By Michael Posner

The year, let us say, is 2150.

A group of us, historians, labourers, thinkers, artists, has assembled to contemplate the wisdom and legacy of ages past. In time, we arrive at the 20th century, a period we now refer to as the Second Dark Ages, marked by violence on an unprecedented scale, epidemics of genocide, terrorism and wholesale barbarism.

But surely, someone says, the 20th century must have had something to recommend it. Surely there was something more illuminating, more ennobling than mere (and fairly primitive) technological innovation -- the automobile, the television, the computer. Surely five billion people must have been able to develop one inspiring, enduring, life-enriching, transcendent idea or sustaining ideology.

The archive discloses nothing. In the 20th century, we are forced to conclude, millions of people lived longer only to suffer more, fleeing from their reality in the fog of meaningless pageant and vacuous entertainment, a daily opiate.

Wait, says another. What about democracy, the great triumph of representation by population, which spread across much of the planet?

Alas, no, says the historian. Democracy was invented (if not exactly practised) by fifth-century Greeks and then developed by 18th-century Europeans. In the 20th century, it was only embellished.

This unsparing analysis and verdict is one Neil Postman would doubtless agree with. Postman, 68, chairman of the culture and communications department at New York University, is among our most trenchant and lucid social critics. His 20 previous works -- including Amusing Ourselves to Death, Technopoly and The End of Education -- constitute a comprehensive indictment of Western society, of technology run amok and of the insidious consequences that accrue to a culture drowning in indiscriminate information and in thrall to mindless entertainment.

As the title of his new book -- Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future -- implies, our own epoch is now beyond salvation. As Postman notes, it has been a century of "almost unrelieved horror."

But if we are going to have what he delicately calls "an agreeable encounter" with the next century, if we are not, in other words, going to deconstruct into tribal anarchy and social chaos, we will need to cross the looming millennial divide fortified with some good ideas.

Not ideas about technology or medical miracles or space travel, or the airy razzle-dazzle notions that appeal most to campaigning politicians and advertising copywriters (the distinction is subtle). But ideas that somehow advance, in Postman's words, "our understanding of ourselves or enlarge our definition" of what it means to be human.

In which case, he suggests, we could do worse than turn to the thinking that characterized the Age of Enlightenment. To Rousseau, Diderot and Voltaire, David Hume and Edward Gibbon, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, among many others. Stretching roughly from the middle of the 17th century into the 19th, it was the Age of Reason, he argues, that effectively gave us the best of the modern world. And though we scarcely pay it homage, barely acknowledge it, in fact, we are in debt to it still.

No misty-eyed romantic, Postman is not unaware that the 18th century built its own shops full of horrors: the burning of witches, for example; the Catholic Inquisition; the practice of slavery. "And I'm not saying we should become the 18th century," he adds, lighting up a Marlboro. "But we should use it for what it's worth and for all it's worth."

Increasingly, however, Americans seem indifferent to the past. Even his brightest students, he says, "have no interest in history. They seem to think that everything began with the Beatles." This book is, in part, his response.

In it, Postman guides us through several now familiar neighbourhoods -- the curse of technology, and our continuing failure to calculate its impact on our lives; the nonsense of deconstructionism; the glut of information that too often comes without context or explanation; the sickening decline of formal education; and the loss of childhood (which flowered first in the 18th century), and is now simply another economic category to be milked, like young adults or seniors.

And then there is democracy. Of course, many commentators -- Harper's editor Lewis Lapham among them -- insist that even the democracy we have is an elaborate charade, that real power today is vested principally in multinational corporations which buy and sell governments like so much corn seed, and are almost entirely unaccountable to popular will.

Postman fundamentally agrees, but is less cynical. "Democracy is mythic," he says, lighting another cigarette. "Everyone knows that it's not working the way James Madison or anyone else thought it should. But it's out there as a kind of ideal." The very fact that his friend Lapham can say what he says is evidence that Lapham, too, subscribes to the ideal.

The problem for Postman is that all of these trends are fast conspiring to undermine the political health -- and even survivability -- of our communities, and it is not at all clear to him that they will survive. No society, he maintains, can long endure "without a story that provides a basis for moral conduct." And given the unspeakable horrors it has witnessed, 20th-century civilization surely faces what Vaclav Havel has called "a crisis in narrative," with neither religion nor science able to claim the ground of absolute and irrefutable truth.

"I think what form religion will take in the next century is one of the most interesting and important questions," Postman says. "Because we do need some transcendent story."

Postman's son, Mark, is an astrophysicist, part of the team that conducted the original explorations with the Hubble telescope (another son is a novelist and his daughter teaches kindergarten).

"So I said to him one day, 'Now that you've looked further into the universe than ever before, did you see God?' "

"And he said to me, 'Dad, if you want to see God, you don't have to use the Hubble telescope. You just have to look outside.' I was very proud of that.' "

But that paternal pride is tempered by Postman's abiding pessimism about modern life. "Soon," he quotes the poet Randall Jarrell in his epigraph, "we shall know everything the 18th century did not now, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us."

