Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future - Hardcover

Postman, Neil

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375401296 ISBN 13: 9780375401299

Publisher: Knopf, 1999

Synopsis

At a time when we are reexamining our values, reeling from the pace of change, witnessing the clash between good instincts and "pragmatism," dealing with the angst of a new millennium, Neil Postman, one of our most distinguished observers of contemporary society, provides for us a source of guidance and inspiration. In Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century he revisits the Enlightenment, that great flowering of ideas that provided a humane direction for the future -- ideas that formed our nation and that we would do well to embrace anew.

He turns our attention to Goethe, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Kant, Edward Gibbon, Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, Jefferson, and Franklin, and to their then-radical thinking about inductive science, religious and political freedom, popular education, rational commerce, the nation-state, progress, and happiness.

Postman calls for a future connected to traditions that provide sane authority and meaningful purpose -- as opposed to an overreliance on technology and an increasing disregard for the lessons of history. And he argues passionately for specific new guidelines in the education of our children, with renewed emphasis on developing the intellect as successfully as we are developing a computer-driven world.

Witty, provocative, and brilliantly reasoned, Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century is Neil Postman's most radical, and most commonsensical, book yet.

About this title

About the Author

Neil Postman is University Professor, Paulette Goddard Chair of Media Ecology, and Chair of the Department of Culture and Communication at New York University. Among his twenty books are Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly. He lives in New York City.

From the Inside Flap

en we are reexamining our values, reeling from the pace of change, witnessing the clash between good instincts and "pragmatism," dealing with the angst of a new millennium, Neil Postman, one of our most distinguished observers of contemporary society, provides for us a source of guidance and inspiration. In <b>Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century</b> he revisits the Enlightenment, that great flowering of ideas that provided a humane direction for the future -- ideas that formed our nation and that we would do well to embrace anew.<br><br>He turns our attention to Goethe, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Kant, Edward Gibbon, Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, Jefferson, and Franklin, and to their then-radical thinking about inductive science, religious and political freedom, popular education, rational commerce, the nation-state, progress, and happiness.<br><br>Postman calls for a future connected to traditions that provide sane authority and meaningful purpose -- as opposed to an

Reviews

"I am not suggesting that we become the eighteenth century, only that we use it for what it is worth and for all it is worth," Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death; Technopoly) argues in this penetrating, extended essay. Though other periods are rich with learning and wisdom, Postman believes the 18th-century Enlightenment is uniquely valuable and relevant to today's world. It gave us the rationalist notion of human progressAexpressed and supported by science and technologyAand the romantic critique, with its idea of inward progress and its suspicion of the machine. It gave us discursive narrative prose as the prototypical model of thought, along with more subtle, less hysterical critiques of language than postmodernists offer today. It gave us floods of new information, yet ridiculed information as an end in itself, urging a healthy respect for context and purpose. It gave us the idea of childhood as a distinct life stage linked to education and nurturance, illuminated by two contrasting visionsALocke's blank slate to be written on and Rousseau's plant to be cultivated. And it gave us representative democracy. All these were expressions of a world in which the dominant media, unlike today, was the printed word. As that environment fades, the complex tensions Postman illuminates are replaced by shallow sloganeering by those who present themselves as the embodiment of novelty and daring. Postman forcefully argues that we can use the complex legacy of the past to resist being swept into a shiny, simpleminded new dark age. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An intriguing cross-century dialogue. Neo-Luddite Postman (The End of Education, 1995, etc.) looks to the Age of Reason for an antidote to the hazy values of postmodernism. At the core of this intellectual journey is the concept of progress. While not quite an invention of the Enlightenment, the belief in progress as desirable and inevitable took root in the embrace of human rationality that fueled the scientific (in the broadest sense) progress of the 18th century. At the same time a powerful Romantic critique emerged, providing Postman a complex conception of progress to wield against a wide array of 20th-century adversaries. Against Derrida's deconstruction of meaning, there is the razor-sharp logic and utter common sense of Hume; against the worship of technology as the source of all good, there is Rousseau. This is a rather diverse (to put it kindly) position to uphold, but in fact Postman is arguing more for a cultural mindset than a specific philosophy: The problem with the 20th century is that it is the 18th century run amok; the combination of confidence and skepticism once associated with progress has been replaced by idolatry and nihilism. Postman seeks to bring us back to the moderate use of reason tempered by adherence to sensible cultural norms by contrasting contemporary and historical perspectives on technology, language, information, social narratives, children, democracy, and education. He shifts precariously back and forth between positive social commentator and borderline reactionary, but on the whole this is an erudite, thoughtful contribution to public discourse. While political theorists will be appalled by Postman's assertion that the meaning of the word ``democracy'' is ``more or less settled'' in this century and his simplistic political analysis, his examination of language and information is original and sophisticated, his essay on children thought-provoking. This book offers contemporary society a grounding in the past that is more than just intellectual nostalgia. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In this wide-ranging call to action, Postman, author of such impassioned books as The Disappearance of Childhood and Amusing Ourselves to Death, offers us the chance to ground our discussions of the 21st century in the historical and philosophical bedrock of the 18th. Postman is certainly no victim of technolust--he has no e-mail, no PC, and writes his manuscripts in longhand. Those Luddite tendencies notwithstanding, Postman says he is not against technology but wants it viewed as merely a tool. He cautions that, in the words of Thoreau, "our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end.'" The philosophers and scientists whose works and thoughts he invokes include Goethe, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Smith, Paine, Franklin, and Jefferson. These worthies focused much attention on the technological developments of their times and all the resulting philosophical, social, political, and spiritual ripples. None of these thinkers "could possibly have embraced... the idea that technological innovation is synonymous with moral social and psychic progress." Yet today, too many e-mail postings and boardroom discussions--corporate, school, and library alike--begin with that certainty. Postman asks and tries to answer the core questions: "What is progress? How does it happen? How is it corrupted? What is the relationship between technological and moral progress?" And at center: "What is the problem to which technology is the solution?"
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Western, and particularly American, society is dynamic and constantly creating new realities. Thus, it is hardly surprising that prophets from Al Gore to Mike Ditka regularly encourage us to look to the possibilities of the future rather than the "limitations" of the past. Yet, as Postman, a professor of culture and communication at NYU, reminds us, the future is an illusion that does not yet exist, while our past will help turn that illusion into a new reality. In this compact and stimulating work, Postman illustrates how many of the beliefs and assumptions that dominate our culture have their roots in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Concepts of political rights and religious and intellectual freedom, cornerstones of our political system, were first asserted then. Perhaps the most subversive, revolutionary idea--that of human progress via the utilization of reason--rang the death knell of the old order and remains a dominant creed in Western thought. Postman is a gifted writer who treats an important but complex subject with clarity and insight. For those who want to know where we came from in order to guide us to where we are going, this will be an extremely valuable book. Jay Freeman

