The Antigonish Review
Issue 121
Ellen Rose
Resolutions for the New Millennium
Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century:
How the Past Can Improve Our Future by Neil Postman (Alfred A. Knopf,
1999, $35.00)
Now that January 1, 2000 has come and gone, it is instructive to look
back and reflect that our most pressing concern during the months preceding
the dawn of the new century was with stockpiling batteries, candles, and
fresh water. We fretted about the possibility of inoperative bank machines,
emptied grocery store shelves of canned beans, equipped our homes with
woodstoves and portable generators, and contemplated the wisdom of stashing
our life savings under the mattress, given dire warnings about the stock
market's millennial whims.
These were not trivial concerns. Nevertheless, in retrospect they pale
when compared with the issues that the immanent arrival of the new millennium
brought to the forefront of Neil Postman's attention, and which are detailed
in his latest book, Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century.
While the rest of us were wrapped up in matters related to our own comfort
and survival, or at best that of our families, Postman was contemplating
the survival of humanity itself in a world increasingly unresistant to
and overwhelmed by the imperatives of technology. And while the rest of
us looked with dread toward an unknown future - a future frighteningly
reminiscent of filmic nightmares in which our own technologies run amok
and destroy us Postman looked with confidence to a well-articulated past
and discovered there ideas that might carry us safely over the bridge
to the twenty-first century.
This is certainly not the first time that Postman has addressed the question
of how we can confront and come to terms with the meaning and impact of
technology in our lives. A professor of education and chair of NYU's Department
of Culture and Communication, Postman is the prolific author of dozens
of books and articles examining the impact of technology on culture and
education. His previous publications include Technopoly: The Surrender
ofculture to Technology (1992) and The End of education: Redefining
the Value of School (1995). The topics that have concerned him over
the years are well represented in the chapter headings of his latest book:
Progress, Technology, Language, Information, Narratives' Children, Democracy,
Education. But unlike so many contemporary cultural critics, who have
capitalized upon the technological revolution and the McLuhan revival
by providing enthusiastic descriptions of high-tech developments and their
intriguing social impacts (I am thinking, now, of Derrick de Kerckhove
and self-appointed CBC cultural conuuentator, Mark Kingwell), Postman
does not revel in technology for technology's sake. His purpose, in Building
a Bridge and elsewhere, is not simply to describe the current state
of affairs, but to advance our understanding of ourselves and our society,
and to suggest alternatives.
Suggesting alternatives is, in fact, a critical aspect of Postman's mandate
because, unlike the aforementioned cultural critics, Postman is far from
enthusiastic about the current state of affairs. In fact, he describes
the twentieth century as, quite frankly, "an almost unrelieved horror"
(p. 14) in which the narratives that have sustained human beings for centuries
have given way to a postmortem blur. Having succumbed to the colonizing
pressures of Bill Gates and other technocrats, we have become "a people
who measure our lives in seconds":
Five seconds saved here, five seconds there,
and at the end of the day, we have perhaps
saved a minute. By year's end, we have
saved over five hours. Af death's door, we
may allow ourselves a smile by gasping that
we saved a month and a half, and no one will
ask, But for what? (p. 43)
This is pure Postman: he asks with refreshing candor and curmudgeonly
wit the questions that few people seem willing to confront in this day
and age. Pure Postman, too, because it suggests the way in which we have
been robbed ofthe quiet dignity and opportunities for civilized contemplation
and discussion that are necessary if we are to come to terms with the
meaning of technology in our lives.
Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century is a book that was
written with pen and paper by a man who does not even own a computer a
man who is, indeed, a self-professed "dinosaur":
I suppose I cannot put myself forward as a
model citizen of the digital age. In fact,
there are many people who, when describing
my response to the digital age, continually
use the word "dinosaur." I try to remind
them that the dinosaurs survived for a
hundred million years, mostly because,
I would imagine, they remained impervious
to change. (p. 55)
Imperviousness to change may seem a strange thing to boast about in an
age of postmortem flux, but it is central to Postman's works. Since the
1970s, he has consistently argued that, rather than making frantic efforts
t o keep pace with technological change, we should find a point of quiet
contemplation from which to observe that change and try to make sense
of its meaning in our lives. All of Postman's subsequent writings have
somehow elaborated that central tenet - the importance of critical reflection
in a world caught up in technological frenzy - while at the same time
approaching it from a unique perspective and wrapping it in fresh ideas
that prevent his books from becoming even remotely redundant.
Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century continues this trajectory.
