyond. Sensory stimulation is only the beginning of a process that moves rapidly forward. The child wants to know what that big yellow object is. To be human is to seek understanding of what we experience. We instinctively generate ideas that make some sense of the data we are receiving. We generate ideas about what might be stimulating us, why it might be doing so, what might come of it, how we might react. We are prolific. “Bright ideas are a dime a dozen” said Lonergan. So, we produce lots of them. Is that yellow something a balloon? Is it a huge canary with a long beak? Is it the sun come close?
That proliferation of possibilities prompts us to the next step: Which idea best fits the data? Which idea is valid and true? What is really happening? What is causing the experience? What understanding best explains my experience? What are others making of the experience? With help of parents, friends, and Public Broadcasting, our sample infant comes to understand that bulbous yellow object is Big Bird, a friendly, trustworthy, fun companion.
As soon as we have moved through steps one to three, level four stirs. Since the happy yellow blob with the little head and big nose is Big Bird and not a monster bumble bee, our infant instinctively accepts the pleasure its presence brings. S/he enjoys the sensations it generates, likes them, trusts their source. The infant wants them and seeks Big Bird’s presence to get them. The infant even finds Big Bird’s attitudes, dispositions, and values (or the ones he provokes within the child) “good.” The infant goes along with them, acts on them, imitates them. The infant makes them her own. The infant seeks to surround him/herself with whatever will sustain this wonderful Big Bird experience with its consequent happy thoughts and good behavior. The infant chooses, decides, acts. Eventually The infant buys.
Finally, as the infant in each of us grows, s/he tends to fall in love with the most important and persistent objects that provide this explosion of consciousness. We cherish all that pleasurably stirs us into consciousness. We like what makes sense of our experience and does good for us. We learn to call the most persistent and important of these sources ‘God’ and toward that object we let loose the most powerful and profound dimension of our consciousness, our ability to commit and devote ourselves fully, our ability to love and worship. Thus, do we become religious. A child’s world may revolve for a time around Big Bird, but adults know that the genuine, abiding, and ultimate Big Bird is unique, the One we usually call God.
Such, in brief, are the five levels of consciousness distinguished by Bernard Lonergan: Experience, Understanding, Judgment, Decision, Religion. In these terms, it becomes clear quickly that the media work predominantly on levels one and four (Experience and Decision/Emotion) while largely neglecting Understanding, Judgment and Religion. Further analysis explains why.
Consider cigarette advertising. The images of Marlboro Man, Virginia Slim woman, and Newport youth are pleasing to the eye. They engage in us a deep desire to become what we see, subtly associating our pleasure and our desire with their cigarettes. The way to become what we see is to smoke! The advertisements would prefer that we not understand that the pleasurable experiences and ideas evoked by these splendid images move us to do something that greatly diminishes our chances of becoming what we want to be. Exercising levels two and three of our consciousness, conceptualization, and judgment, would lead us to conclude that smoking will diminish the masculinity, femininity, and youthful vitality portrayed in the images. It will eat them away with Cancer. Smoking will prevent us from growing into what we want to be. Smoking therefore is not the way to go.
The media would rather that we not ask whether their statement in images — that cigarettes will make us like the pictures we see — is true. They would prefer that we not reflect on whether our emotions are validly directed. They would much prefer that we just buy a pack of cigarettes and light up the next time we have the chance. To them, religion is simply not an issue. They want only that we ‘love our smokes’ and consume their products. Truly, loving ourselves, the other. and the living universe does not pertain.
TV follows the same paradigm. Whether economic or political forces control it, TV wants little more than to engage persons and get them to do something (buy a product in one instance, accept the regime in the other). Whether these persons understand what they are experiencing, reach valid judgments about their experience, and arrive at a devotion that is nearly religious, is unimportant. Indeed, there are far too many ideas for TV to explore them all. Besides, how can one arrive at any certain judgments about which ideas are true, which behaviors good and worthy of pursuit?
Let it suffice to engage people around something with compelling images and get them to do what those paying the bills want, through motivating music and sounds. Philosophers and theologians and nettlesome pastors can worry about the rest. There is not enough time to do that in the media, or enough money. Media work on sensation and emotion, Lonergan levels one and four. Religion, on the other hand, especially as it has evolved in European, Enlightenment-influenced culture, tends to be most comfortable with Lonergan’s second and third levels of consciousness. Religion cherishes the articulation of various ideas and the selection of certain of them as true, correct, orthodox, traditional. If media uses sensory stimulation and emotional appeal to prompt action and generate a quasi-religious devotion to its content, religion uses concepts and truth claims. In turn, religion holds sensation and emotion suspect and keeps them peripheral. This defines the tension between religion and the media in our times. In Lonergan’s terms, it is consciousness levels one and four against levels two and three!
A task of media literacy then is to alert people to the media’s partial engagement of their consciousness and debilitating neglect of its other dimensions. Being concerned with the whole person, we need to help people bring the full resources of their consciousness to bear precisely on their media experiences. This can, and should, include its religious depth and dimension. Vice-versa, religion must reverse its neglect of sensation and emotion. The liturgical and charismatic renewals are helping do that. Effective use of the media in our worship and catechesis can also help.
To summarize, Bernard Lonergan’s thought helps us understand that media purposively work our senses and our desires while leaving dormant other dimensions of our consciousness. Media literacy programs can help people understand what is going on, judge whether it is something sound, and decide whether they want to let it influence their behavior. Media literacy needs to teach people how to bring those deep convictions, that rise from their religious loves and commitments, to bear on their media consumption and response. It can also prompt religious leaders to use media more effectively. Introducing people to Lonergan’s thought can help people bring the full resources of their consciousness into their media encounters. Lonergan can help make people more literate and functional in today’s media culture.