The Original Red Pill
15 years before The Matrix, Neil Postman gave us a skeleton key (of sorts) to understanding the modern world
This is my second post on Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. The first post on why I’m re-reading it is here.
In July, I went through Aurelian Craiutu’s Why Not Moderation?: Letters to Young Radicals
In June, I went through Yuval Levin's American Covenant
In May, I went through Taylor Branch’s At Canaan’s Edge
In April, I went through John Inazu's book Learning to Disagree.
In March, I went through Mustafa Suleyman’s The Coming Wave.
In February, I went through Nick Troiano’s The Primary Solution.
In January, I went through Michael Wear’s The Spirit of Our Politics.
The book of the month schedule is here.
Amusing Ourselves to Death is a short book, clocking in at 163 pages. It was published in 1985.
It is the original red pill.
Long before The Matrix came along in 1999 there was Neil Postman in 1985. Morpheus and Neo popularized the idea of seeing through the appearances of our world to a deeper reality, a hidden universe. But 15 years earlier, a smaller group of devotees had been ushered behind the veil by Neil Postman.
To be clear, Postman doesn't use any analogies that are similar to the story of The Matrix. But the brilliance of Postman's work is also what makes the truth of it so frustrating: most people don't see, can't see or won’t see what he's talking about.
"What is peculiar ... is that [our technology's] role in directing what we will see or know is so rarely noticed. A person who reads a book or who watches television or who glances at his watch is not usually interested in how his mind is organized and controlled by these events, still less in what idea of the world is suggested," (11) Postman wrote (emphasis added).
The metaphor most often used to get this point across is the one that writer David Foster Wallace used in his famous 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College:
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
"The point of the fish story," Wallace said that day, "is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about."
If we were to apply that metaphor to Postman's book, the fish exchange might go like this:
Older fish: "Morning, boys. How's the media ecology?"
Younger fish: "What the hell is media ecology?"
Have I already lost you?
Media ecology is the study of how "different forms of media, from the printing press to the internet, shape our perception, behavior and culture," according to McLuhan.org. McLuhan.org is a website devoted to Marshal McLuhan, the media theorist and philosopher who essentially created the field of media ecology.
McLuhan is best known for coining the phrase: "the medium is the message." Many people, when you mention Neil Postman, simply repeat McLuhan's phrase as a shorthand.
But Postman actually took some issue with that phrase, and argued that it should be amended to: The Medium is the Metaphor. Nevertheless, Postman was influenced a lot by McLuhan.
The Challenges of Being Red-Pilled
One temptation once one has been red-pilled by Postman is to turn into a Luddite who rejects all technology. For some people, this may be an option. For most of us, it's not.
We could probably use more people who use less technology, or none. But for those of us who have to remain in the world of technology because our livelihoods depend on it, one challenge of being a Postman acolyte is to avoid becoming a crank: Just throw it all out! Technology sucks man! (Yelled in a Conan O'Brien voice. I could have gotten AI to do that probably, but it sounds like work)
That means we have to affirm what is good about the things we seek to critique. If we don't, then people we want to persuade may not listen to what we have to say. Nobody likes a crank.
Another pitfall is to over index everything according to the Postman critique. This path can take us from new convert to calcified reactionary, where we start out overly enthusiastic about these insights and then never integrate them into a broader worldview. Everything fits into the Postman critique. His book is a panacea, a silver bullet.
Anyone who considers themselves red-pilled (by anything or anyone) can fall into these traps.
But it's not too difficult to temper ourselves. For example, one of the chief examples Postman uses to illustrate a more literate, more desirable society is the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858.
But two years later, Americans began slaughtering one another in a civil war. A more thoughtful society didn't stop that from happening.
Nonetheless, I do think it's fair to say that many of our challenges in civic life now — the silliness of our politics, the lack of substance, the constant fighting rather than problem-solving, and the breakdown of our civic order to a place where democracy has been under threat — is because we are an entertainment-driven culture. And TV has played a central role in that.
The Deep Value of Postman's Critique
Amusing helps us, in a way no other book I've read, to think deeply about meaning, and how the technology we use to communicate shapes it for us: how we behave, how we talk to one another and how we think.
