I still remember sitting in my car, just having come out of the bookstore, beginning to read his book Technopoly. I had already read Amusing Ourselves to Death and considered him to be an American prophet. And it was in 1999 that my son and I got to hear him do a reading at a bookstore in downtown Chicago.Neil Postman followed in the footsteps of other prophets, people like Orwell and Huxley. They warn us about ourselves and our focus on DISTRACTIONS. We think we have no need for a purpose outside of our own “personal peace and affluence” – that from another prophet, Francis Schaeffer.
If you have read this musing, this far, you might consider spending a few minutes contemplating the introduction of Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death. May it cause a pause in thought, pondering both the present and the future, the temporal and the eternal.
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, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.
This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business