🐰 Down The Rabbit Hole 🕳️

“Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology.”

~ Neil Postman

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Watch As Video

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This week we're getting back to our study of Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, in particular Chapter Two: "Media As Epistemology." Without further ado...

Does having more information lead to more understanding or to less understanding? How do we learn the things we learn and what is the best way to learn them? These are some of the questions we’re going to look at today…and here’s one more: When did our civilization reach its peak?

It can be tempting to think that because we know lots of things and have access to a huge amount of knowledge that we are smarter and more knowledgeable than previous generations. It’s worth asking ourselves: is this truly the case?

The title of Robert Fulghum’s famous book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, gets to the heart of this question. As children, we learned directly from our parents, our siblings, and our friends. Children learn hands-on, directly, intuitively, and eventually through the spoken word. Another way of putting this is that children have a kind of oral culture. The things that children first learn prepare them for a lifetime of proper relationship with other people and with the world around them. Later on, children learn how to read and write, and their source of knowledge becomes increasingly typographic - based in books. This movement from hands-on knowledge to book-based knowledge is a movement from knowing things to knowing about things. Knowing about things can be important and useful, but it’s good to remember that the more knowledge we acquire in this way, the more distanced we are from actual hands-on knowledge.

Why does this matter? Among other things, it matters because how we learn things affects the value (and retention) of the things we learn. If, for example, the goal is to remember that we will burn ourselves if we put our hand on a hot oven, are we more likely to remember this better by reading about it in a book, or by actually burning our hand on a hot oven? Hopefully the latter will not be necessary, but if one learns the lesson in this way, one is much more likely to remember than if one simply reads about it in a book. The more distance there is between knowledge and the physical world, the less real the knowledge becomes, and the less connected we are with the physical world and with the people around us.

Today’s newsletter centers around epistemology, which is simply the area of philosophy that looks at how humans acquire knowledge. Chapter Two of Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death is titled, “Media as Epistemology,” and in it he looks at the transition that has taken place in the past hundred years from the Typographic Age to the Visual Age.

Resonance and Abstraction: The Gradual Distancing of “Truth” From Humans

“Because of the way it directs us to organize our minds and integrate our experience of the world, it [any given medium] imposes itself on our consciousness and social institutions in myriad forms. It sometimes has the power to become implicated in our concepts of piety, or goodness, or beauty. And it is always implicated in the ways we define and regulate our ideas of truth.” (p.18)

A core idea that Postman returns to is that every new medium, and every new technology, has a great deal of unintended consequences that are usually unexpected, are often ignored, and usually proceed unchecked because the usefulness/attractiveness of the new medium or technology is so enchanting. The history of civilization is a history of the increasing abstraction of human thought and of an increasing distancing from human’s innate powers.

When man first appeared, he developed an oral culture, which of necessity limited the amount of knowledge that could be passed on (the limit being the collective memory of the people). It also provided a filter as to what knowledge could be passed on, for knowledge was personally transmitted, each person transmitting the knowledge took responsibility for it, and it was communally transmitted - only those things allowed by the community to be transmitted were passed on. The most famous occurrence of this filter can be seen in the trial of Socrates, who was convicted of supposedly “corrupting the youth,” and his refusal to refrain from telling what he considered to be the truth.

Written text was a step away from oral culture, and a great step towards the increasing abstraction of language (and, therefore, of human thinking, culture, and of life). It was only with the advent of Gutenberg’s printing press in the 15^th century, however, that the weight was tilted nearly exclusively towards the written word, and mass literacy. Literacy accelerated the movement towards individualism, the abstraction of knowledge, as well as greatly diminished the capacity for communities to filter knowledge.

In the 21^st century, we find ourselves living atomized lives, solely bearing the burden of not only finding and understanding knowledge, but of evaluating its veracity, its practical value, its moral quality, as well as situating it in a context in which it can have and generate meaning. And we are attempting this impossible task in a media environment that has completed tilted towards the visual world. Postman will get into what this shift means later on, but for now suffice it to say that visual media is the most immediate and powerful in its ability to bypass the human mind and to trigger our most basic instincts. Increasingly, we live in a culture that reacts to stimuli on a visceral level, rather than rationally tries to understand it, and to respond to it without emotion. Having left our oral culture far behind, we no longer have the social cohesion and assistance of the hive mind (and intuition) to help us process knowledge and to navigate the world.

From Group Intuition to Personal Intuition

When we zoom out and look at epistemology in this way, we can see that humanity has gone through three main transitions, each of which has weakened human’s ability to process knowledge. Initially, in the Age of Orality, humans acquired knowledge both intuitively as well as communally. Knowledge was filtered by the community and the intuition of each member of the community resonated with the accepted knowledge (absent this common intuition, knowledge would not make it through the filter of the community). With the advent of the Typographic Age, any and all knowledge was allowed to flow into written texts that could be distributed independently of any given community. This was a boon for the advancement of science and knowledge, but it left the individual as the arbiter of truth. While human intuition was ultimately the arbiter of “truth” in the Typographic Age, communities could still find cohesion through the acceptance of a canon of agreed upon books, and the fixed word provided an anchor for human thought and communication. With the advent of The Visual Age however, human intuition is all that we have to discern the truth, meaning, etc. of any visual stimuli that we encounter. “Truth” used to be something that communities shared and guarded, and it is now a complete abstraction that is determined individually in the moment.

