In the preface to his book "Amusing Ourselves to Death," Neil Postman writes of The Age of Television: "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." And in the next paragraph, "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."
I won't attempt a summary here, though I will say that it was easily one of the more important books I've ever read -- one of those that will permanently alter the way you see the world. This type of work is a modern-day hint to why the early stages of philosophies and religions are always accompanied by "prophets" or "seers". There's nothing supernatural about this, it's just that some rare people have an unusual capacity for perceiving not only the external qualities of their society but the collective "spirit" behind it, which is composed of the fears, dreams, compulsions, and desires of the masses. In short, they are possessed with an understanding of how the "Mind at Large", at least on the cultural scale, is working at that particular point in history. Postman identifies some of the inner characteristics of contemporary mass culture and finds that the mental atmosphere hanging over the United States is not looking very good. Yet, as he notes in the references to
Brave New World, few people are taking notice because of "man's almost infinite appetite for distractions."
Here's one minor passage from the book that I thought was interesting:
"In Lewis Mumford's great book
Technics and Civilization, he shows how, beginning in the fourteenth century, the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers. 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irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded. Indeed, as Mumford points out, with the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events. 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. Perhaps Moses should have included another Commandment: Thou shalt not make mechanical representations of time." And later, "Our own tribe is undergoing a vast and trembling shift from the magic of writing to the magic of electronics. 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."
In a later chapter he writes briefly about a religious sect known as the Dunkers, which was attacked for its unconventional forms of worship but did not, as a rule, write down their beliefs or practices. A co-founder of the group is quoted in the book:
"
When we were first drawn together as a society, it had pleased God to enlighten our minds so far as to see that some doctrines, which we once esteemed truths, were errors, and that others, which we had esteemed errors, were real truths. From time to time He has been pleased to afford us farther light, and our principles have been improving, and our errors diminishing. Now we are not sure that we are arrived at the end of this progression, and at the perfection of spiritual or theological knowledge; and we fear that, if we should feel ourselves as if bound and confined by it, and perhaps be unwilling to receive further improvement, and our successors still more so, as conceiving what we their elders and founders had done, to be something sacred, never to be departed from." Postman goes on to comment: "Benjamin Franklin describes this sentiment as a singular instance in the history of mankind of modesty in a sect. Modesty is certainly the word for it, but the statement is extraordinary for other reasons, too. We have here a criticism of the epistemology of the written word worthy of Plato. Moses himself might be interested although he could hardly approve. The Dunkers came close here to formulating a commandment about religious discourse:
Thou shalt not write down thy principles, still less print them, lest thou shall be entrapped by them for all time."
