Customer Reviews

Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future

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This book speculates about the advice we might receive about our current society from the great philosophers of The Enlightenment.

How could that possibly be interesting or relevant? When you read the book, you will find out.

It is difficult to do second-hand justice to the book, in part because the writing is so superb. Some examples of his curmudgeonly style:

"to insist that one's children learn the discipline of delayed gratification, or modesty in their sexuality, or self-restraint in manners, language, and style is to place onself in opposition to almost every social trend."

"question-asking is the most significant intellectual tool human beings have. Is it not curious, then, that the most significant intellectual skill available to human beings is not taught in school?"

[after suggesting that students be presented with both evolution and creation science] "'If we carried your logic through,' a science professor once said to me, 'we would be teaching post-Copernican astronomy alongside Ptolemaic astronomy.' Exactly." [Postman's point being that scientists have to learn to evaluate competing theories, not to accept the conventional scientific wisdom on faith]

Postman disdains the Internet. He seems to view it as not being much different from television in its effects. Here I disagree with him. This disagreement is explained more fully in "Building a Bridge to Neil Postman," an essay that is available from me via email.

Postman's books have always divided readers. Some feel that his critical eye is too focused on the past and doesn't adequately and realistically weigh in today's cultural variables. Others feel that his is one of the most stable and eloquent voices of reason in a predominately subjective society. While I'll admit that Postman is oftentimes to social criticism what Wynton Marsalis is to jazz, he is first and foremost a questioner, a modern day Socrates who asks how technology both hurts and helps us. It is his empirical approach that keeps me buying his books.

To reduce Postman to a traditionalist is far too limiting. While he does champion the past and favor reason over emotion, he is also an idealist who believes that society has the power to cure what ails it, if it's only willing to take the necessary steps. "Building A Bridge To the 18th Century" is a collection of suggested steps based on 18th century utilitarian values and practices.

Above all, I like Postman's style. He is a direct, eloquent writer, a person whose ideas and insights are clearly spelled out. And despite others' charge that he is a curmudgeon, I find him humorous and open-minded.

Postman clarifies the impact that technology (computers and television) has on us to such an extent that I was tempted to toss my computer and TV out the window half way through the book. And while Postman has not personally succumed to the siren of the computer, his head is also not buried too deeply in the sand. If anything, he wants us to transcend the age of technology in the 20th century to a new enlightenment in the 21st century. At stake is the loss of childhood which he says was defined in the 18th century as a result of an earlier technological advancement: movable type.

This is my third Postman book and I am still enthralled in the reading of his works. Mainly, I believe, because he writes with a particular verve that I find lacking in many of his contemporaries. His discourse covers a wide range of topics, some of them superficially, but all of them intended to support his thesis: children are losing their childhood; and meaning needs to be revived in language, education, narrative, and culture. He is iconoclastic.

Even though it is possible to read his book in a cursory manner, don't fault the easily accessible work as trite. Postman's criticism is erudite, precise and well-articulated.

I hope he doesn't stop writing. His voice needs to continue.

In declaring himself an enemy of the twentieth century, Neil Postman grieves that the past century forgot the importance of precise language in public dialogue. The consequences have resulted in the most inhumane and violent period in all history. (Richard Rubinstein's book "The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future" has already reminded us of the unprecedented scale of atrocity committed in this century. Need I mention the battle of Verdun, Pol Pot, China's Communist revolution, two world wars, the atomic bomb - alas, where shall I stop?) Postman is aware of the eighteenth century's cruelties - child labor, slavery, anonymity of women, but he believes that the great thinkers of the period were almost unique in offering the kind of thought that could make the course of history more humane.

Indeed, he even posits that childhood is not a biological condition, but was an invention of the eighteenth century, for it was the civilization that actually thought that a youthful period of preparation was necessary. Regrettably, he argues, our generation has regressed by eliminating childhood. Does childhood exist if television, the Internet and the media expose the young to the same information that adults receive? In this respect, we are more like a fourteenth century civilization that bypassed the written word and granted full exposure of adult knowledge, sexuality, and activity to anyone who could speak.

