Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

(New York: Penguin, 1985/2005), 184

"Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements?" (156)

Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether." (121)

Amusing Ourselves to Death is Postman's warning that Huxley's dystopia of enslavement to diversion is coming true rather than Orwell's dystopia of enslavement to dictators. He observes that we had a first major shift from speech to writing, and are currently undergoing a second major shift from writing to electronics: television in his day, but expanded to the internet and social media in our own.

Our tools for thought shape that very thought, and not in ways positive for public discourse according to Postman. The move from typography to television results in the decline of the seriousness, clarity, and value of public discourse. In a culture dominated by print, public discourse tends to be characterized by a coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas. This is unravels in a culture dominated by television and its current extensions with their decontextualized information and focus on entertainment.

Our public discourse has now entered the age of show businesses, where it functions primarily as entertainment. Television trivializes important aspects of public discourse, especially religion, politics, and education: where the substance of these endeavors is replaced with a goal of diversion and entertainment.

Huxley's dystopia is here and we must "take arms against this sea of amusements"—as a Catholic parent this also echoes the call of the Second Vatican Council to "guard carefully" against these harmful influences in our homes (156, cf. ~Inter mirifica 9-10).

For a contemporary Christian interpretation of Postman, see Scrolling Ourselves to Death.

Notes


Contents


Foreword

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, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

Part I

Chapter 1: The Medium is the Metaphor

Summary: Our tools for thought shape that very thought, and our metaphors create the content of our culture. We are undergoing a transformation from writing to electronics that will be just as monumental the prior transformation from speech to writing.

  • The city that embodies our age is Las Vegas, the city of entertainment
  • His argument has roots in Plato, that the forms of our conversation have importance (i.e. you can't do philosophy with smoke signals, and you cannot do political philosophy on television)
  • "We attend to fragments of events from all over the world because we have multiple media whose forms are well suited to fragmented conversation...Without a medium to create its form, the news of the day does not exist." (8)
  • Marshall McLuhan: "the medium is the message" (8)
  • The 2nd commandment to not make idols (Ex-20) does not make sense "unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture" (9)
  • "The media of communication available to a culture are a dominant influence on the formation of the culture's intellectual and social preoccupations." (9)
  • "What is peculiar about such interpositions of media is that their role in directing what we will see or know is so rarely noticed. A person who reads a book or who watches television or who glances at his watch is not usually interested in how his mind is organized and controlled by these events" (11) → this is taken to a new level with the internet and social media
  • Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilization argues that the mechanical clock, by distancing us from nature and eternity, has done as much as Enlightenment philosophy distance man from God (11-12)
  • Plato recognized the monumental shift from speech to writing—we are now engaged in the monumental shift from writing to electronics. This represents a transformation in our way of thinking. (13)

Chapter 2: Media as Epistemology

Summary: The definition of truth is derived in part from the character of the medium. The move from typography to television results in the decline of the seriousness, clarity, and value of public discourse.

  • "It is my intention in this book to show that a great media-metaphor shift has taken place in America, with the result that the content of much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense." (16)
  • "I raise no objection to television's junk. The best things on television are its junk, and no one and nothing is seriously threatened by it. Besides, we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant. Therein is our problem, for television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations." (16)
  • Thesis of this chapter: Epistemology is the origins and nature of knowledge, especially the sources and definitions of truth. Definitions of truth are derived, at least in part, from the character of the media communication through which information is conveyed. (17)
  • "The concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression. Truth does not come unadorned. It must appear in its proper clothing or it is not acknowledged", for example how proverbs and sayings form the substance of thought itself in oral cultures (22)
  • "Since intelligence is primarily defined as one's capacity to grasp the truth of things, it follows that what a culture means by intelligence is derived from the character of its important forms of communication." (24-25)
  • "My argument: a major new medium changes the structure of discourse; it does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content..., by creating new forms of truth-telling. I am no relativist in this matter, and I believe the epistemology created by television not only is inferior to a print-based epistemology but is dangerous and absurdist." (27)
  • "television-based epistemology pollutes public communication." (28)
  • "Every new technology for thinking involves a trade-off. It giveth and taketh away, although not quite in equal measure...We must be careful in praising or condemning because the future may hold surprises for us." (29)

Chapter 3: Typographic America

Summary: Form determines the nature of content, and America from its founding has been dominated by the printed word.

