Media critic Neil Postman (1931-2003) wrote convincingly about the dystopia produced by modern media in books like “Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse In the Age of Show Business” (via Third World Traveler)

Postman asserted the superiority of generalization over specialization, showed why media analysis was the important field for cultural analysis, analyzed the role of education in controlling populations, and drew on the writing of Aldous Huxley to expose the roots of the debasement of public discourse in modern media.

[All these themes are very close to my own way of thinking and I explored some of them in “The Language of Empire”. Not being familiar with Postman at the time and writing on the subjects of torture and war, my book naturally explored “control through pain” but had less to say about “control through pleasure,” unless you include the chapter on pornography. But my conclusions weren’t very different from Postman’].

Postman’s thesis in “Amusing Ourselves to Death” can be summed up briefly as follows:

1. The form of the media shapes its content.
2. TV, the most influential media today, ensures that content is entertaining, short, fact-driven, and divorced from argument
3. This encourages a decontextualized mode of thinking – a mode that is extremely useful to elites, because it discourages understanding the narrative behind random events.

Thus, ‘torture,’ ‘9-11,’ ‘Madoff,’ or ‘Goldman Sachs’ remain as memes that can never be fitted into an overarching narrative line that would make real sense of them. Anyone who does succeed in contextualizing these memes inevitably faces charges of “conspiracy theory” and “antisemitism,” charges that are less about anti-racism today than they are about control.

Here’s Postman invoking Aldous Huxley, in whom I’ve also had a long standing interest, first, because of Huxley’s personal experiments with Eastern mysticism, and then, because of his exploration of mind-control:

“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.”

“Amusing Ourselves to Death” also describes the greatly attenuated role of publishing/writing in the modern world:

“Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published on January 10, 1776, sold more than 100,000 copies by March of the same year. In 1985, a book would have to sell eight million copies (in two months) to match the proportion of the population Paine’s book attracted. If we go beyond March, 1776, a more awesome set of figures is given by Howard Fast: “No one knows just how many copies were actually printed. The most conservative sources place the figure at something over 300,000 copies. Others place it just under half a million. Taking a figure of 400,000 in a population of 3,000,000, a book published today would have to sell 24,000,000 copies to do as well.” The only communication event that could produce such collective attention in today’s America is the Superbowl.” (p. 34)

As for Postman himself, here’s an excerpt from an insightful recollection of the man, the scholar, and the teacher by another media critic, Jay Rosen.

Postman, world famous media scholar, was famous among students and friends for refusing any technology thought to “improve” something in which he had never requested improvements. A simple rule, with hilarious consequences. He didn’t care if you had a better solution to a problem he never felt was real, and he would make fun of you if you tried to recommend it.

Resenting technology

“Television, he (Postman) always said, is inhuman to children because it gives them answers to questions they never asked. It did this for purposes of control. Educational television—Sesame Street—was not the alternative; it was the worst offender. This view denied a lot of people, including educated liberals, comfort. To him that was education.

Postman resented being controlled by technology or bureaucracy, way more than most Americans. He resented the new for retiring an “old” that had no reason to quit. But he thought it funny—and fascinating—that people allowed this manipulation, especially Americans, who were the most open to it. Postman had a big audience and gave many speeches in Germany, where several of his books were best sellers during the 1980s, in part because there was so much in American life he simply rejected. Thus he wrote with a pen, never used email, owned no computer and had no regrets about never going online. To him it was not a matter of convenience. It was about keeping an independent mind by making independent use of objects. In this way, he taught me and many others to think for ourselves, precisely because we didn’t think as he did.

Postman’s general philosophy, which was General Education, also known as the Great Books approach, was made known to me shortly after I enrolled in a graduate program under his chairmanship in 1980. I was there to study the media, and he was at that time a Professor of Media Ecology (a name for his anti-discipline). As he explained to me: “We’re just trying to give people a good liberal arts education.” Which, he further argued, and easily demonstrated himself, was exactly the tool needed to understand the gathering beast… The Media. In an age of specialization, this is not how academic life works. But his did.”