Postman cautions that we tend to evaluate technology by the claims of technologists alone, forgetting to ask the ethicist, the poet, the novelist, and the artist for an evaluation. It doesn't occur to most people to question the benefit of a new technology, and who benefits, and who pays.

Of high importance is a return to the written word, for the written word requires an author to forever place his name on an idea, but the stream of information and the interactive media make all the populace instant plebiscites and pose us for an end of democracy, or a democracy that degenerates into a "mobocracy."

His book is not a road map or a menu or an agenda. He does not tell us what to think, but reminds us of the importance of learning how to think analytically and humanely.

With the publication of "Building A Bridge To The Eighteenth Century", Neil Postman has produced another thoughtful, articulate, and informative tome describing the numbing effects of postmodern society on individual consciousness, moral values, and the disintegration of our culture. In previous books he cited the dangers associated with runaway technological innovation ("Technopoly") and the corrosive cumulative effect of the manipulation of what we see through electronic media, profoundly biasing the ways we come to view, interpret and understand the world at large ("Amusing Ourselves To Death"). Here he examines a multitude of problems associated with the obvious circumstances of our rapidly disintegrating sense of commonality with our fellows in local and regional communities.

Not surprisingly, Postman finds solace and hope in the values and ideas of the Enlightenment, and in particular with authors like Voltaire, Goethe, Jefferson, and Thomas Paine. He quite artfully broaches the problems we currently have and meaningfully connects them to the assault on traditional systems of meanings that former societies had a wealth of. Yet Postman also understands one cannot simply glue or graft old ideas and values onto contemporary situations and expect them to cohere and work. Although he never quite articulates the notion, one can certainly connect the dots among the lines of his argument to disocver a stunning indictment of our present culture, which he apparently sees as hollow, superficial, and cravenly focused on material acquisition. In this fashion he seems to be accepting the arguments of a number of other contemporary thinkers who see the hope for the future in terms of recognizing what our material progress has cost.

In saying that we have become so enamored of progress that we have lost our social narrative, he seems to be recognizing the degree to which our stated values and ideals no longer cohere or make adequate sense in terms of motivating or integrating the social community at large. In this he falls into a long tradition of social criticism that reaches back to classic sociologists like Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim, each of whom argued that rapid scientific and technological progress and the eclipse of the traditional values associated with Christian communities posed enormous dangers for continuation of western culture, since, unlike religion, science had no core values which could act to integrate the community by reference to common values and ideals. In this sense, one can draw a line between these 19th century thinkers and others like C. Wright Mills, John Maynard Keynes, the early Alvin Toffler (before he became an apologist and fellow-traveler of the rich and famous), and contemporary authors such as Noam Chomsky, Wendell Beery, and Theodore Roszak.

This is a thoughtful and wide-ranging book written by someone who understands just how complex our current dilemma is, and who also appreciates that correcting it takes more than the kinds of superficial corrections in course being bandied about in this year of political promises and presidential campaigns. It also shows Postman's powerful intellect at work. He understands that progress in and of itself is meaningless unless it is informed by a meaningful direction in which to grow toward some greater fulfillment of real human possibilities. What we have now is hardly anything like meaningful progress; it is much more like a blind thirst for egregious acquisitions of more and more material wealth at the cost of everything we once treasured. This is an informed excursion into the past in order to better appreciate how we can use our traditional values more meaningfully to avoid the pitfalls of runaway technological innovation and the cultural detritus it has left in its wake. I highly recommend this book. Enjoy!

