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

by Neil Postman (Author) "The day before I began writing this book, I heard on the radio that somewhere between thirty-five percent and sixty-two percent of Americans believe that..." (more)
Key Phrases: Middle Ages, Adam Smith, Declaration of Independence (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
The problem with the world today, says Neil Postman, is that we've become so caught up in hurtling towards the future that we've lost our societal "narrative," a humane cultural tradition that creates "a sense of purpose and continuity"--in other words, something to believe in. "In order to have an agreeable encounter with the twenty-first century," he asserts, "we will have to take into it some good ideas. And in order to do that, we need to look back to take stock of the good ideas available to us." He finds rich source material in the Enlightenment, the salad days for philosophers such as Goethe, Voltaire, Diderot, Paine, and Jefferson, "the beginnings of much that is worthwhile about the modern world." Yet Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century is a call for cultural progress, not regression: "I am not suggesting that we become the eighteenth century," Postman notes, "only that we use it for what it is worth and all it is worth."

Chief among the values Postman cites is the development of the intellect; it plays a part in many of his recommendations, from the cultivation of a healthy skepticism towards overhyped technology to sweeping educational reforms that include replacing grammar instruction with logic and rhetoric and introducing courses on comparative religion and the history of science. He also lashes out at postmodernists who start with the premise that language "is a major factor in producing our perceptions, judgments, knowledge, and institutions" and conclude that language is therefore tenuously connected to reality at best. Enlightenment thinkers knew that language molded perception, he notes, but they also believed that "it is possible to use language to say things about the world that are true" and "to communicate ideas to oneself and to others." Postman is excessively curmudgeonly at times, as in his reference to philosopher Jean Baudrillard as "a Frenchman, of all things," or his remarks on the ancient Athenians: "I know they are the classic example of Dead White Males, but we should probably listen to them anyway." But for anybody with a stake in the culture wars, or who wants to apply the lessons of philosophy to the modern world, Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century will make for provocative reading. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
"I am not suggesting that we become the eighteenth century, only that we use it for what it is worth and for all it is worth," Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death; Technopoly) argues in this penetrating, extended essay. Though other periods are rich with learning and wisdom, Postman believes the 18th-century Enlightenment is uniquely valuable and relevant to today's world. It gave us the rationalist notion of human progressAexpressed and supported by science and technologyAand the romantic critique, with its idea of inward progress and its suspicion of the machine. It gave us discursive narrative prose as the prototypical model of thought, along with more subtle, less hysterical critiques of language than postmodernists offer today. It gave us floods of new information, yet ridiculed information as an end in itself, urging a healthy respect for context and purpose. It gave us the idea of childhood as a distinct life stage linked to education and nurturance, illuminated by two contrasting visionsALocke's blank slate to be written on and Rousseau's plant to be cultivated. And it gave us representative democracy. All these were expressions of a world in which the dominant media, unlike today, was the printed word. As that environment fades, the complex tensions Postman illuminates are replaced by shallow sloganeering by those who present themselves as the embodiment of novelty and daring. Postman forcefully argues that we can use the complex legacy of the past to resist being swept into a shiny, simpleminded new dark age. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (October 10, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375701273
• ISBN-13: 978-0375701276
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #65,356 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

65 of 70 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Neil Postman for Secretary of Education, October 16, 1999

By	Arnold Kling (Silver Spring, Md USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future (Hardcover)

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.

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of Postman's best, February 1, 2001

By	Voice of Chunk (NY) - See all my reviews

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.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another In A Long Line Of Excellent Postman Tomes!, October 22, 2000

By	Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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!