Whereas in previous books, he offered the school as that quiet place of
reflection and contemplitude, that oasis of continuity and tradition,
Postman turns in his latest work to the past, and particularly to the
eighteenth century, in order to find hope for the future. The eighteenth
century was the period when the likes of Goethe, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant,
Hume, Paine, Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin engaged in a great conversation
about the principles that should guide human endeavours; when Bach, Handel,
Mozart, and Haydn composed musical tributes to the human spirit; when
Swift, Defoe, Voltaire, and William Blake turned to fictional forms as
a means of elucidating truths. It was, in short, the Enlightenment: a
time, as Postman says, when many of the worthwhile ideas of the modem
world - ideas about progress, education, religious and political freedom,
and even happiness - had their beginnings. Postman suggests that, as we
confront an unknown future - unknown and unknowable, despite the claims
of digital prophets such as Bill Gates, who claim to be able to plot the
road ahead with absolute precision - the ideas and understandings of Enlightenment
thinkers can help illuminate our way and provide us with a sense of direction.
In this day and age, it takes a great deal of audacity to suggest that
there is much to be learned from eighteenth-century ideas about progress
and technology. Afterall, the Enlightenment belief that human progress
can only be achieved through the rationality of science and technology
is often represented as a primary cause of today's unrestrained technological
growth. But according to Postman, the technological imperative - the idea
that what can be done with technology should be done, regardless of the
consequences - is a product ofthe nineteenth century. While Enlightenment
thinkers saw rationalism and its outgrowth, natural science, as leading
inexorably to a "more peaceful, intelligent, and commodious life for all
mankind" (p.28), they also contemplated technological innovation carefully,
seeking to understand its implications through probing questions such
as: What is progress? How is it corrupted? And what is the relationship
between technological and moral progress? Precisely the kinds ofquestions
that Postman suggests we should be asking today, as we move into the new
millennium.
Clearly, Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century is written,
in part, in defense of the Enlightenment, which is so consistently maligned
in postmortem treatises. These treatises typically reject the "Enlightenment
project" out of hand, questioning the value and possibility of objective
scientific truth - indeed, truth of any kind - in a world in which absolute
knowledge and authority have been shattered by the speed and connectivity
ofdigital technologies. But if Jean-François Lyotard defines postmodemism
as "an incredulity to metanaffatives," the kinds of narratives with which
he claims Enlightenment thinkers sought to legitimize and privilege their
ideas, Postman counters by suggesting that human beings need such "big
stories - stories that are sufficiently profound and complex to offer
explanations of the origins and future of a people; stories that construct
ideals, prescribe rules of conduct, specify sources of authority, and,
in doing all this, provide a sense of continuity and purpose" (p. 1O1).
Postman further suggests that it is a mistake to believe that Enlightenment
thinkers accepted their narratives as absolute truths. Rather, he says,
Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, and others confronted their narratives about
God and science with humility, aware that they were necessarily only limited
human versions of a larger Truth.
Postman's attempt to discredit postmodemism may strike the reader as
odd, given that so many of Postman's own ideas about language and culture,
both in Building a Bridge and his other books, could easily have
come from the pens of the modem French writers Jacques Derrida, Michel
Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Jean Baudrillard - whose tenets he rejects.
For instance, in speaking of the disjunction between language and objective
truth, he suggests, in very Foucauldian terms, that "in discussing what
words we shall use in describing an event, we are not engaging in 'mere
semantics.' We are engaged in trying to control the perceptions and responses
of others (as well as ourselves) to the character of the event itself'
(p.165). And in this book, as in all of his writings, he embarks upon
a typically postmortem quest: to challenge the ideas about technology
and education that are propagated and received as "common sense." In fact,
Postman even admits, with bemused humour, that he is the subject of an
essay "in which I myself am put forward as a standard-brand postmodemist
(and one of long standing)" (p.69). But if Postman believes, like postmodemists,
that absolute certainty "abolishes hope, and robs us of renewal" (p.114),
then he is also equally convinced ofthe moral quagmires associated with
the opposite extreme: an absolute rejection of meaning, which is the essence
of postmortem thinking. It is Postman's deepest wish thathumanity will
proceed into the new millennium with courage, optimism and a sense ofpurpose
- not saddled with the skepticism, disillusionment, and alienation that
have burdened our thoughts during the latter half of the twentieth century.
In Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century, then, Neil Postman
asks us to consider that, although we are drawn relentlessly forward by
visions of miraculous wonders conjured by digital prophets, there is rea
y no way of knowing just what we will find on the other side of the bridge
to the twenty-first century. The only certainty we can carry with us is
a knowledge of where we are coming from. Postman asks us not to step forward
so hastily and eagerly that we forget our antecedents. He asks us to pause
for a while, to look back, and in so doing, to gain a better understanding
of, and perhaps a greater control over, where we are going. Perhaps it
is too late for making new year's resolutions, but it is never too late
to face the future with resolve, and a determination to discover alternatives
to a world in which the dignity and wit of humanity are being eroded by
the imperatives of technology. The twenty-first century is, of course,
only an artificial construct, but it is, as Postman observes, "a name
we use to foster hope, to inspire renewal, to get another chance to do
it right" (p.174).
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