Michael Posner is an arts reporter with the Globe and Mail, where this was published Saturday, November 20, 1999.

Postman

Building a Bridge to the 18th Century

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________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________In Building a Bridge to the 18th Century, Neil Postman weaves an interesting tale on the development of a new "conversation" that Americans should commence. His book was an enjoyable read, and it re-ignites debate over policy questions and knowledge claims in the process of decision making. However, in formulating his arguments, he ran afoul, as so many do, in misconstruing the meaning of social construction and the manner in which society constructs knowledge. At the same time, Postman correctly articulates 'a crisis in narrative' (p.113). His story is best understood in the context of a manifesto that sees current narratives as inadequate for the future development of a healthy society. He sees a loss of meaning in our stories and reminds us that the 18th century is a social location that provides a foundation from which to launch a new conversation in order to restore a more meaningful social life. His manifesto does not seem to be interested in contemplation or conversation as he implies. Instead, I will argue that Postman is looking for efficiency and efficacy, and advocating his perspective from an ethnocentric foundation. I will attempt to provide the notion that there are multiple stories to be told, and that retelling one can be another form of advocating the status quo. In this review, I will focus on Postman's arguments for healthy skepticism, some of his contradictions, the notion of individualism and egoism, and the misconstruction of postmodern thought.

Postman articulates the need for critical thinking and skepticism. Robert K. Merton was instrumental in bringing out this point earlier in the century. However, Merton had other problems including circular arguments and a refusal to question scientists as knowing best. Regardless, Postman isn't the first to talk about skepticism. This issue is rather, what type of skepticism? Does Postman advocate that future scientists be skeptical? Or, by chance, would he prefer the general public be better 'skepticizers' over the scientific enterprise? The latter is quite important. However, if Neil Postman means the former, he has been misled into believing that science can be separated from society. In this book, he put the need for critical thinking and skepticism in the context of education, and he assumes that the teachers in pre-college schools do not have the abilities to correctly teach science in schools, I posit that his policy suggestion for teaching critical thinking and skepticism are impossible at worst, and improbable at best. This is another reason I argue that his work is a manifesto with little chance of making it to the policy-making stages. In other words, it is not a "real problem."

By asking serious questions about the education, information, childhood, narratives, and democracy, Postman is advocating the use of already told stories from the 18th century to help guide Americans through the 21st century. He does have some compelling arguments. For instance, he notes that the "cheerleaders" of technology advancement are not concerned with the slower-paced knowledge acquisition of the printed word. I agree with his characterization of the digit-heads. However, at the same time, there are contradictions in his argument. Do I want to revert to a typewriter? Do I want to search the library racks several times a week on a research project, when I can review current literature on-line, in the comfort of my home office? These are important questions. At the same time, they do not address the central theme of the present book, which carries the assumption that we don't need a narrative such as postmodernism to help solve our "problems." Instead, going back to the 18th century will suffice. "Right" and "Wrong" may become essential questions. However, they are meaningless unless we ask for whom something is "right" or "wrong"?

I also think that Postman missed a critical aspect of his own study. He uses Tocqueville to illuminate individualism and egoism as divergent cultural systems that epitomize the "right" and "wrong" directions, respectively, that our culture has taken. I see Postman's characterization here as lacking any sociological context. He totally misses what Emile Durkheim (1901) claimed was essential -- a social fact! For instance, couldn't anomie be more important than both individualism and egoism? I would argue that normlessness plays a more central role in the lack of meaning, if this lack of meaning exists in society at all. To Postman, "good science" appears to be a natural and distinct entity that is attainable by coordinating the efforts of technology, language, information, narratives, children, democracy, and education. Although, he admits this is a daunting task, he assumes that social constructivist perspectives cannot help us get there. However, it is exactly social constructivism that illuminates the language, information, narratives, and education that are so integrally connected to what science produces -- knowledge claims. In trying to understand knowledge claims, history is important.

I agree with Postman that history is very important. However, deriving a narrative out of a couple of Western European men may not be the answer. Why must there be only ONE narrative? In leaning toward the postmodern, and more specifically, interpretavist perspective (Stone, 1997; Yanow, 1996; Donna Haraway, 1997, 1991), I suggest that a multiplicity of disciplines and perspectives be utilized in crafting multiple stories. Why would one narrative be better than two? It occurs to me that Postman is looking for efficiency and efficacy, not contemplation and conversation as he attempts to imply. For instance, he notes that:

"But one worries, nonetheless, that a generation of young people may become entangled in an academic fashion that will increase their difficulties in solving real problems -- indeed, in facing them" (p.80).

