Technopoly

I found this little book by Neil Postman hugely thought provoking and important on many fronts, even though I work in the heart of "technopoly". Unlike many skeptics with a bit of luddite orientation, Postman is way less arrogant. He freely admits that he has no real solution to the problem, although my view is that he bypasses the obvious solution and focuses on a less desirable solution as an atheist.

The subtitle is "The Surrender of Culture to Technology" and opens with a story from Plato's Phaedrus about Thamus, a great Egyptian king. Thamus entertained the god Theuth, who was the inventor of many things; numbers, calculation, geometry, astronomy and writing. Thamus finds each of the inventions lacking, and has this to say of writing:

"Theuth , my paragon of inventors, the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which accrue to those who practice it. So it is in this; you who are the father of writing , have out of the fondness for your offspring attributed to it quite the opposite of its real function. Those who acquire it will cease to excercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their rememberence by externeal signs instead of by their own internal resources. What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom, your pupoils will have the reputation for it without the reality: they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to society".

Thamus is wrong in missing the fact that writing DOES provide value. Where is very right however is in realizing that no technology has only a single side. When one picks up a technology, both you and the world are changed, and it seems that it is typically an irrevocable change.

"A new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything. In the year 1500, fifty years after the printing press was invented, we did not have old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Europe."

All technology contains an "ideology". In the case of the printing press, that ideology was mainly "power to the people", which many in modern society tend to agree with, BUT it was a major factor in huge changes (the reformation, rise of a better educated common man, democracy, etc)

One of his least favorite technologies is the technology of the IQ score. It has created the idea that something that we can't even define adequately at all (human intelligence) can be expressed by a simple integer that is explanatory of a host of things. He argues convincingly (as have others) that the idea is pure fantasy. Mooses are all in agreement on this priniciple, since we tend to not do well on IQ tests and would much rather they were invalid.

Postman argues that in the 19th century we had a "technocracy":

"The citizens of a technocracy knew that science and technology did not provide philosophies by which to live, and they clang to the philosophies of their fathers".

(He did not specify if their clinging was "bitter" ;-) ) He argues that the Sopes Monkey Trial was the point at which we shifted to "technopoly":

"Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. And it does so by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit its new requirements. Technopoly, in other words, is totalitarian technocracy."

It is at this point that I largely part company with his conclusions. He seems to have made the "guns kill people" error here. There is MORE than "technology" going on here, for "something" HAS made prayer in schools, teaching of creation in schools already illegal, and that "something" may be well on it's way to attempting to make religion itself illegal. I'd name that "something" liberal facism, but whatever it is, it isn't "technology". While there are aspects of truth in Postmans attempts to paint technology as the "bogeyman", primarily, "technology is a tool". As he has obviously made his peace with writing, like all tools, it can be used to write great books like his (and I DO think this is a worthy and useful book), or skinhead pamphlets. The choice isn't implicit in the technology, only the option.

He makes a good argument that in a technopoly, the "information immune system is inoperable. Technology is a form of culutural AIDs, which I use as an acronym for Anti-Information Deficiency Syndrome". We used to have a lot of "gatekeepers". He does a good job of talking about how curriculum in schooling is still a valid gatekeeper and how the "rules of evidence" that declare broad swaths of information "inadmissible" are the only way that the institution of our courts can operate. "...in a Technopoly there can be no transcendent sense of purpose or meaning, no cultural coherence. Information is dangerous when it has no place to go, when there is no theory to which it applies, no pattern in which it fits, when there is no higher purpose that it serves."

He doesn't say "why" there can be no transcendent purpose. Certainly there are many million Christians in the US (which he believes is the only Technopoly so far) that would disagree with him that there CAN be no transcendence. My fundamental split is that I disagree with him on that point. The choice of transcendence MUST be a human choice. It can be inhibited by technology (constant diversion for example), but I see the choice as clearly remaining.

"..cultures must have narratives and will find them where they will, even if they lead to catastrophe. The alternative is to live without meaning, the ultimate negation of life itself. It is also to the point to say that each narrative is given its form and its emotional tecture through a clusxter of symbols that cal for respect and allegiance, even devotion."

At this point he touches on religion and rejects it as a way out and then touches on Allan Boom's "Great Books", espoused in "The Closing of the American Mind" and rejects that as well. His solution is based on Jacob Bronowski's "The Ascent of Man", which I haven't read, but can't quite imagine if thousands of years of religion and culture are not sufficient to the task at hand, how one book is going to be. I'll have to put it on my list.

Very much a highly regarded book. Well written and well reasoned. Oh yes, I almost forgot. He really hates polling and goes through many problems with it, but the one I'll likely remember. Two priests wrote to the Pope asking for guidance on smoking and prayer. One phrased the question "Is it permissible to smoke while praying?" to which the reply was that it was not because prayer ought take ones full attention. The other phrased the question: "Is it permissible to pray while smoking?" Which received the answer that it was, because we are to pray without ceasing. Any further questions as to why polling is an inherently ridiculous technology?