Beyond Images
Where eyes cannot see
Image is easily dominant in our culture, as can be seen in our choice of heroes, a roster filled primarily with movie stars and social media influencers. Humanity has always had its celebrities and cultural icons. But our most popular heroes today haven’t actually done anything; they have only simulated it.
Admittedly, there is value in artistic excellence, and I like movies as much as anyone else. But I can’t help but wonder if we’ve lost something by becoming a society dominated by images.
One hazard of being dominated by images and movies is that both have a habit of bypassing our guards of reason and going directly to our emotions. It’s dangerous to always turn off your mind, to fail to think critically, to allow yourself to be carried along by the stream of images.
Images have their value, certainly, but more than ever, with the rise of AI and deepfakes, we can’t trust them to be the center of thinking. In reality, they never could be trusted: modern circumstances have only revealed that fact more acutely.
In contrast to image is the Word. For Christians, the facts that God spoke the world into existence, that Christ is revealed as the Word, and that we rely upon the written word of the Bible, all demonstrate that words - or more accurately, the Word - are central to our lives.
I don’t argue that Image should be abolished, but that it should be subordinate to the Word. Images may show us things, but words give us the capacity to name them. To see only and not name is incomplete, a maimed mental and spiritual condition. In many ways, words create reality for us far more than images do: we recognize blue as separate from black, not primarily through our eyes, but through our language. We do not view the sea as “wine-dark” like the ancient Greeks, nor describe all brightness under the word for white like the Celts of ancient Wales. They saw the same colors with their eyes, but their language gave them different names, and so they became different to them.
In the end, we shouldn’t lose either Image or Word, or seek to cast away one or the other. Both are needed and give us something that the other cannot. Yet at the same time, it matters which is allowed to predominate in our lives. And I think we are the poorer when Image is allowed to be first.