Before he suggested this notion, Postman creatively crafted 6 questions (p.42-53). The second question is "Whose problem is it?" (p.45), and the third is "Which people and…institutions might be" injured?(p.45) By asking these questions, doesn't Postman realize that race, class, and gender matter? One's social location is an important predictor in telling us what a problem is. When one has privilege (and, by the way science is a privileged enterprise as we enter the new millennium!), one fails to see much of the obvious. So, is it "bad" for young people to get "entangled" in discourse that doesn't necessarily apply to "real problems"? I ask, whose problem is it? I also find it interesting the Postman joins the legions of anti-postmodernists by using the overused case of Alan Sokal (p.80). Does Postman realize that Sokal submitted this "spoof" to a non-refereed journal? Again, the evidence provided by Postman (Sokal, 1996, 1996) is meager at best. At worst, it illustrates Postman's misunderstanding of social constructivists. Social constructivists do not believe that everything is constructed. They realize that material entities are real. However, when human agency is coupled to material agency the "dance of agency" (Pickering, 1995) is illuminated, and this is essentially a social construction.

Postman reminds us that we can find narratives "…in the older ones we have already been telling " (p.113). But, then he contradicts himself by telling us that "…we require…a retelling of our older tales to encompass many truths and to let us grow with change" (p.115). By refuting postmodern thought in the beginning of the book, Postman has constructed his own dilemma. In order to see the multiplicity involved in technology, knowledge, culture, and "truth," one must look toward a perspective that reflects a diversity of ideas. I see postmodern thought as a more encompassing perspective for exactly the type of understanding of "many truths" Postman is trying to advocate. He neglects the diversity of postmodern thought. For instance, the interpretative approach used in policy analysis studies (Yanow, 1996) illuminates the cultural artifacts that produce myths and knowledge claims and sorts out the ambiguous nature of policy decisions. It is obvious to me that Postman hasn't picked up this sort of analysis. More importantly, studies that have illustrated the "culture" of science (Shapin, 1994) help illuminate how closely science and society are integrated. Postman argues that some of the sciences (Medicine over witchcraft, etc.) "…are privileged because they are 'truer'" (p.76). If he were to take his own suggestion and read Shapin, he may come to a more interesting conclusion. The conclusion would be maybe culture shapes the way we form "truth!"

Finally, for the purpose of reminding my audience that I do know when the alphabet was invented (something that Postman challenges me on -- p.171), I ask him "what do you mean?" Should we use one story to tell the multiplicity of narratives about the alphabet? Or, should we use the story that is technically the first documented writing system of Chinese civilization -- around c.1523-c.1027 B.C.? Perhaps he may have been interested in the "sequoyah" alphabet, used by the Cherokee, created in the mid-1700s? Regardless, an ethnocentric (in this case Roman-centric) factoid about the invention of the alphabet does little to help create a conversation about "our new media and our old democracy" (p.154). Neil Postman's book helps create a conversation, but the conversation is one sided and is not a conversation that will "bridge" anything. Having said this, his book is well written, and does provide the semi-knowledgeable reader of science and technology with a foundation to begin conversation.

REFERENCES

Durkheim, Emile. (1901). Suicide: A Study in Sociology. New York: The Free Press (1951)

Haraway, D. J. (1997). Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan© Meets_Oncomouse™. New York: Routledge.

Haraway, D. J. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs, and Women:The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.

Pickering, A. (1995). The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Postman, N. (1999). Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve our Future. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Shapin, S. (1994). A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England. Chicago, IL.: The University of Chicago Press.

Sokal, A. (1996). "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity". Social Text, 14, 217-252.

Sokal, A. (1996). "A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies". Lingua Franca, May/June, 62-64.

Stone, D. (1997). Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making. New York: W.W.Norton & Company.

Yanow, D. (1996). How Does A Policy Mean? Interpreting Policy and Organizational Actions. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.

--John D. Wilkins

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BUILDING A BRIDGE TO THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: HOW THE PAST CAN IMPROVE OUR FUTURE, by Neil Postman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.

Where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket? We are going to the twenty-first century, and Neil Postman wants to make sure that we pack carefully. What shall we bring? Nothing less than the best ideas of the eighteenth century.

But wait a minute, Mr. Postman: why the eighteenth century? Other centuries have had their share of achievements, and the eighteenth has certainly had its share of atrocities. What distinguishes it as the century most suited to guiding us into the twenty-first? Postman posits at least three reasons. First, we are too far removed from earlier centuries to be sensible of their applicability to our own: it is too wide a gap to be spanned by Postman's bridge. Second, it is in the eighteenth century that we find "the beginnings of much that is worthwhile about the modern world": our best ideas about science, freedom, education, government and economics all, says Postman, have their roots in the eighteenth century. Third, the eighteenth century is home to the Enlightenment: here reason, and perhaps more importantly skepticism, prevail upon progress.

And as far as technology goes, a little reason and a healthy dose of skepticism are all Postman asks that we bring with us: let us apply "quiet reason to the fury of technological innovation," he urges. By skepticism he does not mean the predisposition to find fault with technology, but rather the inclination to question the sense and the soundness of technological developments and dogma.

The questions that Postman proposes we ask of technologies are intended to help us filter out the jargon of progress, efficiency, and whizbangery and to perceive the crucial, central and oft-overlooked whys, hows, and implications of technology. What is the problem to which this technology is a solution? Whose problem is it? Is it actually a problem at all? Who will pay for it? Who will benefit from it, and who stands to suffer from it? What new problems might arise from solving this one?