"Writing makes it possible and convenient to subject thought to a continuous and concentrated scrutiny ... Writing freezes speech," he writes in the first chapter. Writing subjects language to the close study of "those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading" (12).
One of Postman's big ideas is that for around 200 years, Americans lived in what he calls a "typographic world": a culture in which "print put forward a definition of intelligence that gave priority to the objective, rational use of the mind and at the same time encouraged forms of public discourse with serious, logically ordered content" (51).
"America was founded by intellectuals, a rare occurrence in the history of modern nations," (41) he notes.
The Lincoln-Douglas debates are a great example. These were seven campaign debates in the Illinois Senate race between Abraham Lincoln, the Republican challenger to Stephen Douglas, the Democratic incumbent senator.
Dispense with your notions of a debate as we now experience them: shouting fests in which a moderator tries to keep anyone from talking about anything for too long. The goal these days — for the candidates and for the press — is to have a memorable moment that can be clipped in a short video and sent around on people's phones. Before the internet but in the age of television, the big question of debates was much the same: what would be the soundbite, the short snippet (or two or three), that would allow one candidate to say they "won"?
In 1858, however, the format was quite different. One candidate would speak, uninterrupted, for an hour. Then the other candidate would speak in response, again uninterrupted, for 90 minutes. Finally, the first speaker would be given 30 minutes to respond.
The debates were well-attended and in fact became sensations. There was a "carnival-like atmosphere" (47) with music before and after the speeches, alcohol served to the audience, and frequent applause.
"What kind of audience was this?" Postman writes. "Who were these people who could so cheerfully accommodate themselves to ... hours of oratory? ... [Their] attention span would obviously have been extraordinary by current standards ... These audiences must have had an equally extraordinary capacity to comprehend lengthy and complex sentences aurally" (44, 45).
At one point in their first debate, Douglas thanked the crowd for a bout of extended applause but then told them that "silence will be more acceptable to me in the discussion of these questions than applause."
"I desire to address myself to your judgment, your understanding, and your consciences, and not to your passions or enthusiasms," (45) he concluded.
Postman continues: "The speakers had little to offer .... but language. And the language that was offered was clearly modeled on the style of the written word," he continues, noting that most public speakers wrote their remarks down and read them, rather than speaking off the cuff (preachers did this too). "The written word, and an oratory based upon it, has a content ... An idea, a fact, a claim is the inevitable result ... There is no escape from meaning ... Words have little to recommend them except as carriers of meaning" (49, 50).
But that world was gone, he wrote in 1985, almost 40 years ago, supplanted by an image-based world, which Postman calls a Peek-a-Boo World in which emotion, rather than reason, rules.
"We are now a culture whose information, ideas and epistemology are given form by television, not by the printed word ... Print is now merely a residual epistemology," (28) he wrote.
"We are by now well into a second generation of children for whom television has been their first and most accessible teacher" (78).
"We might even say that America was founded by intellectuals, from which it has taken us two centuries and a communication revolution to recover," (41) he remarks wryly.
Postman notes that in oral cultures, proverbs — the short stories that contain a lesson — "form the substance of thought itself." The same is true in a typographic world and in a peek-a-boo world. Books and written documents form the substance of thought in a typographic culture. But in a peek-a-boo world, TV shows and movies form the substance of thought itself.
Linger over that phrase: "substance of thought." That seems particularly descriptive of what Postman's book conveys as he takes us by the hand, deeper and deeper into his exposition and argument. In the final post later this month, I’ll go into some detail about what that means.
Because we are now several generations into a peek-a-boo world, which has been layered over by a digital world. We are now probably raising the second generation of those for whom the internet and smart phones form the substance of thought itself.
Before we get to that next post, in the last week of August, I'll have an interview with Major Garrett of CBS News, who has been telling me how much he is looking forward to discussing this book.
I’ve also heard from a few of you who are reading or re-reading this book yourselves, and the first post on this book is already the second most-read post I’ve published here on Substack in the last 18 months. It’s nice to see so much interest!
I remember this book from way back, and it is even truer now than it was then. Thanks for bringing Postman’s work to more people’s attention.