Somehow Postman has been accused of being a luddite. I'm not sure how he got theis reputation. He is certainly critical of present excesses, but as this book shows, he merely - and justly - questions current ideas that have degenerated to produce dubious advantages. he has no objections to technology or science but, he argues, there is aneed to revert to a more humanist (which also implies liberal in the good sense of the word) approaches to temper the way technology is creeping intrusively into our lives. In philosophical terms he argues against cultural relativism and its older brother deconstruction - i.e. Derrida, Lacan. in this he is joined - though he does not mention it - by several leading physicists and, indeed, Fashionable Nonsense by Sokal confirms this. Like many greek classical philosophers, from Plato to Epicurus, postman excercises healthy doubt and merely questions the present. Not all change is good. I also found the book to be very well written, erudite and humorous.

In _Building a Bridge to the 18th Century_, Postman raises a number of excellent questions about the issues and challenges of the post-modern age. In doing so, he tackles technology, education, and our sense of "progress."

Postman transparently states that he is not a fan of email, the internet and television. For this, the title of "luddite" (a perjorative for those who reject "modernization") initally seems appropriate. Postman addresses this and rejects it. I would agree with him on this; he is not opposed to technology per say, but rather is opposed to technology for its own sake. This argument is the basis of his book.

Essentially Postman forces us to ask, "what is the utility of the technological advances we are making?" In responding to this, Postman finds the answer in the philosophes of the 18th century - Lock, Rousseau, Diderot, Jefferson, Franklin, Voltaire - stating that without some purpose for the greater good, we end up serving technology, rather than having technology serve us.

The effects of this "unexamined life" are profound. As we read less and watch more, interact more with machines than people, and lose our sense of skepticism taking the word of experts and scientists without challenge, we are essentially returning to a "pre-Enlightened" age intellecutally reminiscient more of the middle ages than the modern age, to our misfortune.

There is much here to mentally wrestle with. The intellecutal depth of the issue made easier by the lucid writing of Postman. It is a provoking read that I recommend.

Neil Postman, longtime professor and eventual chair of the department of culture and communication at New York University, sadly died in 2003 at the age of 72. Bridge is his final book, and it deals with the same universal themes found in his earlier 20-odd works: language, reason, education, childhood, and the idea of progress.

Despairing over post-modernists who claim words don't stand for anything real, he makes a case for reading and writing. Indeed, he feels if we don't come up with a meaningful narrative for our world, we're toast.

It is no accident, Postman is a huge fan of the two Thomases: Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, particularly Paine.

Note: Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense and The Crisis. Common Sense sold as many as 600,000 copies, which would be equivalent to a run of 60 million copies in the United States today.

During the 18th century we were sewing the seeds for the end of monarchy and, eventually, slavery. Dr. Postman states that "men of the mind" in those heady days thought knowledge should be useful. Such Renaissance Men were known as philosophes, i.e. philosophers using their minds for great and just social causes.

Now consider the modern era, and the so-called information revolution. The pervasive imagery of video and computer media work often to undercut the logical, serial narrative form of print. Reading, books in particular, requires active intellect, constantly evaluating statements, considering context, weighing consistencies, etc.

Too often we succumb to the easier means of getting information... from perceptual streams of video images and sounds, serving to reinforce the perceptual-emotional method of awareness: "see something, have an immediate, often extreme emotion one way or the other."

For example, a large number of Americans see footage of the World Trade Center towers falling and have an immediate animosity toward Arab men. Alternative explanations to the official story, no matter how logically unassailable, are simply blocked from consideration. A society relying on emotions bred from controlled media images is Orwellian... and doomed.

Dr. Postman also has insightful observations on the loss of childhood to technology. He doesn't "rail against the machine," so much as ask questions of the necessity of every shiny new thunderpig widget that comes along:

"What is the problem to which the supersonic jet is the solution?" -- pg.43.

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For my complete review of this book and for other book and movie
reviews, please visit my site [...]

Brian Wright
Copyright 2007

Postman makes an extremely compelling argument that our best source for assistance for moral and intellectual decision-making lies in the 18th century, not the historical aberration that was the 20th century. I won't summarize the points here, if what I said above makes sense, don't delay, read this book! You won't regret it. This is a clear, concise and accurate read that entertains along the way.