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

A Bridge to the 18th Century

The day before I began writing this book, I heard on the radio that somewhere between thirty-five percent and sixty-two percent of Americans believe that aliens have landed on Earth. Surveys vary about the exact percentages, as does the look of the aliens. Some are green, some gray. Some have ears, some do not. All have large heads. The report reminded me of a survey I saw some years ago about the number of people who believe in the Devil. Not the devil as metaphor and not a generalized concept of evil; the Devil, one might say, as a creature of flesh and blood, someone who walks the earth, looks like us, and is inclined to offer sly temptations and unholy propositions. Believers have in mind, I think, something on the order of Stephen Vincent Benét's creation in The Devil and Daniel Webster. I can't remember the percentages the survey uncovered, but they were high. I can't remember because I have repressed the figure or, as the psychologists now say, gone into denial. Conventional wisdom tells us that going into denial is not healthful, even though it is obvious that doing so has many advantages. Ernest Becker explains some of them in his famous book The Denial of Death. But one does not have to go as deeply as Becker to make good use of denial. If you are an American writer who fancies himself an heir of the Enlightenment, it is hard to write three pages unless you emphatically deny that many of your potential readers believe in deal-making devils.
        Denial is also helpful when one begins to contemplate the mental condition of some important members of our intellectual elite. I refer to those who have fallen under the devilish spell of what is vaguely called "postmodernism," and in particular a subdivision of it sometimes called "deconstructionism." Academic responsibility requires me to give some detail about this world-view, and I will do so in a later chapter. Here, I need only remark that in this way of understanding things, language is under deep suspicion and is even thought to be delusional. Jean Baudrillard, a Frenchman, of all things, tells us that not only does language falsely represent reality, but there is no reality to represent. (Perhaps this explains, at long last, the indifferent French resistance to the German invasion of their country in World War II: They didn't believe it was real.) In an earlier time, the idea that language is incapable of mapping reality would have been considered nonsense, if not a form of mental illness. In fact, it is a form of mental illness. Nonetheless, in our own time the idea has become an organizing principle of prestigious academic departments. You can get a Ph.D. in this sort of thing.
        There is, of course, a connection between alien- and devil-believers and a certain variety of deconstructionists. They are people in the thrall of a serious depression, and, in truth, it is unseemly to make fun of them, especially since most of us are suffering in varying degrees from the same malady. If I knew more about psychology, I might be able to give the sickness a name. Instead, I turn to poets -- not for a name but for a confirmation and a cause. Yeats, for example, gives us a precise description of our wayward academics and our overcommitted alienites: The former lack all conviction, while the latter are full of passionate intensity. T. S. Eliot, you will remember, wrote of the hollow men occupying a wasteland. Auden wrote of the age of anxiety. Vachel Lindsay wrote of leaden-eyed people who have no gods to serve. Edna St. Vincent Millay, in her book Huntsman, What Quarry?, wrote a poem which goes to the root of the problem. Here is an excerpt:
Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts . . . they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun; but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric.
No loom to weave facts into fabric, people with no gods to serve, hollow and anxious, distrusting language, uncertain about even the most obvious features of reality, lacking conviction, suspicious of truth.

