It might be considered a bit of schadenfreude that I enjoy reality television. It marvels me that we have so many reality television shows about pawn stars, repo men, jail, coast guardsmen, and on and on. Most reality television shows either purportedly heroic authority figures like police officers, judges, TSA workers, and military figures (like Florida’s Coast Guardsmen) or people who are marginal figures of society, like repo men and the people they repossess, or beauty pageant children and their bizarre families, or people on parole struggling to stay on the straight and narrow. We might be tempted to look down on these people; I think that would be unwise as well as unkind.

After all, there is a subtle art to reality television. First, the situation and people are chosen and selected to make things appear extraordinary, either in terms of envy (The Bachelor, American Idol, or The Apprentice spring to mind) or in terms of bemused superiority (any show about criminals and marginal populations). Many of the areas chosen, for example, for reality television shows that look down on others tend to be in the South or the Far West or in inner cities. Rather than looking down on most of these places, I find many of the people and places to be oddly and disconcertingly familiar, even if I’m not the sort of person who would tend to be in those situations myself. I don’t look down on those people because I am not far removed from those people–even if I am not someone who drinks or does drugs or does any of the other myriad thins that gets you on a reality tv show.

I suppose it is a good thing that the sort of activities I engage in do not draw the attention of cameras. After all, I am sure that at some point in my life I have probably been on footage that could have been made into a reality television show, but it has not happened yet (at least to my knowledge) simply because I suppose my life is not dramatic enough in that way. I’m not complaining about that either. A reality television show has a huge amount of footage, and gets to select what is the most important to advance its own narrative. Whether that means looking at the stupidity of rednecks inner city residents and drunkards or manufacturing narratives out of selectively chosen footage that advances the theme that a given reality tv personality is a hothead or a flirt or an airhead or out of touch, we have to be wary of the fact that what we see is a selection of a vastly larger (and unknown) body of evidence.

When I look at people, and see their lives and hear their stories, it is my native instinct to identify with them and see them as people not so far removed from me, to put myself in their shoes. I find it troubling to see presentations that purport to be realistic that seek to place a group of people that is like me in many ways in a position designed to elicit smug superiority and ridicule, as I take that to be a personal insult towards me. I don’t take that sort of thing very kindly. We would be a vastly better culture if we were able to learn how to identify with people from diverse backgrounds, to recognize that our longings and dreams are not all that different–we all want to be respected, we all want to be rewarded for our efforts, to be loved, to have opportunity. If we could envision and build a world where opportunity and love and respect were not scarce positional goods but were widely available to all, so that people could find honorable and respectable labor according to the talents and personalities that we have been given by our Creator, then we would no more need to see others as competition, or to pit one group of people against others for limited ladders out of poverty and misery, and space on the limited life rafts from a civilization that increasingly looks like a doomed ocean liner. A man can dream, right?