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“Culture without print is not culture. It is television, and television is no more a culture than the wallpaper is a landscape.”

~ Neil Postman

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Greetings, dear newsletter subscribers!

Apologies (again(!)) for being late with the newsletter. Although this week's newsletter is longer than usual, as I mentioned last week, moving forward they should be considerably shorter...

This week we're looking closely at Chapter One of Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death entitled, "The Medium Is The Metaphor."

The Importance of Symbol & Metaphor

Postman begins the first chapter of his book by referring to the importance of symbolism in American history: the Minuteman became the symbol of the Revolutionary War, of freedom, of the American spirit. The Statue of Liberty became a symbol of openness to those seeking a better life, of freedom, of the “melting pot” that New York City, and by extension, the United States, was becoming. Postman titled the first chapter, “The Medium is the Metaphor,” which is a play on his mentor Marshall McLuhan’s famous aphorism, “The medium is the message.”

For Postman, the “medium” of the Revolutionary War was summarized by the metaphor of the Minuteman. Postman’s argument is that in his era (and to a great extent, in ours) the “medium” of entertainment is summarized by the metaphor of Las Vegas. The values of entertainment are the values of Las Vegas and these values have seeped out of Las Vegas into every aspect of human life.

It’s worth noting that it takes awhile to discern the metaphors and how well (or poorly) they provide a key to understanding the events of history. As with all interpretive keys, they’re only useful up to a certain point. As Postman says, “I should be very surprised if the story I have to tell is anywhere near the whole truth. We are all, as Huxley says someplace, Great Abbreviators, meaning that none of us has the wit to know the whole truth, the time to tell it if we believed we did, or an audience so gullible as to accept it.” (p. 6)

Postman wrote his book in the early 1980’s, though the television had been around since the 1920’s (though it only really became a cultural phenomenon during the 1950’s). I mention this by way of pointing out that it took awhile for cultural critics to discern the practical effects that television was having on culture. The question that recurs to me is: what would Postman have to say about the smartphone, artificial intelligence, crypto currencies, and all the emergent technologies that are on the horizon?

Unfortunately, Postman passed in 2003, so it is up to us to carry on the torch of his work. Inspired by the ideas in Chapter One, the question that I ask myself is: “What are the mediums and what are the metaphors in our own time?” I have come up with my own ideas, but I would be glad to hear what you come up with: what are some of the great metaphors that would help future generations (and ourselves!) understand the times we’re living in?

Cultural Symbols and American Identity

Throughout American history, there have been many symbols that have caught the public attention: among others there was the cowboy: a symbol of the Wild West, and of rugged individualism; the environmentalist: a symbol of the mountains and beaches of the West coast; the business tycoon: a symbol of New York and Chicago, and of the Gilded Age. Another great American symbol could be summarized with the words, “Made in the USA.” These words became totemic in America during the late twentieth century as more and more industry was offshored. Behind this symbol was the idea of American integrity and concern for craftsmanship. Postman writes, 

“American businessmen discovered, long before the rest of us, that the quality and usefulness of their goods are subordinate to the artifice of their display; that, in fact, half the principles of capitalism as praised by Adam Smith or condemned by Karl Marx are irrelevant.” (p. 4-5)

I mention “Made in the USA” as it reflects a strain within American culture (and I’m sure that it is present in other countries) that places a premium on integrity. Postman’s quote suggests that alongside the importance of integrity is another characteristically American tradition: making money as the highest of values.

It is a simplification, but in many ways the history of America has been a history of a battle of two main cultures: the culture of the “country,” of small town America, which prioritizes community, the local, a love of and care for the land, and whose focus tends to be on the past and present, and the culture of the city, which prioritizes the individual, efficiency, comfort, speed, and whose focus is on the future. It could be argued that post-war America has been a history of the victory of the culture of the city over the culture of the country.

The Medium Is The Metaphor

Halfway through the first chapter, Postman summarizes his book:

“[T]his book is an inquiry into and a lamentation about the most significant American cultural fact of the second half of the twentieth century: the decline of the Age of Typography and the ascendancy of the Age of Television.” (p. 8)

He goes on to explain that this shift has irreversibly shifted the content of public discourse, for two such different media cannot express the same ideas. With the decline of the influence of text-based media, the content of public business (including education, politics, religion, etc.) must be translated into terms that are appropriate for television. Postman spends a good deal of the rest of the book looking at what being made “appropriate” for television entails.

As I have written many times before, our work is to discern the invisible forces working upon us. Postman is correct in his insistence that the movement from the Age of Typography to the Age of Television is the most defining cultural shift in the twentieth century. Once one understands this, it becomes easier to understand the other great cultural shifts that have taken (and are taking) place.

Language And Worldview

“I have remained steadfast to his [McLuhan’s] teaching that the clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.” (p. 8)

Postman touches on another invisible factor that is noteworthy: one’s language affects one’s worldview:

“[V]ariations in the structures of languages will result in variations in what may be called ‘world view.’ How people think about time and space, and about things and processes, will be greatly influenced by the grammatical features of their language.” (p. 9-10)

One of the great blessings of my life was the opportunity to become fluent in the Greek language. On learning a second language, one becomes aware of both the strengths and the deficiencies in one’s native tongue. After religious experience, language is the deepest and most ancient aspect of a culture and bears within itself an incredible depth and breadth. One’s language acts as an invisible influence over the way we think, the kinds of conversations that we have, and so on.