  • New England at the time of the Revolution had "quite probably the highest concentration of literate males to be found anywhere in the world at that time" (31) and "the Bible was the central reading matter in all households" (32).
  • The sixteenth century started a "great epistemological shift in which knowledge of every kind was transferred to, and made manifest through the printed page" which "released people from the domination of the immediate and the local." (33)
  • No literary aristocracy emerged in the colonies because "almost every man is a reader." (34)
  • "America was dominated by the printed word and an oratory based on the printed word" (41)

Chapter 4: The Typographic Mind

Summary: In a culture dominated by print, public discourse tends to be characterized by a coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas.

  • The Lincoln-Douglas debates illustrate the power of typography to control the character of the discourse. Their language was modeled on the written word (48).
  • Typographic discourse is serious and content-laden. Reading encourages rationality and the "analytic management of knowledge." (50-51)
  • Newspaper advertising illustrates the descent of this typographic mindset and the move from an "Age of Exposition" to an "Age of Show Business."

Chapter 5: The Peek-a-Boo World

Summary: Introduces the "information action ratio" (how much of the information we receive we can take action on), which has decreased as the telegraph and TV bring decontextualized information.

  • Until the invention of the telegraph in the 1840's, information could move only as fast as a human could carry it (64). This invention "decontextualized information environment" (67). "The contribution of the telegraph to public discourse was to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence. Telegraphy also made public discourse essentially incoherent" (69).
  • Information Action Ratio: how much of the information we receive that we take action on, which goes down as information is decontextualized (68)
  • We have also had a "graphic revolution": Photography is also decontextualized. It cannot not deal with the abstract and creates and atomization of information. (72-74)
  • Television has gradually become our culture, and it is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business. (79-80)

Part II

Chapter 6: The Age of Show Business

Summary: The new medium of television has ushered in an age of show business with respect to how we conduct our serious public dialogue.

  • Television is not an extension of literary culture, it attacks literary culture. (84)
  • Distinguish between the Technology (physical apparatus, the machine) and the Medium (the use to which the technology is put, or the social environment the machine creates) (84). Postman is concerned with television as a medium (85).
  • "Thinking [or sustained, complex talk, cf 92] does not play well on television" because thinking is not a performing art. (90)
  • "Sesame Street is an expensive illustration of the idea that education is indistinguishable from entertainment." (94)
  • The medium of television has caused our culture to move toward a new way of conducting its serious business. (97-98)

Chapter 7: "Now...This"

Summary: Television creates an environment of disinformation and discontinuity. This is the environment Huxley predicted would lead to our downfall via diversion.

  • "Now...this" indicates how there is no connection between adjacent topics discussed on television. (99)
  • "If on television, credibility replaces reality as the decisive test of truth-telling, political leaders need not trouble themselves very much with reality provided that their performances consistently generate a sense of verisimilitude." (102)
  • "We expect books and even other media to maintain a consistency of tone and a continuity of content, we have no such expectation for television." (104)
  • "Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world." (106)
  • Disinformation: misleading information, misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented, or superficial; information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing...when news is packaged as entertainment that is the inevitable result. (107)
  • Walter Lippmann: "There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies." (108)
  • Television: "The fundamental assumption of the world of television is not coherence but discontinuity. And in that world of discontinuities, contraction is useless as a test of truth or merit, because contradiction does not exist." (110)
  • "Aldous Huxley believed that it is far more likely that the Western democracies will dance and dream themselves into oblivion than march into it, single file and manacled. Huxley grasped, as Orwell did not, that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions." (111)

Chapter 8: Shuffle Off Bethlehem

Summary: The essence of religion cannot be portrayed via television, and we risk removing the authentic religion it if we attempt to.