These are useful questions indeed, but it may well be that they will never be asked by the people Postman most needs to convince. One suspects that Postman's writings appeal most to people who already agree with him, and who are pleased to have their own opinions so gracefully and clearly articulated. To technophiles, however, he makes his a voice too easy to ignore: it is difficult to imagine that those swept up by technology will set aside their gadgets to read the (hand)writings of one who boasts of not having a computer and who considers the Internet a "mere distraction."

Postman's cautions against allowing ourselves and our society to be unthinkingly swept along on the tide of technological innovation are well-founded and persuasively presented; but his curt dismissal of information technologies does his argument a disservice.

MR. POSTMAN DELIVERS A MESSAGE

BUILDING A BRIDGE TO THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: How the Past Can Improve Our Future

 Reviewed By JENEFER CURTIS

Neil Postman, chairman of the Department of Culture and Communications at New York University, wrote this book -- and 20 others like it -- with a pad of paper and a pen. He doesn't own a computer, sees the Internet as "a mere distraction," doesn't use voice mail or call waiting (they are "uncivil") and, while he has access to a fax machine, he limits his use of it, not fond of the urgency it suggests. For the record, his car has cruise control, but he says, "I have never used it since I do not find keeping my foot on the gas pedal a problem."

Postman explains his old-fashioned ways: "I will use technology when I judge it to be in my favour, I resist being used by it."

By Neil Postman Knopf, 193 pages, $35

When Swiss novelist Max Frisch said, "Technology is a way of organizing the world so that man doesn't have to experience it," Postman was listening. Just as he likes to control his own car, Postman prefers to talk directly to the people in his life, to read books where the symbols of language call on his cognitive abilities rather than the mere "recognition" that images require, and to see children retain some modicum of innocence before an omnipresent media forces them to grow up. As many critics have said, he is America's quintessential humanist.

Yet, such a title only captures part of Postman's mandate. For 30 years, the Brooklyn-born son of a truck-driver has been churning out volumes in all the fields of language, education, media and technology.

These books share, in addition to the dry wit that has become his hallmark, dour warnings around three themes -- first, what he calls "the triumph of one-eyed technology," how in Cyclops-like fashion, technophiles see what is straight ahead of them and are blind to what their inventions are doing to our creativity, values and socialization process; second, "the humiliation of the word," a phrase borrowed from French theorist Jacques Ellul to describe a decline of respect for the written word in the face of the barrage of visual forms of communication; and finally, that it is up to the education system to try to counterbalance these forces.

Postman's sarcasm and his ability to vitalize the highly academic with a slice of everyday living make him delightfully readable. (Criticizing the image-dominated newspaper USA Today, he envisions a time when we will give awards for "the best investigative sentence." In a famous exchange with U.S. culture theorist Camille Paglia, he explains about the second commandment ("In the beginning was the Word . . .") that "Moses, with this commandment, was the first person who ever said, more or less, 'Don't watch TV; go do your homework.' "

However breezy Postman's prose may be, a sense of the foreboding lurks. Take his most famous book, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985),a no-holds-barred castigation of television that argues, in the tradition of Marshall McLuhan, that because TV is a visual medium, everything on its screen is entertainment, "one vast arena for show business," which is leading us essentially to stop taking the world seriously. As animated as its pages are, they contain several chilling passages, such as, "In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us (Big Brother) while Huxley feared what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right."

In Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century,Postman is at his sternest. While he hasn't given up completely, he's given up on this century. "Is it not true that the 20th century has been an unrelieved horror?" he asks, positing that we are without "gods to serve, hollow and anxious, distrusting language, lacking conviction, suspicious of truth." His answer? We should look back, specifically to the 18th century, for it is there, where the Enlightenment was challenged by the romantics of the counter-Enlightenment, that we shall find a "humane direction" for our 21st century. Goethe, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Kant, Hume, Gibbon and Thomas Paine didn't just bring us progress, he argues, but raised important questions about it, "especially about the connection between technological and moral progress."

In fact, there is much in the 18th century that speaks to our 20th-century angst, and Postman is right to point us in this direction. But so intent is he on advancing his agenda (chapter titles are Progress, Technology, Language, Information, Narratives, Children, Democracy and Educacation -- his pet topics from other books) and airing his complaints about our century, that he often manipulates his material to fit his thesis.

Take, for example, his chapter on language. In an effort to arm us against the abuses of propaganda, Postman stresses the complex relationship between language and reality -- how, put simply, language essentially creates our perceptions of reality, making a "world of words" separate from reality, the "world of non-words." The Enlightenment, says Postman, was the Age of Prose, of expository prose that helped to provide a "truer representation of reality than ever before."

