When I launched this blog in 2012, I was passionate about blogging. At that time, I still believed in the power of words—that words truly mattered. I no longer hold that as a truth.
Back in 1995, after coming to the end of another job and place of employment, I took the summer off. I read, I ruminated, and I planted a garden. There was a particular richness to that brief respite from work and busyness.
In many ways, that summer changed my life at the time. I made a transition in my thinking and outlook. I also read Neil Postman for the first time. What Postman taught me about the world is something I’ve carried with me ever since, especially in terms of how I view technology.
In 1995, there was no Facebook. News and presidents didn’t take to Twitter to make proclamations. I would not learn of the internet for another year. It was the perfect time to come to Postman’s ideas and live amidst the wreckage across the following 25 years, watching a world altered by technology.
Unlike 2012 when I’d spend copious amounts of time researching and organizing my thoughts in order to write a lengthy post that would ultimately be read by very few, these days, I simply present some truncation of a greater truth, or the more detailed ideal that I am working from. I am reading less these days than I did in 1995, but I still read. I’m probably reading and writing less because I’m playing guitar more. Since words matter no more that’s a worthwhile trade.
I don’t believe science and technology will save us, greatly improve our lives, or bring about anything particularly special to how we currently live. That thinking comes from internalizing Postman 25 years ago.
Here is Postman on technology, in five points:
One, we always pay a price for technology; the greater the technology, the greater the price.
Two, there are always winners and losers—the winners always try to persuade the losers that they are really winners
Three, embedded in every great technology an epistemological, political or social prejudice. Sometimes the bias is greatly to our advantage. Sometimes it is not. The printing press annihilated oral tradition; telegraphy annihilated space; television has humiliated the word; the computer, perhaps, will degrade community life. And so on.
Four, technological change is not additive; it is ecological, which means, it changes everything and is, therefore, too important to be left entirely in the hands of Bill Gates (or Jeff Bezos).
Five, technology tends to become mythic; i.e. perceived as part of the natural order of things, and therefore tends to control more of our lives than is good for us. …. When a technology become mythic, it is always dangerous because it is then accepted as it is, and is therefore not easily susceptible to modification or control.
There you have it. A cogent consensus on Postman and technology.
I’ve read nothing in the past 25 years that alters how I feel about these five points and my acceptance of them. But, I don’t hold hard and fast to any belief in never-ending progress, either.
Apparently, neither does John Gray, the author of Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals.
As Gray posits in his 2002 book, humans have a limitless capacity for self-delusion. That applies to me and the most rational among us. Gray tells us that humans didn’t evolve to find truth, but rather to mate.
Straw Dogs: Thoughts On Humans and Other Animals by John Gray (2002)
Our current pandemic finds us falling back to technology as a means or remaining connected. Is there anyone who doesn’t know what Zoom is these days?
But Gray notes that while technology and science will progress, humans and our natures won’t. We use technology for both good and evil purposes. As a result, lots of destruction is inevitable.
These days, Gray writes regularly for The New Statesmen. In his essays for that publication, he regular takes down liberals. Not familiar with him until I picked up Straw Dogs, I agree with his assessment about liberals. They set themselves up as the arbiters of free speech and openness—until it doesn’t fit their political agenda. And then, they block it when it doesn’t conform to their particular ideals. See Black Lives Matter and the visceral hatred that most liberals have for Donald Trump. Their solution to Trump? Elect a man who obviously is compromised cognitively. At best, he’s an equally flawed candidate.
And of course, liberals—proud of their rationalism—are now given to conspiracy theories, too.
Gray noted that if liberals are ever at fault (they’ll rarely admit it), it’s for not being liberal enough.
How could the most rational ruling elite in history – as liberals perceive themselves to be – fail to comprehend the world around them? Like the nativists they attack, liberals find a strange comfort in the belief that their societies are being subverted by external forces.
Gray cites Wyndham Lewis, the English artist, writer, and critic touching on “progress.” Lewis who in his time founded the Vorticist movement, calls the idea of progress as “time worship”: the belief that things are valuable not for what they are, but for what they may someday become.
In the 20th century, work became ascendant and that belief has now infected our 21st century world, too. People have to be “busy, busy, busy,” even if that busyness is posting garbage and photos on social media. As Gray observed, “for nearly all of history and all prehistory, work was an indignity.” Even in the Christian world, it was only Protestants that equated work with salvation. If work is salvation, please send me to hell! Actually, for most of its mindless toil and the few shekels given in return, work is torturous most of the time.
Read Gray or not. It’s your choice