  • "Not all forms of discourse can be converted from one medium to another. It is naive to suppose that something that has been expressed in one form can be expressed in another without significantly changing its meaning, texture, or value." (117)
  • Not everything is televisible in a way that preserves its essence. For example: religion (he has a great quote about consecrating space on 119).
  • "You can get your share of the audience only by offering people something they want...But television is not well suited to offering people what they need...Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether." (121)
  • "Television is, after all, a form of graven imagery far more alluring than a golden calf." (123)
  • "The danger is not that religion has become the content of television shows but that television shows may become the content of religion." (124)

Chapter 9: Reach Out and Elect Someone

Summary: Television makes politics into show business where appearances matter more than substance. Censorship is no longer needed in this world of [dis]information overload.

  • Ronald Reagan: "Politics is just like show business." (125)
  • If this is true, then "the idea is not to pursue excellence, clarity, or honesty, but to appear as if you are, which is another matter altogether." (126)
  • Political television commercials epitomize this issue by substituting images for claims and making emotional appeals. (127)
  • "The television commercial has oriented businesses away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable" as a sort of "pseudo-therapy". (128)
  • America is "a nation of kinsmen who have been split asunder by automobiles, jet aircraft, and other instruments of family suicide." (134)
  • "Television is a speed-of-light medium, a present-centered medium...In the Age of Show Business and image politics, political discourse is emptied not only of ideological content but of historical content, as well...With television we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present." (136-137)
  • We don't need censorship when we have [dis]information overload: "Tyrants of all varieties have always known about the value of providing the masses with amusements as a means of pacifying discontent. But most of them could not have even hoped for a situation in which the masses would ignore that which does not amuse. That is why tyrants have always relied, and still do, on censorship. Censorship, after all, is the tribute tyrants pay to the assumption that a public knows the difference between serious discourse and entertainment-and cares. How delighted would be all the kings, czars and führers of the past (and commissars of the present) to know that censorship is not a necessity when all political discourse takes the form of a jest." (141)

Chapter 10: Teaching as an Amusing Activity

Summary: Television has created a philosophy of education as entertainment.

  • Sesame Street represents the educational philosophy that teaching and entertainment are inseparable (142-146). The three commandments of this philosophy of education as entertainment are:
    • Have no prerequisites (atomized education)
    • Induce no perplexity
    • Avoid exposition
  • Television has become a curriculum, meaning a "specially constructed information system whose purpose is to influence, teach, train, or cultivate the mind and character of youth." (145-146)

Chapter 11: The Huxleyan Warning

Summary: Huxley's dystopia is here and we must "take arms against this sea of amusements". Postman is short on solutions but points to education as a possibility.

  • "Huxley teaches us that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face." (155)
  • "In America, Orwell's prophecies are of small relevance, but Huxley's are well under way toward being realized...An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan." (156)
  • "Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements?" (156, cf. ~Inter mirifica)
  • "But it is much later in the game now, and ignorance of the score is inexcusable. To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple." (157)
  • Progress & History: "All that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress. And in this sense, all Americans are Marxists, for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement." (158)
  • Prophetic: "Until, years from now, when it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organizations but have solved very little of importance to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved." (161)
  • In any case, the point I am trying to make is that only through a deep and unfailing awareness of the structure and effects of information, through a demystification of media, is there any hope of our gaining some measure of control over television, or the computer, or any other medium." (161)
  • Postman is short on solutions, and his last-ditch proposal is that schools will fix the problem: "we are in a race between education and disaster." (163)

See Also

Source:

New Words

  • verisimilitude: The quality of appearing to be true or real (101)

Created: 2021-11-12
Updated: 2025-06-02-Mon