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Amusing Ourselves to Death
I still remember sitting in my car, just having come out of the bookstore, beginning to read his book “Technopoly.” I had already read “Amusing Ourselves to Death” and considered him to be an American prophet. And it was in 1999 that my son and I got to hear him do a reading at a bookstore in downtown Chicago.
Neil Postman followed in the footsteps of other prophets, people like Orwell and Huxley. They warn us about ourselves and our focus on DISTRACTIONS. We think we have no need for a purpose outside of our own “personal peace and affluence” — that from another prophet, Francis Schaeffer.
If you have read this post, this far, you might consider spending a few minutes contemplating the introduction of Postman’s book “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” May it cause a pause in thought, pondering both the present and the future, the temporal and the eternal.
Published in General
“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another – slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.
This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
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Interesting. I think it misses a rather large point – people have always been interested in distractions. We just have the free time to enjoy them.
The kicker is that we have moved on from just simple amusement to all-pervasive saturation with The Message™© This is why you see more geeks turning against woke culture. Most people don’t want to be preached at by either party.
There’s an old science fiction book (The Star Seekers, Milton Lesser) in which the inhabitants of a multigenerational starship have lost the knowledge that they are aboard a moving space vessel and believe that their internal world is the whole universe. A boy on an initiation journey through the four spheres of the ship (which have become isolated from one another over time) realizes the truth about their larger journey, and that the ship is nearing its destination and will crash unless immediate action is taken. He encounters great difficulty in getting people to take the situation seriously. The people who are least interested in taking action are those who live in the Place of the Revelers. These people were apparently (generations ago) actors and entertainers, but now they only watch old videos and go to “empathy sessions.”
“The end of the world,” said Rolf. “And the Revelers don’t even play games. They do worse. They watch old pictures of people playing games, they sit in their overstuffed chairs and experience empathy.”
I think much the same is occurring in American society today: the “magical thinking” is that the safety and security of the recent past and of the affluent American environment can be extrapolated.
To which I would add: the “empathy” that today’s Masters of the Place of Revelers wish you to experience is highly artificial and restricted in its targeted objects.
See also my post To Disappear in Dreams.
Gratitude to you @DavidFoster !
Actually, The Message© is a copyrighted pseudo-bible, that waters down and interprets scripture for the unwary. It sounds all frank, and new-agey and edgy, but it’s not Scripture. The interesting thing is that it’s what you say it is, and yet it’s not, at the same time.
One of my favorite books of all time. I just read it again recently and it travels very well from 1985.
Technopoly is also well worth reading; this must have been an interesting cat to talk to.
I read all the rest of his books after being blown away by AOtD. I don’t remember the rest as well as I know AOtD, but then I’ve read that one 6 or 8 times.
I do remember many of the insights of How to Watch TV News. Among many other things, he questions the purpose of music, and all the splashy sets and multiple cameras and all the rest, in a newscast, what it does to the actual content. God, I wonder what he would make of today’s Media?
Maybe it’s time to revisit The Disappearance of Childhood and The End of Education.
Not to mention Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century.
Edit: My god, Disappearance and How to Watch are both at Audible, and both included free with my membership! What a way to start the day.
(Also AOtD and Technopoly, but I already have those.)
Most “Progressives” think the world like that described in Herland (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1915) is just around the corner.
In addition to Brave New World and 1984, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1920 0r 1921) offers another vantage point from which to view our times.
There are a lot of parallels between Postman’s Technopoly and the UNABOMBER’s manifesto.
Dunno if that says something good about Ted Kaczynski or something bad about Neil Postman.
Neil Postman didn’t kill anybody. So there’s that.
No, Orwell was right.
He feared that the government deprive us of information, conceal the truth from us, and hold the culture captive. That’s what’s being done today. Big Brother, meet the Deep State. Neil Postman was just another liberal Orwell-denier.
As a student of Marshall McLuhan I appreciated the source of Postman’s second-hand insights. McLuhan’s objectivity made him timeless, whereas Postman’s heated passion as a social critic (and an anti-televison one at that) dates his work.
Post-Postman, television has distinguished itself as a creative artistic medium while the subsequent ubiquitous digital media are the new and far more deserving media pariahs.
Not sure we can make any final pronouncements on Huxley until someone gets the formula for SOMA right. “Better living through chemistry” remains a chancy proposition, despite several generations of beta test volunteers.
See also my post on The Have Nots. Not only is there a curiously sad and disturbing escapism on the loose, but it’s now being framed as a moral good by people like Marc Andreessen. See his comments on “reality privilege”.
Not to mention genetic engineering, post-scarcity economics, and direct uploading of information to the human brain. Huxley’s fantasy world depends on magic technologies right out of Star Trek.