Modern Mythology

“We must remember that Galileo merely said that the language of nature is written in mathematics. He did not say everything is. And even the truth about nature need not be expressed in mathematics. For most of human history, the language of nature has been the language of myth and ritual.” (p. 24)

A great deal of cultural criticism consists in discerning, pointing out, and critiquing the myths that we as moderns accept as inherently “true.” Our culture’s obsession with numbers and quantification to the exclusion of any other way of thinking about things is one of our greatest blind spots.

Because of our obsession with numbers and with the scientific approach to the world, it has become increasingly difficult for us to relate to, and to engage with the natural world in a wholistic way: “For most of human history, the language of nature has been the language of myth and ritual.” The result of this deficiency in our relationship is that we have increasingly disconnected/extracted ourselves from nature. This disconnection has serious consequences for the ways in which we treat (and abuse) nature. Even more catastrophic are the ways in which we treat and abuse our own human nature.

“These forms [myth and ritual], one might add, had the virtues of leaving nature unthreatened and of encouraging the belief that human beings are part of it. It hardly befits a people who stand ready to blow up the planet to praise themselves too vigorously for having found the true way to talk about nature.” (p. 24)

Typography Vs. Visuality

"They delude themselves who believe that television and print coexist, for coexistence implies parity. There is no parity here." (p. 28)

Postman wrote his book more than forty years ago, and even then he was already noting that the visual medium (television) had already surpassed the written medium. The advent of the internet (and especially of social media) has only solidified this reality. I point this out because most people do not ask themselves the question: “Is our culture more affected by images or by written words? Am I more affected by one or the other?” Because these changes happen slowly, ecologically, we don’t notice them and so we don’t ask these kinds of questions. This is much more the case with younger generations who never experienced a world where the image didn’t reign supreme.

What does this mean for us, though? If we accept Postman’s position that, “the epistemology created by television not only is inferior to a print-based epistemology but is dangerous and absurdist,” (p. 27) then we need to live our lives in ways that minimize image-based culture, especially as it relates to the upbringing of children. We would do well to surround ourselves by people who share our convictions, and to remember that most of the culture around us does not (literally) think the way that we do.

One of the reasons that our culture is in such a bad state is that logic and reasoned argumentation are no longer regarded as the proper source for coming to an agreed upon truth. Image based culture creates people who believe that truth is based on how one feels, and that “facts” are therefore mostly irrelevant. Clearly, one cannot have a fruitful conversation or debate with someone who does not share the foundation of traditional truth claims.

“Like the fish who survive a toxic river and the boatmen who sail on it, there still dwell among us those whose sense of things is largely influenced by older and clearer waters.” (p. 28)

Was The Age of Typography The Apex of Civilization?

“Obviously, my point of view is that the four-hundred-year imperial dominance of typography was of far greater benefit than deficit. Most of our modern ideas about the uses of the intellect were formed by the printed word, as were our ideas about education, knowledge, truth and information.” (p. 29)

I love Neil Postman and greatly appreciate the critical perspective he provides in understanding the modern world. That said, at least for the time being, I remain somewhat agnostic as regards his enthusiasm for The Age of Typography. I certainly recognize the incredible material benefits that the mass produced written word provided. That said, whether or not the “dominance of typography was of far greater benefit than deficit” is a topic that is definitely open to debate.

One of the unintended, and rarely appreciated, consequences of the Age of Typography is that humanity lives under the constant shadow of nuclear annihilation, new technologies appear to have made modern people less content, not more content, and modern technologies such as AI provide additional causes for mass anxiety.

One of the great causes that hides behind many of the modern world’s ills is that, as humans have discovered increasingly powerful tools that provide us leverage to create big results, we increasingly create things: spaces, concepts, ways of being that are not to human-scale. A good example of this is the modern big box store (Walmart, Target, etc.). Yes, we are able to get a lot of things inexpensively because of the leverage that bulk purchasing, etc. can provide, but we often forget to ask ourselves important questions like: Do I really need all this stuff? And: What kind of a community and culture does this kind of commerce create (and do I like it? As a human, does it serve me well?) “Is it human-scale?” is a great question that one can ask to determine the relative value of a thing.

I mention this because the Age of Typography enabled a world of increasingly powerful leverage to be created. The Age of Orality that preceded it was an age where nearly everything was human-scale, and therefore human-centric. It is easy as moderns to dismiss the virtues of the Age of Orality, but I think we would be well served to try to both appreciate and understand these virtues, as well as, to the extent possible, to adopt them in our own lives.

OK…that’s it for today! Next week’s installment will look at Chapter Three of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death.

As always, please join the conversation on Substack + on other platforms.

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