Sep
11
2012
The Dead Sea Video Tapes
“Let us imagine that, somehow or other, a whole lot of contemporary pabulum — video tape and film of television programs with accompanying news footage and advertisements, copies of newspapers and magazines, tapes of pop groups and other cacophanies, best-selling novels, a selection of successful films, recordings of political speeches, exhortations, comedies and talk shows, and other recordings of the diversions, interests and entertainments of our time — gets preserved, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, in some remote salt cave. Then, centuries or maybe millennia later, when our civilization will long since have joined the others that once were and now can only be patiently reconstructed out of dusty ruins, incomprehensible hieroglyphics and other residuary relics, archaeologists discover the cave and set about sorting out its contents, trying to deduce from them the sort of people we were and how we lived.
What, we may wonder, would the archaeologists make of us?”
Malcolm Muggeridge, Christ and the Media (Grand Rapids, 1977), page 53.