This sets Postman up for an ill-informed attack on postmodernism and the field of deconstructionism, which he likens to a "form of mental illness." ("You can get a PhD in this sort of thing.") His argument is that deconstructionism is simply "a continuation of Enlightenment thought" in its recognition of the limits of language to represent reality. But, he claims, its belief that "there is no reality to represent" reduces it to "nonsense." It's a very cursory interpretation that would have both Diderot and Derrida turning in their graves.

He is on firmer ground in his chapter on children. One of Postman's most original books, The Disappearance of Childhood (1979), argues that childhood as a category was born with the printing press, which created adulthood (those who could read) and hence childhood (those who couldn't read). In the same way, TV, with its visual, non-hierarchical nature (anyone can understand it) has caused childhood to disappear completely: five-year-olds watch condom commercials and wars. The new book extends that argument to all information technology: "What does a forty-year-old have to teach a twelve-year-old if both of them have been seeing the same TV programs, the same movies, the same new shows, listening to the same CDs and calling forth the same information from the Internet?"

He applauds the 18th century, particularly some of the writing of John Locke (who died in 1704) and Rousseau, which helped preserve the wonder and innocence of childhood and the very category itself. Today, though, "children are neither blank slates nor budding plants. They are markets . . . consumers whose need for products are roughly the same as adults."

One of Postman's loudest complaints is the transformation of the meaning of the word "information." He stands in nostalgic awe of the 18th century when, as he sees it, information had a purpose -- you passed it along because it helped your friend do something. (Diderot wrote essays on the different methods of catching fish worms, we are told.) Today, we are concerned solely with the moving of information and getting more of it to more people in more diverse forms. Not only do we have no purpose for it, but we have created an information glut of "garbage proportions."

And, he asks, what problems does all this information solve? Did Iraq invade Kuwait because of a lack of information? Does homelessness exist because of a lack of information? Is your relationship on the brink for lack of information? No, what ails us the most has nothing to do with the sort of information made accessible by computers and the like.

Postman believes that the 18th century's greatest gift is skepticism, the incredulous reaction of Hume, poets Blake and Shelley and others, to the rationalist assumptions of the Enlightenment. In the book's last chapter, Postman offers five ways teachers should teach "skepticism based on reason," including teaching students how to ask good questions, rather than how to learn answers. (What if, for example, those studying history were to ask, "Whose history is this?" or, "Whose definition is this?") This is Postman the radical, the author of Teaching as as Subversive Activity (1969), who wanted schools to be "training grounds for subversion."

Critics often accuse Postman of describing society's ills without offering solutions. To his credit, he offers answers here, placing high expectations on both education and the newspaper industry (the latter should run "wisdom pages" as opposed to mere information pages). Postman also refers frequently to the Internet in this book, a subject that, until now, he seems to have taken great joy in ignoring.

In his own way, Postman has a Cyclops mindset, seeing only the problems technology brings and ignoring its gains -- for example, as Peter Drucker notes in the October Atlantic Monthly, thanks to computer software, a piano-tuning now takes 20 minutes rather than three hours, and one engineer can design buildings in a a couple of days, rather than 25 engineers taking two months.

Similarly, when it comes to his list of villainous authors, he should read the fine print. In Being Digital, a book Postman scolds constantly, Nicholas Negroponte explains that he decided to write a book because multimedia offers too little to the imagination. By contrast, writes Negroponte, "the written word sparks images and evokes metaphors that get much of their meaning from the reader's imagination and experiences. When you read a novel, much of the color, sound and motion come from you." Postman couldn't have said it better himself.

That said, every society needs its technological conscience, and Postman performs the role well. Of course there are others who help and have helped him -- Harold Innis, McLuhan, Jacques Ellul, Daniel Boorstin, author of The Image and, more recently, Clifford Stoll, author of Silicon Snake Oil. But none of these have synthesized the learned with the everyday in such an engaging way, all the while spotting commonalities from a huge range of life experiences, as Postman has. McLuhan, urging us to cultivate our own technological conscience sooner than later, writes, "the future of the future is the present." Maybe it's also in the past.

Jenefer Curtis is an Ottawa journalist and speechwriter. She is writing a graduate thesis on Neil Postman's work. This review appeared in the Globe and Mail, on November 20, 1999.

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On a scale of one-to-ten, with one indicating the scurrilous blather of the tabloid press and ten suggesting the obscurantist blather of neomarxist postmodernism, Postman’s work merits a seven.

He writes plainly, as befits a winner of the U.S. National Council of Teachers of English’s George Orwell Award for Clarity in Language, but he also writes intelligently about important issues. Unlike many self-styled "culture critics," whose prose is accessible only to those masochistic enough to have kept abreast of the theoretical drek of French deconstructionism, Neil Postman worries about practical matters, about fundamental issues of democratic politics, and about the technological future that awaits us as we step uneasily across the bridge to the twenty-first century.

What seems to bother Postman most is the fact that the great innovators (whether Bill Gates or Bill Clinton) seem to have no frame of reference other than their own experience, and that experience is lamentably that of the twentieth century. Such apologists for trends such as information superhighways and economic globalization appear to know nothing of history, philosophy and culture; they live digitally in the specious present. Ignoring Santayana, they are the ones who, being ignorant of the past, are condemned to repeat its mistakes.

