On Reading “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” Foreword

Jack Lule
Jack Lule
Sep 2, 2018 · 2 min read

Although it is only one and a half pages, the Foreword to Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death deserves its own consideration.

A few pages earlier, in his Introduction, son Andrew Postman writes, “Substantive as this book is, it was predicated on a ‘hook’” (xiv). The hook leads his father’s Foreword: “We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves” (xix).

Postman goes on to explain. In the novel, 1984, written in 1949, English author George Orwell had offered a dark vision for the world — “that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression” (xix).

It is a world in which books are banned, thoughts are controlled and Big Brother is always watching.

And when the year 1984 came and went, Americans breathed a sigh of relief. But, Postman says, “we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another — slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.”

Huxley’s vision was indeed as dark and dystopian as Orwell’s. Published in 1932, Brave New World offers a world in which “no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history” (xix). In Huxley’s vision, “people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think” (xix).

Most of Postman’s Foreword is a marvelous paragraph that captures in a kind of call and response the differences between Orwell and Huxley: “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 be become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would be come a trivial culture”. . . In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us” (xix-xx).

And in his concluding line, Postman writes, “This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right” (xx).

I am thinking that students and young readers of today might not have read, or be familiar with, 1984 or Brave New World. Postman’s brief but insightful reference to these two classic books of the 20th Century gives just enough for those readers to continue with the hook in place, the stage set.

Lehigh University. Professor & Chair, Department of Journalism & Communication; Founding Director, Global Studies. Interests in journalism and society.

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