Neil Postman, on the computer as Technopoly’s dominant metaphor:

The computer redefines humans as “information processors” and nature itself as information to be processed. The fundamental metaphorical message of the computer, in short, is that we are machines—thinking machines, to be sure, but machines nonetheless. It is for this reason that the computer is the quintessential, incomparable, near-perfect machine for Technopoly. It subordinates the claims of our nature, our biology, our emotions, our spirituality. The computer claims sovereignty over the whole range of human experience, and supports its claim by showing that it “thinks” better than we can.

Neil Postman:

In Technopoly…subjective forms of knowledge have no official status, and must be confirmed by tests administered by experts. Individual judgments, after all, are notoriously unreliable, filled with ambiguity and plagued by doubt, as Frederick W. Taylor warned. Tests and machines are not. Philosophers may agonize over the questions “What is truth?” “What is intelligence?” “What is the good life?” But in Technopoly there is no need for such intellectual struggle. Machines eliminate complexity, doubt, and ambiguity. They work swiftly, they are standardized, and they provide us with numbers that you can see and calculate with.

Evening, Honfleur (1886) by Georges-Pierre Seurat:

Currently reading: Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel 📚

James Wood, in a strange article on evangelical preferential treatment of those on the left, repeats the common misinterpretation of James Davison Hunter’s book:

In To Change the World, sociologist James Davison Hunter argued that broad social change is driven by elites. Since that group was overwhelmingly left-liberal at the time of the book’s publication, it is easy to see how many evangelicals concluded they must show evangelistic deference toward the left. This made sense in the neutral world context. Today, however, those on the left are especially hardened to Christian teachings, and evangelicals’ overtures yield radically decreasing dividends. In the negative world, preferential treatment of the woke is less a strategy for changing the world than for signaling one’s obeisance to power.

I cite it here because I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen this (mis)interpretation offered. It only “made sense” to prioritize elites on the left if you put down Hunter’s book before the end, which I’m quite sure Wood did not…so I’m left to scratch my head. If cultural change happens, as Davison argues, not by changing individual hearts and minds “from the bottom up” but through overlapping networks of elites operating at the centers of cultural power and influence, then the obvious strategy (for those wishing to change the world) would be to “infiltrate” those sectors with Christian elite who could guide the culture in their preferred direction. The problem with this reading is that Davison does not offer this strategy—and, in fact, counsels Christians away from such a strategy. The final part of the book is his alternative: appropriately titled “faithful presence.” It is miles away from encouraging strategic targeting of “elites,” whatever their political leanings. Perhaps we ought to return to his proposal afresh; we seem to have missed it on the first go around.

Neil Postman:

One way of defining Technopoly…is to say it is what happens to society when the defenses against information glut have broken down. It is what happens when institutional life becomes inadequate to cope with too much information. It is what happens when a culture, overcome by information generated by technology, tries to employ technology itself as a means of providing clear direction and human purpose. The effort is mostly doomed to failure.

Neil Postman, on the new world—the “improbable world”—called into being by Technopoly:

It is a world in which the idea of human progress, as Bacon expressed it, has been replaced by the idea of technological progress. The aim is not to reduce ignorance, superstition, and suffering but to accommodate ourselves to the requirements of new technologies. We tell ourselves, of course, that such accommodations will lead to a better life, but that is only the rhetorical residue of a vanishing technocracy. We are a culture consuming itself with information, and many of us do not even wonder how to control the process. We proceed under the assumption that information is our friend, believing that cultures may suffer grievously from a lack of information, which, of course, they do. It is only now beginning to be understood that cultures may also suffer grievously from information glut, information without meaning, information without control mechanisms.

Neil Postman:

The milieu in which Technopoly flourishes is one in which the tie between information and human purpose has been severed, i.e., information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning, or purpose.