Idols and Icons

In current speech we have a modern image that is curious to me. We talk about "Hollywood idols" or "teen idols" that appear on our movie or television screens. These phrases are telling and say much about our contemporary world and its views. I was reminded of this in something I read recently from After Prophecy by Tom Cheetham. Here's the quote:

Many of us who live in a media-dominated world risk becoming unable to percive the inherent uniqueness of the individual persons and things that populate our lives. Modern life threatens to become orchestrated by scripts learned from entertainment and the news media. Though every society has a standard repertoire of social roles, modern capitalism relies on especially powerful images cut loose from any of the usual stabilizing constraints that locate the individual in society in a meaningful way. Technological society is based upon the exteriorization of reality. It encourages us to live as automatons in a world of idols. Idolators are not individuals--they are instances of a type. To discover the deeper self requires a different kind of vision. Idols are always abstract and disembodied. Icons are always absolutely particular, unrepeatable, and individual. The perception of icons requires a transformation of the opacity of the idols, and of the self, so that they becom transparent to the light within them.The practical question concerns how to learn to see this light, to see with ... [the] "eyes of fire" (85).

Cheetham's use of the word iconhere is in reference not to traditional icons, but to the "iconic realities" of real human beings among whom we live on a daily basis.