🐰 Down The Rabbit Hole 🕳️

“What we need to consider is not just how a technology works, but how it works on us and on our society. Each technology has an inherent bias. It has within its physical form a predisposition toward being used in certain ways and not others. Only those who know nothing of the history of technology believe that a technology is entirely neutral.”

~ Neil Postman

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Greetings, dear newsletter subscribers!

This week we're continuing our study of Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, in particular Chapter Three: "Typographic America." Without further ado...

Have you ever felt like you're living in your head while your body just...exists? Like there's some kind of invisible wall between what you think you need and what you actually need? This disconnect between mind and body is actually the result of a massive cultural shift that took place centuries ago, one that most are unaware of.

Today we're going to look at how the way we consume information fundamentally rewires our relationship with our own bodies, and how this explains everything from our exercise obsession to our chronic unhappiness, and most importantly—how understanding this hidden history can help you reclaim that integrated, coherent life your ancestors once lived. Hopefully by the end, you'll have a better understanding of why you sometimes feel like a stranger in your own skin.

The Myth of Progress

One of the difficulties we encounter in our efforts to understand the world that we live in is that our culture has an inherent bias for “new” and “better” things. One of the most pervasive myths of the modern world is that human history is a history of progressing towards something “better.” The problem, of course, is that there is no fixed and agreed upon understanding of what “better” means. I believe that there are, actually, criteria for determining what is “better” for humanity, but for now I’ll simply note that I agree with Postman in his argument that the Typographic Age is demonstrably better than the Visual Age, and that this is essentially an argument against the modern myth of progress. I would go one step further, however, and suggest that it’s likely that the age before the Typographic Age, the Age of Orality, was even better. Again, I don’t want to get into the weeds defining “better” here, but suffice it to say that, as I mentioned in the previous installment, “human-scale” is a good criterion for determining the goodness of a thing, and nearly everything in the Age of Orality was human-scale. A strong argument can be made that it is only at human-scale that true human flourishing can take place.

The Abstraction of Knowledge

An important change that has taken place since the ascendancy of the Typographic Age is the increasing abstraction of knowledge. This is something that I mentioned in the last installment, and I mention it again now as Postman includes a quote from Lewis Mumford making this exact point:

“‘More than any other device,’ Lewis Mumford wrote of this shift [from the oral to the typographic], ‘the printed book released people from the domination of the immediate and the local; . . . print made a greater impression than actual events. . . . To exist was to exist in print: the rest of the world tended gradually to become more shadowy. Learning became book-learning.’" (p. 33)

The importance of this shift cannot be emphasized enough, as it is the increasing abstraction of the world that has detached our inner world from the world around us. We have become a people whose source of truth, meaning, and reality exists primarily in our minds and sentiments, and only secondarily in our bodies and in the world around us.

This process has only sped up as we find ourselves spending more time in virtual worlds online. Increasingly, the line between the virtual world and the real world is being blurred, and there are real world consequences to this confusion. The most obvious consequence is that, as the distance between our minds and our bodies increases, we increasingly treat our bodies according to the “logic” of our mind. Our mind control our bodies, rather than acting in a synergistic relationship with our bodies. The body has a variety of needs and, if we listened to these needs in an intuitive manner, we would better know how to give our bodies the things that it needs. Instead, we leave it to our minds to decide what these needs are and to attempt to satisfy them. The problem, of course, is that our minds do not do a very good job of this, so our bodily needs do not get properly addressed, and then we wonder why we are so unhappy.

Many important issues like this are difficult to address because the world we find ourselves in lacks the language and experience to express these things. As mentioned before, it is difficult to learn about life in the Age of Orality as texts from this period are so limited. An example that might be helpful is that of the modern obsession with exercise. Modern exercise is a response to the realization that we have a body and that in order for it to be healthy, we need to give it exercise. The way I just described this situation is an indication of the problem: we think of the body almost as an appendage, rather than as part of a cohesive whole. Separating the mind from the body in this way is a modern invention that belies the underlying reality.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that exercise is bad. I’m simply pointing out that out that the way we think about the relationship between our minds and bodies is a problem. There was a time when humans lived integrated lives, where they didn’t divide the mind from the body in this way, and where their daily lives provided opportunities for physical exercise such that they didn’t need to find time to exercise. Because of this coherence in their lives, they did not feel a disconnect between the mind and the body, and most people did not suffer the kinds of mental imbalances that many (most? all?) modern people experience.

OK…that’s it for today! We are going to take a couple weeks off from our study of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, but we will get back to it soon!

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

Have a great week/end...I hope you are enjoying Neil Postman's excellent book...please reach out if you have any thoughts/questions you'd like to share!

Warmly,

Herman

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