The Problem With Metaphor

What is the great problem with metaphor? There are actually many problems with metaphor (as a tool for abbreviation, not all metaphors can be considered universal, and can have the effect of confusing, rather than clarifying, things), but perhaps the greatest problem is that metaphor creates a certain distance between human thought and human experience. To this end, Postman quotes the German idealist philosopher Ernest Cassirer: “Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself. He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of [an] artificial medium.” (p. 10)

My intuition is that Postman’s attempt to interpret the Genesis admonition against graven images broadly could have been more usefully focused on the Biblical writer’s realization that there was a danger of creating an imbalance between the image and other forms of human expression. Representational images are metaphors and should not be worshipped; images point to a reality beyond themselves.

When, however, one remains within the metaphor, one runs the risk of living a disincarnate life. One of the great problems with the trajectory of modern life, influenced as it has been by the moving image, is that we are living increasingly disconnected from nature and the natural world.

The Clock as Metaphor

This phenomenon is not new, however, Postman refers to the great cultural critic Lewis Mumford who pointed out that the clock

“‘is a piece of power machinery whose “product” is seconds and minutes.’ In manufacturing such a product, the clock has the effect of disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences. Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God's conception, or nature's. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created.” (p. 11)

So, here is another invisible influence on our life: time as measured by a clock. I don’t want to go too far down any given rabbit hole, lest we lose track of the text at hand, that said I would like to point out one thing that may help in framing our reading: when babies are born they are largely unaffected by the invisible influences that we are now discussing. It is only over time, as one learns to speak and to interact with culture, that these invisible influences begin to control one’s life. The goal with our current endeavor is to identify these influences and then to ask the basic question: do these influences improve, or do they detract from my life? And if they do not improve my life, what can I do to mitigate their effects?

Before moving on, I’d like to drill down a bit deeper into Mumford’s thought as filtered through Postman:

“In manufacturing such a product, the clock has the effect of disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences…In the process, we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded…And thus, though few would have imagined the connection, the inexorable ticking of the clock may have had more to do with the weakening of God's supremacy than all the treatises produced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment; that is to say, the clock introduced a new form of conversation between man and God, in which God appears to have been the loser.” (p. 11-12)

The clock was invented in the 14th century and was a powerful step in the direction in which we find ourselves today: a world that we usually conceive of as a machine, a world of “mathematically measurable sequences.” The monks who invented the clock did not realize the effect that their invention would have, and the modern world’s mechanistic worldview certainly cannot be traced back simply to the invention of the clock, but the clock does represent an important milestone in the development of machine thinking.

Understanding Metaphor

“To be able to see one's utterances rather than only to hear them is no small matter, though our education, once again, has had little to say about this.” (p. 12)

Our history and our literature are replete with metaphors, some of which are helpful and some of which reflect the understanding of bygone eras. As our culture embraces new technologies, new relationships are developed between humans and the world around us, and we subconsciously create new metaphors, many of which eventually find their way into the public consciousness and into the dictionary.

For example, if you asked someone at the end of the twentieth century to explain what a “meme” was, most would have had no idea what you were talking about (even though the word as well as the idea of a “meme” had been around for awhile). As new technologies are adopted, new ways of relating to the world develop, “What I mean to point out here is that the introduction into a culture of a technique such as writing or a clock is not merely an extension of man's power to bind time but a transformation of his way of thinking—and, of course, of the content of his culture.” (p. 13)

Because we find ourselves in a reality where culture is constantly developing, and because the speed of this change increases dramatically daily, it can be difficult to discern. As with most things, however, this process is like a muscle that can be stretched and strengthened, “Thus, it takes some digging to get at them [the new metaphors and their consequences], to grasp, for example, that a clock recreates time as an independent, mathematically precise sequence; that writing recreates the mind as a tablet on which experience is written; that the telegraph recreates news as a commodity. And yet, such digging becomes easier if we start from the assumption that in every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself.” (p. 14) We could take this last line as our mantra: every new tool has unintended consequences; if we were wise, we would be hyper vigilant about the tools that we allow ourselves and our communities to adopt.

As we strengthen this muscle, we will find ourselves becoming increasingly skeptical about “reality” as it is described to us by the modern world. When one understands how culture develops and the ideas that are hidden within and propagated by our tools, one becomes increasingly skeptical about modern man’s ability to understand and navigate the world properly. In this endeavor, we stand in the ancient tradition of techno skeptics, from Socrates and Plato, to Thoreau and Postman, who question the wisdom of our tools.

“We do not see nature or intelligence or human motivation or ideology as ‘it’ is but only as our languages are. And our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture.” (p. 15)

As I mentioned at the beginning of this installment, feel free to read ahead, but so as to allow others to catch up with us, there will be no new reading this week. Also, this will give us all an opportunity to discuss Chapter One this coming week.

Next week we will take a quick break from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, but we will get back to it the following week.

As I've mentioned before, please join the conversation on my Substack page, on X, or wherever you would like (I am on most major social platforms and will be crossposting).

Have a great week/end...enjoy Neil Postman's excellent book...and reach out if you have any thoughts/questions you'd like to share!

Warmly,

Herman

PS: Do you know of someone who might be interested in joining our book study? If so, please forward this email on to them!