Against them, Postman sets himself up as "an enemy of the twentieth-century." His position is well argued and gloriously optimistic. Why, he affirms, should we lower ourselves to the ethical dictates of a century in which more people have been slain in the name of ideology (ours and theirs) than at any other time in human history? Ours is quite obviously the most hideous century to have even existed, the wondrousness of automobiles. paperback books, home vacuum cleaners, penicillin and e-mail notwithstanding. Speaking personally, I recall learning in high school history (which may or may not be taught anymore) that the "reign of terror" during the low point of the French Revolution managed to sever 20,000 heads from various allegedly aristocratic bodies. This was represented as a singularly evil; it is, however, surely small change when compared to relatively recent events in Sudan, Rwanda, Cambodia, Viet-Nam, to say nothing of Germany in the 1940s or the mindless slaughter of the so-called "Great" War of 1914-1918.

What separates Postman from other "doom-and-gloom" merchants is the fact that he actually possesses a social conscience. I mean by this that he is not only adept at revealing falsehoods, stupidities and conscious evil-doings on the part of those in society with the means to impose their will on others (this is important but it is not enough) but that he is also able to show us how, modestly and with respect to all others, to extricate ourselves from the mess we have created.

He asks us to analyze our habits of thinking and to inquire where and when and why we ask all the wrong questions. Ours is, he readily agrees, the "age of information" but information is not enough. Information (bits and bytes of unrelated data) does not comprise knowledge (the assembly of data into a coherent package of thought), much less wisdom (the placing of thought about any specific subject into a larger context). Neil Postman does not oppose information; he merely wishes that it be allocated to its proper epistemological category and that it be interpreted in terms of a sustained moral discourse.

Where do we find the language to carry on this discourse? For Postman, the 18th century is not a bad place to start. Therein lived Dr. Johnson and Voltaire, Diderot, Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant. Therein Bach, Handel, Mozart and Hayden composed their music as did Beethoven his 1st symphony. It was the era of Swift, Defoe, Fielding and the inestimable William Blake. It was the time of Hogarth, Gainsborough, David and Reynolds. It featured Rousseau. It gave credence to Edmund Burke. It inherited ideas from Isaac Newton and John Locke; it gave ideas to John Stuart Mill and the great romantic poets.

Postman, of course, is culturally limited. His exemplars are largely Dead White European Males but, worse, he emphasizes Dead White American Males-Franklin, Washington, Jefferson and (happily) Tom Paine. Still, his aim is to make us think of the "Enlightenment" as a time which presented the ideas that enlarged human freedom, broadened the scope of science and made that amusingly ambiguous word "happiness" a legitimate condition for "all men" to "pursue."

I’ll be frank. I had hoped to like this book more than I did. Postman’s earlier works seem to me to be more focussed, more insightful and more compelling. Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century is simply too convenient, a fin-de-siecle offering that is much less than a masterpiece. He is, moreover, far too willing to disdain Charles Darwin (though he cheerfully gives both Marx and Freud a "pass") when he speaks not only of 19th century thought but also of 20th century education. Still, as an antidote to the relentless "high tech," neo-conservative propaganda of our age, it is certainly useful.

After all, when genuine "conservatives" have been silenced and authentic "leftists" have either been marginalized or cast willfully into the role of terrorists (or Queen’s Park rioters as I write this the day after Toronto has experienced its mini-version of the "battle of Seattle"), there is nothing left but a return to civil discourse. It takes an enormous leap of faith to believe that civility will be everywhere or anywhere adopted, not only in exotic states but in the main cities of western democracies.

Howard A. Doughty teaches Canadian Government and Public Administration in the Police Foundations program at Seneca College in King City, Ontario.

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Building a Bridge to Neil Postman

"Arguing in My Spare Time" No. 2.19

by Arnold Kling

Oct. 17, 1999

If media-studies professor Neil Postman understood marketing, he would have titled his new book "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Philosophes." Instead, he chose "Building a Bridge to the 18th Century," which is just as cute but probably not as likely to rise to the top of the best-seller list.

Postman and I disagree about the Internet. He hates the Net for the same reason that he hates television. I love the Net for the same reason that he hates television. That is, relative to television, I see the Net as an alternative that offers hope, while he sees it as one more impediment to enlightenment, or Enlightenment.

Apart from that minor quibble, Postman's views are very congenial to me. In his climactic chapter on education, which is worth the price of the entire book, he advocates five habits (falling two short of the magic number).

1. Ask questions. Postman says that "question-asking is the most significant tool human beings have." I agree. In fact, when I used to interview job candidates for positions of financial analyst or programmer, I would give a one-minute job description and then ask, "What questions do you have?" My hiring decision was based primarily on the quality of the questions asked by the applicant.

