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

This is my third Postman book and I am still enthralled in the reading of his works. Mainly, I believe, because he writes with a particular verve that I find lacking in many of his contemporaries. His discourse covers a wide range of topics, some of them superficially, but all of them intended to support his thesis: children are losing their childhood; and meaning needs to be revived in language, education, narrative, and culture. He is iconoclastic.Even though it is possible to read his book in a cursory manner, don't fault the easily accessible work as trite. Postman's criticism is erudite, precise and well-articulated. I hope he doesn't stop writing. His voice needs to continue.

Postman's books have always divided readers. Some feel that his critical eye is too focused on the past and doesn't adequately and realistically weigh in today's cultural variables. Others feel that his is one of the most stable and eloquent voices of reason in a predominately subjective society. While I'll admit that Postman is oftentimes to social criticism what Wynton Marsalis is to jazz, he is first and foremost a questioner, a modern day Socrates who asks how technology both hurts and helps us. It is his empirical approach that keeps me buying his books.To reduce Postman to a traditionalist is far too limiting. While he does champion the past and favor reason over emotion, he is also an idealist who believes that society has the power to cure what ails it, if it's only willing to take the necessary steps. "Building A Bridge To the 18th Century" is a collection of suggested steps based on 18th century utilitarian values and practices. Above all, I like Postman's style. He is a direct, eloquent writer, a person whose ideas and insights are clearly spelled out. And despite others' charge that he is a curmudgeon, I find him humorous and open-minded.

With the publication of "Building A Bridge To The Eighteenth Century", Neil Postman has produced another thoughtful, articulate, and informative tome describing the numbing effects of postmodern society on individual consciousness, moral values, and the disintegration of our culture. In previous books he cited the dangers associated with runaway technological innovation ("Technopoly") and the corrosive cumulative effect of the manipulation of what we see through electronic media, profoundly biasing the ways we come to view, interpret and understand the world at large ("Amusing Ourselves To Death"). Here he examines a multitude of problems associated with the obvious circumstances of our rapidly disintegrating sense of commonality with our fellows in local and regional communities.Not surprisingly, Postman finds solace and hope in the values and ideas of the Enlightenment, and in particular with authors like Voltaire, Goethe, Jefferson, and Thomas Paine. He quite artfully broaches the problems we currently have and meaningfully connects them to the assault on traditional systems of meanings that former societies had a wealth of. Yet Postman also understands one cannot simply glue or graft old ideas and values onto contemporary situations and expect them to cohere and work. Although he never quite articulates the notion, one can certainly connect the dots among the lines of his argument to disocver a stunning indictment of our present culture, which he apparently sees as hollow, superficial, and cravenly focused on material acquisition. In this fashion he seems to be accepting the arguments of a number of other contemporary thinkers who see the hope for the future in terms of recognizing what our material progress has cost. In saying that we have become so enamored of progress that we have lost our social narrative, he seems to be recognizing the degree to which our stated values and ideals no longer cohere or make adequate sense in terms of motivating or integrating the social community at large. In this he falls into a long tradition of social criticism that reaches back to classic sociologists like Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim, each of whom argued that rapid scientific and technological progress and the eclipse of the traditional values associated with Christian communities posed enormous dangers for continuation of western culture, since, unlike religion, science had no core values which could act to integrate the community by reference to common values and ideals. In this sense, one can draw a line between these 19th century thinkers and others like C. Wright Mills, John Maynard Keynes, the early Alvin Toffler (before he became an apologist and fellow-traveler of the rich and famous), and contemporary authors such as Noam Chomsky, Wendell Beery, and Theodore Roszak. This is a thoughtful and wide-ranging book written by someone who understands just how complex our current dilemma is, and who also appreciates that correcting it ta

Postman clarifies the impact that technology (computers and television) has on us to such an extent that I was tempted to toss my computer and TV out the window half way through the book. And while Postman has not personally succumed to the siren of the computer, his head is also not buried too deeply in the sand. If anything, he wants us to transcend the age of technology in the 20th century to a new enlightenment in the 21st century. At stake is the loss of childhood which he says was defined in the 18th century as a result of an earlier technological advancement: movable type.

This book speculates about the advice we might receive about our current society from the great philosophers of The Enlightenment. How could that possibly be interesting or relevant? When you read the book, you will find out. It is difficult to do second-hand justice to the book, in part because the writing is so superb. Some examples of his curmudgeonly style:"to insist that one's children learn the discipline of delayed gratification, or modesty in their sexuality, or self-restraint in manners, language, and style is to place onself in opposition to almost every social trend.""question-asking is the most significant intellectual tool human beings have. Is it not curious, then, that the most significant intellectual skill available to human beings is not taught in school?"[after suggesting that students be presented with both evolution and creation science] "'If we carried your logic through,' a science professor once said to me, 'we would be teaching post-Copernican astronomy alongside Ptolemaic astronomy.' Exactly." [Postman's point being that scientists have to learn to evaluate competing theories, not to accept the conventional scientific wisdom on faith]Postman disdains the Internet. He seems to view it as not being much different from television in its effects. Here I disagree with him. This disagreement is explained more fully in "Building a Bridge to Neil Postman," an essay that is available from me via email.