What are we to make of this? There are many possibilities. Among them are the strange and fanciful dreams that seem always to accompany the onset of a new millennium. Some believe a new age signals the Second Coming of Christ, some believe it signals the end of everything, and in between the varieties of delusion are legion. The possibility that strikes me as most plausible is more mundane. And it has happened before, with or without the coming of a new millennium. I refer to the confusion that accompanies the absence of a narrative to give organization and meaning to our world -- a story of transcendence and mythic power. Nothing can be clearer than that we require a story to explain to ourselves why we are here and what our future is to be, and many other things, including where authority resides. I am not writing this book to document the loss of narrative. I have done that already, as have others in books better than mine. Besides, I have no intention of writing still another depressing book about the breakdown of the human spirit. But it may be said here that when people do not have a satisfactory narrative to generate a sense of purpose and continuity, a kind of psychic disorientation takes hold, followed by a frantic search for something to believe in or, probably worse, a resigned conclusion that there is nothing to find. The devil-believers reclaim a fragment of the great narrative of Genesis. The alien-believers ask for deliverance from green-gray creatures whose physics has overcome the speed of light. The deconstructionists keep confusion at bay by writing books in which they tell us that there is nothing to write books about. There is even one group who seeks meaning in the ingenuity of technological innovation. I refer to those who, looking ahead, see a field of wonders encapsulated in the phrase "the information superhighway." They are information junkies, have no interest in narratives of the past, give little thought to the question of purpose. To the poet who asks, "Where is the loom to weave it all into fabric?," they reply that none is needed. To the poet who asks, "What gods do you serve?," they reply, "Those which make information accessible in great volume, at instantaneous speed, and in diverse forms." Such people have no hesitation in speaking of building a bridge to the new century. But to the question "What will we carry across the bridge?" they answer, "What else but high-definition TV, virtual reality, e-mail, the Internet, cellular phones, and all the rest that digital technology has produced?"
        These, then, are the hollow men Eliot spoke of. They are, in a sense, no different from the alien- and devil-believers in that they have found a story that will keep them going for a while, but not for long. And, in a way, they are no different from those academics who find temporary amusement and professional advancement in having no story at all. I am not writing my book for these people. I write for those who are still searching for a way to confront the future, a way that faces reality as it is, that is connected to a humane tradition, that provides sane authority and meaningful purpose. I include myself among such people.
        Where shall we look for such a way? Well, of course, one turns first to the wisdom of the sages, both near and far. Marcus Aurelius said, "At every action, no matter by whom preferred, make it a practice to ask yourself, 'What is his object in doing this?' But begin with yourself; put this question to yourself first of all." Goethe told us, "One should, each day, try to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if possible, speak a few reasonable words." Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." Rabbi Hillel said, "What is hateful to thee, do not do to another." The prophet Micah: "What does the Lord require of thee but to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with Thy God." And our own Henry David Thoreau said, "All our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end."


I could go on nearly endlessly with these quotations, since the wisdom of the ages and the sages is not bound by time and space. We may add to the list Confucius, Isaiah, Jesus, Muhammad, the Buddha, Shakespeare, Spinoza, and many more. What they tell us is all the same: There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it always has been, and it is a delusion to believe that the future will render irrelevant what we know and have long known about ourselves but find it convenient to forget.
        How useful is it to be reminded? The words of the sages can calm and comfort us. They offer perspective and a release from the frenzy of speed and ambition. Very useful, I would say. But, of course, they are very far away from us in time and cultural conditions, and their advice is so abstract that it is difficult to see how we can turn much of it into practical and coherent instruction. In some parts of the Islamic world the commandments of Muhammad are, in fact, taken as imperatives of everyday life. And there are Christians and Jews who follow the Law down to the last detail. But for many of us, unsettled by the realities of vast change, especially technological change, fundamentalism of any kind rings hollow. We have problems and questions that Muhammad, Jesus, Hillel, Socrates, and Micah did not and could not speak of.
        Let us take a small but clear example. Not long ago (as these things are measured) scientists in Scotland successfully cloned a sheep. Another group of scientists in America cloned a monkey and a cow. And apparently, ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375401296
• ISBN 13: 9780375401299
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224