2. Respect language. Postman argues that people need to learn the differences between clear, meaningful language and manipulative gobbledygook. It was in that spirit that when I found that my 14-year-old was going to be assigned a "Seven Habits" book in school, I immediately ordered for her a copy of Wendy Kaminer's "I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional." Kaminer’s work contains a brutal dissection of the (lack of) meaning of Covey's "synergy" Habit. Incidentally, Kaminer's book is out of print. I was able to locate a copy at Powells' Used Books, 3000 miles away, and have it shipped to me. For those of you keeping score, I believe that is one point for the Internet.

3. Think scientifically. Postman says that we should not want children to accept Darwinian or Copernican theory only because we drill it in to them on tests. Rather, they should develop the ability to evaluate these theories against their competitors. In our company, I chose the title "chief scientist" because I, too, prefer to evaluate Internet business hypotheses for myself rather than accept the opinion of experts.

4. Honor history. Postman says that there is value in understanding ideas in the historical context under which they were developed. My high school chemistry teacher, Frank Quiring, took exactly that approach. We followed the progression of the science of chemistry from the formulation of the gas laws through the development of the atomic theory to the discovery of neutrons, protons, and electrons, and on to quantum theory. We learned chemistry by putting ourselves in the position of scientists as they thought in their time. We saw how each new empirical discovery led to theoretical attempts to explain it. At the time, I took it for granted that this was how chemistry was taught. In retrospect, it must have taken tremendous effort by Mr. Quiring to structure the subject in this way. I despair of my daughters ever having such a course taught to them.

The fifth habit that Postman advocates is the teaching of comparative religion in school. As far as that suggestion is concerned, I am relatively agnostic.

With his keen intellect and originality, I wish that Postman had less disdain for the Internet. I feel that, just as Postman was left to speculate about what the great figures of the 18th century would say about modern media, I am left to speculate about what Postman would say if he were to give the Internet its due.

I outline many books, but so far none of them have been written. One recent outline was for a book called "The Internet and Society," with chapters on economic effects, censorship issues, culture and community, political effects, identity and privacy, and education. It is on the latter issue, the relationship of the Internet to education, that I feel we are in particular need of Postman’s insights.

I have heard pundits proclaim that the Internet will completely revolutionize education. However, these claims remind me of the hype that is given to software development tools and methodologies. As Frederick Brooks pointed out in "No Silver Bullet," such tools and methodologies at best can address only the incidental difficulties of software development. However, they do not help with the fundamental task of thinking and problem solving. By the same token, I would be eager to hear of an application of the Internet for education that addresses the fundamentals of the learning process.

For example, some Internet pundits are excited by the potential for "distance learning." I confess that I fail to grasp their vision. If viewing a lecture in my living room is a powerful learning experience, then why didn’t the VCR produce a revolution in education? I would go further and argue that if the VCR had appeared prior to the development of print media, then the invention of the book would be considered a technological advance. Imagine, being able to stop and think without having to press "pause." Or being able to repeat a section without having to hold down "rewind."

Postman argues that the Enlightenment inaugurated the concept of childhood as a period of gradually learning how to function as an adult. He suggests that modern media are undermining this by presenting young people with so much information so early that they no longer enjoy the innocence of childhood. Indeed, I would go further and suggest that at the current juncture of history, children often know more than their elders about the Internet and its cultural effects.

The other night, I went to a meeting at our local high school. A teacher who is organizing a student workshop on ethics asked for parents to volunteer to participate by talking about ethical issues in their work. I offered to talk about ethical issues related to the Internet.

My plan is to let the students pick a topic to address. However, I hope that they want to discuss censorship. The issues of pornography and hate speech will serve to illustrate the differences in the generational knowledge bases.

Suppose that we discuss the challenges of regulating pornography. I imagine that, compared with the students, the teachers will be more familiar with the history of this issue. The teachers will know better than the students, and perhaps better than I, how factors such as the First Amendment and the challenge of defining pornography have affected the evolution of censorship.

On the other hand, I imagine that the students will understand, but the teachers may have trouble grasping, the ways in which Internet architecture affects the issue. The students will have a sense of the practical difficulties of regulating content that is transported across international boundaries as sequences of 0’s and 1’s. Also, the students will be able to appreciate that the difference between how consumers interact with the Net versus with television makes it easier for me to tolerate hard-core pornography on the former than puerile sexual innuendo on the latter. If only I could count on my daughters to react to an 8 PM sit-com, such as "Friends," by forwarding it to

Abuse@NBC.com and hitting the delete key!

What the Internet has done to education is that it has taken away from teachers, and adults in general, the respect and authority that comes from superior knowledge. I believe that this has contributed to the crisis of trust that seems to exist in education. We are trying to operate a peculiar hierarchy in which standards are set for students by often less-knowledgeable teachers, whose standards in turn are set by politicians and parents with even fewer qualifications. The new constitution of checks and balances that is required in education today is one that needs to be worked out.

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NEIL POSTMAN'S WORKS ARE A COMPREHENSIVE INDICTMENT OF WESTERN SOCIETY

By Michael Posner

The year, let us say, is 2150.

