Finished reading: Technopoly by Neil Postman 📚

A persuasive account of the rise and triumph (heh) of technology over all aspects of culture. I imagine it rings even more true today than when it was written (1992!). Some of his historical work is a little broad and impressionistic. However, if, like me, you find his overall account plausible, then it’s not hard to imagine specialists putting some of his historical judgments on firmer footing.

The only other thing to note: Works of cultural criticism like Technopoly always have trouble landing the plane with creative solutions (see: Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed). This is not meant as a harsh criticism: describing problems is easier than proposing solutions. Postman makes a big deal throughout of the ways that Technopoly has undermined traditional narratives and frameworks for making meaning and giving coherence to human life. His gesture at a potential solution in the final chapter involved a revamped approach to education under the banner of what he calls “the ascent of humanity” (drawing on the similarly titled work by Jacob Bronowski). Suffice it to say: such a meager proposal seems totally inadequate to the daunting challenge that Technopoly so aptly describes.

In the concluding chapter of Technopoly, Neil Postman provides some ways that the “loving resistance fighter” can fight against the American Technopoly: Resistance fighters are those who…

• pay no attention to a poll unless they know what questions were asked, and why
• refuse to accept efficiency as the pre-eminent goal of human relations
• have freed themselves from the belief in the magical powers of numbers, do not regard calculation as an adequate substitute for judgment, or precision as a synonym for truth
• refuse to allow psychology or any "social science" to pre-empt the language and thought of common sense
• are, at least, suspicious of the idea of progress, and who do not confuse information with understanding
• do not regard the aged as irrelevant
• take seriously the meaning of family loyalty and honor, and who, when they "reach out and touch someone," expect that person to be in the same room
• take the great narratives of religion seriously and who do not believe that science is the only system of thought capable of producing truth
• know the difference between the sacred and the profane, and who do not wink at tradition for modernity's sake
• admire technological ingenuity but do not think it represents the highest possible form of human achievement

Keturah Hickman, on the allure of being irreplaceable and the deeper joy of becoming replaceable:

When you make yourself irreplaceable, you put a time stamp on that which you love. You become a cog in the wheel. Yes, while you live you are viewed as necessary. The wheel turns and everyone is nourished. And then you are gone, an irreplaceable cog in the wheel … it stops turning. The glory days are remembered well – but what good are they when that which you offered is no longer accessible? Your gift has expired, because you lacked what it took to become a conduit – the vision clogged, stopping with you instead of flowing through you from God to others. […]

It is not an easy task to make oneself replaceable. One must deny the desire to be praised, and must commit to the hard work of instilling skill into those who are our protégé – be they students or offspring. By our witness and instruction, we can guide them to do as we see must be done. It would be easier to clean the house and bake the bread and cook the meals without interruption – and yet what good is a clean home and a full stomach if nobody can continue the good work tomorrow without you? However validating it may feel to be indispensable, our true mission is to have those under our wings become our apprentices. Instead of offering your guest a glass of water, tell your child to carry it until your child is naturally hospitable on his own.

Neil Postman:

One characteristic of those who live in a Technopoly is that they are largely unaware of both the origins and the effects of their technologies.

Neil Postman:

Norbert Wiener warned about the lack of modesty when he remarked that, if digital computers had been in common use before the atomic bomb was invented, people would have said that the bomb could not have been invented without computers. But it was. And it is important to remind ourselves of how many things are quite possible to do without the use of computers. […]

Technological immodesty is always an acute danger in Technopoly, which encourages it. Technopoly also encourages insensitivity to what skills may be lost in the acquisition of new ones. It is important to remember what can be done without computers, and it is also important to remind ourselves of what may be lost when we do use them.

Along these lines, I often marvel that we sent humans to the moon in 1969 (!!). That seems utterly preposterous given the technology of that day (or, at least, what I imagine it to be).

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: