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BOOKS I READ: Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman (1985). Postman posited in 1985 that our dystopian future would be more like Aldous Hexley’s Brave New World than George Orwell’s 1984, claiming that a censoring Big Brother would not be necessary, given that the population could be subdued just as easily using an overwhelming amount of information and imagery, in the form of entertainment.
Postman argued that television was changing the nature of the country’s citizens. Fed a steady diet of irrelevant and irreverent content, with the sole purpose of entertaining, the public was increasingly becoming inured to the complexities of public discourse. Postman pines for the written-word era. Print, he claims, unlike the electronic media, “appeals to understanding, not passion,” and favors reason and exposition.
In the age of television, politicians are judged by their screen appeal, not so much by their intellect, ideas, or positions. He points out how even verbal precision in their statements is no longer necessary. Using contemporaneous newspaper articles, he offers the case of Ronald Reagan. Known as the Great Communicator, the former movie star had charisma, but was never a great orator. Prone to misstatements, so many in fact that his “aides used to become visibly alarmed at suggestions he had given mangled and perhaps misleading accounts of his policies,” but they stopped worrying after noticing that the general public didn’t seem to care. Postman recalls a quote from 1920 by the eminent journalist Walter Lippman, “There can be no liberty for the community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.”
With the success of fast-paced commercials, with their quick cuts and appeal to feelings, so followed the rest of the programming, whose primary function is to engage a passive audience, to become the soma depicted in Brave New World. No matter the subject, programming required no prerequisites, no prior knowledge, and history is soon another pillar that falls. Postman quotes Bill Moyer, who says, “I worry that my own business… helps to make this an anxious age of agitated amnesiacs… We Americans seem to know a lot of the last twenty-four hours but very little of the last six centuries or the last sixty years.”
Reading this book in 2023, one can’t help but marvel at how relevant Postman’s arguments are today, the age of social media, and especially while A.I. looms in the wings, hallucinations and all. The concept of Big Brother and censorship has been a reality in a few authoritarian nations, but it has not been a factor in the prosperous democratic societies — the recent book banning efforts in some conservative American states notwithstanding. Yet, a distracted, uninformed, and trivially manipulated citizenry can be easily found on American streets, heads down to their smartphones, amusing themselves to death.
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