The Trap

I found this 3-part documentary by Adam Curtis interesting and irritating in roughly equal amounts.  It told me some things I didn't know and stimulated thought by juxtaposing events in ways that were new to me.  On the other hand, it grossly oversimplified most of these events.  This was particularly obvious hen I did know even a little about one of the topics - for example, his description of game theory was ridiculously limited. 

Oddly, I often reached different conclusions than Curtis from the material that he presented.  In particular, the last episode suggested strongly to me that Isiah Berlin was right to favour negative liberty (freedom for the individual to do what they liked) over positive liberty (notions of free, purposeful societies that Berlin said inevitably lead to tyranny).  Curtis argued that the recent history of the USA's neoconservatives attempts to impose negative liberty by force, i.e. elevating it to a purposeful ideal that overrules mere freedom for individuals, turned it into another form of positive liberty.  Berlin himself, we are told, warned about this possibility.  Yet Curtis's own non-sequitor was to suggest this shows we still need a progressive form of positive liberty in order to oppose the neocon madness.  A more modest reading would be that we should continue to support negative liberty, without the use of force and in a cautious and evolutionary (as opposed to revolutionary) manner.  Whether that's right in the larger scheme of things can be debated but it seemed to me the conclusion of the arguments presented in the programme.

So one cheer for a set of documentaries that got me thinking but no cheer for the shallowness and no cheer for the lack of coherence in the argument.

Is this the best that television can do, I wonder?