A group of us, historians, labourers, thinkers, artists, has assembled to contemplate the wisdom and legacy of ages past. In time, we arrive at the 20th century, a period we now refer to as the Second Dark Ages, marked by violence on an unprecedented scale, epidemics of genocide, terrorism and wholesale barbarism.

But surely, someone says, the 20th century must have had something to recommend it. Surely there was something more illuminating, more ennobling than mere (and fairly primitive) technological innovation -- the automobile, the television, the computer. Surely five billion people must have been able to develop one inspiring, enduring, life-enriching, transcendent idea or sustaining ideology.

The archive discloses nothing. In the 20th century, we are forced to conclude, millions of people lived longer only to suffer more, fleeing from their reality in the fog of meaningless pageant and vacuous entertainment, a daily opiate.

Wait, says another. What about democracy, the great triumph of representation by population, which spread across much of the planet?

Alas, no, says the historian. Democracy was invented (if not exactly practised) by fifth-century Greeks and then developed by 18th-century Europeans. In the 20th century, it was only embellished.

This unsparing analysis and verdict is one Neil Postman would doubtless agree with. Postman, 68, chairman of the culture and communications department at New York University, is among our most trenchant and lucid social critics. His 20 previous works -- including Amusing Ourselves to Death, Technopoly and The End of Education -- constitute a comprehensive indictment of Western society, of technology run amok and of the insidious consequences that accrue to a culture drowning in indiscriminate information and in thrall to mindless entertainment.

As the title of his new book -- Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future -- implies, our own epoch is now beyond salvation. As Postman notes, it has been a century of "almost unrelieved horror."

But if we are going to have what he delicately calls "an agreeable encounter" with the next century, if we are not, in other words, going to deconstruct into tribal anarchy and social chaos, we will need to cross the looming millennial divide fortified with some good ideas.

Not ideas about technology or medical miracles or space travel, or the airy razzle-dazzle notions that appeal most to campaigning politicians and advertising copywriters (the distinction is subtle). But ideas that somehow advance, in Postman's words, "our understanding of ourselves or enlarge our definition" of what it means to be human.

In which case, he suggests, we could do worse than turn to the thinking that characterized the Age of Enlightenment. To Rousseau, Diderot and Voltaire, David Hume and Edward Gibbon, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, among many others. Stretching roughly from the middle of the 17th century into the 19th, it was the Age of Reason, he argues, that effectively gave us the best of the modern world. And though we scarcely pay it homage, barely acknowledge it, in fact, we are in debt to it still.

No misty-eyed romantic, Postman is not unaware that the 18th century built its own shops full of horrors: the burning of witches, for example; the Catholic Inquisition; the practice of slavery. "And I'm not saying we should become the 18th century," he adds, lighting up a Marlboro. "But we should use it for what it's worth and for all it's worth."

Increasingly, however, Americans seem indifferent to the past. Even his brightest students, he says, "have no interest in history. They seem to think that everything began with the Beatles." This book is, in part, his response.

In it, Postman guides us through several now familiar neighbourhoods -- the curse of technology, and our continuing failure to calculate its impact on our lives; the nonsense of deconstructionism; the glut of information that too often comes without context or explanation; the sickening decline of formal education; and the loss of childhood (which flowered first in the 18th century), and is now simply another economic category to be milked, like young adults or seniors.

And then there is democracy. Of course, many commentators -- Harper's editor Lewis Lapham among them -- insist that even the democracy we have is an elaborate charade, that real power today is vested principally in multinational corporations which buy and sell governments like so much corn seed, and are almost entirely unaccountable to popular will.

Postman fundamentally agrees, but is less cynical. "Democracy is mythic," he says, lighting another cigarette. "Everyone knows that it's not working the way James Madison or anyone else thought it should. But it's out there as a kind of ideal." The very fact that his friend Lapham can say what he says is evidence that Lapham, too, subscribes to the ideal.

The problem for Postman is that all of these trends are fast conspiring to undermine the political health -- and even survivability -- of our communities, and it is not at all clear to him that they will survive. No society, he maintains, can long endure "without a story that provides a basis for moral conduct." And given the unspeakable horrors it has witnessed, 20th-century civilization surely faces what Vaclav Havel has called "a crisis in narrative," with neither religion nor science able to claim the ground of absolute and irrefutable truth.

"I think what form religion will take in the next century is one of the most interesting and important questions," Postman says. "Because we do need some transcendent story."

Postman's son, Mark, is an astrophysicist, part of the team that conducted the original explorations with the Hubble telescope (another son is a novelist and his daughter teaches kindergarten).

"So I said to him one day, 'Now that you've looked further into the universe than ever before, did you see God?' "

"And he said to me, 'Dad, if you want to see God, you don't have to use the Hubble telescope. You just have to look outside.' I was very proud of that.' "

But that paternal pride is tempered by Postman's abiding pessimism about modern life. "Soon," he quotes the poet Randall Jarrell in his epigraph, "we shall know everything the 18th century did not now, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us."

Michael Posner is an arts reporter with the Globe and Mail, where this was published Saturday, November 20, 1999.