The Glamour Trap.

• Author: Shenk, Joshua Wolf
• Position: Review

Are "entertainment values" blinding us to what really matters?

A few months ago, I attended with a friend a 150th anniversary reading of the Communist Manifesto. This was my first time inside the Cooper Union, a stately old building in lower Manhattan that was, in February 1860, the site of a speech by Abraham Lincoln that set the Eastern intelligentsia buzzing and played a major role in his subsequent nomination. "Let us have faith," Lincoln concluded, "that right makes might. And in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."

On this night in 1998, a large crowd had assembled in that spirit. But it was a gray-haired crowd. I wondered why. Did it reflect ideological shifts over generations, or the fact that igniting a revolution or even joining a movement--whatever its ideas--is simply out of step with the values of people my age?

For my part, I attended the reading not as a participant, but as an audience member. I had come because the Manifesto reading featured the playwrights Wallace Shawn and Tony Kushner. I had come in search of provocative ideas. But also for entertainment.

In Life the Movie, Neal Gabler argues that entertainment has "conquered reality." He insists his book contains no "high dudgeon." But his idea does have obvious moral implications, which is why it deserves to be taken seriously. My dictionary defines entertainment as "that which holds the attention by amusing or diverting." If we are "diverting" ourselves, it raises the question of what from? If our relationships--even our internal identity--is constructed around entertainment, then what happens to the more sober demands of reality?

Gabler's conceit is that entertainment is no longer just something we like or participate in, or a technique used to beguile us. It is who we are. We don't just spend our time being entertained. We live in what he calls a "life movie"--with Martha Stewart supplying the sets, Ralph Lauren the costumes, and Tina Brown the scripts. Our audience may be our family and friends--but it is also increasingly an audience of millions, through shows like Jerry Springer's or "Americas Funniest Videos." Life, Gabler argues, has become "the biggest, most entertaining, most realistic movie of all, one that play[s] twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, and feature[s] a cast of billions."

Gabler's story begins in the early 19th century, the point at which an American popular culture emerged that was distinct from its...