On "Self-Definition"

What Am I doing!?
(Image by Richard M Margolin)   Details   DMCA

I once heard the novelist Saul Bellow use the term "self-definition" with regard to his believing it "very dangerous" to get one's self-definition from television (this was way back in th late 60s or early 70s). The implication being that people who derive their "self-definition" from literature and the arts, etc, have a very different view of themselves, and the world, than those who derive it from video- particulary the news. Something Alexander Solzhenitsyn said during his address at Harvard back in the 70s has stayed with me ever since: "People who work and live meaningful lives don't need their divine souls stuffed with useless information." But, today (needless to say), that's vastly even more the norm than it was then. The development of human nature, the psyche and personality, which is based on serious, bona fide "culture", is just going to be radically different from that based on popular culture.